Sports, in brief

American college football's opening weekend held one game between two ranked teams: ninth-ranked Ole Miss against 24th-ranked Louisville, played in Nashville on the Sunday. [1][2]

A year ago the same weekend carried three games between top-10 teams, plus three more ranked sides playing other big-conference opponents. [1]

The big games have not gone. They moved: 13 games between big-conference teams sit in week two, and six more in week three. Ohio State play at Texas next week, and Oklahoma go to Michigan. [1]

It gets thinner from here. Four such games are booked into the opening week of 2027, one in 2028, and none in 2029, and these fixtures are agreed years in advance. [1]

The reason is two sensible habits meeting. American college football has no warm-up matches before the season, so coaches want an easy first opponent. And after nine months without football a home game sells out against almost anyone, so the athletic directors who sell the tickets do not mind. [1]

The sport also scrapped its extra early week this summer. Every team now starts on the US Labor Day weekend or the one before, and schools filling that new opening slot have almost all put a soft opponent in it. [1]

The people who lose money on a weak weekend are the broadcasters. Dave Brown, a former ESPN executive who now arranges these fixtures for a living, said that if he were ESPN or Fox he would have to find a way to get more games in. [1]

The one force that could push the big games back is the playoff argument. The Southeastern Conference, one of two leagues that can block any change to the American college play-offs, has told organisers its price for a 24-team field: every team must play 10 games a season against strong opponents. [3]

On Thursday the Big Ten, the other league with that veto, said it is comfortable meeting that demand. Its commissioner Tony Petitti blocked a 16-team play-off in January; the format has been frozen at 12 teams ever since. [3]

The money problem is not solved. The Southeastern Conference's commissioner Greg Sankey has told colleagues his league must replace roughly $100m it would lose by scrapping its own end-of-season final, which a 16- or 24-team play-off would require. [3]

Saturday's scores read as the schedule predicted: Ohio State won 56-3, Miami beat Stanford 45-6, and Missouri beat Arkansas-Pine Bluff 54-14. [4]

The week's loudest story was not a match at all. A court fight over whether players cut by professional clubs may return to college drowned out the football, including the night game everyone had circled: Clemson away at LSU, whose roster now holds some 40 transfers. [42][1][5]

Why it matters. Watch this weekend's television ratings. The broadcasters are the only people who lose money on a weak opening week, and they are the only ones with a reason to pay for the schedule to change.

Victory+, a Dallas-based streaming service founded in 2024, was dissolved by its parent company A Parent Media Co, and all staff were let go. [6] It carried games from ice hockey's NHL, baseball's MLB, the two main US women's leagues in football and basketball, and Texas high school football. [6] A former producer told Texas school districts by email that everyone had been blindsided. [6] The service had been losing partners all summer over unpaid bills, and two Minnesota Lynx and three Atlanta Dream games are still listed on it. [6]

Why it matters. Those women's basketball teams resume play in about two weeks and could not tell fans where to watch. The Dallas Stars, who own a stake in the dead company, will show their season on Amazon instead, one of six clubs that moved local games there this month. [6][7]

LeBron James announced a partnership with Polymarket on Saturday in a 14-second video posted to his own account. [8] Polymarket is a prediction market: instead of betting with a bookmaker, people buy contracts that pay out if an event happens, and it says it is the largest of its kind. [8] James would be the first NBA player to sign an individual deal with it; Giannis Antetokounmpo, Lionel Messi and the golfer Bryson DeChambeau all signed this year with its main rival, Kalshi. [8] Neither side has said what James will actually do. [8]

Why it matters. These platforms are still fighting US states over whether their contracts count as bets, and a famous face is the fastest way to reach people who would never open a betting app. Polymarket already takes contracts on whether James will play alongside his son Bronny this season. [8]

The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing more than 2,000 New York Times staff, wrote to publisher A.G. Sulzberger demanding the company drop talks with Kalshi over a sponsorship of The Athletic, its sports title. [9] The letter, approved unanimously, said any such partnership would threaten the newsroom's independence, noting that New York officials had been quoted in the paper's own reporting calling Kalshi's contracts an illegal operation. [9] Hours later a source said The Athletic was not proceeding, but insisted the decision predated the letter. [9]

Why it matters. The Athletic reports on prediction markets, including the LeBron James deal above. This is the rare case where the people paid to cover an industry publicly refused to take its money.

