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FIFA President Gianni Infantino yesterday defended controversial ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup, revealing that organisers had received a record 150mn requests for tickets in the past two weeks.Speaking at the World Sports Summit in Dubai, Infantino stressed that all revenues from next year’s tournament in the United States, Mexico and Canada would be pumped back into football around the world.Infantino’s comments were his first public remarks since the ticketing furore erupted earlier this month, with fan groups branding ticket prices as “extortionate” and “astronomical”.FIFA later responded to the criticism by announcing that a sliver of tickets on sale would be priced at $60.”In the last few days, you’ve probably seen there is a lot of debate about ticketing and ticket prices,” Infantino told the Dubai conference.”We have six, seven million tickets on sale and we started two weeks ago. I can tell you in two weeks, 15 days, we received 150mn ticket requests. This shows how powerful the World Cup is.”Infantino said the majority of ticket requests had come from the United States, followed by requests from Germany and Britain.”If you think that in 100 years of history of the World Cup, FIFA has sold 44 million tickets in total, so in two weeks for the next World Cup, we could have filled 300 years of World Cups,” Infantino said. “This is absolutely crazy.””And what is important, what is crucial is that the revenues that are generated from this are going back to the game all over the world and FIFA is the only organisation in the world…that finances football in the entire world.”Without FIFA there will be no football in 150 countries in the world. There is football thanks to these revenues that we generate from the World Cup which we reinvest all over the world.”Fan group Football Supporters Europe (FSE) had been among the most prominent critics of FIFA’s pricing strategy for 2026.The group said earlier this month tickets would cost almost five times more than tickets for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Source link
Head of the General Directorate of Elections (DGE) Djenabou Toure (centre) speaks during the announcement of official partial results at the DGE offices in Conakry, Tuesday,…
Algeria’s goalkeeper Luca Zidane dives to stop the ball during the Africa Cup of Nations Group E match against Burkino Faso at Moulay Hassan Stadium in…
When Bianca Jones, a 33-year-old special education teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, decided a couple of years ago that she wanted to buy a house, she started digging into her Experian credit report. She was shocked by what she found. Her student debt had been double-counted, making it look as though she owed a quarter of a million dollars and putting home ownership out of reach. Jones disputed the items with Experian, one of the major credit reporting agencies, multiple times in writing and over the phone, but got nowhere. “They kept saying it’s been verified, it’s been verified…They never investigated. They never tried to remove it,” Jones said in an interview. Eventually, Jones complained to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP), a federal watchdog created by Congress in 2010 to protect consumers in their financial dealings, helping her lawyers show a judge the lengths she’d gone to mitigate damage to her credit, according to her attorneys, legal papers and a copy of the complaint. That paper trail eventually helped Jones successfully sue Experian to correct her record. Jones closed on a house purchase in the Memphis suburb of Millington for $300,000 in January. “If I didn’t have this agency to go to, I don’t think I’d be in the house right now,” said Jones. “It actually changed my life.” Experian and the CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on Jones’ case. Agency facing shutdownIn interviews, consumers who had fallen on hard times or known difficulty, lawyers who work with the poor and credit counsellors told Reuters the CFPB had been a lifeline for people facing hardship and they feared that, without it, many consumers would be left unprotected from financial predators. Conceived by Senator Elizabeth Warren to police the type of lending that fuelled the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has long been a target of conservatives and industry. Congress created the agency as part of post-crash reforms in 2010 as the sole federal body primarily charged with protecting consumers’ rights in the financial marketplace. The CFPB now faces extinction under President Donald Trump’s second administration, which says the agency is a political weapon for Democrats and a burden on free enterprise. Speaking to reporters at the White House in February, Trump said it was “very important to get rid of the agency”, claiming, without spelling out evidence, that Warren had “used that as her little