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.

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”.

A “political row” about football’s “drinking culture” is now “in full swing”, said Politico, after Andy Burnham said a ban on football fans drinking alcohol in the stands is “wrong”.

The prime-minister-in-waiting is considering lifting the ban but the current PM is standing by it.

What are the laws in the UK?

After a period of serious football hooliganism in the early 1980s, the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act 1985 was passed. It banned the consumption of alcohol while watching a football game from seats or anywhere else within sight of the pitch, meaning spectators had to stay on the concourse or in another area where they couldn’t see the playing surface.

Critics say that this curious law means that fans end up drinking more quickly during half-time because they have only around 15 minutes before returning to the stands. This encourages increasing consumption rather than moderating it, it has been argued.

Other sports are more relaxed: you can drink alcohol in your seat at rugby union, rugby league, cricket, horse racing, tennis, darts and other events. A particular oddity is that when a football stadium hosts a concert or rugby tie instead of a football match, fans can often sit in exactly the same seat with a pint in their hand.

What about other countries?

In Scotland, the rules are even stricter than in England. Generally, alcohol cannot be sold or consumed anywhere in the stadium, with limited exceptions in hospitality areas.

In many other countries in Europe, including Germany and the Netherlands, football fans can drink in their seats but rules are often tightened for derby matches and other fixtures that are deemed high risk.

What might Burnham change? 

Burnham said over the weekend that there was “something wrong” with a ban on football fans drinking in view of the pitch, while rugby fans are allowed to booze away. The prime-minister-in-waiting hinted that he might overturn the ban, but the current PM, Keir Starmer, has “pushed back”, said Politico.

“Police chiefs have warned against the relaxing rules of drinking in the stands, and we think that’s sensible to follow,” a spokesperson for Starmer said this week.

“Fans who go to matches in football league can drink before the game, in the concourse during half time and can stay late after the match or head to the pub, so there’s plenty of chances to get a drink,” they added.

Data suggests that football crowds are far less violent than in the 1980s, so there has been increasing debate about whether the law is still justified. The ban has been reviewed by parliamentary committees, football authorities and supporter groups, but the restriction remains in force in England and Wales. A fan-led review of football governance in 2021 called for the law to be re-examined.

Currently, cocaine use is a growing issue at matches, where fans with “glazed eyes” and “queues” for “cubicles at half-time” are commonplace, said Goal. Use of the class-A drug had been described by police as “excessive” and a “bigger factor in violence at matches than alcohol”.

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.”

The career of Ben Stokes has been littered with “extraordinary scenes”, said Ali Martin in The Guardian – and there was a final one last Sunday, on his penultimate day as an England cricketer. At 3.27pm on the fourth day of the third Test against New Zealand, Stokes was “about to start the 11th over of another marathon spell”, when a “ripple of applause” broke out around Trent Bridge.

That morning, the England captain had told his teammates that he’d be retiring from internationals at the end of the Test – and the news had just been made public. Now that the crowd were “in on the secret”, they rose as one to roar their “champion all-rounder” as he hurtled towards the crease. “And then it happened.” Stokes’s delivery found the edge of Zak Foulkes’s bat, and “flew low into the hands of Harry Brook at second slip”.

Final flourish

With his 252nd Test wicket, Stokes had provided one last “I was there moment”, to go with “countless others” throughout his career. As his teammate Joe Root said later: “It was the most Ben Stokes thing you will ever see.”

Later that same day, Stokes “added a final, frantic flourish” to the Bazball era, by promoting himself to open England’s fourth innings, said Nick Hoult in The Daily Telegraph. With his team needing 373 in just under four sessions, he charged down the pitch to his first ball, attempted to reverse sweep his second, and smacked his sixth for six. But his somewhat “reckless” cameo was short-lived – he departed after hitting 30 from 20 balls – and after that England’s hopes faded. They were bowled out the next day for 212, giving New Zealand a 2-1 victory in the series – England’s first defeat in a home three-match series for 14 years.

Magic of Headingley

“The numbers brook no argument,” said Mike Atherton in The Times. Stokes is one of only two all-rounders in history – the other being South Africa’s Jacques Kallis – to have finished his Test career with more than 250 wickets and 7,000 runs. Yet his significance as a cricketer goes beyond statistics. He will be remembered chiefly for his unique ability to shape games – and entire teams – through the sheer force of his personality.

From his match-winning innings in the 2019 World Cup final to the way he galvanised a previously bedraggled England when he first took over as captain, his achievements have been nothing short of remarkable, said Scyld Berry in The Daily Telegraph.

Yet his “legacy will always be” that magical day at Headingley in the 2019 Ashes, when he secured one of England’s most improbable victories by sharing an unbeaten stand of 76 for the final wicket with his “faithful partner Jack Leach”, who contributed just one run. The moment when Stokes “smote” Pat Cummins to the boundary to secure the victory – and then roared, celebrated and hugged his partner – might just be “the moment that gave more people joy than any other in the history of this sport”.

Thomas Tuchel has said that his England men’s football team will follow Gareth Southgate’s penalty shoot-out blueprint at the World Cup. “We are prepared. We have a process, the players have a process,” Tuchel said.

As part of an overhaul of the England team, Southgate decided on his penalty takers “well in advance based on the training, and he strove publicly to take full accountability to take any blame away from his players”, said the BBC.

With the knockout rounds of this summer’s tournament under way, the “spectre” of the penalty shoot-out “hovers over every match”, said CBC. Many in the game are now turning to studies into the psychology, mathematics and history of penalties to try to gain an edge.

England’s ghosts

“Penalty kick studies” have helped the world’s top teams “win more shoot-outs”, said Science News Explores. The psychological pattern that “stands out” is that “as the stakes go up, the chances of scoring go down”. Players are more likely to score from a penalty during a game than in a shoot-out; penalty kicks tend to be less successful towards the end of tournaments; and during shoot-outs, players are most likely to score if a goal means victory – and least likely if failure means defeat.

The received wisdom is that England are poor at taking penalties. Spain and the Netherlands actually have the worst record, losing four World Cup shoot-outs in all. England (with Italy and France) have lost three, only winning their first with a 4-3 victory over Colombia in 2018, when Southgate was in charge.

A 2023 study that reviewed more than 1,700 penalty kicks found that players from England “scored as often as did the players from other nations”.

This finding was backed up by researchers at Bournemouth University who performed a penalty kick experiment with 130 players from English university and regional teams. Each player took five penalties after being divided into three groups. The researchers reminded one group about England’s poor shoot-out history. That group scored fewer goals than the group that didn’t hear that message and also fewer than the groups that were reminded of the past – but were also told that it proved nothing about English players.

Loving the maths

Mathematics can also come into play. After she scored the decisive spot-kick against Sweden at Euro 2025, the England defender Lucy Bronze explained her method. “I watched the goalkeeper, and every single penalty she dived quite early,” she told the BBC. “Statistically it’s risky for the keeper to stand still… So yeah, I love maths.”

According to recent analysis by Opta of the 292 penalties taken in shoot-outs at World Cups from 1982-2022, 14% were aimed low and to the left as the player looks at the goal, and just over 85% of those penalties were converted.

To guarantee scoring in a World Cup shoot-out, the findings suggest aiming anywhere in the top third of the goal. Of the 39 penalties hit high and on target, none has been saved. But this method requires more precision and nerve because it increases the risk of hitting the post or crossbar, or missing the goal completely. The least successful penalties are those that are aimed at medium height at the centre of the goal, the stats suggest.

Delving deeper still, a 2018 study by InStat of more than 100,000 penalty kicks around the world concluded that accuracy should be prioritised over power, and that the penalty taker’s run-up should be more than five steps and at a medium pace. When taking a penalty it’s also advantageous to look at the goalkeeper, not the ball.

A report published in the Journal of Sports Sciences also found the perfect order for a team’s penalty takers in a shoot-out: the five most successful penalty takers should go in reverse order.

Germany’s penalty record at major tournaments had become the “stuff of legend”, said The Guardian. They had won six consecutive shoot-outs in all competitions and their players had scored their last 15 World Cup shoot-out penalties before their shock defeat by Paraguay on Monday. Three Germans missing in one shoot-out proves that anything can happen in this dramatic sporting lottery.

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.

Three decades after Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds first sang that football was “coming home”, the lyrics are being belted out again during the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.

In the Radio Times, Baddiel, one of the song’s co-writers, said that English people “feel, with this game, that essentially: it’s our ball” and that “football is ours. We codified it. We gave it to the world.” But critics say it is “mistaken” to claim that England is the home of football, said Sky News.

Scottish professors

The Dutch football legend Ruud Gullit has dismissed the “Three Lions (Football's Coming Home)” song as “arrogant”, saying England does not “own football”.

That chimes with the fact that the “English football public has a certain reputation globally”, said The Athletic. “There is an assumption of arrogance, of high expectations, of going into every major tournament presuming their team will win it.”

It’s also wrong to claim that England is the home of football, Hamish Husband, from the Scottish football magazine Tartan Army, told Sky News, because a group of footballers in the 19th century, known as the “Scotch professors”, were pioneers of the modern passing game.

Their new tactics were adopted by Scotland before spreading across Europe and other continents. “It was the travellers that worked the factories of the UK that took football to the world – not England”, he said.

A letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford in the 1600s, “holds the key to Scotland’s claim”, wrote Tom Burrows on BBC Newsround. He complained about people who gathered to play football on Sunday afternoons near Anwoth Kirk, his church. The site can “reasonably claim to be the earliest” game of football, said William Wyeth, a curator of history at English Heritage.

To bolster Scotland’s claim, archaeologists doing building works at Stirling Castle found a football behind a wood panel built in the 1540s. It was “made of pieces of leather sewn together, more like football that we know today”. Also, the first modern football club that’s “widely recognised as such” was founded in Edinburgh in 1824.

Footeball or football?

But the roots of the beautiful game may stretch back much further. More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese played “tsu chu”, or “kickball”. The earliest reference to organised ball games in England comes in around 1174, said Simon Inglis on English Heritage.

But “we can’t be sure” whether these games in England involved “kicking, as well as handling, the ball”. A woodcut from 1612, which refers to “country swaines at footeball”, shows the players “using hands” as in volleyball. So was it called “footeball” because the “players played on foot, rather than because they played it exclusively with their feet”?

However, football’s “global spread” couldn’t have happened without the “evangelical efforts of British entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, soldiers and sailors, who took the sport to Europe, South America and all corners of the Empire”.

On the charge of arrogance, yes, it’s true that people hear the song as a statement that England “view winning as the rightful outcome, and that anyone else winning is somehow wrong”, said The Athletic. But England fans themselves “simply do not see the song that way”. “The whole point of it is looking back on past glories and melancholy,” one fan told the outlet. “It’s not a triumphant song at all.” But “if English is your second language, I get why people would misunderstand it.”

Another long-standing England fan told the outlet she found the controversy entertaining. “I find it quite funny that people get upset about it,” she said. “I actually enjoy using the phrase just to wind up international colleagues!”

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”.

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”.

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?”

David Sullivan, billionaire owner of West Ham United, has resigned as the football club’s co-chair to fight accusations by seven women of “sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour”.

A joint investigation by The Times and the BBC’s “Panorama” revealed claims that women were offered spots as “regular girls” in the tabloid newspapers he owned if they agreed to have sex with him. Two women were told that refusing would mean “damaging their future modelling careers”.

