For a month, and against most of the warnings I’d issued myself, it ended up being a pretty good World Cup.

I spent the spring convinced this thing would be a 48-team monument to Gianni Infantino’s ego, a tournament bloated past the point of meaning and priced past the point of decency. Some of that held. Actually, pretty much all of that held.

But the football has a habit of becoming an overpowering distraction, and for most of the four weeks the actual games did their part. Cape Verde became the smallest nation ever to reach a knockout round, and then took Argentina to the very edge of the cliff, where Sidney Lopes Cabral’s extra-time equaliser will go down as one of the tournament’s great moments.

Vozinha, the 40-year-old goalkeeping hero of Cape Verde, and his Dublin-compatriot Pico Lopes, also held the eventual winners to a 0-0 draw. Dick Advocaat, having left the role due to his daughter’s illness, returning to a tearful opening game for Curacao.

Several titanic games. Mexico and England at the Azteca, Norway beating Brazil, Paraguay going the distance against Germany. Belgium’s mental turnaround against Senegal.

The biggest names shone. Erling Haaland soared and became a household name in the U.S. Leo Messi and Kylian Mbappé went into the final weekend level on eight goals apiece, both having strolled past Klose in the record books on the way. Jude Bellingham starred for England. Giants like Germany and Portugal were slain, while in the end the four top seeded teams remained. Spain bettering the highly favoured French side, while Argentina performed miracles, who kept pulling rabbits out of hats managed one more in the late moments to overcome a retreating England from 1-nil down.

England and France, two sides who’d have happily skipped the third-place game, somehow produced a 6-4 classic that almost nobody had asked for.

Despite every effort from FIFA, including ad breaks disguised as three-minute hydration interludes which cut every game into four quarters, totally changing the flow of a sport that had managed just fine for over a century. Celebrity-spotting dominated TV productions. The price of tickets still hovered in the background, yet stadiums filled up regardless.

But the football persevered onwards. And then everyone perched down for the final and it was like someone had flicked on the lights in the nightclub.

Spain won the World Cup 1-0 after extra time, which rather flatters the drama. It was a truly pig of a game, quite possibly the worst finale the World Cup has ever seen. Armed with all the shadow tactics they could muster, Argentina came less to play, more to scream and kick their way past a clearly superior Spanish side. For a hundred-odd minutes it held, having nibbled at the heels of the Spanish, in a shithousing effort for the ages which saw them not land a single shot on goal in the initial 90 minutes of play.

Ferran Torres finally put a foot through it in the 106th and we all rejoiced as football was the winner.

And Messi cried. Thirty-nine years old, a runner-up medal round his neck once again, and all his emotions buckled just as he turned away from the dignitaries and faced towards his home crowd. It might not be his last World Cup, but the weight of an entire country kind of lifted off his shoulders in that moment, as the fans hailed their hero who had spent much of the first half of his otherworldly career in a pretty strange relationship with the Argentinean fanbase. His harshest critics won over, even in defeat.

I wrote prior to the final that Argentina had built an identity around him worth trusting, and they had, but the final stripped back too much of the football and exposed the nastier element that people will come to remember about this side. Spain were just far superior and the Argentinean reservoir of slices of good luck and never say die charm had finally dried up.

And then there was the brothers-in-arms, Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino.

Because the 2026 World Cup final will not, in the end, really be remembered for Ferran Torres’ goal. It might be remembered for some of the thuggery mid and post match. But it’ll most certainly be remembered for Donald Trump, who had kind of managed to keep out of his own way for much of the tournament. That was, until the low point in the round of 32, when the United States’ Folarin Balogun raked his studs down a Bosnian’s leg, got himself sent off, and earned the automatic one-match ban that every other player in the tournament would have served without review.

Trump rang Infantino, and the ban somehow disappeared into thin air. A truly unprecedented move that may yet have ramifications for the sport and Infantino (who are we kidding, it’ll be swept under the carpet). Balogun played the next game and Belgium won anyway, spending the closing stages openly mocking the president.

The Belgian FA reached for the disciplinary code and the tournament regulations, chapter and verse. But the plainer description is that the rules of the world’s biggest sporting event were changed mid-tournament by a phone call from a man who does not follow the sport, and that FIFA, the body that exists, nominally, to guard those rules, folded like a garden chair.

So nobody should have been surprised by what happened at the final whistle. Trump handed Spain the trophy, which is protocol, and then declined to leave, which is not.

Infantino, to his visible discomfort in his horrendous suit and white trainers, had to skip across the podium and physically take the president by the arm to steer him toward the edge of it, like steering your Alzheimer's-ridden granny to bed.

And even then Trump planted himself beside the last Spanish player still in shot, applauding, in frame for the photographs of a triumph he’d had nothing whatever to do with. FIFA then posted its own picture of the trophy lift with the president carefully cropped out. Spain’s FA have posted photos of the presidents-in-cringe carefully edited out.

And that was the 2026 World Cup, more or less. A tournament better than its leadership deserved, a final that its tournament didn’t deserve. It’ll go down as a decent World Cup let down by the non-footballing nonsense around it and the final, sadly, stumbling over the finish line. The less said about the half-time show the better.

In the end, if we can somehow stick to the football — Spain are champions and thoroughly deserve to be.

A stupid amount of football has happened since, but there is a moment in Argentina’s Round of 16 tie with Egypt worth looking back on.

Argentina are 2-0 down and the television directors are earnestly cutting to a forlorn Lionel Messi, chopping content for the inevitable end-of-era montages. He is 39 years old, after all.

Then he puts a ball on Cristian Romero’s head in the 79th minute, equalises himself four minutes later with a goal out of nothing, and Argentina score a third in stoppage time. Egypt are defeated and Argentina, by the skin of their teeth, are through, having already barely survived a Last 32 scare against the minnows of Cape Verde.

On Wednesday against England he did it again. In a clip that’s now become memeified, Messi and Jude Bellingham chip at each other and the Real Madrid player clearly irks Messi, who nods in that sort of Michael Jordan “and then I took that personally” manner.

Two assists from Messi later and Argentina are in the World Cup final. Again. England, from a position of 1-nil strength, somehow handed all the momentum back into the almost mythic figure who had turned 39 during the tournament and had proved along the way, with his army of manic disciples, that they were never going to roll over too easily.

There will be several comments from the hip this week which tells you this settles the greatest-of-all-time argument. But that debate has been long concluded - Lionel Messi was the greatest football player of all time before the tournament kicked off and has simply highlighted and double-underlined that fact throughout the summer. Messi is the greatest ever.

When his meaningful participation at 39 was in doubt, Lionel Scaloni’s response was to sit down with the man and the medical staff and work out, in cold practical terms, what a 39-year-old body could give and how to build around it. There’s no ego or inclusion for inclusion sake, nor a pitiful ceremonial role. He’s not an anchor on the team, a top-heavy piece weighing down the team, selected on reputation alone.

Argentina had an actual plan, with the squad constructed to carry the running and the bite and the fumes, granted Messi has still managed to exert plenty of that, so that his passing and the finishing and his genius when the moment needs it can happen.

The trust between manager, Messi and squad is the ultimate backbone of why this all works for Argentina. Some strokes of luck and the odd debatable referee decision aside, the identity of this squad is what has set it above all else.

Half of Argentina’s eighteen goals at this tournament have come after the 75th minute. A team that has a collective ability to never die, with complete and utter trust between the mere mortals surrounding Messi to keep going, knowing when the moment is needed he’ll be there.

Cape Verde pushed them into extra time. Egypt nearly beat them. Switzerland pushed them all the way and England had them desperately launching attacks with the clock ticking.

None of this should diminish what Scaloni’s squad are about themselves. Rodrigo De Paul, Alexis Mac Allister, Enzo Fernandez, Romero and the rest are serious footballers who would grace any team, and it would be a disservice to cast them as extras in one man’s film.

Trust is a massive cliché in sport, for sure, but it runs through the veins of this team. Messi trusts them to do the work of a football team; they trust him to do the thing that only he does; the manager trusts the whole arrangement enough to win games and stake back-to-back World Cups.

To Sunday, then. Spain have conceded once all tournament and kept six clean sheets, which is a record, and by any sensible reading they are favourites: younger, fresher, better organised, with the ability to dictate games and slice through teams with consummate ease when legs are ailing.

If Argentina win they become the first back-to-back champions since Brazil in 1962, and the tales will write themself. Messi will set off into the sunset with two World Cup trophies and a culmination as one of life’s greatest icons.

If Spain win, all is not lost. This Argentinean side entertained all tournament, brought all the drama, thrills and tournament-defining moments, and Messi’s summer becomes a beautiful footnote for the history books.

For most of the last decade, the relationship between the GAA’s two codes was firmly implied.

Hurling had the superiority. Hurling had the poetry, the montages, the British tourists stumbling upon the final on BBC and for at least one afternoon, falling under the spell of the clash of the ash.

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Football, meanwhile, got the life-support think pieces. The criticism and labels of “puke football”. Football was fourteen men behind the ball, a wing-back doing forty lateral handpasses, and an annual symposium on What Can Be Done About Football, held roughly every August, resolving almost nothing.

Last Wednesday, tickets for both football semi-finals went on sale and vanished in minutes. Not the final, but the semi-finals. Mayo–Louth on Saturday, Dublin–Kerry on Sunday, two full houses at 82,000 people in Dublin’s Croke Park on the same weekend, and the GAA itself admitting it had probably never seen demand like it for a semi-final weekend. A week earlier, the hurling semi-finals, which had Galway dismantling Cork and Limerick versus Clare, came and went at the same venue with two fantastic ties but far from the golden ticket that the football managed to slide into people's chocolate bars.

Read this back to a football supporter of, say, 2019 vintage and they’d assume you were describing a different sport. In a sense you would be.

The reason has a name so beige it could only be Irish sport: the Football Review Committee. Jim Gavin’s FRC took a game that had been coached into a defensive armadillo and performed surgery on it in full view of everyone; the two-point arc that made long-range kicking a weapon again, the kickout rules that stopped goalkeepers dinking the ball ten yards to a corner-back with a paunch, and the 4v3 structure that legislated the blanket defence out of existence by simply requiring teams to leave forwards in the forward line. Sixty-one motions passed at Special Congress, refined again for 2026, and the result is a sport where scores are up, the ball is willingly sent forward, and a looping kick from distance has become a beautiful part of the game.

We should pause on how unusual this is. The recent history of sport is a museum of governing bodies breaking things: FIFA inflating a World Cup until it doesn’t fit in one country, broadcasters chopping fixtures into content slurry, rugby litigating the tackle beyond recognition and shoving everything else behind a paywall.

The FRC is the rare counter-example - an institution that looked at its product, found what wasn’t working, and adjusted it. It wasn’t rebrands, music after goals or fancy light shows. They simply changed the rules of the actual game, and the actual game got better, and people have responded by buying every ticket in the building. It turns out the growth hack was bettering the sport.

And what the rules unlocked, this summer delivered in spades. Several blockbuster performances across a festival of summer football only rivalled by the tournament across the pond. Louth in a semi-final. Mayo back in a final for the first time since 2021 after putting a bonkers 3-23 on the scoreboard. Kerry seeing off a resurging Dublin by a point in a battle that, for various reasons, has dominated the storylines heading into All-Ireland Hurling final week.

Kerry–Mayo to finish it all off, a final overloaded with attacking talent and tactical intrigue, with forty years of scar tissue on top of it. The rules cracked open the door for the sport to flourish and the teams to play the game refreshed, without handcuffs.

None of this means hurling has got worse. Galway–Limerick on Sunday will be a fine final and Croke Park will be packed to the rafters.

But the aristocrat’s problem is that it has spent twenty years being told it’s perfect, and nothing curdles quite like being told you’re perfect. The same provincial structure funneling the same four or five counties toward the same weekend. A championship where half the country is mathematically eliminated before the evenings get long and the sun hardens the turf. Hurling people watched football’s rule revolution from the high horse, arms folded, secure in the knowledge that their game needed no such vulgarity - and now football has stolen the summer out of their shirt pocket.

