Victor Montagliani’s compensation is thought to be among the highest in the world for a non-club soccer official
Concacaf president Victor Montagliani is paid over $3m per year for what the organization claims is just five hours per week of work, according to the latest tax filing made to the Internal Revenue Service.
Publicly available filings, first reported by ProPublica, show that the Canadian was paid $2.1m in base compensation and an additional $893,750 in unspecified bonus and incentive compensation for the 2024 tax year. An additional $15,780 was paid in deferred or retirement compensation.
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© Photograph: Omar Vega/Getty Images
© Photograph: Omar Vega/Getty Images
© Photograph: Omar Vega/Getty Images
⚽ The latest football news heading into the weekend
⚽ Premier League: 10 things to look out for | Mail Niall
This weekend’s Premier League games are the reverse fixtures of the season openers, back in sun-soaked August. Looking back, the most jarring result was Nottingham Forest 3-1 Brentford, with the teams taking very different trajectories since then.
“It was certainly a tough day for us all, but it is pretty obvious to see the development that we have made in the months since that, and I am delighted with the progress we have made,” Brentford manager Keith Andrews said yesterday.
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© Photograph: Burak Kara/UEFA/Getty Images
© Photograph: Burak Kara/UEFA/Getty Images
© Photograph: Burak Kara/UEFA/Getty Images
With talks of a confrontation over Greenland receding, attention turns back to ending the four-year war between Ukraine and Russia
Meanwhile, the Kremlin repeated its demand that Kyiv must withdraw its forces from the eastern Donbas region for the war to end, showing it had not dropped its maximalist demands ahead of trilateral talks with the US and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi, AFP reported.
“Russia’s position is well known on the fact that Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces, have to leave the territory of the Donbas. They must be withdrawn from there,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding: “This is a very important condition.”
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© Photograph: Alexander Kazakov/Reuters
© Photograph: Alexander Kazakov/Reuters
© Photograph: Alexander Kazakov/Reuters
The Super Bowl match-up will be set this weekend as a weakened Denver take on New England and two NFC West rivals clash in Seattle
What New England need to do to win: Clean up their act. Last week against the Houston Texans, Drake Maye was blindsided too often by edge rushers Will Anderson and Danielle Hunter. The pair wreaked havoc, sacking Maye five times and forcing him into three of his four fumbles. The Los Angeles Chargers also forced two from him in the wildcard round. Denver led the league in sacks (68) in the regular season, and will be intent on causing similar damage on Sunday. But Maye can mitigate that threat if he sharpens his awareness in the pocket and takes the sack rather than rushing into impossible passes. New England’s left tackle Will Campbell is very likely to lose a couple of duels with edge defender Nick Bonitto, so Maye needs to be ready for a helmet sandwich while holding on to the ball for dear life. Simply punting and giving Denver’s second-string quarterback, Jarrett Stidham, tough field position may be all it takes to reach the Super Bowl.
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© Photograph: C Morgan Engel/Getty Images
© Photograph: C Morgan Engel/Getty Images
© Photograph: C Morgan Engel/Getty Images
This month the president was reelected for his seventh term, devastating the hopes of many who fear a future of stagnation and unemployment
When Uganda’s electoral commission declared President Yoweri Museveni the winner of the 2026 general election this month, there was little surprise among the country’s younger voters. Those aged under 35 make up more than three-quarters (78%) of Uganda’s population – the second youngest population in the world – and for many, the news of Museveni’s victory confirmed what they had expected. For some, it also crushed the fragile hope inspired by the rise of the opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi, known as Bobi Wine.
Sarah Namubiru, 21, a university student hoping to be a teacher, says she did not vote for Museveni because of the low salaries in the teaching profession.
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© Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
© Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
© Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
The Scottish author on a masterclass from Toni Morrison, the brilliance of Simone de Beauvoir and the trim novel by Tove Jansson containing everything that really matters
My earliest reading memory
Apparently I taught myself to read when I was three via the labels on the Beatles 45s we had: I remember the moment of recognising the words “I” and “Feel” and “Fine”. It took a bit longer to work out the word “Parlophone”.
