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We are now less than a month away from the start of the NFL season. There will be plenty to follow on the field, but some of the most interesting stories could happen away from it. Here are three I’ll be watching.

Gameday broadcast booths

It is rare to enter an NFL season with this much uncertainty around the major broadcast booths. Usually these jobs stay locked down for years, but a unique set of circumstances means we could see plenty of movement over the next twelve months.

The biggest question is at CBS.

Tony Romo is currently on leave following his arrest on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, and CBS Sports president David Berson said that there is no timetable for a decision on his future. In the meantime, J.J. Watt has been promoted to work alongside Jim Nantz in CBS’s No.1 booth.

That effectively gives Watt an audition for one of the biggest jobs in sports broadcasting. But it is far too early to assume Romo is definitely gone, particularly with four years reportedly still remaining on his contract.

Then there is Greg Olsen.

His Fox contract expires after this season, and he has made little secret of his ambition to get back into a No.1 booth after losing that position to Tom Brady. If CBS eventually has a vacancy, Olsen would be an obvious name to watch.

Amazon could also become part of the reshuffle.

Kirk Herbstreit’s Prime contract is up after this season, while the longer-term future of the Al Michaels-Herbstreit partnership will inevitably attract attention. Travis Kelce is another wildcard. He is still playing in 2026, but whenever he does retire, his profile and growing media career mean he will immediately become one of the biggest names available to broadcasters.

Whatever happens, there could be a lot of network musical chairs over the next year. Who ends up calling the biggest games in 2027 could become one of the more interesting off-field stories of this season.

ESPN’s neutrality

The NFL’s deal with ESPN was finally completed in January following regulatory approval. ESPN acquired NFL Network, NFL Fantasy and distribution rights to RedZone, while the NFL received a 10% stake in ESPN.

In some ways, bringing NFL-owned media properties under a larger media company is not particularly remarkable. What makes this deal different is that the league now owns part of one of the biggest independent media organisations covering it, and one that also pays billions for the right to broadcast its games.

For a UK comparison, imagine the Premier League owning 10% of Sky Sports.

ESPN has insisted that nothing will change editorially, and there is no evidence that the NFL is dictating its coverage. But the structure creates an obvious question: can ESPN continue to scrutinise the NFL as aggressively when the NFL is also one of its owners?

We have already had a taste of the scrutiny that will now follow these decisions. After 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was seriously injured in a car crash in July, Dan Patrick criticised ESPN and Adam Schefter over the timing of the story, questioning whether ESPN had held the information until the 49ers were ready to announce it.

There is no evidence that ESPN suppressed the story at the NFL’s request, and Schefter has denied sitting on it. But that is almost beside the point. The ownership structure means editorial decisions like this will now inevitably be viewed through a different lens.

In years gone by, ESPN has produced some brilliant journalism on the NFL. At its best, that journalism should occasionally make the league and its teams uncomfortable.

That is why this is worth tracking throughout the season. Do we continue to see investigative reporting that challenges teams and the league? Or does ESPN increasingly move towards access-driven coverage that protects those relationships?

The answer probably won’t come from one big story. We'll see it gradually over time.

International games

This is the NFL’s biggest international season yet.

There are a record nine international games across four continents and seven countries, including first regular-season games in Australia and France, alongside games in London, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.

Australia is perhaps the most interesting test. The 49ers and Rams will play at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Week 1, taking the NFL into a completely new market while creating one of the biggest logistical challenges the league has attempted with a regular-season game. Goodell has already said the NFL views Australia as a long-term market rather than a one-off experiment.

If it works, it strengthens the case for taking the league even further into Asia. Japan has already been discussed as one potential future market as the NFL looks for the next stage of its international expansion.

The story to monitor is where the NFL takes this international growth.

Owners have approved up to 10 international games per season from 2027, which is the maximum currently permitted under the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA. Goodell has repeatedly said his eventual ambition is 16 international games a year, effectively allowing every team to play abroad once each season.

That means the next barrier to international growth isn’t necessarily finding cities that want NFL games. It is getting the players on board.

Moving from nine games this season to 16 would require another significant shift in the schedule and negotiations with the NFLPA. At the same time, the league continues to explore an 18-game regular season, an idea the players’ union has already pushed back against.

How players respond to the travel demands this season, particularly in Australia, could therefore have implications far beyond 2026.

The NFL has proved it can find international demand. The next challenge is working out just how global the regular season can realistically become.

Fenway Sports Group sells Liverpool minority stake

FSG has agreed to sell a minority stake in Liverpool to 1892 Holdings, a consortium led by former QPR chairman Amit Bhatia that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The exact stake has not officially been disclosed, but reports put it at around 30%, with the deal valuing Liverpool at more than £5 billion.

Bhatia will become Liverpool’s vice-chairman and join an expanded board alongside Elaine Saverin of EE Capital and Bryan Baum of K5 Sports. Bezos, who is the lead investor in K5 Sports, will not personally have a seat on the board.

The big winner from the deal is FSG. It bought Liverpool for just £300 million in 2010 and is now reportedly selling roughly a third of the club for more than £1.5 billion, around five times what it originally paid for the entire club, while still retaining majority ownership and operational control.

That reflects a remarkable turnaround under FSG. Liverpool went from a club struggling with significant debt and ownership uncertainty to one of the most valuable and commercially successful clubs in world football.

For fans, the interesting part of the deal isn’t really Jeff Bezos’ fortune. Financial rules mean Liverpool cannot simply spend unlimited amounts of new owner money on transfers and wages. The bigger opportunity is what this group could bring commercially. Adding people with networks across technology, investment and global business to Liverpool’s board could open up new sponsorship, partnership and revenue opportunities.

That matters because, in modern football, the ability to spend is increasingly tied to the ability to generate revenue. It also gives Liverpool a broader ownership base and could make any eventual transition away from FSG less abrupt if, further down the line, it decides to sell more of its stake.

Surpries Cadillac changes

Cadillac sacked Team Principal Graeme Lowdon and replaced him with Marcin Budkowski.

Cadillac says the move was part of a “planned leadership transition”. However, that doesn’t feel like the full story. Cadillac CEO Dan Towriss said the team had been considering the change for months, but also confirmed that it wasn’t mutual and that Lowdon had effectively been dismissed.

It could simply be that Cadillac always saw Lowdon as the person to get the team onto the grid before bringing in someone like Budkowski to lead the next phase. If Cadillac wants Budkowski to have a meaningful influence on next season, these are the kinds of changes that need to be made now.

But for a new team still trying to establish itself, changing its leadership midway through its first season is hardly a sign of stability.

The wider context is that building a successful F1 operation takes time. Red Bull entered in 2005 and didn’t win a race until 2009. Toto Wolff only joined Mercedes three years after its return as a works team, while Zak Brown arrived at McLaren in 2016 and the team didn’t win the Constructors’ Championship until 2024.

Cadillac shouldn't be judged on whether it is winning yet. The more interesting question is whether a major leadership change this early is part of the long-term plan, or evidence that the original one is already being rewritten.

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With the US Open only a few weeks away, asks some important questions about the future of tennis fandom.

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Can Gen Z Afford the US Open?

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24 days ago · 27 likes · 6 comments · Racquet Theory and Will

F1 restarts this week, and has a great breakdown of the Mercedes storylines that could shape the second half of the season.

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🔥 Russell vs Antonelli | rivalry in the making

Welcome back to another ‘Tracksidetalks’ post, as today I’m completing a request from ( Lola Vespasiani ), covering the rivalry / relationship between both Mercedes drivers along with on track fighting and how one goal can affect team bonds…

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19 days ago · 2 likes · Julia

F1 has always been at the forefront of technical innovation, but The Race explores an interesting question: has the sport become anti-innovation?

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Record Breaking Performance

For only the fifth time this century, Real Madrid finished last season without a major trophy. For a club with an ambition to become the most commercially successful sports team in the world, you might think that would be a major setback. You would be wrong.

According to its recently published accounts, Real has just set another record, not for trophies but commercial performance. Operating revenue for 2025/26 reached $1.39 billion, passing the previous sports team record of $1.23 billion set by the Dallas Cowboys in 2024.

What stands out is not only how quickly Real’s revenue has grown, but where that growth has come from.

Revenue has increased by 61% since 2018/19 and, remarkably, 93% of that growth has come from income Real manages directly: its stadium and marketing operations.

Stadium revenue has more than doubled, rising from around $200 million to $414 million. That accounts for roughly 41% of the club’s total revenue growth since 2018/19. Marketing revenue has risen from approximately $337 million to $614 million over the same period, accounting for another 52%.

Real Madrid’s marketing revenue is so far ahead of its competitors in Europe that it alone would be enough to place it inside the top ten of the Deloitte Money League.

Then there is the Bernabéu.

It is difficult not to draw a line between the redevelopment and the increase in stadium revenue. The Bernabéu has gone from being primarily a football stadium to an asset designed to make money throughout the year.

It is not just somewhere to watch Real Madrid. There is the club museum, restaurants, a shopping centre and a growing calendar of major events. I saw some of that first-hand earlier this year.

The NFL played its first regular-season game there in 2025 and has since agreed a multi-year deal to return. Concerts should eventually become another part of the model too, once the club resolves its dispute with the local council over noise levels.

None of this has come cheaply. The redevelopment cost around $1.6 billion.

But you can already see the effect. Stadium income is now more than twice what it was before the redevelopment began.

Is it sustainable?

Broadly, yes. What makes Real’s growth sustainable is that much of it is coming from revenue the club can influence itself.

Sponsorship, merchandising and the Bernabéu are not completely separated from results on the pitch, but they are far less dependent on whether Madrid wins La Liga or the Champions League in any one season.

There are still risks.

The obvious one is the stadium itself. With more than $1.25 billion of stadium debt still outstanding, Real needs the redevelopment to keep producing the returns it was built to generate.

There is also a fairly striking gap between revenue and what actually reaches the bottom line. Real generated $1.39 billion in revenue but reported only around $30 million in profit after tax.

That helps explain something else: despite generating more revenue than any sports team in the world, Real Madrid is still not valued as highly as the biggest NFL and NBA franchises.

Forbes values Real at $9.5 billion, below six NFL and NBA teams.

The reason is mostly structural.

NFL and NBA franchises operate in closed leagues with substantial revenue sharing and salary controls. European football offers nothing like the same certainty. Clubs are more exposed to sporting performance, player costs are harder to contain, and the economics of the competitions they play in can change far more dramatically.

So Real Madrid may now be able to generate more annual revenue than any NFL or NBA franchise.

But as long as it operates within European football’s current structure, investors are likely to see it as a less predictable asset than the biggest American sports franchises — no matter how many concerts, sponsorship deals or NFL games the Bernabéu can host.

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Stories I’m following:

FIFA still in crisis mode

There have been more twists and turns in the FIFA story. Gianni Infantino is still FIFA President and issued a blunt put-down of his critics in a statement earlier this week. 

What helps is that the alliances which brought down FEE are starting to fray. Mexico has broken ranks with CONCACAF to back Gianni Infantino, while Argentina has also come out in support of him. This is alongside unanimous support from AFCON. 

UEFA, meanwhile, is keeping its boycott in place and says it has lost confidence in Infantino’s presidency. If the boycott stays in place, it’s hard to see a way through for Infaintio once FIFA tournaments. 

However, the thing I keep coming back to is that we’re seeing plenty of boycotts, resignations and rejection, but much less debate about what actually needs to change at FIFA.

This whole episode has raised serious questions about the checks, balances and accountability within FIFA’s governance model. If this ends with Infantino simply being replaced without addressing those structural issues, there’s a risk football finds itself back in a similar position further down the line.

I’ll be coming back in the next few weeks with a few options for how FIFA could restructure.

Formula 1’s growth hits a speed bump

Liberty Media published its financial report for Q2, which showed a rare period where F1 earnings were down on the previous year. Liberty Media revenue fell 38% year-on-year in Q2, from $1.23bn to $764m.

The big reason is the calendar. F1 held just five races during the quarter compared with nine last year, partly because the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian GPs did not take place following the conflict in the Middle East.

Across the first half of the year, F1 staged eight races compared with 11 in 2025. A lot of this should balance out as more races are held later in the year, although F1 is still currently set for 23 races rather than last year’s 24 after Malaysia stepped in to host the Bahrain GP in October.

The expectation is that the numbers will even out over the next few quarters. Still, it’s an interesting one to watch if race cancellations start having a more sizeable impact on F1’s revenue.

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Number of the Week

That’s the reported high end of what advertisers are paying for a 30-second commercial in Super Bowl LXI, which Disney says has already sold out of advertising space. Disney had reportedly sought $10 million per commercial before advertisers pushed back on pricing, with many spots ultimately selling for an estimated $8 million to $9 million.

