By Mark Baber
August 15 – FTBpro, the fan-generated football media brand, is the new Online Media Partner of the League Managers Association (LMA). FTBpro, which has seen $7.7m invested by its largest shareholders Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Ventures, will benefit from exclusive interviews with top current Premier League managers as well online training sessions for site users.
August 15 – Fans of Croatian champions Dinamo Zagreb, sanctioned by UEFA last month for racist behaviour, are in trouble again.
By Alexander Krassimirov
August 15 – Former Prime Minister of Bulgaria Boyko Borisov (pictured) has taken a stand on the issue with the Russian energy giant Gazprom and the possible sponsorship deal with Levski Sofia. Gazprom is expected to become a major sponsor of the club in near future, a deal that has been leveraged through a government agreement for a pipeline crossing Bulgarian territory. This has led to a burst of indignation from all other clubs in Bulgarian top flight.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 14 – The match-fixing scourge that continues to plague European football has struck right at the heart of the Champions League with UEFA dramatically booting Metalist Kharkiv out of the competition.
August 14 – It was announced at precisely 8.30 on Wednesday morning that global watchmaker Bulova is to be Manchester United’s official timekeeper for the next three years.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 15 – FIFA has now officially asked 2018 World Cup hosts Russia to explain more fully its highly contentious new law banning “homosexual propaganda” that has caused such a fierce backlash from both athletes and the gay community.
By Jake Gable
August 15 – La Liga president Javier Tebas (pictured) has blasted the Spanish FA for what he believes is a failure to take the current revelations of match-fixing seriously enough. In an attack on FA President Angel Maria Villar, Tebas said: “I believe they should be getting more involved in what is being done. It is not enough to let the public investigators act. The Federation, as much as the league,
By Mark Baber
August 14 – A campaign by fans of Arsenal football club to focus attention on the land grabbing and forest destroying activities of the club’s partner in South East Asia hit the UK’s main BBC news yesterday. The club’s recent tour of Vietnam, at which club officials including Arsenal’s executive director Keith Edleman, marketing director Angus Kinnear, and manager Arsene Wenger were pictured with HAGL’s Vietnamese tycoon owner Doan Nguyen Duc,
August 14 – CONCACAF kicked off its first ever U-15 championship in the Cayman Islands yesterday with Bermuda beating the US Virgin Islands 8-0 and Belize beating St Lucia 1-0. The championships, an initiative of CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb (pictured centre), will be played through to August 25 with 23 national teams competing for the title.
By Alex O’Loughln
August 14 – Spain manager Vicente del Bosque has criticised the financial disparities between the ‘top two’ in La Liga and the remaining 18 teams who boast Primera Division status.
By Mark Baber
August 14 – Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill July 29, unanimously passed by the State Duma, banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors.” Although homosexuality has been legal in Russia since 1993, the new law has attracted widespread criticism and campaigners, including Stephen Fry, have been attempting to organise a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 to protest the new law, comparing it to Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Winter or summer?
Confucius say: Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
A summer World Cup has always been the FIFA choice in the past. Ever since the first one in 1930 in Uruguay.
But then, in Switzerland for example, women were not allowed to vote until the sixties – hence women not voting “had always been the choice” until such time as they were allowed to become full-time citizens.
I don’t know if Michel Platini is a fan of Ashes cricket.
If he is, he might have allowed himself a wry smile at the way debates relating to the sport’s attempts to harness technology to improve the quality of on-pitch decisions have provided an engrossing sub-text to the live action as the series has progressed.
Platini as far as I know still opposes use of the sort of goal-line technology that the Premier League will deploy for the first time at Anfield on Saturday when Liverpool and Stoke City kick off the 2013-14 season.
FIFA admit it was a mistake to award two World Cups – 2018 and 2022 – at the same time.
But anyone expecting them to admit giving 2022 to Qatar was a mistake has a long wait.
As the issue is clouded with controversy and debate we get further away from a simple, important truth. That there hasn’t been a World Cup in the Middle East and that there should be a World Cup in Middle East.
As many within the fraternity would remember, the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa were coined as the ‘African World Cup’, for obvious ‘feel good’ reasons – being the first (and hopefully not the last) World Cup to be hosted on the continent.
But with five of Africa’s six teams knocked out in the first round of that tournament, it was anything but a successful advertisement for the strength of its football.