My favourite book growing up
Sister Vincent taught primary six in St Joseph’s, Inverness, and was a discerning reader with very good taste, plus the kind of literary moral rectitude that meant she removed Enid Blyton from the class library because she believed Blyton’s books were written by a factory of writers. In 1972 she and I had a passionate argument when the class was choosing a book to be read out loud to us and I championed Charlotte’s Web by EB White, with which I was in love. Sister Vincent put her foot down. “No. Because animals speak in it, and in reality animals don’t speak.” I recently reread it for the first time since I was nine, and it moved me to tears. What a fine book, about all sorts of language, injustice, imaginative power and friendship versus life’s tough realities. Terrific. Radiant. Humble.
© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
Today’s rumours have a northern feel
Casemiro’s decision to leave Manchester United when his contract expires at the end of the season will intensify the club’s search for a midfielder. The Brazilian’s exit will also knock £350k a week off their outgoings, which should bring a smile to Sir Jim Ratcliffe as United look to follow up last week’s derby win when they travel to … oh … Arsenal this weekend.
Not exactly like for like but stories are circulating that Wythenshawe lad Cole Palmer is homesick at Chelsea and pondering a return to Manchester this summer. The twist is that he wouldn’t be heading back to City as Palmer prefers the red of United – the club he, wait for it, supported as a boy. United scouts were also reportedly in Spain last weekend to discuss on-loan Marcus Rashford’s future and check out Real Sociedad’s versatile midfielder/forward Mikel Oyarzabal. Fun fact: both Palmer (equaliser) and Oyarzabal (winner) scored in the final of Euro 2024.
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© Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
© Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
© Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
(Columbia Records)
Styles is wonderfully loose and unhurried on the lead single to his new album, taking a bold path away from the rest of today’s mainstream pop
Now the proud owner of six Brits, three Grammys and seven UK Top 10 singles, it’s fair to say Harry Styles has elegantly sidestepped the potholes that pepper the route from ex-boyband member to solo superstar. His well-earned confidence means that rather than fill the gap between 2022’s Harry’s House and last week’s announcement of his fourth album – the confusingly-titled Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally – with various one-off releases, spurious anniversary variants or curated social media moments, Styles basically disappeared. In fact, the only sliver of excitement for his fanbase to grab on to came last September when he ran the Berlin marathon in a very respectable 2hr 59min.
Having endured the music industry at the height of its #content-heavy obsession in One Direction, there’s something old-fashioned about Styles’ absence between album eras. That’s unlikely to be accidental: since launching his solo career with 2017’s muted, 1970s soft-rock-indebted self-titled debut, Styles has cast himself as a cross-generational throwback beamed into the present, albeit one sporting fashion choices that rile gender conformists. Each album has arrived with a list of influences more akin to the lineup on the Old Grey Whistle Test than the current TikTok algorithms, while 2019’s Fine Line, Styles told us, was crafted under the influence of those vintage psychedelics, magic mushrooms.
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© Photograph: Johnny Dufort/PA
© Photograph: Johnny Dufort/PA
© Photograph: Johnny Dufort/PA
(Tiny Tiger)
Moving from dream pop to acoustic clarity, the Dutch-British songwriter delivers her most personal record yet where loss is transformed into something quietly powerful
The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory.
The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in The Bricks That Make the Building, a sweet, psych-folk jewel which meditates on “the earth that feeds the garden / The breath that helps the child sing” and Gently Now, which begins in soft clouds of birdsong, then tackles how growing older can cosset the process of grief. Her approach to the subject is inquisitive, poetic and refreshing.
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© Photograph: Bibian Bingen
© Photograph: Bibian Bingen
© Photograph: Bibian Bingen
Feigel uses her own experience as a starting point to examine the past, present and future of separation
This book about child custody is, unsurprisingly, full of pain. The pain of mothers separated from their children, of children sobbing for their mothers, of adults who have never moved on from the trauma of their youth, and of young people who are forced to live out the conflicts of their elders. Lara Feigel casts her net across history and fiction, reportage and memoir, and while her research is undeniably impressive and her candour moving, at times she struggles to create a narrative that can hold all these tales of anguish together.
