Manchester City face a large fine, a points deduction, a transfer ban, the stripping of titles and trophies and even legal action from other football clubs, after reportedly being found guilty of 114 out of 115 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules.

With the verdict – let alone the punishment – still to be officially confirmed, “the chaos and uncertainty is only going to increase” as “City fans, and the rest of football” speculate about how harsh the penalties might be, said Dale Johnson, the BBC’s football issues correspondent.

‘Rewriting’ football history

Man City have reportedly lodged an appeal but, should that fail, there will be a sanction hearing at which “everything will be on the table” – “even demotion” from the Premier League, said the BBC’s Johnson.

The betting markets are already anticipating “just how heavily the Premier League could come down on the club”, wrote Lawrence Ostlere in The Independent. Despite their current position at top of the league, Man City were, on Saturday, sixth favourites to be relegated to the Championship, “with odds shortening by the minute”.

“There will be questions now” over the future of star players like Erling Haaland and Enzo Fernandez, but also “the people who run the football club”. Majority owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United Group was “directly implicated in the alleged accountancy gymnastics”. Under the new Independent Football Regulator’s “honesty, integrity and financial soundness” rules for owners and directors, Man City’s “entire ownership is at risk” if the Premier League’s charges are upheld.

“If the full weight of football law were to be thrown at them”, a “hefty slice of football history would need rewriting”, said Tim Spiers on The Athletic. Man City won nine domestic trophies between 2009 and 2018 – the years the charges span. If these titles were rescinded, former Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and former Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers would become “Premier League title-winning managers”. That would be “very surreal”.

The idea of Man City having to “hand back silverware” may feel “far-fetched” but there is a “high-profile precedent”: the 2006 Calciopoli scandal in Italy, when one of Juventus’ titles was retrospectively given to Inter. There have also been “numerous cases” of international athletics medals being re-distributed after rule-breaking doping cases came to light.

‘Forever tainted’

“It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Man City supporters,” said The Guardian’s editorial board. It seems likely that “the greatest period in their club’s history” will now be “forever tainted”. Some of the team’s football “during the Abu Dhabi era” has been “sublime, overseen by an inspired coach”, former manager Pep Guardiola. This sour ending is “a reminder that the volume of money now washing about at the top of the game has been bad for its sporting soul”.

It can’t take anything away “from the remarkable football journey we have been on”, said Man City fan and founder of City Xtra, Freddie Pye, in The Telegraph. My club has set new standards in “footballing brilliance”, led by “some of the most talented players ever seen”. That’s what we City fans “will forever cherish”, whatever sanctions are imposed or “a litany of critics argue”.

If the findings are upheld, this “will be about much more than Man City”, said Karren Brady, former vice-chair of West Ham United, in The Sun. It will become about how capable the Premier League is at “standing up to” a big club with a huge legal team, and applying its rules and punishments “fairly”. This legal battle has taken over two years already. “Man City may be the defendant” but “the credibility of the Premier League is in the dock, too”.

‘Advice for parents who want to prevent CTE in youth athletes’

Leana S. Wen at The Washington Post

Nobody “disputed that CTE is a serious issue, but many seemed to think that young athletes today are at lower risk than previous generations because of better safety precautions,” says Leana S. Wen. The “majority of head impacts that can cause brain damage do not result in a concussion diagnosis but can still contribute to CTE.” Most “important is taking repetitive head impacts out of the game for kids, including no bodychecking in ice hockey and no tackling in football.”

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‘What peacemaking loses when women are left out’

Cristal Downing at Time

Wars “exact a heavy toll on women and yet, too often their voices and concerns are pushed to the margins of global peacemaking,” says Cristal Downing. The United Nations “has made halting but real progress in bringing women into peace negotiations and postwar reconstruction from Guatemala to Bangsamoro,” but “now that progress is being reversed.” Finding “space for gender diversity could do more than ensure that women are heard; it could also give peace efforts a better chance of success.”

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‘How private equity is killing public access to hospitals and emergency care’

Heather Prendergast at The Hill

Safety-net hospitals “serve a patient population that is disproportionately low-income, publicly insured and racially and ethnically diverse,” says Heather Prendergast. The “corporatization of the healthcare system by private equity has come with significant costs.” While “private equity’s ownership of hospitals may earn millions for their investors, they have put patients, communities and providers at risk.” It is “worth asking what happens to the remaining safety-net hospitals once their primary funding source shrinks even further.”

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‘Trump abuses his pardon power. Getting rid of it would be a mistake.’

Abdallah Fayyad at The Boston Globe

Donald Trump’s “liberal use of his pardon power — particularly his penchant for pardoning wealthy white-collar fraudsters — has created a lucrative industry of so-called pardon brokers,” says Abdallah Fayyad. But “even though the pardon power has undeniably been misused, we shouldn’t dramatically curtail it or get rid of it.” Pardons are a “crucial component of a well-functioning criminal justice system, allowing presidents to undo wrongs when sentences are unjust or punishments are too harsh.”

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Across elite sports, a debate is growing over whether professional sporting bodies should support female athletes in freezing their eggs.

The Royal Spanish Football Federation recently announced an agreement to fund egg freezing and fertility treatments for its players, the first national federation to do so. Under the partnership, valid until 2029, the World Cup winners will “be given more options to pursue motherhood when they feel the time is right”, said ESPN.

It follows similar briefings by the National Women’s Soccer League in the US and Chelsea F.C. Women in the UK, as well as other sporting leagues like the Women's National Basketball Association and Women’s Tennis Association. But experts and athletes have raised concerns about the ethics of employer-offered fertility treatments and whether they truly support athletes during pregnancy and after they become parents.

‘Powerful message’

“Elite athletes have been choosing to freeze their eggs on their own for years,” said El País – when they can “find a gap” in their intense schedules. What’s new is that national teams, leagues and clubs are “beginning to take charge of the process”.

This year, the governing body of European football, Uefa, recommended including fertility and reproductive treatments in employment policies. And this month, Chelsea became the first Women’s Super League club to provide a fund for its squad to freeze their eggs and access fertility services. The fund, understood to be worth at least £189,000, is enough for the entire squad to freeze their eggs at a clinic in London’s Harley Street, said The Observer, “making it the most significant investment into fertility treatment from a women’s sports team in the UK”.

The Spanish federation “understands that you are serving your country against your biological clock, that you cannot stop and cannot be a mother because you need your body to work”, said former Spain captain Alexia Putellas. The footballers who want to become mothers “do not find it easy to fit it in” alongside World Cups.

Fertility services are a huge step forward in giving women more choices, and they send “the powerful message” that champions “should not have to choose between their sport and motherhood”, said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. But “fertility” only goes halfway.

‘Double-edged sword’

Fertility preservation measures are “typically presented as another way to give women in elite sport greater freedom”, said CBC News. But some worry they could inadvertently “perpetuate the attitude that women should wait for retirement” to become mothers.

For many LGBTQ+ athletes, IVF is a necessary part of family planning regardless of timing, said two-time Olympic rower Jill Moffatt. In that sense, funding egg freezing and fertility treatments is a “huge win”. Plus, many athletes likely couldn’t afford expensive fertility treatments. But it’s only a feminist “win” if teams offer support during pregnancy and postpartum, such as maternity leave, breastfeeding facilities and child care options. “Otherwise, it’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she told the news site.

Investing in post-partum training, nutrition specialists, bespoke after-care plans and reintegration programmes is “more inclusive and pioneering than any offer of fertility treatment – and just as important”, said Carson.

Ana Peleteiro-Compaoré Brión, a Spanish Olympic triple jumper, also criticised the Spanish federation's move. “Is this measure intended to make it easier for women to be mothers, or is it intended to make it easier for them not to be while they’re playing?” she posted on Instagram.

When an organisation offers fertility preservation, it brings up the question of whether “the underlying message is that you’re telling your players, ‘Don’t get pregnant while you’re working for us’”, Lamia Zafrani, an athlete gynaecologist, told DW.

The other difficulty is scheduling treatment around training and fixtures. Egg freezing involves multiple appointments, hormone injections and a minor operation. The challenge was highlighted by former England goalkeeper Mary Earps in her book “All In”, who recalled asking an expert: “I’ve got three weeks. Do you think I could fit in an egg-freezing cycle in that time?”

Drugs that are used to stimulate egg production for egg freezing or IVF are also banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, meaning athletes must disclose the medication. “Because there is still some stigma about egg freezing, some female athletes do not want people to know they’re undergoing this procedure,” Margie Davenport, the perinatal research lead for Fifa’s female athlete project, told The Athletic.

Ultimately, “fertility timelines will not change,” said the news site, “but the sport’s infrastructure must.”

‘Normalizing Delcy Rodríguez won’t fix Venezuela’

Juan Pablo Spinetto at Bloomberg

“Given that nobody elected” Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez to the “job she’s performing, and that the constitutional rules governing Venezuela’s presidential vacuum have long been ignored, ‘dictator’ sounds about right,” says Juan Pablo Spinetto. But dictators “tend to do as they please,” while Delcy, “by contrast, appears to be taking all her cues” from Trump. And “no amount of hard-power realpolitik, oil thirst, business ambition and perverse public relations can turn a dictator-puppet-regent into a legitimate leader.”

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‘Despite fewer deaths, the US is actually seeing more overdoses’

Madeline Hilliard and Jim Crotty at The Hill

An “abrupt, substantial decline in overdose deaths is an extraordinary public health achievement,” say Madeline Hilliard and Jim Crotty. But the “drop in deaths only tells part of the story.” As “overdose deaths have declined, nonfatal overdoses — when someone survives the emergency of too much substance shutting their body down — have actually increased.” Even when “survived, overdoses are often life-altering events with lasting impacts.” Preventing these “outcomes starts long before someone experiences an overdose.”

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‘We need to protect college sports from Ted Cruz’

Elie Mystal at The Nation

Sen. Ted Cruz’s Protect College Sports Act is “being sold mainly as a response to upheaval caused, more or less, by colleges and universities finally being forced to pay student-athletes some portion of the billions of dollars they generate,” says Elie Mystal. You “don’t need to follow or care about college football to know that anything Ted Cruz is a champion of is probably a very bad thing.” The legislation is “one of the most anti-labor bills proposed by this Congress.”

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‘If you want to win working-class votes, run on working-class issues’

Mindy Isser at In These Times

If liberals are “serious about winning elections across the country, working-class voters must be at the center of this project,” says Mindy Isser. But “too many campaigns don’t make these voters’ priorities their focus.” For people “concerned about climate change, abortion rights, immigrants’ rights and protecting democracy, our most important task is to learn to talk across the diploma divide, or else we may have very little hope of making progress on our goals.”

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‘The cruel politics that pit struggling Americans against each other’

LZ Granderson at the Los Angeles Times

“American capitalism requires abundance to truly thrive, and yet capitalists prefer the illusion of exclusivity and scarcity to control the market,” says LZ Granderson. “What has long kept the power out of the hands of the people has not been a lack of resources” but a “lack of compassion, particularly among the poor themselves.” This “calculus is cruelly effective. Instead of uniting people, turn one group of poor people against another so that politicians don’t have to help either group.”

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‘There will be blood: Threats against “NAZA’ directors are real and dangerous.’

Haaretz editorial board

Israelis’ “extreme responses” to the new documentary “NAZA,” which “almost no one has seen,” have now “turned into explicit threats and dangerous violence against the filmmakers and their families,” says the Haaretz editorial board. “The work of making the filmmakers fair game” began when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he “plans to advance legislation revoking the citizenship of anyone who ‘defames IDF soldiers.’” The government is “marking Israelis as traitors, and the unbridled mob is starting to hunt them.”

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‘Congress is trying to rip away college athletes’ hard-earned money’

Matt Ford at The New Republic

The Protect College Sports Act bill “would ‘protect college sports’ from the athletes who play them,” says Matt Ford. The PCSA is a “life raft” for the NCAA after “illegally suppressing college athletes’ earning potential for decades.” College players were “finally able to pursue fair-market compensation for their services thanks to a series of major court rulings,” but now the NCAA and its “allies are trying to keep as much of the money that college athletes generate as possible.”

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‘Why the US urgently needs more platelet donors’

Robert Glatter and Peter Papadakos at Time

The American Red Cross’ “latest appeal” deserves “national attention,” say Robert Glatter and Peter Papadakos. The organization “urged Americans to schedule blood and platelet donations, warning that the blood supply ‘remains vulnerable’ after recovering from critically low levels during a summer shortage. It called on donors of all blood types to make appointments now.” The Red Cross “estimates that nearly half of donated platelets go to patients receiving cancer treatment.”

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‘Colin Kaepernick set an example. Nobody wants to follow it.’

Will Leitch at The Washington Post

Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who knelt during the national anthem, desperately “wanted to play,” says Will Leitch. But as the “maelstrom he set off exploded, every NFL team chose not to roster him.” Kaepernick “wouldn’t retreat from his fundamental protest against police violence and oppression of Black people,” even if it meant losing his job. It “turned out the main lesson of it was the high cost of standing firm on belief, particularly against an organization as powerful as the NFL.”

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‘Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: Musicians can no longer opt out of politics.’

Zoe Williams at The Guardian

Since the rapper Macklemore was dropped as a support act on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Loop Tour,’ “every other opening act has pulled out,” says Zoe Williams. Sheeran, “seeking to stay out of politics, has become, in this moment, the most political artist in the world.” The “concern” of many of the involved artists was that “they were facing not just censorship but censorship by billionaires: specifically Robert Kraft, who demanded Macklemore’s removal with the threat of axing the whole show from his Gillette Stadium.”

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‘Trust in America’s food safety system is crumbling — Congress can restore it’

April McClain Delaney at The Hill

The agencies that “keep our food safe have been hollowed out,” says April McClain Delaney. As evidenced by this summer’s cyclosporiasis crisis, tainted lettuce is increasingly common, but the Trump administration “cannot tell us why these outbreaks happen or, in many cases, where they came from,” and “there is no clear plan to prevent” the next one. The “former director of the FDA’s food safety center” says the “people whose job” it was to “warn Americans” about outbreaks were “eliminated in last year’s cuts.”

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‘China cares more about AI victory than safety’

Seth Center at The Washington Post

As the former State Department envoy who “co-led the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, I fear the coming talks will not save us,” says Seth Center. “I expect China to again downplay safety risks” and “portray itself as an altruistic savior dedicated to ensuring that the developing world gains AI access.” Meanwhile, it will “keep doing everything it can to get ahead.” Chinese “models do not currently match U.S. models in safety performance that matters — thwarting access to the most dangerous capabilities.”

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Over a year after courting controversy with an American Eagle ad, actor Sydney Sweeney is facing another firestorm for a racy campaign in which she appears in various states of undress. Posing for the sports trading app Novig, Sweeney has stirred a debate regarding oversexualization in the world of advertising.

A ‘kick in the face’

Despite not wanting to “give this any more attention,” Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus posted on Instagram that she could not “keep” her “mouth shut” upon seeing the ad, per the Sydney Morning Herald. Sweeney’s ad is not only a “kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” but also to every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is: “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity,” Titmus wrote. How do we live in a world where “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”

The criticism isn’t about “being jealous or insecure,” it is about this already being a “male-dominated field” where women are “constantly having to prove why we belong,” Marissa Womack, the manager of game day promotions and programming for the minor league baseball team the Harrisburg Senators, said in a TikTok video, per The Hollywood Reporter. The backlash against Sweeney is coming in defense of “having passions and joy working in this industry” since when the “only representation is sexualization,” you see “less and less young women wanting to pursue this!”

The controversy is about “more than one advertisement,” Vivienne Lewis, a clinical psychologist, said at The Conversation. It “raises a bigger issue” about the “attention we give to what women look like” rather than “who they are and what they can do.” Body image includes “our thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward our bodies” and how much “importance we place on appearance when valuing ourselves.” Sports provide a “wonderful opportunity to shift that focus.” This is why the “discussion goes beyond Sweeney” or elite athletes. It isn’t about “criticizing Sweeney’s body or telling women what they should wear.” The more useful question is “why we give appearance so much importance in the first place.”