Sullivan “made a fortune from selling sex in the pre-internet world of adult magazines, films, telephone chat lines and newspapers filled with topless glamour models and teenage girls”, said the BBC. He was known as the “king of porn”.

In a statement released by West Ham, Sullivan, 77, said he “categorically” denies all the allegations, which he characterised as “decades-old”, “factually incorrect and entirely false”.

“Many inside the game will be taking in the news of Sullivan’s departure,” said The Guardian, “and reflecting on how a pornographer managed to rise as high in the modern game as he did.”

‘Immoral earnings’

Sullivan, who was born in Cardiff and whose father was an RAF officer, grew up in South Wales, Essex and Hertfordshire, before being sent to boarding school aged 11. He was “short and shy” growing up, said The Times, and “experimented” with business from an early age, selling football memorabilia to students. “I stopped being shy when I was 22 and started to earn money,” he later said. “Money gives you confidence.”

After studying economics at Queen Mary College in east London and a short period working in advertising, he began selling “glossy prints” of topless models with university friend Bernard Hardingham. “In one week alone they made £26,000, the equivalent of more than £300,000 today.”

In 1973, their success “caught the attention of the authorities” and both were charged with conspiring to publish and post obscene materials and fined £50, said the BBC.

“By 25, Sullivan was a millionaire, and decided to branch into films,” said The Guardian. “Come Play With Me” was the “first, and most successful”, marketed as the “strongest sex comedy film ever produced and distributed in Britain”.

In 1982 Sullivan was convicted of “living off the immoral earnings of prostitution from massage parlours and jailed for nine months”, though he spent just 71 days in prison following an appeal. He has always maintained his innocence. “One headline at the time read: ‘King Porn is caged at last’,” said The Times. But this conviction “appeared to do little to suppress his ambition”.

Further allegations against Sullivan surfaced in a 1981 undercover investigation by the News of the World. Under the headline “Come to bed if you’re seeking a job”, it alleged that Sullivan had asked a woman for sex in exchange for a job, said The Times. Within 15 minutes of meeting reporter Tina Dalgleish, he allegedly asked: “So are you coming upstairs with me for 10 minutes to see what you can do?”

‘Mainstream’ success

Sullivan then turned to more “mainstream” publishing, founding the Sunday Sport in 1986, and five years later the Daily Sport, said the BBC. They ran a “mixture of bizarre, lurid and salacious stories with a steady diet of topless glamour models on many pages”. There was also a “Countdown to 16” feature, where “partially clothed” schoolgirls were shown before a full topless feature on their 16th birthday. The age limit for when models could legally appear topless was raised to 18 in 2004.

In 1993, Sullivan acquired a majority stake in Birmingham City, which was in administration, for £700,000. In 2010, having sold his Birmingham stake, he bought West Ham, alongside David and Ralph Gold, who ran the Ann Summers sex toys and lingerie empire.

Sullivan resigned as co-chair and director of West Ham on Saturday, saying in his statement that he was stepping down to apply his “full energy and attention on fighting these false allegations”. It has since been revealed that Sullivan has been “banned from having contact” with West Ham’s women’s and youth teams since 2023 due to “safeguarding concerns”, said the BBC.

Sullivan retains a 38.8% stake in West Ham, making him its largest shareholder. With a total net worth of £1.1 billion, together with his family, he is the 149th richest person in the UK, according to the 2026 Sunday Times Rich List.

“Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming” sang England fans in 1996. Another 30 years later, Three Lions supporters finally “have grounds to dream”, said The Telegraph. But not all football analysts believe the picture is so rosy for Thomas Tuchel’s men.

Gnawing hope

There’s a “familiar, gnawing, feeling growing inside all England fans: hope”, said ESPN, that this time, the Three Lions might just do it. There is “incredible depth” in the squad. Tuchel, England’s German head coach, has experience of winning some of the sport’s “biggest trophies” and his squad selection shows he is “clearly not afraid to duck away from making big calls”, nor “upsetting some of the bigger names”.

It’s not just Tuchel who has bags of experience. The “majority” of his squad can “call upon the muscle memory” of reaching finals in two of their last three tournaments. Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane play for Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, Arsenal’s Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka have “more Champions League knockout experience” than two years ago, and Marc Guéhi, “considered untested” at the Euros, has since moved to Manchester City and gained valuable European experience.

To win, a team “must suffer, have luck on their side and improve as the tournament progresses”, said Felipe Cardenas on The Athletic. England have the “attributes”, and Tuchel “understands the players”. This time, captain Kane “can lead England to the promised land”.

‘Back to reality’

“I don’t have a great feeling about England,” said Oliver Kay on The Athletic. “I’m just not convinced they have really taken shape under Tuchel yet”. He “needs something (and not just Harry Kane) to click”.

The trouble is that England are “always a Kane injury away from a full-blown crisis”, said the BBC. Yes, they became the first European side to win eight World Cup qualifiers without conceding a goal, but March’s friendlies – a “turgid” draw with Uruguay and defeat to Japan – “jolted everyone back to reality”.

“In 1966, I left Wembley convinced England would win again,” said Hunter Davies in The New Statesman, but that “won’t happen again in my lifetime”. I fear that “England lack flair”, because “today in the Prem”, coaches have become “obsessed” with set-pieces and are “guided by videos and boring stats”. This makes the players “nervous”, “too concerned about pushing the opposition at corners” and “scared to express themselves”. But “we all live in hope”.

Even England fans themselves don’t seem particularly convinced, going by new data from bookmakers. Only a fifth of England fans are backing the Three Lions to win the tournament, which places England “significantly behind” several European rivals when it comes to “domestic support for their national team”, said Anna Wise in The Independent. In Scotland, confidence “is even lower”: fewer than one in 10 bets placed there are backing the national side, “who are currently priced at 300/1 to win”.

“I came here to play tennis, not to put on a fashion show,” said Laura Siegemund, following her loss to Naomi Osaka in the first round of the French Open. “If other people want to do a fashion show, they can do that.”

Osaka came on court in a black corset and matching pleated skirt to face Siegemund. Though she eventually lost to Aryna Sabalenka in the fourth round in a landmark night session, Osaka’s “shimmering gold dress” became even “more eye-catching under the lights”, said The Guardian.

Known for her “elaborate” playing outfits, including a jellyfish-inspired outfit at the Australian Open, Osaka sparked concern that she may “serve as a distraction”. With Wimbledon around the corner, the tennis-fashion debate is likely to intensify.

‘Another language’

Osaka “really knows how to turn a tennis court into a catwalk” and has done so for years, said the Daily Maverick. Though her “court-ure”, which also included an Eiffel Tower-inspired outfit, has been labelled “problematic” by critics, her choice of fashion is “part of how she chooses to be seen”. For someone who has spoken openly about her struggles with anxiety, depression and public communication, her outfits have become “another language”.

The four-time grand slam champion has “never had average tastes when it comes to fashion”, said The Athletic. Her look at the Australian Open – a “dreamy, dramatic ensemble” that was meant to “evoke jellyfish” – “took over cultural discourse far beyond her match”.

Female athletes “don’t want to be known or judged for their outfits alone”, said The Independent, but with less prime-time coverage of their games than male players, it “can’t hurt to turn a few heads and garner extra attention using a bit of tulle and some sequins, right?”

I understand “how annoying it must be for Osaka’s opponents”, said The Times’ fashion director Anna Murphy. Her “ballroom skirt” and “spangled waistcoat” are “more usually seen in ‘Bridgerton’” and “Dancing on Ice”. I appreciate her angle: professional tennis “isn’t for the shy and retiring”, and if you’re on a rumoured $10 million sponsorship deal, “why not milk it”?

Wimbledon has indicated it will go along with Osaka’s “fancy-dress-adjacent thing”, provided what she wears is white. The restrictions are only on colour, not style, “so what’s it going to be for SW19? A snowman? A snowball? A snowballgirl?” But this sets a precedent that could turn the circuit into a “fancy dress party”, inviting others to follow suit. I am “not sure how even I, a fashion journalist, feel about that”.

Fashion ‘embedded’ in tennis

Tennis has “always been a runway” and fashion has “long been entrenched” in the sport, said the Daily Maverick. Osaka’s idols, the Williams sisters, used fashion as a “platform of empowerment”. Serena Williams’ “iconic” 2018 catsuit “became one of the most discussed outfits in tennis history”, while Venus’ “‘scandalous’ cabaret-inspired 2010 look” also “challenged conventions”.

Such pageantry has become commonplace in other sports too, with “paddock fashion” in Formula 1 and “tunnel walks” in US basketball. People are only noticing, and commenting, because Osaka is “using fashion as a form of self-expression on her own terms”.

Outfits worn by Osaka and Sabalenka have “crystallised how deeply luxury fashion has embedded itself in tennis”, said the Financial Times. “Indeed, the relationship between luxury and tennis isn’t new.” Many of the major stars will have a partnership with a high-end brand: Jannik Sinner and Gucci, Carlos Alcaraz and Louis Vuitton, Zheng Qinwen and Dior, British star Jack Draper and Burberry; the list goes on.

Professional tennis is a “visual theatre”, with increasingly viable commercial opportunities. Lacoste, Ralph Lauren and Rolex have all been “intertwined” with the sport, but there has been a dramatic shift in tennis’ “scale and visibility, both as a participatory sport and a spectacle”. Broader participation in the US (up by 54% since 2019, according to the US Tennis Association), and rising broadcast audiences mean tennis has become a “compelling stage” for marketing. Tennis offers a “rare opportunity to speak simultaneously to affluent buyers and aspirational young fans”.

Forty-two athletes, including swimmers, weightlifters and sprinters, will compete in Las Vegas on Sunday in the first Enhanced Games.

Little in sport has “caused as much controversy – nor provoked as many questions – as the Enhanced Games”, said BBC sports editor Dan Roan. “Those behind it claim it is here to stay, and could soon expand to more events and other disciplines.”

But there is another side to the spectacle of juiced-up competitors trying to beat the world record in their discipline. Earlier this year, the company behind the event, Enhanced, launched a range of personalised performance and longevity medicines to sell to the public.

What did the commentators say?

Proponents of the games say the aim is “to challenge sporting norms by allowing athletes to push their potential with legal drugs under strict medical oversight”, said Chris Kenning in USA Today. “The approach is, let’s not be naive and pretend it’s not happening,” said Enhanced CEO Max Martin. “Let’s just take what’s happening in the shadows, put it out in the open.”

But that’s not sensible, say some sports medicine experts. “It’s akin to me saying I’m going to make smoking safe by supervising you while you’re smoking,” Aaron Baggish, professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne, told Yahoo Sports.

Most critics though “overlook the fact that the Enhanced Games is making obvious what society has always quietly accepted”, said Byron Hyde, philosopher of science and public policy at Bristol University, on The Conversation – namely “that most people are willing to watch athletes risk harm when the entertainment is good enough”. Brain trauma is the “potential price of boxing entertainment”, so “why the outrage about pharmaceutical enhancement risks?”

For Baggish, the “primary concern” is the message the event sends to the public that using these substances when taking part in sports “is in any way, shape or form OK. That’s the really scary thing.”