The GAA has already hinted the FRC experience “may inform” its thinking on hurling. That sentence should make hurling supporters nervous and hopeful in equal measure, because the lesson of the football project isn’t that hurling needs another arc painted on fields around the country. The outcome is that no game is above the question. Football supporters spent a decade being told the sport’s decline was cultural, irreversible, something in the coaching water that would take years to unwind. It just needed a framework and powers-that-be capable enough of delivering the required kiss of life.

It’s been a difficult year for hurling, and as someone from that side of the parish that’s hard to admit, as we look on at envy at our football comrades who feast on the spoils and dominate the attention spans and goodwill of supports who continue to crawl out from dark caverns, having soured on a sport that had become almost impossible to enjoy.

Football spent well over ten years as the GAA’s problem child. One committee later, it’s the hottest ticket in town.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure,” says Peter Pan, who never had to file for a testimonial.

There is a moment, somewhere around the fourth-set tie-break, when the retirement match stops being tennis and becomes theatre. The crowd stiffens as the conclusion they’d come to see beckons. Not for the point or the game or the set. The score is Career Point, and in this moment everybody knows their role.

And, most pertintly, Wimbledon knows its price, sets it accordingly and hands you the golden ticket with a strawberry on top.

Tuesday night on No. 1 Court, Stan Wawrinka lost to Matteo Berrettini across four hours and nineteen minutes of the most beautiful futility you’ll see this year: 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, 7-6, three tie-breaks lost by the width of a chalk mark, one of them (16-14) long enough to have its own interval and ice-cream vendor.

Wawrinka is 41. It was his nineteenth Championships and his last, granted by wildcard, and when it was over he stood in the London dusk and told the crowd, “I don’t want to retire, but I know it’s time to stop. One of the reasons I kept playing for so long was to experience nights like this.”

Wimbledon, an institution that raised its prize pot by a record twenty per cent this year to £64.2 million and has raised half a billion pounds selling five-year Centre Court seats, has discovered that the goodbye is a monetisable resource. You don’t even need the player to win. You just need them to leave, on camera, on the main show courts, to the fawning of fans and broadcasters.

Their prime had been long monetised and eventually their rankings tumbled and fresh faces took on the mantle of entertaining the grassy Wimbledon knolls, relegating them to the periphery. But the farewell is a lucrative sequel, and sequels - as any Netflix executive with a “sports vertical” will tell you - test extremely well.

Consider the week’s roster of departures. Wawrinka, the noble four-hour warrior, exits stage left. And then the headline act: Serena and Venus Williams, wildcarded into the women’s doubles, on the same court together for the first time since the 2022 US Open, with six Wimbledon doubles titles, fourteen Grand Slams as a pair, one 2012 Olympic gold on this very grass. It is, on paper, the most romantic ticket in sport.

Serena, 44, had already made her singles return after a spell in retirement and lost her singles opener to the 19-year-old Maya Joint in two hours and twenty-two minutes, tweaking her right knee at the end of the first set. With that injury in mind, the sister double act were scheduled to play on Thursday but that was quietly shelved, and, at the time of writing, has yet to be rescheduled, nor was a reason given for why it was postponed in the first place.

The cheap version of this column says: cynical old Wimbledon exploits ageing legends for content, the end.

But that’s a lie of omission, and the omission is the players themselves. Wawrinka asked for the invitation and called that battering “the best feeling ever.” The sisters also chose this. Nobody is being dragged onto Centre Court in leg-irons. The whole ghastly beauty of it is that everyone wants the same thing at once - the player wants one more night, the crowd wants to say they were there, the broadcaster wants the montage and early tournament viewership spike, the club wants the debenture holder in the good seat with the good champagne feeling something tangible.

For one evening, the interests of the mark and the house align perfectly. That’s just the market working.

There’s a difference between a farewell that happens and a farewell that is produced, and the tennis calendar has quickly transitioned from the first to the second. A genuine goodbye is a player, at the end of a road, being met by a crowd that loves them. A produced goodbye is a wild card issued with an eye on the order of play, a No. 1 Court slot given not for the ranking but for the ratings of the weeping. This is the oldest trick in the content business; you don’t manufacture the feeling, you just build the turnstile for it and take a fee at the gate.

And here’s where my sympathy curdles slightly, in the direction it always curdles: toward the fan holding the ticket. Because the farewell tour is increasingly a gift to the person selling the seat.

The crowd on No. 1 Court paid to watch Wawrinka lose, and got their money’s worth and a slight tear in their eye. But the logic doesn’t stop at the noble four-set defeat. It ends, if you follow it far enough, with legends wheeled out annually as a heritage attraction, monetised in perpetuity, because leaving turned out to be more bankable than staying around.

So watch the Williams sisters this week, if the knee holds up and the schedule delivers. Venus at 46 and Serena at 44 sharing a service box one more time is the kind of thing you’ll be glad you didn’t miss.

The long goodbye, it turns out, is the only part of the career that never has to end.

There is a particular kind of moment that only comes around once every four years, and it landed last weekend with me on the couch, remote in hand, once again lamenting that we had no skin in the game.

The World Cup is on. Ireland is not. So I sat and watched Curaçao, with a population somewhere around 150,000, a Caribbean island you could lose down the back of West Cork, walk out at a World Cup, and felt that very Irish thing that has never quite been given a word: delight for them and, underneath it, that low familiar ache for us.

We were telling ourselves this wouldn’t happen. The entire sales pitch for the 48-team World Cup, the bloated and sweating beast this newsletter has spoken about before, was that the door was being cast wide for countries like us.

More places, more nations, more fairytales. A bigger tent and more seats at the top table. The little guy would finally get a look in. And here is the part that refuses to sit nicely in the usual story, the one where FIFA is the villain and we are the wronged innocents at the gate: the door was widened, the fairytales did turn up, and Ireland still couldn’t enter through it.

Curaçao, the smallest country ever to reach the tournament. Cape Verde, an archipelago of barely half a million people, who topped a qualifying group with Cameroon in it - Cameroon, the five-time African champions, a country that has produced World Cup quarter-finalists and one of the great tournament folk heroes in Roger Milla. Jordan and Uzbekistan, in for the first time too. The expansion did exactly what it said on the tin and more. It found room for the unlikely and the unheralded. It still couldn’t find room for Ireland.

Because, after all, we are very good at being wronged. It is one of our better-developed muscles. The canonical Irish football grievance remains Thierry Henry’s handball in Paris in 2009, the volleyball assist that kept us out of 2010 and turned a generation into jurists on the laws of the game and supporters for some sort of video assistant solution. We had a villain then, a perfect one, a Frenchman with a guilty hand and a guilty face, and we have largely dined out on that injustice ever since. But even the faux-outrage that many have held onto has mostly dissipated. It is comforting, in its way, to lose to a crime. You get to keep your innocence. But it was over 16 years ago.

There was no crime in Prague. Heimir Hallgrímsson’s side went two goals up inside 23 minutes against Czechia in a World Cup play-off semi-final, the kind of start you spend your whole life as an Ireland supporter never quite believing in even as it happens. And then, of course, we did the thing. Ryan Manning did that in his own penalty box.

Patrik Schick pulled one back from the penalty spot. Ladislav Krejčí levelled the game with moments to go. Sammie Szmodics was carried off on a stretcher having been knocked unconscious. It went to extra time and then to penalties, where 4-3 was all it took to end it. They even missed a penalty before we did. No hand of Henry. No conspiracy. Just a two-goal lead handed back and quickly followed by shootout despair.

For years the implied defence was largely structural: too small a country, too shallow a pool, too many bigger fish swimming in the same European waters, the system stacked against the likes of us. And there’s truth in plenty of that. But when the system was changed in our favour, when the bar was lowered, the field was widened, and an extra play-off lifeline was strung across the gap - and Cape Verde, with fewer people than live in the Dublin commuter belt, managed to hurdle it. The excuses of being a small, underfunded football nation took a dent in Prague that it may not fully recover from.

The fact the Czechs have one point from their opening two games in a group that looks so desperately average just pours more alcohol into the wounds.

And so every fairytale on the screen this month doubles as a mirror to the Irish fanbase. Each time a debutant nation’s anthem plays and grown men weep into fresh replica shirts, it’s a lovely thing and also a small private indictment, a reminder that the romance of the underdog now belongs to other people’s underdogs.

Jack Charlton’s Ireland was the original good-time gatecrasher, the side that turned up where it had no business being and drank the place dry, and the whole country was brought along for the ride. Now we’re the ones at home, bitterly watching on at the likes of the Scottish doing the gatecrashing and reaping all the viral reward.

This is 24 years now since Saipan and Spain and the last time Ireland were actually at a World Cup. A whole footballing childhood has come and gone in the gap. There’s a whole cohort of Irish kids now who have never once seen their country at a World Cup, who will spend this summer watching Jordan and Uzbekistan and a Caribbean island of 150,000 people and wonder why that’s not us.

We pass down Italia ’90 and USA ’94 the way scripture gets passed down, the penalty save and the devastating Giants Stadium heat and the whole island grinding to a halt, a mere history lesson youngsters nod along politely to, little to no solace for them and their long-lasting World Cup absence.

And yet there is a strange and slightly shameful clarity to watching a tournament you’re not in. There is no pre-match dread, no national mood lurching on the back of a 1-nil defeat or late equaliser. You can enjoy Cape Varde for nothing, purely, the way you’re supposed to love a sporting underdog. For one more summer you are the neutral, and neutrality turns out to be a kind of peace - like waiting patiently and awkwardly in a quiet doctor’s office ahead of something grim like a rectal exam.

And yet every Irish supporter I know would trade that serene evening of sport for the sick one without a second’s thought, those jitterbugs where you can’t finish your dinner, where it feels like the entire island is tilting on its axis to every kick, tackle and wayward shot. To the feeling that it actually matters because we’re actually in it.

Being uninvited isn’t a higher form of dignity, even despite the grim and grotesque nature of this particular edition of the competition. It isn’t a clever opt-out from a tournament I’ve spent column inches calling out as ugly and obscene. It’s just being uninvited, and watching through the window, and pretending the view is better from out here.

As Arne Slot sat stony-faced in the Anfield dugout as the Kop serenaded Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson one more time before their departure, there must have been a lot on his mind.

One of them — as had been widely reported and reluctantly accepted by swathes of the fanbase — would’ve been how he was going to turn around this disastrous season and get the title-winning charge back on track.

He seemed to have weathered the ultimate storm and despite 20 losses over the course of the season, with so many mitigating factors taking into account, would be given one more chance to right the ship.

And then FSG, out of nowhere on the morning of the Champions League final, pulled the plug on the Slot project. Having seemingly backed their man throughout the tumultuous campaign in the face of substantial and audible grievances from the support, they took stock and decided too much damage had been done and the crackly foundation that had appeared was simply too unsteady to take forward into next season.

It’s hard not to have a lot of sympathy for the Dutchman. Having expertly guided the club to a Premier League title last season, Slot was making things look easy. He was quickly added to the hall of legendary managers on the Kop banner, joining his predecessor Jurgen Klopp, who had to do so much for his single league title.

He guided the club admirably past the death of Diogo Jota, and with so much credit in the bank it’s quite hard to believe that just under 12 months later he’d be removed from his role.

It’s a huge gamble from the powers that be. Slot is a proven winner across multiple leagues, and despite the issues that have sprouted, isn’t suddenly a bad coach overnight. He coaxed Salah towards his best ever season statistically. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him rock up at another club and be very successful.

It’s also a huge gamble to replace him with Andoni Iraola. The Spaniard guided Bournemouth to an unprecedented sixth place finish and Europa League football for next season.

Positively for the fans, his style of football is more akin to the “heavy metal football” that Mo Salah called for in his end-of-season missive, the strike that might have finally broken Slot’s future and in fans’ eyes may provided one last assist before moving on.

But he’s never won a trophy and his foot-forward, intensive style of football is largely untested twice a week. It worked for the most part under Klopp, who needed years of sweat and tears to fine tune everything, and even then there were downward years where the squad looked like they were running on empty.

His win rate leaves a lot to be desired, and by his own admission has spoken about how much he and his teams struggle against low block, an issue Liverpool have endeavored to overcome for over a decade.

