Netherlands

The initial batch of 400,000 of the 1.2 million tickets available for next year's European soccer championships have all been sold, tournament director Alain Courtois has said.

Dutch soccer club PSV Eindhoven chairman Harry van Raaij believes his club will quit the Dutch championship to play in a 16-team European league by 2002, according to reports.

Euro 2000 will be less profitable for co-hosts the Netherlands than originally thought, research has indicated.

The Belgian government has approved a budget of 30 million Belgian francs ($758,100) to finance a national publicity campaign for this summer's Euro 2000 soccer championship.

PSINet , the Internet solutions provider and full sponsor of Euro 2000, expects up to 150 million hits per day next summer from visitors to the official Euro 2000 site - a figure which would break records for daily site usage. World Cup France '98 recorded 70 million hits per day compared to less than a million hits per day for Euro 96.

Organisers of soccer?s Euro 2000 have launched a crackdown of on-line black market ticket sales for the tournament.

The Dutch government has said on Wednesday it would allow extra flights to land at Schiphol airport for the European Cup Final to be held in Amsterdam next week.

Thirty members of the European Parliament have taken the French organisers of the soccer World Cup to court to force them to redistribute hundreds of thousands of tickets abroad.

Police investigating World Cup ticket fraud have arrested three people, including a consultant working for the French affiliate of ISL Worldwide, FIFA's official marketing partner.

Two executives working for FIFA's marketing affiliate were placed under formal legal examination on Wednesday by a court investigating allegations of a World Cup ticket fraud, court sources said.

In a rare show of European unity, French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn joked that France and the Netherlands should share the World Cup, predicting their soccer teams would meet in the July 12 final.

About a quarter of a million people will paint the streets of Amsterdam pink during the first week of August when the Dutch capital play host to the world's fifth Gay Games.

France's Minister for Sport says she is opposed to a European soccer Super League.

Tour de France team sponsors are divided about whether their brands would suffer from the doping scandal at the world's top cycling race.

Dutch police are expecting to be overstretched during the 2000 European soccer championship and their union is already calling for the three-week tournament to be shortened by a week.

A new European Super League moved several steps closer after announcemnts from UEFA, and top clubs Manchester United, Arsenal and Ajax Amsterdam.