personal agency to go around and destroy people”. In an interview, Warren dismissed the criticism as a sign the CFPB was doing its job. “This is not about vendettas. This is about enforcing the law as it is written, so that billionaires and billionaire corporations don’t cheat American families. I think that’s a pretty good thing,” she said. White House Budget Director Russell Vought, a staunch CFPB critic and the agency’s acting head, told ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’ podcast in October he plans to shutter the CFPB. The administration is fighting in court to fire up to 90% of its workers, while planning to move pending investigations and litigation to the Justice Department. The agency says it is due to run out of money in early 2026 and Vought says he cannot legally seek more until the Federal Reserve returns to what the administration deems “profitability,” a position a federal judge flatly rejected on Tuesday, finding it without legal merit. Congressional Republicans also slashed the CFPB’s maximum allowable funding in July. Together, the administration, congressional Republicans and industry-backed lawsuits have undone a decade’s worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending. The agency has also dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations. The CFPB and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.Warren said that as a law professor studying bankruptcy she saw that consumer protections were weak and fragmented, and that America needed a single federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive and abusive practices. “I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one or more of their creditors,” she told Reuters. “For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between fifth and tenth, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated.” Critics complain of overreachRepublicans said the agency was redundant, with federal bank watchdogs, like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and state regulators already looking out for consumers, and that its funding and leadership structure were unconstitutional. Like other banking regulators, the CFPB’s funding is not set annually by Congress and does not come directly from taxpayers. Rather, the agency draws on the Federal Reserve and its director was until recently protected from removal at will by the president. Republicans accused the CFPB’s first director Richard Cordray, a Democrat, of using those powers to crush small banks and businesses via overzealous enforcement and complex regulations, and of overstepping the agency’s legal authority by trying to regulate companies Congress had exempted from its oversight, such as auto dealerships. Conservative and industry groups tried several times to curb its powers or extinguish it altogether via the courts. In 2020 the Supreme Court handed the president the power to fire the director, which he has since used. Critics on the political right accused former director Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, of exceeding his authority, flouting the federal rule-making process, and harming consumers with an ill-conceived crackdown on financial firm fees. Thomas Hoenig, who served as vice chair of the FDIC from 2012 to 2018, said he was sceptical of some of the CFPB’s work under prior administrations, but that it still served an important purpose. “If you take them out of the picture altogether, you’re going to get more abuse, not less,” he said. “I’m disappointed to see the CFPB just go away.” ‘Very important for me’For some, though, the agency has been a lifeline. Millions of Americans like Jones who are struggling with credit reporting errors, predatory lenders, debt collectors, fraud, discrimination or other challenges, are now filing complaints every year with the agency, which prompts companies to fix the issues, sometimes by paying the complainants, or explain themselves. When companies repeatedly break the rules, the CFPB punishes them and tries to make their customers whole. To date, it has returned $21bn to consumers, according to CFPB data. Morgan Smith, a 31-year-old single mother and social services worker in Issaquah, Washington, turned to those resources when she realised she had been a victim of identity theft. After her wallet and ID were stolen from her car, she learned that someone had opened up a string of accounts in her name, she said: a rental car that ended up in a crash, an unpaid storage unit and a hotel room at an amusement park. Reuters was unable to confirm Smith’s account independently. “I went straight to the CFPB and I was navigated there to their consumer education tab where I was able to find out how to deal with fraud and scams. It gave me all the information I needed to know… my rights,” she said. “That was very important for me to have this resource.” Without the CFPB, borrowers would once again rely on a hodgepodge of federal, state and