Dijon FCO are a second-division French football club that last played in Ligue 1 in 2021. This summer, they replaced their season ticket cards with club scarves, each one embedded with a chip that, when held up to the turnstile scanner, grants entry to the ground. On Friday, fans arrived at the Stade Gaston Gérard for the first home fixture of the season, held their scarves up to the scanners, and got in. Dijon then lost 1-0 to Pau FC. The scarves, at least, worked.

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The Signals

• Back from exile

When it resumes, the 2026-27 Indian Super League (ISL) will have 14 participants. On August 14, Tata Steel approved the sale of Jamshedpur FC (JFC) to Goa-based Churchill Brothers (Churchill) for a symbolic Rs 100, handing over ownership after a nine-year run.

With the acquisition, Churchill now holds JFC’s sporting licence, marking a return to the highest tier of Indian football after an unsuccessful promotion push last season.

A year out: Churchill were initially crowned the 2024–25 I-League champions after the All India Football Federation (AIFF) docked Inter Kashi points over an ineligible player. CAS overruled the decision, restoring the title to Inter Kashi. Despite appeals from Churchill to the AIFF’s executive committee, the majority of ISL teams believed that there was no sporting merit in Churchill claiming a place in the top division. In protest, Churchill withdrew from national football for the 2025-26 season.

Backlash: Valanka Alemao, Churchill’s CEO and daughter of former Goa chief minister Churchill Alemao, told The Times of India, “I think some journeys are scripted by God.” Fan reactions aren’t quite the same, with many viewing the sale as politically convenient, given Churchill’s existing interest in Indian football.

The short road back: Tata’s stock exchange disclosure says the transaction is expected to close by August 31, just a month after its withdrawal from the ISL. AIFF approval, expected soon, will seal Churchill’s return to the top flight.

• LArge amounts

The Los Angeles Lakers are set to change hands again. Just over a year ago, Mark Walter purchased the NBA franchise for a record $10 billion. That record is set to be broken soon, as Joshua Kushner (founder of Thrive Capital) and Bob Iger (former Disney CEO) have agreed to buy the Lakers for approximately $12.5 billion.

An eventful 15 days: Just two weeks ago, UEFA threatened legal action against FIFA and Joshua Kushner over the proposed sale of a stake in FIFA’s commercial rights to Kushner’s consortium. The FIFA sale was withdrawn, but the Lakers acquisition is not free from controversy.

Federal probe: The sale comes amidst federal investigations into Walter’s insurance companies. Concerns centre around the classification of related-party loan transactions. The Wall Street Journal has correlated the investigations with the sale of the 17–time champions, citing Walter’s urgency for cash.

Coming contagion? What remains to be seen is whether Walter’s need for liquidity will prompt the sale of his other sporting properties, including his headline ownership of the LA Dodgers, as well as his stakes in Chelsea Football Club and the Cadillac F1 team.

• Jeff Bezos’s red-letter day

1892 Holdings, a consortium led by Amit Bhatia and backed by the Mittal Family Trusts, K5 Sports (with Jeff Bezos as the lead investor), and EE Capital, the family offices of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, has signed an agreement with Fenway Sports Group to acquire about 30% to one-third of Liverpool Football Club (LFC).

Minority, but for how long?: While described as a strategic minority investment, the Bhatia-led consortium can acquire a controlling stake within the next 12 months at an $8 billion valuation.

Growing markets: FSG don’t need the funds. LFC hit record revenues in their 2024-25 title-winning season. “We have a responsibility as a global club to bring the club out to global markets, whether that’s North America, Asia or wherever,” club CEO Billy Hogan told The Athletic just weeks ago. Few investor groups are better placed to open doors.

The Position

🏆 Expansion: The third edition of the World Championship of Legends is set to relocate from England to a yet-to-be-announced venue. Scheduled for October 2026, the league has added a seventh team, the ‘Bangladesh Champions’, to its roster and will feature cricketing legends such as Yuvraj Singh, David Warner and AB De Villiers.

🎮 Waving the flag: Jemimah Rodrigues has joined Shreyas Iyer as a brand ambassador for the Mumbai Falcons ahead of the F1 Sim Racing India Open 2026. The move is part of the Gadhoke group’s effort to popularise its collaboration with F1, as the sport looks to capitalise on its increased viewership in India.

🤝 Co-Leader: Padma Shri recipient Sania Mirza has been announced as co-leader of Terra-Invest’s health and athletic verticals. The former tennis player turned entrepreneur will join the Dubai-based fund, whose principles are built on uniting capital with public policy expertise.

The Stack

📉 The fall of Fabrizio Romano’s transfer empire (Daily Mail)

🩹 Rebuilding Sheffield Wednesday: How one of English football’s most historic clubs are bouncing back (The Athletic)

🇧🇩 How Australia found themselves on the wrong side of cricket’s most profound upset (The Guardian)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

José Mourinho signed a contract to succeed Alex Ferguson as Manchester United manager in 2013, then changed course, returned to Chelsea, and left United to appoint David Moyes instead. Moyes lasted ten months. Louis van Gaal followed for two seasons. Mourinho finally arrived at Old Trafford in 2016, three years late, and was sacked in 2018. All of this has emerged in a soon-to-be-released Netflix documentary. Ferguson, who appears in it, thought the deal was done. United’s lesson from thirteen years of managerial chaos is left unstated. Perhaps that is spicy fodder for another series.

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The Signals

• Alex Eala brings her own crowd

Alexandra Eala doesn’t play away matches so much as relocate a fanbase. She may have exited the Canadian Open in Toronto late Sunday night, but to the organisers, she’d more than done her job. Tickets for her centre court match sold out in 30 minutes once her appearance was announced, prompting tournament director Karl Hale to say the tour has “never seen a player ranked outside the top five to have this type of effect.”

In Washington, DC, last week, where she became the first-ever Filipino to win a WTA singles title (the Mubadala DC Open), the chairman Mark Ein said 80% of tickets were tied to her alone, in a draw that included Naomi Osaka and local favourite Jessica Pegula.

Manila catches up: The Eala effect, as it is now called, runs the other way too. The Philippines hosted its first WTA event this year, the Philippine Women’s Open, at a newly refurbished Rizal Memorial Tennis Centre, with officials at the country’s Sports Commission crediting her fame directly for making the case. Back home, people can’t get enough of tennis. Court bookings in Manila are now hard to get, a city Eala remembers having empty courts a decade ago. A city mall renamed itself to One Eala (from One Ayala) last week.

The Nike bet: Crowds this side and a high degree of cultural quotient create their own gravity. Eala has been a Nike global ambassador since 2019, and with Southeast Asia emerging as a priority market, the company is betting that she can convert diaspora noise abroad and court queues at home into an actual customer base.

Specific to Eala, Nike has carefully curated its apparel line, with strong ties to her Filipino roots. After being crowned champion at the 2022 US Open Girls’ Singles, Nike designed custom Air Force 1s with the Philippine flag colours taking centre stage. It will now launch a custom US Open dress priced at $140.

Eyes on New York: Tournament organisers are scheduling around her the same way broadcasters slot Grand Slam finals. Later this month, Eala heads to Cincinnati before her sixth Grand Slam appearance at the US Open, where she will look to better last year’s first-round exit. Safe to say, Little Manila will turn up either way.

• The club Tata built, and walked away from

Jamshedpur FC’s place in the Indian Super League (ISL) ended on an unpaid invoice. While the All India Football Federation (AIFF) has pleaded with the Tata group-owned club to reconsider its decision not to pay the ISL participation fee, a u-turn seems unlikely.

Why withdraw: The immediate issue was a Rs 55 lakh participation fee that the club did not pay. But the decision came amid a broader rethink of its ISL commitment, as shareholders deemed the ISL club-run model “structurally financially unviable for the foreseeable future.”

One team down: The 2026-27 season of the ISL is set to commence on September 4. Media rights are yet to be granted, with the last date for commercial and technical bids being August 14. Jamshedpur’s withdrawal leaves the AIFF with another major decision. The choice: find a 14th club or stay at an odd number of 13.

The State of Play looks at why Tata walked away after nine years and why its football future may lie at the grassroots, where it all began.

Read the full story

The Position

🔴 It’s on: An Amit Bhatia-led consortium is set to pick up a roughly one-third stake in Liverpool Football Club, with an announcement imminent later this week, Sky Sports reported. The consortium also includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Savarin.

🎮 Buyout: Electronic Arts has gone private after a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund PIF and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners acquired it for $55 billion. The sale, which was greenlit by the European Union last week, makes it the largest leveraged buyout in history, and ends EA’s 36-year run as a listed company.

🗣️ Clapback: FIFA has rallied behind its beleaguered President, Gianni Infantino, accusing critics of a “concerted and ongoing effort” to undermine his presidency as the fallout from his failed commercial-rights plan deepens. Meanwhile, three continental federations including UEFA, CONCACAF, and the AFC have launched an attack on Infantino, accusing him of a “fundamental breach of trust” over his scheme.

The Stack

🏅🇮🇳 Commonwealth Games 2026: A campaign of contrasts for India (The Bridge)

👕🇮🇳 Primary colours (Lines on The Grass)

🇦🇷🏆 The man who found ‘art’ in this World Cup final scrap (The Athletic)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

The 22-year-old Victor Wembanyama has played three seasons in the NBA. On July 31, Nike gave him a signature shoe, a new personal logo (an alien, naturally), and a long-term contract extension. The shoe is called the Wemby 1. Nike has not released images, a price, or a release date. It did, however, release an eight-second video. Nike has been down this road before. Michael Jordan signed with the company in 1984, before anyone outside Chicago had seen him play. For whatever it’s worth, Nike is not always right about this sort of thing. It is, however, right more often than anyone else.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• Of blackmails and handshake emojis

With FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s plot to sell a $4.2 billion stake in World Cup profits now underwater, attention has shifted to his tenability in the post.

On Tuesday, Jordan’s Prince Ali bin Hussein dropped a bombshell, saying that during the World Cup, a verbal message reached him, seeking an endorsement of Infantino during next year’s re-election and that his country’s pending issues would be resolved. Jordan has been owed $4.2 million in Arab Cup prize money since December. Prince Ali said, “the whole situation amounts to blackmail.”

No way: Continental federations, including Europe’s UEFA and North America/Caribbean’s CONCACAF, have declared no confidence in Infantino’s leadership, since his moves to privatise the World Cup came to the fore. His own senior advisor, Carlos Cordeiro, resigned. Now, Jordan is the first Asian federation to openly defect.

Infantino’s corner: The African federation, CAF, representing 54 out of 211 member votes, unanimously backs him. No surprises why. Africa has received over $1 billion in FIFA investment since 2016. Among the other explicit supporters: Bhutan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka posted endorsement statements on social media, alongside Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Morocco. Fascinatingly, some of these endorsements appeared on Infantino’s own Instagram story, each with the country’s flag and a handshake emoji.

The math: The presidential election (or re-election in this case) will be held on March 18, 2027, in Rabat. Nominations close on November 18. Given how FIFA’s economy works, Infantino needs more of the smaller nations, rather than the big footballing powers, with every member carrying one vote each. While the crisis is real (and Infantino has called an executive meeting), the maths for now are not fatal.

