IMAGE MAN: Barcelona’s Lionel Messi gestures during a training session at Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on Monday.
The Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the mother of football icon Lionel Messi in an international legal wrangle over his image rights.
In a 30-page judgement, Chief Justice Anthony Dudley picked through a corporate tangle relating to ownership of 25,000 disputed shares in Sport Consultants Ltd, a Belize company that controlled how the player’s image is used and exploited commercially.
On one side of the row was Celia Maria Cuccittini de Messi, the …

Real Madrid is at the center of a $1 billion bid to make a soccer-themed resort succeed in a Middle East country where race cars and golf failed.
The world’s richest soccer club is lending its name to a project in the United Arab Emirates with a 10,000-seat stadium and a target of 1 million visitors a year. The attendance goal exceeds the number of people who last year travelled to the emirate of Ras al Khaimah, where the project will be based.
Branded real-estate developments ranging from the Ferrari World amusement …

WARSAW — Poland will reintroduce border controls on its frontiers with fellow European Union nations during the 2012 European football championship, Interior Minister Jacek Cichocki said on Monday.
Cichocki said spot checks would be in place from June 4, four days before the tournament kicks off, and end on July 1, the date of the final in co-host Ukraine.
Border controls were dropped in 2007 when Poland joined Europe’s travel-smoothing Schengen zone, which now comprises 26 countries, including several outside the EU.
Schengen members can suspend the free flow of travellers in certain …

Oman goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi has confirmed his desire to play at this summer’s Olympics in London should his nation beat Senegal in Monday’s qualification play-off.
Al-Habsi, 30, is arguably his country’s most famous football export having starred between the posts for Wigan and Bolton in the Premier League in recent seasons.
And with the Olympics coming to his adopted home in England this July, the keeper is desperate to be involved despite not featuring for Oman during the qualifiers.
“I would love to be part of the Olympics,” Al-Habsi said. “I have played …

FIFA is planning to build a football museum including 3D animations, interactive games, trophies and “everything a football fan could wish for” as part of an extension to its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.
“It is high time that world football had a meeting place for its millions of fans,” FIFA president Joseph Blatter was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
It has been designed by architect Tilla Theus who was the inspiration behind the main building, guaranteeing a perfect symbiosis between the two buildings.
Blatter said Friday an investment of around 180 million Swiss …