That appears to be one of the goals of the organisers. Aron D’Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games, told The Independent in 2024: “This is the route towards eternal life.” The games will “bring about performance-medicine technologies that then create a feedback cycle of good technologies, selling to the world, more revenue, more R&D, to develop better and better technologies”. Ultimately, “it’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer. And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?”

But, said The Economist, “the real purpose of the games is to push the limits of what the public sees as the acceptable use of performance-enhancing drugs”. The event is taking place “at a time when concerns are being raised over the medicalisation of Western society”, said Roan. Social media and ‘looksmaxxing’ are being “blamed for fuelling demand for weight-loss injections, cosmetic treatments and performance substances”.

What next?

The Enhanced Games “speak to a vision of the future in which medicines, rather than being simply used to treat disease, can extend human longevity and enhance well-being”, said The Economist.

But on Sunday, the athletes involved will effectively be the guinea pigs for this idea, albeit ones who have “burned bridges, risked their future livelihoods or their health”. And with the launch of Enhanced’s consumer business, “more and more people may soon be wagering their bodies on a chance to roll back the clock”.

Many questioned whether Pep Guardiola could hack it in the rough and tumble of the Premier League when he became Manchester City’s manager a decade ago.

Could his brand of beautiful “tiki-taka” football, refined in Barcelona and developed at Bayern Munich, cut it on a cold Tuesday night in Stoke?

Ten years on and his record speaks for itself: six Premier League titles, including one secured with over 100 points and another as part of a historic treble; the Champions League; three FA Cups; five League Cups; the Uefa Super Cup and Fifa Club World Cup. It makes him the second most decorated manager in Premier League history behind Sir Alex Ferguson. Now, with rumours of his departure at the end of the season, the question of his legacy has arisen.

‘Level of tactical complexity has soared’

As his mentor Johan Cruyff did as manager of Barcelona, Guardiola has “created a legacy that has changed the face of football at every level in England”, said BBC chief football writer Phil McNulty.

During his time at City, Guardiola “has not just shaped elite football and the game in the league’s pyramids” but “has had an impact at every level down to grassroots, where even junior coaches adopt his strategies”.

“His success goes beyond just the many wins,” said The Sun. “It is embedded into the very foundation of the game in England now.”

Even semi-professional teams now play out from the back. Goalkeepers will pass into danger rather than go long. The rigid formations of old are gone. Defenders sometimes play as strikers. “Kids are growing up with these roles more defined than ever” and “the level of tactical complexity has soared”.

To understand the extent of Guardiola’s impact you need only glance around at the other elite managers working in the game today. Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, who this season delivered the club’s first Premier League title in 22 years, cut his teeth as Guardiola’s assistant at City, as did former Chelsea boss and likely successor at the Etihad, Enzo Maresca. PSG boss Luis Enrique worked under him at Barcelona, as did new Chelsea manager Xavi Alonso in Munich. Current Bayern boss Vincent Kompany was City’s talismanic captain for years under Guardiola.

‘Lingering question’

There is no doubt City’s Abu Dhabi ownership “more than got its money’s worth”, said The Independent’s Miguel Delaney, but there is “another way to think about Guardiola”.

Whether it was having Lionel Messi in his prime, taking charge of already Treble-winning Bayern, or the immense resources he was handed at City, “the one purely football caveat in Guardiola’s sensational record” is “he’s never really had to work anywhere where he’s had to compromise”.

The other “lingering question” concerns City’s “bludgeoning power” and how, “Guardiola’s prodigious gifts aside, they were able to acquire it in the first place”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. The seemingly never-ending Premier League investigation into 115 charges of financial irregularity has hung over the club, and “for years Guardiola has had to deny suggestions of an asterisk being placed alongside their achievements”.

As for the future, replacing Guardiola “will be no easy feat”, said The Athletic. He has “set the standard so high, both for fans of Manchester City and for those of us judging from the outside, that anything short of sustained brilliance could easily seem underwhelming. Mediocrity would feel like disaster.”

Conservatives have long gone after what they perceive as discrimination against whites in hiring and have now found their latest target. The Florida attorney general sent the National Football League investigative subpoenas over alleged civil rights violations in its hiring practices. The issue centers on a longstanding NFL rule, and an investigation by Florida could have wider implications for diversity in sports.

‘Raises more questions’

The escalation began when Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) issued a letter to the NFL earlier this year, alleging that its Rooney Rule violates Florida’s civil rights laws. The rule, in place since 2003, requires all NFL teams to “interview at least two external minority candidates for open head coach, coordinator and general manager jobs,” said Politico. Though his letter led the NFL to alter some of the diversity language on its website, Uthmeier claims the league didn’t go far enough with its changes, resulting in him doubling down with the May 13 subpoenas.

“We appreciate how quickly the NFL changed its website in response to our letter and capitulated on some of their discriminatory hiring quotas,” Uthmeier said on social media. But the NFL’s response “raises more questions about the Rooney Rule, and we look forward to their cooperation with the investigative subpoena.” The subpoenas are Uthmeier’s way of “keeping pressure on the NFL after he previously gave the league a May 1 deadline to scrap the Rooney Rule,” said Politico.

The NFL showed no signs of capitulating. The league’s diversity efforts are “consistent with both Florida and federal law,” NFL General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a responding letter. The Rooney Rule “doesn’t impose any hiring quotas or mandates nor does it even limit who may be interviewed,” and “diversity of the candidate pool, both on the field and off, is also a critical part of the NFL’s success.” The league itself “does not permit the consideration of race, sex or any other legally protected characteristic in any hiring decisions or employment actions.”

‘An existential challenge’

Florida’s subpoenas are “just the latest target of MAGA backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts,” said NPR. While the effectiveness of the Rooney Rule has been “panned by many, including coaches, former coaches, the NFL Players Association and football fans,” continued legal pushes could represent an “existential challenge” to the NFL’s hiring practices.

Legal challenges could also expand to other areas of the NFL beyond the Rooney Rule. Uthmeier’s subpoena targets “many of the NFL’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including a now-discontinued mandate that required teams hire a minority offensive assistant,” as well as the “league’s diversity accelerator program” and a rule related to compensatory draft picks if a “minority assistant coach or executive a team developed is hired away,” said ESPN.

Uthmeier’s threats “echo a broader campaign waged by the Trump administration,” said NPR. They come as the White House and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have “now made tackling discrimination against white people, especially men, a priority.” While there could be implications for the NFL, the effect of the legal challenges could also be seen beyond sports. The head of the EEOC has repeatedly “warned employers that even in the interview selection process, they should not take into consideration a candidate’s race, sex or any other protected characteristic” of the Civil Rights Act.

Hearing that one football club has spied on another “conjures images of classic, covert espionage”, said the BBC. But, as Middlesbrough have found out, sometimes it’s “not that difficult”.

The English Football League has charged Southampton with spying on their opponents two days before the first leg of the Championship play-off semi-final on Tuesday. Middlesbrough claim the supposed spy was a Southampton analyst observing a training session.

Southampton then beat Middlesbrough in extra-time of the second leg to progress to the play-off final at Wembley, but the Middlesbrough manager, Kim Hellberg, has accused them of trying to cheat in what has become known as “spygate”.

‘Understandably incensed’

Southampton have launched an internal review to “ensure that all facts and context are properly understood” before “conclusions are drawn”, said chief executive Phil Parsons. “Given the intensity of the fixture schedule and the short turnaround between matches, we have requested time to complete that process thoroughly and responsibly.”

But the club have “not tried to fight the accusation that they tried to gain an unfair advantage”, said The Telegraph. They reportedly claimed the analyst was “acting on his own initiative and had not been instructed to travel to Rockliffe Hall hotel, adjacent to Boro’s training ground, to spy on Kim Hellberg and his players”. Middlesbrough, though, were “understandably incensed” after their media team “caught the spy lurking near some bushes with professional surveillance equipment”.

Boro have also “been led to believe by whistleblowers that this is not the first time Southampton have spied on their opponents’ training sessions”.

Cases of spying were “practically unheard of” until 2019, said the BBC, when Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa admitted he had sent a member of staff to spy on “every team they played that season”.

At that time, there was no specific regulation against spying; “bullish” Bielsa “even paid the fine himself”. The EFL then introduced rule 127: “no club shall directly or indirectly observe (or attempt to observe) another club's training session in the period of 72 hours prior to any match”.

That’s what Southampton have been charged with breaching, as well as rule 3.4: clubs must “act towards each other with the utmost good faith”.

But perhaps the “most high-profile case of spying” was during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, when New Zealand’s women’s football team spotted a drone above their training session before their game against Canada. French police found its operator: a member of Canada’s staff.

That it was Canada who “performed such an egregious breach of the rules”, a country “known for its people being polite, respectful, laidback and just terribly nice”, added to “the ironic drama”, said The Athletic.

‘Tainted triumph’

Back in the Championship, “spygate 2.0 has become the biggest crisis in play-off history”, said The Independent. And it risks being “Spygate £200 million”, the potential value of a place in the Premier League, if – as predicted – Southampton beat Hull in the final at Wembley on 23 May. If they do, it will be a “tainted triumph”.

The EFL is in an “impossible position”; Southampton would usually have 14 days to respond to the charges, but the EFL has asked the independent disciplinary commission to fast-track the case, given the time pressure. There are also “logistical issues as well as moral ones”.

The “nuclear option” – expelling Southampton from the play-offs – creates “an almighty mess”. But finding them guilty and fining them would cost far less than the prize for promotion, which isn’t likely to “assuage Middlesbrough”.

Meanwhile, Middlesbrough are in “limbo”, continuing to train in case they have to take Southampton’s place in the play-offs. Southampton or the EFL could also appeal any verdict, but Middlesbrough cannot, although they could pursue legal action.

Some Southampton fans are planning to go to Wembley “dressed as hedges or carrying binoculars”. But for Boro and the EFL “this is no laughing matter”.

Kimi Antonelli is too young to legally buy a drink in the US, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. But by the end of the Miami Grand Prix, the 19-year-old Italian had “most assuredly earned a stiffener”. Still in only his second season in Formula One, the Mercedes driver held firm in the face of “immense pressure” from last year’s champion, McLaren’s Lando Norris, to notch up his third straight victory.

In both his previous wins, in China and Japan, Antonelli greatly benefitted from his Mercedes car having a big pace advantage over its rivals, said Tom Cary in The Daily Telegraph. Miami, however, was a more even affair, with the likes of McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari having recently made upgrades that “closed the gap significantly”. That makes Sunday’s victory – which was founded on a successful undercutting strategy – all the more impressive.

Many predicted that Antonelli’s British teammate, George Russell, would be the dominant driver this season, said Jonathan McEvoy in the Daily Mail. But the Italian, to whom Russell was “meant to offer mentorship”, is proving a “mighty big thorn in his race overalls”. In Miami, Russell finished fourth, and now trails Antonelli by 20 points. “The Hard Rock Stadium track is not one Russell likes, so perhaps this should be filed as a minor setback.” But unless he improves, it may look like a “harbinger of things to come”.

What happened

LIV Golf, the PGA Tour rival launched in 2021 with financial backing from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, will lose that funding at the end of this season, The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations reported Wednesday. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi PIF, is stepping down as LIV chair, according to the Sports Business Journal.