‘Hardly an unusual strategy’

Not to be a “crazed optimist,” said Marina Hyde at The Guardian, but the great thing about where women’s sport is today is that it “feels a whole lot bigger and stronger and more compelling” than whether Sweeney “did or didn’t get her tits out for a gambling ad.” It would have been “cooler for women’s sport” to simply “not even mention the naked gambling ad at all.” If it felt it had to, maybe “focus on the gambling bit rather than the woman advertising it.” Instinct says “gambling wrecks a lot more lives than Sydney Sweeney.”

We all know “exactly what Sydney Sweeney was doing,” advertising copywriter Paul Burke said at The Spectator. She was “selling a sports betting app.” She did not “pretend that she was an elite athlete.” Neither did she “decry the great talent, strength and sacrifice involved in becoming one.” Athletes “weren’t even mentioned.”

Novig’s decision to cast Sydney Sweeney was a “savvy one,” Burke said. Her “sultry and provocative performance,” building on last year’s “denim-based outrage,” was bound to “appeal to the people most likely to download this app.” This is “hardly an unusual strategy.” To “rage against beautiful people in adverts” is as pointless as “raging against athletic people in the 400 meter hurdles.” As far as Sweeney is concerned, the “voluble minority” who told the world how much they hated the ad “played right into her hands.” The “power of smart, cynical advertising” and a “certain brand of female empowerment” have once again “emerged victorious.”

College sports were once a bastion of amateur athletics. No more. Players get paid, openly, going to teams that can offer them the biggest paycheck. The lines between college and pro sports have grown fuzzy, and some marginal pro players are even attempting to return to class to keep their careers alive. A fierce backlash has ensued.

LSU: ‘Enraged every stakeholder’

It was once a settled fact that “players who had moved on to pro sports from college could not return to college,” said The Associated Press. Louisiana State University (LSU) is testing that notion, enrolling two athletes, Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, who “spent time in NFL training camps this summer.”

Neither player was on LSU’s roster for Saturday’s season-opening 51-10 victory over Clemson because the Southeastern Conference (SEC) asked a court to “force LSU into following the conference’s rules banning pro athletes.” A judge ruled the duo should be allowed to play under brand-new NCAA rules that allow a fifth year of college eligibility, and the league is appealing. The players are currently in limbo, said the AP. It’s “embarrassing where we are with college football,” Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney said to reporters, per the AP.

First-year LSU Coach Lane Kiffin has “enraged nearly every stakeholder in the sport” with his attempt to bring the pros back to college, said The Wall Street Journal. His recruitment of Wright and Harris sparked “all of college sports’ major conferences” — including the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference — to quickly adopt policies banning the return of players who attempt to go pro. Athletes who “sign professional contracts” should not “be permitted to return to college competition,” the SEC said in a statement, per the Journal.

Kiffin is pushing to let the athletes regain their eligibility to play at the college level. “They’re either gonna play for you, or they’re gonna play somewhere else around the country,” he said at a press conference.

LSU is not the only organization recruiting former pros. The NCAA has been ordered by courts to “allow professional basketball players to return to college basketball,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said at USA Today. Filling college rosters with “older adults and former professionals” will have the consequence of squeezing younger athletes out of college athletics. The NCAA is backing the “Protect College Sports Act,” which would codify college eligibility standards into federal law.

Amateurism: ‘Fundamentally dishonest’

The LSU saga is highlighting “college sports’ identity crisis,” Jason Lloyd said at The Athletic. University athletes “weren’t paid, they weren’t represented by agents, they couldn’t profit from endorsements” until the last few years. Such amateurism was “fundamentally dishonest” given the billions of dollars generated by college sports. Direct payments and endorsements are now allowed, a recent change. But colleges refuse to call the newly paid athletes “employees.” Doing so would give the players “legal rights, obligations and bargaining power” universities want to avoid. The question that must be answered: “What, exactly, is a college athlete in 2026?”

While the legal battle proceeds, LSU is playing without Wright and Harris — and playing well. Kiffin’s football team led Clemson 31-3 at halftime of Saturday’s game. “Imagine,” Kiffin said to ESPN at halftime, “if we had pro players.” The SEC is not amused. The league on Tuesday scheduled a vote of its college presidents to decide “whether to expel the Tigers from the league,” said ESPN.

‘Gloria Steinem’s final essay’

Gloria Steinem at The New Yorker

Opposition “will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born into” rather “than on what they do as individuals,” says Gloria Steinem. “Saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups.” For “some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious.”

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‘America needs its boys to play football’

Ben Sasse at The Wall Street Journal

Football is “back, and America’s boys need to play it and be shaped by it,” says Ben Sasse. While “controversy surrounds the embarrassingly blurry line between college football and the National Football League, our culture needs to take a moment to commend and steward the glorious tradition of high school football.” Americans “need young men full of energy, ambition and growing self-mastery,” and football is a “character-forming institution.” Football “creates the conditions for less, rather than more, violence.”

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‘Debt, a new challenge for democracies’

Le Monde editorial board

In the “United States, Europe and Japan, investors now demand higher returns to lend to governments,” which “reveals mounting concerns over the accumulation of public deficits and the sheer volume that governments must now raise on financial markets,” says the Le Monde editorial board. Returning to “fiscal fundamentals has been painful just as funding needs have reached new highs.” The “current increase in rates acts like a vise, reducing governments’ ability to fund new priorities while making past commitments more expensive.”

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‘Will those in prison help save the arts from AI?’

Mark Osler at The Minnesota Star Tribune

While on the “outside AI is increasingly doing our writing, creating our images and subverting creativity, on the inside of a prison none of that is happening — and the results can be stunning,” says Mark Osler. What is “new isn’t the existence of remarkable talent in prison,” but the “decay of the creative world outside the prison walls.” The U.S. “needs to invest in the arts within prisons and encourage more interaction across those walls.”

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There are very few American industries that private equity has not leached into, and investors are now setting their sights on the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, with numerous sports receiving an influx of funds. But not everyone is on board. Parents and politicians across the spectrum have raised concerns about the future of athletics under this business model.

How is private equity getting involved in youth sports?

It began when the Covid-19 pandemic threw a curveball to youth sports across the United States. Local leagues “stopped building rinks and fields and stopped maintaining the ones they had, and no federal agency exists to coordinate what replaced them,” said Fast Company. A pathway for private equity appeared.

Private ventures find youth sports appealing because they offer “pricing power that almost nothing else in consumer spending can match,” said Fast Company. American families “spend more than $40 billion a year on youth sports — nearly twice the NFL’s annual revenue.” There was also a 46% increase in the amount families spent on youth sports from 2019 to 2025, according to an Aspen Institute survey. The rise in spending grew at “twice the rate of price inflation in the U.S. economy during the same period.” Private equity has used this surge of youth sports dollars to invest in almost every sport played by American children.

One of the most notable ventures in private equity sports is Black Bear Sports Group, a firm that in “less than a decade grew into the single largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the U.S., with 47 facilities across 11 states,” said USA Today. Black Bear, the sports arm of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, has used this leverage to “steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.” Families “must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.”

Black Bear’s model has changed large swaths of youth hockey from a “network of community-based nonprofits into a vertically integrated, for-profit system with fewer checks on how money flows,” said USA Today. And other sports have been similarly impacted. Brand Velocity Group, a private equity firm led by Eli Manning, has purchased the “company that manages and controls the official youth sports licenses for most major U.S. professional leagues,” said Forbes, while investment firm KKR now owns Varsity Brands, one of the largest producers of youth uniforms.

How are the players and families being impacted?

Many say the influx of private equity is creating a pay-to-play culture that can be difficult to escape. There are also questions about whether parents are being “forced into buying bundled services they don’t want,” said USA Today. “We’re all paying so much money, and each year, they take away more and more,” Stephanie Kurzweil, a New Jersey hockey mom who paid $4,600 for her son’s spot on a Black Bear-owned team in 2023, said to USA Today. “They are in it for the money. There is no thought for the kids.”

An obsession with centering youth sports around traveling is another common element of private equity that is creating angst among parents. One soccer mom “was shocked when the coach made a surprise announcement that the team was going to compete in scrimmages in Europe that cost $3,500 per player,” said Intelligencer. “I was thinking, ‘There are plenty of teams we are losing to right here in our state,’” the mom, Elizabeth, told Intelligencer. “Why do we need to go lose to teams abroad?”

As a result of this increase in private money, skills and talent level “no longer act as a barrier to entry,” said Intelligencer. “When I competed, travel was more like you had to be really good. It was intimidating, and most people did not make it,” Amanda Pennel, a Georgia mother who played travel basketball as a teenager and whose son plays basketball now, told Intelligencer. Now it “doesn’t matter if you’re the worst basketball player anyone’s ever met; there’s a travel team for you.”

It’s not just regular parents who are complaining. Some high-profile individuals are also sounding the alarm about this private equity surge. “Investor money has warped youth sports in another way: It has individualized and professionalized the experience,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose son plays in a Black Bear-owned hockey league, said at The Atlantic.

It is a marked change given that for “most of the past century, youth sports were managed primarily by local park departments, parent-led leagues and nonprofit groups,” said Murphy. But the “high-pressure environment, driven by parents and profit-hungry owners alike, has produced a youth-sports culture in which profit and individual achievement matter more than teamwork or character building.”

What has the larger response been?

As private equity’s stranglehold on youth sports expands, many are looking to the government to intervene — and it appears that Washington, D.C., is taking notice. Several lawmakers have been “looking at the skyrocketing costs of youth sports and trying to figure out ways to regulate private equity’s role in the industry, where rising costs have priced out many young athletes,” said Cronkite News. Democrats in both chambers of Congress recently introduced the Let Kids Play Act, a bill that “would protect youth sports from so-called ‘vulture investors’ that Democrats accuse of exploiting youth sports.”

The bill, if passed, would “ban junk fees, loosely defined as fees that are hidden, offer little or nothing in return or are added only after an initial price is disclosed or paid” and “hold private equity firms liable for certain violations,” said Cronkite News. Beyond this bill, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce also held a bipartisan hearing that “scrutinized the role of private equity in youth sports,” said CNBC, another “potential sign that Congress could be inching closer to intervening.”

“Consolidation is driving up costs for families while limiting access to more affordable, community-based options,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), the chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, said during the hearing. The “simple reality is that too many children are being priced out. It’s not that they lack talent or determination; it’s that their families simply cannot afford the rising costs.”

Not everyone is happy that Congress is thinking of regulating the private equity extravaganza. “Some of the largest youth sports groups acknowledge a need for regulation but defend the role of private capital in expanding access and meeting demand,” said Cronkite News. “I agree that there is a problem with youth sports,” Matt Kanne, the CEO of youth basketball operator Open Gym Premier, said to the outlet. “The infrastructure of youth sports is underfunded and ill-equipped nationally. But why block investments?”

What happened

The NBA on Wednesday punished the Los Angeles Clippers with the largest sanctions in league history after finding that owner Steve Ballmer and other team executives violated salary cap rules to funnel millions of dollars to star forward Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers were fined $30 million and stripped of five first-round draft picks, from 2029 to 2033. Leonard was fined $700,000, and Ballmer was banned from all team and league activities for a year.

Who said what

A one-year independent investigation found that the Clippers had improperly “covered personal expenses for Leonard,” CNN said, and “funneled off-court endorsement opportunities” to him through corporate partners who were rewarded with lucrative “team business.” Paying Leonard via a team sponsor would strike at the “very heart of the NBA’s most important financial rules” to ensure a “roughly level playing field” across the league, The Wall Street Journal said. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations,” and “the severity of the penalties reflects” their “seriousness.”

What next?

The Clippers “vehemently reject” the NBA’s “heavily biased investigation,” the team said in a statement, and “intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us.” There is “no appeal or arbitration process available to the team,” The Athletic said, citing a league source.

Filmgoers love sports movies for the same reason that networks linger on players celebrating championships after the big game, then cut to the losers to capture their heartbreak: Sports narratives are innately moving. These nine superb dramas keep audiences riveted because they are about much more than winning or losing.

‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ (1973)

John D. Hancock’s largely forgotten “Bang the Drum Slowly” is the story of a friendship between New York Mammoths star pitcher, Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), and his unsophisticated catcher, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), a frequent target of his teammates’ cruelty who receives a terminal diagnosis and plays brilliantly through it for one last season.

“From here on in, I rag nobody,” Henry announces at the end of this quiet, moving character study, a mantra more people could stand to adopt. Its “mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness and bleak humor” hit home despite the lack of “telegraphed big moments on the field,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

‘Rocky’ (1976)

For a niche sport, boxing has produced an outsized share of the greatest sports movies, including “Rocky,” a movie that still inspires countless people to run up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sylvester Stallone (“Rambo”) is Rocky Balboa, a down-on-his-luck Philly boxer who gets an unexpected shot at greatness when reigning champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) chooses him to fight in the exhibition bout that comprises the film’s final set piece. A movie that features “some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen,” its most winning element is Rocky himself, a “character of enormous appeal and charm,” said Arthur Knight at The Hollywood Reporter. (Netflix)

‘Raging Bull’ (1980)

The turbulent life of boxer Jake LaMotta gets the biopic treatment in director Martin Scorsese's instant black-and-white classic. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta as almost tortured with kinetic jealousy and bottomless insecurity, at one point pummeling another boxer in front of his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), because she had said he was handsome.

“Raging Bull” is also a groundbreaking film in the depiction of domestic violence, one of the first commercial films to take the scourge seriously. This “brutally nihilist tale” is told in a “stunning, dreamlike series of episodes in and out of the ring,” with the boxer ultimately “brought down by his own toxic machismo,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘Hoosiers’ (1986)

Gene Hackman delivers one of the best performances of his long, storied career as Norman Dale, a fallen college basketball coach who steps in to lead the high school basketball team in tiny Hickory, Indiana. Tasked with transforming a motley crew of unseasoned players into a contender, he hires the recovering alcoholic Shooter (Dennis Hopper) as assistant coach, and the team gels and starts winning.

“Hoosiers” sounds like a hundred other sports films. But its attention to detail sets it apart, produced in large part by casting mostly unknown local actors as the players. In director David Anspaugh’s film, the “emotions it asks us to feel are genuine and fairly achieved,” so its “artful familiarity becomes a balm instead of a stumbling block,” said Kenneth Turan at ESPN Classic. (YouTube)

‘Bull Durham’ (1988)

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) is a baseball groupie who picks one ballplayer a year on the minor-league Durham Bulls to sleep with and tutor. She picks the gloriously named Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), a fireballer with an unfortunate lack of depth and wisdom but comes to prefer the aging veteran Crash Davis (Kevin Costner).

Full of timeless observations like Crash noting that “strikeouts are boring and besides that they’re fascist,” it is uproariously funny but also succeeds as both a romance and a baseball film. Written and directed by former minor-league ballplayer Ron Shelton, it is a “long, smart kiss to baseball” with the “loping narrative rhythm of a baseball season,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Mubi)

‘Million Dollar Baby’ (2004)

After spending the bulk of his career on Westerns and vigilante films like “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood underwent an astonishing transformation into a widely respected directing auteur. Here he also stars as Frankie Dunn, an aging, dyspeptic coach who agrees to take on the unpolished Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), as she seeks to rise through the ranks of women’s boxing.

