By Mark Baber
June 17 – Abu Dhabi-backed Manchester City fear their worldwide “secret scouting database” may have been “hacked” by an employee of a unnamed Premier League rival, according to unsourced reports in British Sunday tabloid newspapers.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 17 – Five years before staging the 2018 World Cup, Russia is already coming to terms with the fact that the tournament is likely to cost a lot more than originally outlined.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 17 – FIFA officials are “monitoring the situation” in Brazil after violent protests broke out two days running to coincide with the start of the Confederations Cup.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 17 – A dispute over player bonuses that threatened Nigeria’s participation in the Confederations Cup still appears to be festering, with claims and counter-claims from players and officials.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 17 – Three African countries — Ethiopia, Togo and Equatorial Guinea — are facing disciplinary proceedings for allegedly fielding ineligible players in recent World Cup qualifiers.
By Paul Nicholson in Rio
June 16 – Everything happens late in Brazil, but it is happening. The Confederations Cup kicked off in Brasilia with the hosts knocking over Japan with ease. A result which, if not actually igniting frenetic fever for the event, has certainly woken the country from its pre-tournament slumber.
It was almost inevitable that the UEFA Under 21 tournament should have once again focussed English discussion on the perennial problem in English football: why is the national team so bad? More so, when the Premier League is so powerful and rules the world, at least in terms of the spectacle it provides week after week, and in its reach, exposure and ability to make money?
This is a problem that seems to be always with us like death and taxes.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 14 – In the same week that Scottish football announced ground-breaking plans to preserve its future, crisis-torn SPL club Heart of Midlothian have been plunged into yet more turmoil with the threat of going out of business.
By Mark Baber
June 14 – At the recent E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles, fans had a chance to use Electronic Art’s new FIFA 14 on current-gen platforms while EA provided a peek of what the latest version of the successful gaming franchise will look like on the Xbox One.
By Mark Baber
June 14 – Budweiser, the official beer sponsor of the upcoming Confederations Cup in Brazil as well as next year’s World Cup, are presenting a man of the match award for every game at both tournaments with a specially designed trophy.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 14 – A row over bonus payments that threatened to halt Nigeria’s participation in the Confederations Cup has been diffused at the 11th hour – with the squad en route to Brazil albeit 24 hours later than scheduled.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 14 – FIFA president Sepp Blatter is down playing fears that a number of stadiums will not be ready to stage the Confederations Cup, the traditional World Cup warm-up tournament that gets under way in Brasilia on Saturday when hosts Brazil take on Japan.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 14 – Organisers of a pre-season friendly between Arsenal and Vietnam’s national team are facing a battle to ensure the match goes ahead after the owners of the Hanoi stadium involved hiked up their fees.
By Paul Nicholson
June 14 – Neymar’s lawyer Marcos Motta says that if the European push for the banning of third party ownership of players is successful, and applied globally, then it could lead to a collapse of football on the South American continent.
I have been trawling the fine print of the new Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance (so you don’t have to).
Since football fans like league tables, I have used the data to put together 26 top-threes ranking English Premier League clubs according to different financial parameters.
I wouldn’t read too much into them without scrutinising the big picture.
However, Arsenal supporters, starved of real on-field success, may have mixed feelings about the north London club’s top ranking for most cash,