By Samindra Kunti
March 18 – Belgian champions Club Brugge have launched an initial public offering (IPO) in a deal that could value the club at €229 million, with chairman and majority shareholder Bart Verhaeghe selling at least 30% of the Belgian Pro League outfit with shares priced between €17.5 and €22.5.
March 18 – Uzbekistan will host the AFC U23 Asian Cup in 2022, the first time the competition has been hosted in the Central Zone.
March 18 – La Liga president Javier Tebas believes a limited number of fans will be able to return to Spanish stadiums in April but separate reports that the two Copa del Rey finals the same month could open its gates have received short shrift from the government.
March 18 – New Barcelona chief Joan Laporta has pledged to do everything in his power to convince Lionel Messi to stay after being officially sworn in as the club’s new president on Wednesday.
By Paul Nicholson
March 17 – More details are emerging of alleged financial corruption at the Sudan FA by president Dr. Kamal Shadad (pictured), as well as evidence of a complaint made to FIFA’s Ethics department back in October 2020, three months before FIFA president Gianni Infantino visited the country and reportedly instructed Shadad to support new CAF president Patrice Motsepe ahead of the African confederation’s electoral congress.
March 17 – Former UEFA president Michel Platini spent six hours in front of a Swiss prosecutor as a suspect on Monday – but today was due to appear as a witness in a separate case against his nemesis, FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
By Samindra Kunti
March 17 – Belgium’s top flight clubs have voted in support of a cross-border BeNeLiga, a league that would see Belgian clubs play their counterparts from the Dutch Eredivisie.
March 17 – Arsene Wenger, FIFA’s chief of global football development, is calling for an overhaul of the entire calendar – including holding the World Cup and Euros every two years.
March 17 – The eSports football season is hotting up with UEFA’s eEuro 2021 qualifiers having started on Monday and the eMLS Cup finals in the US starting this weekend.
March 17 – Dijon FCO have become the latest of Europe’s clubs to refuse to release their non-European nationality players for international duty, the French club announced on Tuesday.
March 17 – Manchester United are Europe’s leading club in terms of having a built a squad that will have a sustainable run at the major titles, according to a report from the CIES Football Observatory.
March 17 – Sweden have recalled their talismanic Zlatan Ibrahimovic to the national team five years after he announced his retirement.
March 17 – Maheta Molango, a former Swiss player who spent time in England’s lower leagues, is to become the first black chief executive of a leading English football body when he succeeds Gordon Taylor as chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
By Samindra Kunti
March 16 – New CAF president Patrice Motsepe has said he needs new secretary-general Veron Mosengo-Omba in his team “to hit the ground running”, even if the South African offered little detail on how he will tackle some of CAF’s pressing, existential problems.
March 16 – A FIFPro study of working conditions in the domestic game in 79 countries shows “less than one-third have a well-functioning system” with stable employment conditions.