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Ben Stokes speaks! After stepping down as England Test captain, Stokes sat down with For The Love of Cricket to reflect on his time in one of the biggest jobs in the sport.

is one of the best data analysts on Substack, and his newsletter should be a must-subscribe for any sports fan. I’m excited to see him turn his attention to F1 later this week.

The Numbers Game

I Simulated 10,000 Premier League Seasons. Here's Who Wins.

I ran 10,000 simulated Premier League 26/27 seasons to see where teams are most likely to finish in the coming year…

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a month ago · 47 likes · 22 comments · Dan Fleming

For anyone struggling to get through the F1 summer break, has a great piece from a few weeks ago looking at some of the excitement around one of F1’s newest teams.

Oh Rouge

How Revolut and Audi are redefining Formula 1 aesthetics

I’m still sinking in everything that happened during my past week in London and my weekend at the Silverstone Grand Prix. One of the highlights was definitely spending Saturday with Revolut and Audi F1 at the Paddock Club, including a motorhome tour, a meet and greet with the drivers, and watching Q1 from their garage (one of the peak experiences of my …

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Alba Carballal Muiños

Finally, if you’re looking for some good book recommendations for the rest of 2026, has you covered.

All Sports Books

Sports books coming later in 2026

The second half of the year sees lots of great sports books coming out. Here are twelve I am particularly looking forward to reading with the full list, sorted by sport, below. Do let me know which one’s you’ll be picking up. Happy reading…

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a month ago · 52 likes · 8 comments · All Sports Books

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Subscribe now

ICYMI

• FIFA has scrapped its plan to sell a stake in its competitions to private investors after widespread opposition, including support among UEFA members for a possible boycott. The reversal puts Gianni Infantino under growing pressure, with several European members withdrawing their support ahead of next year’s FIFA presidential election.

• The Big Ten and SEC have backed the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that would give schools, conferences and the NCAA targeted antitrust protection when enforcing rules on eligibility, transfers and athlete compensation. Separately, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction granting eligible Division I athletes from the high-school class of 2022 a fifth season of eligibility.

• CBS has placed Tony Romo on leave “until further notice” following his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. J.J. Watt will replace him alongside Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson on the network’s lead NFL broadcast team.

• Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora is reportedly leading a consortium prepared to offer more than $1bn for a proposed London franchise in NBA Europe.

• The Mubadala DC Open has reportedly quadrupled its revenue since 2019. Its growth, driven by stronger ticketing, sponsorship and concessions alongside an increased focus on full-tournament packages, offers a useful case study in how tennis events can build value beyond the action on court.

Who could join the F1 calendar next?

Sepang’s return as the Bahrain Grand Prix has revived an old Formula 1 question: which circuit or country could be next to join the elite calendar for motorsports?

The first question to unpick is whether there is space for new circuits to join. F1 Concorde Agreement allows for 25 races; 24 has become its working ceiling, and Stefano Domenicali says that remains the target for 2027.

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The changes for 2027 and 2028 are already largely accounted for. Zandvoort leaves after this season, while Barcelona and Spa will alternate, creating two spots filled by Turkey and Portugal.

Istanbul Park returns in 2027 on a five-year agreement, while Portimão has signed a shorter deal for 2027 and 2028. That two-year contract makes Portugal the most obvious bridge to whatever comes next. That makes 2029 the first obvious point at which the calendar could move again, and a new circuit joins, if F1 sticks to the 24-race cap.

Thailand

Thailand appears to have made the most progress. Its government approved around $1.2bn for a proposed five-race agreement from 2028 to 2032, and has since published a preliminary street-circuit layout around Bangkok. The project was initially driven by former prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, whose removal created some political uncertainty. However, design work continued after she left office and, on current evidence, it is the strongest candidate for the next permanent addition.

Africa

Africa remains F1’s biggest geographical gap, but its competing projects are still some way from becoming races. Kyalami has received FIA approval for plans that would allow it to upgrade from Grade 2 to the Grade 1 status required for F1. Approval of those plans is significant, but the work still needs to be completed, and South Africa has yet to secure a race agreement and a funding package.

Rwanda’s proposed circuit outside Kigali has been complicated by the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and diplomatic pressure on F1 to end its discussions with the country. Morocco is also reportedly exploring a $1.2bn motorsport and tourism development near Tangier, although that remains at the early planning stage.

Hockenheim

Hockenheim has reopened discussions about returning the German Grand Prix. It’s commercially attractive for F1: there are now two German manufacturers on the grid in Mercedes and Audi, and the new majority owner, emodrom, is investing €250m in the wider site.

That redevelopment includes an expanded Porsche Experience Centre, a hotel and a Motorworld complex, but nothing for F1 facilities. The principal obstacle remains the economics of staging the race. Circuit managing director Jörn Teske has repeatedly said that Hockenheim cannot absorb the hosting fee without government or other third-party support. Until that funding model changes, Germany has a credible argument for returning but not an advanced bid.

Do Football clubs get any value from pre-season tours?

Now the World Cup is over, pre-season is fully up and running, and Europe’s biggest clubs are back on the road. Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Chelsea have travelled east, while Liverpool has been touring the United States.

Pre-season tours highlight the tension between the sporting and commercial sides of a club. Coaches would rather be based at a settled training camp, as long-haul flights and sponsor appearances disrupt any rhythm. Pre-season is also the one window in the year when a coach can focus on teaching a system rather than preparing for the next fixture.

The commercial return is clearer, which is why tours survive the pushback. Clubs absorb neither the ticketing nor travel costs and can receive up to $5 million in appearance fees per match. That fee, however, is only part of the value. Tours also allow clubs to fulfil sponsorship obligations and strengthen their international fan bases.

It is one of the trade-offs that comes with football clubs becoming global brands, with supporters far beyond their home cities and regions. Despite the disruption to pre-season preparations, tours are likely to continue and grow. For coaches, they may still be preferable to the alternative: moving competitive league matches abroad.

Coming up this week

• The North American hard-court swing is properly underway, with the National Bank Open in Canada setting up the road to the US Open.

• The Hundred continues across England and Wales, with the group stage moving into its final stretch and plenty still to play for.

• Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Seattle Seahawks premieres this week, with HBO and NFL Films going inside the training camp of the defending Super Bowl champions.

Substack

Most sports have gone quiet for the summer, but tennis is still swinging, and has a good read on what happened on the ATP and WTA Tours last week.

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Aces & Faults from Washington, Memphis, & Los Cabos

Ace: This week marked the first-ever title for rising sensation Alexandra Eala. Unseeded in Washington, Eala defeated Qinwen Zheng, defending champion and seventh seed Leylah Fernandez, second seed Elina Svitolina, third seed Naomi Osaka, and top seed Jessica Pegula in her remarkable run. Eala was down a set when the final was suspended due to rain and …

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a month ago · 4 likes · Amanda Bergman

The has been in Franciacorta with Liam Nachawati, an eleven-year-old racing OK Junior for Ricky Flynn Motorsport, and a family betting everything on getting him to F1.

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a month ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · The Paddock Journal

Transfer reporting has become a substantial business in its own right, and has written on the messier end of how it works.

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a month ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Jed Devereux

Podcasts

The Race Business has a fascinating interview with Flavio Briatore, one of F1’s most experienced executives and operators.

With The Hundred well underway, the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast has an interesting debate on franchise cricket.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

ICYMI

Quite a bit has happened since the last edition. Spain won the World Cup, Jannik Sinner defended his Wimbledon title, and the commercial side hasn’t stopped for a second. Here are a few things I found interesting:

• The Kansas City Chiefs have released the first renderings of their new $3bn stadium, a fully enclosed 70,000-seat dome opening in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2031. The roof uses translucent ETFE panels, and the bowl geometry was modelled by audio engineers to preserve Arrowhead’s crowd noise.

• Mexico’s shirt is the best-selling of the World Cup, ahead of Argentina and Germany, with Adidas projecting over 3 million units for each of the three. Mexico leads all 14 federations Adidas kits at the tournament, and did so after going out in the last 16 to England.

• The Seattle Seahawks sold to the Khosla family for a reported $9.612bn, an NFL record against the $6.05bn paid for the Commanders in 2023. Owners vote on 26 August in Atlanta. Paul Allen paid $194m for the franchise in 1997.

• Sepang will host this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix in October, an unusual workaround that keeps Bahrain on the calendar without racing in the country itself. Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain as the final two rounds, but Stefano Domenicali confirmed that if those races cannot go ahead, the 2026 season will conclude in Europe instead.

FIFA wants to sell the World Cup but UEFA won’t take part

The World Cup has left FIFA in a position of extraordinary commercial strength, and they now expect to top $15bn in revenue across the 2023 to 2026 cycle. The important point is, though, that whatever the tournament looked like from the outside, it has strengthened rather than weakened Infantino’s hand. More than 200 members have reportedly already pledged their support for his re-election in 2027.

Infantino is now trying to use that position of strength to push through one of the most significant commercial changes to the World Cup. On Tuesday, FIFA began a consultation on the creation of FIFA Forward Enterprise (FEE), a new subsidiary that would bring together the commercial rights for its competitions, including broadcast, sponsorship, licensing, ticketing and hospitality, and operational delivery of FIFA tournaments. FIFA says the aim is to create a more focused operation that can unlock value and return more money to its members.

The proposed scale is enormous. FIFA values FEE at $20bn and says it could raise up to $4.2bn by selling a minority, non-controlling stake of up to 20 per cent to outside investors. FIFA insists it would retain sole control of the company, including majority board representation, and that sporting decisions, governance, the international calendar and competition formats would remain with FIFA and its members.

It would be significant, and FIFA wants to move quickly. Infantino has given members until 19th September to decide whether they want to participate in the new funding model. Those that do could access up to $40m across the 2027 to 2030 cycle, made up of $20m through FIFA Forward and a further optional $20m through FEE. Those that do not would remain on the existing Forward 4.0 model, which is closer to $10m per association for the cycle.

However, the backlash has been seismic. UEFA said the plan crossed a line football’s institutions should never cross, and that the game’s soul and governance are not assets to trade. The FA called itself “deeply concerned” at the lack of process, while CONCACAF and the AFC both said they had not been properly consulted before the proposal became public.

Earlier today, UEFA’s members met virtually and voted unanimously to withdraw from all FIFA competitions. The boycott covers the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup, and it holds for as long as the FFE proposal remains alive rather than only if members approve it in September. UEFA will lift the threat only if FIFA abandons the plan in full and gives binding assurances it will not return to the idea. “The World Cup is not for sale,” the statement read.

European nations have won seven of the last ten World Cups, and the tournament’s commercial value rests heavily on their players and their broadcast markets. FIFA still holds the votes, needing only a simple majority of its 211 members, with Infantino’s support concentrated across Africa, Asia and South America. All eyes are on FIFA’s responses, and the next few weeks and days leave football at a significant crossroads.

F1 Mid-Season Review

The first half has been unpredictable in the way new regulations always make a season unpredictable, and unexpected in that nobody had Kimi Antonelli leading the championship at the summer break. He leads by 50 points with six wins from eleven rounds. For all the shouting about the regulations and a calendar thrown in disarray by conflict, there is a lot here to be positive about the 2026 F1 season.

Commercially, the sport sits in a strong position. Q1 revenue reached $617m, up 53 per cent year on year, with primary revenue covering race promotion, media rights, and sponsorship up 55 per cent to $496m.

This is despite two races dropping off the calendar but has produced the season’s strangest calendar quirk. Last weekend, F1 announced that Sepang will host an event titled the Bahrain Grand Prix from 2nd to 4th October, funded by Bahrain, some 6,000km from Bahrain. Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain as the final two rounds, but F1 confirmed that if those races cannot go ahead, the 2026 season will conclude in Europe instead.

Attendance shows the audience has not gone anywhere. Silverstone drew 564,000 across four days, the largest crowd in the sport’s history, beating a 31-year-old Adelaide record and adding roughly 64,000 on its own 2025 figure. Melbourne set a circuit record at 483,934, the fifth consecutive year it has done so.

Television is harder to read, for structural reasons. F1 claimed audiences up 25% across its biggest markets after three rounds, Spanish figures fell over the same stretch, and the American series moved exclusively to Apple TV, leaving no honest comparison against ESPN’s 1.1m for Melbourne last year. The opacity suits everyone who has to report a number.

On track, the cars have proved complex enough that circuit characteristics now dictate performance, and momentum moves between teams accordingly. Mercedes have the constructors’ title close to settled at 379 against Ferrari’s 307 and McLaren’s 220. Whether the drivers’ fight survives the second half depends on that variance, and the smart money still puts Antonelli as favourite.

Reading

If you want in on the debate engulfing the World Cup, has a great piece making the case for a 64-team tournament.