The book begins with a woman flinging herself fully clothed into a river and then restlessly walking on, swimming again, walking again. This is French novelist George Sand, driven to desperate anxiety as she waits to go into court to fight for the right to custody of her children. But almost immediately the story flicks away to Feigel’s own custody battle, and then back into the early 19th century, with Caroline Norton’s sons being taken away in a carriage in the rain by their father.
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© Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy
© Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy
© Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy
(Interscope)
On her third LP, Lennox balances jazz-soaked tradition with flashes of unruly humour and a surefire viral hit
Ari Lennox is one of contemporary R&B’s premier sophisticates, preferring a palette of lush jazz, soul and 90s hip-hop over the more genre-fluid sound pushed by contemporaries SZA and Kehlani. But a few songs into her new album, Vacancy, she makes it eminently clear that tradition and wildness can coexist, with fabulously sparky results: on Under the Moon, she describes a lover as “vicious / Like a werewolf / When you’re in it” and proceeds to howl “moooooooooon” as if she is in an old creature feature.
Vacancy, Lennox’s third album, is far and away her most fun, and if it isn’t quite as ingratiating as her 2022 Age/Sex/Location, it makes up for it with canny lyrics and an airy, open sound. Cool Down is a reggae/R&B hybrid that practically feels as if it is made of aerogel, and which pairs its summery lightness with witty lyrics telling a guy to chill out. On Mobbin in DC, she pairs lounge-singer coolness with withering come-ons (“You know where I be / This ain’t calculus / No ChatGPT”), while the strutting Horoscope, with its hook of “That boy put the ho’ in ‘horoscope’,” is as surefire a future viral hit as I’ve ever heard.
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© Photograph: Gizelle Hernandez
© Photograph: Gizelle Hernandez
© Photograph: Gizelle Hernandez
Oasis, Macca and Radiohead made Help a smash for War Child in 1995. A new reboot packs comparable star power – and was partially produced from a hospital bed
When Kae Tempest was asked to contribute to a new track by Damon Albarn, which would also feature Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten, Tempest says he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t just the artists involved, nor the fact that it was for a new compilation benefiting War Child, called Help(2): a sequel to the charity’s hugely successful 1995 compilation Help. After seven solo albums, Tempest had begun thinking about working with others, and so the night before the recording session, he and Chatten repaired to Albarn’s studio and wrote their verses together, “responding to each other”. It seemed to work really well, he says: “A true collaboration.”
Nevertheless, he concedes, the actual recording of Flags proved to be quite the baptism of fire. “Johnny Marr was on guitar, Femi [Koleoso] from Ezra Collective was drumming,” he laughs. “Plus, there was a children’s choir.”
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© Composite: Guardian Design; Adama Jalloh; Pip Bourdillon; Charlie Barclay-Harris
© Composite: Guardian Design; Adama Jalloh; Pip Bourdillon; Charlie Barclay-Harris
© Composite: Guardian Design; Adama Jalloh; Pip Bourdillon; Charlie Barclay-Harris
Millions of graduates are trapped by ballooning debts, as their repayments are dwarfed by the interest added
Helen Lambert borrowed £57,000 to go to university and began repaying her student loan in 2021 after starting work as an NHS nurse.
Since then she has repaid more than £5,000, typically having about £145 a month taken from her pay packet. But everything she hands over is dwarfed by the £400-plus of interest that is added to her debt every month, thanks to rates that have been as high as 8%.
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© Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy
© Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy
© Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy
Exclusive: victims in hiding after attacks involving physical assault, attempted arson and the use of firearms
Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command is investigating a series of “highly targeted” attacks on two Pakistani dissidents living in Britain which may bear the hallmarks of states using criminal proxies to silence their critics.
One person has been arrested after a series of four attacks which began on Christmas Eve. One of the attacks involved a firearm.
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© Photograph: W Khan/EPA
© Photograph: W Khan/EPA
© Photograph: W Khan/EPA
Experts say climate crisis, corruption and lack or misuse of infrastructure among factors driving water conflicts
Water-related violence has almost doubled since 2022 and little is being done to understand and address the trend and prevent new and escalating risks, experts have said.
There were 419 incidents of water-related violence recorded in 2024, up from 235 in 2022, according to the Pacific Institute, a US-based thinktank.
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© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP
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