YouTube TV has passed 10 million subscribers and may now be the largest television distributor in the United States, eleven years after starting as a prototype fed by an aerial bolted to the roof of a Google office. [37] The rest of the pay-television industry has lost nearly 40 million subscribers since 2015. [37] Google bought YouTube for $1.65bn in 2006, then spent a decade failing at television before the bundle idea worked. [37] For a generation of sports fans it is now the default way to watch. [37]

Why it matters. Almost every fight in sport this year runs back to that 40 million. The collapsed streamer above, six hockey clubs moving to Amazon, leagues building their own channels - all of it is about replacing cable money that is draining away. [37][7]

ESPN will launch a daily hour called Big Day with Peter Schrager on 10 September at 2pm US eastern time, replacing SportsCenter in that slot. [22] Schrager, 44, made his name talking American football at NFL Network. [22] He joins Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee, Mike Greenberg and others who already hold daily shows built around their own names. [22] During the college football season the show runs four days a week, with a Friday hour handed to a podcast trio instead. [22]

Why it matters. SportsCenter was a programme about results; these are programmes about people. The network is betting that a familiar voice holds an audience better than the scores do.

The Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport's world governing body, agreed at a meeting in Aigle, Switzerland to build a system that tracks the live position of every rider and every vehicle at professional road races. [10] It follows the death of the British rider Fin Tarling last month, hit by a van that had strayed onto the course of the Volta a Portugal while he rode alone. [10] Trackers were already used at last year's world championships in Kigali, Rwanda, introduced after an 18-year-old rider crashed into woodland and lay unfound for more than an hour and 20 minutes. [10]

Why it matters. Road cycling is the rare sport played on open public roads, where nobody can see the whole course at once. Knowing where a rider is turns out to be something the sport has to build rather than something it had.

Tickets in the Hollies Stand at Edgbaston in Birmingham, England, for next summer's third Ashes Test against Australia will cost 165 pounds, up from 115 pounds for the same seats in 2023. [11] The cheapest adult tickets for the first three days are 115 pounds, with a 2.50-pound booking fee on every one. [11] The former England captain Michael Vaughan called it really poor. [11] The 2023 series sold out every day and drew more than 545,000 people in total. [11]

Why it matters. At the same ground, tickets for next week's England v Pakistan Test at 57.50 to 87.50 pounds have not sold out. The price is following how badly people want the fixture, not what a day's cricket costs to stage. [11]

The Scottish Football Association proposed that clubs in all four national divisions give players under 21 who qualify for Scotland an average of 60 minutes a game across a season, about 6% of available playing time. [12] Clubs that miss it would lose 10% of their final prize money, redistributed to those that hit it, and an extra 1m pounds would be made available. [12] Two more proposals would require two such players to start every domestic cup match. [12] Clubs vote in October and November, for the 2027-28 season. [12]

Why it matters. The proposals follow a sharp fall in Scottish-born players in the top flight and a rise in teenagers leaving for English academies. It is an attempt to make a manager's short-term caution more expensive than his long-term interest. [12]

Ebbsfleet United, a sixth-tier club in Kent, England, had its suspension lifted by the National League and will play its first home game of the season on Tuesday. [13] The club's first six fixtures were postponed while it dealt with a winding-up petition from Britain's tax authority over debts going back to April. [13] A takeover last month by new owner John O'Leary let it pay the tax bill and its players in full. [13] It keeps a suspended six-point deduction and a transfer ban. [13]

Why it matters. A winding-up petition is the step before a court closes a company down, and non-league clubs rarely come back from one. The six-point penalty stays in reserve rather than being imposed.

Europe's top clubs, leagues and national associations agreed a joint position with Football Supporters Europe, which represents fan groups in 50 countries, urging public authorities to ban away supporters only as a last resort. [14] The agreement was reached at UEFA's safety and security conference in Madrid. [14] The campaign followed the decision by Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Police to bar Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a match at Aston Villa in November 2025, which Keir Starmer, then Britain's prime minister, criticised heavily. [14] The police chief who recommended it retired early and now faces a misconduct investigation. [14]

Why it matters. Blanket bans are decided by police and councils, not by football, so the sport has no vote on something that empties a third of its stadium. This is the industry trying to set a norm it cannot enforce.

Everton rejected a bid from Nottingham Forest of 40m pounds plus a share of any future sale for Harrison Armstrong, an England under-19 midfielder who came through the club's academy. [15] Supporters sang his name throughout a draw at Bournemouth and said there would be a riot if he were sold. [15] The board, led by chairman Dan Friedkin, decided against it with the owner leading the discussions. [15] Armstrong, who has played 24 times for the club, has started all three league games this season. [15]

Why it matters. Manager David Moyes said supporters are not always wrong and suggested the call was not his. A crowd rarely gets a veto over a transfer, and this one did. [15]

The United Soccer League and the USL Players Association ratified a new collective agreement covering two levels of the league, raising salaries and introducing 12-month contracts. [16] The USL sits below Major League Soccer in the American game, and its players had been on shorter deals that left them unpaid outside the playing season. [16]

Why it matters. Under the old deals players were not paid outside the playing season. A 12-month contract pays them all year, and this is the layer of the sport where players have the least bargaining power.