• Zee’s European football wall

Zee Entertainment bagged exclusive five-year rights to Serie A and its Italian cup competitions across India and six subcontinent markets on Wednesday. This marks the third major football acquisition Zee has made in under three months.

The spree: Days before the 2026 World Cup began, Zee acquired rights to 39 FIFA events through 2034. The German Bundesliga followed in July, a five-year deal through 2030-31. By August 22, when its Italian football coverage begins, Zee will have a substantial portfolio of European football in India. The Premier League is with JioStar, while FanCode has LaLiga rights.

The void: India’s broadcast market has a clear shape. JioStar holds the most important cricket rights, while Sony has residual properties (say, matches in England, Sri Lanka, the Asia Cup, among others). In 2022, Zee lost its IPL bid in 2022, and has since built its sports strategy around football.

The World Cup showed why. Zee5 logged 46.99 million unique viewers across the tournament and saw daily subscriptions spike 55%, according to audience measurement platform Chrome DM COTT. Bundesliga and Serie A now give Zee the weekly live sport to retain those subscribers. In streaming, a big event such as the World Cup acquires users. What comes after is what keeps them (paying and staying), and in Unite8 Sports’ case, selling advertising against.

The wild card: All of this comes against a strange backdrop. Last week, Sebi barred Zee from the capital markets for two months and imposed 12-month securities-dealing bans on Punit Goenka and Subhash Chandra over an undisclosed 2018 property pledge. Days before the Sebi order, shareholders had approved a Rs 3,143.5 crore fund infusion via fully convertible warrants. Zee insists the Sebi order has “no direct bearing” on its fundraise

The Position

💰 Sold: Manchester United have confirmed Betway as their new training kit partner in a multi-year deal worth a reported £20 million annually. This is Betway’s largest sponsorship deal across sport, and comes over a year after the club’s previous deal with blockchain firm Tezos expired in June 2025.

🏏 Add to cart: Anchor Sports AB, co-owned by former India paceman Zaheer Khan, has acquired Lanka Premier League (LPL) franchise Jaffna Kings. The franchise has passed hands twice since 2025; a firm co-owned by former India U-19 cricketer Manjot Kalra acquired it in May, and its agreement was terminated midway through the ongoing season over match-fixing allegations.

🇹🇷 Freed up: Egyptian star Mohammed Salah will sign for Turkish club Trabzonspor as a free agent following a nine-year stint with Premier League club Liverpool. Salah’s Liverpool career saw him score 257 goals in 442 appearances for the club.

The Stack

🎾 💬 Game, set, Chat: how players use AI to scout opponents and run their lives (The Guardian)

🏏 Yash Punja’s fairy-tale journey – from uni to the IPL (Cricinfo)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

Last week, ESPN signed a global media rights deal with the…International Dance League (IDL). Yes, you read that right. And yes, dance. The IDL launched in May 2026 with six teams, based everywhere from Oslo to Auckland, and by July, it had a broadcaster. In a way, ESPN is going back to what it stands for, which itself is a popular pub quiz question: Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. The lines between the two genres were blurring when it picked up streaming rights to WWE last year. The IDL may be the moment when it entirely disappears. As it turns out, the line between sport and anything that can be scheduled and sold was always thinner than the rights fee.

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The Signals

• FIFA’s one-man project falls

FIFA has withdrawn its controversial plan to sell a stake in the commercial rights to its competitions. If the reasons weren’t obvious enough, Infantino made them explicit: “The project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.”

No due process: UEFA (Europe), CONCACAF (North America and the Caribbean) and AFC (Asia), the three governing bodies that represent 31 of the 48 World Cup 2026 teams, criticised the lack of consultation over FIFA’s plan. FIFA insiders voiced similar concerns. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour said staff had been deceived by “the project of one person”, while one of Infantino’s senior advisers resigned, publicly distancing himself from the initiative.

Legal action: The scheme’s withdrawal, however, may not be enough. The Telegraph reported that UEFA has issued a notice to Infantino threatening legal proceedings over the proposal, with a strict demand that documents be preserved.

Pressure: The FIFA Congress in Morocco, scheduled for March 2027, will see Infantino seek one last term as the organisation’s head. However, the likelihood of a re-election grows slimmer every day. Wales have withdrawn their allegiance. England are set to follow suit. Infantino only counts Qatar among his supporters for now, even as he has reportedly called Donald Trump in a desperate bid to save his job.

Also worth reading: The ruthless rise of Gianni Infantino and his Fifa money-making machine and How Gianni Infantino engineered World Cup to sell his doomed plan

• Tata’s ISL exit

The Indian Super League (ISL) is down to a 13-team league after Jamshedpur FC (JFC), owned by the Tata Group, on Friday announced its withdrawal from India’s premier football league. The decision comes as a significant blow to a league trying to find its feet following a truncated last season.

What remains: In mid-July, it sought extended time from AIFF to confirm its participation, citing pending shareholder approvals. The Tata Group ultimately declined to proceed, but has vowed to remain committed to the development of grassroots football in India, which could mean it returns to its Tata Football Academy roots.

The pleas: JFC’s closure, in the middle of the Durand Cup, has been met, in equal measure, with disappointment and shock in India’s footballing circles. “I am devastated. None of us saw it coming,” Pronay Halder, JFC captain, told The Indian Express, adding that the team learnt of the decision just an hour before it was announced.

India’s leading goalscorer, Sunil Chettri, joined the chorus, urging the Tata Group to reconsider their decision. As did supporter groups of the club (The Red Miners) and rivals such as Bengaluru FC’s West Block Blues.

Elsewhere, VPS Health Group denied reports it was in advanced talks to acquire Kerala Blasters Football Club, leaving questions over the club’s ownership future.

• The Sweat Thesis

The gym that actually makes people sweat is the one that makes money. That is the central thesis behind fitness unicorn Cult.fit’s business model. Sixteen years after Talwalkars became India’s first listed gym chain and ultimately unravelled, Cult.fit is asking public markets to back a fundamentally different approach to fitness (and gym memberships).

Sign-up. Attend. Repeat: Traditional gyms profited from members who paid but rarely turned up, which is to say, your guilt and unswiped membership card paid for the rent. Cult.fit took this model and inverted it. It’s thinking? Members who attend regularly were more likely to renew. The result is a profitable fitness services business (gyms, subscriptions etc), but one still weighed down by expansion costs and a loss-making retail products arm (Cultsport), which theoretically addresses a broader market.

Public test: While the IPO is about raising capital, it serves as the first public test of whether Cult.fit’s “density” formula can replicate beyond Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and crucially, whether investors believe a fitness business built on engagement can scale across India.

The State of Play reviewed Cult.fit’s pre-IPO filing and wrote about it in its latest, subscriber-only story.

Read the full story

The Position

👊 Power Play: Jake Paul-led Most Valuable Promotions and the Professional Fighters League have decided to join forces, creating a new combat sports venture to challenge the UFC’s market dominance.

❌ Banned: The International Cricket Council has banned USA cricketer Bodugum Akhilesh Reddy from all forms of the game for eight years over anti-corruption charges relating to the 2025 edition of the Abu Dhabi T10. The 26-year-old was found guilty of three charges relating to match-fixing.

🏀 Playin’ ball: Nikesh Arora is in talks to buy the London team in the NBA’s European expansion. Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has reportedly “assembled a consortium of investors prepared to offer more than $1 billion” for the franchise, The Athletic reported. Arora is already part of a consortium – Tech Titans, which owns 49% of The Hundred franchise London Spirit.

The Stack

🏟️🇮🇳 The great games gambit: Inside Ahmedabad’s mega plan to host the 2030 CWG and 2036 Olympics (Times of India)

🎾 Inside the push to make Padel the next Pickleball (Wall Street Journal)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

Brian Devine was fielding at first slip for Saltburn CC’s second XI, and nobody in the North Yorkshire and South Durham Cricket League noticed what he was doing. Until someone posted the footage on X. Devine, it appears, had been clicking his fingers as the ball passed the bat, close enough to a real edge that the umpire gave the batter out. The stunt earned him the moniker “Clicky Ponting” – a pun on the former Aussie skipper –and now he’s suspended. The club has lost sponsors. That said, cricket’s newest scandal is also its neatest. No sandpaper required, no sleight of hand. Just a man in first slip with a gift for percussion.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• Infantino makes a $20 billion play

Football’s governing body FIFA confirmed plans this week to sell minority stakes in a new commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, which would bundle its commercial and media rights, including future World Cups and the Club World Cup.

Money talks: The initial raise is $4.2 billion, based on a $20 billion valuation. JPMorgan is advising, with Greg Maffei, former chief of Liberty Media, as commercial adviser. Among the intended investors is Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Eternal, whose brother Jared is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. FIFA intends to retain sole governance control, while investors get a slice of future competition revenues.

Europe resists: UEFA said the plan crossed “a line football’s governing institutions should never cross” and is convening an emergency meeting of its 55 member associations this week. A World Cup boycott is among the options on the table. In 2021, FIFA shelved its biennial World Cup proposal when UEFA made the same threat. Aleksander Čeferin, the UEFA president, did not attend the World Cup final earlier this month, citing disputes over refereeing logistics.

The $40 million question: The proposal needs approval from a majority of FIFA’s 211 member associations and its ruling council. No vote has been scheduled yet. To smooth the path, Infantino has offered member associations $40 million in development funding if they back the plan, and $10 million to those that do not. This could come down to simple arithmetic. UEFA’s 55 associations can’t block it alone, so the real scramble is to pull other confederations into line.

• Why the IPL keeps rising

The Indian Premier League’s (IPL) business value rose 11.4% to $20.6 billion in 2026, per investment bank Houlihan Lokey’s annual valuation study released today. It stood at $15.4 billion in 2023 and $18.5 billion last year. Its standalone brand value reached $4.3 billion, marking a second straight year of double-digit growth.

Why RCB leads: IPL 2026 winners Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) led the franchise brand rankings for the second consecutive year at $312 million, becoming the first franchise to top both the brand value and business value tables at once. The $1.78 billion sale to a David Blitzer-led consortium and the Mittal-Poonawalla Rajasthan Royals transaction at $1.65 billion helped push the market higher. On a per-match basis, only the NFL ranks above the IPL globally.

Left unsaid: Houlihan Lokey’s figure covers franchise transactions and broadcast revenue through the current rights deal, which runs until 2027. It doesn’t capture the next cycle. The existing round – with JioStar now merged – set a benchmark of $6.2 billion in 2022. That will be tested next year, when rights to the next four years go back to the market.

The Position

💰 Bigger play: The Amit Bhatia-led consortium seeking a minority stake in Liverpool could eventually become majority owner by buying equity in stages, Bloomberg reported. Besides Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Savarin is also among those approached.

⚽ Record haul: Real Madrid announced €1.221 billion in revenue for 2025-26, the first time a club has crossed the €1.2 billion mark. Revenue rose 3% year-on-year, while EBITDA jumped 18% year-on-year to €287 million.

