Imagine a country where football clubs have not legally registered their players, where the national football federation has ordered thousands of jerseys and shorts with false PUMA trade marks and the top official in the federation has obtained his job with a false university degree. If media reports are to believed this country is Macedonia.

Football has become the first target in an anti-corruption drive in Poland. A few weeks ago the Polish sports minister suspended the entire board of the Polish Football Association (PZPN) after one member was arrested on suspicion of corruption and match fixing. The price for this action may be high but the goverment is willing to pay.

Rafael Serra, a reporter from Radio Gaucha in Brazil, was beaten up by fans from the Gremio football club when he went to cover the arrival of the team's new goalkeeper in the airport of Porto Alegre.

Whilst the wider football community in Europe may think of Ukraine mainly in terms of its joint bid with Poland for the European Championships in 2012, Ukrainian Ultras Against Racism now urges the very same football community to speak out against the attempts by Ukrainian neo-nazi groups to increase their influence amongst football fans.

The behaviour of violent fans at a match in Nancy last November, has cost the Dutch club Feyenoord its place in the 2006/07 UEFA Cup after UEFA's Appeals Body decided to exclude the Rotterdam team from all UEFA competitons this season. The club feels let down by the police that was warned that banned supporters were on their way to France.

For Franco Carraro, 2006 was a rollercoaster. He resigned as president of the Italian Football Federation because of the match fixing scandal in Italian football last summer. Then Carraro , an IOC member and member of UEFA and FIFA. was banned from sport leadership for 4.5 years. But appeal after appeal diminished the punishment and now the IOC Ethics Commission has also given him a clean bill of health.

Who is in charge of football in Kenya? Well, the answer differs depending on who you ask. FIFA has just backed the Kenyan Football Federation (KFF) and its attempts to re-launch a national league. Kenya’s sports minister on the other hand refuses to have anything to do with KFF officials and KFF has also been renounced by twelve of its own branches.

Multinational cooperation between police and football authorities will be a must if European football wants to counter criminal money laundering activities through football. So says Henri Roemer, a special advisor to UEFA’s Executive Committee and an expert on what makes football vulnerable to organised crime.