Netherlands

Only a few hundred tickets are left unsold for this summer's Euro 2000 soccer championships, according to the tournament organisers. Sale details of the remaining tickets will be released in the next couple of weeks.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter has said that all international teams will play to a unified calendar after the European Championships in Belgium and the Netherlands next year.

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.

The spirit of co-operation between Europe's leading soccer clubs and UEFA was tested on Tuesday when they began discussing the financial aspects of an expanded Champions' League.

The group of investors that won the bidding war to buy SkyDome Corp., home of baseball's Toronto Blue Jays, is having to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay the $80-million price tag.

Cricket minnows Canada, Kenya, Namibia and the Netherlands will share a one-million-dollar fund to help them prepare for the 2003 World Cup.

Munich's Olympic stadium has witnessed some of the finest hours in Germany's rich footballing history but is unlikely to play any part in the 2006 World Cup finals.

Les McDonald, president of the International Triathlon Union (ITU), the world governing body of the Olympic sport, has been forced into a court case in Vancouver, British Columbia, over allegations that recent elections to his organisation were fixed, with some national federations being denied their right to vote.

A row has broken out in Australia over an embarrassing design on the medals for next month's Sydney Olympics which depict a Roman colosseum rather than a Greek temple.

Euro 2000 organisers have warned soccer supporters that realistic fake tickets for Sunday's are in circulation.

British Home Secretary Jack Straw has said a move by Belgium and the Netherlands to reimpose border controls to prevent trouble at the Euro 2000 soccer tournament was a good idea.

Sportal has confirmed it has become an official sponsor of the UEFA European Football Championships.

The Dutch city of Arnhem is to spend one million guilders ($500,000) on close circuit television cameras ahead of next year's European soccer championship.

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.

Fiorentina said on Sunday that they would appeal against European soccer body UEFA's decision to kick the Italian league leaders out of the UEFA Cup.

A year before the Euro 2000 soccer championships, organisers received a possible taste of things to come as hooligans linked to Rotterdam's Feyenoord fought with police and wrecked the centre of their own city.