By Paul Nicholson
April 24 – Sports group Doyen Global has invested in Squawka, the social media-driven sports app. Doyen principals Simon Oliveira and Matt Kay will both join the Squawka board.
Fifteen years seems a long enough time to prepare for an event you know will happen. That is double the time countries hosting the World Cup or the Olympics get. But despite knowing about it for so long, and supposedly preparing for it, the fact that Manchester United has failed to manage the transition into the post Alex Ferguson age raises serious questions of how it went about this, arguably, the most crucial job the United management has faced since the 1960s.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 23 – FIFA presidential candidate Jerome Champagne has denounced what he describes as the polarisation of European football in the latest edition of his thematic manifesto policy distributed to all FIFA’s 209 member federations.
April 23 – The negotiations between the Scottish FA (SFA) and the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) over who controls the direction of the game in Scotland found part resolution after a meeting of the two boards.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 23 – The row between France and FIFA over the issue of headscarves shows little sign of diminishing. France’s new sports minister is defending the right of his country to uphold its policy of banning headscarves for footballers – in defiance of the game’s lawmakers.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 23 – On his latest four-day inspection visit to Brazil’s World Cup host cities, an anxious FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke has made it abundantly clear yet again that time is running out to complete the necessary construction work – not least at the Sao Paolo venue where the tournament begins.
By Alexander Krassimirov
April 23 – There was yet more chaos in Bulgarian top tier football after the shocking scenes of violence that caused the abandonment of the Plovdiv derby at the weekend. This time it was the extreme Ultras of Levski Sofia who took action into their own hands amid fears that the top level of the game is getting out of control in the country.
“To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose.” William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
Football fans today must be as literate in financial matters as in the intricacies of the midfield-diamond formation or of the Cruyff Turn. Recent reports that some clubs will face regulatory sanctions in the first application of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play environment show that to be the case, and columns such as this owe their existence to money’s ever-growing role in the world’s biggest sport.
April 23 – Sportlobster, a social network for sports fans, has raised £2.2 million for a minority stake in the business from MBM Capital Partners and Wychwood Capital. The new money into the year old company will be used to update the website and app.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 22 – Qatar’s 2022 World Cup organisers are reported to have agreed to radically scale back the number of stadiums being built for the tournament, possibly by up to one third.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 22 – David Moyes, the man personally recommended by Sir Alex Ferguson to succeed him as manager of Manchester United, has been sacked after only 10 months in the job – the third shortest reign of any manager in the club’s illustrious history.
By Jaroslaw Adamowski
April 22 – Legia Warsaw could launch an initial public offering on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) in the few next years, according to Dariusz Mioduski, the majority shareholder of the Warsaw-based club.
By Alexander Krassimirov
April 21 – Ferocious scenes terminated Bulgarian derby between Lokomotiv Plovdiv and Botev Plovdiv. The match, which in Bulgaria has become known as the Battle of Plovdiv, was stopped in the 41st minute after the home crowd started to throw missiles, stones and flares towards the ground in protest against club owner Konstantin Dinev.
April 21- Embroiled in constant negative headlines about the World Cup, Brazilian football has now been rocked by a shambolic domestic dispute when relegated Portuguesa abandoned their opening game of the new league season after just 17 minutes after a court order ruled they had a right to remain in the top division.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 20 – Australia’s national women’s team coach Hesterine de Reus has been sacked less than a month before the country’s defence of the AFC Women’s’ Asian Cup. Football Federation Australia announced the decision following an internal review into the Dutch woman’s methods.