Sports, in brief

Clubs changing hands fast

Mark Walter agreed to sell basketball's Lakers fourteen months after buying them. [3] Nearly a third of that league's clubs have changed majority owner since 2020. [3] In baseball, the San Diego Padres sold for $3.9bn against $800m in 2012. [28]

Spending past the limit

American colleges may share $21.6m with their players this year, and at least 20 are believed to spend above $30m on football alone. [9][10] A US senator's report says 94 per cent of the biggest college sports programmes spend more than they bring in. [8] In England's second division, clubs are borrowing to match the ones dropping down from the top league. [6]

Rulings that never arrive

The Premier League charged Manchester City in February 2023 and no verdict has been published. [11] A barrister called the delay incredible as the hearing passed its second anniversary. [11] The federal inquiry into Mark Walter's insurers has run since February with no charges. [2]

Leagues looking for a leader

Women's basketball in the United States is hiring a commissioner after Cathy Engelbert said she would retire. [12] A new women's baseball league's own chief executive describes a power struggle on its board. [13] Basketball's club owners chose their second longest-serving owner to chair them. [3]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Sports too.

• Figures handed to a regulator, and then checkedBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1Savers' retirement money helped buy baseball's Dodgers and basketball's Lakers, a lawsuit says
2. 2Basketball's owners keep selling up
3. 3A US Senate bill for college sport nears a vote
4. 4Colleges spend past their own pay limit
5. 5A soft landing becomes a head start

Mark Walter owns baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers and bought control of basketball's Los Angeles Lakers last year. [1]

Watch whether the prosecutors in New York turn their subpoenas into charges.

A criminal case would have to settle which figure is right: the 3 per cent the insurers reported, or the 42 per cent the lawsuit alleges. [1][2]

Also seen in Climate and Tech.

Mark Walter agreed to buy control of the Los Angeles Lakers last year at a $10bn valuation, then agreed in August to sell to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at $12.5bn. [3]

The Buss family had owned the club since 1979 and passed it down for nearly fifty years. [3]

Nearly a third of the NBA's clubs have changed majority owner since 2020, and the league's governors have elected Micky Arison, who has owned the Miami Heat for 31 years, to chair their board. [3]

Owners vote on everything a league does, and they hire the commissioner and can sack him.

When they keep leaving after a year or two, Adam Silver is the only person in the room who was there the last time a question came up. [3]

Nearly a third of basketball's clubs have changed owner since 2020, and each sale takes away somebody who sat through the last argument.

The more often they sell, the more often they have to ask the employee who was there the last time it came up.

Most of us are inside something - a workplace, a school, a street - where the people formally in charge keep changing, and somebody further down knows how it has always been done.

That person holds no vote, and they decide a great deal.

The US Senate voted 74-24 on 15 September to open debate on the Protect College Sports Act, and a final vote is expected within days. [7][8]

The bill, written by Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, would give American college sport protection from competition law and cut players to one free transfer between schools. [7][8]

All four Black senators who are Democrats voted against it, and the NAACP, the oldest civil rights group in the United States, opposes it. [7]

Senator Chris Murphy said the bill protects a system of exploitation. [7]

The House of Representatives has failed repeatedly to pass earlier college sports bills, so the margin in the US Senate is what its sponsors are pointing to. [7]

Colleges in the four richest American conferences may share up to $21.6m a year directly with their athletes, under a court settlement, and most put about 75 per cent of it into football, roughly $16m. [9]

Reporters who spoke to more than 70 people inside the sport estimate at least 20 programmes are spending above $30m on football rosters, and a few reach $50m. [9][10]

The extra comes from booster collectives, pools of donor money that pay players outside the school's own accounts. [9]

No college has to publish what it pays, so agents and rival coaches cannot check a figure.

