FIFA president Gianni Infantino has just publicly announced that Iran’s ban on women attending soccer matches is “unacceptable” and must be lifted.
The comments come in response to the tragic death of Sahar Khodayari, an Iranian woman who set herself on fire in protest after she was arrested for attempting to attend a soccer match in Tehran.
Sahar Khodayari, a 29-year-old woman facing six months in prison for simply attending a men’s soccer match, died Monday.
Donald Trump has become the latest figure to join in on the debate surrounding equal pay for the U.S. women’s national team. Sort of. We think.
The four-time Women’s World Cup champion USWNT is in the middle of a legal battle with U.S. Soccer over equal treatment to the USMNT, which wasn’t even able to qualify for the last World Cup. President Trump received a visit from FIFA president Gianni Infantino on Monday and the two discussed women’s soccer.
Infantino was in D.C. to discuss preparations for the 2026 World Cup, which the U.S. will co-host with Mexico and Canada.
FIFA's unveiling of the 2022 World Cup logo was . . . underwhelming. The unveiling took place in Qatar's capital Doha on Tuesday at around 8:00 p.m. local time, with thousands of spectators watching as the logo was projected on billboards and buildings throughout the city.
It’s that time of year again: FIFA has announced the 10 finalists for the annual Puskás Award, the trophy given to the player, male or female, “judged to have scored the most aesthetically significant, or ‘most beautiful,’ goal of the calendar year.”
This most certainly wasn’t the case last year when Mohamed Salah scooped the award after Liverpool and Egypt supporters spammed the fan vote. The goal Salah scored against Everton back in December of 2018 hadn’t even won the Premier League’s Goal of the Month, so it was an awful joke to see it given the prestigious Puskás Award.
Frank de Boer, manager of Atlanta United, has become the talk of the town after calling equal pay “ridiculous.”
In an interview with the Guardian he said:
We all know that Manchester City loves to spend big, and it has been under the watch of just about every governing body in football as of late. FIFA and UEFA are the big ones, and they have been after City for a while now after exorbitant amounts of spending and the suspicious transfers of youth players since Pep Guardiola arrived in 2016.
The U.S. Soccer Federation’s hiring of lobbyists is not going well.
The USSF lobbyists were ostensibly hired to try to convince politicians that the USWNT was in fact paid quite well and the USSF should not be punished for an inequality between the men’s and women’s national teams.
But things appear to be going south for U.S. Soccer.
Video footage has circulated around social media of construction workers in Qatar going on strike in response to the inhumane working conditions they have dealt with during stadium construction for the upcoming 2022 World Cup. The strike began on Sunday with thousands of workers protesting on the outskirts of one of their work-sites.