SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Around 50,000 fans watched Manchester City beat Atlético Madrid 3-1 in a pre-season exhibition game at Seoul World Cup Stadium on Sunday, offering a rare example of soccer making headlines for on-field action here during a scandal-hit summer.
The big transfer news of the period saw South Korea’s star player Lee Kang-in move from Paris Saint-Germain to Atlético Madrid last month in a deal reportedly worth more than $40 million.
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Manchester City's Omar Marmoush celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Manchester City's Omar Marmoush celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Atletico Madrid's Koke argues with referee Kim Jong-hyeok during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Atletico Madrid's Lee Kang-in reacts during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Despite Lee’s second-half introduction, he couldn't prevent Manchester City rallying from a goal down to win. Jorge Dominguez put Madrid ahead just before the break but two goals from Omar Marmoush and one from Rayan Ait-Nouri gave the English club the victory.
The match offered a welcome break from the World Cup fallout, which involved police raids and parliamentary hearings. A leaked government audit recently revealed that Korea Football Association (KFA) officials used corporate credit cards in 2011 and 2012 to pay for services at adult entertainment venues for foreign referees.
“We express our sincere apologies for causing concerns over a range of issues, from a parliamentary hearing and an unprecedented police raid to media reports about incidents from more than a decade ago that even members within the federation were unaware of,” the KFA said in a statement Saturday.
Leading soccer pundit Park Moon-sung was unimpressed with the extent of the apology.
“Are match-fixing and sexual services — things so disgraceful that I do not even want to mention them — something that can be brushed aside by saying, ‘Why bring up events from more than a decade ago that we did not know about?’” Park posted on social media
That was the latest controversy. Anger erupted in June after South Korea’s poor World Cup performance, with the Taeguk Warriors losing two of three games and failing to advance from the group stage in the tournament co-hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
The general reaction was so fierce that police revived a stalled investigation into the appointment of head coach Hong Myung-bo in July 2024. Hong’s appointment had prompted accusations that KFA President Chung Mong-gyu and technical director Lee Lim-saeng failed to follow the organization’s own hiring process.
In July, Hong and Chung, who have both stepped down from their KFA roles, were questioned by lawmakers at the National Assembly about their actions.
A government-backed K-Football Innovation Committee has been established to recommend changes to the governance structure of the national soccer federation. The committee is co-chaired by former Manchester United and South Korea star Park Ji-sung and Ryu Seung-min, president of the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee.
The committee has proposed expanding the electorate for the next KFA presidential election from 300 voters to about 20,000, to include players, coaches, referees and amateur football participants.
While South Korea is currently without a head coach and federation chief, the KFA is hoping to hire a temporary coach ahead of the 2027 Asian Cup which kicks off in Saudi Arabia in January.
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Manchester City's Omar Marmoush celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Manchester City's Omar Marmoush celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Atletico Madrid's Koke argues with referee Kim Jong-hyeok during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Atletico Madrid's Lee Kang-in reacts during the preseason friendly soccer match between Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
CHAMONIX-MONT-BLANC, France (AP) — For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe's highest peak have gazed upon seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave the colossus its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.
But climate warming is dismantling the picture at alarming speed.
Europe's record heat waves this summer savaged permafrost that for millennia has acted like glue on the Alpine landscape. Defrosting cliffs came apart as high-altitude cold gave way to higher temperatures, sending rock falls cascading from the heights. A famously dangerous rock-prone gully that climbers have long braved on ascents to the summit, 4,805 meters (15,766 feet) up, became temporarily impassable.
“We weep for our mountain, the way it's changing. It hits us in the gut,” said Stéphane Bozon, a deputy mayor in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, a French town at the foot of the giant that straddles France's border with Italy.
“From mid-July onward, we saw an increase in rock falls. We saw areas becoming difficult to access because of glacial retreat and snowmelt on the glaciers, with crevasses opening up and rock collapses making some areas difficult to reach or traverse,” he told The Associated Press.