One general manager said the secrecy lets agents reset the market whenever they like. [10]

Clubs relegated from the Premier League, England's top football division, receive about 50m pounds in their first season down and 40m in the second. [6]

Every other club in the second division receives about 5.5m. [6]

A report covering ten seasons to 2024-25 found clubs on those payments took in 59.7m pounds a year on average against 21.3m for the rest, and won promotion 31.4 per cent of the time against 7 per cent. [6]

The report says the others are now spending unsustainably to keep pace. [6]

The payment exists so a relegated club does not collapse.

It also hands that club a wage budget nobody else in the division can match, and the clubs chasing it borrow to try. [6]

The Premier League charged Manchester City in February 2023 over its financial reporting, after an investigation that started in 2018, and no verdict has been published. [11]

The hearing passed its second anniversary this week. [11]

Nick de Marco, a barrister who has worked on other football cases, called it a most incredible delay and questioned the claim that sports arbitration is quicker than the courts. [11]

The club denies wrongdoing. [11]

Richard Masters, who runs the Premier League, said last month the case had taken longer than he expected and that clubs rarely raise it with him. [11]

Every season that passes is another season City have played with the charges unresolved. [11]

Gary Bettman, who runs the NHL, said the league is exploring a second team in Texas, in Austin or Houston, and has signed an agreement giving the Friedkin family about six months to choose. [20]

The family has agreed to put in $3.5bn, covering both the entry fee and the cost of building an arena. [20]

The league last added clubs in 2017, in Las Vegas, and in 2021, in Seattle. [20] Its revenue last season was between $7.5bn and $8bn. [20]

The Dallas Stars have played in Texas since 1993, so a second club there splits a market the league already holds. [20]

Asked which city should be next, players named Quebec City, Houston and Arizona three times each. [21]

Major League Baseball's agreement with its players expires on 1 December, and a lockout, where the owners shut the sport down until a deal is signed, is widely expected. [28]

A former general manager of sixteen years set out this week what each side has put on the table, and said the current deal works best for the richest clubs, the best-paid players and their agents. [28]

He noted the San Diego Padres sold for $3.9bn against $800m in 2012, and the Los Angeles Angels have agreed a sale at a $4bn valuation. [28]

The argument is about a salary cap, a limit on what a club may spend on players.

Owners want one and players refuse, and the people the current rules serve worst are first-year players and the lowest-earning clubs. [28]

The NFL, MLB, the NBA, the NHL and MLS, with their player unions, wrote to American gambling regulators asking for lifetime bans on bettors who harass athletes, coaches, staff or their families, or threaten them with violence. [14]

They also asked for one standard way to report abuse, and for betting companies to monitor and flag accounts linked to it. [14]

Sports betting has spread across the United States since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling opened it up. [14]

Earlier this year the Big Ten athletes commission asked for limits on bets about individual players, for the same reason. [14]

Any ban would be applied by the betting companies themselves, since the leagues do not hold the accounts. [14]

The WNBA is looking for someone to replace Cathy Engelbert, who has announced her retirement, in the league's 30th season. [12]

Players are earning record salaries in front of the biggest crowds the league has had, while the season has been taken over by fights about transgender athletes, objects thrown onto courts and online abuse of players. [12]

Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player, was escorted out of a Chicago Sky game in August, banned from the arena, and has since sued the club. [12]

More than a dozen players, coaches and executives said waiting for the noise to die down has not worked.

The players' union director said it has left players unsafe in arenas, at home and online. [12]

The Women's Professional Baseball League threw its first pitch on 1 August, the first professional women's baseball in the United States since the 1950s apart from a brief attempt in the 1990s. [13]

Its own chief executive, the Canadian lawyer Keith Stein, describes a power struggle on the board. [13]

A board member, Mina Kim, went to court over the summer demanding to see the league's finances, and there are open questions over whether the majority owner ever put money in. [13]

Four teams played a full season and women's baseball came back. What is unsettled is who actually paid for it, and that decides whether there is a second season. [13]

The Saudi Pro League has launched a scheme called Share and Earn, which lets players and online creators post links to matches and take a share of the money those links bring in. [15]

Anyone clicking is taken to a streaming service the league owns. [15] It runs in sixteen countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, South Korea and Greece. [15]

Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays for Al Nassr and has more than a billion followers across his accounts, would earn the most if he takes part. [15]

Leagues have always sold their matches to broadcasters.