But the biggest gamble of all would have been persisting with Slot heading into next season. With so much more tuning needed to the squad, you’d have thought FSG would gift Slot the chance to go again with a refreshed squad. But a slow start to next season and Anfield would have become even more toxic than ever before.

One of the biggest challenges to the keep Slot debate was that the football had simply become stale and boring. It’s hard to reverse that overarching sense of misgiving with the style, and as Salah crucially outlined, the Liverpool fanbase clearly demand and expect a swashbuckling style of football that Slot’s team simply weren’t delivering.

Even through low periods of the Klopp era, there was rarely a sense of apathy with the football and certainly not with the effort and endeavour of the squad. The work ethic persisted, and as reports dribbled towards the end of the season that Liverpool weren’t training to as high a standard as before, and that players were taking too many city breaks — something that been debunked — Slot began to lose the fans.

He had to fight numerous fires in the media but his combativeness was rarely seen as something to rally behind. There was complaints, washy excuses about conceding goals first in games, and set piece concerns that he baffling tried to justify.

There was also a lot of displeasure with how me managed academy players, and reportedly barely stepped foot at academy events and certainly saw no reason to lean more heavily on younger players, even with such strain on the senior squad, something his predecessor had done to great accomplishment.

Indeed, the stats boffins and decision makers clearly saw that Slot, despite his tactical acumen, had simply burned all his credit and letting it continue would have been calamitous. At least now, a new manager has a full summer to review and refine his squad, engineer a pre-season plan off the back of the World Cup, and hope the wheeling and dealing on the transfer front returns enough quality to replace Salah and fill the gaps that had appeared in the team.

It feels wrong in many ways, but if anything has been learned about Liverpool as a fanbase and an institution this season, is that they need a force of personality at the helm to unite and rally behind when times get tough. They want a coach who can extract a lot from very little. They need a manager in all but name, because the Kop will only ever demand 101% from their man in charge. Slot soldiered on admirably, but was missing that magic ingredient that gave fans hope for the future.

In the end, the decision to sack Slot was a straight forward one, but one that will have stung across every level of the football club nonetheless.

As tennis moves deeper into life beyond the Big Three, the sport is changing quickly, and, in many ways, thriving.

A new generation of stars has entered the fray, pushing the game into fresh territory and easing fears that tennis would struggle to maintain its pull once Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic began to fade from centre court.

Those worries now look misplaced. Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka have not merely inherited the sport’s spotlight but have helped reshape it.

But away from the court, a different kind of story is gathering pace heading into the second Grand Slam of the year at Roland Garros.

Tennis finds itself facing a renewed challenge that could alter the landscape of the sport for years to come. Players are becoming increasingly united over prize money, revenue sharing and the question of how much of tennis’s growing wealth should flow back to the people who make the sport worth watching.

The prize money debate has been dragged by players into the public arena, raising a question the sport has spent years politely avoiding: why do those athletes receive such a small slice of the money they generate?

The immediate flashpoint has been the upcoming French Open. Roland Garros has increased its 2026 prize money pot by 9.5% to €61.7 million, however players point out that their share of tournament revenue is projected to fall from 15.5% in 2024 to 14.9% in 2026.

Players had reportedly requested a move towards 22%, in line with other major ATP/WTA 1000 events.

This is why Sinner, Gauff, Sabalenka and others have been willing to raise the nuclear option: a Grand Slam boycott.

Sinner has framed the dispute not as greed, but as offering players more respect. Gauff has pointed towards the difficulty lower-ranked players face with comfortably making ends meet. Sabalenka has been among the loudest voices calling for collective action. Novak Djokovic, long associated with the Professional Tennis Players Association, has backed the broader push for structural reform.

"It's more about respect, you know? Because ​I think we give much more than what we are getting back. It's not only for the top players, it's for all of us players," Sinner told reporters ahead of the Italian Open in Rome.

To the casual observer, tennis players complaining about prize money can sound absurd. Grand Slam winners will earn millions while the biggest names fly privately with huge entourages, wearing luxury watches and signing massive endorsement deals.

Carlos Alcaraz was reportedly the world’s highest-paid tennis player in 2025, with estimated earnings of over $50million. Gauff topped Forbes’ 2025 list of highest-paid female athletes with $33million, ahead of Sabalenka and Swiatek.

But the economics of tennis changes drastically beyond the top category of stars. Players largely rely on prize money around the circuit to earn money, while a lucky subset might receive sponsorship and endorsements deals, or even grants and funding from their home federations.

The sport is more akin to a travelling circus of independent contractors than a single sports league with guaranteed salaries, revenue sharing, pensions and collective bargaining power.

In addition, expenses come direct from players own pockets — often scraping the bottom of prize money once they’ve paid off taxes, coaches and physio, travel, accommodation and all the other miscellaneous expenses that comes with being a globetrotting sports athlete.

In contrast, in the NBA, players receive roughly 49–51% of basketball-related income. In the NFL, players receive at least 48% of annual revenue under the current collective bargaining agreement. In major American team sports, the idea that players should get close to half of the money is not absurd but simply baked into the economic model of the sport.

Tennis is nowhere near that. The Grand Slams are tennis’s biggest money spinner and sit comfortably alongside other premium sporting properties, yet are understood to allocate roughly 13–15% of revenues to prize money. The players’ ask of 22% is not even close to half that of primary American sports leagues.

Jessica Pegula, another player spearheading the push towards fairer pay, told The Times that the campaign is about more than simply increasing prize money.

“What we’re really looking at is player welfare, pensions, stuff like that. That’s really important and right now the grand slams don’t contribute anything,” she said.

“Second to that is the prize money revenue share not changing. It’s not meant to look like ‘we want more money’, that it’s greedy, it’s just what’s fair. When you look at other sports, the revenue share is not changing.”

The ATP’s own Baseline programme is an acknowledgement of this problem. For 2025, it guaranteed minimum income thresholds of $300,000 for top-100 singles players, $200,000 for players ranked 101–175, and $100,000 for players ranked 176–250, provided they met certain playing requirements. That sounds useful, but it also reveals the fragility at the lower levels of the professional circuit. In what other supposedly major global sport does a top-250 athlete need a safety-net programme to make their career viable?

For context, Jannik Sinner led men’s tennis in 2024 with $16.9million in prize money. The ATP No. 100, Federico Coria, earned around $590,000, while No. 250 Abdullah Shelbayh earned just under $205,000 in singles prize money. Those numbers are before the substantial costs of operating as a professional tennis player. Tennis stars are rich, but tennis professionals are often far less secure than their equivalents in other major sports.

Tennis, generally, has always had a strange relationship with labour power. Its stars are individually famous, but collectively quite disparate. The tours are split. The Grand Slams operate as their own power centres and are run by local federations, or in the case of Wimbledon, a private tennis club.

The ATP, WTA, ITF and tournament owners all have overlapping interests. There is no single commissioner, no simple league table of revenues, no clean CBA negotiation where players can sit across from figures who can help align funding and player revenue.

Instead, tennis players are the product, but not the owners. They are the reason the tickets sell, but also not part of the room where salary and revenues are discussed.

The Grand Slams will argue, not entirely without merit, that their money does not simply disappear into the ether — they fund facilities, grassroots programmes, national federations, development pathways and the wider ecosystem of the sport. That there is a broader tennis pyramid to sustain.

There is also an optics trap in the discussion. Tennis leadership know fans are unlikely to instinctively sympathise with millionaires demanding more millions. That is why the campaign needs to keep pushing the lower-ranked player to the front of the argument.

The romance of tennis is that anyone can, in theory, pick up a racket, climb the rankings and walk onto Centre Court in any given year. The reality is that the road is brutally expensive. If only the already wealthy, heavily sponsored or federation-backed can survive long enough to break through, then tennis becomes less meritocratic than it pretends to be.

And that, ultimately, is why the pay dispute matters. Prize money is not just a reward, but probably the single greatest backbone of a true professional tennis pathway. It decides who gets to keep travelling. Who can afford a coach. Who can travel comfortably and recover properly. Who can bring a physio. Who can play a full schedule without gambling their future on the next cheque that might never arrive.

A boycott, as things stand, feels unlikely to happen and, in truth, probably suits both sides better as a threat than a reality. Tennis doesn’t need to become the NBA, nor does it need salary caps, franchises or trade deadlines. Part of its beauty is that it remains brutally individual, global and slightly chaotic in that regard.

But it does need to answer a basic question — if the players are the whole show, why are they still fighting for a fair share of the box office?

It took just three games into a new era at Liverpool for Arne Slot to capture people’s attentions, for the better, after Liverpool made it three wins from three in the league and dismantled Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United 3-0.

Despite United’s struggles, it was still mightily impressive for a new Liverpool manager to go into Old Trafford and win so convincingly. Within that performance, Ryan Gravenberch was in the early trials of a total renewal at the club, having been overlooked a bit under Jurgen Klopp. Luis Diaz was firing. Salah looked fresh. There were so many things going for the team and their new manager.

And then Slot swanned over to the Sky Sports sideline desk and delivered a most clinical and damning tactical analysis of the opposition team. On the surface, it was nothing groundbreaking — a succinct summation of what he and his team had analysed before the game and duly taken advantage of.

"Their full-backs are sometimes really high and then Casemiro comes in between. So if you pick the ball and you keep Luis Diaz and Mo Salah high you're constantly in a one-v-one situation."

It was straight-talking and something rarely sounded from a Premier League manager. As Ten Hag’s future wobbled, it was a fellow Dutch manager who was sticking the knife in in front of a worldwide audience — here’s what we saw, and here’s how we managed to beat these guys so easily.

This past weekend, in Slot’s long-awaited second trip over to Old Trafford, the tone around his management has changed drastically, while on the field Liverpool look a shambles. Where Gravenberch and MacAllister had dominated the midfield 20 months prior, they were mere shadows to 34-year-old Casemiro and once-alienated Kobbie Mainoo. Gravenberch looks a shell of his Team of the Year form of last season, while MacAllister has fallen off so severely that he almost gets a reprieve in being left on the sideline.

Trent Alexander-Arnold offering from full back is obviously long gone, whilst Luis Diaz — who scored and created havoc all game back in August of 2024 — is preparing for a Champions League semi-final second leg with Bayern Munich, a week off the back of one of the great European goals.

And rather than Ten Hag facing his backside to the fire, Slot seems the one now in danger of losing his position. All the indications from the club are that they will stick with Slot, but when United went 2-0 up inside the first fifteen minutes at Old Trafford there was an air that a big defeat will make Slot’s position totally untenable. Thanks largely in part to United errors, Liverpool clawed it back to 2-2 and Slot’s job suddenly looked secure again. A 3-2 defeat, ultimately, was kind on Liverpool, who looked like a part-time cast of struggling footballers.

So much has been documented about Liverpool downfall since this time last year. Arne Slot, an unlikely but convincing first-time Premier League winning manager, was already starting to see the cracks. A poor Champions League bowing out against PSG and a slight post-title sealing drop in form eventually led to a summer of total tragedy and transfer market chaos.

A year on, his time at Liverpool hangs by a thread. It seems crazy that Liverpool would so quickly sour on a league winning manager but there’s now a dark cloud of inevitability around Slot’s future. Fans have lost faith, while the club leadership push as much pro-Slot coverage that any one media platform can handle. Slot perseveres somehow, but his terse and self-assured manner has been replaced by daily firefighting and unsatisfying soundbites.

He continues to back himself and the FSG-powered leadership seem happy to do the same, while fans wonder if he’s lost that initial bottle and steeliness that makes a them row behind a manager. Klopp was a force of nature, personality-wise, that made fans and players alike want to run through walls on his behalf, and even when times were bad there was never a semblance of doubt that he wasn’t the man to turn things around.

As of now, it’s hard to see such a capability from Slot. Losing has become the norm, an astonishing 18 in all competitions this season, with an utterly withered team that lacks fight and energy and any semblance of an identity.

They’re in a tremendously lucky position that the league around them has been equally lethargic, somehow allowing them to slot into a Champions League position for next season, something FSG will no doubt be delighted by as it once again props up the coffers for more badly needed spending.

