Organised crime groups make an estimated €120 million of profit a year from betting-related match-fixing in sports events. Not only football matches are fixed, but tennis results are also manipulated more and more. And sports mafia are no longer only corrupting players, but clubs too.
The interruption to football championships – local, national and European – caused by the coronavirus pandemic is plunging the sport into a crisis. For a sector with billions in annual turnover, tomorrow’s world is looking very different to yesterday’s.
Europeans are getting heavier. One in three 30-year-olds weighs more than they should, and a full half of 40-year-olds are overweight. Only 44 per cent of people do some form of exercise at least once a week.
The statistics speak for themselves: countries with higher taxation levels have a greater chance of winning in international football tournaments.
An increasingly large ball that ends up more and more often in the same goal. That’s the new face of European football
A big team losing a football match would not necessarily cause much of a fuss. However, the defeat of Real Madrid at the hands of Ajax in the knockout phase of the Champions League (Europe’s major tournament for top-division clubs) marks the beginning of a new era in the business of football.
The UEFA publishes an annual "European Club Footballing Landscape", an overview of European clubs, their influence and financial health.
Facing rising hostility in Western Europe, migrants are massively overrepresented in the region's World Cup's teams, compared with the overall population.