Each degree of warming can have an outsized impact. On the Aiguille du Midi peak, which rises to an altitude of 3,842 meters (12,605 feet) in the Mont Blanc range, average temperatures for July have soared. From a chilly 1.6 C (33.8 F) in 1994, the monthly average for this July was the warmest ever recorded, at 3.3 C (37.4 F), says Meteo France, the national weather service.
“The mountain really dried out, with temperatures unlike any I had ever experienced,” Bozon said.
In the wake of devastating floods in the Himalayas, AP talked to researchers, climbers and residents coping with the risks and uncertainties of climate change on Mont Blanc.
The Aug. 26 floods that swept through Nepal and China were triggered after a collapse of bedrock and glacier ice sent debris and water surging through multiple Himalayan rivers. Initial assessments of many scientists are that climate change played a key role in creating conditions for the catastrophe.
As Earth’s global average temperature rises because of the burning of oil, gas and coal, the chances of such disasters increase.
In the Alps, glaciers once admired for their icy majesty are being eyed with trepidation as they shrink and lose stability.
Bozon, who is in charge of safety for Chamonix, says his town urgently needs to prepare for “serious scenarios” of chunks of glacier or mountain potentially falling onto inhabited areas.
“We have to move quite quickly because this summer has shaken us and year after year we’re being shaken by the glaciers’ retreat,” he said.
In Italy, researchers are also documenting dramatic damage wrought by heat on glaciers this year. In Lombardy, Alpine glaciers have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the region's glacier service.
“While it used to snow at high altitudes in the past, now it rains,” said Vanda Bonardo, head of the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, a nongovernmental organization.
“So we’ve also seen the effects on the stability of the terrain,” she said.
Permafrost that has held Alpine peaks in its icy grip for thousands of years acts as a cement, helping to hold their steep rock faces together. It took a beating from the succession of heat waves.
“That doesn't mean that all the rock faces will collapse in the coming years or decades but quite a number of them are on the verge of becoming unstable and remain stable today only because of the presence of that ice. As the ice changes, we have seen a huge, huge number of rock falls and rock collapses this year,” said Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University who specializes in climate change's impact on mountain snows, glaciers and frosts.
A collapse is a major fall involving more than 100 cubic meters (3,531 cubic feet) of rock — more than enough to fill a large shipping container. Ravanel expects this year's tally of collapses in the Mont Blanc massif “will probably reach around 400.” He says that is about 10 times more than two decades ago.
The last time things got close to this bad was the ’’catastrophic year″ of 2022, he said, with nearly 300 collapses.
“This has really been one of the defining features of the summer of 2026,” he said.
Chamonix-based mountain guide Stuart MacDonald says it shocks him to see how rapidly and extensively glaciers that hang from the flanks of the Mont Blanc massif are retreating.
When he guides people up the peaks, he points them to “where the glacier was last year and this is where it was 10 years ago. And that usually has quite an effect.”
Melting and the risk of rock falls made his job “pretty challenging” this summer and forced him to cancel plans to lead a group to Mont Blanc's summit last week.
“You hear it before you see it and then you’ll turn round and you’ll just see an enormous cascade of rocks coming down a slope and it can be quite terrifying,” MacDonald said.
“What’s most scary is that sometimes these rocks are falling on routes that we used to be climbing at this time of year,” he added. “It can be depressing sometimes when you look at something that you maybe climbed in July or August in the past and you see that it’s absolutely impossible to do it now.”
Leicester reported from Paris. Associated Press journalists Trisha Thomas and Paolo Santalucia in Rome and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
People look at the 'Mer de Glace' glacier as tarpaulins cover the ice cave to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tarpaulins cover the ice cave of the 'Mer de Glace' glacier to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
The Mont-Blanc massif mountains are seen from the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tourists enjoy the view on the Mont-Blanc massif mountains from the Aiguille du Midi, in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tarpaulins cover the ice cave of the 'Mer de Glace' glacier to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