The club clearly believe that there’s several unavoidable issues that Slot has had to contend with that, rather than completely writing off the season, have at least hindered him enough to give him a bit of a once-off reprieve. But that free hit has become so desperately bad on and off the field that it’s become increasingly risky to let that seep into another season.

Liverpool spent a warchest last season, dragging the Alexander Isak saga deep into the summer, denying him a true pre-season. Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike have had flashes of brilliance but it’s been far too fleeting, while the German has been anonymous for large swathes of games, including this past weekend.

Accelerating matters and derailing the settling of new players has been the downturn of old players. Mo Salah signed a massive two-year extension to continue his career at Liverpool but has clashed with Slot and his own form has fallen off a cliff, so much so that the club and the club legend have mututally agreed to part ways. Virgil van Dijk has been shaky, but is also almost singlehandedly trying to keep a pondering midfield and a shaky defence from combusting. MacAllister form has been stark, something dating back to the end of last season, while Slot has trust issues over his wider squad, forcing him to persist with a team of out of form players.

The most damning messaging out of the club, and not so thinly-veiledly stoked by the leaving Mo Salah, has been the drop in training ground work ethic and intensity. Liverpool look completely zapped of energy, but are reportedly barely training and are often taking days off to recover. If this is Slot easing off on the accelerator ahead of slamming the metal to the floor next season, he risks finding a squad that have forgotten how to put in the hard yards and have lost its hardened edge forged under Klopp.

But it looks like, for now, Slot’s position is safe. He has the backing of his bosses and a limitation of alternatives on the market, which currently start and end with former player Xabi Alonso, who although a fanciful thought for fans has his own question marks.

With a summer curtailed by the World Cup, a squad still needing an awful lot of surgery, and a further purging of senior leadership, it all leaves Liverpool and Slot in a very precarious position. New players will need to flip their form instantly. Florian Wirtz will need to start justifying his huge outlay. New player leadership will need to set vastly higher standards in a post-Salah dressing room. And vitally, for Arne Slot, Liverpool need to find an identity and stop losing games.

When a Formula 1 docuseries following the 2018 season hit streaming platform Netflix, it very quickly changed the trajectory of how producers and Netflix in particular would approach the sports documentary.

Drive to Survive was not the first fly-on-the-wall sports series. The NFL had been doing this kind of thing for years, while plenty of clubs, teams and competitions had already invited cameras behind the curtain. But Netflix’s Formula 1 series had managed to discover a certain recipe that helped it find a different gear.

Firstly, it followed a sport that was niche enough to feel fresh and unfamiliar, but simple enough to understand at speed. Formula 1 may be built on ultra-complex engineering, political manoeuvring and microscopic margins, but the basic proposition is wonderfully clean: cars go very fast, drivers try to win, teams try not to crash and burn.

Secondly, it introduced a sprawling cast of characters. Drivers, team principals, billionaire owners, engineers and executives all arrived with their own quirks, grudges, vanities and bloated egos. The show did not need to manufacture drama from nothing. It simply pointed the camera at a sport already full of stress and insecurity.

Thirdly, it looked fantastic, taking the viewer across Monaco, Monza, Singapore, the Gulf and beyond. The sport came wrapped in wealth, glamour and absurdly cinematic backdrops. There were private jets, helicopters, hotel balconies, expensive cars, champagne on yachts, and men in branded polo shirts behaving as if a botched pit stop was an international emergency.

By placing a microscope over a season of racing and cutting it through driver soundbites, paddock politics and boardroom tension, Drive to Survive discovered lightning in a bottle. Its rise was then helped by the COVID-19 streaming boom, when millions of viewers were stuck at home and suddenly had time to binge-watch a sport they may previously have overlooked.

Although Netflix are coy with their viewing figures, Drive To Survive hit a peak of over 90.2m watch hours in season 5 (the 2022 season). F1’s American TV audience roughly doubled across the Drive to Survive era, with ESPN noting that 16 races set viewership records in the 2025 season. Ultimately, there’s strong evidence that Netflix helped drive F1 interest in the US, especially among younger fans, women, and casual sports viewers.

Naturally, this boom introduced the Netflixication of the sports docuseries.

In 2023, Netflix launched Full Swing, following golf’s biggest names, and Break Point, which tracked the top-level tennis circuit. Later that year came Tour de France: Unchained, following the gruelling French cycling race. In 2024, the Six Nations rugby championship received the same treatment with Six Nations: Full Contact.

If there was a sport that needed a season under the microscope and wanted a F1 booster injection, Netflix was there, camera crew in tow.

But the formula that worked so well for Drive To Survive quickly became saturated when applied to other sports. The same ingredients keep reappearing: dramatic voiceovers, slow-motion training footage, contrived boardroom tension, carefully chosen swear words, and overly dramatic talking heads.

Ultimately, none of Netflix’s follow-up docuseries has come close to matching the scale or cultural impact of Drive to Survive.

Per FlixPatrol, Break Point was broadly well received at over 30 million watch hours, but that plummeted by over half for season 2. Unsurprisingly the show was canned in 2024, generally accepted that the supply of trendy sports docs and docuseries on streaming platforms was outpacing demand.

Golf’s Full Swing has fared better, but its numbers have also dropped sharply from a season 1 high of more than 53 million watch hours. Its fourth season recently arrived with just four episodes, down from eight and seven in previous seasons, despite covering one of the most dramatic golf years imaginable: Rory McIlroy completing the career Grand Slam at the Masters, a Ryder Cup year, and the ongoing tension around the sport’s fractured future.

While the show’s shorter runtime keeps it flowing quickly the season felt curiously light and insignificant. The 2025 Ryder Cup provided a solid spine, but the show never quite lands the punch one might have expected from such a newsworthy campaign.

Elsewhere, the Six Nations rugby championship got the Netflix treatment, but viewing figures fell off a cliff in season 2 before it’s cancellation. The show failed to capture any of the magic the Drive To Survive creators managed to find in F1, and it followed the same familiar and formulaic treatment as the others, ultimately failing to attract many new fans to the sport, as Six Nations CEO Tom Harrison said Netflix made the strategic decision not to continue beyond season 2.

Tour de France: Unchained was arguably more successful creatively, and its viewing numbers remained steadier than some of its peers. Cycling, like Formula 1, has obvious advantages for this kind of treatment: danger, scenery, tactics, suffering, team orders, internal politics and enormous physical cost. But Netflix still pulled the plug after three seasons, another sign that competent execution alone may no longer be enough.

In the end, everyone had hoped to find strike a cord with an audience that responded avidly to Drive to Survive, but few managed to find the same magic recipe. And as the Formula 1 docuseries reached its eighth season this year, even it may have become a victim of its own success.

Although its viewing figures have remained strong — certainly exorbitant compared with its sporting counterparts — the old formula has started to become cold and boring. There is an argument that the production has become too sanitised, controlled, and PR-friendly. One of the major storylines from the 2025 season, Christian Horner’s departure from Red Bull Racing, was given noticeably soft-touch treatment.

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The show now feels more contrived than ever. The drama has been diluted and the big egos have been sanded down. The bite from the racing drivers and bosses has been largely lost. Drive to Survive always required the viewer to play along with a certain artifice, that the talking heads and dramatic commentary were recorded long after the fact, but that overkill has now resulted in a very unfulfilling and sanitised product.

It will, of course, persevere. Season 9 will likely arrive on Netflix next year, ahead of the 2027 Formula 1 season. But it will stand alone as the first and last of its kind.

Everyone went hunting for the next Drive to Survive. In the end, not even Drive to Survive could fully survive sticking to its own sterile blueprint.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

As World Cup 2026 swells into view, it doesn’t so much arrive as it expands - bloated, stretched, and slightly out of shape.

It swells in participation — 48 teams for the first time.

It swells in scale — 104 games across three countries.

It swells in ego — Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president turned geopolitical wheeler and dealer.

And it swells into a world that feels increasingly unstable and politicised, going head on with Donald Trump’s American juggernaut — a country that is currently flaming wars in the Middle East and having a public spat with the Pope.

Rather than skidding excitingly round the bend four years on from Qatar, the World Cup 2026 has almost had to be dragged into place — like the struggle of Homer dragging the Stone of Shame. It’s sweaty, it’s heavy. It’s not particularly pretty to look at. But it’s here and we’ll watch it anyway, I guess?

For many, it will be hard to separate the basic purity of kicking a leather ball around and the geopolitical tightrope that’s brought us here. With just under two months to the competition, Iran are in conflict with Donald Trump, who is TACOing in and out of various positions. It remains unclear if the Iranian national team and their fans will be able to safely attend the tournament and support their team, and step foot in a land where just two weeks ago in an expletive-laden Truth Social post, Trump vowed to end their entire civilisation if they didn’t back down.

Last year, Infantino was lauding Trump with the inaugural FIFA “Peace Prize”, a moment that now feels less like diplomacy and more like parody. It wasn’t the first time Trump butted into view on a FIFA stage, having been bizarrely inserted into the Club World Cup celebrations when Chelsea won the inaugural tournament last summer.

If this was some genius gambit from Infantino to keep Trump onside so he could carry FIFA through this summer’s tournament unscathed, he’s failed utterly and made himself look like a sniveling Yes-man. The FIFA Peace Prize has become an oft-referenced meme as far as Trump is concerned, an award that is unlikely to see the light of day again.

Infantino has seemingly moved heaven and earth to strike a close friendship with the U.S. president, attending Trump’s inauguration, making several appearances in the Oval Office, attending Trump’s Board of Peace meetings and last weekend he posted a photo on Instagram alongside Trump at a UFC event in Miami. Infantino has also opened a FIFA satellite office in Trump Tower in New York.

Infantino has somehow become a pitiful and disdainful figure in an occupational pipeline that delivered us Sepp Blatter.

Such has been Trump’s overriding influence on the hosting of the tournament, recent reports from The Athletic suggest FIFA and Infantino are planning to request an amnesty from ICE raids across America while the World Cup is under way, seemingly leveraging off his new-found friendship. Several FIFA member countries have raised concerns over the safety and viability of travelling to the host nations, with ICE arrests reaching thousands per day and in almost half of cases, targeting people with no criminal records.

In addition, the mass inflation and skyrocketing fuel prices Trump has induced through his escalation with Iran will likely not help draw people to matches in the U.S. or the surrounding carnival of football.

Previously lauded as the most inclusive World Cup ever, this edition instead looks to be the most financially challenging ever. Beyond the difficulties of obtaining VISAs and attending the tournament, exorbitant price hikes and ticket gouging are rife, with local host cities announcing transport cost rises to help cover the significant costs of handling the World Cup wave.

Boston are to charge fans $95 for buses to Gillette Stadium, while a round-trip rail ticket from New York Pennsylvania Station to MetLife Stadium will cost $150 per passenger, impacting eight games and the World Cup final on July 19th.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill accused FIFA of taking fans “for a ride”.

“FIFA is making $11billion off of this World Cup and charging fans up to $10,000 for a single ticket for the final. I won’t stick New Jersey’s commuters with that tab for years to come. That’s not fair.”

Meanwhile, FIFA has created a new category of tickets in an apparent effort to milk even more money out of prime seats. They released new batches of tickets listed as “Front Category 1” for seats in the first several rows of certain sections, being charged at upwards of $900.

Suddenly, seats purchased from the original standard Category 1 ticket that, if bought beforehand, should have been eligible for placement in those exact same rows and sections.

Fans in the ticket lottery have reported feeling “scammed” and “misled” by FIFA’s ticketing system, further alienating fans who were willing to go, and likely convincing other fans to stay at home and not travel to the tournament. It’s one further Americanisation of the World Cup, where VIP culture is rife at big events, with exorbitant ticket levels and dynamic pricing strategies all contributing to inflated prices of attending an event.

On an economic front, leaders of hotel associations in major host cities told Forbes that the economic boon FIFA promised isn’t coming to fruition. That same Forbes report spotlighted thousands of room cancellations FIFA made in host cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico.

