Russian star highlights a potentially big problem.

Join Our Facebook Fan Page for the Latest News/Rumours/Forums/Videos/WAGS/Funny Stuff/Features!

Arsenal midfielder Andriy Arshavin says he expects a large number of Premier League stars to abandon England in the near future, as the tax band is almost twice as big as in Spain.

Texan billionaire Ellis Short will buy out Sunderland this week - bringing with him a staggering £200m kitty. It's just the news Sunderland fans want to hear as they go into today's game with Chelsea at the Stadium of Light battling for Premier League survival. People Sport revealed on March 29 that Sunderland chairman Niall Quinn was [.

Things are still going at a snail's pace in the selling of the Newcastle Football club, but it does look like the man behind the Malaysian bid for Newcastle is Ananda Krishnan as we had suspected a couple of days ago. Ananda Krishnan likely new owner? The Sun is reporting that billionaire Ananda Krishnan is closing in [.

It was a tough Sunday in many ways for the Miami Ultras. Once again we were invited to attend Univision's Republica Deportiva for the USA vs Mexico Gold Cup final. Everything was great, confidence was high. The Mexican fans chanted their typical Mexican tunes while the Ultras began to drown them out with our incessant USA!

The Russian billionaire Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has some James Bond technology in his yacht.
And no I don't mean the two helipads, two swimming pools, the movie screens in all the guest rooms, the mini-submarine or the missile-proof windows.
He's got a paparazzi shield:

Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph.

Montreal and Ottawa just got company. In a move that is sure to raise the ire of some of those who have trouble with two Canadian teams in MLS much less one, how about the prospect of four or five? Bill Archer, please take your heart meds.
Courtesy of Canada.com:

EDMONTON — Major League Soccer isn't on the Edmonton horizon, but its rise to relative prominence elsewhere on the continent has piqued the interest of a local businessman with the kind of loot it takes to get into the game.

Good, perhaps great, news from The Indy:

In the previous two seasons, Wenger has said that the club must sell a player every year to help service the annual £24m payments on the Emirates Stadium. He has sold Thierry Henry and Alexander Hleb – both to Barcelona – over the last two seasons and the evidence suggests that a further sale will be in order this year if he is to continue financing the club.

Rafael Benitez, Liverpool Manager with the weight of the World upon him.Losing playmaker Xabi Alonso in the summer was bad enough but having to replace him with Lucas Leiva was the kick in the goolies I even felt myself, Owwhh!Half his team not playing well so far including Skrtel, Jamie, Masch and Stevie G.

The pain of yesterday's mauling is likely to linger for a while. I still can't think straight and it's impossible to digest that we could be so naïve, almost idiotic. This isn't a new feeling either. We have been outplayed in the big matches with mind numbing regularity in the recent past. It's as if all of us deserve shock treatment every few months for being mentally challenged enough to support the Arsenal.

Liverpool have reportedly entered negotiations about a possible takeover with the owners of an Indian Premier League cricket side.
According to a report in the News of the World, representatives of the billionaire owners of the Delhi Daredevils met with Anfield officials last week.
The paper claims that officials from the GMR group were also present at Anfield in midweek, as Rafael Benitez's men drew 4-4 with Arsenal.

Carlo Ancelotti in his tell all autobiography "Preferisco La Coppa" or "I prefer trophies" reveals that Abramovich, in an extraordinary moment of candour confessed:

"My Chelsea team don't have a personality. My ambition is to win every competition but at the moment I don't even recognise my team.

Who has what it takes to break into the big time?

There is something to be said for a gradual organic approach to building a successful football team and whilst Harry Redknapp has made some good solid purchases he also had the nucleus of a good quality squad to aid a rise up the table.

Every club has one. That vital cog that keeps the team wheels turning. With the season in its infancy, supporters up and down the land are still harbouring dreams of glory (or at the very least over achievement, given that short of a billionaire Sheikh turning up on your doorstep, thoughts of the title are confined to a privileged few these days).

As a Roma fan it was only a year ago that AS Roma was nearly purchased by Hungarian Billionaire George Soros who saw value in the Serie A side. Forbes magazine has AS Roma valued as the 11th most valuable franchise in World football. Only Juventus and AC Milan are valued higher when it comes to Serie A Sides.