Leading broadcasting and governing-body executives wrote to the UK chancellor, the minister in charge of British tax and spending, asking for tax credits to increase television coverage of women's sport. [17] A tax credit cuts a company's tax bill in return for doing something ministers want, and Britain already uses them for film and high-end television production. [17] The signatories are both the people who commission the coverage and the bodies that sell the rights. [17]

Why it matters. The request is an admission about where the money is: the audience for women's sport is growing fast, but not yet fast enough for the advertising to cover the cost of the cameras and crew.

Roughly 50,000 people filled AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, for Spikes Under the Lights, a new women's college volleyball showcase with a court built on the American football pitch. [18] Its 1m-dollar prize pool is the largest for any tournament in the history of US college women's sport; Nebraska, the top-ranked team, took $350,000 for entering and winning. [18] Nebraska then played at the Las Vegas arena of an ice hockey team, and this weekend at Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs' baseball ground. [18]

Why it matters. The run traces back to 30 August 2023, when 92,003 people watched a volleyball match at Nebraska's American football stadium - still the record attendance for a women's sporting event in the United States. [18]

The Buffalo Bills ripped out and replaced the entire grass field at their new $2.2bn Highmark Stadium after two pre-season games and two open practices. [19] The Kentucky bluegrass was laid in October 2025 and left unused for ten months, but its roots never took hold and large pieces were gouged out by players. [19] The club's president of business operations had said the field was performing to expectations. [19] Its first home game is in two weeks, the first of three at the ground in 18 days. [19]

Why it matters. George Toma, who prepared every Super Bowl field for decades, said somebody fell asleep. A stadium is mostly finished long before the one surface the sport is actually played on. [19]

The $9.612bn sale of the Seattle Seahawks by the estate of Paul Allen to the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla completed, and the club named the 14 members of the ownership group. [20] They include the private-equity firms Carlyle, Dynasty and Sixth Street, the family behind the beer brand Modelo, a former US commerce secretary and the venture capitalist Mark Stevens. [20] The Seahawks become the seventh NFL club with private equity on its share register. [20] Sixth Street also holds 3% of the New England Patriots. [20]

Why it matters. Private-equity firms buy small stakes with no vote, which is what makes them acceptable to leagues. The same firm holding pieces of two rival clubs is new territory. [20]

The NFL plays its first regular-season game in Australia next week, the San Francisco 49ers against the Los Angeles Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. [21] It is the first of nine games abroad this season, alongside a first match in France and others in Brazil, Spain, Germany and three in London. [21] Owners have approved a rise to 10 games abroad, and league executives say they would like 16. [21] Japan, where the league has played pre-season games before, is under discussion. [21]

Why it matters. Getting to 16 would need the players' union to agree, because every game abroad is a home game somebody loses. American stadiums sell out either way, so a fixture is worth more in a country the league has not reached. [21]

The Athletic released the findings of its inquiry into Dianna Russini, a former NFL reporter, concluding she was noncompliant with the publication's standards because of an undisclosed relationship with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. [23] Russini resigned in April, a week after the New York Post published photographs of the two together at an Arizona resort. [23] The inquiry drew no conclusion about the full nature of the relationship and found scant evidence that it affected her reporting on Vrabel or his teams. [23]

Why it matters. Sports reporting runs on access to the people being reported on, and the line between the two is drawn by disclosure rather than distance. Publishing the finding rather than the resignation is the unusual part.

The Arizona Cardinals agreed a three-year, $75m extension with the wide receiver Michael Wilson, with $47m guaranteed and a maximum value of $78m. [24] Talks had stalled for months before restarting on Wednesday. [24] Wilson passed 1,000 receiving yards for the first time last season, after managing just 52 through his first five games. [24] Elsewhere the cornerback market moved when Seattle gave Devon Witherspoon $132m over four years on 16 August, the highest for the position. [25]

Why it matters. American football contracts are set by whoever signed last, so one deal resets the asking price for everyone at that position. The New England Patriots are now stuck working out what that means for Christian Gonzalez. [25]

Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Joey Porter Jr. returned to practice with his contract dispute unresolved, and gave contradictory answers about whether he will play in the opening game. [26] Detroit Pistons centre Jalen Duren, an All-Star last season averaging 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds, is still apart from his club, with one rival executive saying there is still a gap and it will drag. [28] The Baltimore Ravens' general manager said he is optimistic about extending the quarterback Lamar Jackson before March. [27] Cincinnati's cornerback DJ Turner II has, one reporter says, virtually no chance of a deal before the season starts. [43]