other local agencies which lack the CFPB’s resources, expertise and legal powers, say consumer groups. “Prior to the CFPB coming around, we’d have to say, ‘write your attorney general, write to the FTC,’ whoever it was, and it became this sort of letter-writing campaign,” said Sam Hohman, who runs the Nebraska nonprofit Credit Advisors Foundation, which helps people get out of debt and offers consumer education services. As a result, people like Virginia resident Michael Johnson, 49, may have fewer options in future when they fall into trouble. After a kidney transplant and leg amputation several years ago left Johnson unable to work, he racked up credit card debt paying for basic expenses, he said. This summer he received court summonses from creditors seeking to collect on that old debt, according to court records. “I got in over my head unintentionally,” Johnson said in an interview. Using a CFPB database of credit card terms and conditions, Johnson learned that his creditors were required to use arbitration rather than sue in court, which could cost more than the underlying debts. Johnson represented himself in court and says so far one creditor has dropped its complaint while the other is considering its options. “It adds credibility to your defence that you understand your rights,” Johnson said. “Life happens to everybody.” Source link
Ivory Coast’s head coach Emerse Fee in Marrakesh. (AFP) Ivory Coast coach Emerse Fae has backed the decision to play the Africa Cup of Nations every four years instead of two, saying that the change could benefit the development of football on the continent.“It can be a good thing if alongside that we do what we need to do for the development of African football,” he told AFP.The Cup of Nations has almost always been held at two-year intervals since the first edition in 1957 but Confederation of African Football president Patrice Motsepe announced the change on the eve of the ongoing tournament in Morocco.Motsepe said that the tournament would go ahead every four years after the next two editions planned for 2027 and 2028, a decision that has been heavily criticised by some on the continent who see it as bowing to pressure from leading European clubs and FIFA.He said an annual African Nations League – along the lines of the UEFA Nations League – would instead be introduced to boost the coffers of national federations.“We are lucky in Africa now to have better infrastructure, better structured teams, better players, most of whom play for the best teams in Europe,” added Fae, who led the Elephants to the AFCON title in 2024.“Holding the AFCON every four years would mean having a major tournament every two years with the World Cup too, but there needs to be another major competition in Africa like the planned Nations League.“That would allow us to have games between teams like Morocco and Senegal every year, or Ivory Coast against Tunisia and Algeria against Mali.“And I don’t think that would penalise the smaller nations because I don’t know that them losing games 5-0 or 6-0 really raises the level of African football.“If they play against other teams of their level with the aim of being promoted, I think everyone will be a winner.”Meanwhile Fae admitted retaining the AFCON crown at the ongoing edition in Morocco is a hard task for his team.Ivory Coast are already through to the last 16 before playing their final group game today against Gabon.“There are eight or nine teams with squads that can win it, and I feel like teams play differently against us because we are the reigning champions,” Fae admitted.“That makes things even harder, but we are motivated to go all the way and we are confident too.” Related Story Source link
A left-arm spinner from Bhutan has become the first bowler to take eight wickets in a Twenty20 international.Sonam Yeshey, 22, took 8-7 in his four overs during the third men’s T20 international at home to Myanmar, who were all out for 45 replying to 127-9.Yeshey went ahead of Syazrul Idrus, who took 7-8 for Malaysia against China in 2023, and Ali Dawood, who had 7-19 for Bahrain against Bhutan earlier this year, on the all-time T20 international best bowling list.Yeshey made his T20 international debut in 2022 against Malaysia when he had figures of 3-16 and has gone on to take 37 wickets in 34 matches.In domestic and franchise T20 cricket there has never been an eight-wicket haul.Colin Ackermann took 7-18 for Leicestershire Foxes against Birmingham Bears in England’s T20 Blast in 2019.Taskin Ahmed grabbed 7-19 for Durbar Rajshahi against Dhaka Capitals in the Bangladesh Premier League this year.The best bowling figures in a women’s T20 international are 7-0 by Indonesia’s Rohmalia against Mongolia in 2024. Source link
