Canada 2-0 El Salvador
June 24 – Fresh from emerging from a Concacaf-imposed timeout, Canadian head coach Jesse Marsch returned to the technical area at Shell Energy Stadium in Houston, knowing any more misbehaviour would send him back to the naughty room. He needn’t have worried as their opponents El Salvador simply imploded in a red mist.
October 25 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino is a simple man. He hails from a simple Alpine small town and has a simplistic outlook on the big wide world. For a decade he was fighting FIFA, the arch enemy. And fighting hard. Now he is its boss. A victory that probably surprised him more than many of those who had given him little chance of winning, as the stand-in for Michel Platini that he was.
October 26 – UEFA has gone to market with a new set of sponsorship categories for its Women’s Football properties for the 2018-2021 cycle.
October 26 – He didn’t appear on the podium of either the FIFA Best or UEFA’s annual awards but data for the season so far makes Neymar the Most Valuable Player in Europe’s Big 5 leagues.
October 25 – Gianni Infantino’s controversial $25 billion plan for two new international tournaments has come under further attack, this time from the umbrella body representing Europe’s major leagues.
By Paul Nicholson
October 25 – The FIFA Council meeting this Friday in Rwanda will look again at the proposed revised competition structure for the international calendar – a new Club World Cup competition, and a move towards some kind of Nations League. All underpinned by the elephant in the room of $25 billion of Saudi money.
October 25 – The group that re-founded Parma after the Italian club’s bankruptcy in 2015 and started again in Serie D under the banner ‘Nuovo Inizio’ (New Beginning) have re-taken a majority shareholding, wresting control from Chinese investors Desports.
October 25 – During their 2026 World Cup campaign, Moroccan officials were at pains to stress how human rights were not an issue – just as Turkey did for the 2024 Euros.
October 25 – Former Guinea international Ismael Bangoura has been handed a six-month suspended jail sentence and fined more than €130,000 after being convicted of fraud by a court in France.
October 25 – Defending champions Nigeria were paired with South Africa, Zambia and Kenya in Group B as the eight participants in the 2018 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations learned their fate at the draw in Accra.
October 25 – New eSports league e.Football.Pro has signed Portugal’s Boavista as the fifth participating team for Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer platform.
October 25 – Tottenham Hotspur have made a statement of intent with the opening of the largest club shop in Europe at their new stadium.
October 25 – Arsenal have launched a new chat tool, powered by artificial intelligence and operating across social media channels including Facebook Messenger, Slack, Sky and Telegram, that will give supporters easy access to the latest news, fixtures, results, videos, player stats and ticket information.
October 24 – Police have arrested Lokeren coach Peter Macs (pictured) in the latest move linked to the wide-ranging investigation into the damaging match-fixing and money laundering scandal hitting Belgian football.
October 24 – The geo-political financial partnership between Saudi Arabia and Japanese financiers SoftBank, rumoured to be the operators of the financial vehicle behind the $25 billion FIFA international calendar sell off, looks like it might have run into difficulties over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
October 24 – The head of the Spanish FA, Luis Rubiales, hopes FIFA will try to block the controversial La Liga fixture scheduled to be switched to the United States in January when its Council meets this Friday in Rwanda.