One thing we are thinking about right now, is it could only be at Newcastle that a Billionaire buys the club, and then had them relegated within two seasons. Brad Friedel - Villa aiming for 5th place Somehow, that didn't seem to happen at Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Aston Villa, to name some other clubs acquired [.

English Premier League club Portsmouth have announced that their owner Alexandre Gaydamak has accepted an offer from Dubai based billionaire Dr.Sulaiman Al-Fahim to buy the club. Al-Fahim, who is on the board of the Abu Dhabi United Group (Owners of Man City), had talks with Pompey chairman Peter Storrie last night in Rome.

We here at the Man United offside have been pondering how United would enter the transfer window for... oh... roughly 3 months. Well we officially received our answer this morning, as Citeh manager Mark Hughes confirmed his interest in Carlitos Tevez.

Obviously, it isn't quite on the level of Gareth Barry's ridiculously absurd transfer to the Middle Eastlands, but when a club backed by a multi-multi-multi billionaire takes interest in one of your players, you tend to sit up and take notice.

Much has been said and written about St Louis's lack of a billionaire big money owner-investor for an MLS expansion side but it has almost been universally assumed that such a team would be well supported. Today we take a closer look at that through the eyes of Superliga.
When MLS/SUM made the decision to place a Superliga match in St Louis, regardless of what they may say officially, they probably wanted to gauge the response.

Benzema is unveiled at Madrid.

Since the summer transfer window has opened the English Premier League has gotten a taste of its own medicine and apparently it is bitter.

Many coaches, players, and columnists have hit out over Real Madrid's spending over the past months. And they would have had every right to do so, after all Madrid has paid exorbitant prices for football's biggest stars, something that probably isn't over yet.

When you think of a club backed by an American billionaire (or two) you think of Liverpool and Manchester United. It is rare that Randy Lerner's ownership of Aston Villa comes up. But he has financed a lot of buying of players since he bought the club. And still Villa have a threadbare squad that will be troubled by the injuries and departures they've suffered this off-season.

"It is difficult for us to qualify, but not impossible,We have to win our game and see what happens with Fiorentina and Lyon. Then we will approach the last game." Benitez has certainly fought his corner today after the galling last minute equaliser Liverpool conceded in the Stade Gerland last night.

Stan Kroenke has purchased even more shares in Arsenal today taking his holding to 29.9% of the club. With only another 0.09% required to reach the threshold to make an offer for the rest of the clubs shares, Kroenke has purchased 627 shares this week for the princely sum of £5.3 million.

-
-QPR REPORT Available on TWITTER!...QPR REPORT UPDATED THROUGHOUT THE DAY!
-Also Check out the "cutting-edge" combination messageboard and quasi-blog QPR Report Messageboard. If your interest is constantly-updated QPR-related news; QPR nostalgia; and items on some other broader football-related isssues: QPR Report Messageboard is one such site.

Seven months ago Luiz Felipe Scolari was hired to take the manager position of Chelsea, and on February 9, 2009, he was fired after a lackluster season thus far. The problem with the firing is that they got rid of the wrong man. Now there are 11 men on the field and only one manager, so getting rid of the manager is the easy thing to do since you can rarely eliminate three or four non performing players.

-
- For "cutting-edge" news articles re QPR and football-in-general...For a site where differing opinions about QPR and football are encouraged without the ad-hominems: Visit the free-thinking and completely-independent QPR Report Messageboard. Post if you want. Or just read if you prefer.

In a week where Silvio Berlusconi was served divorce papers by his wife and blamed very publicly for being a scoundrel for a dalliance or two the Patron of AC Milan must have been feeling prickly.Adhering to the philosophy that pooh pooh always flows down hill. The seventy two year old billionaire decided to pass his anger on to Carlo Ancelloti in a very public case of transference.

A deal has finally been brokered between Israelis and Arabs. Portsmouth FC have been sold from Israeli Alexandre Gaydamak to Arab Sulaiman Al-Fahim.
Al-Fahim, a real estate billionaire, has been nicknamed the "Donald Trump" of Abu Dhabi. The 32-year old will take over a club in dire need of some investment, and the task will be considerably more difficult than producing a season or two of The Apprentice.

