Play the Game has decided to celebrate its 6th world communication conference one week earlier than scheduled. The new dates are 8-12 June.

Today it was announced that Play the Game will receive the Gerlev Award 2008 next Saturday 4 October when the academy celebrates its own 70th anniversary and the 30th anniversary of the award.

Long held suspicions of match-fixing in Bulgarian football materialised in the arrest of Bulgarian Ivan Lekov, vice chairman of the State Agency for Sport and Youth and member of the Executive Commission of the Bulgarian Football Union (BFU). This happened after a group of former referees went public about experienced bribes and match-fixings conducted by top positioned deputies in the BFU.

American media giant CBS has filed a lawsuit against the NFL Players’ Association, in response to threats by the Association that it would bring legal action unless CBS agreed to pay licence fees for use of player statistics in its NFL Fantasy Football tournament. The lawsuit marks another flashpoint in the debate over the limits of a free press in the world of sport.

The chairman of the Japan Sumo Association (JSA), Kitanoumi Toshimitsu, has resigned after a series of scandals in the sport. Initially, Kitanoumi had been able to escape responsibility, relying on ideological preconceptions with regard to hierarchy within the ancient Japanese sport. However, when a Russian wrestler from his own stable was found guilty of smoking marijuana, he was forced to step down, reawakening debate in Japan on the future of the semi-religious sport in a commercial environment.

Play the Game, the world communication conference on sport and society, will travel to the UK for the first time. Coventry is to be the first ever city outside of the Nordic countries to host the conference, which has been running for the last eleven years. The conference, taking place 8-12 June 2009, is to be co-organised by Coventry University’s Centre for the International Business of Sport (CIBS).

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) is backing a formal complaint to UEFA against the Romanian Football Federation (FRF) and its president Mircea Sandu, after the football federation allegedly encouraged footballers to throw stones at journalists and verbally abuse them.