Fights

A total of 2,198 football-related arrests were made in the 2021-22 season in England and Wales, the highest number since the 2013-14 season, a report by the Home Office said on Thursday.

The 2021-2022 season was the first full season where all scheduled matches were played at full spectator capacity following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The arrests made last season were around 59% higher than those in the 2018-2019 season, which was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The most common offense types were public disorder (36%) and violent disorder (20%).

The lives of most professional footballers — outside of vacation — are never quite as exciting as we'd like to believe. Their schedules are a ceaseless clockwork of training, recovery, matches and rest, so they spend the majority of their days on the couch in the living room recuperating.

This is doubly so when footballers are injured and deprived of their one meaningful outlet, so they become hellbent on returning to action by spending every waking hour either in the physio room or planted in front of the television.

Real Madrid restored its two-point lead over Barcelona at the top of LaLiga with a surgical 2-1 win at the home of eternal rival Atlético Madrid on Sunday evening.

In what looked to be an unassuming clash between Italian giant Juventus and newly promoted Salernitana, VAR got all the headlines for all the wrong reasons. A 2-2 draw saw both sides take a point away from the match, but the Turin-based club will feel hard done after new images came out revealing the officiating crew made an appalling mistake, costing Juve two points.

When a professional footballer is asked to describe their worst nightmare, the response of "having my own fans chant 'asshole' at me" would probably be considered a totally irrational fear. But that's exactly what happened to New York Red Bulls midfielder Dru Yearwood on Saturday night at Red Bull Arena while getting sent off in his team's 2-0 defeat to Philadelphia. 

BENGALURU - India's soccer fraternity breathed a sigh of relief as FIFA lifted the suspension imposed on it after 11 days, but the decision came too late for Gokulam Kerala FC whose hopes of playing at the AFC Women's Club Championship were shattered.

FIFA suspended the All India Football Federation (AIFF) on Aug. 15 for undue third-party influence leading to Gokulam Kerala being banned from the club championship — a pilot tournament before the launch of the AFC Women's Champions League in 2024.