Former Fifa president Sepp Blatter has urged the world of football to kick Gianni Infantino out of the role, claiming the recent World Cup “lost its credibility” due to the actions of his successor.

Blatter – whose own Fifa presidency was rife with accusations of corruption – insisted that “politics must not be allowed to overshadow the game”, seemingly in reference to Infantino’s close relationship with US president Donald Trump, which helped lead to the controversial overturning of USA striker Folarin Balogun’s ban for the red card he received against Bosnia.

Trump intervened, getting on the phone to Infantino urging him to look at Balogun’s sending off and, in due course, Fifa unprecedentedly suspended the ban for a year, enabling the forward to play in the last-16 clash with Belgium, where the US were hammered 4-1.

And reflecting on the World Cup, which ended on Sunday evening with Spain beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in an ill-tempered final, Blatter was unimpressed.

“The longest World Cup has come to an end – with the right champions,” he wrote on social media. “But on the way to the final whistle, the tournament had lost its credibility.

“Politics must not be allowed to overshadow the game. Now it is up to the fans, players and national associations to reclaim football and bring it back to its roots under new leadership.”

Blatter followed this missive with a string of hashtags including ‘Fifa half-time show’, ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Gianni Infantino’.

The ex-Fifa president wasn’t the only man to criticise Infantino and call for his removal, with LaLiga president Javier Tebas specifically calling out the Balogun incident.

“The suspension of the American player’s ban is an extremely serious matter,” said Tebas in an interview with Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport.

“They were lucky that Belgium eliminated the US because otherwise a case could have arisen that might have cost Infantino his job. Since Belgium won, they managed to bury the matter. But these things are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Tebas went further, saying he believe Fifa is “destroying the football industry” by expanding international competitions at the expense of domestic leagues and clubs.

When asked if he believes Infantino should quit, Tebas said: “In my opinion, yes, I think his time is up.”

Infantino said back in April that he would seek re-election for a fourth term as Fifa president, with the vote for the 2027-2031 cycle scheduled to take place in Morocco on 18 March next year. He may well run unopposed but even if another candidate emerges, the chances of them winning are miniscule.

“He ⁠shouldn’t stay, but the current state of affairs means he won’t leave,” Tebas added. “There’s no opposition candidate; no one wants to run to lose.

“This is the system, and it’s a system that’s flawed from the ground up. I’ve heard a lot of people against Infantino, who don’t ​agree with ⁠what he’s doing. They say it, but ‌then they don’t do anything.”

Tebas and Blatter aren’t the only dissenting voices, with Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin not attending the World Cup final following a series of disagreements between Uefa and Fifa over disciplinary procedures, refereeing logistics and match operations.

Additional reporting by Reuters

Warren Zaire-Emery has emerged as the latest midfield transfer target for Manchester United with interest dating back to 2023

Manchester United are reportedly weighing up a €60million (£51m) offer for Paris Saint-Germain star Warren Zaire-Emery. Old Trafford chiefs first considered a move for the midfielder back in 2023 when he was just 17 and it looks as though he could be targeted as their third midfield signing this summer.

Andrey Santos and Youri Tielemans have already joined for a combined £85m with AS Roma’s Manu Kone and Alex Scott of Bournemouth emerging as other targets.

With the likes of Sandro Tonali, Elliot Anderson and Mateus Fernandes moving for significant fees, United will likely have to fork out to make another signing but Zaire-Emery could be the solution. The 20-year-old has been on the fringes at PSG which could help United strike a deal.

According to French outlet Top Mercato, he is highly-regarded by those at the club, so much so that a €60million (£51m) approach is being ‘prepared’ in order to see PSG’s stance on a potential sale.

The report goes on to add that the European champions value him at closer to €80m (£68m). Zaire-Emery made 54 appearances in the 2025/26 season and followed that up with 109 minutes at the World Cup for France.

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It is unclear whether or not Zaire-Emery would consider a move away from the French capital having made so many appearances in both midfield and at right-back

However, injuries to Fabian Ruiz and Achraf Hakimi offered him more minutes but Luis Enrique relegated him back to the bench when those players were back fit and for PSG’s most important matches.

Attackers have also been under consideration by those at United with Everton’s Iliman Ndiaye and Crysencio Summerville emerging as targets.

The latter looked set for a move to AS Roma but has instead opted to join Saudi Pro League side Al Hilal after they had a sensational €80m (£68m) bid accepted.

Interest from United in the Dutch winger had cooled over recent weeks with any move linked to the future of Marcus Rashford. He looks set to stay at his boyhood club with Barcelona having signed Anthony Gordon and Karim Adeyemi to permanent deals.