Joey D'Urso

A 64-team World Cup would be good, actually

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a month ago · 20 likes · 7 comments · Joey D'Urso

The New York Knicks have been one of the biggest sports stories of the summer, and has written a wonderful piece on Knicks star Jalen Brunson.

Between the Sidelines

The Guard that Could

Happy Thursday, and welcome back to Between the Sidelines…

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a month ago · 44 likes · 6 comments · Sophia Prieto

No one does sponsorship analysis better than , who has a great piece on what F1 can learn from the World Cup.

Sunday's Sponsors

What Can F1 Learn From The World Cup?

Welcome back to Sunday’s Sponsors, a Formula 1 sponsorship newsletter discussing partnership announcements and activations, with a particular focus on those driving fan engagement and meaningful impact. Thank you for being a paid subscriber to the newsletter, I hope you enjoy this bonus post…

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a month ago · 13 likes · Sarah Beakey

Finally, I wrote a piece for exploring a new way to think about how F1 builds its season calendar.

The Paddock Journal

The Hidden Logic Behind the Formula 1 Calendar

In the coming weeks, Formula 1 will publish its 2027 calendar. Under Liberty Media, the calendar has become more than just a list of dates, instead, it is now a menu with each race having its own recognisable identity, audience, and price…

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a month ago · 10 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

Podcasts

Beyond FFE, English football has its own money fight. Premier League clubs are voting on the ‘New Deal’, worth around £1.5bn to the EFL over ten years and funded partly by lifting the transfer levy from 4% to 6%. It needs 14 of the 20 clubs, and one former Premier League board member has already predicted it falls. The Price of Football is the best guide to why Championship economics make this so hard to settle.

ESPN is the other story. Its layoffs were announced following the acquisition of NFL Network and RedZone distribution rights. The Varsity, at Puck, has the sharpest read on what happens when a league part-owns its own broadcaster.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

ICYMI

• The NBA Finals drew their biggest crowd since Jordan. The series averaged 20.6 million viewers, the most-watched finals since 1998. Game five peaked at 33 million.

• Crystal Palace’s American owners are testing the water. The FT reports that Woody Johnson, Josh Harris, and David Blitzer are exploring a sale of their shares, possibly a controlling stake. Johnson only bought in last summer. A long-overdue Selhurst Park rebuild sits in the background.

• The Big Bash is edging towards private money. Cricket Australia and the six states agreed in principle to let each state sell stakes in its own clubs, though four conditions still stand in the way. Cricket Victoria looks likely to go first, possibly selling the Melbourne Renegades outright. For scale: England’s Hundred fetched nearly £1 billion, and the IPL is valued at nearly $20 billion.

• F1 handed its ticketing to a unicorn. Formula 1 named Fever, a live-entertainment tech platform, its official ticketing supplier from 2027; a five-year deal that ends Platinium Group’s decade-plus run. Fever, founded in 2014 and valued at $1.8 billion, is better known for Candlelight concerts than Paddock Club passes.

• The NFL’s rarest draft might return. Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, ruled ineligible after a gambling case, has applied for the supplemental draft, a seldom-used summer mechanism. No player has been picked in one since 2019, and the league still has to approve holding it at all.

• The Williams sisters are back at Wimbledon. Serena and Venus have been handed a doubles wild card for the Championships. It is Serena’s first Grand Slam since 2022. Their last Wimbledon doubles title came in 2016. Serena has also been handed a singles wild card

Can USMNT ever win the World Cup?

The World Cup is well and truly up and running. Despite the ticketing backlash and other issues, the on-pitch product has carried the tournament. The 48-team format has mostly dodged the dead-rubber problem critics feared: with eight of twelve third-placed teams advancing, most groups stay alive into the final round. It has been high-scoring and rarely dull.

The three hosts have all delivered. The US has been the story, top of its group with a game to spare after beating Paraguay 4–1 and Australia 2–0, even without Christian Pulisic. Winning it remains a long shot; the realistic ceiling is matching or bettering the 2002 quarter-final, the team’s high-water mark of the modern era.

But the hype is not the prize. A World Cup win is, and the US is years of structural work away from it. Hosting in 1994 left the country a league, MLS, which has grown ever since. The national team has not: thirty-two years on, the 2002 quarter-final is still the ceiling.

The bottleneck is structural, and it is not mainly “college versus academies”; that debate is half-settled. The golden generation came through MLS academies and European clubs, not the college game; college is no longer the elite men’s pathway. The real drag is pay-to-play: a youth system that filters talent by family wealth before it filters by ability.

That filtering is the problem. Elite youth soccer runs $3,000–$5,000 a year, with academy places reaching $7,000 — beyond lower-income families, the communities that produce players almost everywhere else. A country of 340 million ends up picking from a smaller, wealthier pool than its size implies. The US has the participation numbers and the money. It has never built the pathway.

The fix is half-built already. Local MLS academies are free and produced this generation; the task is to extend that reach into the neighbourhoods that pay-to-play shuts out, and to reward clubs for developing players rather than charging for them. Christian Pulisic joined Chelsea for around $71m; but the Pennsylvania academy that raised him received nothing. If the US are serious about winning the World Cup, they need to ensure more funding and incentives flow down to local academies. Reward the development and free academies become a business model, not a favour. Fees alone will not finish the job, but right now the country is barely starting it.

1994 gave American soccer a league. 2026 will be judged on whether it finally gives the country a route to the top that does not price out its best players at fourteen.

College sports: the Protect Act clears a hurdle

The Protect College Sports Act is the most credible federal vehicle yet. That is not the same as a bill that will pass.

On 18th June it cleared the Senate Commerce Committee 19–9, with bipartisan backing from Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, and now heads to the full Senate. Real progress: the predecessor SCORE Act died in the House twice, pulled for lack of votes. This version is a compromise — Cruz softened on employment status, Cantwell accepted a one-time transfer limit, and new protections for women’s and Olympic sports won a US Olympic Committee endorsement.

But it is squeezed from both sides. The SEC and Big Ten — the “Power 2” — came out against it on 2nd June, warning it could shrink the revenue-share payments their schools now make under the $2.8bn House settlement. Athlete advocates oppose it too, because its antitrust exemption strips players of the right to sue. With a 60-vote Senate threshold and a House that has already buried one bill, the two richest conferences sit close to a swing vote.

The deeper flaw is what the bill avoids. It is explicitly neutral on the question that sets the economics, whether athletes are employees, and parks that with a federal court in Johnson v. NCAA. The Sorsby saga, which pushed a quarterback into the NFL’s supplemental draft, is exactly the eligibility litigation a uniform rulebook is meant to end. But a symptom does not move sixty senators.

So: committee cleared, then a stall on the floor or in the House, and likely a slip into the next Congress. Trump’s executive order and its 1st August deadline keep the heat on, but an order cannot grant antitrust immunity or pre-empt state law. The defining question, whether a scholarship athlete is an employee, stays where it has sat all along: a courtroom in California.

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On the pods this week

The business of horse racing. Royal Ascot wrapped on Saturday — five days, £10.65m in prize money, and racing’s shop window for the year. Unofficial Partner’s episode on the business of the sport is the ideal companion: the money, the model, and where racing goes from here.

F1’s newest track, previewed. Madrid’s Madring joins the calendar in September, and The Race F1 Podcast got a tour of it three months out. Edd Straw and Jon Noble weigh up whether its centrepiece — a 550-metre, steeply banked corner — makes this a real addition or another Valencia, with home favourite Carlos Sainz, who’s been close to the project, chipping in. The must-listen for F1, and one you’ll have your own take on, having been out there yourself.

Yes, the NFL still exists. In the quiet of the offseason, Front Office Sports sat down with Fernando Mendoza — the No. 1 pick and reigning Heisman winner — on adjusting to life as a pro. The line that lands for this audience: the biggest shock wasn’t the football, but the “professionalism and business” of the building. Tom Brady’s mentorship, via a nightly read of his newsletter, features too.

The Week Ahead:

• Wimbledon qualifying gets underway. The scramble for the last main-draw places runs Monday to Thursday at Roehampton, before the Championships proper begin on 29 June (British hopeful makes his injury return at Eastbourne this week). The singles draw is made on Friday.

• The World Cup group stage reaches its climax. The final round of group games runs through to Saturday 27th June, settling who survives the 48-team field. Then comes a first: a Round of 32, the extra knockout round that opens on Sunday and runs to 3rd July.

• F1 is back at the Red Bull Ring. After a weekend off, the Austrian Grand Prix takes over Spielberg from 26 to 28 June, with the race on Sunday afternoon. Four different winners in the past four years here.

• And the PWR final lands at the Stoop. Premiership Women’s Rugby crowns its champion on Sunday 28 June at the Twickenham Stoop. Trailfinders, semi-final debutants who knocked out three-time winners Gloucester-Hartpury, face Saracens. Whoever lifts it, the Gloucester-Hartpury era is over (Subscribe to GSR Podcast for the best preview).

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

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ICYMI

• The Olympic pay fight escalated. IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she does not believe in paying athletes, then clarified she meant prize money, defending the IOC’s “solidarity” redistribution model. Olympians were unconvinced: Australian champion Cameron McEvoy noted that an appearance fee for every competitor, plus podium prize money, would cost roughly 1.5% of the IOC’s revenue over an Olympic cycle.

• Goodell skipped Congress. Roger Goodell declined to testify at the House Judiciary Committee’s 10th June hearing on the Sports Broadcasting Act’s antitrust exemption, citing the ongoing Sunday Ticket litigation while sidestepping scrutiny of why more NFL games now sit behind streaming paywalls.

• Wimbledon raised the purse. The All England Club lifted 2026 prize money 20% to a record £64.2m, with each singles champion earning £3.6m. It still equals only about 15% of last year’s revenue; players, fresh from press-conference protests at the French Open, want 22% by 2030.

• Utah confirmed a $100m deal with Otro Capital. It is among the first direct PE investments into a college athletic department.

• The Knicks cashed in. New York's first NBA title since 1973 — a 4–1 win over the San Antonio Spurs — became a record off the court too: Fanatics took more than 8,000 orders a minute and posted the biggest 24-hour sales of any league champion to date, ahead of last year's Super Bowl-winning Eagles.

• The women’s Lions found their coach. The British & Irish Lions named Jo Yapp, a former England captain and most recently the Wallaroos’ head coach, as the first head coach of their inaugural women’s team. The first women’s Lions tour brings three Tests against New Zealand’s Black Ferns in September 2027. Hear Yapp on the job below.

The World Cup’s other tournament

The 2026 World Cup kicked off on 11th June, and fashion has treated it as a global shop window from the first whistle. The interesting part is how brands are attaching themselves to it, increasingly not through FIFA, but around it.

Official sponsorship is expensive and crowded, so the more inventive routes run through federations, players, kit suppliers, and the culture surrounding the tournament.

Luxury has moved closest to the team bus. Loewe now dresses Spain off the pitch — its first sporting partnership, and a deal running to the 2030 World Cup that Spain co-hosts. Crucially, it sits separate from the on-field kit contract with adidas: the Spanish FA has sold its formalwear and its kit twice over.

Gabriela Hearst tailors Uruguay in domestic merino, Dunhill suits Japan, Cavallaro Napoli the Netherlands. Off-pitch formalwear has become a category of its own.

Nike works the same idea from the streetwear end. Its X2 programme pairs seven federations with seven designers and seven youth organisations — Jacquemus for France, Palace for England, the Virgil Abloh Archive for the United States, Patta for the Netherlands, NOCTA for Canada, Slawn for Nigeria, PEACEMINUSONE for South Korea, each with a ‘Cryoshot’ boot reworked as a street trainer. These are identity projects, not kit launches, and they sell to people who will never buy a replica shirt.”

Underneath all of it, the replica shirt remains the commercial engine; the global football merchandise market was worth roughly $16bn last year. But the margin has migrated to everything around it. FA’s no longer sell a home and away kit; they sell a wardrobe: pre-match tops, travelwear, training gear, lifestyle capsules, limited collaborations, each carrying a fatter markup than the mass-produced jersey.

Hamilton wins in red.

Lewis Hamilton won the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday — his first victory for Ferrari, and his first anywhere since the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix, 686 days ago.

A three-stop strategy and a timely virtual safety car set it up, and championship leader Kimi Antonelli’s engine failed while running second. But the pace was real, and over a hot afternoon Hamilton showed, slowly, what he can still do on the track. The win also ended Mercedes’ perfect start to 2026 — six wins from six.

For Ferrari, the result vindicates the commercial logic of the signing. Ferrari did not merely hire one of the grid’s best drivers. It hired the only one who moves freely between Formula 1, fashion, celebrity, and culture in a way no rival can. That dual value is why Ferrari signed him, to lift the team on and off the track.

Ferrari is still the sport’s most valuable team, worth $6.4bn on Sportico’s latest count. But the lead is no longer safe, and the threat is Mercedes.

