Latin America

Soccerex, the world's largest business to business football convention, is delighted to announce that subject to Parliamentary commitments, the UK Minister for Sport, Rt Hon Richard Caborn MP will be attending the 10th annual Soccerex convention, held at the Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, 26th-28th November 2006.

The South American Football Confederation said it was unaware of a Colombian bid to host football's 2014 World Cup finals.

The World Cup final between Italy and France was a ratings winner in France, Italy and the USA. In Italy over 23 million watched public-service broadcaster Rai’s coverage of the final, some 84 per cent share of the audience, with an estimated two million more watching coverage on pay-broadcaster Sky Italia.

Motor racing series A1 Grand Prix unveiled a provisional calendar of 13 races for its second season, 2006-07. The season kicks off on October 1, 2006 at Circuit Park Zandvoort in the Netherlands and concludes at Brands Hatch in the UK, on April 29, 2007. A New Zealand race, although still to be confirmed, is new to the calendar, while races at the EuroSpeedway and Estoril have disappeared from the calendar.

The FC)dC)ration Internationale de l’Automobile approved the calendar for the 2007 World Rally Championship, adding three new races in Ireland, Norway and Portugal. The new races replace those in Australia, Cyprus and Turkey. The FIA said in a statement that its World Motor Sport Council had approved a calendar which would continue to run on the existing January-November format instead of the proposed August-May switch. It said that it would decide whether to add further events to the calendar at its next World Motor Sport Council meeting.

The 2006 World Cup is generating record television audiences for football in the US.Before the quarter-finals US network ABC averaged 3.7 million viewers for each of its 10 matches while cable channels ESPN and ESPN2 averaged 1.8 million and 1.1 million viewers respectively per match and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision averaged 2.2 million viewers per match.

TV audiences for the FIFA World Cup in host country Germany have rocketed by 51 percent on the 2002 event, according to the latest research commissioned by Infront.

Close to four in ten viewers of the global audience for the FIFA World Cup are women, according to soccer world governing body FIFA’s marketing agency Infront.

Sochi (Russia), Salzburg (Austria) and PyeongChang (Republic of Korea) were today accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board in Lausanne as Candidate Cities to host the XXII Olympic Winter Games in 2014. The cities were accepted unanimously from a total of seven Applicant Cities, which also included Jaca (Spain), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Sofia (Bulgaria), and Borjomi (Georgia).

Nike may have scored an own goal with its latest TV ad airing in the UK – celebrating the skills of Brazilian star Ronaldo.

TV audiences in Europe for the FIFA World Cup look set to beat expectations judging by the initial viewing figures.

FIFA chiefs are likely to close the roof of certain upcoming World Cup games – to help prevent the shadows which left many TV broadcasters complaining.

After all the hype it is finally here – the FIFA World Cup 2006 kicks-off this evening in Germany and is set to smash TV viewing records.

The online unit of Brazilian media giant Globo has teamed up with geolocation specialists Quova to deliver live streaming video coverage of next month’s FIFA World Cup.

Infront has concluded a new mobile broadcast deal for a host of Latin America territories ahead of next month’s FIFA World Cup.

It will come as little surprise to most, but Brazil’s soccer team is the most commercially attractive for corporate sponsorship to play at next month’s FIFA World Cup, according to a survey conducted by a sports marketing company.