With travelling fans priced out and stretched thin, the atmosphere and soul of the tournament is at major risk of diluting away. The football pyramid is already oversaturated, with more games than ever before, and the 48 team structure will likely dilute the quality even more, with several mismatches and dead rubbers likely, granted the likes of Curaçao and Cape Verde will offer great underdog tales and a beacon of light with their unlikely qualification.

With so much chaos off the field, perhaps some serenity will be found on it once it all kicks off. Plenty of geopolitical fears as well as infrastructural challenges hounded the approach to the Qatar World Cup, but a lot of it was largely forgotten once the action got underway.

But the 2026 edition has managed to become the most greedy, grotesque offering yet. Somehow it will go ahead, amidst all the chaos of exorbitant prices, worldwide inflation, wars and geopolitical knife-edges, but it’s another example of FIFA managing to cultivate calamity and highlighting a world rife with division and unrest. It claims to “unite the world”, and is doing so manages to take all the attention away from the game itself.

Stay tuned for more World Cup 2026 writing before and during the tournament here on Game Over, Ball Burst.

Beyond Rory McIlroy’s historic back-to-back Masters win last weekend, one of the main talking points coming out of the tournament was how it now exists in the modern content era.

“Content” feels like a dirty internet word at this point, but the Masters — something that once seemed to speak entirely for itself — has quickly become a content behemoth. For a tournament where phones are banned on course, it still drives an immense amount of clicks, views and attention.

Augusta National has made a concerted effort to enter a more digital age — the mobile app is now an annual ritual for the Masters acolyte, offering unrivalled replay and attention to detail on every single shot and every single hole. This year, the tournament had a renewed social media focus, providing plenty of content throughout the week on their various channels, beginning with behind the scenes footage of McIlroy’s Champions Dinner preparation, to neatly edited stories on Instagram threading through the on-course storylines. While the style wasn’t exactly to my taste and I found myself speed-tapping through them, clearly a lot of effort had gone into the format.

A bigger bone of contention was how mainstream components beyond the golf had become, as patrons transitioned from golf nerds into consumers and influencers, unpacking massive hauls of Masters merch on TikTok, revealing their extensive collections of caps and a garden gnome or two. At times it felt like a distraction, and although Augusta National have been criticised for leaving millions of dollars on the table through their somewhat archaic traditions, it’s something perhaps the board may consider reversing course on in future tournaments.

The Masters has always been wrapped in a mystique, but that is now being repackaged as a brand identity to be bought, displayed and circulated online. The tournament remains beautiful, but parts of the culture around it are beginning to resemble a luxury drop from a designer brand than a major championship, less a golf tournament that happens to have iconic branding, and more an iconic brand that happens to stage a golf tournament.

On television, ESPN entered the fray with their exclusive airing of the Par 3 tournament on Wednesday. It attempted to merge the Worldwide Leader’s increasingly Barstoolish tenor with the decorum of Masters week and although it was largely confined to the Par 3, it fed into a broader sense among pundits and hardened golf fans that this is exactly what they do not want the Masters to become — loud, boorish, and cluttered with unwelcome characters drafted in for comic relief.

Jason Kelce is a popular, louder-than-life character of this new ESPN era, but his involvement at Augusta was widely criticised. Although Pat McAfee was denied at the gate, it still felt as though ESPN failed to grasp the mood of the earnest golf fan. On the morning of day one, WWE wrestler The Miz was on hand to preview the tournament, in some awkward bit of cross-promotional synergy between ESPN’s coverage and this weekend’s WrestleMania. Needless to say, it went down like a lead balloon.

While this is more of an ESPN problem than an Augusta one, it does raise the question of whether stricter lines will be drawn in future. Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley made a rare admission in his once-a-year press conference last week that the club may have made a mistake in allowing Dude Perfect, the YouTube trick-shot troupe, to play frisbee around Amen Corner a few years ago.

Ridley noted that while Augusta is willing to explore themes outside its traditional box, there is clearly little appetite to veer too far into influencer and celebrity culture. Most golf fans still see the exclusivity of the Masters as something to be protected. Get the balance wrong between that and the gimmicks designed to capture more eyes, clicks and money, and the club risks alienating the true worshippers of Masters golf.

Beyond ESPN, the television coverage once again left plenty to be desired. It is well documented at this point just how limited live coverage of the golf remains, with early viewing restricted to specific featured groups and featured holes before broadening later in the day into the full broadcast window.

That approach leans into the supposed exclusivity of the course itself — you will see what we want you to see — and, in theory, whets the appetite for the main names and big storylines when the coverage finally opens up properly in the evening.

But there is a thin line between leaving viewers wanting more and simply excluding whole swathes of the tournament. Even when shots did make the air, the production often appeared to show them on a significant tape delay, sometimes several minutes after they had happened in real time. Several golfers disappeared into a black hole once they slipped down the leaderboard, with little effort made by television to colour in the wider picture and show how the tournament was unfolding beyond the top five or six names.

When Haotong Li was thrashing his way around Augusta National’s greenery en route to a quintuple bogey on the 13th, for instance, it was not even mentioned on television. Not only did it remove him from the top-five picture, it also had an impact on Scottie Scheffler, his playing partner, who viewers actually were following on screen.

Shane Lowry, near the top of the leaderboard for much of the tournament and still in the mix early on Sunday, eventually drifted out of contention with little effort made by television to tell that particular story, with only 19 of his shots finding airtime.

NBC analyst Kevin Kisner pulled no punches in his assessment of the coverage, openly baffled by CBS’s production decisions:

"Our production team at NBC prides themselves on playing every shot that they possibly can live… I have no idea what they’re doing. Literally no idea. They’re showing every shot on tape. I don’t even know how the announcers call it.

The problems escalated from there and left fans completely in the dark when production seemed to lose track of McIlroy’s second shot on the 18th. Needing at least a bogey to win the tournament, McIlroy ended up right of the fairway in the trees and recovered with a looping iron that finished in a bunker just short and right of the green. But for a good thirty seconds, neither the television pictures nor the commentary seemed entirely sure where the ball had gone.

All while this was happening, over on Sky Sports, Nick Faldo was mindlessly waffling on about how energy can be absorbed from the trees in moments like these. Faldo, long treated as one of the network’s authoritative Masters voices thanks to his Augusta pedigree and years in Sky’s golf orbit, can still sound more dutiful than illuminating. There is no questioning his stature or understanding of the course, but his television persona has often leaned toward the dry, aristocratic and faintly joyless, as though the audience is being lectured on the game rather than invited deeper into it.

For a tournament built on tension, that kind of commentary can flatten the drama rather than heighten it. Sky have long valued Faldo’s gravitas, but gravitas on its own is not always the same thing as insight. In a broadcast already constrained by Augusta’s rigidity, the last thing the viewer needs is another layer of distance between themselves and the event.

And that, really, is the modern Masters dilemma. Augusta is becoming less exclusive in the ways many golf fans never asked for — through TikTok haul culture, manicured social content and celebrity intrusion — while remaining just as restrictive in the one area viewers might actually welcome greater openness: the golf itself. In trying to preserve its mystique while broadening its commercial reach, the club risks drifting into an awkward middle ground: less formal, less sacred and less exclusive than before, yet still unwilling to let fans fully into the tournament they actually came to watch.

Leave it to Rory McIlroy to inspire a clearing of the cobwebs over on Game Over, Ball Burst, which, must like the golfer himself, has had a quiet opening to 2026 after a blistering and unforgettable 2025. However, unlike Rory, I’d love to say that I’ve been grafting in the shadows, sharpening my keyboard ahead of a big Majors season, day-tripping to the course after the school-run, but that is sadly not the case.

Travel, work and the impending doom hovering over planet Earth have all contributed to a loss of form and a tumbleweed forming around the GOBB offices.

But there’s not much better than a Masters tournament, another episode of the award-winning Rory drama and a lick fresh of paint to find renewed vigour to get back into action.

You might notice a new, sort of Masters-inspired colour scheme around here, or perhaps a tribute to reigning All-Ireland champions Kerry. The new green and yellow branding scheme was my latest example of procrastination from actually writing on this thing, when I cobbled it together last week in anticipation of returning to the newsletter in a post-Masters roll of thunder.

This weekend, after a decade of Masters turmoil and almost Animaniacs levels of cartoonish anguish, Rory McIlroy showed how Augusta National is his town now. Not only has he finally found the key to the front door, he’s changed the locks, grabbed himself a cold iced beer and created his very own ass-groove on the sofa. That’s his television set, those are his slippers. Those are his beers in the fridge.

Last year’s victory was the tsunami of relief, sealing a long-awaited golfing Grand Slam and releasing a powder keg of pent up Masters pressure. This year’s victory didn’t come without its drama, but it presented a player who knew the course inside out and had matured enough to wrestle it into submission.

Friday’s score taking him to -12 heading into the weekend was absurd, especially consider he was playing so loosely. At various points over the weekend he lost his iron play and pulled a few putts, but as the course brought everyone down to size come Sunday night, Rory rarely looked any more than slightly uncomfortable.

Which is brazeningly un-Rorylike considering he had somehow relinquished a 6-hole lead and the overall lead after a double-bogeyed fourth hole. Scottie Scheffler shook the earth coming down the stretch, but ran out of holes, whilst Cameron Young and Justin Rose, after various flirtations with the lead, eventually succumbed to the Masters blackhole.

Sam Burns and Shane Lowry fell off drastically, Haotong Li came and memely dropped off the face of the leaderboard. As the temperature intensified, Rory looked like the only player coping. Seriously deep scars still exist, especially for us onlookers who wince and squirm at every wayward Rangefinder line.

Of course, it’s never straight forward when he’s in play, not least with an 18th drive flew so wayward right that McIlroy had to manage game of musical chairs to move patrons out of the firing line. He had lost that swagger and jaunty gait, looking tired and saggy. You sure get your money’s worth with this guy.

But his quality and touch never waned. With the finishing line in sight, a gorgeous chip shot onto the green on 17th, after a Tiger-esque approach putt, Rory knew exactly how to maneuver himself towards a tournament-winning putt. The glorious lift out of the bunker on 18, when a more tense pair of arms, or indeed an older version of Rory McIlroy may have shrank deep within its pits as the sandy walls cocooned around him.

The line from Rory coming out of his 2025 win was “what are we all going to talk about next year?!”. Talk of going back-to-back was tempered in the run up to the tournament. More than ever it seemed like a bolter was due, perhaps a rookie could rise to the test.

And then Rory wagged his finger at those doubting him again. Entering the bastion of greats, probably the greatest European golfer ever, and into privileged territory as only the fourth to defend a Masters title.

The course, longer than ever, is his now - malleable in the palms of his hands.

When it was announced that a wrestling biopic of the Von Erich family was coming to the big screen in Sean Durkin’s Iron Claw, my immediate reaction was on how exactly they were going to pack so much tragedy into one single, compact two-hour yarn.

The filmmakers were working with some pretty murky material - a wrestling family cursed by several life events of destruction and devastation. On paper, it stretches almost beyond the realms of human reality and into fiction. In the end, the film didn’t have to contend with the entire life story of the Von Erich’s with the creative decision to annex an entire brother, Chris, as the filmmakers felt that elements of his story would not only overlap with his siblings, but almost added too much misfortune for one viewer to comprehend.

While I believe it’s up there amongst some of the great sporting biographical dramas, and arguably the best wrestling film of its kind, as someone who was fairly in lock with the story beforehand it certainly stuck in the craw that they would exclude an important and worthy component of the Von Erich family tree.

Naturally, I realise this is mostly a me problem along with any wrestling snobs who know more about the inside mechanisms of World Class Championship Wrestling than they care to advertise too much. This is a wrestling film about some grueling but absorbing source material that tries to toe the line between doing its duty with the story and not intimidating the audience. And it does a pretty good job at that. It’s not necessarily aimed at me, or others closely familiar with the Von Erich tale, but a wider audience who are already being asked a lot of by buying into a wrestling movie.

The Von Erich story is a tale of utter pain and misery. A clan of brothers who follow their father, Fritz, superbly acted by Holt McCallany, into the wrestling industry. Determined to do good by him and honour the family’s wrestling legacy, the brothers all have ambitions of making it in the business, whilst also tasked with earning their father’s kudos and meeting his unachievably lofty expectations.

