Goalkeeper Ivan Banovic was booked after rescuing a pitch-invading cat during a top-flight match in Croatia.

Medjimurje Cakovec’s Banovic picked up the wandering feline after it strayed on to the pitch 20 minutes into his team’s match at Sibenik.

He placed it safely near a scoreboard but was then booked by the referee for leaving the pitch without permission.

Media reports said the official’s actions annoyed fans, who barracked him for punishing Banovic’s kind deed.

He was being questioned Wednesday night in Madrid police station after allegedly trying to take works of art out of the country

The ex President of Real Madrid, the businessman Lorenzo Sanz, has been arrested for trying to take works of art out of Spain illegally. Reports indicate he gave a statement to the police in a central Madrid police station at Retiro on Wednesday night, and was allowed to go home afterwards, but with charges outstanding.

Manchester United have accepted a world record offer of £80m from Real Madrid for Cristiano Ronaldo.

“United have agreed to give Real Madrid permission to talk to the player,” said a statement from the English club.

It added that the decision came at Ronaldo’s request after he “again expressed his desire to leave”.

United described the offer for the 24-year-old forward as unconditional and added that they expected the matter to be concluded by 30 June.

The Premier League saw its revenues soar by 26% in the 2007/08 season to nearly £2bn ($3.15bn; 2.2bn euros), a report into football finances has said.

The revenues of top-flight English sides were £1.93bn, up from £1.5bn a year earlier, Deloitte said.

Despite the downturn, 11 of the 20 top league clubs made an operating profit in 2007/08, from eight a year before.

Spain’s national television broadcaster has sacked its director of sports for censoring jeering during the national anthem before the national cup final.

Julian Reyes chose to show reporters in Bilbao and Barcelona instead of the events at Valencia’s Mestalla stadium, which King Juan Carlos was attending.

TVE later replayed the anthem at half-time, blaming “human error”, but this time with the booing edited out.

On Thursday, TVE said Mr Reyes had taken responsibility for the incident.

Images of a fan wearing a McLaren-Mercedes shirt, with his face blacked-up by paint, bore clear echoes of the scenes that took place in winter testing last February when Lewis Hamilton suffered racist abuse from a section of supporters.

While the incident was in isolation – with just one offender witnessed on the day out of nearly 100,000 spectators – millions of viewers saw the incident during the BBC’s live television coverage.

The 52-year-old five-time major winner has had four operations and recently made his first public appearance since the start of his treatment.

“Now I am perfect, I can do any kind of sport, running, swimming, rowing and I am also hitting golf shots,” he said.

“The fact that I was a sportsman and used to competing and fighting helped.”

Spanish entry Telefonica Black collided with a whale on the Rio-to-Boston sixth stage of the Volvo round-the-world race, but it suffered no real damage and the yacht was able to continue.

Its sister yacht, Telefonica Blue, meanwhile had a lead of about 40 nautical miles Tuesday over the two Swedish entries, Ericsson 4, the overall race leader, and Ericsson 3.

The incident with the whale occurred overnight Saturday, just hours after the gennaker sheet, or headsail, broke during a squall, skipper Fernando Echavarri said Tuesday.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced Tuesday he will take personal charge of the sports portfolio in a bid to help Madrid’s candidature for the 2016 Olympics.

“I can see that it is the most useful and most efficient way to support Spanish sport, where we have had success, and above all for the Spanish candidature for the Olympic Games,” he told a news conference called to announce a cabinet reshuffle.

The Spanish parliament’s tax commission on Tuesday rejected a proposed law which would ban Spanish athletes who live in tax havens from representing the country.

The proposal from the United Left coalition was turned down by the ruling Socialist Party and the main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) during a meeting of the commission broadcast on television.

Scotland and Wales have ditched plans for a joint bid to host Euro 2016 because of the global economic crisis.

With European governing body Uefa set to expand the event to 24 teams for 2016, there was concern that the costs would have been prohibitive.

Both countries would have had to spend many millions upgrading and building new stadia for the tournament.

Spanish police said Thursday they had arrested a Serbian-born football agent suspected of running a drug trafficking network, following an operation in which they seized 600 kilogrammes of cocaine.

Ten other people, including “several linked to the world of football,” were also arrested, a police statement said.

A police official later told a news conference that two retired footballers and two players’ agents were among those held, but did not identify them.

The Daily Star reports that extra officers and fire crews have been put on standby in the event of trouble. The friendly was moved from Madrid following racist abuse of England players at the Santiago Bernabeu in 2004.

The newspaper quotes a Seville police source, who says: “Moving the game means many people won’t get to see it. There are concerns people will be here without tickets, that trouble could take place on the streets.