With a number of players coming back from representing their country and subsequently collecting a dose of COVID-19 for their efforts, it comes as no surprise that international football has come in for something of a bashing as of late. As the club landscape becomes ever more dominant and the clamour for competitions such as the Premier League and LaLiga to run unimpeded grows further, the international theatre of football has been described as a nuisance as of late.

With many stadia across the continent are still unable to open their gates at present, an increased amount of focus was placed on Northern Ireland’s recent European Championship play-off tie with Slovakia. Not only because the winner would claim one of the four remaining berths for next summer’s tournament but also because there were a limited number of supporters that were permitted entry to Windsor Park.

Like so many competitions around the world, America’s National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) has had to deal with scheduling upheaval in 2020 and although navigating their Challenge Cup through to completion was difficult, there is certainly reason to be cheerful at the end of it.

You wait for one radical idea in football and then two come along almost at once, as no sooner has “Project Big Picture” been kicked into touch for at least the short-term, than plans for a European Premier League are announced. Plans that would produce another seismic shock within football’s global community and after one idea was eventually dampened only recently, it is time for some governing bodies to fan the flames once again.

Although the Scottish Premiership has been in full swing for a couple of months, the three other divisions that make up the SPFL have only just kicked their first balls in anger and they do so without any fans lending their support. Of course, this has been widely the same situation within the Premiership, bar two test events which saw a limited capacity of 300 supporters at both Aberdeen’s Pittodrie and Ross County’s Global Energy Stadium.

The quest for supporters to be welcome within English stadia continues and with a united front now forming, there is a hope but not yet an expectation, that soon the UK government will eventually bow to such pressure. Pressure that has come via a number of different mediums, none more so than a petition that has recently collected as many as 125,000 signatures, as the clamour to ‘Let Fans In’ grows with each weekend that passes.

Although Spain and Portugal are obvious international rivals due to their close geographical proximity, it is a shared border which often provides great benefit to the two nations and they will hope this proves to be the case in the distant future. Because even though the 2030 edition of the FIFA World Cup is still an exceptionally long away, the planning phase has already begun and that means soon, a host for football’s biggest party will have to be decided.

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) is the club with the greatest financial power in world football according to the Soccerex Football Finance 100, the annual report from football business experts Soccerex, which uses bespoke methodology to evaluate and rank the world’s top 100 clubs according to their finances.