By Mark Baber
May 20 – Monday’s kick-off of the 2014 AFC Challenge Cup final is being hailed as a remarkable achievement for the Maldives (total population 340,000) which has managed to refurbish two stadiums to bring them up to AFC standards.
May 20 – The announcement of Louis van Gaal as Manchester United manager – football’s most open secret – has been widely hailed as the best possible appointment to restore the club to its former glories at home and in Europe after the one-season disaster under the luckless David Moyes.
By Tom Parsons
May 20 – Football clubs and media have increasingly turned to Twitter as their platform of choice for getting their audiences to vote for events and individuals as the end of term football awards season gets into full swing.
By Jaroslaw Adamowski
May 20 – Gornik Zabrze has signed a two-year sponsorship deal with betting operator Totolotek who will become the Polish club’s new main sponsor.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 20 – FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke has arrived in Brazil for the final time to oversee the run-up to the start of the World Cup, saying he expects “busy days ahead” to make sure everything is ready on time. Valcke arrived 24 hours after Brazil held the last two test events at its delayed stadiums, notably at the Sao Paulo venue that will host the opening game, and will visit all 12 host cities one last time “to see that the finishing touches”
May 20 – Qatar’s 2022 World Cup organisers have announced the second phase of construction at Al Wakrah, the first of the proposed venues to stage the finals. Last week the Qataris announced sweeping changes to their own labour laws though there was still criticism from pressure groups that they hadn’t gone far enough.
By Alexander Krassimirov
May 20 – Bulgaria’s CSKA Sofia has failed in its bid to become a public company listed on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange. The failed IPO sold only 360,000 shares – the minimum requirement for the club to become publicly traded was 1.4 million. 3 million shares had been released for sale at the nominal price of BGN 3 (€1,5).
By Andrew Warshaw
May 20 – Two months after its top clubs voted against goalline technology, the subject has moved back into the spotlight in Germany following a controversial decision in last weekend’s domestic cup final between rivals Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.
May 20 – In what is surely one of football’s most bizarre transfers, a first division Bolivian professional side has signed up the country’s 54-year-old president Evo Morales (pictured) to play in midfield at a reported token salary of $213 per month.
May 19- Highlighting football’s perceived ability to provide a marketing push to a vast array of brands in different fields, Barcelona has unveiled a partnership with the power tools group, Stanley Black & Decker.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 19- Every national footballing federation should consider appointing at least one woman representative at board level, according to Australia’s Moya Dodd, vice-president of the Asian Football Confederation and one of the sport’s most influential female administrators.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 19- United States soccer chief Sunil Gulati admits the game has some way to go at professional level to reach the levels of established domestic sports like American football and baseball – and, for that matter, to match the interest in football overseas.
May 19 – Cypriot football, which has often been in the news for positive reasons in recent months as officials try to unify the sport on both sides of the island, has been rocked by an unwanted end-of-season incident that saw one of its many foreign players hit by an object thrown from the crowd.
May 19- The climax to the Spanish league season luckily avoided tragedy when a barrier collapsed during the relegation clash between Osasuna and Real Betis, causing almost 70 injuries.
By David Owen
May 19 – German giants Bayern Munich are the club providing most players to the provisional 2014 World Cup squad lists circulated by FIFA last week. The Bundesliga champions have 18 players on FIFA’s release list, two more than Manchester United, who were comfortably the most heavily-represented Premier League club, despite their difficult 2013-14 season.