Who said what

LIV Golf “will announce details of its strategic path forward” on Thursday, including new leadership and “a push to secure new, long-term financial partners,” CNBC said. LIV chief executive Scott O’Neil told TNT two weeks ago that if PIF funding ended, he would “work like crazy to create a business plan to keep us going.” But most likely, the Saudi withdrawal “sounds the death knell for the upstart that sowed chaos in professional golf,” the Journal said. It will be “nearly impossible” for LIV to carry on in “any resemblance to its current form after the Saudis lost billions on the endeavor.”

What next?

Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and other pro golfers who “abandoned the PGA Tour for nine-figure guaranteed contracts are now facing an uncertain future,” USA Today said. The “mainstream golf world” has already made clear it “isn’t ready to simply welcome them back,” the Journal said.

When the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in June, it may be missing something important: fans. Several factors, including political unrest and high transportation costs, are causing host cities across the United States to worry that the presumed economic bump from the World Cup may not occur.

What did the commentators say?

Eleven U.S. cities will be hosting World Cup games: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. These cities are dealing with everything from “labor strife and high ticket prices to geopolitical turmoil and culture-war politics fanned by President Donald Trump,” factors that are “turning the event into a nationwide stress test for the governmental institutions charged with pulling it off,” said Politico.

Many were hoping the World Cup would provide a “triumphal turn in the international spotlight,” but it is instead becoming a “case study in the local hazards of staging a spectacle at a moment of global disruption,” said Politico. Cooling forecasts are largely due to “ticket prices, inflation fears and anti-American sentiment,” said the Financial Times. Many hotels are reflecting this reality: Room rates for game days in “Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco have dropped about a third from their peak earlier this year.”

FIFA originally predicted the World Cup would give the U.S. a $30.5 billion economic boost. But the “demand has certainly not been at anywhere near that level,” Vijay Dandapani, the president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City, said to Forbes. International soccer fans were expected to provide a lifeline, as they typically “spend four times as much as domestic travelers,” said the outlet. But it is “unclear if foreign visitors will come in the numbers necessary to drive the promised economic boost.”

The White House’s “‘America First’ agenda and rhetoric have also fueled widespread perceptions that the country is unwelcoming,” said The Athletic, causing many international soccer fans to rethink their plans. The potential presence of immigration officers is worsening things for Europeans. The Trump administration’s immigration agenda has created “heightened anxiety about travel and attendance for both fans and teams,” said Politico. The tension is especially increased for Iran, as the ongoing war “has raised questions about whether that country’s squad will even play.”

Transportation has additionally played a role, especially in cities where the cost of living is higher. In Massachusetts, a game day train trip to the stadium near Boston will cost $80. In New Jersey, where the New York City-area games will be played, a ride will be $150. This is over an 11 times increase from the standard $12.90 train fare in New Jersey. FIFA is also charging an average of $175 for parking at most venues nationwide.

What next?

Trepidation over hosting the games in the U.S. “could be sufficient motivation” for global fans to “hold off until 2030, when the tournament will take place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco,” said the Financial Times. Amid growing tensions, the head of Norway’s soccer association has also called for Trump to be stripped of his recently awarded FIFA Peace Prize. But FIFA officials seem not to be too worried. The organization is “confident that the event will be a resounding success for everyone involved, all the participating teams, the fans from all around the world and the hosts,” FIFA spokesperson Bryan Swanson told Politico.

On many stretches of water in Britain over the summer months you will find people “wielding their paddles like modern-day Argonauts”, said The Economist.

Boosted by the Covid pandemic, the rise of stand-up paddleboarding has been sharp. One survey estimated that 4.5 million Britons had tried SUP, and people of all abilities now flock to rivers, lakes, canals and the coast to soak up the sun on their boards.

As summer fast approaches here are some of the best spots around the UK to explore by paddleboard.

Bala Lake, Snowdonia, Wales

With its “charming canals, rivers and dramatic coastlines”, Wales has many great paddleboarding locations, said Portia Jones in Wales Online.

Bala Lake, also known as Llyn Tegid, is the country’s largest natural lake at more than four miles long and a mile wide, and it “boasts the most inviting, clear water for paddling”. Bala Lake is also “famed for its impressive mountain scenery, rare wildlife and excellent fishing opportunities”.

Bala Watersports offers paddleboards to rent and you will need to collect your permit from the lake warden’s centre before taking to the water. There’s no need to stick to paddleboarding; there are plenty of opportunities for sailing, canoeing and wild swimming too.

Kingsbridge, Devon, England

The five-mile stretch of Salcombe Estuary and its surrounding rivers is “beautiful”, said Abigail Butcher in The Telegraph. Devon’s trademark “lush rolling hills” meet “clear and blue” water “lined with sandy beaches”. The wildlife is worth watching out for too, with regular sightings including seals, herons and egrets, and even basking sharks.

Most of the routes are suitable for “complete novices”, while expert paddlers can sign up for the “SUP the Creek” race in October – an annual event that includes a variety of challenges.

Portrush, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland

Paddleboarding in the sea can feel daunting, but not on the Causeway Coast, said Lisa Drewe in The Times. Beginners can start in the “sheltered waters” and “calm conditions” of Portrush Harbour, and those with more confidence can progress to trace the coastline past Ramore Head and the Skerries Islands. These spots reveal “glimpses of marine life”, and seagulls “wheel overhead”.

Again, equipment can be picked up on arrival at Portrush Surf School, and Freedive NI offers guided tours along the Causeway Coast, with sea cave explorations included. The workouts deserve a reward too, with plenty of cafés and pubs in the area to follow a long day on the water.

Regent’s Canal, London, England

Don’t fancy the open water? For an alternative in the heart of the city, head along the canal between Paddington and King’s Cross, said London’s The Standard. The waterway offers a “seamless blend of the contemporary, historic and wild”, giving you a “unique view of the capital’s industrial heritage”.

On the way, you pass “charming” Little Venice, “vibrant” Lisson Grove and a “scenic green stretch” next to Regent’s Park. Later on, the sights of Camden Market and Gasholder Park promise a lovely balance between the buzz and tranquillity of London.

Isle of Wight, England

Just a hop, skip and jump away from the mainland, the Isle of Wight has so many fresh- and salt-water paddle options, said Lisa Joyner and Rosie Stagg in Country Living. Compton Bay, tucked away on the west coast, is one of the island’s “best-kept secrets” with its “seaside promenades, chalky cliffs, rolling hills and sandy beaches”. You can also combine the on-water exploration with fossil hunting, surfing or wildlife watching.

Just along the coast is Freshwater Bay, closer towards the western tip. This has become something of a “magnet” for paddleboarders. Its “brilliant pebble beach” is popular all year round for swimming, walks and boating.

Has Japan broken with its pacifist past? Who or what is Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia? And why are sportspeople retiring later than they used to?

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What happened

A humanoid robot called Lightning won a half-marathon in Beijing on Sunday, beating his robotic competitors and the human runners in a parallel race by completing the 13-mile course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — nearly seven minutes faster than the world record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month.

Who said what

The victory of Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, marked a “significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race,” when the winning robot “finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds,” The Associated Press said. The “remarkable feat” was also a “big stride for China in its technological rivalry with the U.S.,” CNN said.

China already has “more robots at work” than “the rest of the world combined,” The New York Times said. Beijing also recently hosted the first Humanoid Robot Games, featuring “plenty of running, kicking and punching,” though the robots “also flailed around, crashed and fell over many times.”

What next?

The leap forward in China’s humanoid engineering “is genuinely impressive,” Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told the Times. But it’s “much less obvious” how a robot winning a half-marathon “translates into productivity and ultimately, profitability.”

“Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” wrote LIV Golf’s chief executive, Scott O’Neil, in an email to staff on Wednesday night, hours after an emergency meeting in New York over a “seismic” funding announcement.

“But what about beyond this season?” said The Telegraph. O’Neil’s email was an “attempt to calm ferocious speculation” that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is “pulling the plug” on the franchise, a project into which it has already sunk $5 billion (£3.7 billion).

With the future of the controversial tour under threat, a change in Saudi Arabia’s investment priorities could spell the beginning of the end for its sporting soft power.

‘Dying days’

“Farewell, LIV Golf, we hardly knew ye,” said The Independent. Four years after initiating a “prolonged and ultimately pointless civil war” with the PGA, “LIV is dead, or at least in its dying days”. There had been “signs of creaking” for some time now, with major stars like Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed departing, and “more would surely have followed, given time”. Fundamentally, though, the tour couldn’t ever quite “shake” the sense that the players were “doing it for the money”.

LIV Golf was “supposed to be the breakaway tour that changed golf as we know it”, said BBC Sport. Though it “certainly managed to disrupt the status quo” with the help of an “eye-watering” amount of money from the PIF, it has failed to make returns. The tour’s net losses have totalled more than “more than $1.1 billon (£810 million) since it was established in 2021”; even O’Neil admitted that the tour would not be profitable for another “five-ten years”.

If they ever make a documentary about LIV, “it will look a lot like the one about that calamitous Fyre Festival”, said Sean O’Brien on TalkSport. The dominant narrative is of Saudi Arabia trying to buy “disruption, influence, and a seat at the table with professional golf’s establishment”. Some of the game’s big names who rejected offers to join the tour, such as Tiger Woods, Scottie Scheffler and Ryder Cup and recent Masters winner Rory McIlroy, have been shown to be “on the right side of history”. McIlroy, in particular, was thought to have turned down an offer in excess of Jon Rahm’s reported £500 million contract. In the end, the tour’s only purpose was to “make rich men absurdly richer”.

Changing world

The change in Saudi Arabia’s stance comes as the PIF announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday to make up a budget deficit of $73 billion. It is expected to “narrow” its funding focus and take stock of a “decade-long spending splurge”, said the Financial Times. One thing’s for sure, the Kingdom’s apparent coldness towards LIV Golf “will reverberate through professional sport”.

The focus for Riyadh has always been money, and diversifying its economic interest away from oil, said The i Paper. Though there was enthusiasm from “golf-mad” PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan, “all that matters” to Saudi sovereign Mohammed bin Salman – “who wouldn’t know a five-iron from gridiron” – is return on investment.

For a while, the soft power of sport was a “critical driver” in Saudi Arabia’s repositioning, but the “world has changed since then”. Criticism of the country’s approach to human rights has, “if not washed clean off”, then at least “shunted down the list of global concerns”, while the Iran war has “reinforced the strategic and diplomatic importance of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East”.

This is unlikely to mean a complete retreat from the sporting world, however. The Kingdom is still a major investor in F1 and football, including as hosts of the 2034 men’s World Cup. For now, Riyadh will focus on events that “serve a PR purpose” or “promise a return on investment”. “Golf falls outside both metrics.”

Tottenham Hotspur’s defeat at Sunderland plunged them into the Premier League relegation zone with only six matches left to save their season.

No football club wants to be relegated but for a famous name like Tottenham, the drop can be particularly tough because “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”, said The i Paper.

Departing jewels 

The north London club have won two league titles, eight FA Cups, four League Cups, and four European trophies in their illustrious past. As recently as 2019, they were beaten finalists in the Champions League. Spurs are the ninth richest club in the world but it’s their position in the Premier League that really matters right now – and they are third from bottom.

Spurs’ wage bill is the seventh highest in the Premier League at £2.63 million per week – nearly twice as much as relegation rivals West Ham. A clause in player contracts imposes a 50% pay cut if the club are relegated but sports finance expert Rob Wilson said this is “nowhere near enough”. The club would need to cut wages by a minimum 75% to “balance” the books.

