Major grocery chain Rewe has scrapped its advertising campaign with the German Football Association after soccer's global governing body cracked down on players wearing 'OneLove' armbands in support of diversity at the Qatar World Cup.
The move by Rewe, one of Germany's biggest supermarket chains with group-wide sales of 76.5 billion euros, makes it the first sponsor to take action after FIFA threatened to issue yellow cards to any player wearing the multi-coloured armband at the World Cup.
"We stand up for diversity - and football is also diversity. We live this position and we defend it," said Rewe Group chief executive Lionel Souque. "FIFA's scandalous attitude is absolutely unacceptable."
Separately, Deutsche Telekom on Tuesday said it planned to talk with the German Football Association about the armbands controversy.
English media, meanwhile, are reporting that drinks maker and England sponsor Lucozade has pulled all its branding from the World Cup in a snub to Qatar.
Messi laments 'five minutes of mistakes' against Saudis
Lionel Messi lamented Argentina's shock second half capitulation against Saudi Arabia but said he was not surprised by the threat from opponents 48 places lower in the world rankings.
"It's a situation that this group of players has never been through, it's been a while since we suffered such a tough blow, we didn't expect to start like this," Messi told Argentinian media after the 2-1 defeat in Group C.
Starting his fifth World Cup, Messi had opened the scoring with a 10th minute penalty and Argentina had three goals disallowed for offside in a free-flowing first half.
But in the second half, "in five minutes of mistakes that we made, we went 2-1 down and then it was really tough and we lost organization and started punting the ball," he said in comments broadcast by Todo Noticias.
"We knew they were a team who would play if we let them...They did not surprise us, we knew they could do that."
Argentina now have to focus on beating Mexico and Poland in their next group games in search of the only major title that has eluded Messi in his otherwise glittering career.
"Obviously, we have to win or win now. It's up to us to fix what we did wrong and get back to the basics of who we are," said Messi, whose team had been on a 36-match unbeaten run prior to the shock result at the Lusail Stadium in Qatar.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen to the RTÉ Soccer podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