🏏 Growing on: The ICC T20 World Cup is likely to expand from 20 to 24 teams from 2032, The Telegraph reported. The move could happen as early as the 2030 edition, with the International Cricket Council targeting a 32-team tournament.

💸 Fresh dough: Germany’s Bundesliga has held discussions with US investment firm Apollo Sports Capital for a 20-year loan worth €1 billion, reportedly backed by future broadcast earnings.

The Stack

🏅 Chad le Clos: The greatest sportsperson in CWG history, who beat Phelps at the Olympics (The Indian Express)

🏀 LeBron James Might Be the NBA’s Greatest Ever Bargain (Wall Street Journal)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

Over the weekend, Czech president Petr Pavel turned up at the Hungarian Grand Prix not in a suit, but in shorts and a T-shirt, camera hanging from his neck. Instead of holding court in a paddock hospitality suite, he prowled the Hungaroring like any other trackside obsessive, framing shots of F1 cars and star drivers as if he were on assignment. Perhaps, he was, given that he had FIA accreditation. The images lit up Czech media and social feeds, raising a simple question: when was the last time a head of state looked this much like a fan?

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The Signals

• Restarting India’s F1 dream

Just hours before Formula One’s eleventh race weekend began in Hungary, India’s Sports Ministry granted provisional recognition to the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI) as a National Sports Federation.

A long-drawn pit stop: For many fans, India’s place in F1 history lives in a single frame: Sebastian Vettel bowing before his Red Bull at the Buddh International Circuit in Noida after victory in 2013.

A U-turn on an entertainment tax exemption that had been available for three years pushed F1 out of India in 2014. Since then, Formula One has watched its Indian audience grow by an estimated 63% in just the past three years.

Finding grip: India wants its role in F1 to go beyond a nostalgic highlight. The sport senses that opportunity. Just over a month ago, CEO Stefano Domenicali said F1 will return to India, provided it finds “the right promoters, the right collaboration, and the right timing.“

The Adani Group’s acquisition of Jaiprakash Associates could be the catalyst. It would hand Adani control of the Buddh circuit, with 2030 increasingly viewed as the next realistic window for a race. If completed, the deal would at least tick one part of Domicelli’s formula: collaboration.

Draft to survive: FMSCI’s next steps are clear on paper: align with the National Sports Governance Act, 2025. Inter alia, it must amend its bye-laws and inform the Government once that is done. Whether the federation can match the ambitions of broadcasters, promoters, and fans is a different contest.

• Paris Pays

For years, tennis players have argued that booming commercial revenues have not translated into a fair share of the sport’s financial gains. Now, the French Open has become the first Grand Slam to move towards a revenue-sharing model, according to The Guardian.

The grievance: Just weeks before the 125th edition of Roland Garros, women’s world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka warned that players could begin boycotting tournaments unless they received a fairer share of revenues. Her counterpart atop the men’s rankings, Jannik Sinner, backed her just days later.

The French Open has been the slowest of the four majors to grow prize money, with a 9.5% increase compared to the Australian Open’s near-16% rise and the 20% jumps at last year’s US Open and this year’s Wimbledon.

Domino-effect?: Talks are still at an early stage, but attention will now turn to the US Open, which starts on August 23. Paris has moved first. New York will decide how far this goes.

The Position

⚖️ Royal dispute: Two minority shareholders of the Rajasthan Royals – Bajan Boys Gully Cricket LLC and Halla Bol LLC – have alleged in the UK High Court that Emerging Media Ventures Limited (EMVL) was forcing them to sell their shares for £1 ($1.32).

🏁 Selamat: Formula One has announced the sport’s return to one of its most beloved circuits, the Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia, which will host the 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix as tensions continue in the Middle East.

🦊 Thai sale: King Power, the Thai retail group which owns football club Leicester City, has begun sounding out buyers for the League One club. The sale follows a difficult post-pandemic run for King Power’s core duty-free business and dreadful on-field results for Leicester, resulting in successive relegations.

The Stack

⚽ Teamwork, tactics, and data: behind the scenes at Wigan’s pre-season training (Guardian)

🏆 From ‘curse’ to crown: How Delhi teen Anahat Singh scripted Indian history (Indian Express)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

The World Cup final was barely two days old when a headline dropped that read like parody: Donald Trump wants Gianni Infantino to be the next UN Secretary-General. Read that again. While it sounds like a promotion, you know, FIFA has 211 member associations; the UN has 193 member states, it might well be a polite shove towards the door. The World Cup is over, the money’s counted, and now the man who once handed Trump FIFA’s inaugural peace prize is now Trump’s pick for the UN top job. Football doesn’t hang around.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• The Mittals’ Merseyside Play

Liverpool’s ownership story has pulled in an Indian billionaire family, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sniffing around.

Fenway Sports Group (FSG), majority owner of Liverpool FC, confirmed on Tuesday that it is in active talks to sell a significant minority stake in the Merseyside club – as much as 30% for £1.35 billion – to a consortium led by Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. That would put Liverpool at a valuation north of $6 billion.

Sky Sports reported that Bezos has been approached to join the group, though nothing is signed. Before any of this could move, Bhatia transferred his Queens Park Rangers shareholdings to Ruben Gnanalingam to stay on the right side of dual-ownership rules.

Not walking alone: Bhatia’s consortium is backed by the Mittal family, which has been racking up sports assets, and significantly so, over the past 12 months.

• Aditya Mittal, Lakshmi’s son, took a $1 billion stake in William Chilsholm’s $6.1 billion acquisition of the Boston Celtics in May 2025.

• He recently fronted the runner-up bid for the NFL franchise Seattle Seahawks, which venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s group eventually won for $9.612 billion.

• In May, the family acquired a 75% controlling stake in the Indian Premier League franchise Rajasthan Royals in May at a $1.65 billion valuation.

If Liverpool gets done, it’s another tile on a board that now runs from Jaipur to Boston, and maybe, the Kop.

Exit or hedge? FSG bought Liverpool for £300 million and has grown club revenue past £700 million a season. In 2023, global sports investment firm Dynasty Equity took a minority stake (~4%) in the club worth £82-164 million. Selling a bigger chunk now at a $6-plus billion mark lets them bank a win and plant a price on Liverpool that everyone has to stare at. In other words, it’s trimming and not walking away (or alone!)

That said, look at the pattern. FSG sold NHL franchise Pittsburgh Penguins in December 2025 for $1.7 billion, having first sold a minority slice there. If Liverpool follows the same arc, this stake sale may be a pre-credit scene.

• Lalit Modi 1, ED 0

The longest over in Indian cricket’s legal history just ended.

Last week, the Appellate Tribunal under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forefiture of Property) Act, 1976 or SAFEMA, set aside the Enforcement Directorate’s penalties against former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi. The case had been rolling around since the league’s second season.

Charge sheet: The ED had alleged that foreign remittances used to stage the 2009 IPL in South Africa were capital account transactions that required Reserve Bank of India approval. The tribunal saw it differently.

Tribunal call: It held that the remittances were current account transactions, which did not need that clearance, and that Modi was not responsible for the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) compliance obligations. On that basis, it binned the penalties against him in the main proceedings — and the ones against the board.

Modi, now a fixture on YouTube cricket podcasts, has lived outside India since 2010, when the BCCI proceedings that culminated in a lifetime ban began. The IPL he created has since become one of the world’s most valuable properties. While the ruling clears his name on the specific charges, it does not yet repair his standing with Indian cricket. Modi said he will return to India “end of this year or early next year.”

The save: The BCCI, which banned Modi for life, also walks away with a win. The tribunal scrapped the ED’s penalties against the board alongside Modi’s. In effect, it signed off on the call to move the IPL to South Africa – a shift Modi has long claimed was what saved the tournament. On that narrow point, at least, the scoreboard now matches the version of events.

The Position

💰 Kit real estate: Australia’s men’s and women’s cricket teams will carry a back-of-jersey sponsor across all formats for the first time. Hola Health has “upgraded” its partnership with Cricket Australia and will appear below the player’s number on the playing kit.

⚽ Grassroots play: Indian pharma company Mankind Pharma has partnered with Mohali-based Minerva Academy to support football. Three of Minerva’s age-group teams will sport jerseys featuring Mankind on the back and the front.

❎ No, thanks: Chess legend Judith Polgar has declined an offer to become Hungary’s next president. Prime Minister Péter Magyar invited, then met Polgar to pitch the role. She declined, and Hungary will keep looking for someone to sign the scoresheet.

The Stack

🍛🏏 Biryanis, bhajis, and braais: diverse culinary culture is at the heart of cricket (The Guardian)

🫡🏏 Garry Sobers: where art met sport (The Cricket Monthly)

🏟️🏅 The history of stadium design in 15 buildings (Dezeen)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

If you’re still rubbing sleep from your eyes after another 430 am finish, blame Spain. On Sunday night in New York New Jersey (as it is absurdly called), Ferran Torres struck a winner past Argentina’s Emi Martinez in extra time, stitched a second star on Spain’s shirt, and shut the lights on a tournament that refused to let India go to bed. The football is over. Take a few hydration breaks. Because the real games have just begun.

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The Signals

• $15 billion and counting

On the eve of the final, Gianni Infantino walked into a room full of FIFA delegates with a simple message: the numbers have changed (and resoundingly so).

Biggest payday: The men’s World Cup in North America is expected to haul in more than $15 billion across the 2023–26 cycle, the Guardian reported. That smashes FIFA’s own $11 billion forecast and makes this the first sporting event on earth to clear $10 billion in revenue.

Attendance across 16 venues topped 6 million, more than twice the combined crowds in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. North America, long treated as football’s “emerging” market, turned out in lines that wrapped around NFL stadiums.

Next bidding war: FIFA is already lining up the next act: US rights for the 2030 World Cup. Estimates put that package at around $2 billion. ESPN, which sat out 2026, is back in the room with Fox and Telemundo. Netflix is reportedly lurking on the touchline. So is YouTube, which was already involved in the just-concluded edition.

Everyone wants the same thing: a handful of nights so big that subscribers think twice before smashing “cancel”. Fox paid $485 million for English‑language rights to 2026. That number is now less of a “deal” and more of a “starting bid”.

Power by cheque: The windfall does more than fill FIFA’s vault. It locks in Infantino’s power. At the FIFA Congress in Morocco in March 2027, he’ll stand for a final term as president. More than 200 member associations have already endorsed him. The reason runs through a line item called FIFA Forward.

Between 2027 and 2030, the development programme is expected to send about $2.7 billion to national associations—roughly eight times what was on offer a decade ago. For many small federations, that money means staff on payroll, teams on planes, and pitches that don’t turn into parking lots. In this business, speeches are optional, while the cheque is the real endorsement.

• The franchise Raj Kundra couldn’t leave alone

A London court just priced the cost of bad timing. Last week, a judge ordered (PDF) Raj Kundra to repay $4.94 million to the owners of the Rajasthan Royals, ruling that he had repeatedly breached the settlement that ended his time with the franchise.

