Biggest contract in sport history tempts baseball star to join city rivals December 9, 2024 Major League Baseball star Juan Soto has agreed sport’s biggest ever contract, worth $765m (£599m), to join the New York Mets. The Dominican’s 15-year deal eclipses Shohei Ohtani’s $700m contract with the LA Dodgers, signed last year, although that is worth more per season. Soto, a free agent after leaving the New York Yankees, is [...]
Team GB star tipped to end 20-year wait at Sports Personality of the Year December 9, 2024 Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson is tipped to become the first female track and field athlete to win BBC Sports Personality of the Year for two decades after the shortlist was announced on Monday. Team GB’s golden girl of middle distance running is the odds-on favourite with bookmakers to claim the prize, which is decided [...]
Top 14 comes up trumps again in as Investec Champions Cup kicks off December 8, 2024 Anyone hoping for an end to the dominance of French clubs in the Investec Champions Cup, look away now. Holders Toulouse and Bordeaux-Begles both won their opening pool games on Sunday, making it six wins out of a possible eight from representatives of the Top 14 over round one of the competition. The league that [...]
Hamilton rolls back the years on Mercedes farewell in Abu Dhabi December 8, 2024 Lewis Hamilton was delighted to finish on a high after he defied starting from the back end of the grid to pip teammate George Russell to fourth place in his final race for Mercedes. Lando Norris won the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to ensure McLaren held off Ferrari and won their first Formula 1 [...]
Tom Willis makes mockery of England omission as Saracens bludgeon Bulls December 8, 2024 Saracens director of rugby Mark McCall urged England to take note after No8 Tom Willis burnished his growing reputation with a man-of-the-match display in Saturday’s 27-5 Investec Champions Cup win over the Bulls. Willis was surprisingly omitted from Steve Borthwick’s 36-man England squad for last month’s Autumn Nations Series but made a mockery of that [...]
‘One or two errors’: Ratcliffe comments shed light on Ashworth departure December 8, 2024 Manchester United are searching for a new sporting director after splitting from Dan Ashworth, the man who was supposed to be a key architect of the team’s revival. United waited for almost half a year to prise Ashworth from his contract at Newcastle United but have dispensed with him midway through his first full season. [...]
Why doesn’t Saudi Arabia sponsor rugby when it invests everywhere else? December 7, 2024 If you were going to have a gander through the list of sports sponsorship deals related – directly or indirectly – to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you’d be scrolling for a good while. Because research by Play the Game reports that there’s a total of 910 deals between Saudi Arabia or Saudi companies/individuals and [...]
Top footballers spend 87 per cent of time working, study finds December 6, 2024 Fresh concerns have been raised about player burnout ahead of next year’s Club World Cup after a new study found that top professional footballers typically spend 80 per cent of their time working. Drawing on data that it compiled for global players’ union Fifpro, independent consultancy Football Benchmark says that, for some individuals, the number [...]
Show football’s 3pm blackout the red card and women’s game will benefit December 6, 2024 While men’s football works out whether to scrap the 3pm blackout, women’s matches offer a perfect test case, argues Anna Reynolds. Imagine being barred from watching your favourite TV programme at a certain time of the day. That’s the current situation in football, where games scheduled for Saturday at 3pm are restricted from being broadcast [...]
Can English clubs mount an Investec Champions Cup charge? December 6, 2024 If you were to list the last five English appearances in an Investec Champions Cup final you’d find Exeter there once and Saracens the other four times. Before that it was Northampton Saints in 2011 and before that London Wasps and Leicester Tigers in 2007. But if you were to ask me to predict which [...]