The film’s turning point is a tragedy during a fight arranged by Frankie, making its second half more of a dirge than a sports film. A “rueful rumination on sin and absolution,” Eastwood’s “striking framing has the muscular simplicity and directness of Ernest Hemingway's prose,” said Colin Kennedy at Empire. (Paramount+)

‘Moneyball’ (2011)

A movie about the data analytics revolution in baseball is an unlikely contender for one of the best sports movies, but director Bennett Miller’s take on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book gets it done. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the woebegone Oakland Athletics, who hires data wizard Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to revolutionize the team’s scouting and gain an edge over the team’s better-funded peers. Featuring a “sharp, sleek script,” it is as much about a “fundamental cultural shift and the rise of the information elite” as it is about baseball, said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘The Fire Inside’ (2024)

Ryan Destiny (“Grownish”) anchors “The Fire Inside” as Claressa Shields, the two-time Gold Medal-winning boxer from Flint, Michigan, and her coach, Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry). Written by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and directed by Rachel Morrison in her feature debut, it is both an unflinching look at the obstacles faced by a community that would soon be plunged into a national news-worthy water crisis and an unusually well-shot sports film whose boxing sequences jump off the screen. It asks a question rarely posed in sports films: “If you don’t come from privilege, what happens when you fight your way to the top, only to realize that it looks a lot like where you started?” said Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times. (MGM+)

‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)

One of the only feature films about the niche sport of ping-pong, “Marty Supreme” is a character study of the distinctly unlikeable antihero Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), one of those people who leaves a wake of chaos, heartbreak and destruction wherever he goes. He also happens to be a truly gifted table tennis player who pursues his dream of becoming the world’s top-ranked with savage self-interest, running cons on everyone from his own love interest, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), to Gwyneth Paltrow’s depressed, aging film star Kay Stone. Buoyed by Marty’s “endless slippery charm,” it is also a “very unconventional coming of age story,” said Kieran Battams at Voice. (HBO Max)

‘Sports medicine must get better at treating women’

Ashley Austin at Newsweek

Even as “more eyes turn to women’s sports and female athletes surge in popularity, there’s still a great deal that sports medicine doctors don’t know about actually treating women,” says WNBA doctor Ashley Austin. Americans need “increased investment in women’s sports science — not just to improve outcomes for elite athletes but to improve care for women and girls across the healthcare system.” Doctors should learn to “provide care that is truly based on evidence specific to women’s anatomy and physiology.”

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‘Are US black ops targeting boats in the Galapagos?’

The Dallas Morning News editorial board

Attacks on “fishing boats off the coast of Ecuador earlier this year are surrounded by mystery and unanswered questions,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. The “evidence is scarce, but it is enough for Congress to start asking questions.” Who “ordered these attacks and to what end”? If there is “indeed some sort of black ops targeting fishermen with no accountability, it will mark another stain in a long, bad history of U.S. intervention in Latin America.”

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‘I’m a physicist. Congress is about to close the door that let me in.’

Stephanie L. Bailey at The Seattle Times

Somewhere in the “country, a talented future scientist is about to be overlooked, not for lack of ability, but because no one has decided they’re worth helping,” says Stephanie L. Bailey. Two House bill provisions “would bar federal science agencies from funding the offices and grants that broaden participation in STEM.” Some “argue federal agencies should simply fund the best science and that programs like these distract from that mission,” but “in fact, the opposite is true.”

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‘My road trip revealed the good and the bad that hold America together’

LZ Granderson at the Los Angeles Times

There is a “commonality I saw on my drive across America: homelessness,” says LZ Granderson. Americans “like to tell ourselves it’s a California problem, a Chicago problem — something that happens in big blue states.” But of the “states I drove through, all but one were red.” We are “teaching the next generation that, in the richest country that has ever existed, it is acceptable that some people are reduced to huddling in storefront entryways overnight.”

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“Sports are supposed to be a diversion,” said Candace Buckner in The Athletic, but the Women’s National Basketball Association suddenly feels “less like a sport and more like a societal powder keg.” When the Indiana Fever in 2024 drafted Caitlin Clark, the leading scorer in NCAA history—male or female—the league’s audience exploded, but so did the culture war nastiness. Clips of the straight, white Clark being clobbered by Black opponents, in a league where 25% to 35% of players are publicly LGBTQ+, became a staple of rightwing social media. Then, this summer, Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham became her on-court “bodyguard” and a social media phenomenon in her own right. Cunningham recently told ESPN that society should “protect young girls” from playing sports or sharing lockers with “biological men,” and the already toxic “cesspool” of WNBA discourse became instantly more poisonous. Pro- and anti-trans activists held dueling rallies outside Fever games. But now two burly ex-NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom (6-foot-10 and 250 pounds) and Royce White (6-foot-8 and 270 pounds) have “mockingly” threatened that if the league doesn’t ban male-born players, they’ll declare themselves women and enter next year’s WNBA draft. With attendance and TV viewership at record highs, this “should have been a history-making season for the WNBA,” said Rachel Bachman in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the season has “spiraled into absolute chaos,” amid racial resentment, feuds, and on-court physical fights.

Kanter and White are “attention-starved” trolls who can safely be ignored, said Mike Wise in MS.now. The WNBA has never had a male-born player, and with about 3 out of 4 Americans agreeing with Cunningham, probably never will. Cunningham isn’t a troll, said Kase Wickman in Vanity Fair. But the blonde, beautiful social media star likes to seek attention, as she demonstrated with her viral “pointing” meme after a scuffle with a Black player in June, which gained her throngs of new followers and lucrative endorsement deals. By coming out against trans players, Cunningham became “MAGA’s favorite women’s basketball player.”

Don’t blame Cunningham, said Joe Nocera in The Free Press. The league could have avoided its “trans mess” just by following the lead of the Olympics or the Women’s Tennis Association, whose rulebooks now clarify that “woman” means “biological woman.” Because that would anger its progressive and LGBTQ+ fan base, however, WNBA executives are responding to the firestorm with meek, meaningless calls for “inclusivity.” Their cowardice also explains why the league’s “race issue isn’t going away.” When the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington blamed “white privilege” last week, after being ejected for a flagrant foul on Cunningham, the league stayed silent. Unless it can “develop a spine,” the WNBA will remain a “piñata in the culture wars.”

The good news, said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, is that all this drama is a by-product of the league’s astonishing success. Since Clark arrived, TV viewership has doubled and TV revenues have quadrupled to $200 million. Players’ salaries have soared. “Any emergent sports league” has growing pains, said Will Leitch in The Washington Post. The WNBA can survive the culture wars so long as the quality of the product—the actual basketball—remains high. If you haven’t seen a game lately, the players’ skills are better than ever, and the WNBA’s “product is magnificent.”

For every traveler who wants to kick back and relax on their vacation, there’s another who refuses to sit still. These seven hotels and experiences are for the active voyager who is never too far from their golf clubs, knows where all the best tennis courts are and is always game for a new sport.

Play padel at Adare Manor, Ireland

Pickleball had its moment, and now it’s padel’s time to shine. A mix of tennis and squash, this racket sport is growing in popularity, and Adare Manor has the perfect spot to learn the game or hone your skills.

The Padel Club houses two custom-built padel courts, with instructors on hand to teach newbies and a selection of racquets to borrow. Once the ancestral home of the Earls of Dunraven, the grand Adare Manor sits in a “secluded” area, and its many activities on top of padel, like fishing and falconry, are “fit for Irish nobility,” said Forbes.

Hit it out of the park at the rooftop batting cages at ‘Alohilani Resort, Oahu

It’s all swings, no misses when you have a view like this. The rooftop at ‘Alohilani Resort is part of the property’s fitness hub, and guests can gaze out at Waikiki Beach and feel the Pacific Ocean breeze while practicing their hitting in the batting cages. An open-air TRX gym and red clay tennis courts are also located on the recreation deck, which often hosts yoga classes and other wellness events.

Pick up polo at Coworth Park, England

It’s “hard to imagine a more pleasant setting” than Coworth Park, tucked away in the Berkshire countryside, said The Telegraph. There’s a lovely meadow filled with wildflowers, lake with swans and polo fields where you can take customized lessons through the Guards Polo Academy. Learn to properly swing a mallet and glide across the field, or for the more confident rider, enjoy a day out playing with polo club members.

Get your heart pumping at Miraval Arizona, Tucson

At Miraval Arizona, you’re encouraged to take a flying leap and go out on a limb — safely, of course. While on the property’s Challenge Course you can also swing through the air, climb up a giant ladder, cross a tightrope and elevated platforms and zipline.

The course “encourages you to step out of your comfort zone, both physically and mentally” and is “designed for personal growth,” said Condé Nast Traveler. The Sonoran Desert spreads out around you, a “stunning backdrop” to your adventure.

Hang 10 at Nobu Ryokan Malibu, California

The Pacific Ocean is your playground when staying at Nobu Ryokan Malibu. The 16-room property is right on Carbon Beach, and through its new surfing program, guests can ride the waves on a custom surfboard during a private lesson from Malibu Fit Concierge. Afterward, put on your best bathing suit for a two-hour water photo session with celebrity photographer (and former competitive surfer) Steven Lippman.

Try wing foiling at Oil Nut Bay, British Virgin Islands

Water sports are a big deal at Oil Nut Bay. This beautiful property provides “pure laidback luxury,” and that extends to its activities, said Travel and Leisure. Tubing, waterskiing, wakeboarding, snorkeling, kayaking, paddleboarding, kiteboarding and Hobie Cat sailing are all offered (with instructors and experienced drivers), plus two more unusual options: wing foiling and Seabobbing. Wing foiling is developed from windsurfing and kitesurfing, while a Seabob is an electric underwater scooter.

Explore the trails at Río Perdido, Costa Rica

The outdoors is your gym at Río Perdido. Hike, run, do yoga or take a peaceful stroll on the property’s 1,500 acres.

Guests have access to a vast network of solid rock trails for mountain biking that twist and turn through dry forest and a thermal canyon, and can spike their adrenaline by whitewater rafting on the Tenorio River. This proves to be “both intense and exhilarating if the rapids are strong,” said Condé Nast Traveler. Wind down in the property’s naturally heated thermal river and mineral pools, covered by a canopy of lush tropical foliage.

‘Baseball labor talks may look like a battle among millionaires, but it’s really about billionaires vs. peons’

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

“Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?” says Michael Hiltzik. The “idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season” for a “rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.” The “trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost” should be “put in context.”

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‘Five years on, Washington is failing Afghanistan again’

Priyali Sur and Hardin Lang at Foreign Policy

“Five years ago this month, Kabul fell to the Taliban,” and the “images from that week still define how many Americans think about Afghanistan,” say Priyali Sur and Hardin Lang. In the “following years, Washington has found new, quieter ways to fail Afghans,” and “this time, the failure has a body count that the Trump administration has so far refused to acknowledge.” Examining the “impact of the aid cuts on the ground” paints a “disturbing picture of a collapsing system.”

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‘Flock camera resistance is just the beginning. Let’s avoid a “1984” scenario.’

Farrah Hassen at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Government surveillance “isn’t new, but new wide-ranging technologies that can detect our faces and track our movements are making it ubiquitous,” says Farrah Hassen. While the “tools have changed, the purpose remains the same: to chill independent thought, free speech and dissent, bringing our country closer to the events in George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984.’” Tech like “Flock cameras has brought the issue into communities across the country” and “led to wrongful arrests, profiling and countless other abuses.”

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‘The Muttur massacre in Sri Lanka remains, 20 years later, a prime example of impunity for attacks on humanitarians’

Hector Sharp and Lily Sparks at Le Monde

“Twenty years ago, on August 4, 2006, a team of 17 humanitarians working for Action Against Hunger in Muttur, Sri Lanka, were forced to kneel, before being shot in the back of the head,” say Hector Sharp and Lily Sparks. The massacre “became emblematic of the collapse of humanitarian protection.” It “remains a prime example of impunity: a defining failure of justice which is impossible to separate from the increase in attacks on humanitarians around the world.”

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Mark Walter promised a bright future when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers last year. That future is already passed. Walter flipped the team to new owners this month, netting a reported $2.5 billion profit. Dollar signs have always dominated the big leagues, but sports ownership is increasingly reserved for corporations, private equity and superrich investors. Where does that leave fans?

‘Highly sticky consumer base’

Jerry Buss and his children ran the Lakers as the “NBA’s version of a mom-and-pop shop” for decades before last year’s sale to Walter, Benjamin Wilhelm and Samuel Agini said at the Financial Times. The days when a local businessman would buy and run a team as a sort of community trust are over. Instead, the “shock sale” of the Lakers demonstrates how pro teams are “no longer treated as vanity assets but legitimate investment vehicles.”

The new generation of sports owners look like Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO who now co-owns the Lakers. They are “billionaire financiers” who see professional sports as a business sector “resistant to potential disruption from AI” and have access to “deep pools of capital,” said the Financial Times.

Sports are good business thanks to a “highly sticky consumer base” of die-hard fans and “contractual revenue streams” for broadcast rights that produce massive revenues, MAI Capital Management’s Kurt Nye said to Investment News. Pro teams are thus selling at “prices that would have seemed implausible a decade ago,” said the outlet. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks sold for $9.612 billion in July, while the Chicago Bulls were valued at $6.45 billion when Walmart heir Lukas Walton bought a 10% stake in June. Those sky-high valuations now make franchises “legitimate portfolio planning territory” for the highest-dollar investors.

It can be messy territory. The Buss family announced this week it is selling its remaining minority stake in the Lakers, said The Athletic. But that sale is opposed by Jeanie Buss, who led the franchise in recent years. The “bitter dispute” between Buss and her siblings could end up in court.

Fans ‘pay through the nose’

Team owners are “flush and want to be even flusher,” Mike Lupica said at the New York Daily News. The “sure thing” profits from ownership come in part because owners like Walter and the Knicks’ James Dolan “charge vulgar amounts for ticket prices” for the fans who keep the enterprise going. Many Knicks fans could not afford tickets to Madison Square Garden during the team’s recent championship run. Fans pay “through the nose” while team owners keep winning big money “whether their teams win or not.”

The Lakers sale is “exactly why we need publicly owned sports teams,” Dave Zirin said at The Nation. Team owners have long had “zero regard” for communities where their franchises “have taken root.” But franchises belonged to their communities “spiritually, psychologically, personally” before they became “just another asset” in private equity portfolios. When sports billionaires buy our teams they are “buying our joy.”

“It’s pretty worrying, the state of men’s tennis, especially right now,” said British star Jack Draper, announcing his withdrawal from Wimbledon this year due to injury. “The amount of injuries, especially young players.” Draper thinks “the tour and the calendar have to adapt if any of us are gonna achieve some sort of longevity”.

The unrelenting schedule of the ATP Tour has meant Draper’s world ranking has dropped from no. 4 to no. 147, and he faces the prospect of having to qualify for this year’s US Open, where he was a semi-finalist two years ago. He has missed most of the last year with the injury to his serving arm.

Players on both the men’s ATP and women’s WTA tours have long complained of the hectic playing schedule and called for reforms to ease the workload. But calendar alterations are just one of the many challenges players are facing.

Injuries ‘steadily increasing’

“It is difficult to remember a time when each tournament’s build-up was not punctuated” with withdrawals like that of men’s world no. 1 Jannik Sinner from this week’s Cincinnati Open, said The Telegraph.

The calendar is to blame. Of the nine Masters 1000 events – one step below Grand Slams in prestige and usually lasting seven days – seven of them have “expanded to a 12-day format”. And punishments for opting out of the “gruelling” schedule don’t help players. Barring injury, they must play a minimum of eight such tournaments or “have their bonus pool reduced for each subsequent tournament missed”.

Optimists would argue that top players’ absences give opportunities to younger and lower-ranked players, but fans have started to “raise concerns” about their favourites “regularly missing events”. Clearly, the ATP Tour has “its own interests at heart”, attempting to “squeeze out every revenue source possible”.

This has impacted player health. “Survival of the fittest has become an apt metaphor for life on the tennis circuit in recent months,” said The Times. Injuries are “inevitable” in any sporting arena, but at the top level of tennis they are “steadily increasing”. University of Barcelona data from 2024 found that match retirements had increased by at least 25% and 50% on the ATP and WTA Tours respectively since 1999, while the Professional Tennis Players’ Association found that the average distance covered by players on court has increased “by more than 50 per cent since 2015”.

Players must contend with a “lack of recovery time and accumulated stress between matches”. In training, they can record performance “to the nth degree” with trackers and advanced technology, but these are banned in Grand Slam tournaments. However, “the stress of real competition is far greater”

Counterintuitively, players’ improved athleticism is also causing issues, said El Pais. In both men’s and women’s competitions, the physicality has “evolved exponentially compared with two or three decades ago”, meaning players can hit the ball harder, and have better equipment with which to do so. This places even greater strain when on the receiving end, and the rules are not adapting to accommodate this.