What’s the deal? Back in 2019, Kundra signed a deal: he’d receive $4.94 million for his 11.7% stake and agree not to make any further claims. This came after the Supreme Court found him guilty of betting on IPL matches, pushing him out of the league.

Then he started talking again – publicly accusing the then-majority owner, Manoj Badale, of fraud and trying to reopen the maths. The court called his defence “no realistic” case. The settlement stood.

Missed jackpot: In May, Rajasthan Royals agreed to sell to the Mittal family and Adar Poonawalla at a headline valuation of $1.65 billion. That figure covers the IPL team and its South African and Caribbean cousins. On that number, Kundra’s old stake would now be worth $190+ million. Instead, he cashed out at just under five.

The Royals’ sale is expected to close in Q3 2026, pending BCCI approval. By then, the anti‑suit injunction stops Kundra from taking his fight to any other court.

He has now exited Indian cricket twice: first with a ban, then with a contract.

• One8: Beyond Virat Kohli

“I’d love to be forgotten completely, for this to take over.” That was Virat Kohli last month, on stage at the high‑profile launch of One8, his new performance label built with Agilitas, a sportswear company where he also holds equity.

Brand bet: One8 didn’t start as some fully formed global brand. It began as a logo and a line of merch built around India’s biggest cricket star. Over nine years, it has turned into something more ambitious: a performance‑led, design‑driven sportswear label that wants to be taken seriously in locker rooms, beyond just fan stores.

Legacy-building: For Kohli, the payoff is even clearer. Endorsement deals stop paying the second form dips or careers end. Equity in a brand that outlives him is one way to turn a prime‑time decade into something more durable.

We followed the nine‑year journey behind One8—from early decks and trademark transfers to product runs and office visits—to see why he chose ownership over a lifetime of sponsorship cheques, and how Agilitas is betting that an Indian sportswear label can one day stand on its own.

Read the full story

The Position

🧑‍⚖️ National identity: The Bombay High Court has advised twelve petitioning cricketers holding Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) cards to either return to India and reclaim their citizenship or build a career in their respective nations.

🏆 Building blocks: Mumbai is set to host the fourth season of the World Padel League at the Dome SVP Stadium from August 12 to 16. With more than 36 players representing five countries, this is expected to be the tournament’s biggest iteration yet.

💧 Undecided: FIFA is undecided about the future of its controversial three-minute hydration breaks in either half, with Arsene Wenger, the body’s chief of global football development, insisting that they did not “change the results of the competition.” Wenger said FIFA will review them post-competition.

The Stack

How Goalhanger built a podcasting empire and why it’s investing in the next one (SportsPro)

What happens when President Trump attends major sporting events - and why he does it (The Athletic)

My journey down the rabbit hole at the Conspiracy World Cup (FT)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

In 2020, The Last Dance became one of the most-watched sports documentaries ever made. Directed by Jason Hehir, it reset expectations for what a sports documentary could do. Hehir is now back with Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, out on Prime Video in August. Djokovic holds 24 Grand Slams, more major titles than any man in tennis history, yet he has never inspired the affection that powered The Last Dance. This film has to answer why. ICYMI, the trailer dropped yesterday.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• The ODI World Cup’s commercial fix

The International Cricket Council (ICC) approved new formats for both its flagship men’s events at its annual meeting in Edinburgh today.

What’s changing? For the 2027 ODI World Cup in southern Africa, the three lowest-ranked qualifiers start in a Super Series. The winner joins 11 others in the main group phase. The seven best-placed teams then move to a Super 7 round-robin before the knockouts.

Also, the 2028 T20 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand will add two Eliminators before the semi-finals.

The problem: Bilateral ODI series are bleeding broadcast value. Two-nation series that once drew premium fees now go head-to-head with T20 leagues for airtime, and lose. The ICC’s fix is to bottle what remains of ODI cricket’s commercial pull inside its own centrally owned tournaments.

Three takes, maybe: The Super 7 guarantees a full round-robin among the seven best-qualified sides, a cluster of premium fixtures that could easily deliver at least two India-Pakistan matches, the proverbial golden goose.

• Arsenal’s old deal, now on Aston Villa’s shirts

On Tuesday, Aston Villa announced a £20 million-a-year deal to put the Rwandan Development Board on the front of all their shirts. Or, Visit Rwanda as they’re famously known. As part of the partnership, Aston Villa players will, predictably, do what the shirt tells fans to do.

The deal: The Rwandan board’s tie-up with Villa comes just weeks after its £10-million-a-year sleeve sponsorship with Premier League champions Arsenal formally ended in June.

Villa have called it the most important sponsorship in the club’s history; Felix Jakens of Amnesty International countered that Rwanda is using the partnership to deflect attention from “its terrible human rights record.”

Expanding portfolio: Before the Villa announcement, Visit Rwanda already had its name on Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain’s training kit (in a deal extended to 2028) and Atletico Madrid’s jerseys.

Arsenal’s exit followed sustained pressure from supporter groups, who campaigned against renewal. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government also urged the club to walk away, after UN accusations that Rwanda was backing M23 rebels in eastern Congo. Arsenal replaced Visit Rwanda with global HR software firm Deel. Within weeks, Villa stepped in to sign Rwanda’s next contract.

Above-market rate: £20 million a year for a front-of-shirt deal is above market value for a club in Villa’s commercial tier. Amnesty’s criticism has not shifted the basic calculation, across eight seasons with Arsenal and now with Villa. When one European club drops the deal, another takes it. Rwanda is a patient buyer.

The Position

🎮 Skin in the…game: The International Cricket Council is in advanced talks to invest in Bengaluru-based AAA game-tech startup LightFury Games, Moneycontrol reported. The company has also secured the ICC’s official gaming rights.

• In April, The State of Play wrote about cricket’s decades-long search for an official game. You can subscribe and read the full story here.

♟️ Money moves: FIDE has approved a new, expanded format for the 2027 World Cup and lifted the combined Open and Women’s prize fund from $2.67 million in 2025 to $3.3 million. The 2027 World Cups (Men’s and Women’s) will also shift to two stages: a Swiss-system qualification and the knockout finals.

The Stack

📺💰 Why The Golden Age of Sports TV Is Driving Fans Crazy (Wall Street Journal)

🥅⚽ Podcast: Trump, Infantino, and the political history of the World Cup (FT)

🇦🇷👕 The iconic art form that inspired Argentina’s World Cup semifinal shirt (The Athletic)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

• The $9.6 Billion Handshake

The Seattle Seahawks have agreed to sell to a group led by Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder and venture capitalist, for $9.612 billion. The price sets a record for any NFL franchise, smashing the $6.05 billion the Washington Commanders fetched from Josh Harris’ group in 2023.

Khosla’s wife, Neeru, will become the controlling owner, with their son Neal also taking a leadership role. To close the deal, the family must sell its minority stake in the San Francisco 49ers, which it acquired last year. NFL owners are set to vote on the transaction as early as August 26.

The bump: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought the Seahawks for $194 million in 1997. His estate, run by his sister, Jody Allen, since his death in 2018, must sell both the Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers under the terms of his trust, with the proceeds going to charity. The Trail Blazers went earlier this year for $4.25 billion to a group led by Tom Dundon.

A first: New Delhi-born Khosla would become the NFL’s first Indian-American controlling owner. Vivek Ranadivé hit that milestone in the NBA with the Sacramento Kings in 2013. Khosla beat a rival bid from a group led by British-based Indian industrialist Aditya Mittal.

That both finalist groups have Indian heritage, and that the league’s record sale is going to a Silicon Valley VC, says plenty about who has built and now commands serious capital over the past two decades.

• When Wimbledon stops being enough

The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) has teamed up with Redrice Ventures to co-invest in sport-related startups, the Financial Times reported this week. They’re targeting online coaching apps and smart-court technology, including automated line-calling.

The timing is rather interesting. For the first time last year, Wimbledon prize money paid to players exceeded what the tournament passed on to the LTA. The LTA’s Wimbledon income slipped 4% to £48.6 million in 2025.

Why Redrice?: Redrice already has tennis-adjacent credentials. Andy Murray and Olympic triathlete Alistair Brownlee are associate partners. Its best-known bet is Castore, the kit maker for England cricket and Newcastle United, now valued at close to £1 billion. LTA chief executive Scott Lloyd told the FT that the partnership is designed to attract more institutional investors over time.

The VC wave: The LTA is hardly an outlier. Tennis Australia has run AO Ventures for several years, backing startups in court technology and fan experience. The WTA launched a venture arm in 2023 backed by CVC Capital Partners. British Cycling spun out a commercial arm late last year. Across sports, the same thesis is being tested: can governing bodies deploy capital like VCs without eroding the independence that is supposed to define them?

• The league behind India’s volleyball revolution

India’s men’s volleyball team won bronze at the Asian Volleyball Confederation Cup in Ahmedabad last month, the country’s first continental volleyball podium in 12 years, and jumped 16 places to World No. 42. They managed it while the Volleyball Federation of India was suspended from governing the sport it is supposed to oversee, for the second time in six years.

The State of Play’s latest piece traces how that happened. It follows Baseline Ventures’ Prime Volleyball League, valued at over $90 million, with 1.1 billion cross-platform views, and is now formally recognised by FIVB as India’s first-division league, as it has built a professional circuit the federation spent years trying to kill. It tracks how two players walked out of a national camp in April, triggering a fresh suspension. And it asks how a foreign coach, five weeks in Bengaluru, and a proper weight programme produced a medal almost nobody saw coming.

Read the full story

The Position

🏏 End of an era: Stephen Fleming has stepped down as Chennai Super Kings (CSK) head coach, ending an 18-year association that began as a player in 2008 and continued as coach from 2009. During his generational tenure, CSK won five IPL titles and two Champions League T20 trophies.

⚽ Friendly boost: The Indian men’s national football team will play two friendlies against New Zealand during the November international window. The first will take place in Auckland, the second in Christchurch. New Zealand are among the 48 teams competing in the ongoing 2026 World Cup.

The Stack

🎾 Can tennis survive its golden age? (The Atlantic)

🇮🇳 Scenes From An Unserious Sporting Nation (Lines on The Grass)

That’s it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• Sport’s Russian question, reopened

On Tuesday, the International Olympic Committee provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), saying it had received formal assurances that the ROC no longer includes regional sports organisations in territories under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Olympic Committee.

The ban has been in place since October 2023. Its removal now clears a path for Russian athletes to return to international competition. The Kremlin, unsurprisingly, welcomed the move.

Within hours, football’s governing body FIFA said it would “analyse the decision before deciding on next steps in coordination with relevant stakeholders.” Russia has not stopped bombing Ukraine.

The real problem: UEFA has already extended its ban on Russian clubs and national teams through the 2026/27 season, and president Aleksander Ceferin has shown no sign of reconsidering.

FIFA can edge towards reinstatement, but Russia’s most realistic route back—UEFA qualifying for the 2030 World Cup—runs through an organisation that does not take its cues from FIFA. That fork remains unresolved.

The thin reed: The IOC’s assurance is provisional. The ROC has pledged not to operate in occupied Ukrainian regions, even as Russia still controls them. Ukraine’s NOC condemned the decision as “premature” and “unjustified.”