United kick off their 2026/27 campaign away to newly-promoted Hull City. Their pre-season has already started with Rashford possibly featuring in one or two friendlies once back from his mandatory break after the World Cup.

Stuttgart entered the race for Leo Sauer alongside the negotiations with VfL Wolfsburg for Dženan Pejčinović. The Slovak international scored three goals for Feyenoord in 20 Eredivisie appearances last term.

Hoffenheim are already on the track as the potential alternative to RB Salzburg’s Adam Daghim, who spent last season on loan at Wolfsburg. According to several reports, the Sinsheim club are currently prioritizing the deal for the Danish winger.

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Saur had his breakthrough season in 2024/25 when he scored seven league goals in his loan stint at NAC Breda. The now 20-year-old was one of the top performers when Slovakia stunned Germany in the opening fixture for the World Cup qualifiers last year.

More than a decade on from Lance Armstrong’s disgrace, cycling is still unable to shake the shadows of its past. The sport’s paranoia over doping and its inability to ever truly prove itself has been in the spotlight again this week, as a result of some unusual measures to combat doping which have possibly had unintended consequences.

Two-time Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard and race leader and four-time winner Tadej Pogacar were both woken in the small hours of Sunday for out-of-hours doping tests. Visma-Lease a Bike’s Vingegaard was woken up at 2am, Pogacar at 5am; the latter said he could not get back to sleep afterwards. The tests occurred mere hours before a difficult mountain stage heading to the hors-categorie climb of Plateau de Solaison in the Alps, a key point in the three-week race.

The regulations of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling’s governing body, state that usually riders are tested between the hours of 6am and 11pm, with riders required to give one-hour whereabouts windows each day and accept that they may additionally be tested outside those times. The UCI has delegated responsibility for doping controls to the International Testing Agency (ITA) since 2021, and the latter required permission from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to conduct these nocturnal visits, as well as from a Parisian judge.

Those tests raised eyebrows because of their unusual times but may not have led to anything else, had Vingegaard not crashed out of the race that same day.

What seemed an innocuous crash on an awkward but otherwise inconsequential piece of road has acquired greater significance in light of the fact that his sleep was heavily disturbed by the 2am call and could possibly have led to lapses in concentration during a hard day’s racing. The Dane is not prone to crashing; he had never previously abandoned a grand tour and had come through five Tours de France unscathed. It is certainly an unusual occurrence.

His Tour is “ruined”, as Pogacar put it, and the Slovenian, as well as other riders and commentators, openly speculated that the late-night doping test may have played a part. Remco Evenepoel, who won stage 15, described the 2am call as “inhuman”.

Cycling’s most famous doper – Armstrong – then accused anti-doping officials of “human rights issues”, although it feels as though you must take any of the American’s proclamations on drug-related issues in the sport with a pinch, or perhaps vat, of salt. Either way, it has sparked a furore around whether such out-of-hours testing is fair to the riders, or necessary at all.

The whole point of night-time doping is to catch riders micro-dosing performance-enhancing substances such as EPO, which would otherwise go undetected. The UCI’s own rules say as much: “It is known that some riders use low doses of EPO during these hours so that it will be undetectable in the morning.” There is a clear case to be made for the sport to permit this sort of testing given its heavily chequered past.

Former rider Jonathan Vaughters, who admitted blood doping on the US Postal team and who now manages the EF Education-EasyPost team which is riding the Tour, wrote on X: “If [the] UCI had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have been suspended and saved the sport 25 years of drama.”

Twenty-five years of further drama is what the likes of the UCI and ITA are trying to avoid. And the late-night testing is by design highly unusual: the UCI’s own regulations say it will not test between the hours of 11pm and 6am “unless it has a serious and specific suspicion that the rider may be engaged in doping”. Cycling Weekly has reported that a number of teams, believed to be up to eight, have also been subjected to night-time testing at this Tour, suggesting that the governing body has widespread “serious and specific” suspicions about a number of riders, or teams.

We may never know the results of any of these tests – the ITA said that like all tests it conducts, the outcomes “would be published according to our public disclosure policy, only in the case of an apparent anti-doping rule violation”. But if they have been as prevalent as has been reported, that suggests there is significant paranoia about doping in the current edition of the Tour. We can only hope that that is unfounded.

But is it fair to disturb riders in the middle of the night for a doping test, when recovery is so crucial to the utterly gruelling experience of riding a grand tour, and so hard to come by? Perhaps the bigger question is whether testing the integrity of the sport in this way more important than playing fair?

Pogacar himself seemed resigned to it being a necessary evil. The race leader said on Sunday that he “totally accepts” the irregular tests “if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean”.