‘Highly vulnerable to match-fixing’

Environmental changes are also overlooked too, said the Financial Times. “Extreme heat is affecting tennis tournaments globally”, particularly at the French Open in May, and different organisations follow different rules to combat it. Until this year, the decision to suspend ATP matches due to weather conditions was “at the discretion of tournament supervisors”. Now a new “heat rule” is applied.

In addition to the playing schedule and more common heatwave conditions, tennis is “highly vulnerable to match-fixing”, said The Athletic. Top players may earn “more than $20 million in prize money each season”, but the majority of lower-ranked players “live a hand-to-mouth existence” on tour. “Fixers thrive on this inconsistency.”

The scoring system means players “can be convinced to corrupt matches whilst still winning them”: they can throw the opening set, or a particular service game, before “returning to playing at their best”. In December, French player Quentin Folliot was “suspended for 20 years on fixing charges, while Chinese player Pang Renlong was “barred for 12 years for separate offences”.

Like in other sports, change in tennis “takes time”, said The Independent. But unlike in others, tennis essentially has “seven governing bodies”, with the ATP, WTA, World Tennis and the four historic Grand Slam events all claiming certain jurisdiction. “Getting everyone around the same table is challenging enough”, let alone them agreeing on reforms to the game.

‘Syria’s leaders need to prove they can be trusted’

Ilan Berman at The Washington Post

The United States’ “rehabilitation of Syria has proceeded at remarkable speed,” but it is “becoming increasingly clear that, at least at the moment, Washington is making its bet based more on hope than hard evidence,” says Ilan Berman. The “ideological makeup of the country’s new rulers has not changed nearly as much as Western officials might wish to believe” and “reflect an officially sanctioned effort to shape Syria’s next generation according to a radical, rejectionist worldview.”

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‘Critics can no longer claim ESPN is “woke”’

Michael McCarthy at Front Office Sports

If “you want proof the ‘woke’ era at ESPN is over, all you had to do was watch President Donald Trump’s inaugural Freedom 250 Patriot Games,” says Michael McCarthy. The “happy, smiling scene between ESPN/Disney power players and the second Trump administration was a far cry from some of the media giant’s previous tense interactions with ‘The Donald.’” ESPN “might not want to enlist in the culture wars anymore, but the culture wars will draft them anyway.”

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‘The US is now using the “terrorist” label to interfere in Brazil’s election’

Raphael Tsavkko Garcia at Al Jazeera

In “designating Brazil’s two largest criminal organizations” as terrorist groups, the U.S. “has asserted its own definition of Brazil’s security threats, with consequences that reach far beyond law enforcement,” says Raphael Tsavkko Garcia. This “says far more about politics than security.” The “designation reflects a dangerous convergence between Washington’s longstanding interventionist instincts in Latin America, echoing memories from the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship that lasted from 1964 until 1985, and the interests of Brazil’s far right.”

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‘How AI poses a threat to journalism, already weakened by 20 years of digital upheaval’

Aude Dassonville at Le Monde

For the “media, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence has proven to be an earthquake, profoundly shaking journalistic practices and relationships with readers, along with the economic models of newspapers, magazines, television channels and news websites,” says Aude Dassonville. How “can organizations continue to exist if, on top of having their content scraped by AI, readers drop and advertising revenue is siphoned off?” A “worrying trend is that, quite often, chatbot users are confident with answers generated by AI.”

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With Saudi Arabia ending its funding of LIV Golf after this season, the league is at a crossroads, moving away from its largest controversy while still in need of new financial backing. Now it appears LIV may have found some, announcing last week that it has secured investors to bring it into the 2027 season and beyond. But some major questions about the tour’s future linger.

‘Supporting the path forward’

LIV Golf has an “agreement in place with a lead investor, signed by the investor and approved by the board, to anchor the transaction and play a key role in supporting the path forward for the league’s next era, driven by and for the players,” the tour’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, said in a statement. O’Neil “didn’t identify the investor or how much money will be injected into the league,” said ESPN, though he hopes to “finalize terms in the coming weeks.”

A new backer would mark a significant changing of the guard for LIV Golf, which has been financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund since its 2022 founding. This partnership has elicited backlash, as the fund is “chaired by Mohammed bin Salman — the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the man who a U.S. intelligence report named as responsible for approving the operation that led to the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said CNN. Saudi Arabia has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses.

With bin Salman pulling his funding after 2026, there is “no need to root for LIV’s demise, especially since the moral argument against it — the Saudi backing — is now out of the picture,” said The Athletic. Whoever the new investors are, however, they “won’t remotely approach the fantasy golf funding of Saudi Arabia’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund,” meaning the next season of LIV Golf will likely look very different.

‘A talent exodus’

It is a “reality that the Saudi Public Investment Fund invested billions into the league with no return,” and any newer investments “won't stretch as far as the previous financial backing did,” said Bleacher Report. It also remains to be seen how the players themselves will factor into the new-look league, as LIV Golf finds itself looking to bring in fresh golfers for the upcoming season.

LIV Golf “must contend with a talent exodus,” as it has seen “major winners Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed return to the PGA Tour under a program that caps some of their future earning opportunities,” said Sportico. Other big-name golfers “left the league for different reasons.” One of the main question marks is Bryson DeChambeau, the “league’s biggest star” whose expiring contract “looms large over LIV’s future.” Golf industry insiders believe DeChambeau “could command a deal with a total value somewhere between $200 million and $500 million.”

The tour wants to put golfers at the forefront either way, as during the next phase, players “will be majority equity holders in the league,” said Sportico. But “how that structure will play out, especially with the prospect of new investors coming on board, is unclear.” Many are still looking forward to the potential new phase of LIV Golf despite all the current unknowns. If the “league is reduced to a parade of fading 40-somethings who want to play 10 team-centric events a season while bouncing from continent to continent, what’s the harm in that?” said The Athletic. “More golf is better than less golf.”

It has become fashionable of late to declare that the Commonwealth Games no longer matter, and are living on borrowed time. Well, tell that to the good people of Glasgow, said Nik Simon in the Daily Mail. Over 11 days, Scotland’s second city – which stepped in as host after the Australian state of Victoria pulled out in 2023 on grounds of cost – welcomed competitors from 74 nations, who (in the absence of an athletes’ village) were accommodated in hotels across the area.

In return, the 434,000 ticket-holders, plus 200,000 who watched for free at the city’s fan sites, were treated to a spectacular show, said Matthew Henry on BBC Sport. Highlights of the Games, which ended on Sunday, included Scotland’s Josh Kerr storming to victory in the mile race in front of a jubilant home crowd; Wales’ Emma Finucane becoming the first sprint cyclist to win four track gold medals at the same Games; and Jamaica stunning Australia in one of the biggest upsets in netball’s history.

Overall, though, it was the Australians who dominated: spurred on by mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s offer of cash bonuses for podium finishes, the country notched up 171 medals – dwarfing second-placed England’s total of 110.

‘Ozempic’ games

As host city, Glasgow did a sterling job, said Fiona Tomas in The Telegraph: events were “impeccably run”, and the “army of cheery volunteers” kitted out in tartan couldn’t be faulted. But it was hard to escape the feeling that this was the Commonwealth Games “on Ozempic”. As a result of “cost-cutting measures”, only 10 sports were featured, down from 19 in Birmingham four years ago; and with the BBC losing out to TNT Sports on the right to broadcast the Games, TV audiences were miserly.

Worse still, a “deluge of high-profile athletes” – from England’s Keely Hodgkinson to Jamaica’s men’s 100m world champion Oblique Seville – prioritised other competitions and sat out the Games altogether. Attention now turns to the 2030 edition to be held in Ahmedabad, India. They’ll mark the centenary of the Games, and that “might be a good one to end on”.

Stepping stone

I’m not so sure about that, said Rick Broadbent in The Times. The Games may lack the glamour of the Olympics, say, or the World Cup, but that’s the whole point of them. Where else could you watch Idi Amin’s grandson complaining about ill-treatment in the boxing ring, or hear Archie Goodburn, a terminally ill swimmer, being roared on in the pool by a partisan crowd? And it’s a competition, don’t forget, that has long served athletes as a “stepping stone” to greater glories. Of course, it must be financially viable – Glasgow only managed to host the Games so cheaply because Victoria had to pay £190 million in compensation, for pulling out. But assuming that “the price is right”, this is undoubtedly “an event worth saving”.

This year’s Tour de France Femmes has been rocked by allegations that some riders are artificially exaggerating their bust size to gain an aerodynamic advantage.

Several women’s World Tour teams have raised concerns that cyclists on rival teams are padding their sports bras to give them a boost in time trials, according to leading Dutch cycling news site, WielerFlits.

Every second counts

The practice of “chest fairing” – also known as “bra boosting” or “bra doping” – involves increasing the surface area of the chest to change the airflow around the torso. Other forms of chest fairing include placing a water bottle or radio receiver under your cycling jersey. This can reduce drag, potentially saving valuable seconds in a time trial, where aerodynamics are crucial.

An optimised chest fairing can reduce drag by as much as 3.6%, which could gain a time-trial cyclist at least 0.78 seconds every kilometre, according to research published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics in 2024. “You won’t gain tens of seconds,” said study lead Bert Blocken, an aerodynamics expert at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. But over a 20- to 30-km time trial, “it could save enough seconds to make the difference”.

“We’ve done some testing with a push-up bra versus a sports bra” and “we’ve definitely found some differences there”, Koen de Kort, head of technical and innovation at professional cycling team Lidl-Trek, told The Athletic. We haven’t used enhanced bras in competition, as we “don’t think it’s in the spirit of the sport” but I’m sure other teams “have found the same results and have experimented with it”.

It’s a controversy that has echoes of the row at the Winter Olympics earlier this year, when male ski jumpers were accused of artificially boosting their penis size in order to be fitted into ski suits with larger, more aerodynamic dimensions in the crotch area.

Grey area

Using any item to “artificially modify the morphology” of a rider to gain an advantage is banned by the UCI, cycling’s governing body. Riders found violating these rules can be disqualified and fined. Yet, at present, they are “virtually unenforced”, said WielerFlits.

For male riders, the policing of chest fairing “is relatively easy”, said Cycling News, but it becomes “complicated for women, who all have different sized breasts and use all different kinds of sports bras during races”.

On Monday, the UCI took the unusual step of issuing a warning that the Tour de France Femmes race jury overseeing final checks for yesterday’s stage 4 time trial will play “particular attention” to clothing and accessories which “could modify riders’ morphology”.

But “confusion remains as to what exactly” the jury was tasked with looking for, said Cycling Weekly. I don’t see how they are going to police this in future, de Kort told The Athletic, describing sports bras as a “grey area”. How can you define how much padding “a woman needs”?

After a World Cup dominated by hydration “ad” breaks, political interference and match-rigging conspiracies, football’s biggest prize really is, “it seems, for sale”, said Alyson Rudd in The Times.

Under plans drawn up by Fifa President Gianni Infantino, football’s world governing body would retain majority control of the tournaments it runs, including the men’s and women’s World Cup and Club World Cup, under a new company, the Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE).

But a minority stake would be offered to each of Fifa’s 211 member associations and, controversially, to private investors. Infantino would be installed as “commissioner” when his term as Fifa president ends in 2031, a role that “could potentially earn him tens of millions of pounds”, sources have told The Times, which broke the story.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” European football’s governing body Uefa said in a statement. “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.”

What did the commentators say?

For once, public outrage at the proposals is entirely justified and understandable “because it ties together so many of the extremes that have been pushing, pulling and twisting football, let alone the world, for so long”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent.

To muddy the waters further, the Financial Times has reported that Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is being lined up to lead the $20 billion commercial part of the deal through his Thrive Eternal investment fund.

Infantino “understands political and commercial power”, said the FT. And “in the latest battle for football’s soul and spoils”, the 56-year-old Swiss “has a key ally in Trump and, many suspect, the support of Fifa members around the world”.

Purists may decry the commercialisation of the beautiful game, but this has been happening for decades. Football’s “owners and exploiters have long seen the matches themselves as mere 90-minute sections of legacy content”, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. These “would be far better relegated to the second, third or even fourth tier behind such always-on output as branded content, shareable clips, behind-the-scenes footage, lifestyle and commerce”.

Others will say that what Fifa is proposing is “no different to the commercial entities that the likes of the French and Spanish leagues have created and sold stakes in to private-equity funds”, said Matt Slater on The Athletic. The German and Italian leagues have debated “the same move for several years” too, and the strategy has been tried in other sports such as Formula 1 and golf’s PGA Tour.

What next?

Fifa insists the plans are still in the consultation phase, but “if this escapade succeeds, the trickle-down effect would be unpalatable”, said Rudd in The Times. It would, for example, “reinvigorate those who wanted a breakaway European Super League so feared by the fans and then so valiantly protested against”.

Selling off a slice of the World Cup “should be the cue for outright rebellion”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. Given European teams made up six of the eight men’s World Cup quarter-finalists this year and three of the four semi-finalists, Uefa “should have the courage of its convictions and issue a warning to secede”.

That “will almost certainly never happen”, though. “These scandals follow a time-honoured pattern: politicians fulminate, a few federations speak out, and then Infantino ploughs ahead regardless.”

Superstar is a word that is overused these days, said Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail; but if ever a man was worthy of it, it was Kevin Keegan. Back in the 1970s, the footballer – who died this week aged 75 – was a “riot of colour” in a grey world; and for a few years, said The Times, England’s hopes of becoming a great footballing nation again seemed to rest entirely on his “poodle perm”.

As England captain, his success in elevating the team above mediocrity was only fleeting, but his impact crossed cultural boundaries. Not only was he charismatic and open-hearted, he was one of the first players to fully market his brand, deploying “his ready smile and dimpled chin with charm and professionalism”. He was ubiquitous on cereal boxes; he was a face of Brut on TV, splashing it “all over”; he even released a handful of singles.

Fighting spirit

Keegan wasn’t the first “celebrity footballer”, said Jim White in The Daily Telegraph: George Best had been that a decade earlier. But “King Kev” or “Special K”, as he was known, was not like Best. A clean-cut family man, he had neither Best’s destructive streak nor his natural brilliance. Having grown up “football-mad” in South Yorkshire, the son of a miner, Keegan had trained tirelessly to become a great, and disprove the selectors who’d told him that, with his slight and small frame (he was five foot seven), he’d do better as a jockey.

His energy, tenacity and fighting spirit, which won him the nickname “Mighty Mouse” – and led him into a notorious on-pitch brawl in 1974 – became evident to the wider public in 1976, on the multi-sport TV show “Superstars”. In the cycle event, Keegan fell off his bike and landed very painfully. He was bloodied and bruised, yet he insisted on taking part in the re-run, which he then won. The public adored him for it.

King Kev

On the pitch, he had first achieved stardom at Liverpool in the early 1970s, said The Guardian. He moved to Hamburg in 1977 – where he twice won the Ballon d’Or – and ended his playing career at Newcastle, from 1982, where he achieved the status of a demigod by helping to return the Magpies to the First Division. When he retired – flying off the pitch in a helicopter after a testimonial – fans wept.

Eight years later, he was back as manager. The club was facing relegation to the third tier; under his helm, it was promoted and became one of the most thrilling in the Premier League. And though his final stint at Newcastle was less successful, the fans still loved him. In January, after he revealed that he had terminal cancer, they unfurled a huge banner at St James’ Park reading: “Long Live King Kev – The Messiah”.

For much of its duration, the 23rd edition of the men’s World Cup was “dominated by the exploits of star players”, said Oliver Kay on The Athletic. Yet for all that Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham excelled, none could carry his side to glory. Instead, the tournament was deservedly won by the team with the strongest “collective” identity: Spain.

United front

Spain don’t lack for outstanding players, of course – whether their captain Rodri, winner of the Fifa Golden Ball award, or their 19-year-old winger Lamine Yamal – but they are about as far from being a collection of individuals as it’s possible for a football team to be. “That word ‘team’ overrides everything else.”

