By Samindra Kunti and Paul Nicholson
October 12 – The Belgium and Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois has criticised UEFA and FIFA for the congested international match calendar, labelling the third-place play-off between his national team and Italy in the Nations League “a money game”. He argued that UEFA don’t care for player welfare.
October 12 – France’s Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) president Vincent Labrune has said the league’s new commercial subsidiary could raise €1 billion with an investment partner that will be key to the survival of French professional football.
October 12 – Having announced that women would be allowed to attend the crucial Iran vs South Korea Qatar 2022 qualifiers, Iranian authorities appear to have staged a last-minute u-turn in banning fans from attending. It would have been the first time in two years that women would have been allowed to attend such a high-profile fixture.
October 12 – Germany became the first team to qualify for the 2022 World Cup after breezing past North Macedonia 4-0 on Monday to claim top spot in Group J with two games to spare.
October 12 – With just 100 days to go until kick-off, the AFC and the organisers of the Women’s Asian Cup India 2022 have unveiled the official tagline of the tournament as ‘Our Goal For All’.
October 12 – The English FA yesterday launched its new campaign – Let Girls Play – to coincide with International Day of the Girl and to force the pace of change in providing girls with equal opportunity to play organised football.
October 12 – Benjamin Mendy, Manchester City’s French defender who is accused of multiple charges of rape, has been refused bail for a third time.
October 11 – FIFA is reported to be running out of time to find a host for the much-maligned Club World Cup in December and may be forced to postpone until early next year – an unfortunate public relations blow to Gianni Infantino.
October 11 – English football’s 19 other top-flight clubs have reportedly sent a joint complaint to the Premier League after it cleared the £305 million takeover of Newcastle by a Saudi Arabian-backed group.
By Paul Nicholson
October 11 – Former FIFA Deputy Secretary-General, Zvonimir Boban (pictured), has hammered the idea of a biennial World Cup as an ‘absurdity’ that no ‘normal person’ in football would accept and that “we have to fight it”.
October 11 – Arsene Wenger has a new gig. The former Arsenal coach and current FIFA director of development is to coach the Saudi select that will play Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain in a friendly in the Riyadh Season, a larger-than-life entertainment festival in the capital of Saudi Arabia.
October 11 – Mexico are back at the top of Concacaf’s Qatar 2022 qualifying after another seesawing round of qualifiers that saw Panama stun the US and Canada draw with Jamaica.
October 11 – Swiss international Xherdan Shaqiri has been caught up in a new independence dispute involving Kosovo that has caused outrage in Serbia.
October 11 – Rui Costa is the new president of Benfica, winning the election this weekend with a landslide. In his victory speech, the former Portugal midfielder who played 121 times for Benfica, promised a new dawn for the club.
October 11 – Concacaf has been forced to push back the start date of its Concacaf W Qualifiers to the FIFA Women’s Window in February 2022. The new timetabling has been necessary because of issues with travel and different quarantine restrictions across the region due to the Covid pandemic.