LAGOS JANUARY 12TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Fresh from their brilliant performances at the World Cup, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe are among the nominees for FIFA’s The Best award for last year, world football’s governing body announced on Thursday. Messi, who has won the prize once before, captained Argentina to victory in Qatar, a career-defining triumph that has…
LAGOS JANUARY 11TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Democratic Republic of Congo have been forced to pull out of a regional qualifying tournament for the 2023 Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations after 25 out of 40 players failed mandatory age testing. It is the latest age fraud scandal to hit the Central African Football Federations’ Union (UNIFFAC) qualifiers after…
LAGOS JANUARY 9TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Lionel Messi and Paris Saint-Germain will play a friendly against a select side made up of players from Cristiano Ronaldo’s new club Al Nassr and their Saudi rivals Al Hilal in Riyadh on January 19, the French champions announced on Monday. Qatar-owned PSG will travel to Doha on January 17 before moving…
LAGOS JANUARY 6TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Cameroon’s Under-17s face a race against time to field a team for regional African Cup of Nations qualifiers after more players failed age tests ordered by Samuel Eto’o, president of the country’s governing body, Fecafoot. The former Barcelona and Inter Milan striker’s insistence on using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) screening saw the…
LAGOS JANUARY 5TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Cristiano Ronaldo has been banned from making his Al-Nassr debut against Al-Ta’ee on Thursday. The 37-year-old was due to play his first game for his new club at Mrsool Park in the Saudi Pro League, after he was unveiled as an Al-Nassr player earlier in the week. Ronaldo was set to receive…
LAGOS JANUARY 5TH (NEWSRANGERS)-The 1980s Brazil international Walter Casagrande, a fearsome striker of the era and now a columnist with views just as robust, was unequivocal about the way in which Pele had been treated in death by his successors in the famous yellow shirt. “The vast majority resent the King,” Casagrande wrote in his…
LAGOS JANUARY 5TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Some of Brazil’s best-known footballers have faced a furious backlash as fans and pundits questioned why they had failed to attend ceremonies bidding farewell to Pelé. Hundreds of thousands of people waited for hours under a burning sun on Monday to file past the recently deceased soccer legend’s coffin at Santos’ Vila…
LAGOS JANUARY RD (NEWSRANGERS)-Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo made a slip of the tongue over his megabucks new deal on Tuesday when he seemed to say he had moved to South Africa rather than Saudi Arabia, home of his latest club Al Nassr. “It’s not the end of my career to come to South Africa,” he…