This was starkly illustrated by Sunday’s final, which ended with Spain beating Argentina 1-0 courtesy of Ferran Torres’s extra-time goal. While Argentina, a side over-reliant on the “genius” of Messi, displayed a “paucity of attacking ambition”, Spain were their usual calm, intelligent, methodical selves. And in footballing terms, it was no contest: Spain dominated possession, and created many chances, while Argentina didn’t manage a single shot in normal time – the first time this has ever happened in a World Cup final.

‘Question everything

Spanish football is underpinned by the philosophy of el entendimiento del juego, which translates as “understanding of the game”, said Tom Allnutt in The Sunday Times. It’s an approach that prizes “decision-making on the field” as much as technical skill. To get them to learn to “think for themselves”, coaches encourage players to “question everything”. They favour drills which require players to “make multiple decisions at speed” – the classic example being the rondo, or “Spain’s piggy in the middle”.

The system particularly excels at producing “ball-playing midfielders” – the likes of Xavi and Iniesta in a previous generation, Rodri and Fabián Ruiz in the current one. Known as pivotes (“pivots”) or volantes (“steering wheels”), such players are often physically slight, but rely on body shape – and quick wits – to keep hold of the ball. As one Premier League scout who works in Spain has observed: “In Spain, players happily give the ball to a marked player... English players are much less comfortable” doing so.

If England ever want to win the World Cup again, then they must strive to do things the Spanish way, said Jason Burt in The Daily Telegraph. “Get the ball, keep the ball, love the ball, move the ball.” That is what the best teams – especially teams in international football – do. “It is not complicated, but it requires a re-education.” Thomas Tuchel – for all his talk of remodelling England – didn’t ultimately deviate from the old flawed system. It’s something he “got wrong and should admit”.

‘Big money is distorting college sports in too many ways to count’

The Dallas Morning News editorial board

College sports has been “known for its regional affiliation,” but “after the latest major conference realignment,” this has “become a distant memory,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. It has become “difficult for those competing to be both athletes and active students” because “conferences are no longer composed of teams in neighboring states but instead made up of schools that span the country.” Students “find themselves spending more time on the road or in the airport than they spend in class.”

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‘Just say “no” to nepo senators’

Nia-Malika Henderson at Bloomberg

Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) “chose not to use her legal last name,” Nordone, “when she was sworn in as her brother’s replacement last week,” an “obvious clue that she was thinking as a candidate, not just a caretaker,” says Nia-Malika Henderson. Graham “wants the seat because her brother had the seat.” If she “wins it, it will be because of rank nepotism,” as she has “no real experience in politics, other than appearing in ads for her brother’s various campaigns.”

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‘Smoke-filled summers cannot become the norm’

Jill Burcum at The Minnesota Star Tribune

Canadian wildfire smoke is “blanketing Minnesota again and again, turning blue skies to apocalyptic yellow, with ash coating cars and windowsills,” says Jill Burcum. The “gloomy haze has made it challenging to enjoy our world-class natural resources during the season when they’re easiest to appreciate.” Canada has “already stepped up to help in a big way.” Combining U.S. and Canadian “resources, technology and expertise is our best shot at preventing and getting ahead of fires before they become a crisis.”

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‘Chaff can fool Russia’s radar’

Robert Brull at The Wall Street Journal

Ukraine “won’t always have the element of surprise,” and as “long-range drones become increasingly crucial to modern warfare, militaries must develop new ways to protect them,“ says Robert Brull. As “long-range drones get larger and carry heavier payloads, chaff is becoming more attractive as a low-cost way to confuse radar defense systems.” Ukraine’s “powerful long-range drones will meet increasingly sophisticated networks of air defenses.” To “prepare, the offense needs to invest in a new defense: improving chaff.”

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The end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks a major inflection point for soccer in the United States. While the U.S.’ co-hosting duties, along with round-the-clock media coverage of the American team, helped soccer’s status explode over the last month, the sport has never maintained long-term popularity in the country on the same level as, say, the NFL. Some believe that may all be changing.

What did the commentators say?

The arrival of the tournament always brings up the “quadrennial question: Can this be the World Cup that finally converts U.S. sports fans to soccer fanatics?” said Forbes. In 2026, the “answer might be yes, or at least closer than ever.” Many Americans have shied away from soccer because what they “find electrifying is the possibility and manifestation of drastic change” and large comebacks, like those often seen in football and baseball. Soccer’s “low-scoring structure makes such reversals rare.”

But many are hopeful that the 2026 World Cup marked the beginning of a turnaround. The “macro picture,” former U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati told The Athletic, has “always been about: What does it look like the day after” the tournament ends? A similar enthusiasm happened when the U.S. hosted the 1994 World Cup, but a “key difference between 1994 and now wasn’t just that American players then couldn’t fathom playing professional soccer, but that there was no real route to do so — at least domestically.”

Three decades later, though, the United States has created “not just the soccer-specific stadiums and training grounds but also the academies and pathways that led to a generation of players,” said The Athletic. Despite the U.S.’ loss to Belgium, the “next Christian Pulisic or Leo Messi somewhere along the way might have attended a game and perhaps is going to be sitting in the stands in the World Cup final and will see the greatest players in the world, and say, ‘Wow, I want that to be me,’” Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer (MLS), told The Athletic.

Others believe that MLS, the nation’s top professional soccer league, helped ingrain soccer into the United States even before this year’s World Cup. MLS is an “established, stable American sports league” whose “franchises keep increasing in value,” said The Tennessean. There is also the U.S. Women’s National Team, a dominant force that has “won four World Cups since 1991.” And while there has been “public discourse on a flawed youth soccer system in this country,” soccer enthusiasts are hopeful it will “lead to necessary improvements at the ground level” and that “American soccer will grow from this.”

What next?

There is also some data supporting the idea that soccer’s popularity may be here to stay. More than half of Americans, 57%, think the World Cup will “increase America’s general interest in soccer,” according to an Ipsos survey of 1,027 adults. Many of those polled also said their overall excitement about the game had grown, with enthusiasm about the World Cup rising from 25% in May to 38% in July.

The excitement about soccer is particularly strong among Gen Zers, as the sport is “already disproportionately popular among this demographic,” said YouGov. Gen Z adults “make up nearly a fifth of all soccer followers compared to just a tenth of the overall U.S. population (18% vs 10%).” Much of the data shows that the World Cup was a primer to “make America a soccer nation,” said Forbes.

What happened

Spain beat defending champions Argentina 1-0 on Sunday to win its second World Cup title, with Ferran Torres scoring the decisive goal in the 106th minute. Spanish captain Rodri was crowned the Golden Ball winner as best player, while goalkeeper Unai Simón won the Golden Glove after conceding just one goal during Spain’s eight games. The Golden Boot went to France’s Kylian Mbappé, whose 10 goals in the tournament edged out the eight scored by Argentinian star Lionel Messi.

Who said what

Spain was so good, not even an “absolute icon” like Messi “had any answers” amid its “airtight defense,” The Associated Press said. Messi “has put in some of the great World Cup performances,” The Athletic said, but his final international match “was not even within a million miles of being one of them,” and “Argentina had nothing else.” Only a “near-perfect game” by Argentina goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez “kept this from being a laugher,” Nancy Armour said at USA Today.

What next?

President Donald Trump, who was “loudly booed as he entered the field after the match” to hand out medals, is “already seeking an opportunity to host” the next World Cup, The Washington Post said. But the 2030 men’s tournament “will be primarily co-hosted by Morocco, Portugal and Spain, and Saudi Arabia is widely expected to host the 2034 competition.” Next year’s Women’s World Cup is in Brazil.

This should be a golden age for the WNBA. The Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark helped push the league to new heights of popularity, and players are making more money than ever. But controversies are plaguing the league, Clark has become an unwilling symbol of racial polarization and GOP members of Congress are entering the fray.

‘Losing control of its story’

The House’s Republican Study Committee this month asked the WNBA to “investigate the on-court treatment” of Clark, said The Hill. The popular player has been “hip-checked, poked in the eye and struck in the throat” by other players in game action that has gone “far beyond routine physical play,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) said in a letter to league officials following a controversial flagrant foul on Clark by the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas.

It was the latest in a series of conservative complaints that “many WNBA players, particularly Black players,” are hostile to Clark, Bobby Burack said at Fox News. Clark has resisted being cast as an avatar in the culture wars. “People should not be using my name to push those agendas,” she said to reporters in 2024, per ESPN.

The WNBA is “losing control of its own story” to “right-wing grifters” who have taken hold of the narrative surrounding its most popular player, said Seerat Sohi at The Ringer. The league has become “fertile ground for these types of shenanigans” because it surged into popularity at the same moment the country became “embroiled in a cultural, political and legal fight over the role of women in society.” The players are “primarily Black, openly queer, politically outspoken” which makes them the “antithesis” of the “modern conservative project.” The people using the league to advance that agenda “understand the league’s power as a symbolic vehicle” better than the WNBA’s own leaders do.

‘Political football’

“This isn’t fun,” said Candace Buckner at The Athletic. Clark’s ascendance was supposed to be “magic” for sports fans “watching, celebrating and obsessing over women’s sports.” Clark instead is having the “least fun of all,” plagued by injuries and at the center of “rage bait” controversies like the Thomas foul. The “justifiable anger” over the incident sparked “racial attacks” and death threats against Thomas, set off a new round of controversy over WNBA officiating and even prompted commentary from President Donald Trump. It’s all a lot for basketball fans who “just want a little fun.”

It is “incredibly unfair” that Clark has become a “bit of a political football,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday at the Game Plan Summit, per ESPN. (The NBA founded and still owns a large stake in its sister league.) Clark is a “young woman who's trying to improve her game." The upside is that Clark has helped “significantly increase” the league’s popularity, said the outlet. The downside is that “race, officiating and politics” are dominating the conversation.

‘America’s trillion-dollar failure’

Ro Khanna at Foreign Affairs

The media’s Department of Defense coverage has “focused on military parades, high-profile firings and lectures about haircuts,” says Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). A “less-acknowledged but just as worrisome development has been progressively undermining the U.S. military: Defense acquisition remains stubbornly slow and wildly over budget.” The Pentagon “needs to be as nimble as it is strong or it risks losing its ability to respond to global hot spots and to deter great-power conflict.”

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‘When did sports get so loud?’

Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic

Baseball is “wall-to-wall stimulation,” and “in this way, baseball is explicitly following other sports, which were earlier to invest in state-of-the-art multifactor sound systems, huge screens and sophisticated lighting schemas,” says Ellen Cushing. Many organizations are “focusing not on season-ticket-holding diehards but on more casual fans who want a big night out, are willing to pay for it and may need to be guided through a game with aural or visual cues about how to feel at any given moment.”

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‘I see my father in the fathers killed by ICE’

Ingrid Rojas Contreras at Time

“As a Latina, it is impossible for me not to see my father when I think of” the men killed by ICE, says Ingrid Rojas Contreras. “In them, I see men who wanted nothing but a better life for their children.” Families “like mine can’t help but feel their families’ pain.” To “grieve is to take stock of what we have lost, can lose and to spend time deconstructing the harmful narratives that cause our grief.”

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‘How the networks handled President Trump’s speech about election integrity’

Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute

In the “days leading up to Thursday night’s address, there were questions about just how factual Trump’s address would be,” and “because of all the discourse beforehand, there were questions about whether or not TV networks would air Trump’s address,” says Tom Jones. It was “another night of networks trying to figure out how to cover a president who often makes claims that simply are not true or, at the very least, are misleading.”

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Video assistant referee (VAR) technology was introduced to correct clear and obvious refereeing errors, but has since “morphed into something far greater”, said Kevin Baxter in the Los Angeles Times.

At the 2026 Fifa World Cup there have been more than 100 VAR interventions in matches up to the round of 16. Most of these reviews were technically correct, but many of the infractions have been “so imperceptible yet so consequential” as to raise questions over whether “allowing a game to be decided by electronic evidence of a touch detectable only through Nasa-level technology” is “violating the spirit of the game”.

‘Replay doohickey’

The tournament’s “most consequential actor” has not been a star player such as Lionel Messi or even Donald Trump, but the post of VAR, said Roey Hadar on MS Now.

The sad thing is that technology in football is a “great idea on paper”, but “the perfect has become the enemy of the good” and its use at this World Cup has “felt arbitrary, at best a minimal improvement over human judgement”.

Take Croatia’s last-gasp equaliser against Portugal, disallowed due to a contentious offside ruling based on data collected by a microchip in the ball which detected a slight touch by a Croatia player in the build-up to the goal. Or Egypt’s goal against Argentina, disallowed on VAR review for a perceived foul earlier in the play, leading goalscorer Mostafa Ziko to declare the match had been “rigged”.

This “baffling, deeply unpopular replay doohickey” was the equivalent of “getting stopped by a Swat team in Rhode Island and being told you were being ticketed for jaywalking in Oregon. In 1974”, said Jason Gay in The Wall Street Journal. VAR “doesn’t feel like a backstop”. It has become a “joy denial device” designed by “evil robots to rob wonder and suck the soul out of a beautiful game based on constant flow”.

Technology has “undoubtedly corrected mistakes that once shaped tournaments” but it “has not removed controversy” from football, said Clemente Lisi in Forbes. Rather, “it has shifted the conversation from whether referees saw an incident to whether technology was applied correctly and consistently”.

‘Line in the sand’

“In football’s history, it has sometimes required major incidents at big international tournaments to accelerate change,” said Adam Crafton for The Athletic. The back pass rule was introduced in 1992 to prevent goalkeepers from picking up the ball after a pass from a team-mate, and slowing down play by keeping hold of the ball, which reduced goals at the Italy World Cup in 1990.

Goal-line technology came in after Frank Lampard’s 2010 last-16 round goal against Germany was not given, despite the ball clearly having crossed the line. Now Fifa must draw a “similar line in the sand, ending once and for all the unfair and disfiguring use of slow-motion and freeze-frames”.

To improve the game, I would introduce a rule that VAR reviews must “conclude in a set short amount of time”, said Hadar on MS Now. For example, a 30-second limit from the first stoppage of play for an initial VAR verdict, then another 30 seconds for the referee to make the final call. “If the error is visible in that time, it meets the criteria of ‘clear and obvious’. If not, then it’s too inconclusive to change. Just keep the game moving.”

Christina Unkel, a former Fifa referee, said a majority of officials would prefer referees to have discretion to ignore or even overrule VAR if common sense and their understanding of the game suggest they should, just as judges have discretion to use common sense in applying the law.

The majority of decision-making on the pitch is “very subjective,” she told the L.A. Times. “I think everyone’s universally saying there are a lot of different kinds of decisions we do not want part of our game. Toenail offsides, hair follicle arguments.”

When the 2028 Summer Olympics kick off in Los Angeles, a Russian team could be among the competitors for the first time in more than a decade. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has lifted its suspension of Russia’s Olympic organization, which had been in place since 2016. Many are angry at the prospect of Russia rejoining the international competition, especially amid its ongoing war with Ukraine.

What was the IOC’s decision?

The IOC “provisionally lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee that had been in effect” since October 2023, the group said in a statement, because it wanted to “ensure a fair opportunity for participation” by Russian athletes. The suspension is also being lifted because Russia is “no longer trying to claim regional sports organizations on Ukrainian soil” as part of the Russian Olympic Committee, said The Athletic. Russia must also abide by anti-doping measures since the country “systemically organized a doping program to pump up their athletes” during the 2014 Winter Games.

But there is also a “lack of confidence in the global sporting community relating to the return of Russian athletes to international competition,” the IOC acknowledged. As a result, the “decision in relation to the display of the Russian flag, anthem, colors or any identifications for the Olympic Games at the appropriate time” will be made in the future, said the IOC, as will any decisions on potentially hosting international events in Russia. Russian officials will also still not be invited to Olympic events.

Olympic officials have stated that they no longer want to punish Russian athletes for their country’s decision to invade Ukraine. “We wanted to ensure all athletes have the possibility to compete at the Olympic Games and not be held responsible for their government’s actions,” IOC President Kirsty Coventry said during a press conference. “But we’ve also been very clear that we do not condone any violence and war around the world.”

What does this mean for the 2028 Olympics?

The IOC’s decision represents a “significant step for bringing Russian athletes, who have struggled with their country’s pariah status on the world stage, back into the international fold after several years,” said The New York Times. The choice to potentially reintroduce Russia to the Olympics will be a “highly controversial decision by the IOC and one likely to be condemned by European countries in particular,” said the BBC.

But “many within the IOC were also mindful of the current geopolitical landscape, and accusations of double standards if the sanction against Russia was maintained, while other countries that have launched military action against other nations escape punishment,” said the BBC. Others say that Russia’s ban should only have ended when the country pulls out of Ukraine, and that allowing it in the 2028 Olympics “risks emboldening President Vladimir Putin and handing him a propaganda win.”

So while the IOC’s decision does mean Russia “could compete at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics,” said Politico, Russian participation in the games will not come without backlash, including from Ukraine. The IOC’s choice “sends a deeply concerning signal to the international community,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on X. “We also call on international sports federations to maintain the existing restrictions on representatives of the aggressor state, in line with their commitment to protecting the integrity and values of international sport.”

“The only thing more riling than a referee’s interference in a sports event is a politician’s,” said Sally Jenkins in The Atlantic. The red card issued against US star striker Folarin Balogun for “stepping on an opponent’s ankle” during the World Cup match against Bosnia-Herzegovina, was a “terrible call”. But Fifa’s regulations “couldn’t be clearer”: a red card means “automatic suspension for the next game”.

Instead, the tournament organisers “magically lifted” the 25-year-old’s suspension in time for the host team’s last-16 clash against Belgium on Monday, after a phone call by Donald Trump to “his good friend Gianni Infantino, the president of Fifa”.

The US president later thanked Fifa for “doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice”. The world governing body has given “such a feeble procedural explanation” for the reversal that the “entire sporting globe” is “incensed over the garbage-y scent of an inside job”.

A ‘balanced measure’

“Reviewing the legal consequences of red cards in football is nothing new in the modern game,” Mohammad al-Kamali, chair of Fifa’s disciplinary committee, said in a statement. The red card was “not overturned”; its effects were suspended “based on an explicit provision of the applicable regulations” in what he called a “balanced measure”.

Fifa’s disciplinary code allows the judicial body to decide to “fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure”, opting instead for a probation, said The Independent’s senior sports writer Kieran Jackson. Balogun has essentially received a “suspended sentence”, active for one year.

There is a “high-profile precedent”: Cristiano Ronaldo was banned for three games after his red card against the Republic of Ireland in November’s qualifiers. The Portugal captain had the latter two bans “suspended” too. But Fifa was “widely condemned for that decision”, too, which came a week after Ronaldo, who plays in the Saudi Pro League, visited the White House with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Still, no one can claim Trump “fails to advocate for American interests with a doggedness that borders on obsession”, said Nicole Russell in USA Today. I’m not surprised he made the call, nor should anyone be – this is just “Trump being Trump”: a World Cup red card was “never going to be the exception”. But Infantino “could have said no”.

‘Crossed a red line’

Critics say this latest episode is “symptomatic of deeper problems at Infantino’s Fifa”, said the Financial Times’ sports editor Josh Noble. They argue its decision-making is “increasingly designed to further political and commercial goals”.

European governing body Uefa said the decision to suspend Balogun’s ban “crossed a red line”. Sorry, but “we crossed that line a few moral galaxies ago”, said The Guardian’s Marina Hyde. Maybe when Infantino was “butching it out in the photocall at Trump’s Gaza Peace Summit For Ghoulishly Rapacious Businessmen”, certainly when he “inaugurated the auto-satirical Fifa peace prize and awarded it to Trump” just a few months before the war on Iran.

Even former Fifa president Sepp Blatter (who somehow managed to be cleared of corruption charges on appeal last year) is thundering that “red cards are not overturned by political phone calls”. Blatter suggesting Infantino is corrupt? “If irony could kill, we could be looking at a bloodbath”.

The US’s exit from the tournament “allows this rotten case to be quickly brushed under the rug”, said The i Paper’s chief football writer Daniel Storey. But it has “slipped a viper into the tent of football’s governance and started a civil war between Fifa and Uefa”, and all for the host nation to lose 4-1 to a “barely functional Belgium team”. During this tournament, the US national team had gained fresh admiration from supporters and new levels of interest from a “football-sceptic population”, but now that “reputation has been torched”.

What happened

FIFA Sunday lifted U.S. striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game suspension from a red card he drew during last week’s 2-0 World Cup win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The unusual decision means that Balogun, the top U.S. scorer in this tournament, can play in today’s knockout round-of-16 match against Belgium. Shortly after FIFA announced its decision, news organizations reported that President Donald Trump had called FIFA President Gianni Infantino following the match and asked him to review Balogun’s suspension. “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump said on social media Sunday.

Who said what

Balogun’s red card was one of the World Cup’s “most controversial and consequential decisions,” The Associated Press said. But FIFA’s “extraordinary” decision to reverse it was the “first time since 1962 that a red card during a World Cup did not result in a suspension.” It is “highly unusual for a head of state to intervene in a soccer disciplinary matter with FIFA’s top official,” The Washington Post said. FIFA “insists that the decision was an independent one made by its 18-person disciplinary committee,” Politico said, though it didn’t say if there was a vote.

What next?

Belgium’s soccer federation said it was “astonished” by FIFA’s apparent violation of its own rules and was “investigating all potential options” to “protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport.”

After scoring tickets to see your favorite team, you are going to need to book somewhere to stay if you don’t live nearby. The cold, hard facts: The best accommodations are always within walking distance.

You can enjoy the game, stay for every inning or quarter and not worry about leaving early to beat the lot-exiting traffic. These seven hotels are close to — and in one case, in — some of North America’s biggest sports venues. They’re not just convenient, though. They are straight-up great stays.

The Anthem Hotel, Inglewood, California

The thrill of the game continues at The Anthem Hotel. This vibrant hotel is in the “lively” Stadium District, next to Intuit Dome and down the street from SoFi Stadium and Kia Forum, said The Points Guy.

All of the comfortable rooms were recently renovated and are decked with blackout curtains. There are also, for an immersive experience, themed suites that celebrate L.A. basketball and soccer. Cool off in the “massive” pool, and enjoy cocktails at the colorful Soundwave Pool Bar or rooftop Tom’s Watch Bar. (rates from $130)

Caravan Court, Arlington, Texas

A historic motor court, aka a vintage roadside motel, has been revamped for the modern age. Caravan Court’s well-appointed rooms come with stocked Smeg refrigerators, Nespresso coffee makers, smart TVs and wireless charging pads.

AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field are short walks away, so before and after the games you can swim in the hotel pool, relax in a private cabana and hang in the Idle Hour Social Club or Elora Sky Club rooftop lounge. (rates from $152)

Carté Hotel, San Diego

Petco Park is a fast walk — or even quicker trolley ride — from Carté Hotel. The sleek property features several odes to San Diego landmarks, starting with the heated saltwater pool inspired by the Balboa Park Lily Pond and gazebo honoring the Botanical Building.

Head to The Rooftop for craft cocktails and live music with a side of fantastic city views. The bar’s game day menu features all the bites you want to eat while watching sports. You know the ones: buffalo wings, cheeseburgers, beer-battered fries and other edible kin. (rates from $232)

Fidelity Hotel, Cincinnati 

The spectacular 1913 Beaux Arts Gwynne Building has been transformed into Fidelity Hotel Cincinnati, the city’s newest lodging. The sophisticated rooms and suites feel like home, with plush couches and beds.

Oversized windows look over downtown, and Great American Ball Park, home of the Cincinnati Reds, is right around the corner. When it’s time to eat, there are two restaurants to choose from: the full-service Gwynne and grab-and-go Cora’s All Day Café. (rates from $143)

Hotel Commonwealth, Boston

The Hotel Commonwealth’s Fenway Park Suite is a mere 507 feet from the legendary stadium, bringing guests as close to the action as possible. Fans will appreciate the one-of-a-kind decor and furnishings, including original seats from the ballpark, an authentic scoreboard and a coffee table signed by Red Sox players. From the balcony, there’s a direct view into Fenway, which is a five-minute stroll away. Hotel Commonwealth occupies an entire block in Kenmore Square and is known for having “comfy” mattresses and “warm” service, said Condé Nast Traveler. (rates from $362)

The Rally Hotel, Denver

Guests at The Rally Hotel love its “rare mix” of “sports excitement and luxury amenities,” said Rolling Stone. Adjacent to Coors Field, the property offers “quick access” to Colorado Rockies games and McGregor Square’s restaurants and stores.

Rooms are “stylish” and “upscale,” featuring curated art and one-of-a-kind furnishings, and the rooftop pool boasts impressive city views. At check-in, guests are greeted with a glass of Coors Banquet or seasonal wine, and additional amenities include ice cream during the hotel’s social hour and access to s’more kits and roasting tools. (rates from $253)

Toronto Marriott City Centre Hotel, Toronto

You can’t beat the sights from Toronto Marriott City Centre Hotel. It’s inside Rogers Centre, home of the Toronto Blue Jays, and several accommodations peer directly into the field.

From inside The Rawlings Room, guests can watch the action unfolding a few feet away. That could include batting practice and warm ups, or the big game itself. The hotel’s Sportsnet Grill also offers a great vantage point of the stadium, with floor-to-ceiling windows and plenty of big-screen televisions broadcasting every inning. (rates from $265)

When the San Francisco Giants recently held Pride Night, said Hannah Keyser in CNN.com, three of the team’s pitchers decided to make a “culture war” statement. JT Brubaker, Landen Roupp, and Ryan Walker scribbled the numbers of Bible verses next to the rainbow-colored logo on their themed caps to protest the celebration of the Bay Area’s large LGBTQ+ community. The three Christian pitchers could have simply opted not to wear the rainbow cap, as a fourth Giants pitcher chose to do, but instead they decided to express their religious beliefs about homosexuality. Major League Baseball issued a mild warning that the players had violated a rule against personally modifying on-field attire without prior approval, saying its reminder “had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message.” Still, MLB’s response sparked outrage on the Right. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) accused the league of religious discrimination, and the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation. “Trump won,” chimed in Vice President JD Vance. “We don’t have to do this anymore.”

Tell that to the hypocritical left, said Becket Adams in National Review. Sportswriters and progressives promptly portrayed the pitchers as “villains.” But it wasn’t long ago that another San Francisco athlete, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, refused to stand for the national anthem to protest police brutality against Black men. His demonstration was far more “conspicuous” than what the three Giants did. For expressing his views, Kaepernick was celebrated as a “civil rights hero.” Actually, said Scott Ostler in The San Francisco Standard, Kaepernick paid dearly for kneeling during the anthem. He was vilified by conservatives and “blackballed from the NFL at age 29,” ending his career. That was wrong, just as it would be wrong to punish these baseball players for “their peaceful protest.”

As a gay sportswriter, I don’t object to professional athletes showcasing their homophobia, said Jason Page in MS.now. It serves as a necessary reminder that “the fight for acceptance isn’t over.” Just look at what’s happening around the U.S., said Drew Atkins in USA Today. Polls shows that support for LGBTQ+ rights is regressing “after nearly two decades of growth.” So far this year, “nearly 800 anti-trans bills have been filed across 43 states.” A 2025 report “revealed that 1 in 10 LGBTQ youth attempted suicide.” In Donald Trump’s America, it is “a frightening time to be openly queer.”

Wimbledon fortnight is underway with a record prize pot of £64.2 million, but this has done little to assuage the sport’s “increasingly mutinous” players, said The Observer.

Tennis is “having a moment”. It's jettisoned its “gentlemanly image” to become a “global cultural phenomenon”, but this also means its stars want a “bigger slice of the pie”.

What are the protests about?

The players want a larger ratio of revenue to acknowledge their contribution towards the financial successes of the tournaments, with “more money trickling down the draws”, said the BBC.

Specifically, they are calling for the prize pots of the four Grand Slam tournaments to be increased to 16% of each one's revenues, rising to 22% by 2030. Wimbledon’s new prize money is equal to 14.4% of its revenues,

They’re also concerned about welfare issues, including how much the Grand Slams contribute to pension, healthcare and maternity pots, and they want better consultation on questions such as scheduling, late-night finishes and prolonged tournaments.

Several star names had planned to limit their contractual media commitments to a “symbolic” 15 minutes per match day during the first week of the tournament, said The Independent. The 15 minutes referred to the prize money and the fact they were getting less than 15% of the overall tournament revenue.

But leading players will return to normal media duties following what they describe as “constructive meetings” with the All England Club. Though they have warned that the “underlying matters remain unresolved”.

Why is it so controversial?

Wimbledon announced a 20% increase in prize money, taking the “total sum of the pot” to £64.2 million only a couple of weeks ago, said the BBC. The All England Club has said it was “surprised and disappointed” by the threat of players’ action, and the broadcaster's pundit Andrew Castle said the players were being “tone deaf”.

Some of the game’s biggest names, including last year's Wimbledon winner Jannik Sinner, have threatened boycotts. Others include Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka, the women's world number-one, but with career winnings of $65m and $49m respectively, plus “lucrative” sponsorship deals, they would be “just fine if the money remained the same”, said The Observer.

But it can be a “slog” for lower-ranked players, whose winnings must fund their coaches and travel in a sport that “spans continents”, leaving them “barely breaking even”. “We don’t do it for ourselves,” said Sabalenka, “we do it for the rest of the players who are suffering to even hire a coach.”

What next?

The players welcomed Wimbledon’s “commitment to return with specific proposals” addressing their concerns, while promising to “carefully evaluate the proposals once received”. In return, the players said they will provide Wimbledon with further information it has requested.

Wimbledon argues that the players’ representatives underestimate the costs of running tournaments and staging important warm-up events.

The dollar has long been the world’s primary currency, giving the U.S. unusual sway over international affairs. But China’s yuan is emerging as a small-but-growing competitor, with consequences for American power and influence.

What did the commentators say?

China is building an “alternative financial system” designed to weaken the United States’ “power to dictate world affairs,” said The Wall Street Journal. The dollar is still used in 80% of international trade, and that dominance has given U.S. governments a “big advantage in policing global business.” But transactions conducted using Chinese currency allow some businesses and rival countries to evade the U.S. banking system. That is how Iran earned up to $43 billion in oil revenue in 2024 despite restrictive American sanctions. And such examples are growing in number: The yuan’s share of global finance has “tripled over the past five years,” still well behind the dollar but ahead of the euro.

The yuan is emerging as a “more important part of the global financial system,” Robin Harding said at the Financial Times. But it does not yet threaten the dollar’s dominance, in part because “China’s economic model depends on its own relentless accumulation of dollar assets.” Beijing “wants to buy oil in its own currency,” but it also wants to maintain its “massive trade surpluses” with the rest of the world, and those transactions are conducted in dollars. There is “little sign of the dollar losing control of the global financial system.”

Beijing “cannot decree demand” for the yuan, Agathe Demarais said at Foreign Policy. While China has “made genuine progress in building alternative financial channels” to U.S.-dominated systems, it “cannot translate its rising global trade footprint into greater use of its currency.” That is because China puts strict controls on the use of the yuan outside the country, making it “costly and impractical” for foreign firms to use. Absent a “massive shock,” it is unlikely the world will “embrace Chinese financial channels.”

Beijing “doesn’t need to displace the dollar” to weaken U.S. dominance over global finance, said The New York Times. But having an alternative “could expand China’s influence in a financial crisis.” And some countries will welcome that alternative. “There is a desperate desire in the world to escape the clutches” of the America-dominated system, Cornell University’s Eswar Prasad said to the outlet.

What next?

The dollar is still the “dominant currency” for loans to “developing economies,” said Reuters, but there are signs of change. Kenya last year agreed to convert its debt to China (for loans to construct a railway) from dollars into yuan to “cut borrowing costs.” Now countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Zambia that have taken loans from China Eximbank are considering similar restructuring, and the bank is “encouraging — and in some cases requiring” national borrowers to “borrow in yuan rather than dollars.”