Vingegaard, whose Tour dreams have been crushed, is a very measured character and struck the sort of note one would expect from him. He said: “It’s good that they test, but when it’s affecting performance and your sleep, I don’t think it’s so good.” He refused to say his crash was to do with his lack of sleep: “I don’t want to blame it on that, because it’s a bicycle race, and crashes happen in bicycle races.”

Evenepoel, now up to second overall, is a far more outspoken character and he was blunt in his assessment: “It’s inhuman and this is something we actually should not accept as athletes, because everybody knows sleep is the only recovery that we have in the night. This is the hardest and the biggest race in the world. This is a shame that this happened, and I hope it doesn’t happen any more in the future.”

Which gets to the fundamental point. Riders are aware that doping controls are a fact of life and cycling more than any other sport has to bear the cross of its past. But in a sport as inherently unsafe as cycling, which has seen several riders killed in horrific crashes in recent years, everything must be done to keep them as safe as possible – including letting them recover between long and exhausting days of racing. Vingegaard himself said he “luckily” only sustained a broken collarbone. It could have been much worse.

The ITA said it was “conscious that night-time testing may be disruptive to riders’ rest and recovery. Due consideration has therefore been given to minimise as much as possible the impact testing activities have on riders.” But it added it “has the responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of the cycling anti‑doping programme and the integrity of cycling races”. It is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Funding for anti-doping testing in cycling has heavily increased since the ITA took responsibility for it in 2021, but there has not been a slew of positive tests since then. Either the mechanisms to cheat are becoming more sophisticated and the methods of detection poorer, or cyclists really aren’t cheating the way they used to.

The anti-doping process is deliberately opaque and unpredictable so dopers can’t get one step ahead of the authorities, but that also means the authorities aren’t required to explain, or able to justify, their decisions, either to the riders or the public.

You can’t prove something you can’t catch; that is the issue the ITA and UCI are wrestling with. Riders are aware of it too – they have to support the anti-doping authorities, because cycling has a lot to atone for, but equally they have to protect their own health, especially at one of the toughest sporting events on the planet.

The 2am testing is here to stay – but whether it should be is another matter, and another question for which the sport has no easy answers.

There are two Hardware Challenges available to complete in Battlefield 6 Season 4. Season 4 is now live, and players can start progressing these challenges right away. Unlike the previous season, there are only two rewards this time, both of which come with their own advantages and drawbacks. Fortunately, the challenges are quite easy to complete and won’t take much time.

Read on to learn about all Hardware challenges and rewards in Battlefield 6 Season 4.

Battlefield 6 Season 4: All hardware challenges and rewards

Battlefield 6 Season 4 features two Hardware Challenges that offer two exclusive rewards. Here are the challenges and their rewards:

• Attachment/M87A1/ 24′ Extended: Kills and Assists in Multiplayer. Kills with Shotguns count double, or Kills and Assists in Battle Royale. Kills with Shotguns count double.
• Sight/1P86 LPVO: Kills and Assists while ADS. Kills with VSSM count double.

Here’s what you can expect from these two attachments:

M87A1/ 24′ Extended (Attachment)

The Attachment/M87A1/ 24′ Extended for a non-double-barreled shotgun is a great addition to dominate close-range fights. It simply increases the projectile velocity of the weapon, so enemies will get less time to move out of the path, making shots much easier to land.

Read more: How to unlock EF88 assault rifle in Battlefield 6

However, it does come with a few drawbacks. If you equip this extended sight, it will reduce the weapon’s Aim Down Sight (ADS) speed and slightly lower your overall mobility.

1P86 LPVO (Sight)

The 1P86 LPVO is the perfect competitor of the SU-230 LPVO. While the SU-239 LPVO Optic offers a magnification range of 1.0x to 4.0x, players can now equip the 1P86 LPVO Optic for a slightly higher range of 1.5x to 4.5x. Although the difference is only 0.5x magnification, it can sometimes create a huge difference during a gunfight.

Check out: Battlefield 6 Season 4: Everything we know

BF6 hardware challenges from previous seasons

If you haven’t collected the Season 3 Hardware challenge rewards, then you can get them now. Here’s a list of rewards along with their challenges:

• Burst fire – Get 40 kills with Carbines or SMGs
• Aftermarket Buffer – Get 40 kills with Assault Rifles or DMRs
• Speed Holster – Get 10 kills with Sidearms
• Gunslinger – Get 10 kills with Sidearms

That concludes everything you need to know regarding all Hardware challenges and rewards in Battlefield 6 Season 4.

Check out the links below for more such guides: