Just as many fans have been grudgingly coming to terms with football’s new reality, Qatar Sports Investments shelled out the £198m to transfer Neymar from Barcelona. This hardly came as a surprise. Neymar is a phenomenal talent. But it is important to understand what lies behind this: governments from across Asia have been targeting football for some time as a means of building their global soft power and boosting their images.

The Vermont ski industry is worried about the Trump Administration's review of the J-1 Visa exchange program which allows resorts to hire some foreign workers. "This program is an ambassadorship program. You get incredible students who come on up and are enthusiastic and hard working. They go back to their home country and share the incredible experiences they've had here in Vermont," says Ski Vermont President Parker Riehle.

Japanese athletes in the Taipei Universiade have been earning high praises in Taiwan since a series of photos of them cleaning a park was posted on social media Tuesday morning. [...] "This is true people-to-people diplomacy," someone else wrote. "Their likability is completely off the charts."

The Moroccan Football Federation has announced it will bid to host the 2026 World Cup. [...] The World Cup has only been hosted once in Africa - in South Africa in 2010 - and this will be Morocco's fifth bid.

Williams is a skateboarding envoy with the U.S. State Department and is spreading his love for the sport, recently completing a cultural diplomacy mission in Cambodia, where he highlighted skateboarding's benefits to young people.“It’s a bridge between people all over the world,” Williams said. “For me, I’ve always been focused on what it was that made skateboarding special.”

Tens of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians and Afghans passed through here, heading for the Hungarian or Croatian border, hoping to get to Germany or Austria. [...] The vast majority left were young men and boys from Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the game of choice to pass the time in the refugee camps was cricket.

Skateboarder and University of Waikato PhD student Neftalie Williams is in Cambodia this week at the invitation of the United States Embassy. As a US sports envoy, he will be leading a US Department of State Target of Opportunity Sports Diplomacy program, tasked with helping to increase mutual understanding between the people of Cambodia and the USA.

The renowned Premier Skills initiative run by the Premier League and the British council returns to Cape Town this week as part of their three-year Premier Skills programme. The programme, which started last Saturday and will conclude this Saturday, is taking place at the Ikamva home of Ajax Cape Town with intensive training for 60 grassroots coaches and 24 referees from all over the province.