Sometimes life gets exceptionally busy and, as a blogger, you have to store all the articles you want to write away for another time, frustrated that you haven't the time to get it all done.

Other weeks, you ignore the football world for a day, come back to see what you've missed, and find precisely nothing.

For me, this is a great time of year to be a Spurs fan. I love all the stories about who we are going to sign that never come to fruition but year on year people still fall for the same old bullshit. If you think of all the big names we have been linked with in the last five years or so, how many have we actually signed?

Billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich will have seen a few diamonds in his time. Thanks to his latest managerial appointment at Chelsea, he is observing a new one, and on initial inspection, it may be to his liking.

In the spirit of pre-season hype, much has been written about Carlo Ancelotti's favoured diamond system.

A lot has been said about Serie A's decline over the past couple of years. Critics have claimed the English Premiership and Spain's La Liga have become Europe's best leagues leaving Serie A to challenge the Bundesliga for third spot.

Sadly, Serie A has witnessed a sharp decline in the past few years that cannot be attributed to the lack of financial means alone.

Speculation continues about the possibility of Prince Faisal bin Fahd bin Abdullah al-Saud, a member of the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, buying into Liverpool, after the English Premier League club admitted that it had appointed advisors to look at new investment opportunities.
Fahd bin Abdullah's F6 company has signed an agreement with Liverpool and co-owner George Gillett's Nascar franchise, Richard Petty MOtorsports, that will see two Liverpool-backed youth academies and a number of motor racing tracks built in Saudi Arabia.

Big Story
New models in stadium ticketing don't come along too often, and when they do, they are rarely great for fans. Many in England will remember the massively unpopular bond schemes dreamed up by clubs such as Arsenal and West Ham in the 1990s when they were scrambling around for a new way to suck cash from fans to pay for needed stadium redevelopment.

Ever since the arrival of the Roman Abramovich era at Chelsea, the world of football seems to exist in two separate yet parallel universes.

There are clubs who teeter on the brink of bankruptcy despite brief flirts with glory (a la Leeds United and recently at Portsmouth). Then there are other clubs whose history has been blanketed by anonymity and mediocrity but now whose names, with the financial aid of the multi-billionaire, are dared uttered in the same sentence with title aspirations.

Following their recent take-over by a Sudanese billionaire food additive magnate, Heart of Clackmanannshire is buzzing. However, Faisal Wally Camel has something of a maverick streak and, in this week's "Shit Shot Mungo", he decides that the "man in the street" could do better job than any of these so-called football "managers" and appoints, well, the first person that he comes up in the street.

by CARL ELDRIDGE The stars and stripes will soon be flying over the Emirates Stadium. Well, maybe not but surely it can't be much longer before Yank billionaire Stan Kroenke launches a takeover bid for the Arsenal.

For the Denver Nugget has snapped up a further 10 shares in our holding company, at a cost of £85,000 and now the odd-haired moneybags owns 28.

Fulham have been a surprise club this year in the Premier League. Roy Hodgson's brilliant management, the emergence of inexpensive fantasy studs Brede Hangeland, Clint Dempsey, and Mark Schwarzer, and a superb home record at Craven Cottage have all contributed to the London team's success.
Despite the club's on-field accomplishments, their owner, billionaire Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, is still as outspoken and flamboyant as he ever was:
Speaking out against the disparity between rich clubs and poor clubs, and the rising expenses and player wages across the league, Al-Fayed said "The Premier League and the FA are run by donkeys who don't understand business, who are dazzled by money.

Why do we love English football quite so much? We have a Premier League that is consistently contested by just four teams. We have the swanky stadiums but a fundamental lack of fans to fill them. In addition we have clubs being operated by billionaire owners who have little interest in football bar the money that can be squeezed out of it.

PGL: Good morning Insiders and welcome to the TGIF Season Awards as voted by you, our readers! (How cheesy an intro was that? I should be wearing a Tux.) FTK and myself thought this would be a nice touch to bring the curtain down on a long season; it's always good to finish on a positive.

It was June,2007 and a Billionaire, from England no less, had just bought Newcastle United. Derek Llambias and Mike Ashley - two incompetents together At last Newcastle were getting a decent owner, and he would be one of the few Billionaire owners of a Premier League club who was English - not like those clubs like Chelsea, [.