By Mark Baber
May 8 – The likelihood of India hosting the 2017 Under-17 World Cup received a boost as the All India Football Federation’s (AIFF) bid received the support of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as well as of FIFA’s vice-president Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein (pictured).
By Mark Baber
May 7 – The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) general assembly accepted Iran’s Football Federation’s (IFF) request to lift a ban on development projects for Iranian football teams.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 3 – Almost forgotten amid the hullabaloo of Sheikh Salman’s Presidential victory was the appointment of three women to the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 3 – Twenty-four hours after being sworn in as the new leader of Asian football, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa followed up his election victory with a call to the warring factions to put an end to all the sniping and backbiting and come together for the common good. But festering resentment still remains.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 2 – It is hard to know which was the most extraordinary sight at the Asian Football Confederation’s Extraordinary Congress at the Mandarin Hotel in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday morning: Sheikh Salman Ebrahim Al-Khalifa winning the election to become the next president of the AFC in the first round of voting, his bitter rival Yousuf Al Serkal coming in last or Sepp Blatter lecturing delegates about the necessity of returning to core football values.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 1 – The talking will shortly be over, the daggers are drawn and the tension is as thick as the cigarette smoke filling the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the Malaysian capital.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 1 – Any chance of Thursday’s Asian football Presidential election vote being cleanly contested has totally evaporated following an unsavoury 11th-hour spat between the two front-runners, both of whom have thrown verbal grenades in each other’s direction, prompting the intervention of FIFA.
By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
May 1 – During the increasingly fractious battle in Kuala Lumpur to become President of Asian football, it has been conveniently overlooked amid the political in-fighting that the position is effectively transitionary and only for 18 months.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 1 – UEFA President Michel Platini has called for Asia to put an end to its in-fighting and move forward starting with Thursday’s vote to elect a new president of the Asian Football Confederation.
By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
May 1 – Claims and counter-claims, conspiracy theories bouncing back and forth, all manner of dirty tricks allegations – and even FIFA intervention. Unity, what unity?
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 1 – Outsider Hafiz Al Medlej of Saudi Arabia as expected quit the race to become the next president of the Asian Football Confederation today, just hours after exclusively revealing to InsideWorldFootball that he was on the verge of pulling out of the running.
By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
May 1 – The timing could hardly be worse. On the eve of the vote to clean up its act, Asian football has been rocked by yet another embarrassing scandal after Sri Lanka’s Vernon Manilal Fernando, one of the continent’s most powerful administrators, was kicked out of FIFA for eight years over unspecified unethical wrongdoing.
By Paul Nicholson, Editor in chief
May 1 – A third human rights organisation has written to FIFA president Sepp Blatter asking him to refer Asian Football Confederation presidential candidate Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain to FIFA’s ethics committee.
By Mark Baber
April 30 – Thailand’s broadcast regulator has ruled that all 64 matches of the 2014 World Cup finals must be televised over free-TV channels. The ruling comes as a blow to Thai pay channel RS Inc which holds the rights.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
April 30 – Yousuf Al-Serkal has not only labelled Bahraini rival Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa over-confident for predicting that he could win Thursday’s Asian Football Confederation presidential election in the first-round of voting but the head of the United Arab Emirates FA hinted to Inside World Football that he could receive help from other candidates in subsequent rounds.