In February, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said the ban should be revisited. The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is the unspoken deadline shaping the calendar. From here, the questions are whether FIFA’s analysis becomes a formal decision—and on what timeline.

• Fox’s World Cup is up for bid

FIFA is preparing to sell US media rights for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups, and the likely bidders look nothing like the current rights holder.

Netflix, Disney and YouTube have all held preliminary talks with FIFA’s commercial team, CNBC reported, and are eyeing a package that would bundle English and Spanish-language rights for the first time. Amazon and Apple could also join the race, with rights valued at between $1.5-2 billion per tournament. Front Office Sports reported a bidding floor of around $1 billion.

For the 2026 tournament, Fox paid $485 million for English-language rights and Telemundo paid $600 million for Spanish-language rights. FIFA is now offering those two deals as a single package. It expects to open formal negotiations within three months.

The bundling question: The winner cannot just be a sports broadcaster. It needs real-time reach into both the English and Spanish-language US markets—something neither Fox nor Telemundo had to manage alone.

The bidders have an edge. Disney already covers both languages. YouTube has massive reach and no cable dependency. FIFA has also let Netflix in through the side door, signing the streamer to carry the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups in the US.

The time zone puzzle: The 2030 World Cup will take place in Morocco, Spain and Portugal; the 2034 edition will be in Saudi Arabia. Whoever pays ten figures is also committing to matches that will mostly air in US afternoons or overnight. No rights fee solves that scheduling problem.

The Position

🏀 Hot seat: The Indian Basketball League has hired former Rajasthan Royals chief executive Jake Lush McCrum to take on a similar role. ACG Sports is developing the league, which is expected to debut in 2027. McCrum joins after eight years with the Royals, where he led the franchise’s commercial growth, among other responsibilities.

⚽ Crossover: Popular web browser Firefox will become Championship club Wrexham’s front-of-jersey sponsor from the 2026-27 season in a multi-year deal, The Athletic reported. The Mozilla-owned browser will also serve as the club’s “official web browser partner.” Its logo will appear on the men’s and women’s team jerseys, replacing United Airlines.

🇮🇳 Your call: The All India Football Federation (AIFF) says it will not require Indian Super League and Indian Football League clubs to keep an Indian striker on the pitch, reversing a proposal from last month’s Special General Body Meeting. It reiterated that Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) players will count as foreigners for the 2026/27 season.

The Stack

📺💰 How obscure leagues get mainstream TV deals (Front Office Sports)

🥅⚽ Podcast: Is tech ruining sports fandom? (FT)

🗣️🏆 Cancelled bans, rigged draws, and CIA plots: How the World Cup breeds conspiracy theories (The Athletic)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) is in Edinburgh this week for its annual general meeting, with a McKinsey-assisted review of the global cricket calendar on the table. Among the proposals, as reported by The Guardian: a World Club T20 Championship (franchise vs franchise, under ICC control) and shorter ODIs, with the 50-over format potentially confined to an eighteen-month window before each World Cup. Cricket has tried a World Club T20 before: the Champions League T20, which ran from 2009 to 2014 before collapsing under competing board interests. Those boards haven’t gone away; they’ve only grown more powerful. McKinsey and the ICC have their work cut out.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

• Trump called. FIFA folded.

USA striker Folarin Balogun might be the luckiest man in football. On Thursday, he was sent off for stepping on Bosnia and Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemovic’s ankle during the USA’s 2-0 Round of 32 win. VAR confirmed the red card and, under FIFA’s own World Cup regulations, such decisions are final and cannot be appealed. Unless, of course, the most powerful man in the world picks up the phone for you.

The campaign: Over the Fourth of July weekend, while the fireworks went off, President Donald Trump went to work. He called his friend, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, to push for a review of Balogun’s suspension. Per Politico, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also lobbied FIFA behind the scenes, alongside donors to US Soccer.

By Sunday, Infantino and FIFA had obliged, clearing Balogun for Monday’s Round of 16 tie. Trump quickly took a victory lap on Truth Social: “Thank you FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice.”

What FIFA used: FIFA’s disciplinary committee leaned on Article 27 of its code, which allows it to “suspend” a sanction for a probationary period.

• The mechanism isn’t new. Cristiano Ronaldo’s ban was deferred before the tournament kicked off, and FIFA invoked the same clause for two South American defenders before the qualifiers.

• What makes this case different is a sitting president calling his FIFA counterpart directly, the US government submitting what it described as “additional evidence”, and the reversal arriving in just 36 hours.

The use of the “Trump” card echoes 1962, when Brazilian hero Garrincha received a red card in the World Cup semi-final against Chile. At the time, red cards did not automatically trigger a one-game ban. Brazilian prime minister Tancredo Neves—with a crucial assist from Chilean president Jorge Alessandri—successfully petitioned FIFA by telegram to overturn Garrincha’s red. The rest, as they say, is history.

The line UEFA drew: The Royal Belgian Football Association called the decision “astonishing” and said it contradicts FIFA’s own World Cup rules. UEFA, European football’s governing body, said FIFA had “crossed a line.” Belgium has been granted an appeal, to be heard today by a committee member from neither Europe nor the Americas.

Sepp Blatter, banned from football by FIFA’s own ethics committee in 2015, posted on X that “red cards are not overturned by political phone calls.” He isn’t wrong. The fact that Blatter now sounds like the most credible voice on FIFA’s institutional independence says everything.

• Nike’s “Sports Offense”, one year on

Elliott Hill has just wrapped his first full fiscal year as Nike CEO with Q4 revenue of $11 billion, down 1% year-on-year, and full-year revenue of $46.4 billion, flat. Headline net income jumped 407%, almost entirely due to a $1.1 billion refund on Trump-era import tariffs. Strip that out, and the business is still grinding through a slow recovery.

Year one, decoded: Hill launched Sport Offense in June 2025, moving 8,000 employees into teams organised around individual sports rather than consumer segments such as gender and age. FY2026 is the first full year under that model.

The performance side of the business grew in the mid-single digits. Sportswear and Jordan are still dragging. Wholesale recovered 4%. The restructure is working in the categories Nike built its identity on. It hasn’t yet reached the categories that have funded the business for the past decade.

The World Cup test: “Rip the Script,” a six-minute film featuring more than 30 athletes, including Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, drew 1.5 billion views in its first week. Nike and Adidas are running parallel campaigns into the same market. For a one-year-old strategy built around sport-specific identity, this World Cup is the first test at scale. Whether those views turn into sales is the question for FY27, when the refund disappears, and the numbers are just… numbers.

• Building a market at a loss

Australia won the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup final at Lord’s yesterday, claiming a seventh title. The tournament spanned 33 matches in England, went out in 14 languages, and by the halfway mark had generated 1.7 billion ICC channel views across 19 games—more than the entire 2024 edition.

The category-building case: The 2025 Women’s World Cup lost $31.4 million on its own account. The men’s Champions Trophy, run by the same body six months earlier, delivered a $587 million surplus. The ICC is treating that gap as the cost of creating the category.

Sanjog Gupta, who became ICC chief executive in July 2025, told The State of Play that his oft-cited ambition to make women’s cricket “the biggest women’s sport on earth” is “definitely realistic.” We spoke to Gupta about the decade of work behind that line: how the women’s game was funded, filmed, and sold—and whether the economics can ever catch up with the audience.

Read the full story

The Position

💰 Done deal: Tottenham Hotspur have signed midfielder Sandro Tonali from Newcastle United for a club-record £100 million. Tonali is part of Spurs’ summer spending spree, which also includes the £85 million signing of Mateus Fernandes from relegated West Ham United.

🤝 In the bag: Comcast-owned Sky will acquire ITV’s broadcasting and streaming arm for £1.6 billion, creating the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster. The deal includes ITV’s free-to-air TV channels in the UK as well as its ITVX streaming platform. ITV holds rights to multiple sporting events, including the 2026 World Cup.

The Stack

🇺🇲⚽ How two hedge fund managers helped revolutionise US football (Financial Times)

✍️🏏 Ben Stokes, Absolute Cinema (Lines on The Grass)

That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

On Tuesday, 41-year-old LeBron James told the LA Lakers he’s not coming back. Now a free agent, he can command a max deal from a dozen teams. Early reports have the Golden State Warriors in pole position, dangling a $15 million offer—small change for a player of his stature—for the chance to pair him with Steph Curry.

It’s a good moment to revisit our last edition, where we broke down Iren’s $50 million-plus-a-year deal to plaster its logo on the Warriors’ jersey. If LeBron ends up in that jersey for $15 million, it may go down as the most valuable ad Iren never paid for.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• The backend play

Agilitas, a sportswear company backed by Virat Kohli and Yuvraj Singh, is in advanced talks to acquire Sports365, an online retailer where Singh is also an investor. The deal values Sports365 at a discount to its own peak annual revenue of Rs 46 crore. Neither the price nor the shared cap table alone explains why Agilitas wants it.

What Agilitas really wants: SportsYard, its big-box physical retail format, opened in Bengaluru in January and turned profitable within two months. Ten more stores are slated for this financial year. Agilitas has also said it wants e-commerce to account for 25-30% of revenue.

Sports365 has sold sports gear online since 2012 and already has the fulfilment rails that take years to build. If (and when) the deal closes, Agilitas will have bought a ready-made digital shelf at a distressed price, rather than burning time and cash to build one from scratch.

One piece at a time: Look under the hood and Agilitas starts to resemble a full stack in motion. Mochiko handles manufacturing; Lotto and One8 front the consumer brands; SportsYard anchors the offline retail chain. The Bengaluru-based Sports365, once folded in, would plug the online gap. India still doesn’t have a truly vertically integrated sports company. Agilitas is racing to become the first.

• Small sports, big checks

Two niche sports just landed nine-figure funding rounds on back-to-back days.

On Tuesday, the Premier Lacrosse League announced a $100 million Series E led by Ares Management and Alibaba Group chairperson Joe Tsai. ESPN converted its media relationship into a 3% equity stake, joining a cap table that also includes actors Glen Powell and Rob McElhenney.

A day earlier, the Premier Jumping League—an equestrian show jumping circuit (horses, fences, riders, arenas)—sold its first franchise for $50 million to a quant finance executive. The PJL has not played a match yet.

Seven years of grind: The PLL has run since 2019. Since then, peak viewership on ABC has reached 833,000, and sponsor revenue has more than doubled. Co-founder Paul Rabil says this round may be the last the league needs to raise. Lacrosse returns to the Olympics at LA28. ESPN’s equity stake turns a media partner into an investor with real skin in the outcome, not just the broadcast. Those are very different incentives.

One massive assumption: The Premier Jumping League plans to launch in April 2027 with $300 million in guaranteed prize money across its first three seasons. McCourt Global, its sole backer, is also the guarantor. The first buyer has effectively paid $50 million on the belief that an audience will show up before the bill does. How fast the other 15 franchises move at that price will tell us whether that bet was prescient or premature.