The film mainly focuses on Kevin, the only surviving brother, played by Zach Efron in a performance that, in my book, was starkly overlooked during last year’s award season. We meet brothers David, Kerry, played by Jeremy Allen White, Mike, and eventually Jack, the oldest of the brothers but who died when he was a child.

Left out entirely was Chris, the youngest of the brothers. His story does in many ways overlap with what we see through his siblings - a guy determined to make it in the wrestling industry, facing various setbacks and challenges colluding against that, leading to depression and drug use and eventual suicide.

But there was so much more to Chris’ story than that crude summation. He loved wrestling and, unlike Mike, who didn’t dream of becoming an on screen performer, was determined to make it in the squared circle. However his size, at just 5’5”, and brittle bones made it an impossible task.

And unlike Kevin, David and Kerry who all had degrees of success in the business, Chris never really got that chance bar some fleeting moments as an extra or as an addition during his brother’s matches. He had to contend with the fact that he’d never be a wrestler in the truest sense, never able to entertain the crowd, earn their adulation and respect, although he was popular with wrestling fans of the time with his underdog frame. And notably with his father, forever be the brother who was too small and meek to become a wrestler and follow in his footsteps. His story is blended with Mike, who had other passions and little desire to enter the business, but this considerably dilutes Chris’ story.

Director Sean Durkin explained that including Chris would have been too much for the audience to handle, too much tragedy, and that the film may never have been made that they tried to do too much.

Including Chris wouldn’t have necessarily made the movie any better, but he has a heart wrenching tale that deserved outright exposure in the film. Chris Von Erich wasn’t just another tragedy in an already tragic family. He was the brother who wanted it most and was denied it almost entirely, and his absence rings loudly in an already cripplingly tragic story.

I’m reticent to write too often about Manchester United, mainly because there already exists a never-ending tsunami of content surrounding the club, from every possible angle.

Secondly, because there’s some far better writers out there with a far better handle on things that I could ever match up to. And thirdly, they ruined much of my childhood. Growing up a Liverpool fan in an Irish primary and secondary school, surrounded by United fans, throughout the entirety of the Alex Ferguson era. I’ve been mentally scarred, and only just coming out of the light on the other end. Maintaining an unbiased overview to anything United is immensely difficult and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve taken a fine deal of satisfaction in their downfall.

I do however have this bizarre thought process that a lot of people tend to differ from when I bring it up, with a mixture of judgmental outrage and get-this-guy-medical-help responses - I actually think a good Man Utd would be good for the Premier League, and I’d prefer Liverpool to be competing for titles with them rather than the likes of City or Chelsea.

I really am a bit disappointed that we never truly got a Liverpool and United title challenge during that era where Liverpool became sort of good again, just as United crumbled into oblivion. Sure, the years against Man City were fun and amounted to some titanic battles and never-before-seen points tallies in the Klopp and Pep era, but, and no disrespect to any City inboxes, it would’ve felt far more substantial if those wars had been against United. There’s nothing worse than losing to United on a normal day, putting that concoction into the melting pot of a title challenge would really get the juices flowing.

Anyway, what I see with United, something that’s edged back to the fore now that the Ruben Amorim era is shuttered, is a club falling over and crumbling under the immense weight of the empire it’s been built on.

There’s almost a cruel monkey’s paw allegory to the club. They had decades of success under arguably the greatest manager ever, a force of nature who ruled the club with an iron fist, which happened to coincide with a conveyor belt of some brilliant talents either emerging from the academy or joining the club and becoming folk heroes, who rose up and delivered, sometimes against the odds, under the guidance of Ferguson.

It’s like someone came a long and asked for sustained dominance, a powerful identity, and greatness built around one man and one generation. That receipt has now come due over the last decade with institutional dependency on the ghost of Ferguson following his retirement, who hovers over the club despite remaining physically present at Old Trafford. Symbolically, every manager works under his shadow.

In an effort to reclaim that identity, some of those ex-players are teed up to connect that great past with the new. A thread to the era of success when things were better. They know the club. But with each failure deepens the sense that the past is judging the present and that while many ex-players may know the club, the club has simply become too big and immovable to be steered forward now that that era is in the history books.

In addition, you have several more ex-players sprawled across the media, adding narrative and discourse on TV and podcasts, shining a blinding microscope on everything the club does. They are part of the problem and the hamster wheel the club finds itself, putting forward their old comrades for the role of manager, delivering a thumbs up to a Roy Keane, a man who hasn’t managed a club in over 14 years, and a thumbs down to the reigning FA Cup manager in their latest viral video effort. Keane is perhaps the biggest cult of personality to emerge from the remnants of the club after the very manager he most publicly fell out with. In the middle stands dozens of ex-players who must eternally offer sigils of deference to both figures.

In another corner is Gary Neville, Sky Sports lead commentator and who’s built an empire of his own in podcast form, almost off the backs of several of his ex-teammates and even rivals, into a steamship that almost exclusively fuels itself through the United of the past.

The loop wheels around once more as United turn to Michael Carrick this time, and for a second time, to carry the club forward until the summer when another outsider will be given perhaps the greatest poisoned chalice in sport.

It will be the twelfth instance of a new figure in the dugout since Ferguson’s departure, five of them being former players of the man who’s shadow looms large.

Amorim’s departure at this juncture, with the club in seventh place in the league and performing well beyond last season’s measly 15th, shows a club that has an ambition for the future but no clue on how to get there, or at least an uneasiness with truly committing to something. Amorim’s spell saw the club marry itself to a very specific system that needed very specific system players to deliver it, something the club was in the process of overturning. But results were inconsistent, performances often lacking, and despite several clear issues to mask over, Amorim, clearly a strong personality himself, eventually had enough and clashed just enough with the football directors that triggered an end to his time there.

The new ownership structure, led by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a force of personality himself as a businessman but so far floundering helplessly in the business of football, has committed and then changed his mind on two managers, while in the middle pursued sporting director Dan Ashworth at great expense and then binned him months later, and are now immediately back in the ex-player carousel of legends who dominated Old Trafford at their peak but are now mere mortals in the dugout as the empire continues to crumble and crack at the seams.

The club’s suffering is the bill coming due for a period of success so complete, so all-encompassing, that it eliminated the need to plan for a future without it. United didn’t just win under Ferguson, it outsourced everything to him and is doing it again with it’s ex-players - direction, identity, standards and evolution.

And that, perhaps, is the final curl of the monkey’s paw. United got exactly what they wished for: dominance so absolute it became their defining feature. But now they are trapped in reverence, unable to move forward without constantly checking back over their shoulder, stumbling under the weight of the empire it had became.

Josh Safdie’s long-anticipated Marty Supreme feels like a natural extension of what he and his brother Benny built with Good Time and Uncut Gems. The same ultra high-intensity, pressure cooker of emotion and movement set to a gritty New York backdrop, placing you in claustrophobically tight spaces and with the incessant overlay of people speaking over each other and loud noises.

For anyone familiar with their catalogue, it should come as no surprise that Marty is just as relentless, albeit slightly more cartoonish in its action, hot-stepping from one episode of outlandish carnage to another at breakneck pace.

What separates Marty, however, is it can be placed firmly into the category of sports film, with the story based loosely on real-life ping pong player Marty Mauser, with the degree of filmmaker’s creativity on this film, set across a nine-month period, to the nth degree.

It follows Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, an American table tennis star who’s toiling at his uncle’s shoe store as a means to an end to fund his ambition to become the greatest player in the world. From the outset we’re hammered with just how relentless Marty is in achieving his dreams. The film follows a trajectory of Mauser firstly at the British Open table tennis tournament, where he blitzes through the early rounds, his lofty standards clashing with table tennis authorities when he laments the quality of his sleeping quarters and accordingly checks in to The Ritz, racking up a substantial bill on the table tennis association’s name. Mauser clearly sees himself as a star, acts like a star and has an unshakeable confidence that nothing can stand in the way of. That was before coming up against a Japanese wall in the deftly talented and deaf Koto Endo, who seems to have Marty’s number.

The table action scenes are terrific and parallel the relentless pace of the film. From the early rounds where tables are stacked upon tables and players barely have room to swing their bats, to the wider open tables in the finals where the darkened, smoky arenas artfully highlight the plight and pressure of the players.

From that initial tournament, the film takes you into a different stratosphere as Marty will stop at nothing to fund his travel to the World Cup in Japan later that year and meet Endo on home soil. From concocting an affair with Gwyneth Paltrow, the wife of a rich pen magnate, played annoyingly well by Kevin O’Leary, through to hustling at a bowling alley with Tyler, the Creator, through to searching for the dog of a cash-rich but deathly dangerous mafioso, the film tallies through episode after episode of Marty’s euphoria of winning his chance at Japan, the inevitable pain of letting it slip through his fingertips, and his almost sadistic fortitude to pause, plan and try again. He will simply stop at nothing to play in Japan, throwing out all ethics and morals, blind to the reality that surrounds his situation.

Of course, the story doesn’t pan out as expected and he’s delivered one final blow on the eve of the tournament, but we are afforded one final showdown with Endo, who doesn’t utter a word all film and is played by real-life player Koto Kawaguchi, which, once again, is shot tremendously. The table tennis match scenes might be few and far between, but they are enthralling and absorbing enough to stand it with any sports action moments across other genres. And you preposterously end up rooting for this kid, who’s left the woman he impregnated alone in a New York hospital just so he can get spanked, even in the most literal sense, with a table tennis paddle.

At its most derivative essence, Marty Supreme is a quality sports movie. It harnesses that motive - aiming to dream big and reach the pinnacle of your sport with, and adds typical Safdie chaos in eschewing all moral bankruptcy to fuel this ambition.

Mauser is a deeply flawed, immoral anchor to work towards that vision. Josh is a big basketball fan. It’s easy to imagine what Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant might have become if that same impenetrable desire to win had been cocooned inside 1950s New York ping pong halls.

Streamers

I’m happy to see far less from streamers in my 2026. I don’t watch streamers, I don’t know very many of them, yet my timelines are often filled with dudes reacting to things in the comfort of their gaming chair. Other times, they’re mobile, sometimes joined by other streamers, and getting into skirmishes that sometimes breaks into my mainstream news avenue, like recently when Puka Nacua told streamers that he doesn’t believe in CTE or when he was told to do an anti-semitic dance the next time he got in the endzone. I don’t know who watches them, I don’t know how they’re able to earn so much money, I don’t care for their opinions or their reactions. Go away.

AI

I’m AI-skeptic, but not totally anti-AI. I’ve found use cases in my personal life where AI can be quite helpful and that’s just dandy. But there’s a fine line in AI being actually useful and mind-numbingly awful, and it often starts with actually knowing how to use it. The best tip I’ve learned about using an AI is no matter what, it aims to please you. So when it’s bigging you up and telling you are God’s gift to green earth, take that with a pinch of salt.

But I don’t need AI everywhere. It’s not hugely beneficial or helpful in most use cases that don’t involve you doing something that would otherwise involve trawling through Google or Reddit. And it’s particularly awful and useless on Twitter, where Grok has become this entire entity of awfulness that came to the fore already in 2026 with the absolute scandal that it will take any request involving the removal of clothing or the sexualisation of people’s photos without their consent. Before this disgusting escalation, Grok and AI in general has made people stupider, made social media infinitely more worse and totally accelerated it to the point of unuseability, and I’m happy to see far less of it in 2026. Newsflash: I won’t.

Gianni

In a steeped category, Gianni Infantino is probably my Worst Person of 2025. The man leading the great sport of football has managed, in no uncertain terms, to make it all about himself in an effort like no other. Whether he’s sucking up to Donald Trump in the Oval Office, honouring him with the FIFA Peace Award (???), bringing him onto the field at the finale of the Club World Championship, that egregiously stupid looking award for said competition. The reams of horseshit he spews at every turn. That World Cup draw will live long in the memory as one of the worst and most excruciating things I’ve ever had to sit through.

The thing is, it’s a World Cup year. IN AMERICA. There will be more Gianni, more Trump, more Gianni and Trump. Please. Make it stop.

