FIFA will have to clarify its ticket sales practices for this year's World Cup in the face of accusations of artificially inflating prices and deceiving fans at the time of purchase. The state attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have opened an investigation into the eight World Cup matches that will be played at MetLife Stadium, including the tournament final. Currently, on the Seatpick.com portal, tickets to watch some of the matches at the New Jersey stadium are being sold for an average price of $2,790.

Storm winds are blowing for Lleida football. To the category descents of two historic clubs from the region, such as Unió Esportiva Tàrrega (which falls to Segona Catalana) and Borges CF (to Tercera), three more simultaneous ones concentrated in Lleida city are added. It has been a long time since so many sporting failures have been accumulated in the capital: AEM's women's team will no longer continue in the Primera RFEF after thirteen years of competition; Atlètic Lleida, despite having opted to compete in the Segona RFEF, drops dramatically to Tercera; and Lleida Club de Futbol, in addition to falling into the abyss of the Lliga Elit (the sixth level of Spanish competitions), cannot find an investor to cover its debts and is one week away from disappearing.

For years, every time a young child tops a human tower in front of thousands of people, the debate about the safety of castells resurfaces. The image of children several meters high continues to generate admiration, but also apprehension among those who see this practice as a particularly dangerous activity. Now, a study by researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) and the Santa Tecla Network provides data that question this negative perception.

On July 25, 1975, Ladislao Kubala walked onto a football field at the head of a group of players. These men were not unknown footballers. They were the best of the Spanish league at the time, many of them destined to play in the Argentina World Cup a few years later under the command of Ladislao, who was then the national team coach. That was no ordinary match. To begin with, the field where these stars would play was made of sand. The audience was also different. No luxury and no giant stands. It was all the people of Sarral, a town in the Conca de Barberà region with fewer than two thousand inhabitants, surrounded by fields of vineyards and olive trees.

Pep Guardiola has retired amidst the admired recognition of everyone, who have proclaimed him the best coach of the last 20 years and one of the most influential in the history of football, after how he made Barça, Bayern and City play and win, with a model that more than creating a school has marked a before and after for Pep. (That they didn't recognize it in Madrid before caused me perplexity and then made me laugh. Now it causes me great spiritual comfort because I see the coherence in it: there is nothing more provincial and stingy than believing yourself the center of the world, and Madrid-Club and Madrid-Ayuso speak as if the sun had not set in Flanders many centuries ago.)Excuse the digression. What I meant to say is that these days on social media there's a scolding from Guardiola to his players after a lost game played with a terrible attitude. The dressing-down he gives them is epic. But it has nothing to do with big data, or whiteboards, or footballing concepts, or "you didn't follow the instructions I gave you." It's born from the monumental, human anger of someone who feels disappointed, almost betrayed, and wants that game to have consequences: the boss is very angry, we need to get to it.You can ask artificial intelligence to write you a scolding or whatever it may be, and it will come out well-articulated but flat, because it will not have arisen from natural intelligence, from commitment to work, from a sense of responsibility, from personal knowledge of a group, from accumulated personal experience. It seems that Leo XIV writes about all this in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, which is presented today. AI is so useful that it can make us believe it can replace us. But it lacks the moral authority, the head and the heart that allow us to decide that today is the day to slam our fist on the table.

The Vega Andújar family founded a project in the sports events sector in 1999. They organized a Coca-Cola Cup and some summer camps. The idea evolved towards the distribution of sportswear, and at the beginning of the 2000s, it grew to have eight multi-brand stores. From this initiative, Gedo (Gestión de Eventos Deportivos y Ocio) was born, founded in May 2002, and it grew to the point of outfitting more than 800 sports clubs throughout the country. In Catalonia, l’Hospitalet, Llagostera, Terrassa, and Reus were part of its client portfolio. But what seemed like a solvent business was not so much in reality. In fact, up to five transactions by brothers Ricard and Jordi Vega to raise funds for the company have ended up in court due to non-payment. Other attempts to capitalize Gedo, which today is a project in limbo, have involved several professional footballers. Most have lost their money and their faith in recovering it.

When in 2019 everything went wrong, surely few people imagined that the city of Reus would continue to enjoy its football. After years of irresponsible management that caused shameful scenes, La Liga decided to expel Reus Deportiu with the season already started in the Second Division. Joan Oliver, former general director of Barça in Joan Laporta's first tenure, had managed to bring Reus to the Spanish Second Division for the first time, but he did so by playing so hard that he burned his fingers. He fell out with the fans, stopped paying, and couldn't find anyone to sell the entity to. Instead of bringing glory to Reus football, he sank it.