The club would then need to sell the “crown jewels” in the squad, such as Archie Gray, Djed Spence, Dominic Solanke and Cristian Romero. Rival clubs will “squeeze down the value” of players and “open with offers 30-50% below Spurs’ asking price”, said Wilson. Its annual revenue, which was £565.3 million at the last count, would be expected to drop by £200 million after relegation.

On the brighter side, Spurs would receive “parachute payments”. These are a series of “solidarity payments” the Premier League makes to relegated clubs for up to three years, to “help them adapt to reduced revenues”, such as “significantly less TV revenue”, said the BBC.

Big target

The experience of other big clubs relegated from the Premier League offers precious little hope for Spurs fans. Between 2000 and 2003, Leeds United finished in the top five of the league and reached the semi-final of the Champions League in 2001, but the club were still relegated in 2004. Three years later, Leeds dropped into League One, the third tier, where they spent three seasons. It took them 16 years to get back to the Premier League.

When Manchester City were relegated from the Premier League in 1996, they too ended up in the third tier. They returned in 2002, after changing divisions six times in a “dizzying seven-season period”, said The Sporting News.

When Aston Villa were relegated in 2016, they won only one of their first 12 matches in the Championship, partly because opponents often raised their game against such a big club. One Villa player, Ashley Westwood, said you play with “a big target on your back” in the Championship. “Did teams try harder against us? It certainly felt like that,” he told The Athletic.

The “wider fallout” of Villa’s drop included a redundancy programme to reduce the workforce by around a third. Steve Hollis, the chairman, was “left astonished” after some of the staff told him they would be “willing to work for nothing” because they “loved the club so much”.

Italy “woke up ⁠angry and disillusioned” after their play-off defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina meant they missed out on a third consecutive World Cup, “prolonging a sporting nightmare for ⁠the football-mad country”, said Al Jazeera.

Italy have won the tournament four times but are now suffering from a “World Cup curse”, said Corriere della Sera on its front page. The last time the Azzurri “actually won” a knockout match on the game’s biggest stage was “before the first iPhone was released”, said Politico.

‘Outrage across the country’

“The Italian catastrophe has now lost its sense of shock,” said Luigi Garlando in Gazzetta dello Sport. “Rather than being unpredictable, it seems to be the norm.” So for the first time an “entire generation will have grown up” without seeing Italy at a World Cup.

The “influx” of overseas players that headed to Serie A in the late 1990s “came at a cost”, said the BBC, because “homegrown talents” then found “opportunities” in the top flight “increasingly hard to come by”.

The Italian league is suffering from financial problems, so as Premier League clubs “benefit from ever-increasing TV deals” and other European leagues “attract heavy investment”, Serie A has seen that type of revenue “stagnate”.

The play-off defeat “triggered outrage across the country”, said Al Jazeera. “It’s clear that Italian football needs to be rebuilt from the ground up,” said Italy’s sports minister Andrea Abodi. Gabriele Gravina, president of the Italian Football Federation, has ⁠quit in the wake of the defeat, after he initially “lashed out” at a “perceived lack of support” for football from the government.

‘In need of tearing down’

The problems go beyond the national team. A 98th-minute penalty earned Atalanta a place in the last 16 of the Champions League – but they are the only Italian club left in the elite European competition. The “giants” of Serie A have “fallen”, said Sky Sports.

The “lack of investment” in Serie A clubs has seen a “dip in player quality”. The top division is “relying more and more” on older players and there’s “a lack of promising Italian youth coming through”. There’s also a “lack of tactical innovation” at the “heart of Italian football”.

Even if “the state of Italian football in 2026 isn’t alarming”, there are bells “sounding anyway, right now”, said Mark White on Four Four Two. The “colosseums” of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, famous stadiums like the San Siro, Delle Alpi and Olimpico, are “either crumbling, torn down or since abandoned altogether”. Italian football itself is “in need of tearing down and starting again”.

Meanwhile, there’s “still a chance” that Italy will end up at the 2026 World Cup finals, said Give Me Sport. With “uncertainty” over whether Iran will compete at the tournament, it’s thought that Italy could be Fifa’s preferred choice to replace the Middle Eastern nation if necessary.

What happened

The International Olympic Committee on Thursday announced that transgender women athletes will be barred from competing in women’s events starting with the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The announcement ends “months of speculation” over how the governing body would address one of the “most contentious issues facing global sports,” The New York Times said. It was the IOC’s “most consequential” decision since Kirsty Coventry took over as the organization’s first woman president last June.

Who said what

“Eligibility for any female category event” at any IOC event is “now limited to biological females,” the IOC said in a statement. Any athlete who wants to compete in a women’s category must take a mandatory one-time gene test to determine if they have a Y chromosome. “We know that this topic is sensitive,” Coventry said. But the “science” conducted by the IOC’s “medical experts” shows that “biological males” have inherent physical advantages, and “at the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat.”

Critics warned that the new policy “extends beyond transgender athletes and could subject all women competitors to invasive scrutiny,” Advocate said. The “potential” for “increased ‘gender policing’ of all female athletes” is “unwelcome,” said Outsports. The French Olympic Committee said the genetic tests “raise major ethical and scientific concerns” and also “practical difficulties,” since French “bioethics laws and the civil code” prohibit their use.

What next?

The IOC’s policy is “widely expected to be adopted by international sports federations and become a universal rule for competitors in female elite sports,” Reuters said. But it also “can — and likely will — be challenged at the Court of Arbitration for Sport,” The Associated Press said. Any challenge would examine the “science underpinning IOC research which was not published” on Thursday.

What happened

Venezuela beat Team USA 3-2 on Tuesday night to win its first World Baseball Classic title, with Eugenio Suárez’s ninth-inning tiebreaking double topping Bryce Harper’s eighth-inning two-run home run. The championship game, in Miami’s loanDepot Park, capped the sixth edition of the 20-nation event, which is held every three years. As the heavily Latino crowd cheered Venezuela’s win in Miami, thousands of people also celebrated in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

Who said what

“Thirty million people around the world were watching this game today,” Venezuela captain Salvador Perez said after the game. “The World Series, as you all know, is one of the most important championships in the major leagues, but when you fight for your country, that goes beyond.” Team USA captain Aaron Judge, who went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts, said his teammates “put on this uniform, signed up to go out there and get a gold medal,” and “we just fell short.”

This year’s Team USA was “the greatest collection of American baseball players ever assembled for the World Baseball Classic,” bringing together “All-Stars and MVPs and future Hall of Famers,” said The Athletic. But “despite the gaudy statistics and lucrative contracts,” the team “lacked cohesion and performed as less than the sum of its parts.” Venezuela was overshadowed ahead of the tournament by the U.S., Japan and the Dominican Republic, the only other Latin American team to win the WBC, in 2013. But Venezuela’s “success was not that surprising,” The Associated Press said, given that 63 Venezuelan-born players “appeared on Major League Baseball opening-day rosters last year.”

What next?

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, declared Wednesday a National Day of Joy, giving everyone but essential workers the day off. Team USA — which has only won one WBC championship, in 2017 — will get its next shot at the title in 2029.

What happened

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) on Tuesday filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing the online prediction marketplace of “running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law.” The 20-count indictment alleges that Kalshi illegally accepted bets on sporting outcomes, political events and election results, among other “unlicensed wagering.”

Who said what

“Arizona will not be bullied into letting any company place itself above state law,” Mayes said in a statement. The criminal charges, the first filed by a state against Kalshi, mark a “new front in a high-stakes legal battle over whether prediction markets should be subject to the same rules as gambling companies,” The Associated Press said. President Donald Trump, whose son Don Jr. is a “strategic adviser” for Kalshi, has thrown his “support behind the multibillion-dollar prediction market industry.” Several other states have sued Kalshi and its rival, Polymarket.

The Arizona lawsuit “comes less than a week” after Kalshi filed a preemptive suit, asking a federal judge to rule that its wagers are “not gambling but instead something more akin to trading futures on commodities,” the Arizona Capitol Times said. The company argues its “contracts” can only be regulated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, “out of reach of state authorities.” CFTC chair Michael Selig appeared to agree, calling the Arizona suit a “jurisdictional dispute” that is “entirely inappropriate as a criminal prosecution.”

What next?

The outcome of the legal actions in Arizona and “at least nine other states” could have “sweeping implications for how sports betting — which makes up roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume — is regulated in the U.S.,” the AP said. Legal experts predict the dispute over prediction markets “has a good chance of making its way to the Supreme Court,” Axios said.

This summer’s controversy-laden men’s Fifa World Cup took on a whole new layer of jeopardy when the US, the main co-host, attacked Iran, one of the competitors.

The football tournament, hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico and due to kick off on 11 June, had already been beset with criticism. There were worries about logistics and infrastructure, calls for a boycott over Donald Trump’s travel bans, and fears about fans’ safety in a US where Ice agents have been sweeping into cities for violent immigration crackdowns. Fifa itself has also been under fire – for its president Gianni Infantino’s sycophancy to the US president, and its “strategic partnership” with Trump’s Board of Peace.

Now Iran’s participation has been thrown into doubt by the war in the Middle East. Fifa seems unwilling to grant the Iranian football federation’s request to relocate its US fixtures to Mexico, and Trump has already said it would not be “appropriate” for the Iranian players to take part “for their own life and safety”.

Will Iran participate?

“When Trump has explicitly stated that he cannot ensure the security of the Iranian national team, we will certainly not travel to the United States,” said Mehdi Taj, the president of Iran’s football federation, on the Iranian embassy in Mexico’s X account.

Moving Iran’s fixtures to Mexico would be logistically tricky but not unprecedented. But then there’s the issue of the knockout stages: if the US and Iran both finish as the runner-up in their group, they would play each other in the last 32. Should Iran decide to withdraw, they would be the first qualifying team to do so since 1950.

As the schedule currently stands, Iran’s first group fixture is against New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June. New Zealand told The Athletic that it is continuing to “monitor the situation” but is making plans to play Iran “until we hear otherwise”.

What about other Middle Eastern teams?

Iraq has a chance to qualify for its first World Cup finals since 1986 but it needs to win a play-off against either Suriname or Bolivia on 31 March – in Mexico. With airspace currently closed over the Middle East, it’s hard to see how the Iraqis can travel to their match.

The Iraqi team coach, Graham Arnold, has called for the play-off to be postponed, and the country’s football chief, Adnan Dirjal, has, has written to Fifa to explain the “difficulty of the journey”. In the meantime, he has made plans for the team to travel Mexico by private plane, according to the BBC.

What else is a concern?

There are worries that Ice officers will be deployed at US World Cup venues, for security purposes. And there is alarm about the wave of violence in Mexico since the death of a cartel boss in Jalisco state. Guadalajara, the state capital, is due to host four games.

Last month, the EU Sports Commissioner, Glenn Micallef, urged Gianni Infantino to “help safeguard fans”, said Politico. He has since asked again as violence escalates in the Middle East but said there has been “no further communication from Fifa”. It’s “legitimate” to seek assurances from a “public security point of view”, particularly as “one of the hosts of this biggest sporting event in the world is party to a war,” he told the news site. “Let’s say there’s room for more clarity.”

Fifa also has “a lot to answer for” on its role with the Trump-backed Board of Peace, said Micallef. It may have pledged $75 million for football infrastructure in Gaza, but Europe would “prefer to partner up” with organisations that “respect the international rules-based order, like Unesco and Unicef” on such sports-related projects.