Oversized Drinking Vessels

Why has the simple act of water intake become a thing? Water bottles have become an extension of people’s identity. There’s several colours, styles, shapes and ultra-massive sizes to choose from. Water has been drank since the Neanderthals, it was probably the first thing that became a thing when they realised they could consume this nectar without getting poisoned or experiencing the overbearing taste of salt.

Just get a decent bottle that doesn’t leak and drink from the shaggin’ thing, not one that needs it’s own check-in tag.

Hyrox

Look, fitness is good. Trying to maintain longevity in life and avoid the risk of heart disease and bad things happening is undoubtedly good. Running, sure. Gym, go for it. Marathons and the rise of organised races, park runs, Run Clubs, all that manner of outdoorsy forced fun and desire for human connection, absolutely.

But I draw the line at Hyrox - specifically the marketing and promotion of the endeavour. You’re running about a warehouse, pushing sleds and throwing around medicine balls. It’s crossfit and yet why do I have to watch so much of it on my timelines? Go on, get your medal, but I don’t think anyone is going to regret on their death bed doing one less Hyrox.

Bad Television

2025 seemed specifically bad for television and I think we’ve largely jumped the shark with streaming sites and production companies pumping incessant amounts of bad television just to fill their waves. Adolescence was a 2025 thing and that feels like forever ago, and it was good in the moment and had a phenomenal message, discussed in parliament and schools and so on, and the one-shot takes were amazing.

But other than that, it’s hard to find too much that moved me. I definitely overexpected from Severance and the third season kind of just came and went. The White Lotus was terrible. The Bear hasn’t returned to the heights of season two, granted I liked it better than a lot of the reviews. Dept Q. was one of the better things on Netflix, while Slow Horses maintained a high floor with that new series.

And rounding it off with Pluribus which was just kind of… there. It definitely didn’t feel like a great year for television. When a reality show, The Traitors, is topping or shortlisting on most lists, you know you’re in trouble.

The Overlap

I could probably have six different categories of different areas of football content, punditry and television coverage I’d like to change in 2026 or leave behind in 2025, and that is something that I’ll probably tease out in a longer post at some point. It might be unfair to label The Overlap specifically on this one, but I’m quite content with leaving this cabal of guys behind. The oversaturation of Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, and I’m sorry to do this to you, but Ian Wright and Roy Keane as well, to my ears and eyes has just become too much.

At least that’s somewhat avoidable, granted it’s probably the most virable podcast in football and clipsharing is inescapable when Roy Does Something. But television coverage is altogether harder to avoid for me as I tend to watch a lot of Premier League football. And it is terrible. Putrid. Awful. The format needs to change, the approach, the creativity, the blandness. It’s worse than ever in my opinion, over-polished within an inch of its life and yet still just so terrible.

Jake Paul

Arguably in the streamer category, but this one has a particular intersection with sport that needs to be consigned to 2025, never to be seen again. And that’s Jake Paul the boxer, Jake Paul the promoter, YouTubers and non-boxers boxing, any combative performance not involving two people who have actually trained and dedicated their life to being the best at this particular thing. I’m not a huge boxing fan and this sort of carry on has undoubtedly pushed me further and further away from it. It clearly has a market and that probably is a reason why streamers are as big as they are and why Grok AI is used so potently by idiots — this venn diagram is pretty big, if not just one huge circle.

Temu

And that ilk can firmly stay in 2026. When I moved house a couple of years back we used the cheap and cheerful Chinese overproduction site to source some households things. Not a single one of those items are still in use, and each usage was reeped with the miserable thought that I and I alone were responsible for this stupid plastic thing being shipped half-way around the world, just because I was too cheap to spend an extra couple of euros in Mr. Price or Dealz.

Temu, their incessant ads, it’s silly coupon thing and the intolerable means of navigating the site can be gone.

Doomscrolling

A lot of my problems come from being unable to disconnect from my phone. If I could just consign doomscrolling to 2025 then life would be far chirpier, happier and these kind of lists not a thing because I’d have less of a reason to be mad. I know it would make my life infinitely better and my mental health indestructible. Doomscrolling, I so badly want to leave you in 20…. *swipes on*

Triple H

I don’t like to advertise it too widely, hence why this is last in my list. But I’m a wrestling fan. And I’m totally fine with leaving Paul Levesque in 2025 along with John Cena’s utterly dreadful retirement run. That heel turn with The Rock against Cody Rhodes will go down as one of the worst booking decisions of all time once the dust settles. The fact they patted themselves on the back so proudly on Netflix for all to see, pulling back the curtain of how the whole idea came to be, makes it a million times worse.

Triple H is awful. He can’t book wrestling. You, sir, can suck it and stay in 2025.

I’ve found it really hard to pick up the inspiration to write in the last few weeks, despite no shortage of stories to draw from. Even sitting down to pen some of the bits that I have posted over the last while, I’ve found myself phoning it in a bit. I’m not sure if this counts as writer’s block, when my goal is to write just a single piece a week, at about a thousand words, on whatever sports story has piqued my interest, but here we are.

I’ve always dealt with a degree of imposter syndrome when it comes to sports writing. I’ve generally always seen myself as a guy writing about sports, rather than a sportswriter. And I think there is a big difference between the two.

And that usually compounds into periods where I struggle to write at all. I look around and see several others capable of saying what I’d like to say, but simply far better, and look on enviously at their terrific output.

But then I log on here and see a couple of hundred of you sports hungry readers waiting for something and it’d be mental of me not to appreciate that. There’s few things more cringey and self-indulgent than a writer complaining about writing. Especially someone who struggles to even categorise themselves as a writer.

So let’s try and overcome that today and take a look around at what’s been happening…

… and OH CHRIST MO SALAH WHAT HAVE YOU DONE…

There is a man who is not short a few words. For anyone suffering from a lack of inspiration, maybe turn to a guy like Mo Salah who had a lot to get off his chest to the first interviewer who caught his gaze in the media tunnel after Saturday’s 3-3 draw with Leeds, and see if that can rekindle something inside of you. I could easily trot out several thousands words on what’s going on with Salah and the club and end up twisting myself in knots on who is in the wrong, how it could possibly be reconciled and where the club is going and still barely scratch the surface.

My plain view is he was wrong to do it in the manner that he did. Liverpool, as is obvious to see, have been truly awful lately. But this manner of complaint and self-sabotage at this juncture is really telling not only on himself, but a lot of his teammates. The crux is Liverpool have been pretty terrible, for various reasons, and much of that is down to Arne Slot and his coaching and decision making. But he has a team leaking goals and a right sided attacker who not only won’t defend, but is unable to do much in the other direction and looks leggy and zapped of confidence.

Salah is also evidently feeling the departure of Trent Alexander-Arnold, whom he had an almost surgical understanding with down the right hand flank which offered him copious amounts of possession and space to attack. Slot’s mish-mashing at right back has totally upset what was until the end of last season, always Liverpool’s most dependable outlet - give it to Trent, give it to Mo, and wait for something to happen.

He’s been an exceptional player for Liverpool, but the option to go nuclear to the media after a string of three games on the bench, three games Liverpool didn’t lose - but, granted, didn’t play particularly well in, either - feels misguided and is inherently egotistical.

It’s firmly placed everything into a club v Mo Salah equation and, as the classic and over bandied cliché reiterates - nobody is bigger than the club.

But this isn’t a great position for the club, either, especially the head coach. Unless he can rapidly turn this form around then the players who have sided with Salah will make that even more known, and some are undoubtedly doing so already. And those who are keeping their toes out of the fire might start questioning this guy, also.

It’s hard to see a way forward for Liverpool. Barring some spectacular reconciliation and return to form happening before next weekend it looks like the club’s future is without Mo Salah. It also, to me right now, looks like it’s more than likely going to be without Slot as well. And the next man up, whoever that is, has a hell of a job on their hands because I simply can’t see a functioning team in this squad, especially one that extracts something out of a stuttering Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz and can also maintain Hugo Ekitike’s bright start. Not to mention accounting for some of the significantly poor form of others around the team.

What has irked me during all of this it’s largely been Slot versus the world and the culture of modern football means we never hear from personnel above the manager, namely sporting directors and notorious laptop boffins Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards. These were the guys wheeling and dealing throughout the summer and have spent extraordinary amounts of money on players who seemingly haven’t or can’t click into a system that also benefits a player the club handed a massive new contract to only a few months ago. Is that on them, and if so, why aren’t they fronting up to the media to take some heat off Slot? And if the blame is on their hand-picked head coach who seems incapable of getting a tune out of these well-paid superstars, why are they persisting with him?

The scapegoat, it seems apparent, is Salah. Cut Salah out now, a guy who looks likely to leave regardless in the next 12 months or so, and you open up a spot for someone else and can at least add one more player willing to track back and defend. But in the brief sample size we have so far, we’ve yet to see Wirtz and Isak connect, a very tidy finish against West Ham aside, while Ekitike proved his quality against Leeds with a very decent performance before it all went pear shaped. In the very role Isak is expected to occupy as the most expensive striker in history.

Something doesn’t add up and I’m not sure how dropping Salah alleviates any of it in the short to medium term.

But back to that interview, I mean, everything he’s saying is understandable but the timing, the tone and the message is entirely out of kilter with the situation, which is a player in a poor spell, potentially seeing the writing on the wall, taking his manager and the club to task. Going scorched earth, even if what he said is largely clear, and I’m sure there’s several of his teammates nodding their heads in approval, has helped nothing except accelerate a possible release from the club, where he departs on a desperately sour note.

Salah is all smiles in training this morning where there’s undoubtedly an undercurrent of tension and a coach who has to face media scrutiny ahead of their Champions League match-up with Inter Milan on Tuesday. Reports say Salah won’t be joining them on that trip, and he’ll be off to the African Nations Cup after next weekend’s game with Brighton.

What state of a club he returns to will paint a clear picture of the future - if the mess continues beyond his mid-season sojourn to Morocco, he could be tasked as the potential savior, maybe even under a different coach.

But if Liverpool and Slot somehow turn this all around in his absence, the player and the club who remained loyal to each other for eight unforgettable years will come to an abrupt and sad end of the line.

Apologies for the brief hiatus on here over the past few weeks. A badly-needed holiday to the South of France followed by a taxing return to work this week meant I hadn’t had a chance to put pen to paper on anything until now.

Frequent readers will find it as no surprise as to what the topics of this week’s newsletter will be. It’s Irish football.

You’d want to have been living under a rock to not have seen the scenes, videos and images of Ireland’s come-from-behind victory against Hungary in Budapest, sending them to March’s play-off round of qualification for the 2026 World Cup.

It’s a moment that has sparked across the nation, lifting the smog that has burdened the landscape of Irish football for almost a decade, and a feeling that has transcended well beyond just our shores and been seen and enjoyed all around the sporting planet.

It’s hard to convey just how low of an ebb things had been for Irish football. Troubles both on and off the field over the past decade, even two, have left Ireland in an almost terminal state of football decline, having to somehow kickstart a struggling engine mid-flight, all while countries around us were investing in their football, gradually improving and overtaking us on the field of play. Ireland were far from football powerhouses, but we were rapidly becoming a minnows on the international stage.

The past week has shown we haven’t fully gone away, or at least, for now, are showing sprouts of life that we may have been able to crawl through a pipeline of shit just enough to reveal a brighter future on the other side.

What’s pleased me most about the victories over Portugal and Hungary, a do-or-die must-win double for Ireland to have any hope of heading towards next summer’s World Cup, is its a long overdue coming-of-age moment for a lot of these players who were dumped in the deep end of international football prematurely.

Mostly out of desperation and a glaring lack of alternative options, when Stephen Kenny took on the COVID-riddled role in 2020 he was left with an ageing side that had a monumental schism between those were approaching the end of their careers and the next era. What came was the promotion of players who were far too young, inexperienced and had barely scratched the turf of senior club football, but were being hyped as Ireland’s next great hopes.

Headlining that billing this week was Troy Parrott, who was parachuted straight into the national team as a promising teenager at Tottenham, despite having barely a lick of first team experience. He wasn’t the only one - Dara O’Shea, Jayson Molumby and substitute Adam Idah were amongst those dropped into the fray at an extremely young age, in addition to several names who missed the squad this week through injury or having fallen through the cracks in that five year period.