Mercedes presses Ferrari on both fronts. On the track, it has won every race this season but this one. Off it, it is the better business: its 2025 accounts posted a record £167m operating profit on flat revenue, as sponsorship offset a smaller prize-money cheque. Ferrari owns the bigger brand; Mercedes, second in value at $5.88bn, owns the bigger margin and the faster car. Brand value is not the same as profit, or pace.

One win does not change the balance. But it makes a Ferrari title for Hamilton sound less like fantasy and more like a plan. Barcelona was the first proof. The harder task is turning a moment into a season.

The Week Ahead

• England v New Zealand, second Test. England resume their three-match series from Wednesday (17th–21st June).

• The grass-court swing continues. Tour warm-up events lead into Wimbledon, which opens on 29th June.

• Royal Ascot, 16th–20th June. Britain’s richest flat meeting — five days, 35 races, £10.65m in prize money — is as much a fashion and society fixture as a sporting one. The Gold Cup runs on Thursday’s Ladies’ Day.

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Podcasts

• The Good, the Scaz & the Rugby: The award-winning women's rugby podcast, hosted by World Cup-winning Red Roses Emily Scarratt and Natasha Hunt with broadcaster Elma Smit. Six seasons in, it pairs real warmth and humour with serious ground on player welfare, coaching, and the growth of the women's game, and lands access to most outlets can’t. This week's way in: their interview with the first Head Coach of the British and Irish Lions women's team.

• Racing Pilot. A podcast for anyone who wants the commercial machinery behind the racing. The hosts work on the sport’s business and media side, and guests include Tiggy Vallon of Paddock Project and The Race’s Edd Straw. Start with the recent episode on how the average F1 team came to be worth more than $3bn.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

Subscribe now

Monaco doesn’t need a great race

Kimi Antonelli won again on Sunday — his fifth in a row, leading from pole and rarely troubled, even with Verstappen out on the opening lap and a late red flag as the track surface broke up.

On pure racing, Monaco seldom delivers a classic, and the debate about whether it still earns its place rumbles on. And yet it’s still the race everyone wants to be at.

What I keep coming back to is how the commercial story only strengthens, whatever the racing does. This year the race ran under a new official name: the Formula 1 Louis Vuitton Grand Prix de Monaco. Vuitton’s parent, LVMH, already holds a ten-year partnership with F1, yet of all the races on the calendar, it chose Monaco to put its name on.

And it isn’t alone. Gucci timed the announcement of its own arrival in the sport — as Alpine’s title partner from 2027 — to the Monaco weekend. Kim Kardashian picked Monaco for her first grand prix, there to support Lewis Hamilton. The gravitational pull of the place is unlike that of any other F1 race.

It would be lovely if the racing were brilliant everywhere F1 went, but Liberty has grasped that each venue offers a different kind of value, and not all of it happens on track. Monaco’s contribution is heritage, glamour, and credibility: the things that keep the sport culturally central even when the race itself underwhelms.

The long-term picture is settled too. Last autumn Monaco committed to 2035, agreeing to roughly double a hosting fee that had long been the lowest on the grid and to hand F1 more commercial control than it once did. The old question of whether Monaco belongs has quietly answered itself.

Try picturing F1 without it. Some things just belong together.

New York is having a basketball summer

Normally, when FIFA brings a men’s World Cup to town, it expects to own the place. Not this fortnight in New York. The Knicks are 2-0 up in the NBA Finals, riding thirteen straight playoff wins and chasing a first championship since 1973, and the city has fallen for them completely. Even the President has caught it: who is expected to be courtside for Game 3 at Madison Square Garden on Monday night.

The World Cup, meanwhile, opens on Thursday, in Mexico City, with New York’s first match the Saturday after. Which sets up a collision nobody can really stage-manage: if the Finals run long, a possible Knicks Game 6 lands on 16th June, the same day France play Senegal across the river at MetLife, the stadium that hosts July’s final. A quick Knicks series wraps things up before the tournament gets going; a long one keeps the city’s attention happily divided.

I find it a neat reminder that even the biggest event in world sport has to share the marquee now and then. New York will give the World Cup a magnificent welcome. It’s just enjoying the basketball first.

The pitch at Lord’s

England wrapped up a comfortable win over New Zealand inside four days at Lord’s — and, but for the rain, it would have been three. Yet the result wasn’t the story. The pitch was.

This is part of what makes cricket unlike any other sport: the surface, and the weather above it, are the biggest variables in how a team plays. It’s why the groundstaff are among the most important people at any venue. At Lord’s, the bounce was uneven from the first morning — sixteen wickets fell on day one — and it never settled.

There were only two individual half-centuries in the entire match. Both captains, Ben Stokes and Tom Latham, said afterwards that the surface fell short of Test standard; Stokes warned that conditions like these do nothing for the future of a format he wants to protect. The MCC, which owns and runs the ground, took the rare step of issuing a public apology.

What’s interesting is why. The MCC has spent recent years trying to add pace and bounce to its square, even steaming the soil last winter, and this match suggests the experiment has gone wrong. That leaves the home of cricket with an awkward choice: take the surface out of action to relay it properly, most likely after next summer’s home Ashes, or carry on and risk eroding a reputation built over more than a century. For the ground that has now staged 150 Tests, more than anywhere on earth, that’s not a small question.

The Week Ahead

• The World Cup kicks off (Thursday). The biggest yet, 48 teams across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, opening with hosts Mexico against South Africa at the Estadio Azteca, with the USA out against Paraguay on Friday. Plenty of off-pitch questions travel with it: ticket pricing, player and fan welfare, the politics of staging it across three nations. I’ll be following those closely. But mostly: a month of football to look forward to.

• A World Cup at home, too (from Friday). England host the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, running through to mid-July.

• Serena returns (from Monday). Williams takes a doubles wildcard at Queen’s with the teenager Victoria Mbok, her first competitive tennis since 2022. A grass-court warm-up, and surely a glance towards Wimbledon.

• F1 in Barcelona (11th–14th June). The last of Barcelona’s annual races before it shifts to alternate years with Spa, and the first under its new name now Madrid has taken the “Spanish Grand Prix” title. Two Spanish rounds this year; Madrid’s street race debuts in September.

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• And if you want more on the heritage of the Monaco Grand Prix, has a lovely piece on that side of the race.

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• I couldn’t resist a Harlequins note. With the season just wrapped, the Stoop gave a fitting send-off to Nick Evans, who leaves after an 18-year association with the club — first as its record-breaking fly-half, latterly as the attack coach behind the 2021 title. A proper Quins great.

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Podcast

• To prep for the World Cup, The Varsity has a good listen on the American view of hosting football’s biggest tournament: the media, the money, and whether the US is ready.

• And Nico Rosberg, the 2016 champion who walked away from F1 days after winning the title, is on the High Performance Podcast on his abrupt exit and the strange emptiness that followed.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

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On 10th June, the House Judiciary Committee will ask Roger Goodell to defend a law older than the Super Bowl.

The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act underwrites the NFL’s economics, and Washington has begun probing where it bends. Chairman Jim Jordan has invited the commissioner to a hearing titled “Examining the Sports Broadcasting Act”, which Goodell can decline. He is unlikely to.

The Act does one essential thing: it grants the NFL a narrow exemption from antitrust law, letting it pool its clubs’ media rights and sell them as a single package. Without it, 32 clubs jointly setting the price of their broadcasts would invite prosecution. That permission built the modern league. Each of the 32 teams collected an identical $432.6m in national revenue last year, most of it from television, up from $138m eighteen years ago. Pooled selling, shared equally, keeps Green Bay competitive with Dallas.

The deals have since outgrown anything 1961 anticipated. The NFL’s current contracts run beyond $110bn through 2033: roughly $2.7bn a year from ESPN and ABC, $2.2bn from Fox, $2.1bn from CBS, and $2bn from NBC. Football supplied 86 of the 100 most-watched US broadcasts last year, by the league’s own count, and the NFL has priced that scarcity accordingly.

The exemption, though, covers only broadcast networks. Courts have repeatedly held that it does not extend to cable, satellite, or streaming, and the NFL’s agreements with Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have never fallen under its protection.

So when politicians ask whether the league has outgrown its antitrust privileges, they point at deals the privilege never covered — and at a renegotiation window that opens in 2029.

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Later this week, there’ll be a longer piece on NFL broadcasting rights.

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Gucci comes to Formula 1

Alpine filled my feed this week because, from 2027, the fashion house replaces BWT as Alpine’s title sponsor, and the team will race as the Gucci Racing Alpine F1 Team, the first time a luxury label has held an F1 title slot. No one has confirmed the figure, but reporting puts it at around $50–60m per season and north of $150m across the deal once success bonuses are counted.

What interests me is how little of this is new. Flavio Briatore, now Alpine’s executive adviser, ran the same play at Benetton, whose clothing money carried Michael Schumacher to titles in 1994 and 1995 — and he brokered this deal too. It all runs through one relationship: Luca de Meo, the former Renault chief, now runs Kering, Gucci’s parent. This is as much a corporate alliance as a sponsorship.

The complication is that both sides are buying from weakness. Gucci’s sales have slipped, and Kering is mid-turnaround; Alpine finished last in 2025. The encouraging part is the car; they’ve opened 2026 in fifth, their strongest start in years.

One subplot worth following: Otro Capital’s 24% stake is up for sale at roughly £536m, valuing the team near $3bn, about three times the 2023 price. Mercedes looked, baulked at the number, and withdrew. Whether that opens a path for Christian Horner or whether Renault has parked the sale entirely is the open question.

Champions League Final

PSG beat Arsenal in Budapest to keep the Champions League, and as a spectacle it delivered: 1-1, settled on penalties, Arsenal painfully close in their first final since 2006 before Eze and Gabriel missed from the spot. Back-to-back titles put this PSG side in any conversation about the modern greats.

What held my attention, though, wasn’t the match but where UEFA now stages them. The final used to be a roadshow; between the 1993 rebrand and Istanbul in 2005, thirteen finals went to twelve different cities, with only Munich repeating. In the twenty years since, the same handful of grounds keep coming back: Wembley has staged three (2011, 2013, 2024), with Paris, Lisbon, Munich and Madrid taking two apiece. The next few only continue the trend: Madrid in 2027 (last there in 2019), Munich, the sole bidder for 2028 (it hosted just last year), and either Wembley or the rebuilt Camp Nou in 2029.

The cause is UEFA’s own requirements. The demands on capacity, hotel stock, and transport now rule out most of the continent, so the showpiece keeps returning to the same handful of mega-stadiums. It is edging towards the NFL’s model: a fixed rotation of giant venues in major cities.

Where it goes from here is the interesting part. The logical endpoint is a settled rota of super-venues, and perhaps, before long, a final beyond Europe altogether: UEFA has begun discussions about a possible final in New York. How far the biggest night in European club football is willing to travel is worth watching.

Baseball’s labour talks have begun

Baseball’s next round of collective bargaining is under way, and it opened precisely where everyone expected.

The owners tabled their first offer on Thursday: a hard salary cap of $245.3m and a floor of $171.2m from 2027, alongside a 50/50 revenue split and the pooling of all local television money. It is the first time they have formally proposed a cap in three decades. The players’ union has refused one for fifty years and showed no sign of shifting; its interim chief, Bruce Meyer, called the offer an attempt to control costs.

For scale: roughly half the league currently spends below the proposed floor, while only a handful of clubs — the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees among them — sit above the ceiling. The back-to-back champion Dodgers, on a payroll north of $400m, would have the most to unwind. The floor is the element the union might accept, since it forces the cheapest owners to spend; the cap is the one it won’t.

This is an opening position, not a deal, and there is a long way to run; the current agreement holds until 1st December 2026.

The Week Ahead

NBA Finals: Knicks vs Spurs, Game 1, Thursday 1.30 am GMT (Sky Sport/Amazon Prime)

New York's first Finals since 1999, and a rematch of the very series Tim Duncan's Spurs won back then. Win it, and it's the Knicks' first title since 1973. For the NBA, it is close to an ideal draw: its biggest market against Victor Wembanyama, the 22-year-old already cast as the face of the sport, in the opening showcase under the league's new media deal.

The Spurs are favourites, and the Knicks are underdogs for the first time all postseason — which is just how New York likes it.

French Open: Finals Saturday & Sunday (TNT Sports)

The men’s draw has been turned upside down. The Sinner–Alcaraz pairing that has won the last fifteen majors between them is gone, Alcaraz out injured, Sinner beaten in the second round, Djokovic knocked out by 19-year-old João Fonseca — so a first-time champion is guaranteed.

The defending women’s champion, Coco Gauff, is out too, beaten in the third round. Tonight’s night session on Court Philippe-Chatrier is also a blockbuster game (around 7:15 pm GMT, TNT Sports): world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka against Naomi Osaka, into the second week of Roland Garros for the first time in years and playing again like the four-time champion she is.

