Futsal makes its CONCACAF club debut in Guatemala

CONCACAF logo

August 4 – A regional club Futsal championship will make its debut in CONCACAF at the end of this month in Guatemala. The draw for the inaugural CONCACAF Futsal Club Championship was held last week with six clubs representing their member associations.

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Man Utd needs Champions League return to hit top level of Adidas cash

adidas and manutd

By Andrew Warshaw
August 1 – The pressure on Manchester United to put in a strong season and get back to dominating the Premier League under new coach Louis van Gaal has been underlined with the revelation that the club must return to the Champions League before the end of the 2016-17 season or face the prospect of a 30% reduction in their world record £75 million-a-year kit deal with Adidas.

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Moldovan businessman buys Romania’s Rapid Bucharest

Rapid Bucharest

By Jaroslaw Adamowski
August 1 – Moldovan businessman Valerii Moraru has acquired 94.72% of the shares in Romanian club Rapid Bucharest. The full cost of the club to Moraru has not been declared but it has been reported he paid between €2.7 million and €4 million for the 20% stake he purchased from Adrian Zamfir, one of the club’s former co-owners.

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AFC bans Vietnamese match-fixers as police swoop again

AFC hq

August 1 – The Asian Football Confederation has extended the domestic ban on nine Vietnamese players to confederation level for their role in the country’s match-fixing scandal. The chairman of the AFC Disciplinary Committee took the move following a request from Vietnam’s own national federation.

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WADA alludes to football ‘false positives’ from Rio lab

WADA footballs

By David Owen
August 1 – Further details of alleged shortcomings at the Rio de Janeiro doping control laboratory whose accreditation was revoked last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), obliging FIFA to send blood and urine samples from the recent World Cup for analysis in Switzerland, have emerged in minutes of a WADA meeting in South Africa now available on the agency’s website.

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