Parrott, who made his debut in 2019, is still finding himself as a footballer. This past week, with five goals in two and a 95th minute hero against Hungary, he’s now catapulted himself beyond that wiry but determined youngster who was too unproven and unready for international football into a bonafide star.

He’s now a 23-year-old Eredivisie striker with 33 caps to his name. He’s been linked with moves to the Premier League and around Europe’s top flight. For the first time this past week in a green shirt, he finally looked like he had arrived as a football. Parrott had played a fleeting role in the qualification campaign until an Evan Ferguson injury offered him a chance to shine up front. Ferguson, the other young talent who we’ve had to ask far too much from far too soon. He’s only 21 and has 26 caps, and has yet to truly find himself at club level. But we’ve burdened these guys with so much pressure.

That build up of pressure and expectation uncorked like a bottle of fine champagne on Sunday afternoon and the release of emotion from Parrott and his team was palpable. This is the moment a lot of this squad and this nation of football die-hards needed, to quell all the doubt and misery that’s come before them. Announcing to the world stage that we haven’t gone away.

It’s also a marker that although we might seem down and out, we’re not an easy match for anyone. Cristiano Ronaldo was baited into red card-worthy rage last Thursday, while Hungary, despite the almost single-handed best efforts of Dominik Szoboszlai, couldn’t stop the Irish push from 1-0 and 2-1 leads.

The future is now clear and the path to a World Cup next summer has been enlightened. An away play-off against Czechia in March will see the winner get a home tie against one of Denmark and North Macedonia. On paper it’s far from the most difficult draw, but all four of those nations will be thinking the same over the next few months. If the match was next week it’d be impossible not to fancy Ireland out of pure form and the high of emotion alone, but March is a long way away.

But to be in the race at all is incredible. In the first international round, Ireland lost to Armenia away from home and the future looked terribly bleak, not least for manager Heimir Halgrimsson. Many wondered if he’d see out the campaign. The Icelandic dentist who moonlights as a football coach somehow turned Ireland’s fortunes around and a play-off is all anyone could have asked for at the beginning of the campaign.

Maintaining this momentum will be tricky, but not impossible. With three wins on the bounce and marquee victory over a tier one side in Portugal, there should be a billowing of belief around the Irish squad and these players. The sheer will and desire to win against Hungary is testament to their mindset that nothing is impossible now.

Why can’t we dream? Why can’t Parrott, now a shining name across the football sphere, not dream of going further and being the catalyst for success? This is where this team have left us, and why sport is so important in this country. It’s given everyone a lift. It’s given us something to look forward to and a chance to dream of bigger and better nights ahead.

On these pages early last year, I penned a piece on why the U.S. sports gambling dam being cast wide made for particularly bad, predictable news.

I won’t go as far as to say I told you so, as it was so blatantly obvious what was going to happen, but the latest scandal emanating out of the NBA is just another predictable instance of sport losing its integrity as legal gambling becomes the norm in America.

For decades, U.S. sport and the professional sport leagues shunned the greasy tentacles of gambling, until widespread gambling reforms across the States jerked open the door for sporting organisations and their respective media and television industries to get into bed with the lucrative betting sphere, opening up a treasure trove of new business opportunities and sponsorship opportunities.

This all came in stark contrast to sport’s efforts on this side of the pond to curb the influence of gambling in advertising and marketing material and sponsorship that appears on and off the field.

Instead, the U.S. sports market was ripe for gambling’s vices. Hyper-specific markets and prop bets, widespread insider information across a whole swathe of sports, divisions and the many, many hundreds and thousands of personnel around teams and leagues to extract information on.

The latest scandal embroils current and former NBA figures, including Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier and former Portland coach Chauncey Billups. It involved Mafia families and dates back to scammed card games in 2019, with a scheme featuring a shuffling machine that had been secretly altered to use concealed technology to read the cards in the deck.

FBI investigators allege the gambling scheme involving non-public game status information began, with the co-defendants accused of using “access to private information known by NBA players or NBA coaches that was likely to affect the outcome of upcoming NBA games or individuals’ performances,” according to the federal indictment.

The indictment alleges Rozier, then playing for the Charlotte Hornets, had informed co-defendants that he was going to prematurely remove himself from a game against the New Orleans Pelicans in the first quarter. This information was sold to various co-defendants, and substantial sums were placed on prop bets for Rozier’s “unders” in the game.

Rozier, indeed, removed himself from the game in the first quarter after playing less than 10 minutes and did not return. He had five points and two assists and finished “under” the lines set by oddsmakers for his points, assists and 3-point shots.

Billups had allegedly told co-defendants that his Trail Blazers were tanking and several of their best players would not be playing.

The prop bet, featuring hyper specific in-game scenarios, have become ripe for insider information. You can bet on player overs and unders, team dynamics, and injury information on big name withdrawals before that news reaches the news and betting markets give betters a crucial edge to go all-in on.

On the other hand, these bets wildly stand out on sportsbooks and it’s argued that the fact gambling is now legal, these instances of insider gambling can be more easily caught.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver has criticised prop bets, calling for reform after the previous NBA scandal involving Jontay Porter, who has been banned from the NBA for life after the league found that he violated gambling policies by “disclosing confidential information to sports bettors, limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes and betting on NBA games.”

Sporting commissioners have taken a stern position against players and personnel betting on games and other sports, with various scandals dating as far back as 1919 and the Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series for the benefit of a gambling ring.

David Samson, a former sports executive and president of baseball club Miami Marlins for 15 years, explained on the Pablo Torres Finds Out show that MLB players personnel must sit through an annual lecture on the illegality of gambling on baseball, in an effort to combat issues down the road.

The opening of the dam has created a new category of gambling addicts, paired athletes and sports personnel with crime syndicates, while the leagues have gone beyond just tolerating the change and made partnerships and sponsorship deals with major sports gambling companies. The two leading companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, are official corporate gambling partners of the NBA, the NFL and MLB, as well as with individual teams.

During broadcasts, it’s common to see betting ads and in-game statistical projections on-screen, complemented with the corresponding prop bet.

The prop bet has been described as like heroin to the vulnerable, offering instant gratification during games for those betting. They “may be associated with risky gambling behavior,” according to the National Council on Problem Gaming.

In a memo issued by the NBA, they singled out prop bets as trouble spots: “In particular, proposition bets on individual player performance involve heightened integrity concerns and require additional scrutiny.”

And as gambling becomes mainstream and roundly legal, it’s become more accessible than ever. Phone apps mean you can drop bets at the few touches of a button, loading up your balance with barely a verification check.

The ills will have been well sign posted, but there really is no putting the cat back in the bag. DraftKings has more than doubled its revenue since 2022, reaching $4.8 billion last year, and nearly doubling its monthly average users to 3.7 million. There is just far too much money and it’s far too lucrative for executives to correct course.

With gambling now legal across most of the country, it’s almost impossible for governments to re-regulate and for sports leagues to turn up away from the vast incomes that are now flowing through their coffers. This will be one of the more unusual gambling scandals that hit the headlines - it most certainly won’t be the last involving sporting figures in America’s big leagues.

“People’s opinions aren’t going to pay me. They’re not going to help me set up my future.”

These were the words of Irish swimmer and three-time Olympian Shane Ryan, as he defended his decision to cast aside a career of sporting integrity and enter into the highly controversial Enhanced Games effort, which is to go ahead some time in the next year.

His announcement was immediately condemned by Irish sporting organisations, Swim Ireland, and even Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

The move has brought several issues to the fore, not least the moral ethics of the entire endeavour of a doping-fueled sporting competition, but also the financial structures currently making it difficult for athletes to earn a reasonable living having committed their lives to Olympic sports like swimming.

It has also pitted Ryan against his home nation, the country he swam on behalf of throughout his career and represented at three Olympic Games.

Ireland is a deeply rich sporting nation, punching well above its weight on various fronts, and sporting integrity is woven into the very fibre of our makeup. When such a large part of our sporting identity is based around amateur sports, where financial incentives are put behind honour, integrity and community, the very contemplation of doping is scandalous. Two of the most high profile anti-doping journalists come from these shores in David Walsh and Paul Kimmage, whilst the nation outright shunned an Olympic Gold medalist swimmer who is suspected, but never proven of cheating at the 1996 Games.

So to contend with one of ours brashly casting aside all that we stand for, it for sure leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It also lands the Enhanced Games audaciously at our doorstep, something that until now seemed peculiar and alien and involving figures we needn’t spend much brain power caring about.

However, Ryan has proved to be a worthwhile addition to their ranks, speaking candidly and from the front foot over the past week across Irish and international media defending his decision, giving it an enormous amount of promotion, with the pointed angle that however we may feel about his move, it isn’t going to fill up his bank account.

To base his defence around financial incentive is a major middle finger to the sporting establishment, arguably more so than the “scientific” advancement the organisers purport it to be. It slots welcomely into where the Enhanced Games can pick at the scabs of genuine sporting competition, propped by a bottomless pit of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, led by Aron D’Souza, an Australian venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur, and financed by abominable characters such as Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.

The social contract of clean sport is built on the idea that we compete on a level playing field and that victory is earned rather than engineered synthetically. But the notion of clean sport is, and always has been to a certain degree, partly fairytale. From Ben Johnson’s syringes to Lance Armstrong’s blood bags to entire Olympic teams juiced up under state-wide programmes, sporting history is riddled with pharmaceutical gremlins.

We yearn for sport to be noble, pure and romantic. Ryan is a reminder that it’s more often grubby, compromised, and transactional. The Enhanced Games are just taking that and stripping away the Omerta.

“Yes, the Enhanced Games are a bit controversial, but the Olympics aren’t that clean anyway. You’d be surprised at what some athletes get away with. They also make so much money off the participants, who live very basic lives,” said Ryan.

Across Olympic sports, athletes scrape by on crumbs while global federations pocket billions. The IOC is the world’s wealthiest multi-sports organisation, with revenues in excess of $7 billion per four-year cycle, yet athletes, particularly those from countries like Ireland, are funded on a sliding scale with government grants that are barely covering annual living expenses.

The Enhanced Games are exploiting that hypocrisy, offering prize money that some of these athletes are in dire need of, sponsorship opportunities, a little bit of notoriety and a cut of the profits. It’s easy to preach about morality from our vantage points, slightly less so when you’re choosing between competing in a sport and being able to pay the bills. As Ryan explains, he had to live on €18,000 a year whilst training for the Olympics. Now, he’s guaranteed $200,000 with potential earnings of over $600,000 should he succeed at the games.

Shane Ryan will be heralded as both a trailblazer and condemned as a cheat. He’ll be branded a traitor to true sporting values. But he’s also holding up a mirror to a sporting system that is happy to exploit athletes’ passion while preaching for purity and fairness.

The Enhanced Games, however, isn’t simply about profiting downtrodden athletes with a view into scientific and technological advancements. There is something much more sinister at play, in a sort of Black Mirror-like public testbed for human enhancement and biotech advancements.

Notably, nobody involved comes from a sporting background. One of the co-founders, Christian Angermayer, is a biotech billionaire described as a “psychedelics mogul” who takes several mushroom trips a year, and has planted the Enhanced Games as a “New Human Agenda”, which will “usher in true superhuman abilities through the seamless integration of technology into our bodies”.

Just like in most industries nowadays, these are the ultra-rich mushroom-addled minds shaping the future of life as we know it. They are venture capitalists and futurists using sport as a proving ground for their next frontier. But, it’s important to remember that this is still an extremely niche effort and far from the end of clean sport as we know it.

Unfortunately, with athletes like Shane Ryan on board, it is a warning shot across the bow for clean sport. I’m in no doubt that athletes do want to compete cleanly and fairly, but I’m also sure they want to be paid adequately. Organisations need to support them beyond podiums and Olympic cycles.

What could become a problem is athletes like Ryan approaching the twilight years of their careers and looking around to see meagre bank balances and finding it easier to throw off the shackles of clean sport and make easy, albeit tainted money. And if clean sport refuses to confront its own economic hypocrisies, it shouldn’t be surprised when they do.