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has often seemed less welcoming to outsiders than it used to. But the World Cup is showcasing the country’s grassroots hospitality and prosperity to visitors from abroad.

What did the commentators say?

Many international soccer fans were worried about “visa access, high costs, gun violence” and other issues ahead of this year’s World Cup, said Reuters. Visiting teams and their fans have instead “flooded” social media with posts revealing a “warm welcome from Americans” as well as a “distinctive culture” awash in “free soda refills” and “chicken wings dipped in ranch dressing.”

Host cities across the United States have witnessed an “unlikely romance between everyday Americans and squads from around the world,” said The New York Times. While polls show the U.S. global reputation “has dipped in recent years,” the visitors are discovering American communities have “all kinds of estimable traits.”

“Welcome to the World Cup of U.S. hospitality,” Jack Butler said at The Wall Street Journal. There is a “long tradition” of foreign visitors being “deeply affected” by their visits to the United States. Now international soccer fans are “showing America’s greatness in real time.” They are “also amazed by America’s material abundance.” Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops have been featured in viral videos and so has Chicago deep-dish pizza. America’s vastness “contains multitudes.”

U.S. residents are welcoming the world “even when their government has failed to do so,” Juliette Kayyem said at Early Warning. Events like the World Cup “represent a kind of soft power that America has been increasingly unwilling to exert” and had seemingly been lost. The world’s “dismal view of America” has been reflected in declining tourism numbers, and the damage “may not be repaired in a single summer.” There are signs of hope, however. “Americans are proving better diplomats than their administration.”

The Trump administration has been hard at work “besmirching America’s cultural attractiveness,” Daniel Drezner said at Drezner’s World. The World Cup is offering a different vision. It is the American people, not their government, who are “reminding the rest of the world that this country still has a lot of attractive values.” That may not matter to world politics in the short term, but it offers a “hopeful reminder that in just a few years America can be great again.”

What next?

The Department of Homeland Security is “easing its restrictions” on the Iranian national team, said The Associated Press. The team has been staying in Mexico and playing its matches in the U.S., with American authorities mandating the team return quickly to its home base after play is complete. Iran will now be allowed into the U.S. two days before its next match.

The team had “complained about the travel restrictions” for much of the tournament. “We are here for football, not politics,” Iran coach Amir Ghalenoei said to reporters, per the AP.

‘If America wants soccer’s passion, it should start with soccer’s past’

Nedra Rhone at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“In the U.S., new soccer fans of the 21st century fit into two categories: immigrants and their direct descendants and the highly educated,” says Nedra Rhone. In “Europe, South America and Africa, soccer has historically been the primary national sport with influence on politics, social mobility, national identity and international reputation.” While Americans “will never have the deep history with soccer that fans from other countries have, we can learn from and respect the sport’s influence on human and civil rights.”

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‘Keep cameras out of the Supreme Court’

Ben Sasse at The Wall Street Journal

The Senate Judiciary Committee “unanimously advanced legislation last week that would require TV cameras in Supreme Court proceedings,” but “they shouldn’t turn the Supreme Court into a sister circus,” says former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Cameras “turn conversations into performances.” It is “key to why Congress doesn’t work — and can’t be allowed to poison the judicial branch.” The Supreme Court “wasn’t designed to reflect the will of a majority or embrace the popular opinions of the day.”

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‘Old people run America. And that’s a problem.’

Samuel Moyn at The Boston Globe

Americans “live under gerontocracy — a form of government of, by and for the old people,” says Samuel Moyn. This era “has the most elderly presidents ever elected,” while “Congress and the judiciary are also old folks’ homes.” But the “problem is deeper than aged politicians.” Gerontocracy is “actually a story of elder civic power.” It “doesn’t much matter how old the politicians are if old people still control the system.” Voters “can enact a series of policies to limit that power.”

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‘Why “China First” will fail’

Patricia M. Kim at Foreign Affairs

As the United States “retreats from global leadership and challenges the norms it once fostered and the order it once upheld, the world is waiting to see whether Beijing steps up,” says Patricia M. Kim. But China is “not trying to replace Washington as a global leader or take on the burdens traditionally associated with superpower status.” Beijing “instead seeks global reach without entanglement, partnerships without binding obligations and great-power status without the burdens of leadership.”

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The best golf resorts don’t just offer world-class courses. They’re also a sanctuary where you can relax away from the fairways with a pampering spa treatment, delicious meal or countryside stroll. The hotels on this list promise all that and more, with a wide range of activities to keep the entire family entertained – and stellar service to boot.

Viceroy at Ombria, Portugal

Situated among the rolling Algarve hills, Viceroy at Ombria offers guests some of the “prettiest views” and “top-tier dining options”, said Conor Keenan in Golf Monthly. Located around half an hour’s drive from Faro airport, the property has established itself as a “resort with a golf course, rather than a golf course with a resort”. It is designed to be “accessible” for new players while catering to those who are “more capable longer hitters”. To unwind after a round, guests can relax in the private outdoor heated pool, indoor thermal pool as well as Finnish sauna and salt steam room. The property has “plenty to do for non-golfers” such as hiking, cycling and exploring the “tucked away villages dotted around the valleys”.
viceroyhotelsandresorts.com

JA Mar Hall Golf & Spa Resort, Scotland

This might be the “grandest airport hotel in the world”, said Antonia Quirke in Condé Nast Traveller. The “terribly scenic” resort is a 10-minute drive from Glasgow airport and sits on the southern banks of the River Clyde. Designed in 1828 by Sir Robert Smyrk, the architect who worked on the British Museum, the property houses an 18-hole golf course and spans 250 acres. Few experiences can compare to enjoying “the timeless beauty of the volcanic Old Kilpatrick Hills” while playing the fourth hole. In 2025, the resort underwent an extensive refurb but it has retained its “spirit of Victorian ambition and adventure”. The property has a state-of-the-art spa and guests can enjoy “excellent” food made with “farm-to-plate ingredients” at the Dining Room and indulge in a fancy tipple at the “fantastic” cocktail bar.
jaresortshotels.com

Camiral, A Quinta do Lago Resort, Spain

“Perched among rolling hills” and five minutes from Girona airport, Camiral “exudes excellence and quiet luxury”, Harry Fletcher in The Independent. There are two “blockbuster” golf courses. The Stadium, host of the Spanish Open and the Catalunya Championship in 2022, is a challenging course with “real bite”. The other is the “more playable” Tour course. The resort will also host the 2031 Ryder Cup. After the golf courses, the biggest attraction is the impressive wellness centre and “tastefully designed” rooms with "nods to Spanish art”. As for dining, guests can head to Origin for a “memorable” meal that celebrates “local ingredients". And in the Lounge Bar you will find a “well-stocked” collection of spirits, “including Macallan and Lagavulin whiskies”.
camiral.com

Big Cedar Lodge, Missouri, US

This 4,600-acre property sitting on the edge of Table Rock Lake gives you the chance to play under the “powder blue Missouri Ozarks sky”, said T.J. Olwig in Travel + Leisure. The “newest thrill” in the resort’s "ever-expanding golf playground” is the Cliffhangers: an “unconventional” course that features “cliff-hugging switchbacks and a maze of showy cart path water crossings”. The lakeside cottage feels like staying in a “chic mountain chalet” complete with a large living room, open kitchen and “towering stone fireplace”. If that doesn’t sound relaxing enough, a visit to the Cedar Creek Spa can do the trick; there are four saltwater pools and a “comfortable indoor pool for cooler days”. The lodge boasts 13 restaurants and bars, including the Buzzard Bar, which offers “burgers, live music, and a drink on its lakeside patio”. Guests can also take a lake swim or enjoy the water with the “pedal boats, canoes, and kayaks”.
bigcedar.com

As rabid fans pack stadiums for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, some of the tournament’s most contentious issues are not about what the players say or do but what they wear. Several countries have put themselves in the crosshairs of political debates regarding their team jerseys, and in some cases FIFA has been forced to intervene.

Colombia

Colombia’s iconic yellow soccer kit became “embroiled in the country’s bitterly disputed presidential election, sparking debate over whether the yellow shirt should be used at political rallies,” said The Associated Press. Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing presidential candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump, turned the Colombian jersey “into his campaign’s official attire,” said The New York Times, with thousands of de la Espriella’s supporters donning the athletic wear.

Sen. Iván Cepeda, de la Espriella’s leftist opponent, “slammed his rival’s choice of apparel, accusing him of stealing a national symbol,” said the AP. But despite Cepeda’s anger, the sea of yellow jerseys seemingly propelled de la Espriella over the finish line, as he appeared to narrowly defeat Cepeda in the June 21 election, becoming Colombia’s president-elect.

Egypt

Egypt is playing in the World Cup with a major change to their uniforms, as their jerseys are “not bearing the stars commemorating their seven Africa Cup of Nations victories, following a reminder from FIFA,” said ESPN. The Egyptian national team typically wears jerseys emblazoned with the stars to “recognize each of their continental triumphs,” but such a display is not allowed by FIFA.

FIFA’s being involved in the stars’ removal marks a shift from normal procedure. Typically, the “accompanying of stars to commemorate historical honors on kits is at the discretion of national teams themselves, with different national federations opting to interpret the guidelines in different ways,” said ESPN. But for the World Cup, FIFA told the Egyptian team that stars may only appear on jerseys to “commemorate victories in the competition itself.”

Haiti

Haiti’s 2026 World Cup outing marked the team’s first appearance in the tournament in 52 years. Though the team was eliminated early, the jerseys generated plenty of buzz. The team was forced to alter their jersey design after FIFA “deemed certain elements to be too political in nature,” said The Guardian. FIFA’s issue was with the “shirt’s right hip, which depicted silhouettes inspired by the Battle of Vertières and the Haitian Revolution.” One of these silhouettes represented Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Many supporters were angry that FIFA forced Haiti to adopt the change. FIFA’s decision is part of an “effort to discredit the Haitian Revolution,” and the “mere implication of Dessalines, standing alongside his fellow revolutionaries, was enough to elicit a backlash,” Julia Gaffield, a history professor at William & Mary College, said at The Conversation. Despite FIFA’s decision, the jersey has “become a fan favorite” and is still sold on the manufacturer’s website.

Mexico

Mexico is one of the three co-hosts at this year’s World Cup, but even hosts can spark drama. The nation’s iconic green jersey “brings back the Aztec calendar design that was popular in the 1990s,” said The Associated Press, but the manner in which the jerseys were made sparked an uproar among some indigenous Mexican artists.

The jerseys were “embroidered by hand by 150 Nahua women high in the mountains of central Mexico, in a tiny town called Naupan,” said The New York Times, but activists have accused the manufacturers of “exploiting the Nahua women while profiting off their image.” There are “murky details behind the Adidas collaboration with the artisans of Naupan,” Luz Valdez, a Mexican activist and influencer, said in a translated TikTok video. The artists were reportedly “not even allowed to use their traditional sewing method.”

ITV has been accused of “unwitting sexism” after placing expert pundit Emma Hayes in a “bureau-meets-countryside-kitchen” set for its World Cup coverage, said The Times.

Hayes, the Londoner who is head coach of USA women and who won seven league titles with Chelsea, has been given an analysis slot during the new hydration breaks in World Cup matches and was in ITV’s Brooklyn studio for England’s victory over Croatia.

In “relegating” Hayes to using chalk and a blackboard, rather than the more customary interactive digital tools, on a set resembling a kitchen, ITV bosses have risked “reinforcing sexist stereotypes”.

Katie Bailiff, chief executive of charity Women in Film & TV, called it an “ill-conceived, damaging creative decision”, which has led to significant online criticism.

‘Intellect shone’

Hayes’ analysis has been “one of the triumphs of the tournament so far”, said Football365. ITV has “adroitly” leaned into her strengths by making the segment “as lo-fi as humanly possible”. Her blackboard insights gave “infinitely more value” than the “empty, lazy” cliches we are used to from the channel’s “tacticos”.

Her greatest asset is how “lightly she wears her vast and extensive knowledge”, digesting the game “without waffle or potential for bafflement” under intense time pressure.

The chalkboard set-up makes sense, said Molly Hudson in The Times. Hayes’ communication skills have helped her to the “pinnacle of the women’s game”. TV coverage is now “dominated by high-tech screens for analysis” by former players, so using the “classic prop for football managers” – especially one at the heart of the evolving game – is understandable. And she can add one more line to her “lengthy list of achievements”: she is the “woman who made hydration breaks fun”.

ITV has “bravely tried to innovate”, said Felix Keith in The Mirror. The BBC, who made the decision to broadcast from Salford, have “chosen to stick with what they know”, filling the time with back-and-forth between the commentator and co-commentator. But rather than copying their competitor, or using the breaks to “pump in another few minutes of adverts” like their American counterparts, ITV has given the stage to one of the world’s best managers to “educate us”.

Despite looking “a bit cheap”, the set had a “retro” feel and was “a bit of a throwback”, said Kathryn Batte in The Telegraph. It has been “genuinely refreshing” to see Hayes’ return after her absence from the 2022 men’s World Cup. ITV’s only failing is giving Hayes such a “short window” and not “maximising the air time of one of the best pundits at the tournament”.

‘Hung Hayes out to dry’

“Hayes’ ­intellect shone,” said The Times. But she was hampered by the ITV’s vision of an “old-school, retro, jumpers-for-goalposts vibe”. Without the “gizmos and graphics” afforded to her male colleagues, her “acute and informative” analysis was reduced to resemblances of “noughts and crosses”. “Lose the blackboard. She deserves better.”

Hayes is one of the “most decorated tacticians in world football”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But ITV’s decision to give her a “kitchen-esque backdrop” turned her insightful segments into “pure, uncut meme fodder”. The “inherently sexist optics” of positioning a female pundit in an “almost-kitchen” has “played into the hands of misogynist trolls”.

Hayes offers a “class of punditry that football sorely needs”. She stands alongside other established female commentators such as Karen Carney, Ellen White and Alex Scott who have bright careers in the field – “as long as ITV doesn’t put them in a kitchen, that is”.

“If you drew a Venn diagram of Emma Hayes’ critics and the fragile folk who cry ‘snowflake’ about others”, you would have drawn a circle, said Michael Hincks in The i Paper.

“The optics are awful from the World Cup broadcaster.” The lack of foresight to see that a “tinpot” chalkboard and kitchen setting would cause this much online furore is “naive”. It’s as if “someone ran to the nearest shop when realising drinks breaks equals more studio time”. The result is that ITV has “hung Hayes out to dry”.

‘What a 150-year-old oak teaches about Juneteenth’

Theodore R. Johnson at The Washington Post

The “white oak in my backyard is living history,” as it has “been standing for about a century and a half, dating to the end of Reconstruction,” says Theodore R. Johnson. With “trees, as with history, what is measured matters as much as how.” Juneteenth “signifies both the end of slavery and the rebirth of a nation.” But the “majority of Americans don’t celebrate,” and that “makes it harder for the idea of a second founding to take root.”

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‘Trump and Vance’s spin on the Iran agreement is completely incoherent’

Michael A. Cohen at MS NOW

The White House agreed to a “ceasefire extension that met none of its prewar objectives while providing enormous financial concessions to Tehran” and “now, the administration is desperately trying to argue otherwise,” says Michael A. Cohen. Donald Trump “got played by the Iranians, and no one is buying his spin job.” The “most telling sign that the ceasefire deal is a dud is the White House waited until Wednesday to share the text.”

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‘The culture wars in pro sports go on — for now’

Michael Brendan Dougherty at the National Review

The San Francisco Giants “recently held a Pride Night” and “two Christian players wrote Bible verses on their caps,” says Michael Brendan Dougherty. This is “far from the first controversy about Pride celebrations and American sports, and probably far from the last.” The “major sports leagues are perhaps the last relics of 20th-century American mass culture.” There are “fights over the values expressed in these arenas precisely because there is an assumption that they reflect shared American values.”