The Position

✅ Greenlight: On Tuesday, India’s Competition Commission (CCI) cleared the David Blitzer-led consortium’s $1.78 billion acquisition of Royal Challengers Bengaluru. The Aditya Birla Group has invested via a new holdco, Big Banyan Holdings Pte. In April, The State of Play broke down the winning consortium’s fundraising blueprint in detail. Subscribe to read the full story.

🧢 Double role: Indian cricket great Ravichandran Ashwin will join the Rahul Dravid-owned European T20 Premier League franchise Dublin Guardians as captain and mentor. Ashwin, who retired from international and Indian cricket last year, currently turns out for the San Francisco Unicorns in Major League Cricket.

❌ Unwanted record: The group stage of the ongoing World Cup saw a 13% jump in online abuse compared with Qatar 2022, FIFA said on Wednesday. Its digital watchdog, the Social Media Protection Service, had unearthed 89,000 abusive social media posts during the opening leg of the tournament. Racial abuse accounted for 11% of all detected messages.

The Stack

⚽🇦🇷 The Dream Factory: Inside the ‘cruel’ system behind Argentina’s soccer empire (ESPN)

🇮🇷🏆 Inside Iran’s ‘disaster’ World Cup: Infantino’s ‘offer’ and a home from home in Tijuana (The Athletic)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

Germany have lifted the World Cup four times in Adidas. Every win came in those three stripes. The relationship began in Bern in 1954, when a West German side nobody backed beat Hungary and rewrote footballing history. From 2027, Germany will wear Nike. The American giant offered the German Football Association (DFB) €100 million a year – twice Adidas’s number. A German federation, a German team, and a global stage…in an American rival’s kit. The reaction in Germany says it all. Adidas has been rooted in Herzogenaurach since 1949. Germany face Paraguay in their Round of 32 fixture tonight (2 am IST), the start of Adidas’s farewell tour in white, red, black, and yellow. However it ends, the next shirt will look and feel different. Sport stays loyal – right up until the money doesn’t.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

The armpit was always the point

The fourth official at this FIFA World Cup doubles up as a billboard. Rexona’s logo hides under the armpits of the jersey – out of sight during the match, perfectly framed every time the substitution goes up or added time appears. All 104 matches. One tiny patch of fabric, maximum attention, albeit for a split second. The brand rotates by market: Rexona in most of the world, Degree in the US.

The backstory: While it looks stunt-y, Unilever first tried this with Rexona Clinical Protection during the 2021/21 Big Bash League (cricket) in Australia, with the logo sitting in their…pits. The campaign had a name – Pitvertising – and a clear outcome: deodorant sales jumped 10%.

Unilever then got deeper into sports with the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia before scaling for 2026. The current five-year FIFA deal, signed in 2023, is the largest in Unilever history. It spans 35 brands across more than 120 markets. Unilever’s US sports marketing spend nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025. First came the armpit. Everything else is catching up.

The board vs banner: The substitution board also carries a Unilever deodorant brand. The moment itself is gold: peak focus, minimal clutter, and replayed everywhere (especially, a high-profile sub!). It generates attention that no media planner can purchase directly. The image travels on its own, separate from any Unilever campaign. Including here. That, in a way, is the activation paying off twice. over. Somewhere, a brand manager is sketching out their own version of the fourth official – one sharp, repeatable moment, where their logo lands in the exact frame they want. Every single time.

The fan is besides the point

Next season, Iren will replace Rakuten on the Golden State Warriors jersey. The deal, announced last week, is worth more than $50 million a year – the largest jersey sponsorship in North American sports.

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, has held that patch since 2017. Iren is a very different beast: an Australian AI cloud company with an $18 billion market cap that builds renewable-powered data centres for heavy compute AI workloads. Nobody watching a Warriors game can buy what Iren sells.

The change: For most of the past decade, tech marketers treated sports like a mass-market funnel: put the logo in front of millions of eyeballs and convert. Smartphone makers (Samsung/Chelsea or even Oppo/BCCI), fantasy gaming apps (Dream11 and MPL with BCCI and multiple IPL teams), and crypto exchanges bought jersey patches as giant, moving billboards.

That era is fading. The money now splits between platforms that still chase reach and enterprise tech companies that want something entirely different.

Iren’s play: The Chase Centre is packed with tech leaders and investors who sign nine-figure procurement contracts. Iren wants to live in their heads when they approve their next AI infrastructure budget.

The pattern is everywhere: Anthropic on the Williams F1 car, CoreWeave on Aston Martin, Atlassian on RCB’s trousers in the IPL. These companies don’t need you to scan a QR code from the stands, but the handful of people who can trigger a hundred-million-dollar purchase to see their name again and again.

While the fan is watching, the buyer is courtside.

India’s passport tax

Last week, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) clarified that a passport is a travel document that attests nationality when an Indian is abroad, and not proof of citizenship. That line has turned into an assist for a live proposal in the Prime Minister’s Office: the Sports Passport. Under this plan, Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) cardholders could represent India without surrendering their foreign passports. A decision is expected within six months.

In the queue: Yan Dhanda, 27, plays in the Scottish Premiership and wants to play for India. However, surrendering his British passport would strip him of his right to live and work (and play) in the UK football system. Danny Batth, with nearly 500 appearances across England’s top three divisions, has been trying to play for India since 2017.

Blocked in Zurich: FIFA does not currently accept OCI status as proof of national eligibility. India’s Citizenship Act of 1955 bans dual nationality. India is now trying to thread a needle: craft a document that satisfies FIFA without granting citizenship.

No other country has attempted this route. Whether Zurich agrees is the full story, on The State of Play this week.

Read the full story

The Position

💰 Buying in: Walmart heir Lukas Walton and his wife Samantha have acquired a minority stake in NBA team Chicago Bulls and the United Center. The franchise, majority-owned by the Reinsdorf family, carries a $6.45 billion valuation. Lukas will be the second Walton with an NBA interest – after Ann Walton Kroenke owns the Denver Nuggets.

🤝 Count me in: Actor John Abraham has joined the ownership group of European T20 Premier League franchise Rotterham Dockers. He teams up with South African cricket names Jonty Rhodes, Faf du Plessis, and Heinrich Klassen, as well as Madhukar Shree. Abraham already owns Indian Super League club NorthEast United.

💸 Signed: Manchester City will pay £116 million to sign midfielder Elliott Anderson from fellow Premier League club Nottingham Forest. The fee sets a new record for a British player, though it still trails the £125 million Liverpool spent on Alexander Isak last year.

The Stack

🇯🇵 ⚽ How Japan’s strategy for overcoming 100 schoolkids might help them eliminate Brazil from World Cup (The Athletic)

🥊👟 World Cup Pits Adidas Against Nike In Fight For Football Street Cred (Bloomberg)

🎾💷 The struggle over Wimbledon’s finances (Financial Times)

That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

Vaibhav Sooryawanshi is on the verge of becoming India’s newest T20 international, heading to Ireland and England fresh off becoming the youngest centurion in Indian Premier League (IPL) history. At 15, he will wear the same India shirt as his teammates and sit through the same team talks. He will not, however, share the same dressing room. The International Cricket Council and England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) child safeguarding rules bar under-16s from adult changing facilities, so Sooryawanshi gets his own room at every venue. He may enter the dressing room during games, just not while anyone is changing. Protocol also requires his parents to travel with him. Sport rarely pauses to ask whether a 15-year-old is ready. The dressing-room paperwork did.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition:

The Signals

• The Rs 12 crore homecoming

Rishabh Pant will return to the Delhi Capitals in the 2027 Indian Premier League (IPL) season. To engineer the move, Pant agreed to a Rs 12 crore pay cut — from the Rs 27 crore Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) paid for him at the last mega auction to Rs 15 crore now. Kuldeep Yadav moves the other way at his existing Rs 13.5 crore fee. The trade, confirmed on June 23, frees up Rs 13.75 crore in LSG’s auction purse.

Down memory lane: The IPL’s first trade dates back to 2009, when the Mumbai Indians sent Ashish Nehra to the then Delhi Daredevils and received Shikhar Dhawan in return. Nehra carried a Rs 1.6 crore price tag; Dhawan, Rs 12 lakh. The combined deal was worth Rs 1.72 crore.

The moves since: In November 2023, the market reset when Hardik Pandya moved from the Gujarat Titans to the Mumbai Indians for Rs 15 crore in cash. On the same day, Mumbai traded Cameron Green to the Royal Challengers Bengaluru for Rs 17.5 crore. The Pant–Kuldeep swap, worth Rs 28.5 crore in combined value, now stands as the richest two-player deal in IPL history.

By rule, no trade clears without the player’s consent. Pant chose the pay cut; LSG chose cap space, Rs 27 crore off their books, and Kuldeep in at Rs 13.5 crore. Meanwhile, Shardul Thakur, now back at the Mumbai Indians (again via a trade), has set a record of his own: three all-cash trades across seven IPL teams, the most in league history so far.

More to come? If you trust the social media rumour mill, Pandya could be on the move again, this time away from the Mumbai Indians, with multiple suitors circling. Teammate Suryakumar Yadav may not be far behind. The Rajasthan Royals’ Yashasvi Jaiswal has already emerged as a potential target for the Mumbai Indians.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR ASSOCIATE PARTNER

• The rights cycle always turns. The question is: what are you holding when it does?

Franchise revenue still leans heavily on central-pool money from multi-year broadcast deals – money clubs neither price, sell, nor control. When the next cycle resets, you negotiate from the position you’ve built, not the one you wish you had.

During IPL 2026, six franchises rewrote that starting position.

Their owned fan databases grew seven times faster than their Instagram followings. Together, they now control more than 10 million first-party fan profiles – people they can reach, sell to, and build with, without asking any platform for permission.

Driving that shift is SI’s FanOS.

This year alone, FanOS powered seven teams and drove 200 million page views on websites and apps that the franchises actually own.

The next rights cycle is coming.

FanOS is how you walk into it stronger.

Own your fans

• India’s longest-running football problem has a proposal

In December 2008, a Sports Ministry circular barred Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) and Overseas Citizens of India (OCIs) from representing India in sport. The Delhi High Court upheld that order in 2010.

Eighteen years on, India is watching players of Indian descent represent Qatar, New Zealand, and DR Congo at the World Cup. Now, the Ministry has sent a “Sports Passport” proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office.

The framework would allow PIOs to represent India without surrendering their current passports. Football is the first target, but the idea could extend to other team sports. The AIFF already has a 30-player shortlist. The next step rests with the Home Ministry, whose strict stance on dual citizenship narrows the path but does not close it.

The human cost has a name: Arata Izumi, who surrendered his Japanese passport in 2012 to wear an India shirt. Earlier today, The State of Play published the full, subscriber-only story. Subscribe to read.

Read the full story

The Position

🎾 Let’s play: Eternal-owned going out platform District has onboarded PadelPark. The partnership covers 11 PadelPark facilities across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Pune. (ICYMI: The State of Play dug into how District is trying to crack urban India’s growing pay-to-play space)

🤝 Done deal: Michele Kang has agreed to acquire French football club Olympic Lyonnais from Eagle Football Holdings Bidco, per Bloomberg. She will pay around $30 million for 88% of Lyon’s men’s team and provide financing worth $80 million for the next two years. Kang, a football entrepreneur, also owns Lyon’s women’s team.

