FIFA announced that it has opened an investigation into Neymar's '13 transfer from Brasileiro club Santos to Barcelona. Santos believes it was "unfairly compensated from the deal," having received only €17.1M of a potential €83.4M, although the club insists talk of it demanding a six-month ban for Neymar "is wide of the mark" (FOOTBALL ESPANA, 10/17). Santos has "made it clear" that it "did not specifically request Neymar to be banned" for his role in his transfer to Barcelona. Globoesporte reported on Thursday that Santos President Modesto Roma had demanded his side's former forward be slapped with a six-month suspension. However, a statement on Santos' official website said, "Santos did not submit any additional requests to FIFA. Only the arbitration proceedings initially proposed are ongoing" (FOOTBALL ESPANA, 10/16). ... Nepali police arrested five former and current national team players "on charges of match fixing, in another blow" to the country's embattled FA. Metopolitan Police Crime Division SSP Sarbendra Khanal said that captain Sagar Thapa, Sandip Rai, Ritesh Thapa, Bikash Singh Chhetri and Anjan KC "were arrested on charges of alleged match-fixing from 2008." Khanal: "From preliminary examinations of the players' accounts, we found connections to known match-fixers in Malaysia and Singapore. It seems that these players were invloved in a deep network of brokers and fixers in other countries" (REUTERS, 10/15). ... Kuwait was banned from int'l football on Friday "because of government interference in the running of its football association." In a statement FIFA said, "The suspension will be lifted only when the Kuwait Football Association and its members (the clubs) are able to carry out their activities and obligations independently." Kuwait "could be expelled" from the World Cup qualifying competition "if the situation is not resolved" before its next game against Myanmar on Nov. 17. Kuwait has "twice previously been banned for government interference," in '07 and '08 (REUTERS, 10/16). ... FIFA "removed the entire executive committee of Thailand's football association (FAT)" on Friday, four days after its president Worawi Makudi was "suspended pending an ethics investigation by soccer's governing body." FIFA said that it had put in place a so-called "normalization committee" to oversee the election of a new exec committee by Feb. 16 "at the latest." Worawi, who had been FAT president since '07, "was provisionally banned for 90 days on Monday over a possible breach of FIFA's code of ethics" (REUTERS, 10/16).
