December 5 – UEFA has announced the introduction of a new 16-team group stage for the Women’s Champions League from the 2021-22 season with centralised marketing and TV sales programme raise revenues and the profile of the women’s club game.
By David Owen
December 5 – Brighton and Hove Albion, the south coast club winning plaudits for their adventurous style under new head coach Graham Potter, slipped back into loss in their second season in the Premier League.
December 5 – UEFA wants to tweak the qualifying process for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, allowing a pathway via the Nations League to reach the global finals.
By Osasu Obayiuwana
December 5 – The consequences of the decision of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to terminate its $1 billion, 12-year marketing contract with Lagardere Sports (LS) continue to reverberate at the French company, with staff of its Africa Division uncertain of their future.
December 5 – East Africa’s flagship competition the Cecafa Cup will kick off with a depleted participants field after South Sudan, DR Congo and Ethiopia all withdrew from the competition.
December 5 – Spanish TV group Mediapro are taking UEFA to court for allegedly altering submission bids for the Champions League for 2021-2024 in favour of France’s Canal Plus and Middle East broadcasting giant beIN Sports.
December 5 – The draw for the 2020 Copa America, held in the Colombian city of Cartagena, has drawn Argentina with Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and invitees Australia. In the other group reigning champions Brazil and co-hosts Colombia were paired with Peru, Equador, Venezuela and Asian champions Qatar.
By Osasu Obayiuwana
December 5 – Cairo club Ahly have announced that they will now be staging their matches at the Al Salam stadium.
By Paul Nicholson
December 4 – A club ownership storm has broken in Greece linking controversial Russian-Greek oligarch Ivan Savvidis to control of two clubs in the Greek Super League.
“We must find an African solution to our problems” – Kwame Nkrumah (Prime Minister of Ghana, 1957-1966)
Anyone with an acute sense of history will remember how, in the late 1980s, the master-servant relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western financial institutions, on the one hand, and financially troubled African nations on the other, led to the imposition of flawed ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAP) that devastated the economies of the countries that borrowed money under these onerous SAP terms and conditions.
December 4 – Qatari telecoms company Ooredoo has become a local sponsor of the Club World Cup which kicks off on December 11 in Doha, Qatar.
December 4 – Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the president of Paris St. Germain and boss of beIN Sport Media, has been questioned for a second time by Swiss federal prosecutors as he seeks to have a two-year investigation into allegations he bribed the man who was once FIFA’s second most senior official dismissed.
December 4 – FIFA has banned a third senior Afghanistan football official implicated in a sexual abuse scandal.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 4 – UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has re-iterated his long-held view that more needs to be done to combat racism in European football following an unwelcome resurgence of discrimination across the Continent, from Bulgaria to Italy.
December 4 – Concussion substitutes, improving player behaviour and tweaks to VAR were among the topics discussed when the International Football Association Board (IFAB) held its Annual Business Meeting (ABM) in Belfast, Tuesday.