By Andrew Warshaw
November 3 – As football’s stakeholders gather at FIFA headquarters today for the latest meeting to determine exactly when to stage the 2022 World Cup, FIFA’s leading medical expert has insisted once again that the Qatar tournament must not be staged in the middle of the Gulf summer.
By Jaroslaw Adamowski
November 3 – RasenBallsport Leipzig has unveiled plans to increase the capacity of its stadium. Under the plan, the German club’s stadium will be increased 55,000 as the club targets promotion to the Bundesliga’s top tier and, ultimately, qualification for European competition, an ambition of its Red Bull owners.
By Ben Nicholson
November 3 – The MLS has broken its season long attendance record, averaging 19,147 fans per game. Eleven teams saw an increase in attendance figures, whilst eight teams suffered drops in attendance.
By David Owen
November 2 – Everton, whose shirt sponsorship deal with Chang, the Thai beverage company, is now the longest-running in the Premier League, has become the latest top-flight English club to report a pre-tax profit for the 2013-14 season.
By Paul Nicholson
November 2 – Anyone who thought the seismic impact of disgraced American football official Chuck Blazer was over can think again. Blazer has been named as the main informant in an FBI investigation reportedly into money laundering and fraud in football.
By Andrew Warshaw. chief correspondent
October 31 – The head of Sierra Leone football has painted a grim picture of the devastating effect the Ebola crisis is having on the sport back home, with a fanatical football nation in lockdown domestically and forced to play internationals overseas.
By David Owen
October 31 – The venue for the final of next year’s women’s World Cup in Canada will need to seek recertification in January, to verify that its artificial pitch surface remains of the necessary quality.
By Mark Baber
October 31 – South Korean and French delegations have handed over rival bids for the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup 2018 and 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup on Thursday to FIFA President Blatter and FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke.
October 31 – The Russia 2018 World Cup will be held at 12 stadiums across 11 cities. In keeping with World Cup tradidition a series of posters have been designed to promote the World Cup and refelct the culture and traditions of the country’s football. Pictured here is a gallery of the posters from the 11 cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Sochi and Rostov-on-Don.
By Paul Nicholson
October 31 – Education is taking lead position in the battle against match-fixing. With a number of confederations and national federations launching player education programmes – the Sportradar-led integrity tour in Wales being the latest – player union FIFPro has launched its own campaign with FIFA and Interpol.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 31 – FIFA have been forced to apologise for a politically embarrassing gaffe after a video launching the logo for the 2018 World Cup in Russia displayed the disputed Crimean peninsula as being part of Russian territory.
October 31 – In an unprecedented ruling that has stunned Scottish football as well as his English parent club, Celtic’s Bulgarian international winger Aleksandar Tonev has been handed a seven-match ban for racial abuse.
By Mark Baber
October 31 – The day before the expiry of a FIFA deadline for his court case to be withdrawn, and following intervention from Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, Chris Giwa’s faction has withdrawn its case against Amaju Pinnick and his newly elected board, forestalling a possible FIFA ban for government interference.
The whole business of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, and when it should be held, has again emphasised why sport, more than any other business, must make sure that it arrives at its decisions after very careful deliberation. Now you may say surely that is true of everything we do. Yes. But sport faces a problem no other business, indeed activity, does. This is that by its very nature people who follow sport tend to make instinctive judgements.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 30 – English football authorities have split public opinion by clamping down hard on former England and Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand and one of the country’s top referees, Mark Clattenburg, for two unrelated misdemeanours.