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‘Federal cap on student aid will hurt nursing workforce’

Jinhee Jeong at The Seattle Times

Some states are “already experiencing a nursing faculty shortage, and the problem will only get worse with the U.S. Department of Education’s Reimagining and Improving Student Education, or RISE, rule,” says Jinhee Jeong. This “excludes post-baccalaureate nursing degrees from the ‘professional degree’ category, and sets nursing students’ loan limits at $20,500 annually.” With the “increasing cost of graduate school, fewer nurses will be able to obtain a graduate degree in nursing, which will significantly worsen the shortage.”

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England captain Ben Stokes and bowler Gus Atkinson will not take part in the Test against New Zealand at The Oval, starting on 17 June, after breaking curfew rules in a Chelsea nightclub following their victory at Lord’s, England Cricket announced last week. Sonny Baker and Jordan Cox will make their debuts as their replacements.

At a press conference at The Oval, managing director of England men’s cricket Rob Key “answered the myriad questions over this whole mess with the enthusiasm of someone in a hostage video”, said cricket correspondent Chris Stocks in The i Paper. And as Key was fielding questions “mere metres away from a row of kegs of beer, the irony was lost on nobody”.

Key confirmed that management were considering a ban on alcohol for a national side that has repeatedly faced allegations of booze-fuelled unprofessionalism.

‘Staggering stupidity’

One of Stokes’ strengths as England captain has been his “capacity to show the way”, said Harry Latham-Coyle in The Independent. Given the additional scrutiny around the team’s culture, it is “scarcely believable” that he would allow himself to end up in a boozy altercation at a Chelsea nightclub.

Coming on the heels of reports of excessive drinking at last year’s Ashes, as well as white-ball captain Harry Brook’s run-in with a bouncer in New Zealand, Stokes’ behaviour shows “staggering stupidity”. The leadership team made a vow that things would be different after the Ashes. “That promise has been broken at virtually the earliest opportunity.”

“I find this beyond staggering,” said Matthew Syed in The Times. Stokes’ actions are born out of “utter, crass and unforgivable selfishness”, the symbol of an English side that is neither “trustworthy” nor “mature”. There is something “seriously wrong with the culture” of the England men’s cricket team. For that reason above all, Stokes’ captaincy is “permanently and irredeemably untenable”.

It is “impossible not to feel sympathy” for Stokes, said Emma John in The Guardian. This is a man who recently celebrated his 35th birthday, had just won the first Test of the summer, had 10 days before the next game and has been “teetotal for the best part of a year” in order to manage his heavy workload. England cricket has a “tradition of shooting itself in the foot”, and the instinct to judge him “for the most meaningless of infractions” has felt “perverse”.

‘Lagging behind’

“Heavy drinking sessions are nothing new,” said cricket reporter Elizabeth Ammon in The Times. “Cricket and alcohol have been intrinsically linked since the sport was invented.” Some players believe that “natural talent is a shield”, protecting them from the effects of alcohol, while excessive drinking can also be a response to the “sheer mental toll of long, isolated tours”. But although the modern cricketer is typically more professional than previous generations, the sport is “still lagging behind” its contemporaries.

“The absurd affair captures a simple truth,” said Tim Wigmore, senior cricket writer at The Telegraph. “Cricket is less professional than other leading sports.” Top England cricketers can be earning in excess of £1 million a year – excluding personal sponsorship deals – but this “surge in salaries” does not reflect “comparable advances” in professionalism.

Naturally, the “sheer brutality” of Test cricket – spending “hundreds of days” away from home and 30 hours per game “under spectators’ glare” – demands a “release”. But international cricket has “not merely tolerated alcoholic excess” as a means of escape, but “celebrated it”.

“Does cricket still have a drinking culture?” said The Athletic. “Yes.” But the situation is “complicated and more nuanced than it sometimes appears”. The game is full of “alcohol-related anecdotes”, and social drinking is “deeply entwined” with the sport. Indeed, at the grassroots level, booze is the “lifeblood” of many clubs, with the clubhouse bar “often central to the community”. But admittedly, and “increasingly at the top level, a compromise has to be reached”.

Major League Baseball remains the only North American professional sport without a ceiling on team spending, due in large part to the fearsome power of its players’ union. But owners have declared their intent to impose a salary cap, setting them on a collision course with the players, who remain opposed to joining their capped peers in football, hockey and basketball.

Baseball has enjoyed a resurgence in attendance and interest of late following rule changes like the pitch clock that have noticeably shortened the overall length of games. Hanging over the upcoming negotiations are memories of the disastrous 1994 labor stoppage that canceled the World Series, leading to a yearslong downturn in attendance and enthusiasm. It remains to be seen whether owners are willing to risk baseball’s new era of prosperity by dying on the hill of a salary cap.

Fans crave a cap

The owners are emboldened by polls that show fans want a salary cap. But perhaps the highest-profile booster for the owners’ position is the U.S. president, who has demonstrated a willingness to intervene in pro sports disputes. “If you don’t have a salary cap you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves,” said President Donald Trump on June 5, per The New York Times. Fellow critics of the current structure note that each of the championships of the 2020s have been won by teams with top 15 payrolls. “The correlation between spending and winning is obvious,” said Andy McCullough at The Athletic.

The failure of the sport’s luxury tax system to dissuade richer teams from spending lavishly means that “we need a realistic framework that addresses the fans’ concerns about competitive balance,” said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred per Fox Sports. Those concerns have been heightened by the free-spending habits of teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets, who have hoovered up the most prominent free agents on the market over the past several offseasons using financial loopholes like deferred salary payments. The Dodgers will pay a $169 million luxury tax on their $417.3 million payroll in 2026 alone, more than the total salary spending of 15 out of baseball’s 30 teams.

“Beneath the shameless posturing” of owners, the “gut instincts baseball watchers have about the state of the game” are “relatively legitimate,” said Lex Pryor at The Ringer. Backed by that fan outrage, many owners “are ready to burn the f---ing house down,” said one senior team official to ESPN.

Journalists and players think it’s a smokescreen

Baseball’s labor war pits owners and fans against not just the players but most baseball journalists. The push for a salary cap “drives me crazy,” said The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal on the Foul Territory podcast. The system is “not perfect,” but “does it need a salary cap that could cost us games in 2027 to be rectified? I still believe the answer is no.” Rosenthal and other salary cap critics point out that wild spending is no guarantee of success, and many clubs operating on a shoestring, like the Milwaukee Brewers, have found ways to win consistently.

For others, the salary cap proposal demonstrates pure greed from owners who are all fabulously wealthy yet perennially crying poor. Forget the details of the “gobbledygook-intensive” initial proposal from owners who are “less savvy businessmen than garden-variety landlords in search of that sweet, sweet passive income,” said Ray Ratto at Defector. “MLB owners want a salary cap just because everyone else in their microclass has one” and because it would inflate the value of their franchises.

Baseball has “just as much, if not more, parity than the salary cap leagues,” and pro-cap sentiment is driven by the reality that “deep down in places people don’t talk about at parties, there’s a feeling that the billionaires in business earned their dollars and the players just won the lottery by being good at a kids’ game,” said Matt Snyder at CBS Sports. Indeed, between 2015 and 2024, 14 different teams played in the World Series, as opposed to 10 in the NHL and NFL championships and just 8 in the NBA.

What happened

President Donald Trump celebrated his birthday by hosting a UFC mixed martial arts cage match on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday night. He kicked off the spectacle by saluting a military flyover alongside UFC chief Dana White on the Blue Room balcony, and ended the night watching fireworks from inside the blood-splattered cage.

Who said what

Using the White House lawn for a “violent sporting event sponsored by light beer and cryptocurrencies was overwhelmingly unpopular, garnering the support of just 31% of Republicans and 11% of independents in a Reuters-Ipsos poll,” The Washington Post said. But the spectators, which included at least nine Cabinet secretaries, “reveled in the unabashed masculinity of the scene,” The Wall Street Journal said, “cheering on fighters as they bloodied each other’s faces.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the fights as a “gift to the American people.” But it was “streamed exclusively on Paramount+,” a subscription service whose “owners have close ties to Trump,” the Journal said.

What next?

Trump “sought to tie the fights to larger celebrations” of America’s 250th anniversary, The Associated Press said. But the event “was so geared toward himself” that fellow G7 leaders “pushed back” their summit in France so he “could attend his cage-match party and then fly to Europe” overnight.

The World Cup kicked off this week – but in the days leading up to it, “no one seemed all that excited”, said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. The tournament will feature 48 nations playing 104 fixtures in 16 cities across the US, Canada and Mexico, and will give a stage to “some of the most famous people on Earth” – from Harry Kane to Kylian Mbappé. Yet for many, it is “surrounded by angst”.

Ticket prices are “astronomical”. Fifa has introduced “dynamic pricing”, so a seat at the final could set you back $10,000, and demand for many matches has slumped. Prices for everything from parking to accommodation have been vastly inflated: Airbnbs near New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, where the final is being played, cost up to $17,000 for three nights. America’s relations with its co-hosts are strained, and there are fears of cartel violence in Mexico.

“Hanging over it all is the war in Iran, particularly because it was started by the guy to whom the tournament’s organisers recently awarded a peace prize.”

‘Maga World Cup’

This expanded World Cup will be the largest and most commercially driven in history, said Jason Burt in The Daily Telegraph.

Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, wants “every match to be a money-spinning event” akin to the US Super Bowl: the fans are being treated like a “cash machine”. It’s also likely to be the “most politicised”. There have already been stories of Iranian players and staff struggling to secure visas; and progressives have voiced alarm that America’s immigration agency, Ice, is being used to provide stadium security. As for Donald Trump, he can be counted on to “hijack proceedings” in a cringeworthy way.

Some have already dubbed this the “Maga World Cup”, said Simon Kuper in the FT. But Trump might not see much benefit from it: all 11 of the US cities hosting games voted Democrat in their most recent elections, and there is a good chance of anti-Trump protests at matches.

Hard to mess up

But what of the football itself, asked US Women's National Team head coach Emma Hayes in The Guardian. The favourites for the tournament include Spain, France, Argentina and, yes, England; but much will depend on how well squads adapt to the stifling heat, games at high altitude, and having to play across four different time zones.

Before every major sporting event, “people foresee a nightmare”, said Will Leitch in The Washington Post. And then, when the games begin, everyone just enjoys them. Maybe some things will go wrong. But the World Cup is the one event that captures the interest of the whole planet. It’s hard to make a mess of it, “no matter how hard you might try”.

While countries fight for victory on FIFA World Cup fields in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, an unforeseen competitor is lurking on the sidelines: climate change. Increased heat and humidity could make playing long games outdoors a serious health hazard.

How does heat affect the tournament?

Climate change is “boosting the likelihood of performance-impairing heat during most scheduled World Cup matches (97 of 104),” said an analysis by Climate Central. Among those matches, “nearly half (49) have at least a 50% likelihood of experiencing heat that can impair performance,” and in “26 of those matches, climate change increases the likelihood by at least 10 percentage points.”

It is “pretty safe to say climate change is going to have a mark on this World Cup,” and it is “not just going to be hotter, but it’s also going to increase the humidity as well,” Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate of climate science for Climate Central, said to the Los Angeles Times. Several World Cup locations are expected to exceed 78 degrees Fahrenheit with no internal cooling systems.

Intense exertion in high levels of heat and humidity could have dire health effects. In these conditions, the “body’s normal cooling system begins to struggle,” said Reuters. “Humidity is a ​particular concern, since sweat cools the body only when it evaporates.” In addition, “75% of all the energy that we utilize during exercise gets converted to ​heat,” Chris Minson, a physiology professor and co-director of the Exercise and Environmental Physiology Labs at the University of ⁠Oregon, said to Reuters. “Only about 25% goes to actually doing the exercise.” Excessive sweating because of heat “could lead to dehydration, cramps and increased fatigue,” said Al Jazeera.

How will future World Cups be affected?

As climate change is only expected to get worse over time, there have been “discussions on moving the start of the tournament from June to March or October after 2030,” said the Los Angeles Times. For now, “early kickoffs, cooling breaks, air-conditioned stadiums and regular weather-related delays will necessarily become common features of the tournament.”

High temperatures and humidity are “likely to slow games down,” Ryan Calsbeek, a biological sciences professor at Dartmouth College, said to Reuters. “When athletes have to perform for a very long time, they’re just not going to be able to balance the explosive power of their fast-twitch efforts with the more aerobic long-term efforts of a 90-plus-minute game.”

Not only will the World Cup be affected by climate change, but it will also make climate change worse. FIFA “seems intent on fueling the fire,” said an analysis by the New Weather Institute. It is estimated that the North American World Cup “will be responsible for at least 9.0 million tons of carbon dioxide.” The increased number of participating teams, as well as the expanded geographic area of the tournament, means more people are traveling around and polluting. “Unlike in parts of Europe or Asia, there is a notable absence of low-carbon alternatives such as high-speed rail networks connecting major host cities.”

“Just happy to be here.” That is the category assigned to a host of footballing nations, including Haiti, Panama and newcomers Curaçao and Cape Verde, by the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of the men’s 2026 World Cup.

Unlike the established national teams coming into the competition with “high expectations”, these unlikely contenders have spent decades on the fringes of international football.

“One of the most topsy-turvy weeks in World Cup qualifying history” saw a handful of heavyweight footballing nations fail to qualify, while several “tiny nations reached the finals for the first time”, said ESPN.

Punching above their weight

Fifa’s decision to expand the World Cup finals from 32 to 48 teams has created more pathways for smaller countries to qualify, including first-timers Curaçao, Cape Verde, Jordan and Uzbekistan. Many of these nations have spent years building a footballing infrastructure that punches well above their demographic weight.

Despite having a “land mass smaller than the Isle of Man” and a population of 156,000, the southern Caribbean island of Curaçao has relied on “well-drilled organisation” to help its team reach the finals, said the BBC. The team – nicknamed the Blue Family and led by “vastly experienced” Dutch coach Dick Advocaat – is “hard to break down and dangerous in transition”.

Meanwhile, “the Blue Sharks of Cape Verde are swimming in uncharted waters”, but “you wouldn’t want to bet against them” either, said The Guardian. “Physical and happy to defend”, this “eclectic” group of players has worked together “for the best part of half a decade”. Two years ago, they were joined by Rotterdam-born forward Dailon Livramento, who has proven “the missing piece for a team who have a host of talented wide players, but lacked a central presence up front”. Racking up four goals in the qualifying stages, he “has already cemented his status as a legend”.

There is cause for optimism even among the smallest participating nations, said The Athletic: when the women’s World Cup expanded its own group stage in 2023, there were predictions of drubbings, but “the underdogs fared much better than expected”.

Most of the “minnows” are likely to focus on defence against the stronger sides in their group and aim to “keep the scorelines respectable”, before taking a more aggressive stance against their weakest rival, “in the knowledge that a single win in the group stage may take them through”.

‘Real hope’

“For the football-mad boys of Port-au-Prince, the next month promises to be one of unparalleled excitement,” said ITV. Haiti have qualified for first time since 1974, long before the majority of its citizens were born.

Haiti is the poorest country in the tournament and its citizens are the subject of a US travel ban, so attending matches in person is out of the question for most of them. But regardless the nation “is entering the tournament in a spirit of optimism”. For many Haitians, the tournament is a chance to show the world that, “despite its profound challenges, this country can compete on a global stage”.

In Cape Verde, there is a sense of “real hope” that is “widely shared” among the islanders, said Reuters. Bars, restaurants and cafes are “gearing up” for the tournament of a lifetime. One bartender said the World Cup would help Cape Verde gain “more visibility in the world”.

The tournament also presents a significant earning opportunity: “about $10.5 million” (£7.85 million) for getting to the finals, said NPR. Such a cash injection could strengthen “youth development” opportunities and expand “scouting across the diaspora”.

And football is, perhaps “more than most sports”, known for its “shocks”, including when Saudi Arabia beat Lionel Messi’s Argentina, the eventual champions, in a 2022 group match, said Joshua McLeod and Hunter Fujak, sports lecturers at Deakin University, on The Conversation. “Could we see Cape Verde or Curaçao produce an even greater World Cup upset?”