Fast bowler Jofra Archer was included in England’s provisional T20 World Cup squad announced yesterday, despite suffering a left side strain that ruled him out of the final two Ashes Tests, but there was no place for wicketkeeper Jamie Smith.Archer’s fellow quick Josh Tongue has been called up to the T20 squad for the first time in a 15-man party to be captained by Harry Brook for the tournament in India and Sri Lanka beginning on February 7.Archer will sit out the warm-up tour to Sri Lanka next month to continue his rehabilitation following the injury he sustained during the third Ashes Test in Adelaide earlier this month.Brydon Carse will replace Archer in Sri Lanka for three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 internationals beginning on January 22.There was no place, however, in the T20 World Cup squad for Smith who has endured a torrid Ashes tour of Australia, for all that is an unusual starting point in deciding selection for a white-ball tournament in the sub-continent.The Surrey wicketkeeper-batsman smashed 60 from 26 balls in his last T20 appearance against the West Indies in June, but was rested due to his heavy all-format workload from the subsequent series against South Africa and Ireland.But following four Tests in Australia where he has averaged a lowly 19.85 with the bat and endured several struggles behind the stumps, he has been left out entirely, with the experienced Jos Buttler and Phil Salt providing England with keeping options for 2024 T20 World Cup semi-finalists England.Tongue, by contrast, has never played white-ball cricket but has enhanced his reputation with impressive Ashes displays in Adelaide and Melbourne, where a England’s four-wicket win still left them 3-1 down heading into a series finale at Sydney starting Saturday.And the 28-year-old was the top wicket-taker in last season’s Hundred competition, taking 14 wickets in just six games.Test-match opening batsman Zak Crawley returns to the ODI squad for the first time since December 2023.Brook will lead his first World Cup campaign as white-ball captain, with England facing Bangladesh, West Indies, Italy and Nepal in Group C, with both managing director Rob Key and coach Brendon McCullum looking for an impressive showing after they came in for criticism following the Test team’s tame Ashes series loss.England T20 squad for World Cup squad and Sri Lanka tour: Harry Brook (capt), Rehan Ahmed, Jofra Archer, Tom Banton, Jacob Bethell, Jos Buttler (wkt), Sam Curran, Liam Dawson, Ben Duckett, Will Jacks, Jamie Overton, Adil Rashid, Phil Salt, Josh Tongue, Luke Wood, Brydon Carse (Sri Lanka tour only)England ODI squad for Sri Lanka tour: Harry Brook (capt), Rehan Ahmed, Tom Banton, Jacob Bethell, Jos Buttler (wkt), Brydon Carse, Zak Crawley, Sam Curran, Liam Dawson, Ben Duckett, Will Jacks, Jamie Overton, Adil Rashid, Joe Root, Luke Wood Source link
In the wake of Brooks Koepka's early departure from LIV Golf, it's only natural that all eyes would turn to see if LIV's most popular star, Bryson DeChambeau, would similarly jump ship with one year left on his contract or sign an extension early.If you're waiting for a clear answer, you'll have to keep waiting.’It's confidential. I'm not going to share too much, but the conversations are in process,’ DeChambeau told social media outlet Flushing It Golf in a long- ranging interview.DeChambeau left the door open on his future at LIV Golf, while the American also offered praise and positivity for his experience with the Saudi-backed league.’We have to get to a place where both parties have a good understanding of one another,’ DeChambeau said of his readiness to sign an extension on a contract that expires after the 2026 season. ‘It is getting to a place that makes sense for both sides. And, I think that can happen, but you never know. Life throws curve balls.’Koepka's deceptive pitch came in the form of an announcement by LIV Golf on Dec. 23 that the two sides had ‘amicably and mutually agreed’ to part ways. With a reported year remaining on his LIV contract, Koepka said he wanted to prioritize spending more time with family.’That was quite a shock to a lot of people,’ DeChambeau said. ‘There was always rumblings, but ultimately, it was a shock when I saw it today. … People make decisions for whatever their needs and wants are, and ultimately, you have to respect it and move on, and it feels like it was a mutual understanding and that's great.’DeChambeau did express excitement for his successful Crushers GC team and his passion for the potential growth of team golf.DeChambeau — who is among the LIV team captains that own 25% of their franchises — said his Crushers team has cleared $20 million in revenue.After expressing optimism at June's U.S. Open about renegotiating his LIV Golf deal before the end of the year, DeChambeau hesitated to say whether an extension could be done before LIV Golf's first event of the new season in February at Riyadh.’I don't know about before Riyadh, there's a lot of things to go through,’ he said. ‘You know, it's a scenario that is very unique. With Brooks leaving, it definitely throws in some unique things. I've said it all along, I want to do this, I want to grow team golf across the globe. But it has to be right. And there's a lot of things that have to be done in order for it to be right, you know?’… It's going to be interesting to see what happens.’ Source link