Why it matters. Every one of these players is asking to be paid on last season, and every club is deciding whether to pay for the next one. Jackson's $84.34m cap charge in 2027 is why Baltimore would rather settle early. [27]

The Los Angeles Rams spent heavily after losing the NFC Championship game 31-27 to Seattle, once the 2025 most valuable player Matthew Stafford decided to return for an 18th season. [40] They traded for the cornerback Trent McDuffie from Kansas City in March and immediately extended him at $124m over four years, briefly the highest-paid cornerback in the sport. [40] They also kept the safety Kam Curl on a three-year, $36m deal. [40]

Why it matters. A salary cap is a hard ceiling on what a club can pay in a year, so the trick is not spending more but pushing charges into later seasons. That is a loan against future rosters, and it comes due.

Chelsea beat Brighton 4-3 with 25.6% possession, their lowest share of the ball in a Premier League match since detailed data collection began in 2003. [29] Their 146 completed passes and 67% passing accuracy were also record lows for the club. [29] It was not simply a matter of protecting a lead: they went 3-0 up inside half an hour, but had also given up most of the ball in a 3-2 win at Fulham days earlier. [29] Xabi Alonso has won both of his opening league games in charge. [29]

Why it matters. Holding the ball has been the assumed route to control in English football for 20 years. Two games prove nothing, but they are two games where the assumption did not hold.

The Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer agreed a club-record deal for the English winger Morgan Whittaker from Middlesbrough, beating the $7m they paid for Paxten Aaronson. [30] Whittaker, 25, scored 14 goals with seven assists in 40 games last season and had cost Middlesbrough about $9.5m in January 2025. [30] Colorado also sold the forward Rafa Navarro to St. Louis City for $12m and signed the Israel international Sayed Abu Farkhi for $6m. [30] The club set records for both sales and signings. [31]

Why it matters. MLS clubs usually rebuild between seasons, when there is time to bed players in. Doing it mid-season is a bet that the new squad gels faster than the old one falls apart. [31]

London City Lionesses were promoted to England's Women's Super League in 2025 and are owned by the American businesswoman Michele Kang. [32] This summer they signed Alexia Putellas, a two-time Ballon d'Or winner, the former FIFA goalkeeper of the year Mary Earps, Mapi Leon and the France forward Kadidiatou Diani, mostly on free transfers. [32] The league's spending rule caps player wages at 80% of a club's revenue, plus owner funding worth 25% of revenue or 4m pounds, whichever is larger. [32] The club then announced a multi-year Nike shirt deal. [32]

Why it matters. Because the cap is a share of revenue, a club that wants to spend must first raise revenue - so the stars are bought to make the sponsorship possible that pays for the stars. It is only enforceable from this season. [32]

The New York Yankees signed a marketing partnership with Sequel, a tampon company, the first such deal with a Major League Baseball club. [33] Free products will be available inside the stadium. [33] The Yankees already have official partners for life insurance, printers and field-maintenance equipment. [33] Sequel's co-founder Amanda Calabrese, who started the company with a fellow Stanford graduate, said being in the stadium was the ultimate credibility driver. [33]

Why it matters. Roughly half of a baseball crowd is women, and until now no club had sold that to a company making something they need. The sponsorship list is a fairly exact record of who a sport thinks its customers are.

The NFL players' union has not revived its 2024 attempt to have players interviewed somewhere other than the changing room, and talks with the league and the writers' association are inactive. [34] The union's new executive director JC Tretter, a former offensive lineman elected in March, is visiting all 32 clubs before setting priorities. [34] Bargaining over the next labour agreement, which could include an 18-game season, is on hold in the meantime. [34] The two sides did jointly agree a rule this month suspending any player who breaks an on-field safety rule three times. [34]

Why it matters. The changing room is where reporters get players unprepared, which is exactly the argument on both sides. Dropping it quietly is a sign the union is spending its capital on the 18th game instead. [34]

The former Premier League referee Mike Dean spoke on a podcast hosted by the ex-striker Jamie Vardy. [35] Dean said he and colleagues used to see how long they could go without giving a free kick, and would sometimes stay in the centre circle for minutes at a time for a laugh. [35] A fellow former referee, Graham Scott, wrote publicly that Dean did not need to embellish stories that damage referees' reputations. [35] Dean used the word we throughout, which is what drew the response. [35]

Why it matters. Refereeing depends on players believing decisions are honest attempts, and there is no way to disprove a claim like this once it is made. That is what the rebuke is about.