At the start of the season, Barcelonism agreed that winning the League again would be a great achievement, because the team “of all Spaniards” could not repeat the surprising, almost ridiculous, blank year with a squad full of multi-million euro signings who were supposed to usher in some new era of world football under a new coach, Xabi Alonso, presented as a Guardiola for this new hegemony. Eight months and two coaches later, Alonso appears on the long list of victims of president Florentino Pérez; the multi-million euro signings have once again shown that, as Cruyff used to say, you've never seen a bag of money score goals; Madrid is once again left blank; Barça wins the League for the second consecutive year, and, in line with this good governance, Mourinho (!) is rumoured for next year.

The name of Marie-Louise Eta (Dresden, 1991) has already been etched in the world of football. She has become the first woman to manage a men's team within the top five leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and France). She arrives at the Union Berlin bench with the mission to turn around the difficult situation they are going through. The team is not in the relegation zone, but they have been in a very bad dynamic for a few months. They had a good first half of the season and reached Christmas in eighth place, close to European spots. However, since then, results have worsened: out of the last 16 matches, they have only won two.

Huesca and Real Zaragoza arrived at the 37th matchday of the Second Division with the urgent need to score points in an increasingly suffocating period of the season. The team from the Aragonese capital is in the lower zone, very close to a relegation that would be as historic as it would be dramatic. And Huesca also fails to distance itself from danger. In this context, the Aragonese derby presented itself as an especially delicate fixture, with the feeling that a defeat could have decisive consequences in the fight for permanence.

The Italian Guardia di Finanza has dismantled a network accused of exploiting prostitution and managing nightlife-related events that allegedly provided services to high-level footballers. Among the players mentioned are Real Madrid's Dean Huijsen and Inter's defender, a target for Barça, according to information that has emerged in the Italian press. As confirmed by the EFE agency, the operation, which is being investigated by the Milan Court at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office, has resulted in four people under house arrest, accused of facilitating prostitution by organizing escort services, as well as money laundering derived from this activity.

Sant Andreu is celebrating. One of the historic Catalan football clubs has been able to celebrate promotion to Primera RFEF, after the triumph of the four-bar team (2-1) against Reus Reddis in a Narcís Sala packed to the rafters. More than a decade later, the club returns to the third tier of state football after a strange week as the team's coach, Natxo González, suffered a heart attack that led to him being hospitalized. Today, logically, he could not be on the bench for the match against the Reus team, a club where he also worked. The Reus fans present at Narcís Sala showed banners of support for González, who could not witness the triumph on the field with goals from Mendes and Señé, from a penalty. Goals that led to a great celebration on the stadium's pitch.

The life of Alberto Edjogo-Owono Montalbán (Sabadell, 1984) has always revolved around a ball. He defended the jersey of clubs such as Sabadell, Sant Andreu, Granollers, or l'Olímpic de Xàtiva, in addition to passing through Espanyol's youth football. He was also an international for Equatorial Guinea, his father's native land. He is now a television commentator for DAZN, where he broadcasts the best matches of the First Division. Edjogo has just published Heridas en la piel (geoPlaneta), a book where he reflects on racism in the world of football.

FC Thun is making history not only in the Swiss Super League, but in European football. The team where the Catalan Genís Montolio plays has been promoted to the First Division this very season and, far from settling in and playing it safe, has wanted to go a little further and establish itself as the undisputed leader of the competition. “It is a situation that nobody expected. Being first or even fighting for European places was almost unthinkable. I am valuing it very highly. Now that we see that we are close to achieving it, I enjoy it even more. It is a historic moment for the club and very important for the city [of less than 50,000 inhabitants]. I live it with enthusiasm and without pressure,” explains Genís in conversation with ARA. With twelve points advantage over the second, St. Gallen, with only six matchdays left – including those of the final phase – before the end of the competition, glory is within reach.