Monaco Grand Prix: Qualifying Saturday, 3 pm GMT & Race Sunday, 2 pm GMT (Sky Sports)

Monaco's race is, more often than not, a procession: track position is everything, and overtaking is close to impossible. So if you watch one session, make it Saturday's qualifying. A single lap flat-out between those barriers, with no margin at all, is still one of the best hours of the F1 calendar, and pole here is worth more than almost anywhere else on the schedule.

A big change this year: for the first time, F1 has moved the race to early June for freight and sustainability reasons, a rare alteration to a weekend that has barely changed since the first Monaco Grand Prix in 1929.

Kimi Antonelli leads the title race for Mercedes.

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Gucci × Alpine: more on this week’s deal from two angles: is the sharpest on the commercial side, and takes the fashion view.

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Podcasts

Front Office Sports Today: the pick for NBA Finals week, built around an interview with Mark Cuban on owning an NBA franchise.

The Economist: Why snooker, long associated with Sheffield pubs, has become one of the fastest-growing sports in China.

That’s the first one. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

Twelve months on, it’s gone further than I expected. I’ve met some incredible people, ended up in rooms I never thought I’d be in, learned a huge amount, and worked alongside brilliant writers. I’ve even seen my own writing on platforms I love reading — the , and .

A year in, I’ve also got a much clearer sense of which parts of this I love, which parts you enjoy, and how to keep the whole thing sustainable without burning out. So a couple of things are changing.

What’s changing

First: I’m stopping the weekly F1 breakdowns.

Partly because there are people already doing them better than I could justify spending my time matching ( and are both worth your inbox), and partly because dropping them frees me up to write more deep dives, which are consistently what you engage with most.

I’ll still be posting F1 content, and the best bits of those breakdowns won’t disappear either; they’ll fold into something new.

Second: from Monday 1st June, AGM is going to look a bit different.

There’ll be a free weekly newsletter: my take on the business and cultural stories in sport that catch my attention that week, plus a few Substack and podcast recommendations. Free to everyone, every week.

And then there are the deep dives. These are the pieces AGM is really built around: why families are quietly behind the county cricket resurgence, what the NFL’s international strategy actually adds up to, what the biggest untapped market in F1 is, and plenty more on the business, culture, and politics shaping sport.

Here’s how it’ll work:

Free: the weekly newsletter and one deep dive a month.

Paid (£5/month or £45/year - two months free): every deep dive, plus the full archive. (£5 covers the flat white I’ll order in the café I’m usually writing from — so you’re basically buying the coffee that keeps me going.)

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If you’ve been reading for a while, paying is the thing that lets AGM keep getting better — more reporting, more of the work you signed up to read. If you’d rather stay on the free list, that’s genuinely great too. You’ll still get lots in your inbox every week.

Either way, thank you for reading and for all the support you’ve shown AGM so far. The best of it is still to come.

For those of you who are new: a few of this year’s most-read pieces, in case you missed them:

This week’s piece has been over a year in the making, a personal recount of my search for the best live sport experience in London for young families.

Scroll to the end for recommended reading & listening from other Substackers. This week features , , and .

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A boundary went past us, and my one-year-old daughter clapped along with the crowd. She had no idea what she was clapping for. The Oval was packed in the way county cricket is packed on a warm spring afternoon; slowly, contentedly, with picnics and pushchairs parked along the boundary.

I’d spent the last year trying to find somewhere in London where I could take a baby to watch live sport without apology. I’d tried most of the obvious options. None of them came close to this.

My daughter was born last spring. The first few months were the usual quiet recalibration of an old life around a new one. Live sport mattered more than I’d admitted. I’d grown up with weekends shaped around fixtures, and I wanted some version of that for her, something we could share, even though at this stage she’d remember none of it.

So I started looking. The criteria were simple. Somewhere close to home. Somewhere, a baby and a buggy weren’t a problem. Somewhere with enough going on to hold her attention, but I could leave easily when she’d had enough.

The list narrowed quickly. Most Premier League clubs don’t admit children under two, which dispensed with football before I’d really started.

I’m a long-time Harlequins supporter and tried the Stoop a few times. The verdict was mixed. The club itself is trying hard, the staff are good, the facilities are there, but a rugby crowd is a rugby crowd, and the Stoop is a small, intense ground. There were sideways looks when we arrived after kick-off. Sharper ones when we left a few minutes before half-time because, as anyone with a one-year-old will tell you, children are children.

None of this is the club’s fault. It’s a broader problem for rugby, which has a fan base that hasn’t yet decided whether it wants to grow or keep things as they’ve always been.

Wimbledon was meant to be the easy win. I grew up a short bike ride from the All England Club and had a vision of a picnic with my family on Henman Hill while dipping in and out of tennis on the outside courts. We even reached out in advance to ask whether it was worth attending with a baby, were reassured it would be fine, and were encouraged to bring her along.

The reality was very few facilities geared toward babies, and staff who looked genuinely surprised that we’d brought one. None of it felt welcoming. The Championships sells itself as a family event. In practice it’s a Grand Slam, and Grand Slams are built around adults who’ve planned a day around the tennis.

Three sports, three different reasons. The pattern was clearer than I’d expected. When you arrive with a small child, you’ll get a look that says, “Not here, not today.”

The place that ended up working was Surrey County Cricket Club, at The Kia Oval.

Cricket runs across the whole day and embraces the slower side of life. You arrive when you arrive. You leave when you leave. The format absorbs interruptions in a way football and rugby can’t, because cricket was built for a slower kind of attention.

The rhythm of the day suits a one-year-old in a way no other live sport does. There are long, quiet stretches where she can nap in the buggy or a carrier. There are sudden bursts of noise, a wicket, a boundary, the crowd standing up, that she finds thrilling. There are intervals long enough to walk her around the ground. There are families everywhere doing exactly the same thing, which means no one is looking at us, silently hoping we’d leave.

None of this happened by accident. It’s part of a concerted effort by Surrey to make the Kia Oval a home for families.

Earlier this season, I went down to The Oval to meet Rebecca Lockyer, Surrey’s Head of Ticketing, Membership and Supporter Services, to learn how they’ve gone about it.

Rebecca was clear that this hasn’t been a recent pivot. “We’ve always tried to be welcoming for everyone and anyone,” she told me, but added that a few years ago, the club ran a deliberate exercise asking what could be improved for families.

The most visible expression of that strategy is the Pride of Lions, Surrey’s junior membership for under-16s. It costs £20 a year. It includes access to every domestic match at the Kia Oval, County Championship, Vitality Blast, and The Hundred, plus access to reserved seats in the Family Zone during Blast fixtures, an interactive membership pack, and invitations to events with players and coaches.

Surrey describes it as the largest junior membership offering in the country, and given the club crossed 20,000 Members in 2025, it isn’t a side project. It’s a pipeline. There are now over 2,000 Pride of Lions members, with total under-18 membership sitting just over 3,000.

It also goes beyond tickets and membership to the ground’s infrastructure itself. Family rooms. Spaces for women to breastfeed. Practical buggy space, and an attitude from all staff that families are welcome no matter what.

The part Surrey is really getting right is the balance. If you’ve paid serious money for a ticket, you don’t want your day disrupted by children being children, and Rebecca was honest about that tension. She described Surrey’s approach as ‘solutions-led’. The Family Zones at Vitality Blast and The Hundred fixtures are the clearest example: dedicated areas with access to rooms full of games and activities, where children can take a break from the cricket without their parents missing the game. The logic cuts both ways. Families get a space designed for them. Other spectators get to watch the cricket undisturbed.

The same thinking has now extended to members, with a dedicated family room inside the pavilion, for Blast fixtures on Sunday. This isn’t paying lip service to inclusivity by adding a buggy park and a baby change and hoping everyone is fine with it. It’s a genuine strategy for making the experience work for everyone.

The obvious risk in any of this is that traditional members resent it. Rebecca said the club had been alive to that, “but we spoke to those members in the pavilion, and they are so happy about it.” The reasoning she described was long-term: those young children could one day be members themselves and part of the club.

Surrey is not alone in this. The Hundred’s 2025 figures show families now make up 41% of attendance, with junior tickets accounting for another 23%. Across the County Championship, attendances have climbed steadily for four seasons. Surrey set a 21st-century record at The Oval in 2025 with 85,000 spectators across the Championship season, and a single-match high of 14,000 against Essex. Four of the seven fixtures last year saw more than 10,000 spectators come through the gates.

There are structural advantages that make cricket well-suited to a good family experience. Multiple formats let the club tailor the day to different kinds of supporters. The game plays out over a longer period, with ebbs and flows, which makes it easy for families to dip in and out.

Surrey is also well positioned to market itself as a family venue: The Oval is in south London, easy to reach for anyone living in the city, and in an area many young families call home.

My journey over the past year has shown that there is no perfect experience for families at live sport, but on the evidence of the past year, cricket at Surrey is the best one I’ve found.

So if you’ve recently become a parent and you’re looking for a great way to spend a weekend this spring or summer, I’d start at The Oval.

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As always, scroll to the end for this week’s recommended reading, which features great articles from, , and

If you’re enjoying Any Given Monday, tap subscribe and follow on Instagram.

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The Setup

Miami delivered everything it promised. The track baked under a Florida sun, the Hard Rock Beach Club ran DJ sets across all three days, and a paddock that included Messi, Nadal, Jon Rahm and Jimmy Fallon (filming Tonight Show segments out of the Red Bull garage) had the loose, half-festival energy this race has made its own.

After five weeks away, the longest break of the season, prompted by the cancellation of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Miami was always going to feel like the season’s second start. On the track, Kimi Antonelli took his third straight Grand Prix from pole, holding off Lando Norris after a decisive Mercedes undercut. Oscar Piastri completed the podium.

What kept playing in the background was the bigger picture. F1’s stated commercial ambition is for every race to feel like the Super Bowl, and Miami is the race that’s actually building the blueprint. Five editions in, the Miami Grand Prix is drawing celebrity, fashion, music and broadcast attention at a scale no other US race weekend can match, and the activations are bigger every year.

There’s a small irony to it. Hard Rock Stadium itself just lost its place in the NFL’s Super Bowl rotation, partly because the F1 track and the Miami Open take up the open space the league wants for hospitality. Miami can no longer host a Super Bowl. F1 has built one anyway.

Race Result

Who’s Up

• Kimi Antonelli: three from three poles, first driver past 100 points, leads Russell by 20.

• McLaren: seven upgrades, a Sprint win, and arguably the fastest car of the weekend. The only thing missing was the Sunday result.

• Franco Colapinto: career-best seventh, his first points of 2026, and the most complete weekend of his Alpine career.

• Williams: first double points finish of the year.

Who’s Down

• Ferrari: eleven upgrades, the biggest single-weekend package on the grid, and a result of sixth and eighth after Leclerc spun on the final lap.

• Isack Hadjar: disqualified from qualifying for a 2mm floor infringement, started from the pit lane and crashed on lap five.

• Martin Brundle’s microphone cover: bitten off and removed by Jimmy Fallon during the gridwalk.

  

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On Track

Antonelli makes it three

Kimi Antonelli won his third consecutive Grand Prix and became the first driver to cross 100 points this season. He now leads Russell by 20, and Mercedes leads Ferrari in the constructors’ by 68.

Despite the win, Antonelli was caught out at the start again and had to win the hard way. A three-wide drag to Turn 1 with Verstappen and Leclerc ended in chaos: both Antonelli and Verstappen locked up, Leclerc threaded through to take the lead, and Verstappen spun out of contention moments later.

Antonelli held second, lost it briefly to Norris, and spent the next twenty laps stalking the McLaren. The decisive move came in the pits. Mercedes pulled the trigger on an undercut Norris couldn’t respond to, and Antonelli emerged in front. From there, he held the gap to 3.3 seconds at the flag.

The pace was there. So was the strategy. Antonelli’s race starts remain the one part of his weekend that doesn’t function, but for now, his recovery driving is good enough to render the issue cosmetic.

McLaren’s strange Saturday

The five-week break gave every team chasing Mercedes a chance to close the gap, and almost all of them used it. Ferrari brought eleven upgrades to Miami after Leclerc publicly identified a four- to five-tenth deficit to Mercedes in Japan. McLaren brought seven, built around a completely new floor with the bodywork rebuilt around it. Red Bull brought seven of its own, including a Ferrari-style “Macarena” rotating rear wing and a six-kilo weight reduction. Mercedes, the championship leaders, brought two: a repositioned tailpipe and a tweaked front brake drum. They saved the bigger package for Canada.

