By David Owen
October 8 – Flummoxed by Brexit and with a general election looming, Britain’s opposition Labour party has turned to the people’s game to try to build some much-needed political capital.
By Paul Nicholson
October 7 – The growth of the beoutQ broadcast piracy operation that has seen the emergence of beoutQ-enabled set-top boxes being retailed in countries around the world suffered a derailment in a London court on Friday with the conviction of a shop owner on two charges of copyright theft and two charges of fraud.
October 4 – Liverpool may have hoped the £1 million paid to Manchester City in 2013 over allegations that the club’s scouts had been spying on the activity of their Manchester counterparts had been brushed away. While the Premier League has shown no investigative interest in the ‘spygate’ row, the FA has asked to see Man City’s evidence surrounding the hacking.
October 3 – Cardiff City have decided to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against FIFA’s ruling that they must pay the first instalment of €6 million to Nantes for €17 million striker Emiliano Sala who died in January when the light aircraft carrying him to Cardiff two days after he signed crashed into the sea before he could play a single game.
October 3 – Manchester City’s Portuguese midfielder Bernardo Silva has been charged with misconduct by the Football Association over a tweet he sent to team-mate Benjamin Mendy.
October 2 – The former president of Valencia Juan Soler (pictured) has been jailed for two years for conspiring to kidnap his one-time vice-president and break into his home.
By Paul Nicholson
September 27 – FIFA’s move to reform the player transfer market are unlikely to go far enough to appease critics who say that in reality all the measures will do is keep the current system in place and postpone the issues indefinitely.
September 26 – The Swiss parliament has narrowly voted to extend the mandate of the country’s attorney general Michael Lauber despite a series of undocumented private meetings he held with FIFA president Gianni Infantino during his office’s handling of numerous cases of alleged FIFA-related corruption since 2015.
September 26 – The chairman of the Italian Olympics Committee has sparked fierce controversy by suggesting that diving is a more serious issue than racism in Italian football.
September 25 – A tweet posted by a Manchester City player about a teammate has been condemned by Britain’s Anti-racism group Kick It Out but played down by City manager Pep Guardiola.
September 24 – Two people who illegally accessed CCTV footage of Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala’s post-mortem examination and who were “driven by morbid curiosity” have been jailed.
By David Owen
September 23 – The overall budget of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is set to rise to $46.6 million by 2022. This will represent an increase of around 55% in the space of seven years.
September 23 – Racism in Italian football has become so bad that AC Milan have taken the step of launching an internal anti-racism task force.
September 23 – The Qatar Stars League (QSL) became the first professional football league in Asia to sign a co-operation agreement with the Sport Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA).
September 20 – Days after the lawyer representing Rui Pinto, whose string of incriminating leaks shook the footballing world before he was controversially extradited from Hungary to his native Portugal, denounced the Portuguese authorities for holding his client without charge, over 100 charges have been brought against the hacker-cum-whistleblower.