Follow our live coverage as the General Assembly and its Fifth Committee meet today to finalize negotiations and vote on the United Nations’ regular budget for…
Ciara Carolan and Jessica Howard-Johnston A dozen girls whizzed around an English karting track, part of a pioneering drive to draw women into motorsports and maybe even race to the top in male-dominated Formula 1.A special test day in October in Nottingham aimed to address a major gender gap in F1, one of the flashiest of sports.Italian Lella Lombardi was the last woman to compete in an F1 Grand Prix in 1976, and the absence of women on the circuit is linked to young girls’ limited exposure to motorsports, according to gender parity organisations.More Than Equal, a non-profit that supports women drivers, said girls start karting two years later than boys on average. Seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, for example, got into the format aged just eight.”These are the first steps that a girl could take,” Cameron Biggs, coaching and academy pathway manager at Motorsport UK, told AFP.”We’re really trying to join the dots between grassroots and elite.”The enthusiasm was palpable among the youngsters, who were mostly new to karting.Some attended the taster day, supported by makeup company Charlotte Tilbury, after watching F1 while others were encouraged by their parents.None seemed put off by F1’s breakneck speed, the thrumming engines and the prospect of driving a vehicle years before they are old enough to have a driver’s licence.”On the second time, I came first and I’m very proud,” beamed 11-year-old Megan.”I watch Formula 1 quite often, and so I kind of know how to get around the track,” said Erin, also 11.F1 paradoxF1’s official website boasts a global fanbase of 827mn people – a 63 percent increase since 2018.But there is a paradox: F1 is one of the world’s few non-gender-segregated sports yet one of the most male-dominated.”We know that the pathway for female drivers hasn’t successfully got a woman into Formula One competitively in the last 50 years,” More Than Equal’s head of driver development Lauren Forrow told AFP.That means that girls are “not thriving within” the current system, she said.The organisation has pledged to “make history” by training a woman not just to compete but to win.”We know that this is a real challenge and that it’s never been done before,” CEO Tom Stanton told AFP.More Than Equal lists limited access to motorsports at an early age, cultural and structural biases, sponsorship gaps and a lack of role models at the top as barriers obstructing women’s entry into F1.Forrow said the organisation’s unique Driver Development Programme “acknowledges the physiological, psychological and technical differences” women face, such as the impact of menstruation on athletic abilities and daily life.These realities “inform what the kind of right recipe is for supporting female athletes in this space”, she said, of the programme created for young female racing drivers.- ‘Nobody to look up to’ -Fifteen-year-old Skye Parker, from Trelogan, North Wales, told AFP she is determined to become “Formula 1 world champion”, having started karting aged six and now loving the “feeling of excitement” she gets on the track.On a wet December day, the assured teenager did laps in a Formula 4 car on Spain’s Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. It has a challenging layout and is used by More Than Equal to hone the skills of female drivers.F4, for junior drivers, is an essential stepping stone for drivers on their way to the top.Parker’s personalised pink-and-green helmet distinguished her from other drivers as she drove for 45 minute stretches, concluding each session with a technical debrief.Parker told AFP there are more women than before, but noted “boys definitely outnumber us”.”It is quite sad that there is nobody to look up to female-wise in Formula One,” she said.On top of obstacles unique to women, F1 is an “incredibly expensive” sport to pursue, Forrow said.In Nottingham, Marcus McKenzie stood on the sidelines, using a headpiece to instruct his eight-year-old daughter Georgia as she rocketed around the karting track – at 25 miles (40 kilometres) per hour, somewhat slower than the average speeds of 220 miles per hour characteristic of a Grand Prix.The single father conceded that the cost of the sport made things difficult, but he is hoping to secure sponsorship for Georgia and her 11-year-old brother who is also passionate about F1.But money was far from the minds of the youngsters, who were exhilarated as they stepped off the track.”Don’t be shy to do it. Just be brave and have fun,” was eight-year-old Thea’s message to other girls her age. Source link