For most of the weekend, the gamble looked exposed. Leclerc topped FP1 in the upgraded Ferrari. Norris took the Sprint pole, then converted it into McLaren’s first win of 2026, beating Piastri by 3.8 seconds in a Sprint that rarely felt under threat. Russell admitted in the paddock that “it’s quite surprising the huge leap that McLaren and Ferrari have made.”

Then Saturday evening happened. The car that had been untouchable hours earlier slipped backwards in qualifying — Antonelli on pole, Verstappen second, Leclerc third — leaving Norris fourth on the grid and Piastri further back. On Sunday, the McLaren was clearly the pace of the field; Norris stalked Antonelli for half the race and pushed him to the flag. Antonelli getting track position from the undercut was the only variable between them.

P2 and P3 read like a strong result, and on the season’s wider arc, it is. But McLaren left Florida knowing the win was theirs for the taking. The pace is back. The next challenge is making it stick across all three days of a weekend.

Verstappen’s lap one

Verstappen’s race lasted eight seconds. A three-wide launch into Turn 1 ended with him spinning his Red Bull through 360 degrees and dropping to tenth.

Replays confirmed he spun independently of Leclerc, despite some early speculation of contact. The recovery was vintage Max: aggressive opening laps with multiple light contacts, a one-stop strategy executed under safety car, and a late stint chasing Russell for fourth that went to the final lap. He finished fifth on the road and held it after a five-second pit exit penalty was applied; the demotion would have dropped him behind Leclerc, but Leclerc’s own twenty-second penalty had already moved him to eighth.

Ferrari’s quiet collapse

Ferrari brought eleven upgrades to Miami, more than any other team, and walked away with sixth and eighth.

Leclerc started third, took the lead off the line with a clean Turn 1, and held the front of the race for stints either side of the safety car. On the final lap, fighting Piastri for the last podium spot, he ran wide, spun, and hit the wall, then limped on with a damaged car, repeatedly cutting corners on the way to the flag and earning a twenty-second post-race penalty that dropped him from sixth on the road to eighth in the classification.

Hamilton finished sixth, an early collision with Colapinto behind him and a long, anonymous afternoon ahead. He never seriously featured. Ferrari now sits 68 points behind Mercedes in the constructors’ table, and Leclerc is 37 points off Antonelli in the drivers’ table.

The midfield

Franco Colapinto’s seventh-place finish was the highlight of the midfield, his first points of 2026 and a career-best F1 result. He also took tenth in the Sprint, the most complete weekend of his Alpine career to date. Alpine continue to outperform their billing, a story that hasn’t quite found its way into the headlines yet.

Williams scored their first double points finish of the year. Carlos Sainz finished ninth, and Alex Albon, finally on the board, brought home tenth. They also launched a Marvel Comics collaboration in the Miami fan zone, more on that below.

Aston Martin saw both cars reach the chequered flag for the first time in 2026, ending a run of vibration issues, retirements and partial finishes that had defined their season since Australia. Alonso fifteenth, Stroll seventeenth. The Honda power unit problems are now manageable. The pace gap to the rest of the field is not.

Cadillac’s first home race was more contained: Perez sixteenth, Bottas eighteenth, both two laps down. Unspectacular result, real milestone, the eleventh team’s American debut went the distance with both cars classified.

Off Track

The engine question

The FIA used Miami to push the next-generation engine debate further into the open. Mohammed Ben Sulayem all but confirmed that the next power unit cycle will move to V8s with minimal electrification. “It’s coming. Oh yes, it is coming,” he said. “The most popular and easiest to work with is the V8. You get the sound, less complexity, lightweight.”

The 2026 regulations introduce a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electric power. The next cycle, targeted for 2030 or 2031, will likely shift that balance back toward the engine, closer to a 90/10 ratio, and run on sustainable fuels. Ben Sulayem’s argument is road relevance: Ferrari, Mercedes, Audi and Cadillac all build V8 road cars. None of them build V10s, which is why his earlier push for a V10 return was rejected last year.

Toto Wolff, who has every reason to defend the current rules given Mercedes have won all four races, came out in support. “From a Mercedes standpoint, we are open to engine regulations. We love V8s. That has only great memories. From our perspective, it’s a real Mercedes engine; it revs high. Count us in.” That’s significant. Mercedes is the team with the most to lose from a regulatory reset, and they’ve just told the FIA they’d back one.

Cadillac comes home

Cadillac’s first race on American soil produced sixteenth and eighteenth on the road, both cars two laps down. The result was almost beside the point. The team built a stars-and-stripes livery, fifty stars on the front wing, “USA” across the rear, set up a two-day fan headquarters in Jungle Plaza in the Design District, and launched the CT5-V Blackwing F1 Collector Series, a 26-unit limited-edition road car designed to mark its entry to the grid.

The Miami debut was the first opportunity to put the brand in front of its home audience properly. The fact that Perez and Bottas were two laps down by the flag mattered less than the fact that Bruno Senna drove an MP4/6 around Coconut Grove on Wednesday, and a CT5-V Blackwing was on display in the paddock by Sunday.

Williams x Marvel

Williams launched a collaboration with Marvel Comics. Albon, Sainz and Team Principal James Vowles have been written into a one-shot comic book in which they team up with Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow to defeat Doctor Doom, who has presumably been threatening the championship's integrity.

The full launch comes at Monaco in June, with limited-edition variant covers across the Silverstone, Madrid, Singapore, Austin and Las Vegas weekends. Pre-orders opened in the Williams Fan Zone on Saturday, alongside a giant cover photo-op and a Marvel mural. The team’s pitch is that “Alex and Carlos are already heroes to our millions of fans.”

The fashion machine

Miami is now the unofficial fashion week of the F1 calendar. Nahmias dropped a co-branded collection in the Design District with Jackie Stewart fronting the campaign, which is a sentence that twelve months ago would have been a satire headline. Adidas launched its first race-specific drop with Audi, taking design cues from the 2006 World Cup ball. Williams partnered with New Era. Pacsun delivered its fourth Miami GP capsule. Ray-Ban released a Miami-edition Scuderia Ferrari sunglass with a blue-to-yellow gradient.

The paddock

Lionel Messi met Franco Colapinto pre-race. Rafael Nadal and Jon Rahm were on the grid. Jimmy Fallon spent the weekend in the Red Bull garage filming Tonight Show segments with Verstappen and Hadjar. The Hard Rock Beach Club ran sets from Zedd, Marshmello, DJ Diesel (Shaquille O’Neal’s stage name, in case you’d forgotten), Loud Luxury and Kane Brown across the three days. Carbone Beach hosted three nights on the sand. E11EVEN had Snoop Dogg on Saturday and Afrojack on Sunday.

Recommended Reading:

• A fascinating piece from on the influence the Miami GP is having on other Grands Prix.

• on the Bundesliga’s media strategy and what it tells you about the next generation of European football rights.

• tackles a topic that’s front and centre for me at the moment: private equity investment in college sports.

This week, I’ve been working with on a fun one: football’s fashion moment.

If you’re enjoying Any Given Monday, tap subscribe and follow on Instagram.

This piece was co-written with . Check out her Substack for more.

In September 2024, a runway was built on the pitch at the Emirates Stadium.

Grime artist and lifelong Arsenal fan Ghetts opened with a spoken word piece. Clara Amfo, Michael Dapaah, and actor Michael Ward watched from the front row.

Then Declan Rice walked, wearing a tailored reimagining of Arsenal’s away kit by Foday Dumbuya, the Sierra Leonean-British designer behind London label Labrum.

It was London Fashion Week. The venue was a football ground. And the strangest thing about it was that nobody seemed particularly surprised.

Four months later, at Anfield, Liverpool’s squad walked down the tunnel against Newcastle in nautical stripes, tailored navy blazers, and knit jumpers stitched with Tommy Hilfiger’s red, white, and blue block. It was the first matchday outing of a partnership the club had called a “first of its kind in world football.” Liverpool won 4-1. The outfits got nearly as much attention as the scoreline.

Two clubs. Two completely different approaches. Same underlying conviction: that in 2026, a football club’s off-pitch identity matters almost as much as what happens on it.

For decades, the relationship between football and fashion followed a simple script. A kit manufacturer made the shirts. A sponsor went to the front. Replicas were sold in the club shop alongside scarves and keyrings. The most adventurous thing a club might do is release a retro range at Christmas.

What changed is the audience. Younger supporters, Gen Z especially, engage with clubs through culture and identity as much as through match results. A 19-year-old in New York or Lagos might discover a club’s badge on a jacket before they ever watch a game.

The NBA worked this out years ago, turning tunnel walks into weekly style moments and players into fashion figures in their own right. Formula 1 followed, with the paddock becoming a rolling runway. Football, the biggest sport on earth, was late to the party. It is making up ground fast.

The shift has been sharpest in the Premier League, where global audiences and cultural capital collide. Arsenal have built what amounts to a fashion programme, a rolling sequence of collaborations with independent London labels that now stretches to more than fifty collections in under two years.

Liverpool has taken the opposite path, partnering with a single global brand and embedding it deep into the matchday experience.

One is a creative director. The other is an institutional deal. Both are bets on the same idea: that the clubs which win the off-pitch culture war will be the ones that grow fastest in the next decade.

For Arsenal, the story starts in 2019, when Los Angeles streetwear label 424, founded by Guillermo Andrade, became their official formalwear partner. It was a signal that few people fully registered at the time. 424 designed suits for the first-team players, the manager, senior staff, and, notably, Arsenal Women, making it one of the earliest fashion collaborations to span both the men’s and women’s sides of a club.

Then came Labrum. Then came Aries.

In October 2024, Arsenal dropped a 26-piece capsule collection with Aries, a London-based independent streetwear brand. The collection was fronted by Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, and Alessia Russo, alongside musicians Ghetts, Knucks, and Lava La Rue.

It was the most successful collaboration the fashion label had ever produced. At peak demand, Arsenal processed orders for Aries items every 2.5 seconds.

A year later, in October 2025, came A-COLD-WALLs, a 22-piece limited-edition collaboration with Samuel Ross’s London-based label, marking the designer’s first-ever partnership with a football club. The collection drew a line between Arsenal’s industrial origins and A-COLD-WALLs signature architectural minimalism. Garment-dyed finishes, layered dye sublimation prints, hi-build textures. Saka, Saliba, Rice, and Odegaard featured in the campaign alongside players from the women’s squad.

And beyond the headline collaborations, the output has been relentless. Since July 2024, Arsenal have released more than 50 different clothing collections and ranges.

Liverpool’s approach could hardly be more different.

Where Arsenal assembled a roster of independents, Liverpool went all in on a single name. On January 8, 2026, the club announced a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger, the first time the brand had entered club football, and a deal Liverpool called a first of its kind in world football.

Just a few weeks prior, on the eighth of the same month, Liverpool and Hilfiger debuted the announcement of a “first-of-its-kind partnership in world football.”

The new relationship will see the multinational brand dress both the men’s and women’s Liverpool squads for matchday arrivals and collaborate on global campaigns.

The New York brand and the club from Liverpool will work together on special Tommy Hilfiger-curated collections and will also include co-branded club capsules to bring the clothing giant’s prep heritage to Anfield and fans across the world.

In celebration of the newfound collaboration, an announcement featured first-team players and stars of both the men’s and women’s sides, including Virgil van Dijk, Dominik Szoboszlai, Florian Wirtz, Conor Bradley, and Hugo Ekitike, as well as Gemma Bonner and Leanne Kiernan.

Van Dijk said, “It’s great to see our LFC club partnership with Tommy Hilfiger go live. We as players are excited to see the collaboration come to life, bringing together fashion, culture and heritage.”

To further mark the announcement, the largest Tommy Hilfiger flag ever produced was unfurled at Anfield. Pieces of the flag were donated to the Silly Goose Foundation, which was founded by Reagan, a lifelong Liverpool fan and LFC Foundation participant, who “inspires people via her passion for textiles, art and design, frequently sewing LFC-themed pieces that are auctioned for charity.” The flag will subsequently be repurposed into pieces that will be auctioned to raise funds for charity.

This is Tommy Hilfiger’s first foray into the club football world, after previously working with teams in other sports, namely the U.S. SailGP Team and, most recently, a move from Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport to the Cadillac Formula 1 Team.

But why now? Why with Liverpool FC?

Ben Latty, Liverpool’s Chief Commercial Officer, mentioned that the partnership works so well due to a “long-standing connection to innovative style and a deep-rooted sense of community.”

Tommy Hilfiger himself added, “For my entire career, I’ve been inspired by sports icons, stories and uniforms. I am drawn to teams with deep fan heritage and value-driven storytelling, and Liverpool Football Club has an unmatched history shaped by its people - their belief, resilience and pride.”

The men’s squad hit the tunnel styled in Tommy Hilfiger as part of their matchday looks against Newcastle, a game they’d later win 4-1.

