Luka Modric has claimed The Best FIFA Men’s Player 2018 award ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo and Mohamed Salah (and dare I say it at risk of being murdered, Lionel Messi), but that contentious decision pales compared to everything else that unfolded at a star-studded gala (sans Messi and Ronaldo) in London on Monday evening.
One day after it was revealed that FC Barcelona and Girona FC had submitted formal proposals to move their LaLiga match from Estadi Montilivi to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami in accordance with a 15-year marketing agreement between Spain’s top division and Relevant Sports,
First things first, I mean absolutely no disrespect to Marta. When I tackled the impossible task of ranking the 18 greatest female soccer players of all time last week, I concluded with Marta in the top spot. She’s an unreal footballer, but 2018 hasn’t exactly been the best of the 32-year-old’s career. And yet here she is as one of three finalists shortlisted for The Best FIFA Women’s Player 2018.
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise given the outcome of the 2017-18 UEFA Men’s Player of the Year Award voting (finishing order: Luka Modric, Cristiano Ronaldo, Mohamed Salah), but the three finalists for The Best FIFA Men’s Player 2018 are Modric, Ronaldo and Salah, leaving the likes of Lionel Messi, Antoine Griezmann, Kylian Mbappe and Kevin De Bruyne on the outside looking in.
The world’s most powerful president had a bizarre meeting in the White House on Tuesday. I’m talking, of course, about FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
Infantino was welcomed to the Oval Office by a slightly less prominent president, Donald Trump, in what has to be one of the more bizarre interactions between the sports world, politics and the free press — at least in the last three days (it is 2018, after all).
Jibril Rajoub, the president of the Palestine FA, was banned from all soccer activities for the next year by FIFA on Friday, a ruling stemming from words targeting Barcelona star Lionel Messi.
Rajoub had called on fans to burn jerseys and pictures of Messi ahead of a friendly between Argentina and Israel in Jerusalem this summer, saying one of the world’s biggest stars should not “whitewash the face of racism” by attending the match.
Jose Maria Marin, the former president of Brazil’s soccer federation, was sentenced to four years in prison by a federal court on Wednesday in New York, marking the first sentencing of a soccer official in relation to the United States’ FIFA corruption investigation.
Football's governing body updated its August FIFA rankings of national teams this week and, surprise surprise, there were some big moves. We are just over a month removed from the World Cup, and you would like to think FIFA has spent a long time deliberating over who should be ranked where.
World Cup winner France takes the top spot, jumping up six spots to now be the top dog in international soccer. Belgium, the bronze medallist at the World Cup, is in second place, but only three points behind France. Brazil dropped one spot to round out the top three.
FIFA has finally taken corruption out of the beautiful game.
According to an Associated Press report, the word “corruption” doesn’t appear anywhere in FIFA’s new code of ethics governing officials and players. And that’s not the only shady new practice the AP revealed.
FIFPro, the global footballers' union, released an official statement urging the need for a longer football offseason on Monday. The union’s worries concern 15 players who played in the 2018 Russia World Cup only to start their UEFA competitions two to four weeks later — urging the need for longer breaks.