Safety and security at the World Cup is a “top priority”, said a Fifa spokesperson. We are “confident that efforts being made by Canada, Mexico and the US will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved”.

Max Dowman made football history on Saturday. Running from his own half, he fired into an empty net to secure Arsenal a 2-0 win over Everton and become the youngest goalscorer in the Premier League.

But afterwards, in the “ecstatic dressing room, the man of the match wasn’t there”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent. That’s because Dowman “isn’t actually the man of the match”, but a child. The midfielder, aged 16 years and 75 days, isn’t allowed in the same dressing room as the adults, and gets changed in his own space near the referees’ room.

‘Never left alone’

Dowman “probably cannot even remember a time when he was not skipping past opponents with a ball at his feet”, said Sam Dean in The Telegraph. There has been “a buzz” around his name for years. He was scouted when he was just four; at 13, he became the youngest player to represent Arsenal’s under-18s; at 14, he was the youngest to play for their under-21s. He also played for the England under-17s at 14, and started training with Arsenal’s first team. Earlier this year, he became the youngest player in Champions League history and the youngest starter for Arsenal.

There are “clear rules in place” for minors playing adult football, said BBC Sport. Dowman has to change in a separate room from his teammates, before going into the main changing room for pep talks. The teenager, who is due to sit his GCSEs this summer, divides his non-playing time between a private tutor and school. One member of Arsenal’s security team is “assigned to stay close to Dowman at all times”.

“In the eyes of the law, he is still a child,” said former Leeds United welfare officer Lucy Ward. “He looks and behaves like an adult, he’s in an adult environment and scores goals for Arsenal, but the law says that he is treated as a child until he is 18.” Dowman is “never left alone with anyone” who hasn’t been cleared by a DBS check. His parents must give consent when he travels for an away match, and he has to have a chaperone. “He doesn’t want to stand out – he just wants to fit in – but these safeguarding measures are in place for young players.”

‘Right temperament to deliver’

Last season, Dowman was “so far ahead of his opponents and teammates that he was almost playing a different sport”, said Dean in The Telegraph. It was obvious he had “outgrown youth football”. If Premier League rules hadn’t prevented him from playing for the senior team last year, “he might have broken through even earlier”.

In January, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta likened the teenager to a young Lionel Messi. That was after Dowman signed a pre-contract agreement with the north London club (his father handled the negotiations). A professional deal will follow when he turns 17 in December.

“For all the skill, though, you need to have the right temperament to deliver” at that age, said Sky Sports. For every wunderkind who went on to a glittering senior career, there are “players who fell through the trapdoor of promise”.

“He doesn’t seem to be fazed by the occasion or the moment or the context or the opponent,” Arteta said on Saturday. “I’ve seen a lot of players with talent but at 16, very few that can cope with that level of demand.”

Dowman’s goal will “go down in Arsenal folklore”, said Sky Sports. The “touch of the head” to gain control of the ball, the “physicality” required to get past Everton left-back Vitalii Mykolenko, and the touch that sent midfielder Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall “to the shops”. It took Arsenal closer to their first Premier League title in two decades, but it looked like Dowman “had been doing that for years”.

“I just felt it was a magical moment for Max Dowman, a magical moment for Arsenal and absolutely it stopped me in my tracks,” said football pundit Gary Neville. “This kid does look different.”

The winter months in Europe are dominated by skiers heading for the Alps. But before you “(snow)plough on with your usual ski holiday booking”, why not see what else is out there to scratch the adrenaline itch, said Rhiannon Batten in The Times.

If there was one thing to take from the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina this year, it’s that snow sports can take many, many forms. Here are some of our top recommendations for your upcoming coolcations across Europe.

Skijöring in Switzerland

The country’s “sporty mountain resorts” have always offered “far more than just downhill skiing”, said National Geographic. As you can imagine with such isolated Alpine communities, traditionally “getting from A to B in winter has often required ingenuity”.

Enter “skijöring”, also known as “horse-powered skiing”. The sport was exhibited at the first Winter Olympics, in Chamonix, France, in 1924. Try it for yourself in the Alpine resort village of Arosa, where a “horse-drawn sleigh takes riders from railway station to hotel”.

But perhaps the crown jewel is skijöring across the “sparkling Lake St Moritz”. With winter walking, ice skating and snowshoeing also on offer, Switzerland offers “some of the most diverse ways to have fun on frozen water”.

Wolf tracking in Abruzzo, Italy

Wolves have been “making a comeback” in Italy, said Batten. As a result of rewilding drives in Abruzzo National Park, visitors have the “chance to find out more about this keystone species” and its historical links to the region.

With trips available to Apennine Wolf Museum, the more adventurous can also embark on “hikes, snowshoe expeditions and torchlight forays into the surrounding mountains in the hope of sightings and to listen to the howling”. On your return, traditional “homemade pasta, proper pizzas and cups of rich hot chocolate” are the perfect way to warm up after your adventure.

Hiking in Germany

“It’s a mystery as to why the spectacular landscapes of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in eastern Germany remain so under the radar,” said Annabelle Thorpe in The Guardian. This is a hiker’s dream, with “sandstone cliffs, dramatic gorges” and “flat-topped mesas”.

There is a famous self-guided walking tour through the region – known as “Saxon Switzerland” – which “takes in quiet villages of timber-framed cottages and dense pine forest, cloaking the peaks that sweep up to the sandstone spires”. Starting in Bad Schandau, “home to the spectacular, 11-metre-high Kuhstall rock gate and the beautiful Lichtenhain waterfall”, it provides plenty of opportunity to indulge in the area’s culinary delights. Expect piles of Spätzle, sausage and lentil soup, and marzipan cakes at traditional “Berggasthofs”, or mountain inns, en route.

Northern Lights tours in Norway

“Watching the ethereal Northern Lights as they dance across the skies is possibly one of the most awe-inspiring activities you can enjoy on a snow holiday,” said Jo Blyth in Country Living. Alta in the far north of Norway is nicknamed the “Northern Lights city” for a reason. It is one of the best places in the country to see the aurora borealis, so consider embarking on a tour to “discover the magic of Norway’s fjords, villages, and coastal towns in their winter glory”.

North Korea, one of the world’s most secretive and patriarchal countries, dominates in a surprising arena: women’s football.

The hermit kingdom became a powerhouse after the regime invested heavily in the women’s game as a tool of soft power and propaganda. The youth team still excels internationally, but after losing the Asian Cup final to Australia in 2010 the senior team “all but disappeared from global competition”, said The Guardian.

Now, the Eastern Azaleas are back in the tournament, playing their opening match against Uzbekistan in Sydney tomorrow. Invigorated by a “new generation of youth World Cup winners”, they are “hoping to return to the summit of Asian football”.

Rise and fall

At Fifa’s annual congress in 1986, the Norwegian delegate “demanded the creation of a World Cup for women”, said The Guardian. North Korean officials, so the story goes, were “inspired”. They returned to Pyongyang with a plan to use women’s football as a “tool to reassert their collapsing power on the world stage”.

Like China, the government saw sport as an opportunity to “strengthen their international profile”. Under Kim Jong Il, the women’s game “became a proxy platform” for North Korea’s political agenda. The government introduced development programmes in schools, built new facilities and even had teams in the military where players trained full-time at the state’s expense. That investment “paid off almost immediately”.

Between the 1990s and the 2010s, North Korea had one of the world’s best women’s football teams, winning three Asian Cup titles and more trophies across the continent. Then Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011 and, like his father, made competitive sport a “key policy priority”, said Jung Woo Lee, senior sport lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, on The Conversation. Any victory on the global stage “helps boost nationalism among the country’s people”. As North Korea grew more internationally isolated, sport became one of the only avenues through which it could assert itself.

But in 2011, a major doping scandal “put the brakes on this success”. Five players tested positive for a banned steroid at the Women’s World Cup in Germany. North Korea had a “bizarre excuse”, said The Times, claiming they had been “struck by lightning” and given a traditional Chinese medicine of deer musk gland, which caused the positive tests. Fifa was “not persuaded”.

North Korea was banned from the 2015 World Cup, then failed to qualify for the Asian Cup in 2018 and the World Cup in 2019. Tightening sanctions also made it impossible for players to sign overseas contracts. Then, when the pandemic hit, North Korea shut its borders and withdrew from both tournaments.

The missing decade

During the senior team’s missing decade, the youth teams flourished. The regime has “developed a sporting powerhouse of young girls”, said The Observer.

In 2013, it opened a state-run elite training facility to develop talent. At the Pyongyang International Football School, young girls are “selected, developed and educated following a highly disciplined and scientific approach”, said DW.

The first generation of graduates from that school are the reigning under-20 and under-17 World Cup and Asian Cup champions, and have won five of these titles since 2020. They have “cemented their status as the dominant force in women’s youth football”.

Their success is “the product of a broader strategy aimed at strengthening national pride and boosting the country’s international standing”, said Lee. Domestically, the regime uses the popular sport of football as a “propaganda tool to glorify their leaders and also how great their country is”, Lee told DW.

Many North Korean media reports say that players under a communist regime “do whatever they can, even if they’re physically exhausted”, said Lee. “Then they directly compare those mentalities with capitalist countries.” When those athletes are exhausted, they are substituted.

“That psychological element has seemingly given the team an edge, but beyond a strong sense of patriotism and years of disciplined work lies the motivation of a life-changing reward.” The regime can give players living in poorer rural areas, where food and healthcare shortages are common, a chance of a far better life in Pyongyang. It’s like “winning a lottery”, said Lee.

It remains to be seen whether North Korea can qualify for the senior women’s World Cup in Brazil next year. But this year’s Asian Cup, said The Guardian, will be “the best glimpse yet of whether this old, unlikely superpower of women’s football is rumbling back to life”.

Competitive sports are a reliable foundation on which to build solid comedy and drama. The great thing about these eight superb shows is that you don’t need to know much of anything at all about sports to enjoy them.

‘Sports Night’ (1998-2000)

Creator Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived but beloved cult classic followed the hosts and producers of a fictional nightly sports recap show trying to compete with ESPN’s pioneering “SportsCenter.” Josh Charles starred in a breakout role as the show’s co-host Dan Rydell, alongside Casey McCall (Peter Krause), as the pair and executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) chase the ESPN ratings behemoth.

Looking back, it is truly hard to believe that ABC saddled the series and its witty, fast-moving dialogue with a laugh track in its first season. A show “populated by characters whose jobs define who they are,” it was “full of walk-and-talks, clipboards and very important meetings,” said Ciara Moloney at Paste Magazine. The result was “unadulterated Sorkin — with all of his strengths and none of his weaknesses.” (Prime Video)

‘Friday Night Lights’ (2006-2011)

Adapted from the hit 2004 film, “Friday Night Lights” is an intimate look at a Texas high school football team and one of the last truly magnificent network television shows before the streaming era gave us the concept of “prestige TV.” Kyle Chandler is the show’s moral center as Coach Eric Taylor, whose team is the pride of fictional Dillon, Texas. Connie Britton plays his wife, Tami, and the strength of the pair’s performances covered up for some uneven acting from the high school ensemble. The first season of the show was “great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red,” said Virginia Heffernan at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘The League’ (2009-2015)

Fantasy sports are an enormous, if niche, industry, and FX’s “The League” might be the only sports show ever to focus on a group of friends and their sometimes relationship-wrecking obsession with this odd little hobby. Mark Duplass stars as Pete, the reigning champ of the titular fantasy football league when the show starts, and Katie Aselton is a consistent standout as football savant Jenny, who competes in the league with her husband, Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi).