Many of the players wore pieces selected for them during a styling session with Randy Cousin, who is Head of Styling at Tommy Hilfiger.

In the video posted by LFC, Cousin explained that the Tommy team meticulously reviewed each player’s social media accounts, noting details such as how they wear their clothes, the right fit, how they style stripes, whether they favour colour in their wardrobe—everything.

The result? Nautical style, American prep, and red, white, and blue featured on players of one of the world’s most well-known teams.

Both of these fashion-forward approaches from Arsenal and Liverpool suggest that a game long shaped by practicality and driven by performance may be stepping into a new season. And in it, players don sharper tailoring and far more stylish boots.

It’s not just Arsenal and Liverpool, though. The fashion bug has spread to other football clubs and has long been present in other sports, such as basketball.

Slightly ahead of its time, New York–based luxury label Thom Browne famously dressed FC Barcelona as the club’s “official off-pitch outfitter” during the 2018/19 season.

And most similar to the Liverpool deal, Real Madrid and Louis Vuitton announced their partnership in June 2025. LVMH is no stranger to the sporting arena, having already made its mark in F1 and designed trophy trunks for some of the world’s most high-profile competitions.

Now, the fashion house is taking on the task of dressing the players of one of Europe’s most successful clubs. Louis Vuitton will provide exclusive outfits for the men’s and women’s football squads, as well as the men’s basketball team, styling players for appearances and designing travel accessories for the club.

Taking it a step further to seal and personalise this partnership, the travel side of the collection will feature Louis Vuitton’s signature Monogram canvas (1) reworked in Real Madrid’s signature white and gold (2) personalised with the club’s “RM” initials and (3) finished with exclusive leather charms.

Similarly, the trend continues in Serie A. Giorgio Armani will dress Juventus’ men’s first team in bespoke suits through the 2025/26 and 2026/27 seasons, while Emporio Armani has partnered with Napoli as a technical sponsor, featuring its EA7 logo on the club’s jerseys and providing off-the-pitch apparel.

However, it goes beyond luxury outfitters dressing teams.

Jerseys themselves are becoming more fashionable, and clubs like Ligue 1’s Paris Saint-Germain have even been credited by Vogue with positioning the team as a fashion and lifestyle proposition, especially with their work with the Jordan Brand.

This makes merging soccer and fashion accessible to fans and players alike.

Just look at PSG’s recent collaboration with the local French brand Walk in Paris.

@walkinparisboutiqueParis Saint-Germain & Walk in Paris present “They talk, we walk.” Available 19.02.26 online at Walk in Paris store and Paris Saint-Germain stores and e-store.

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With teams like Venezia FC focusing on jersey aesthetics, sports giants like Adidas bringing back retro kits that spark a fashionable wave of nostalgia, the rise of the “blokecore” and “blokette” trends on social media, and luxury brands collaborating with Europe’s biggest clubs, football is becoming more fashionable across the board.

So, what does this mean for football overall?

Firstly, the growing trend of younger supporters incorporating sporty pieces, such as jerseys, into everyday outfits means fans can participate in the movement, too.

And secondly, the emergence of new partnerships, even beyond those mentioned here, suggests that more luxury brands will continue entering football and, more broadly, sport as a whole. Whether through collaborations with clubs or ambassador deals with individual players, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

For clubs like Paris Saint-Germain, the ambition is clear: to evolve into something bigger than a football team. Increasingly, clubs are positioning themselves not just within the sporting world but also within the lifestyle space.

And for clubs like Arsenal and Liverpool, the sky remains the limit as they seek to establish themselves in the fashion world.

As Daniel Yaw Miller wrote in his recent Substack piece that detailed Liverpool’s Hugo Ekitike sitting front row next to Vogue’s Anna Wintour at Balenciaga’s Paris Fashion Week show:

“The fact that Ekitike was allowed to travel to fashion week ahead of the Champions League tie on Tuesday night could speak to Liverpool’s wider ambitions to be seen as a team immersed in the fashion industry”

@vsrsusHugo Ekitike sat front row next to Anna Wintour at Paris Fashion Week 😮‍💨 #football #hugoekitike #ekitike #pfw #parisfashionweek

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Football has officially shifted beyond the pitch - into the wardrobe.

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Headlines

• Kimi Antonelli wins at Suzuka and becomes the youngest leader of a Formula 1 World Championship.

• Ollie Bearman's crash overshadowed an otherwise exciting race.

• Five-week break before Miami as FIA schedules meetings with teams, manufacturers, and drivers to review the 2026 regulations.

• F1 celebrated the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. at Suzuka. The drivers, who have spent three races comparing the racing to Mario Kart, were not short of material.

Quote of the Weekend

“I finally see what you mean about the mushroom. It’s accurate.”

Oscar Piastri, in the cooldown room.

On Track

History at Suzuka

Kimi Antonelli won his second consecutive race and became the youngest driver to lead the F1 World Championship. At 19 years and 216 days, he breaks Lewis Hamilton's record and is the first Italian to top the standings since Giancarlo Fisichella after the 2005 Australian Grand Prix.

Antonelli started from his second consecutive pole but got too much wheelspin off the line and dropped to sixth before Turn 1. He recovered positions through the opening stint, running fourth and applying pressure to Leclerc ahead, when Bearman's crash on lap 22 brought out the safety car. Antonelli had not yet pitted; the leaders ahead of him had. He stopped under caution and emerged in front. From there, 29 laps of controlled, mature driving brought him 13.7 seconds clear of Piastri at the flag.

The safety car played a role. But Antonelli's second stint was the best of anyone on track, and his restart was flawless.

The Bearman crash

Antonneili's overshadowed by Ollie Bearman's crash, which exposed drivers' worst fears about the new regulations.

Bearman was approaching Spoon at 308km/h on lap 22 when he encountered Franco Colapinto at a closing speed of 45km/h. Both drivers were flat out.

The difference was electrical deployment: Bearman’s Haas was in deployment mode while the Alpine was not, and deployment is not something the drivers control. Bearman swerved, went sideways across the grass, and hit the barrier at 50G.

He walked away with bruised knees and no fractures.

The drivers had warned this was coming. Carlos Sainz, speaking as a GPDA director, said the union had sent a specific warning to the FIA about closing-speed incidents under the new energy management rules. The FIA issued a post-race statement, unusual for a set of regulations three races old. Meetings are now scheduled in April between the FIA, teams, manufacturers, drivers, and FOM.

Suzuka showed both sides of the debate for the new regulations. The deployment cycles create overtaking, and the racing has been entertaining. But the same system produces large speed differentials between cars on the same stretch of road, and the drivers cannot predict or control when those gaps appear.

Three races in, the sport has its first serious safety incident under the new regulations. The debate is now when and what to change, rather than whether to change. The next big gap gives them time to figure out a solution.

McLaren arrives

Piastri had not completed a single racing lap in 2026 before Sunday and made up for lost time. A brilliant start from third carried him into the lead before Turn 1, and he controlled the opening stint with composure, managing pace and tyre wear while pulling a gap over the chasing Ferraris.

The safety car changed the picture. Piastri had already pitted and was running in a strong position; Antonelli had not, and the free stop under caution handed the Mercedes driver the lead. Whether Piastri would have won without the interruption is unknowable; plenty can change over a remaining stint, but his pace and racecraft across the full afternoon were the standout performance of the day.

Second place and a first podium of the campaign is the result McLaren needed. Norris took fifth. Whether Suzuka is a turning point or an outlier depends on what they bring to Miami, where a significant upgrade package is expected.

Red Bull’s midfield reality

The RB22 came to Suzuka with upgrades, revised sidepods, a new floor, and an updated engine cover, but it did not work. Verstappen qualified 11th after being eliminated in Q2 and spent the race stuck behind Pierre Gasly's car. At one point, he waved sarcastically at Gasly when the energy deployment left him powerless to overtake.

The car is carrying an estimated 9–10kg over the 768kg minimum weight. A weight-reduction programme is planned for Miami, but the correlation between simulation and track performance remains poor. Red Bull is a midfield team until it solves the car’s frontal instability.

The struggles have rekindled Max Verstappen's doubts about staying in F1, and he seemed more downbeat than usual on Sunday about his passion for the sport.

The rest of the field

Gasly was a deserved seventh, another quietly consistent weekend for Alpine’s driver. Lawson took ninth for Racing Bulls, Ocon scored his first point for Haas in tenth, some consolation on a dark day for the team.

Williams used the afternoon as a data-collection exercise. Albon made six pit stops across 53 laps, cycling through compounds and gathering tyre information. Sainz brought the other car home 15th.

Aston Martin celebrated Fernando Alonso's finish. That sentence reads like satire, but it reflects where the team is. Neither car had completed a full race distance before Sunday, so getting one car home at Honda’s circuit counts as progress. Stroll retired on lap 36 with a suspected water pressure issue. The Honda power unit’s problems have eased, but the performance gap to the midfield, let alone the front, is enormous.

Off Track

Mercedes x Yamamoto

Mercedes ran a wolf motif on the W17’s front wing, the result of a collaboration with Y-3, the Adidas sub-label led by 82-year-old Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto.

The wolf graphic revives artwork from Adidas’s F50 Tunit “Beast Pack” football boots from the 2006 World Cup and is anchored in Japanese mythology, where the wolf represents speed, instinct, and protection. The SS26 capsule collection was first teased on the Paris Fashion Week runway in June 2025.

Toto Wolff fronted the campaign alongside Russell and Antonelli. The team principal in a fashion shoot is not standard practice in F1. But, it tells you where Mercedes sees its brand: not just motorsport performance, but lifestyle positioning at the intersection of luxury sportswear and racing.

Special liveries

Haas ran a Godzilla-themed livery through their season-long deal with Toho Co., the Japanese studio behind the franchise. The design integrates the monster into the team’s white, black, and red colour scheme to coincide with the upcoming release of Godzilla Minus Zero this autumn.

Racing Bulls went with a cherry blossom and calligraphy-inspired design by Bisen Aoyagi, revealed at the Red Bull Tokyo Drift event: white, red, and silver, shaped by the Red Bull Spring Edition can and Japanese cultural aesthetics.

It was a joke, right?

The Japanese Grand Prix marked the 40th anniversary of the Super Mario Bros. brand. Nintendo and the cast of the upcoming Mario movie were present at Suzuka.

F1 has spent three races hearing from its drivers that the 2026 energy deployment feels like Mario Kart. Leclerc made the comparison first in Melbourne: the mushroom power-up, the sudden burst of speed, the helpless cars running without boost.

Having the actual Mario Kart brand at the circuit while the drivers protested the racing felt like Mario Kart was either a spectacular lack of self-awareness or a masterclass in leaning into the narrative.

Knowing F1, probably the former.

The April reset

The cancelled Bahrain and Saudi Arabian rounds mean the season pauses until the Miami Grand Prix sprint weekend on 1st–3rd May. Five weeks of factory time and time for the FIA, manufacturers and F1 to figure out how to tweak these new regs to satisfy drivers and fans.

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This week, I’ve been working with on a big one: stadium finances.

Stadiums have become one of the most valuable assets in professional sport, not just as venues, but as financial instruments. Naming rights, hospitality revenue, matchday income, real estate plays, concert programmes. The money is enormous. The models behind it are wildly different.

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Deloitte’s 2026 Football Money League recorded €12.4bn in combined revenue across the top 20 clubs. The most interesting part is that the fastest-growing slice is now matchday income.

This year it hit €2.1bn for the first time, up 11% year on year, outpacing both broadcast and commercial. Stadiums, for decades the least dynamic part of a club’s balance sheet, are now the asset building value fastest.

The investment pipeline reflects it. Deloitte has counted over 300 stadium projects, renovations, or new builds underway worldwide, marking the most intensive period of football infrastructure spending we have on record.

It is driven by a straightforward calculation: a modern stadium, properly structured, is no longer a cost centre. It is the platform on which everything else is built, whether that's commercial partnerships, broadcast value, civic identity, or global positioning.

This is why clubs and national associations are repositioning stadiums as financial assets to generate income, with hotels, premium hospitality tiers, shopping districts, and concert calendars. Tottenham Hotspur generated €64m from non-football events in 2023/24.

On the surface, the model seems simple and transferable: build bigger, build smarter, monetise every square metre. However, globally, each project varies widely.

A Premier League club financing through US bond markets is not solving the same problem as an Argentine giant building a luxury brand in a collapsing currency.

A North African state constructing the world’s largest stadium as a geopolitical statement has nothing structurally in common with an MLS franchise trying to lock in a post-Messi future.

And a South American institution choosing cultural identity over commercial ceiling is making a bet that most modern sports executives would not.

Five stadiums. Five models. Five completely different answers to the same question: how do you turn a football ground into a financial asset?

