LONDON (Reuters) – Portsmouth will go into administration on Friday unless a new buyer comes forward before then, the club said on Tuesday.

Owner Balram Chainrai will take that step rather than risk the Premier League’s bottom club being wound-up in the High Court on Monday when it faces a petition from the Government’s Customs and Revenue department for unpaid taxes.

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MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s professional football league (LFP) has called on the government to cut sales tax on match tickets to help the sport during a time of economic hardship.

The same value-added tax (VAT) rate of 7 percent levied on tickets for theatres, cinemas and amusement parks should be applied to ticket sales and season subscriptions instead of the current 16 percent, LFP president Jose Luis Astiazaran said.

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Kuala Lumpur – The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) today named international direct selling company, QuestNet as Official Direct Selling Supporter of the AFC Champions League, the region’s top club competition.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome QuestNet™ as a new partner of the AFC Champions League and into the fold of the Asian football family,” said AFC President, Mohamed bin Hammam.

“These are exciting times for club football as we continue to raise the level of professionalism within our game here in Asia. With the 2009 season setting records for both attendances and viewers, we are glad to have a partner like QuestNet™, who will further engage the football fans in this competition.”

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DUBAI (Reuters) – United Arab Emirates businessman Sulaiman al-Fahim resigned from his position as the non-executive chairman of debt-ravaged Premier League club Portsmouth on Monday and gave his 10 percent shareholding to the club’s supporters’ trust.

Fahim confirmed the developments to Reuters as moves continued in London to save the 112-year-old club from going into liquidation.

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Football has proved itself to be an immensely popular talking point online for Singaporeans, even crossing over to the area of technology brands, according to the latest Digital Brand Index by Edelman and Brandtology.

The two companies analyze online conversations covering technology brands in Singapore, and their second quarter results found that SingTel and StarHub’s battle over the English Premier League and FIFA World Cup rights drive one-fifth of all online discussions in the period. The Digital Brand Index reveals insights covering more than 150,000 online conversations and 73 technology brands, across 554 different channels.

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CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – South Africa faces a possible health crisis if a swine flu outbreak strikes during the soccer World Cup this year, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told parliament on Monday.

“One of our biggest nightmares is the fact that 2010 is going to be held in June when there is a possibility of another bout of H1N1,” Motsoaledi said.

The month-long tournament, hosted in Africa for the first time, is expected to attract 450,000 tourists during the South African winter.

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PARIS (Reuters) – France’s second largest commercial TV group, M6, aims to spend around 100 million euros ($137 million) on a new soccer stadium for Bordeaux, the top club it owns, its chairman and chief executive said.

M6 head Nicolas de Tavernost also told an analysts’ meeting on Friday that programming costs at the core M6 channel would rise slightly this year.

He added that he lacked visibility on the advertising market, which he said was “neither good, nor bad” at the moment.

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s all-powerful state sports channel cancelled the broadcast of the national team’s match against Japan at the weekend as Chinese soccer continued to reel from the ongoing match-fixing scandal.

The CCTV 5 channel, which owns 85 percent of China’s sports television market, had bought the broadcasting rights to the East Asian Championship tie and had scheduled it for a live broadcast from Tokyo on Saturday evening, local media said.

When fans tuned in for the clash with China’s fiercest rivals, however, they were presented instead with a local version of the long-running European gameshow Jeux Sans Frontier, “Inter-Cities”.

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MILAN (Reuters) – Dubai government-owned Emirates airline is to sponsor AC Milan from next season in a four-year shirt deal worth around 50 million euros ($68.31 million), a source close to the Italian club said on Monday.

The Arab world’s largest airline, which also sponsors Arsenal’s stadium among other European soccer endorsements, will replace Austrian online betting group bwin as Milan’s shirt sponsor from July 2010 until June 2014.

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Tickets for the World Cup semi-finals and final, as well as two of England’s first round matches in South Africa, have sold out, FIFA said on Friday.

FIFA said there were no more tickets for England’s matches against the United States in Rustenburg on June 12 and Slovenia in Port Elizabeth on June 23.

Tickets for the match between world champions Italy and Paraguay in Cape Town on June 11 and Brazil and Portugal in Durban a fortnight later have also sold out.

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