🎰 Inside the Arena: Meta is reportedly building a prediction markets product similar to Kalshi and Polymarket. The New York Times reported. The app, codenamed Arena, will “rely on a video-game-like points system”, and could eventually explore real-money betting.

The Stack

🍺🏆 The World Cup’s Other Hydration Break: A High-Speed Beer Run (Wall Street Journal)

⚽⚽⚽ The mystery of the World Cup’s first hat-trick – and how the truth emerged 76 years later (The Athletic)

💸 ⚽️ Want to own a 100-year-old Austrian soccer team? It’ll cost $500 (Front Office Sports)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

Today’s intro writes itself. India currently stands 139th in the FIFA rankings. The World Cup is, as ever, a television programme, not an itinerary. On Saturday, the All India Football Federation (soon to be the Football Federation of Bharat, if the Sports Ministry agrees) unveiled its strategic rethink: play India’s national song, Vande Mataram, before every match, along with the national anthem. On Sunday (also International Yoga Day), it followed up by partnering with the Art of Living and the Heartfulness Institute to provide yoga and meditation training to the national teams. The name change awaits a file noting. The ranking awaits something else.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

The $250 million water break

In December 2025, Manolo Zubiria, FIFA’s chief tournament officer (USA), told a room of global broadcasters that three-minute hydration breaks would be mandatory at the 22nd minute of each half, no matter the weather. He said it was about player welfare. The room heard something else.

The backstory: The origin story is more prosaic. In 2014, a Brazilian labour court ordered FIFA to introduce cooling breaks in high heat or pay $90,000 (or 200,000 reals) per match. FIFA complied. The first use came in the Netherlands vs Mexico round of 16 in Fortaleza, where the Dutch edged a 2-1 win.

Russia 2018 barely used them, and only when the wet-bulb temperature hit 32°C (the point at which humidity and heat combine to prevent the body from cooling itself through sweat). Qatar 2022 moved to November to avoid that threshold entirely. Breaks were rare. For 2026, FIFA stripped away every condition that had kept them occasional and left it no longer to the referee’s discretion.

By the numbers:

• FIFA allows four 30-second ads per break, eight slots per game, across 104 games—832 slots in all.

• The Wall Street Journal, citing an ad buyer, reported rates of $200,000 per spot in early matches, climbing to $750,000 when the US plays.

• At an average of $300,000 per slot, hydration breaks alone add up to $249.6 million, more than half of Fox’s $485 million US rights fee.

• Telemundo, the Spanish-language US broadcaster, stayed with the football. The BBC is barred by law from selling ads. ITV passed, citing Ofcom’s total ad limits.

What to watch: FIFA hasn’t said if mandatory breaks will carry into the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, or the 2034 edition in Saudi Arabia. Both are summer tournaments. Fox missed 8-10 seconds of live play during a hydration-break ad pod in the 2026 opener and faced no sanction. In many ways, the line, both commercial and regulatory, has been drawn.

The fitness race that funds itself

Hyrox staged its first event in 2017. Nine years on, it is chasing Olympic recognition by 2032. Douglas Gremmen, the company’s chief growth officer, told SportsPro that the bid hinges on getting the elite competition structure right in the next 12–18 months.

Last week, Sky News reported that L Catterton, the LVMH-backed private equity firm, is weeks away from investing in Infront, the company that runs Hyrox. The timing is neat rather than accidental.

The scoreboard:

Hyrox’s monetisation matrix:

L Catterton’s thesis: Media rights are largely untouched. The gym network plus tens of billions of Instagram impressions is where the upside lives. Besides, L Catterton is also an investor in fitness tech company EGYM, fitness company Solidcore, exercise equipment makers Peloton and Tonal, and luxury fitness company Equinox, signalling synergy.

We wrote about Hyrox’s India debut last November and the looming contest to own the country’s premium endurance market. Subscribe to The State of Play to read the full story.

Read the full story

The shoe that’s really a strategy

Virat Kohli launched One8’s debut footwear range in Delhi on Sunday, the brand’s first public showcase since he restructured the business in December.

Kohli sold One8 to Agilitas Sports and invested Rs 40 crore ($4.4 million) of his own money for a co-founder stake, after turning down a Rs 300 crore (~$32 million) offer to renew his Puma contract. Agilitas was led by Abhishek Ganguly, who spent a decade running Puma India. Kohli was Puma India’s most valuable Indian asset through that period. In 2025, he followed Ganguly out.

The shoe: The debut Seam XVIII Signature is priced at Rs 9,230, Kohli’s Test run tally. The Cover Drive 18 cricket spikes, at Rs 13,999, are already on the feet of Jos Buttler, Rinku Singh, and Rashid Khan. Pre-booking a pair on District doubled as your ticket to the premiere. It is a new kind of event format for India: the shoe as event, not just inventory.

Chasing the market: Agilitas, which acquired India’s largest sports footwear manufacturer (Mochiko Shoes) in 2023, is the production base the brand needs. The question is whether Kohli’s pull, among other things, extends beyond cricket into the performance market he is now chasing.

The Position

💰 Of interest: The Public Investment Fund (PIF), owner of Newcastle United, has held talks with KKR-owned Arctos Investments about investing in the club and the stadium, Bloomberg reported. Arctos already holds minority stakes in Paris Saint-Germain and Liverpool (via Fenway Sports Group).

🎾 Welcome back: Seven-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams will return to the 2026 Championships’ singles event on a wild card. Her comeback began on the doubles court alongside her sister Venus on grass. The pair will also play doubles at Wimbledon after receiving a wild-card entry.

📺 Scale: JioStar, Reliance Industries’ OTT platform, averaged about 451 million monthly active users in FY26, Akash Ambani said. JioStar—home to the IPL, India’s international and domestic cricket, and ICC tournaments—also crossed one billion downloads.

The Stack

🎾 💸 How tennis agents spot the next generation of stars (Financial Times)

✔️ 👟 ‘We’re here to win’: Nike CEO on the race to revive the biggest brand in sport (Financial Times)

🇳🇱🟠 Why do Dutch fans wear orange? (Politico)

That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

Twenty thousand Scots poured into Boston for Scotland’s opening World Cup match this week. The Sam Adams Boston Taproom ran out of its own beer. Bars across downtown reported demand at four times a normal Fourth of July. One owner called it “triple St. Patrick’s Day.” This is Scotland’s first World Cup since 1998—and they won their opener. The Tartan Army has been emptying foreign bars for twenty-eight years without a win to show for it. Now they finally have one. Boston should probably order more beer.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition.

The Signals

• India’s rugby moonshot

The second season of the HSBC Rugby Premier League (RPL) kicked off in Hyderabad on Tuesday, with four women’s franchises lining up alongside six men’s teams for the first time. HSBC, which came in as a “powered by” partner in Season 1, is now on the masthead as title sponsor.

The Olympic play: The RPL is a talent pipeline dressed up as a franchise league. India has an 84‑month plan to get to LA 2028, with rugby sevens as the wedge sport.

The Asian bracket is thin: only a handful of teams sit between India and an Olympic berth. The men finished seventh in Asia at the Paris 2024 qualifiers; the women were fifth. Neither ranking screams “contender,” but the women’s path is shorter. Adding four women’s franchises in Season 2 is a very public bet on that.

GMR’s bigger move: In the Indian Premier League, GMR co‑owns the Delhi Capitals, and it owns the UP Yoddhas in the Pro Kabaddi League. It holds the RPL’s commercial rights under a 10-year deal with Rugby India – a cleaner, more ambitious play up the value chain.

• BBL’s half-step

Cricket Australia and the six state associations reached “strong agreement” on Monday to push ahead with privatising the Big Bash League, settling on a hybrid model that lets each state decide when—and whether—to sell stakes in its clubs.

It’s the first time CA’s three biggest state associations have lined up behind any proposal in this long-running process. Melbourne’s Stars and Renegades will both take the field in 2026‑27, but the Renegades will be run under temporary management funded by Cricket Victoria.

How the deadlock broke: Cricket Victoria (CV) had moved furthest, proposing to merge its two Melbourne clubs into a single franchise and sell the Renegades licence, with an opening bid of $180 million (a number CV chief executive Nick Cummins said he’d be happy to accept). That plan jammed up with everything else.

The hybrid model—letting each state move at its own pace—was the concession that finally broke the logjam. But only in the boardrooms.

The ACA problem: The Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) had already sent its “no” to players the night before the meeting. ACA chief executive Paul Marsh argues the current model doesn’t deliver higher pay or a bigger revenue share for players. No privatisation without ACA sign‑off is the unwritten rule. That makes 2027‑28 the earliest realistic start date.

The Position

💯 Listed: Indian cricketer Smriti Mandhana has been named to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential sportspersons. Mandhana, vice‑captain of the Indian women’s team, is the only Indian on the list, which is headlined by LeBron James. South Africa’s Test captain, Temba Bavuma, also features.

📺 Record: The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup is off to a flying, record‑breaking start, smashing both attendance and broadcast numbers. An India‑Pakistan game on Sunday in Edgbaston helped supercharge the opening weekend, drawing nearly 19,000 spectators.

The Stack

⚽ America is remaking football in its image (Financial Times)

🤳 From Vozinha to Tim Payne: How the World Cup is creating viral stars (Guardian)

👟 Why are so many players wearing pink footwear at the World Cup? (The Athletic)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

The brand replied with one deadpan Instagram video: “Welcoming the world to the beautiful [redacted] stadium.” Seven million views in eight hours. Boom. Fans now want the covered-up logo on a t-shirt. Last week, we told you FIFA would charge fans $79 (plus tax!) to flash their name on the big screen. Levi’s just earned 7 million impressions by hiding its own.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

• India turns to diaspora for sporting glory

India’s Sports Ministry has reportedly sent a ‘Sports Passport’ proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office, asking for a formal framework that lets Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) represent the country in international sport.

U-turn: India banned OCI cardholders from playing for the country in 2008, a position the Delhi High Court backed in 2010. The fallout was most visible in football and tennis, where players of Indian origin had no legal path to the national team. The push has been building for over a year, driven largely by football officials and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) watching diaspora talent sign for other nations.

India’s neighbours took the opposite bet: Pakistan had Zesh Rehman, Bangladesh turned to Hamza Choudhury, and others to deepen their talent pools. India dug in. In a way, this proposal admits it was a mistake.

The 2026 moment: India wants the 2036 Olympic Games. For years, it has watched athletes of Indian origin compete against it rather than for it. The ongoing 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup alone has multiple footballers of Indian descent turning out for countries like Qatar, New Zealand and, delightfully, DR Congo.

If cleared, the framework would formalise a playbook that many countries, especially in the Middle East, have used to build competitive teams. India’s 30-million-strong diaspora across North America and Europe is the most obvious, and underused, talent pool waiting to be tapped.