Featuring “time-honored elements of screwball comedy,” the best humor in this fantastic series comes not from the league but “from equal opportunity humiliation that is the basis of their friendships,” said David Wiegand at SFGate. Like the amoral gang in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” no one in “The League” ever grows or learns — and that’s part of the fun. (Disney+)

‘Eastbound & Down’ (2009-2013)

Washed-up major-leaguer Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) returns to his hometown to take a job as a substitute gym teacher after yapping his way out of professional baseball in creators Ben Best, Jody Hill and Danny McBrides’s cringe-inducing HBO Max comedy. The show’s gamble is that rather than a redemption arc, Powers’ “very public crash and burn is only the beginning of his downward spiral,” said Wired, exacerbated by him having the “capacity to care about and even love others, but he’ll sacrifice anyone if it means he can step back into the spotlight.” Harboring dreams of returning to baseball, he crashes with his brother Dustin (John Hawkes) and tries to reconnect with high school flame, April (Katy Mixon). (HBO Max)

‘GLOW’ (2017-2019)

The 1980s-set “GLOW” gave us three superb seasons of wrestling and drama before Netflix axed it. Alison Brie is Ruth Wilder, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles whose career is going nowhere. She accepts an invitation to audition for the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, where she is cast along with her estranged friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), and directed by aging film director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), who looks like he would rather be literally anywhere else.

But when Ruth takes on the moniker “Zoya the Destroya” she transforms her professional life and finds a path she can really throw herself into while trying to repair the damage to her relationship with Debbie. Together their exploits create a “quiet and simple masterpiece that deserves to be the most popular show on television,” said Matt Gannon at TV Wasteland. (Netflix)

‘Brockmire’ (2017-2020)

A decade after a drunken, on-air meltdown caused him to lose his job as a major league baseball announcer, Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) returns stateside to take a job with the woebegone, minor league Morristown Frackers. The team’s owner, Jules James (Amanda Peet), thinks that hiring the washed-up Brockmire will put her team and its rust belt town on the map.

This somewhat familiar set-up is elevated by the show’s surreal sense of humor, as well as by the foul-mouthed Brockmire’s endless antics. The show works “both as a snapshot of this aging oddity of Americana and a universal story about a washed-up person coming to terms with himself,” said Sonia Saraiya at Variety. (Netflix)

‘Ted Lasso’ (2020-)

When it debuted on August 14, 2020, the world was six months into the miserable Covid-19 pandemic, and the Apple TV+ dramedy was not only a poignant, low-stakes lifeline for millions of viewers, it also put the relatively new streamer on the map with its first big hit. Jason Sudeikis plays the title character, a U.S. college football coach who agrees to accept a bizarre job offer to manage a fictional English Premiere League soccer team, AFC Richmond.

Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) acquired the team in a divorce from her gross ex-husband and wants to run it into the ground to spite him only to find that she can’t resist Lasso’s aw-shucks charm and that his leadership sparks a renewal led by veteran star Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). Sudeikis’ Lasso is “practically impossible not to like,” said Nick Harley at Den of Geek, and the “easy charms of a well-executed, feel-good sports story make it a breezy, low-effort watch that just about anyone can enjoy.” (Apple TV+)

‘Heated Rivalry’ (2025)

This discourse-driving hit is set during the Obama years (Yes, 2017 is now the stuff of period pieces) and depicts a secret, steamy romance between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two young stars who break into fictional Major League Hockey at the same time for different clubs. Early in the series, their romance takes place mostly in hotels as the pair struggle with how they might be perceived if word gets out, especially the Russian Rozanov, whose home country is considerably more dangerous for gay men than Hollander’s.

The sex is “plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot,” said Naomi Fry at The New Yorker. But a bigger “part of the pleasure for viewers” is the “show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does.” (HBO Max)

The Premier League has turned a “tactical corner”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. Corners and set-pieces generally are back in fashion, much to the annoyance of some fans who claim they are the antithesis of the beautiful game.

Clubs are employing specialist set-piece coaches, and players are celebrating winning corners, allowing them to perform their well-rehearsed routines in front of goal. After years of “strategy and technique”, and the dominance of patient, possession-based football, fans are concerned that packed penalty areas and the all-in wrestling between opposing players is ruining the spectacle of the English game.

‘It doesn’t feel right’

Most of what goes on from dead-ball situations “is not strictly against the rules per se”, but it’s a question of optics, said Football 365. Players can stand where they want, and have no obligation to move to allow others to challenge for the ball. The issue is that when “12-14 players” are all doing the same thing in such an enclosed space, it “jars with what the game is supposed to be. It doesn’t feel right.”

Tony Pulis, who managed Stoke City and Crystal Palace in the Premier League in the late 2000s and 2010s, was known for his “pragmatic” approach, he said on the BBC. “I was seen as a dinosaur for my focus on dead-ball situations and long throws”, but “I knew back then how important they were”.

Premier League leaders Arsenal have led the way in the resurgence of set-pieces. Their 37 league goals from corners since the start of the 2023-24 season far eclipsing the next-best 26 by German side Borussia Monchengladbach out of all teams in Europe’s top five leagues.

Some people are “snobbish” about the role of set-pieces in the game, said Pulis, but “the expectation, and the pressure they put on the opposition, is amazing”. Ignore the inevitable criticism, “what matters is winning”.

The “suddenness” of the change in approach from English teams has been “remarkable” but this “present trend will fade away”, said Wilson in The Guardian. The obsession with possession-based tactics, as well as widening financial inequality, has led to opposition teams defending in a compact “low block”, feeling unable to compete skill-wise. A “reversion to something more physical” in the game certainly poses a threat, but in a game of tactical cycles “this too will pass”.

‘Action is needed’

Some scenes in the recent game between Everton and Manchester United were an “absolute disgrace”, said Martin Samuel in The Times. We have grown used to a “melee of grabbing, holding, pushing, pulling, grappling, backing in” penalty areas. The game has become dominated by a “supposedly unsolvable wrestling issue” and fans are not happy about it.

Nothing is being done to safeguard the “beautiful game”. Governing bodies “obsess over trivia and the trivial”, exemplified by the International Football Association Board prioritising things like five-second countdowns for goal-kicks. “No group is less qualified to decide on football’s rules than Ifab”, and it has already made a “mess” of video replays, offside and handball rulings.

“Enough already,” said Graham Scott, a former Premier League referee, in The Telegraph. Corners are “ruining the spectacle” of football with all the “wrestling, grappling and holding”, but referees have a “nearly impossible job to decide who is truly to blame”. Occasionally, a clear pull or obstruction in the fracas around the six-yard box is “black and white, but there are more than 50 shades of grey in between”. With fans having little “appetite” for lengthy VAR delays, officials must “walk a tightrope” to decide what is “fair and foul”.

So “action is needed”. To try to fix the issue, “I would imitate hockey by forcing teams to place a certain number of players in the other half” to reduce congestion. In a “more radical move”, defenders could be inside the six-yard box and attackers outside it when a corner is taken, separating them entirely.

What happened

The 2026 Winter Olympics concluded in Italy Sunday with a closing ceremony in Verona’s 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater. Verona is about halfway between Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, the two host cities for the Games, and people in the stadium watched via video link as the Olympic flames were extinguished in each city’s cauldron. In the final competition of the Games, the U.S. men’s hockey team beat Canada in overtime Sunday to win their first Olympic gold medal since 1980.

Who said what

“Thank you Italy, for these magical Games,” International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry said, in Italian, at the closing ceremony. “You delivered a new kind of Winter Games and you set a very high standard for the future.” If the “opening ceremony emphasized the unprecedented spread-out nature of these Games,” The Athletic said, “the closing ceremony brought them back together.” It “opened with a whimsical tribute to Italian lyric opera,” and included aerial ballet, Italian rock and a DJ set, before ending with a light show, The Associated Press said.

Italy won its highest Winter Olympics medal count ever — 30, including 10 gold — putting it in third place behind Norway (41 medals, including 18 gold) and the U.S. (33 medals, including 12 gold). It was a “Winter Olympics to remember,” with “drama, thrills, moments of hilarity and plenty of gripping medal action,” CNN said. And the concluding “frenetic” men’s hockey final was “an instant classic.”

What next?

The Winter Olympic baton “now passes to the French Alps, which are expected to follow a similar blueprint of using multiple existing winter sports venues in 2030,” Reuters said. But first, the Milan Cortina Paralympics will begin March 6 with an opening ceremony in the same Verona Arena, and Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics.

In an Olympic event as fast as downhill skiing or speed skating, the margin between winners and losers can be measured by thousandths of a second.

Careers are “forever altered by that tiny difference”, said NBC News. There is a “baseline expectation” that “every result must be perfect”. And that is “determined by the most important team at the Olympics you don’t know about”: the Games’ timekeepers.

‘Tiny calibrations of a split second’

Swiss watchmaker Omega has been the official timekeeper of every Olympic event for nearly 100 years, initially chosen for the 1932 Los Angeles games as it was the only watch brand capable of providing accurate timing to the nearest tenth of a second.

The company dispatched one “intrepid watchmaker” from its Swiss headquarters with 30 high-precision stopwatches in his suitcase, said The Times. “Each night he would take the stopwatches back to his hotel room and recalibrate them, before handing them back to race officials the next morning.”

Omega now provides the timing for all 116 events, including (for the first time this year) ski mountaineering. The intervening years have, of course, seen “extraordinary technical developments”. Omega arrived in Paris for the 2024 Summer Games with “the most advanced tech it has ever delivered”: 350 tonnes of equipment, including 200km of cables, hundreds of scoreboards, and 550 professional timekeepers. The days of a ribbon breaking across a winning runner’s chest are “long gone”. World records are now regularly broken; margins of winning come down to “tiny calibrations of a split second”.

No margin for error

“We’ve come quite a long way since one watchmaker travelled” from Bienne, said Forbes. Planning for the current Milano-Cortina Games began three years ago, with more than 300 timekeepers and 130 tons of equipment dedicated to the Games, including high-speed cameras that can capture up to 40,000 digital images per second. This information can then be fed into AI models specifically programmed for each sport to produce graphic recreations of every movement. Judges have access to that data instantly – and this year, for the first time, so will viewers.

“For a person who is following action sports not on TV every weekend but once every four years, it’s very difficult to understand the differences in performances,” said Alain Zobrist, chief executive of Omega Timing. We are “trying to explain where these differences are and how these differences may impact the judging.”

But the final call is still human: an operator looks at a monitor with footage from the finish-line cameras, and “manually places a cursor where the athlete crosses the finish”, said NBC News.

“What you cannot learn is the pressure that comes with it when you operate it,” said Zobrist. “We take a lot of pride doing it, but it also humbles us a lot.” Billions of people are watching and waiting for the results to appear. An operator knows they’re “not allowed” to make mistakes; “as soon as you push that enter button, the result is released and public”.

Olympic time-keeping has grown so complex that preparations are well underway for the return of the games to Los Angeles in 2028. The only device still used that hasn’t changed since 1932? “A metal bell is still rung by hand to mark a race’s last lap.”

