World Cup digest: Germany lose major sponsor due to armband issue

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