This one pays its own players to bring viewers straight to it, so a player's follower count becomes a reason to sign him. [15]

Mike Priest, president of the Columbus Blue Jackets, has announced his retirement after about three decades with the club and with JMAC, the McConnell family holding company that owns it. [23]

John H. McConnell II, grandson of the club's founder and son of its majority owner, will take on his duties for the immediate future. [23]

Priest did not comment on the decision. [23]

The job passes to the founder's grandson rather than to an outside hire, so the club keeps both its owner and its management inside one family. [23]

The Washington Capitals signed the forward Ryan Leonard to an eight-year extension worth $84m, an average of $10.5m a season, hours before ice hockey's new labour agreement took effect. [22]

Leonard is 21 and scored 20 goals in 75 games last season. [22] The new agreement is more restrictive on contracts, and the league's spending limit is expected to rise sharply. [22]

Clubs pushed deals through before the deadline to lock young players in on the old terms.

Players took guaranteed money rather than wait to find out what the new rules allow. [22]

Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal own the Portland Thorns in women's football and the Portland Fire in women's basketball through RAJ Sports. [27]

Last year they lost out on buying the Portland Trail Blazers, the city's NBA club, to a group led by Tom Dundon. [27]

They then sued one of Dundon's partners and dropped the case within a month, settling out of court. [27]

Speaking this week, Bhathal Merage said the family is focused on its women's teams in Portland. [27]

They are betting that women's basketball and football are the better long-term investment, in a city where the men's club's future under its new owner is unsettled. [27]

Ipswich Town said it is investigating racist abuse posted online about Abdul Fatawu, its 22-year-old Ghanaian winger, after he was sent off in the club's 1-0 defeat at Everton on Saturday. [19]

The club called the abuse completely unacceptable and said it is investigating alongside the Premier League. [19]

A club can ban someone from its own ground, but the posts were made on platforms neither the club nor the league owns. [19]

A new episode of the television comedy Ted Lasso shows a second-division women's footballer delivering food between training sessions. [18]

Reporters who looked at the real game found players doing exactly that. [18]

Players in England's lower women's divisions take internships, deliver takeaways and fit childcare around training, because the pay does not cover a life. [18]

In one scene a law school dean brushes off a player's professional career as a hobby rather than a job. [18]

The top of women's football now pays properly. One division down, players are subsidising their own careers, and those are the players who drop out first. [18]

Alex Eala, the Philippines' best-known tennis player, is at the Asian Games in Aichi, Japan, instead of the China Open, a WTA 1000 tournament that highly ranked players are required to enter. [24]

Missing it without an approved waiver can bring a fine and a zero score for that event in her ranking. [24]

The Philippine Tennis Association has formally asked the tour for an exemption. [24] Eala won two bronze medals at the 2023 Asian Games and gold at the 2025 Southeast Asian Games. [24]

Rankings are built to reward players who turn up at the tour's own events.

National team competitions sit outside that system, so playing for her country costs Eala points she cannot get back. [24]

Japan's women played India at Twenty20 cricket for the first time on Friday, in the quarter-finals of the cricket event at the Asian Games in Aichi. [16]

India, the sport's richest and strongest nation, won comfortably. [16]

Japan's men meet India on Monday in Sano, the home of Japanese cricket, in a game billed as the Suzuki Cup and tied to 75 years of formal relations between the two countries. [16]

Japan's captain, Mai Yanagida, took up cricket at university after growing up with baseball. [16]

Japan is a baseball country, and the cricket association's chief executive says people there now know what cricket is but have never tried it. [16]

A game against India, on television, is the cheapest way to change that. [16]

Middlesex beat Leicestershire by 31 runs at Trent Bridge to win English cricket's One-Day Cup, the county's first trophy since the 2016 County Championship. [17]