The International Olympic Committee has boasted that Milano-Cortina 2026 is “the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games in history”. But there’s actually one sport women don’t even get to try.

For all the claims about “the highest level of female participation in Winter Games history”, the door is “slammed shut” for women in Nordic combined, said The Independent. The three Olympic events where athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing are strictly men-only, despite there being equivalent women’s World Cup and World Championship events.

‘Misogynistic mindset’

Nordic combined has been part of the Winter Olympics since its beginnings in 1924. It requires precision, courage, strength and endurance to follow the “daredevil thrill” of ski jumping with a “physically exhausting cross-country ski race”, said The Associated Press. It makes for a “two-day event unlike any other”.

Cross-country skiing has centuries-old origins in Scandinavian military training, which could be a partial explanation for the “misogynistic mindset” towards Nordic combined, said ABC News. But it’s the combination with ski jumping that seems to be the decisive factor. While women had to wait until 1952 to compete in single-discipline cross-country events at the Winter Olympics, they were barred from ski jumping until the early 2000s. For decades, they were “deemed too fragile to stand up to the rigours of repeatedly hurtling themselves off the side of a mountain”. And it’s only at these 2026 Games that women ski-jumpers will be allowed to jump off the same large hill as the men.

To complicate matters for those campaigning against Nordic combined’s Olympic gender imbalance, the sport as a whole is “in jeopardy” – because it “doesn’t have a big following” and only “a small number of countries dominate the podium”, said AP. The IOC has “put the entire sport on notice”, said The New York Times, telling it to boost the number of participating athletes, “the size of the audience” and “the diversity” of competing countries or “risk falling off the Olympic programme altogether”.

The women of Nordic combined are not just “stuck sitting on the sidelines” while the men compete, they are “relying on the men’s performance to keep the sport’s future in the Games alive”.

‘Glacial pace’ of change

Women have had a long fight for fair inclusion in the Olympics. They were excluded entirely from the first modern summer Olympics in 1896 and, when they were allowed to compete in Paris four years later, their participation was limited to a handful of sports, such as tennis, archery and croquet. Slowly, the exclusions for women have been mostly eliminated but the Winter Olympics, in particular, has changed “at a glacial pace”, said The Independent.

Female athletes staged a protest a fortnight ago at the Nordic combined World Cup, in Seefeld, Austria. They held up their ski poles at the starting line in the shape of an X, symbolising “no exceptions” for women’s inclusion at the Winter Games.

“I do what every single other athlete does,” US Nordic combined skier Annika Malacinski told The Washington Post. “I work my ass off to be where I am. And yet there’s one group of people telling me I’m not doing it hard enough.” I cried for eight hours when I found out the IOC wouldn’t open Nordic skiing up to us at Milano-Cortina but I will continue to campaign for inclusion at the French Alps 2030 Winter Olympic Games.

The 2026 Winter Olympics officially kick off with the opening ceremony at San Siro Stadium in Milan this evening.

The Games are officially branded Milano Cortina 2026 and are spread across northern Italy, with Milan serving as the primary city host. It’s been 70 years since the Olympic Flame first arrived in Cortina d'Ampezzo, which is co-hosting and anchoring the mountain events.

Now, viewers can look forward to new events, political controversies... and a rumpus over some suspicious packages.

Skimo

The new event of ski mountaineering – known as skimo – sees athletes “run up a mountain and ski back down it again” in what “may or may not be best understood as an elaborate metaphor for the human condition”, said The Guardian. Let’s hope it “does as well as ski ballet, bandy, and military patrol”, and “some of the other sports” the Winter Games has “offered over the years”.

Ice Agents

Tension has been growing in Italy, after it was confirmed that the US immigration enforcement agency, whose officers fatally shot two people in Minneapolis, would be sending agents to “bolster security”, said ITV News.

There’s been “outrage” in Italy, but the Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said that the Ice agents who were coming were not “those with machine guns and their faces covered”. They are coming because “it’s the department responsible for counter-terrorism”, he said.

Unlikely stars

As Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards showed in the 1980s, Olympic winners “aren’t always on the podium”, said ITV News. This year’s “unexpected heroes” could include the US ice dancer Maxim Naumov, who hopes to honour his parents and life-long coaches, who were killed in a plane crash in Washington DC a year ago.

The Jamaican bobsleigh team will continue the country’s “legacy” in a sport that helped inspire the Disney film, “Cool Runnings”. The speed skater Jutta Leerdam, fiancee of influencer Jake Paul, is struggling to be seen as heroic: she’s already been accused of “diva” antics for taking a “private jet” to Italy, reported the Daily Mail.

Individual Neutral Athletes

Athletes with Russian or Belarusian passports have been banned from many tournaments since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So, as at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, Russian and Belarusian athletes will only be allowed to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” (AIN).

But several Russian athletes approved to compete as neutrals “have links to activity supporting the war in Ukraine”, said BBC Sport. For example, Petr Gumennik, a figure skater, has recently worked with and been coached by Ilya Averbukh, who has been sanctioned by Ukraine.

Family dynasty

The three Macuga sisters will be “looking to take over the Olympic skiing world”, said NBC: Lauren, an Alpine skier; Alli, who takes parts in moguls; and Sam, a ski jumper. To add to the family feel, their younger brother, Daniel, is an “up-and-coming competitor” in Alpine skiing.

A 17-year-old skier will join his 46-year-old mother in Mexico’s tiny Winter Olympic team in Italy. Alpine skier Lasse Gaxiola has been named Mexico’s fifth athlete for the Winter Olympics. He will compete in the same sport as his mother, the veteran Olympian Sarah Schleper.

Penis scandal 

Claims that ski jumpers are using penis injections to fly further are being investigated by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Bild reported concerns that male athletes might inject hyaluronic acid into their penises, in a bid to increase the size of their genitalia, allowing them larger ski-suits which could improve aerodynamics.

A study in the scientific journal Frontiers found that adding 2cm to the circumference of a suit would reduce drag by 4% and increase lift by 5%. So theoretically, a 2cm enhancement in suit size would give an extra 5.6m in jump length. Olympians competing at the Game will have their crotches “microchipped” in “an effort to crackdown on cheating”, claimed The Sun.

While millions will tune in to watch the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots battle it out in Super Bowl LX, just as many are excited for Bad Bunny’s highly anticipated halftime show. The Puerto Rican singer is the latest in a long line of superstar musicians to make their mark at the Big Game. From Prince to Katy Perry, Super Bowl halftime shows have a long history of memorable moments.

Historical firsts

While modern Super Bowls are thought of as platforms for major acts, this wasn’t always the case; the majority of early halftime shows were performed by college marching bands. The first major pop group to headline a Super Bowl was New Kids on the Block, who performed during the game in 1991. The boy band performed alongside a choir of kids singing songs like “It’s a Small World.” But while the show was historic, it was also not well-received, even by the band. “I don’t know how much pride I take in the actual performance,” frontman Donnie Wahlberg once told Playboy. “But I take pride in the fact that we were the first ones to do it.”

When pop stars began regularly performing at the Super Bowl, they were exclusively English-language singers — until 1999, when Gloria Estefan headlined the halftime show. Estefan had previously made an appearance at the 1992 Super Bowl show, and as “part of the ‘A Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing’ halftime show in Miami, Estefan performed her single ‘Oye,’ which blends Spanish and English lyrics,” said ESPN. Ahead of Bad Bunny’s performance, Estefan also had some advice for the Latino singer. “Enjoy every second because it really goes by so fast,” she said to E! News. “In those minutes, he’s gonna have the ability to impact the world.”

While the Super Bowl is a uniquely American phenomenon, another barrier was broken in 2000 when Phil Collins became the first non-U.S. citizen to headline the halftime show. The British singer, known for his work with the rock band Genesis as well as solo songs like “In the Air Tonight,” performed alongside Christina Aguilera and Enrique Iglesias. After this, the floodgates opened for a slew of British icons to perform at Super Bowls, including Paul McCartney, The Who and The Rolling Stones.

Record-breaking performances

Given the hype and cultural status of the Super Bowl, it should be no surprise that the halftime show is often one of the year’s most-watched events. Millions of people tune in annually, but one concert stands above the others: Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 performance is the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history. Lamar’s show was watched by an estimated 133.5 million people, according to Billboard. The rapper “came into the gig riding sky high” following a big Grammys weekend and “wowed viewers with intensely satisfying versions” of his songs, said The Mercury News, including his hit diss track “Not Like Us.”

And while The Weeknd’s 2021 performance didn’t include a diss track, it does carry another distinction: It’s the most expensive halftime show of all time. The total cost was reportedly a staggering $17 million. Performing at the Super Bowl is so desirable that the Canadian performer “used $7 million of his own money to fund his incredible production,” said the South China Morning Post. This is “on top of the estimated $10 million the NFL is believed to allow for a halftime show budget.” The high price shouldn’t be surprising; airing a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl “costs about $8 million on average,” according to USA Today, and some companies are “paying $10 million or more.”

These shows are also known for incorporating many big-name artists into one act. This was never more apparent than during the 2022 halftime show, which featured the largest ensemble of performers at a Super Bowl. The show, which honored host city Los Angeles’ rap roots, was headlined by Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, with a surprise appearance by 50 Cent. The “spectacular, high-energy performance was a powerful celebration of hip hop and its evolution over the last three decades,” said Time, and also “marked the first time the halftime show lineup consisted entirely of hip hop headliners.”

Super Bowl superlatives

While Tom Brady is widely considered the football GOAT, there has been debate as to which halftime show can truly be called “the greatest.” However, many analysts consider the 2007 performance featuring Prince to be the best Super Bowl halftime show ever. There was a “great deal of anticipation for Prince’s performance,” said The Athletic, and the legendary singer delivered, as “no one before nor after has gotten close to him.” His rendition of his iconic song “Purple Rain,” which happened to occur during a rainstorm, created a “performance for the ages.”

Not all superlatives are positive; many shocking and unexpected moments have happened at halftime shows, too. The most jaw-dropping incident likely came during the 2004 show featuring Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. During the pair’s performance, Timberlake accidentally ripped a piece of Jackson’s shirt, which “saw her right breast briefly exposed to 70,000 in-person spectators and more than 140 million TV viewers,” said The Guardian. The controversial moment “left Jackson, then 37, blacklisted from a significant portion of the music industry for years,” though she would later have a career resurgence.

And for as many halftime shows that have been lauded, there have also been some that have been questioned. The 2015 show, headlined by Katy Perry, is often considered the “campiest” in Super Bowl history. The show was filled with “Perry’s top songs, an entrance on top of a lion,” and costumes described as peak camp, said 303 Magazine. Given Perry’s history of concert performances, her Super Bowl outing “wasn’t too different than what we’ve seen from Perry previously.” But for many, it “seemed like they broadcast from one of Perry’s concerts instead of planning something new.”

Super Bowl shows have also had their fair share of daring, sometimes even death-defying moments. When it comes to stunts, many people think of Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, when she entered the stadium from above on a platform suspended by cables. From there, the Barbadian singer carried out a 13-minute intense dance routine to rave reviews. But it was only when the show started that viewers realized Rihanna was also doing all of this while pregnant. Overall, the performance garnered critical acclaim, as Rihanna “graciously granted us a medley of her biggest hits,“ said Buzzfeed News.