What is the link between La Liga bottom club Real Betis, French strugglers Lyon, English FA Cup winners Wigan Athletic, now mid-table in the English Championship, and Eintracht Frankfurt, fourth from bottom in the Bundesliga?
Thursday nights. The Europa League.
The ugly little brother of the Champions league gets such bad press one sometimes feels reluctant to criticise it.
By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
November 14 – FIFA are distancing themselves from a suggestion by their leading financial scrutineer that Qatar could be stripped as 2022 World Cup hosts by the world governing body’s independent ethics committee if the Gulf state is found to have broken any bidding rules.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 14 – FIFA have been urged by football’s main players’ union FIFPro to come to the aid of a French-Algerian midfielder involved in a contract dispute in Qatar.
By Jaroslaw Adamowski
November 14 – Poland’s Widzew Lodz has signed a sponsorship deal with local pharmaceutical company Aflofarm Farmacja. The logo of one of the drugs manufactured by the company, Braveran, will appear on its squad shirts.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 14 – Austria is the latest European country to be hit by the global match-fixing scourge with a former international reportedly detained after apparently attempting to blackmail SV Grodig defender Dominique Taboga into manipulating one of the country’s top-flight games.
November 14 – FIFA has fined both England and Poland for the crowd trouble that occurred at their decisive World Cup qualifying match at Wembley last month.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 14 – Uruguay and Mexico have all but booked their places in next year’s World Cup with thumping victories over rank outsiders Jordan and New Zealand respectively.
By Paul Nicholson
November 14 – German data giant SAP has increased its foothold in football and signalled an intention to grow its business in the sports area with an expansion of its relationship with the German Bundesliga football club TSG 1899 Hoffenheim and the addition of German national team manager Oliver Bierhoff as a brand ambassador.
By Paul Nicholson
November 13 – The foundation stone for the €250 million Grande Stade de Lyon was laid yesterday. The new Lyon stadium. also known as the Stade des Lumières, will be one of France’s 10 UEFA Euro 2016 venues and the race is now on to make sure the stadium is finished in time for the championships.
November 13 – Australia are believed to be the first country to publicly raise concern about security at next year’s World Cup finals in Brazil because of all the recent civil unrest.
November 13 – Barcelona have agreed a two-year extension to its partnership with the United Nations Children’s fund, Unicef.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 13 – Carson Yeung, the Hong Kong businessman who owns English club Birmingham City, has lost a second appeal to have his money laundering trial thrown out. A district court judge said Yeung wasn’t prejudiced by new evidence submitted by the prosecution during the trial which has been going for almost two months.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 13 – What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it seems, when it comes to the history of football clubs. Not for the first time, fans of an English top-flight club are up in arms over plans by ambitious owners to do away with deep-rooted traditions for commercial reasons.
By Alexander Krassimirov
November 13 – Non-profit organisation CSKA Forever is raising funds via premium short text messages to be used in several ways. The bulk of the money raised will go towards the construction of several small football grounds which will be used by the club’s Academy. Currently young CSKA players train and play matches at different stadiums in Sofia and the surrounding area.
Over the years, I’ve been forced to develop a rather sceptical, hard-nosed attitude towards the achievements of particular African teams in FIFA’s Under-17 and Under-20 competitions, because some Cup ‘victories’ were certainly achieved by using over-aged players.
In an ‘off-the-record’ conversation I had with an ex-Nigerian player, who captained the ‘Golden Eaglets’ to one of their four Under-17 World Cup wins, he freely admitted to me – long after retiring from the game,