Toby Roland-Jones, who sealed that 2016 title with a hat-trick at Lord's, bowled all ten of his overs in one spell and took 3 for 27. [17]

The club has money and governance troubles off the field that this does not fix. [17]

Ten years to the week after his hat-trick at Lord's, the same bowler decided the final. [17]

Roland-Jones said it had been a long time since he played in front of a crowd like that. [17]

Dapo Afolayan, a forward for Blackburn Rovers in England's second division, said the club needs its supporters in the ground to succeed, after a home crowd he described as loud. [29]

He talked about fans spending hard-earned money to travel, and about wanting to give them the bragging rights at work on Monday. [29]

He is one of the few players to say out loud that the result depends partly on how many people show up. [29]

Adam Wharton, a 22-year-old midfielder at Crystal Palace, said he is happy to stay until his contract ends in three years, after Manchester City showed interest in him over the summer. [30]

Palace made clear he was not for sale. [30]

Wharton said he stays away from transfer talk and that his agent tells him nothing, because there is no point knowing if he is not going anywhere. [30]

A club with a player on a long contract can simply refuse, and Palace did. The player's own indifference to the talk is what makes the refusal hold. [30]

Christopher Nkunku has returned to RB Leipzig on a season's loan from Milan, the Italian club he joined after two difficult years at Chelsea. [31]

He was the German league's player of the season at Leipzig before leaving for London in 2023. [31]

He said he needs to enjoy football again, and that neither he nor the club hesitated over the deal. [31] He scored in a 5-0 win over Hamburg. [31]

A loan parks a large salary somewhere else for a year while the player tries to get his value back. Both clubs need the same thing to happen. [31]

Newcastle United conceded four goals at Leeds United, something they had not done in a Premier League game since a 4-1 defeat at Liverpool on 31 January. [32]

Matthias Jaissle, who took charge this season, gave a blunt one-word verdict on the performance. [32] The midfielder Joe Willock gestured an apology towards the travelling supporters. [32]

It is the first heavy defeat of Jaissle's time in charge, and it came against a promoted side with momentum rather than a European power. [32]

Green Bay's receiver Jayden Reed was taken off on a backboard on the second play against the New York Jets, and right tackle Zach Bako-Bewele was carted off with a leg injury on the very next play. [33]

New England's right guard Mike Onwenu broke his right ankle in the first quarter of a 20-3 win over Pittsburgh. [34]

The Los Angeles Chargers' tight end David Njoku left on a cart with a knee injury against Las Vegas. [35]

Indianapolis ruled out their main receiver Alec Pierce with a heel injury. [36]

Four starters went off in one Sunday, three of them on carts. [33][34][35] Pierce's injury is on the same leg he had operated on in March. [36]

Joey Porter Jr., a cornerback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, has been cleared of the back injury that kept him out of two games in a row. [37]

The club says it has received no trade offers for him and is not trying to move him. [37]

No offer has been made, so a fit player stays where he is. [37]

The women's 800m was added to the Olympics in 1928 and then dropped for 32 years, after reports, later shown to be false, claimed the runners had collapsed with exhaustion. [38]

The International Olympic Committee decided women were too frail for the distance. [38]

It is now one of the most anticipated events on the track, and Audrey Werro this month finished 0.42 seconds outside the world record. [38]

A decision taken on bad evidence in 1928 removed the event from two generations of runners. [38]

Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who co-wrote the Protect College Sports Act, appeared on ESPN's College GameDay, the network's Saturday morning college football programme, and used the slot to argue for his bill. [39]

Reporters went through his statements afterwards and questioned several of them. [39] The US Senate voted to open debate on the bill three days later. [7][39]

The audience for a Saturday football show is exactly the audience the bill is about, and he reached it without a single question from an opponent. [39]

Darius Cooper scored a late touchdown as the Philadelphia Eagles came from behind to beat the Tennessee Titans. [40]

Tyler Shough pushed in from close range near the end for the New Orleans Saints to beat the Baltimore Ravens 24-17. [41] Neither team was ahead until the closing minutes. [40][41]