Waiting game: A decision is six to eight months away, per KhelNow, and needs a Home Ministry sign-off. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, so any scheme has to square athlete eligibility with existing passport law. The Ryan Williams case, an Australian who gave up his passport to play for India’s football team, shows what the current system really costs. The AIFF has shortlisted 28 players and asked ISL clubs to introduce a dedicated quota. A Sports Passport is meant to make that kind of leap the exception.

• Women’s cricket has never been more expensive to stage

The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup began in England on June 12, the first edition to feature 12 teams.

On Sunday, 18,814 fans packed Birmingham’s Edgbaston for India vs Pakistan, setting a new Women’s T20 World Cup group-stage attendance record. It broke the previous mark, also set by the same fixture in Dubai in 2024. England has already sold 200,000 of 270,000 available tickets (36% to women, a record for any ECB event). The crowds are turning up, and who’s turning up is changing too. But the vibe in the stands hasn’t yet turned into a healthy P&L.

By the numbers: As per data analysed by Business Standard:

• The last five women’s ICC events generated $119 million in revenue against costs of $182 million—a $63 million deficit.

• The 2025 Women’s ODI World Cup in India set broadcast benchmarks: the India-Pakistan match drew 28.4 million digital viewers across platforms.

• It still ran at a loss. The men’s 2023 Cricket World Cup generated $719 million in revenue. The gap between the two is more than 20-to-1.

The India question: Every commercial milestone in women’s cricket now passes through India, especially after their 2025 ODI World Cup win at home.

If they reach the final at Lord’s, the economics change. Broadcasters pay more; the deficit math starts to look different. If they don’t, not even a record Edgbaston crowd will close the gap.

• District Play’s court takeover

Eternal already owns how urban India eats (Zomato) and what it gets in ten minutes (Blinkit). District Play is the third bet: your evenings. In seven months, it’s gone from launch to a 2,000‑venue network, locking in “District Exclusive” courts with interest‑free advances and turning five‑a‑side bookings into a data land grab.

State of Play subscribers get the full story: how the model really works, who’s being squeezed (Playo, Hudle, KheloMore), and what happens when those exclusivity contracts start to expire.

Read the full story

The Position

📺 Prime time: Manchester United is heading to Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing, in a deal reportedly breaking the record for access fees. Cameras will follow the club’s 2026-27 season from pre-season on, with fly-on-the-wall footage across the men’s, women’s, and academy teams.

🤝 Greenlight-ish: Cricket Australia and its state associations have agreed “in principle” to a “self-determination” model that opens the door to private investment in the Big Bash League. The deal clears the way for Victoria to sell a second BBL licence after the shock Stars-Renegades merger. One snag: the Australian Cricketers’ Association hasn’t signed off and is vowing to block the plan in its current form.

💰 Getting in: The Argentina Football Association has signed prediction-markets firm Kalshi as an official sponsor for the 2026 World Cup. Lionel Messi broke the news on Instagram, fronting an image with teammates Nicolas Otamendi and Rodrigo de Paul.

The Stack

⚽🇺🇲 How Gianni Infantino and FIFA won Trump’s heart (New York Magazine)

🇨🇩⚽ A Nation’s Soccer Hero: The Superfan Who Says He Can Stop Goals (Wall Street Journal)

🇲🇦🌍 How the Moroccan World Cup Team Became A Symbol of The Global South (The New Yorker)

That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.

FIFA has spent the past year turning the 2026 World Cup into a cash machine. Ticket prices are up 34% on average. Its official resale portal skims up to 30% off every transaction. A regular seat for the MetLife final now runs $6,730. And this week brought the most on-brand flourish yet: $79 (before tax) to flash your name on the big screen before kickoff via its Super Shoutout programme. The tournament opens tomorrow. For now, the football still comes bundled with the ticket.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition:

The Signals

• The counteroffer that landed

On June 9, the All India Football Federation (AIFF) agreed in principle to a two-year, club-led model for the Indian Super League (ISL), with a formal signing due on June 15.

How we got here: Last month, several ISL clubs issued a joint statement after meeting the AIFF, saying they were “compelled to review the extent of their commitment to the league” beyond this season. They baulked at handing full control to Genius Sports, which had emerged as the preferred bidder for the long-term commercial rights to Indian football’s top division.

The number that mattered: Genius had tabled the top bid for ISL rights—Rs 2,129 crore over 15 years for the full commercial package. That came with a guaranteed Rs 12.8 crore each year for the AIFF to run its operations. The clubs came back with Rs 15.4 crore a year for the AIFF, kept the commercial rights for themselves, and beat Genius at its own game.

Let’s play: The 2026-27 season is expected to kick off on September 4, with 14 clubs playing a full home-and-away calendar over seven months. Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya backed the clubs after a two-hour meeting and asked both sides to form a joint task force to settle their financial disputes.

ICYMI

The clubs’ win is the headline. The subtext has been brewing for a while. A fortnight ago, The State of Play unpacked what Genius Sports was really after, and why a data company built around sportsbooks was bidding for the commercial rights to India’s top football league.

That story—along with our redesigned site—is now live. Subscribe to read.

Read the full story

• Sold Out (Except the Seats)

In January, FIFA president Gianni Infantino claimed demand for the 2026 World Cup was the equivalent of “1,000 years of World Cups at once.” All 104 matches, he promised, would be sold out. Today, nearly 180,000 tickets are listed on FIFA’s own resale platform ahead of tomorrow’s opening game, the Financial Times reported. Of those, 176,000 are for group-phase matches. Some get-in prices have dropped to $69.

How it happened:

• FIFA hiked prices on more than 90 of the 104 matches by an average of 34% in the run-up to the tournament, the first time dynamic pricing has been used at a World Cup.

• Since then, the average resale price of the cheapest group-stage ticket has fallen 23%, from $730 in April to $560 in May.

• FIFA’s own resale platform charges 15–30% in transaction fees with no price caps, making discounted tickets even harder to shift.

The Italy problem: The sharpest example is Canada’s opener. When Italy were expected to be the opponent, tickets were listed above $2,000 on the secondary market. Then Italy lost to Bosnia in the qualifiers. The same seat now goes for $675.

The $13 billion question: SportsPro estimates the World Cup’s total economic footprint at $13 billion. Broadcast rights ($4.26 billion) and sponsorship ($2.8 billion—with Kraken signing on June 9 as official crypto exchange supporter) are largely locked in.

Whether empty seats matter in the end depends on how much of that money was ever meant to come through the gates.

The Position

✈️ Flying high: Emirates will remain Real Madrid’s shirt sponsor for the next five seasons, through the end of 2030-31. Spanish daily AS pegs the deal at €100 million a year, which would make it the richest shirt sponsorship in football.

✋ No, gracias: Real Madrid have confirmed that cross-city rivals Atletico Madrid rejected a €150 million offer for striker Julián Álvarez. Barcelona were also understood to be interested in the Argentine, who joined Atletico from Manchester City in 2024.

📺 Add to schedule: After clinching rights to FIFA events through 2034, Zee Entertainment has bagged linear TV rights to India’s three-match tour of Zimbabwe to be played between July 23 and 26. FanCode will livestream the matches.

The Stack

👟 Nike can’t just do it anymore (The Economist)

⚽ A ‘broken’ system, nascent culture: Why the US has never had a world-class men’s soccer star (The Athletic)

🧠 Football Clubs Try Training A Body Part They’ve Ignored: The Brain (Bloomberg Businessweek)

🏆 The World Cup According to Gianni Infantino (New Yorker)

That’s it for this Wednesday edition of The Left Field.

Welcome to the Monday edition of The Left Field, a twice-weekly sports business newsletter from The State of Play. It hits your inbox on Monday and Wednesday evenings (IST), always free to read. Think of it as a short, sharp desk briefing built to be finished in one sitting. The deeper dives and long reads still live at The State of Play every Friday.

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On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽

The Signals

• The event is the ad

If you’ve doom-scrolled X lately, you’ve probably seen the Enhanced Games. Think Olympics meets pharma trial: a sporting competition where performance-enhancing drugs aren’t just allowed, they’re the main attraction.

Enhanced Group, the company behind it, listed on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month at a $1.2 billion valuation after merging with a blank-check company. Among its backers: Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital.

The actual business: The games themselves are a very expensive advertisement. Enhanced Group sells performance medicine and optimisation services directly to consumers—telehealth for people who want to run, lift, or swim faster. The event is the funnel: athletes performing at enhanced levels are the product demo; anyone who wants in on that is the target market. Prize money, including $10 million for world records, comes from the float.

The scoreboard: the inaugural event in Las Vegas on May 24 drew 42 competitors and produced one unofficial world record. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam a 50-metre freestyle in 20.81 seconds and picked up $1 million for it. Two-time Olympic medallist Fred Kerley ran an underwhelming 9.97 in the 100 metres— “clean”, he said—and still earned $250,000.

The pitch problem: A company worth $1.2 billion, on the promise that drugs would rewrite human performance, needed a cascade of records on opening night. One swimming mark is, at best, a proof of concept. Kerley’s clean 9.97 suggests that, in sprinting at least, the case is harder to make. The scoreboard and the share price are now in conversation.

• A letter to no fixed address

On May 22, five Indian Super League (ISL) clubs—Kerala Blasters, Bengaluru FC, Mumbai City FC, Inter Kashi, and Sporting Club Delhi—issued a joint statement warning that they “are compelled to review the extent” of their commitment “beyond the current season.” Their worry is basic but existential: nobody has decided who actually controls Indian football’s commercial rights, or when that will be sorted.

The dispute: Genius Sports has tabled the highest bid for ISL commercial rights—Rs 2,129 crore over 15 years, with an option to extend for five more. The clubs want Genius as a data and technology partner only, with commercial control staying inside the league. Genius, which supplies official sports data to betting operators across major global leagues, wants the full deal locked in.

The vacancy: the Master Rights Agreement between the AIFF and Football Sports Development Limited, the Reliance-backed company that ran the ISL, expired at the end of last season. Nothing has replaced it. The 2025–26 season was already a stripped-down one, with only 13 matches per side.

The Position

⚡ Challenger: Energy entrepreneur Enrique Riquelme is stepping up to take on Florentino Perez for the Real Madrid presidency. Perez has run the club since 2009, remains the overwhelming favourite to keep the job, and has four years left in his current term.

⚽ Shopping around: An American consortium led by Underdog Global Partners has offered €2 billion to acquire Serie A club Napoli, currently owned by the De Laurentiis family, according to The Athletic. Officially, the club is not for sale. Unofficially, that hasn’t stopped UGP from knocking for six months.

💰 Raking in: The world’s 50 highest-paid athletes pulled in a combined $4.1 billion over the past 12 months (before taxes and agent fees), according to Forbes. The number is a marginal decline from the $4.2 billion earned last year. Of that, Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo banked $300 million last year, matching boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr’s 2015 peak.

The Stack

⚽ How the Premier League became a UK economic asset (Financial Times)

🇨🇼 How the smallest country to qualify for a World Cup did it (Financial Times)

🏆 Replica trophies, sold-out merchandise and Cazorla chants: Inside Arsenal’s title celebrations at the Emirates (ESPN)

That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.