Whistles at Egypt's anthem, chants of “Muslim who doesn’t jump!”, insults to Pedro Sánchez and the essential “Spanish Gibraltar!”. What is this if not Torrente going to Cornellà-El Prat yesterday to cheer on the Spanish team?Bring, bring the Spanish team to Catalonia, so that all the Vox voters come out to make racist chants.Racist and stupid. Because, as an Ara reader says today in their comments, “you have to be an idiot to go to see a match of your team, start shouting racist cries and chants, and end up insulting the best player on your own team.” Because, of course, these patriots have forgotten that if there is a player who can decisively contribute to Spain winning the World Cup again one day, it is a player named Lamine Yamal and he is Muslim. Not to mention whistling the Barça goalkeeper and former Espanyol player Joan Garcia on his debut for the national team. And they were not minority chants. At the end of the match, when asked about racism and xenophobia, the coach Luis de la Fuente (the one who applauded Rubiales on the day of “I am not going to resign”) replied that these people, “the further away from society, the better.” Impossible for them to be far away, they are society. They are a fraction of society that has a voice and a vote (Vox in Spain) which is a vote that is very much in line with their voice.

"I used to work in a publishing house called Linkgua at 45 Muntaner street. I was an editor and proofreader. And one day at the door I meet a lady about 80 years old, Carme Humet Cocinero. And she asks me if I can hug her because she hasn't hugged a black person in 40 years," explains Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana (Havana, 1964). Rodríguez hugged her and asked why she had asked. "She told me that her aunt, Maria Cocinero, had married a black Cuban named Longinos Betancourt who was a doorman in a building in Urquinaona. And she added that the son of this couple had played for Barça. It blew my mind. I knew nothing, and I'm Cuban, black, and a Barça fan," he adds. "Thus began Rodríguez's investigation to publicize the figure of Francesc SiscuBetancourt y Cocinero (1913-1998), the first black player in Barça's history. "Betancourt came to find me. It was a sign. Unfortunately, his family wasn't very interested in remembering Siscu's figureand they threw away many documents. I'm very sorry. So I had to investigate," explains Rodríguez, who has just published Ciscu Betancourt, first black footballer of Barça and the Spanish league, a book to vindicate this player who defended the jersey of a lot of Catalan teams. He debuted at Fort Pienc in the 20s and in 1961 he was still linked to football at Sant Cugat, where he coached. In between, good spells at Barça, Sabadell or Badalona, even scoring a goal against Real Madrid with the blaugrana jersey.

Kylian Mbappé has suffered a series of physical ailments this season, forcing him to miss important matches. After a period of absence and a gradual return, his knee injury has once again put the spotlight on Real Madrid's medical management. In fact, according to French journalist Daniel Riolo, the club's medical staff may have made an error in the initial diagnosis of the player's injury, delaying his recovery by analyzing images of his right knee when the injury was actually in his left.

The Canary Islands referee Juan Luis Pulido Santana has sparked a new controversy following statements made on the Rogue Cast podcast, in which he harshly criticized former Catalan referee Xavier Estrada Fernández, whom he described as "a wretch" and "a sinister character." But the issue isn't just the insult itself, but the underlying message. During the interview, Pulido explicitly introduced a particularly sensitive element: Estrada's political ideology: "Now he's playing the nationalist, a total Catalan, but he was certainly getting paid by the Spanish Football Federation," he stated. He then added a highly symbolic remark: "When he officiated the Copa del Rey final, he had to bow down to the national anthem."

"It was almost like winning the Champions League. For any other team, it would have been just another victory, but for us, it's our first and it could be our last. What we endured was tough, quite difficult, but it was worth it," explains Sergi Pont (1998). Ribera de Ondara, the club from a town in the Segarra region with fewer than 500 inhabitants, recently broke a streak of 31 defeats and 412 days without a point with a hard-fought 4-3 victory against Santa Coloma de Queralt B, thanks to a brace from Pont. Their last win had been on January 11, 2025. This season, they had suffered seventeen defeats in seventeen matches in the fourth tier of Catalan football, the lowest division, with eight goals for and 98 against, including some particularly painful results: 13-0, 10-9, 2-10, 7-0. "When the referee blew the whistle, we couldn't believe it. We were all laughing, all shouting like mad, all freaking out. Our faces were beaming with joy and happiness," he says.

Alba Caño was born in 2003 in Puiggròs, a tiny village in Les Garrigues, where a deep passion for football grew from a very young age. She learned to play at the Les Garrigues Football School, later played for a few seasons with AEM Lleida, and at just fifteen years old, joined Barça, where she even played for the first team in the last two seasons. But to gain the playing time that the Barça stars weren't giving her, she decided to radically change teams. Since January, she has been a midfielder for Boston Legacy FC, a newly formed team in the American professional league (the NWSL)