The Commercial Fortress: Tottenham Hotspur

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was financed during a low-interest-rate window that no longer exists. Approximately €450m was refinanced through bonds targeted at US capital markets, sharp capital structuring, but a product of its era.

Any club attempting the same exercise today would face materially worse terms. The fixed-rate protection insulates Spurs now, but refinancing risk sits further down the timeline if the debt needs restructuring in a higher-rate environment.

The non-football revenue line is where the model earns its name. In 2023/24, the stadium generated €64m from concerts, NFL games, and boxing across just 16 permitted dates. In August 2024, Haringey Council approved an increase to 30 events per year.

Goldman Sachs analysis projects that the expanded calendar could push non-football revenue towards €110m annually. For context, that figure alone would exceed the total matchday revenue of most Premier League clubs. Add the F1 DRIVE karting experience beneath the South Stand, a hotel under construction, stadium tours, and a rooftop Skywalk attraction, and the venue starts to resemble an entertainment complex that happens to host football rather than the other way around.

The stadium is, by almost any commercial measure, a success, a venue generating elite-level revenue regardless of results on the pitch.

Luxury vs Legacy: Buenos Aires

Stadiums in Argentina are caught between expansion and multipurpose reinvention. River Plate and Boca Juniors are the clearest examples: investing in upgrades while staying true to their original purpose. Brazil follows a similar pattern: the Maracanã, Morumbi (now called MorumBIS for sponsorship reasons), and Allianz Parque all reflect the same tension. Elsewhere in the region, progress is slower. Uruguay’s Estadio Centenario is being refurbished ahead of the 2030 World Cup, but nothing more ambitious than that.

In Buenos Aires, River Plate is positioning itself as the owner of Argentina’s premier multipurpose stadium. The club’s ground, now the Más Monumental, following a naming rights deal, sits in the affluent Belgrano neighbourhood, and that location does real commercial work. It has become the default venue for major global concerts and the effective home of the World Cup-winning national team.

What sets River apart from Brazilian equivalents is the hospitality play. The club is building a luxury brand around the stadium experience: high-end VIP spaces, premium concert infrastructure, and naming rights income that together generate year-round revenue in an economy where the currency’s purchasing power can shift by the week. Navigating a complex macroeconomic environment, River has transformed its stadium into a highly resilient hard asset that reliably preserves its long-term value. That is a financial instrument, not just a ground.

Across the city, River’s eternal rival is taking a fundamentally different approach. Boca Juniors confirmed a project to expand La Bombonera rather than replace it, a decision that tells you everything about the weight stadiums carry as community assets. For Boca, moving would mean abandoning a ground embedded in the fabric of the La Boca neighbourhood. The expansion mandate is strict: increase capacity without losing the stadium’s world-famous, claustrophobic atmosphere.

The Sovereign Brand Vehicle: Morocco

The South American examples are shaped by local economics and deep institutional identity. Morocco offers something structurally different: stadium infrastructure deployed as a national strategy.

Preparing to co-host the 2030 World Cup, Morocco is not simply upgrading facilities. At the centre of its ambition is the planned Grand Stade Hassan II, designed by Populous, a 115,000-seat venue that, on completion, will be the largest football stadium in the world.

The project is about far more than capacity records. The design draws heavily on traditional Moroccan Moussem tents and gardens, blending cultural heritage with futuristic engineering in what amounts to the ultimate physical expression of “Brand Morocco.” Botanical gardens will surround the entire venue, projecting national identity to an international television audience before a ball is kicked.

The hospitality model matches the scale. The stadium will feature five distinct levels of hospitality, including exclusive VVIP and VIP boxes designed to accommodate over 12,000 high-end guests, as well as premium retail spaces.

The investment is, ultimately, a political calculation. By offering such high-class accommodations and unmatched scale, Morocco is aggressively positioning the Grand Stade Hassan II as the primary candidate to host the 2030 World Cup Final. In doing so, the country is directly challenging historic European strongholds, like Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, and proving that stadiums can be powerful tools for shifting the centre of gravity in global sports.

The Franchise Catalyst: Inter Miami

Each of the previous models is shaped by its context and culture. In Miami, the context is a single player.

Pre-Messi, Inter Miami’s franchise valuation sat at $585m. Sportico’s 2026 rankings put it at $1.45bn, MLS’s most valuable club, with projected revenue of $250m. That value is explained by one signing. Messi’s extension through 2028 secures the draw that underpins ticket demand, merchandise sales, global broadcast interest, and the sponsor profile that made everything else viable.

Nu Stadium, which opens on 4 April, is built on that foundation. 26,700-seat venue with a naming-rights deal from Brazilian fintech Nubank. It anchors Miami Freedom Park, a 131-acre privately funded development comprising 750 hotel rooms, a million square feet of office and retail space, and a 58-acre public park.

Inter Miami’s challenge is converting celebrity-era demand into permanent infrastructure value before the player who created it retires. Freedom Park is the mechanism: if the mixed-use development matures on schedule, the stadium becomes an anchor that functions independently of who plays there. If it doesn’t, the club risks a valuation correction that exposes the gap between Messi-era economics and what a mid-table MLS franchise in a 26,700-seat ground can sustain on its own.

What the Five Models Tell You

Three hundred stadium projects worldwide, and no two business cases are quite alike. But every club and every country on this list has reached the same conclusion: the stadium is no longer a cost centre to be tolerated. It is the asset that everything else gets built around. The 300 projects on Deloitte’s list are not a trend. They are a permanent repricing of what a football ground is worth.

This piece was co-written with . Check out her Substack  for more sports content.

As always, scroll to the end for this week’s recommended reading. which features great articles from , and .

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The Headlines

• Antonelli became the youngest pole-sitter in F1 history and converted it into a maiden victory, leading a Mercedes one-two.

• Ferrari showed superior corner speed but couldn’t overcome Mercedes’ straight-line advantage; Lewis Hamilton took his first Grand Prix podium for the Scuderia after a thrilling multi-lap battle with team-mate Charles Leclerc.

• China now has 221 million F1 fans, the Grand Prix sold out three months early, and almost no one, international or domestic, is tapping into this huge market for F1.

Quote of the Weekend

On Track

Antonelli delivers

Kimi Antonelli became the youngest pole-sitter in F1 history on Saturday, breaking Sebastian Vettel’s record from Monza 2008 at 19 years, six months and 17 days. Twenty-four hours later, he converted it into a maiden victory, only the second teenager to win a Grand Prix, behind Max Verstappen.

The headline was Antonelli’s composure. He lost the lead briefly to Lewis Hamilton off the line, retook it before the end of lap two, and was never headed again. A flat-spot scare at the Turn 14 hairpin with four laps remaining was the only wobble. He finished 5.5 seconds clear of team-mate George Russell, who retains the championship lead by a single point.

Ferrari closes the gap.

Hamilton’s third place was his first Grand Prix podium for Ferrari, at the same circuit where he won last year’s sprint for the Scuderia. The podium care after an intense intra-team battle: Hamilton and Leclerc ran side-by-side through multiple corners, swapping positions across several laps before Hamilton pulled clear for third, with Leclerc fourth.

Ferrari’s SF-26 is demonstrably quicker than the Mercedes through Shanghai’s slow-speed sections. The car has more downforce, more mechanical grip, and looks more comfortable on the brakes. Hamilton spoke all weekend about how much better the Ferrari feels to drive than his former car. But the power unit deficit on the straights, evident on Shanghai’s 1.3km back straight, is real and, for now, decisive.

The pattern from Melbourne repeated itself: Ferrari jumped the Mercedes at the start, then got reeled in on pace. It’s a car that wins the launch and loses the race. The question for Maranello is how much of that is down to compression ratio and whether the June rule change is enough to close the gap.

McLaren’s crisis

Neither Lando Norris nor Oscar Piastri started the race. The reigning constructors’ champions had both cars withdrawn before the formation lap. This was due to separate electrical failures on the power-unit side, which the team confirmed were two different problems occurring simultaneously.

For Norris, it was the first DNS of his career. For Piastri, it was the second consecutive non-start, following his reconnaissance lap crash in Melbourne. The Australian has not completed a racing lap in the 2026 season.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella described it as an “extremely unfortunate coincidence.” The team and engine supplier Mercedes High Performance Powertrains are investigating. McLaren confirmed the issues were electrical but distinct, two different failure modes on the same component type.

The broader competitive picture is no more encouraging. Even when both cars ran in qualifying, McLaren was the clear third-fastest team, lining up fifth and sixth. Piastri has acknowledged a deficit in grip and said the team’s pace in China was “pretty representative.” Norris has pointed to a straight-line speed gap against the works Mercedes operation.

Red Bull’s struggles continue.

Verstappen qualified well enough to be competitive but retired with 11 laps remaining when his RB22 ground to a halt, the latest in a weekend defined by oversteer and frustration. The four-time champion has been vocally critical of the 2026 regulations, describing the racing as “terrible” and the rules as “fundamentally flawed.”

Hadjar, starting from eighth in the sprint, recovered to score points in the Grand Prix despite an opening-lap scare involving Bearman at Turn 13.

Midfield movers

Ollie Bearman was the best of the rest in fifth for Haas, continuing an impressive start to the season. Pierre Gasly took sixth for Alpine, points at consecutive races for the first time since the team’s competitive resurgence. Both Racing Bulls scored, with Liam Lawson seventh and Hadjar eighth. Carlos Sainz brought Williams home ninth, and Franco Colapinto rounded out the top ten in the second Alpine after surviving contact with Ocon.

The attrition was severe. Both Aston Martins retired (Alonso and Stroll), Audi’s Bortoleto failed to start alongside the McLarens, and Williams lost Albon before the race began due to a hydraulic failure. Only 18 cars took the start. Only 15 finished.

Off Track

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia officially cancelled

The news that had been expected for days was confirmed on Sunday morning in Shanghai. The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grand Prix will not take place, owing to the conflict in the Middle East.

The 2026 calendar drops from 24 to 22 races. No replacements will be made. Portimão and Imola were explored as alternatives but deemed logistically impossible at short notice. F2, F3 and F1 Academy rounds at both venues are also cancelled.

The consequence for teams is a five-week gap between the Japanese and the Miami Grand Prix on 3 May. For those struggling with the new regulations, McLaren, Red Bull, and Aston Martin, the window is a gift: uninterrupted development time in the factories before the calendar resumes.

The financial implications are substantial. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are among F1’s highest-paying host fee circuits, and the cancellations remove two major revenue events. The FIA has left the door ajar for potential rescheduling, but the packed second half of the calendar makes that practically impossible. Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain on the schedule, for now.

Shanghai sells out, but it has untapped potential for F1

The Chinese Grand Prix drew approximately 230,000 spectators across the weekend, with tickets sold out three months in advance.

The numbers are impressive. The context is more so.

China now has an estimated 221 million claimed F1 fans, up 39% year-on-year and over half started following the sport in the past five years.

Its growth trajectory mirrors that of the US, the market Liberty Media has spent seven years and three Grand Prix cultivating as F1’s most commercially dynamic region. But while American expansion is now backed by deep brand activation, media investment, and year-round cultural engagement, China remains largely untapped.

International brands treat the Chinese Grand Prix as an annual event rather than utilising it as a year-round platform for entering the Chinese market. Sponsorship activations arrive for the race weekend and disappear with the freight.

The other side is equally stark: the near-total absence of Chinese brands from the F1 landscape. This is partly a structural gap. The commercial infrastructure to meaningfully activate an F1 partnership in their home market for Chinese companies does not yet exist at scale. There is no established playbook for a Chinese consumer brand to move from interest to integration, no equivalent of the agency networks, hospitality packages and media partnerships that funnel Western brands into the paddock.

The window to establish a meaningful position in this space is open, but it will not remain so indefinitely. The Shanghai Grand Prix is already sold out months in advance. Viewership is accelerating. The commercial infrastructure around F1 in Asia is maturing. BYD has reportedly been considering entering F1 to boost its global brand appeal. The commercial opportunity in China is not theoretical. It is growing and waiting for someone to grasp it.

Red Bull announces Indeed partnership.

Red Bull Racing have signed Indeed, the Austin-based recruitment platform, as a multi-year recruitment partner. The deal spans both the F1 team and its F1 Academy programme.

Indeed, branding debuted on the RB22 and driver/pit crew helmets at the Chinese Grand Prix, with visibility expanding to driver apparel and team principal kit as the season progresses. Beyond the branding, Indeed becomes the presenting partner of Red Bull’s Talent Academy Programme, an initiative that offers work experience, student projects, apprenticeships, and structured career pathways into motorsport.

Laurent Mekies, Red Bull’s CEO and team principal, framed the deal around people rather than branding: the team’s championship success, he said, is built on talent, collaboration and culture. Indeed’s CMO James Whitemore described the partnership as placing the brand alongside “one of the most high-performing teams in the world.”

What surprised you most about the Chinese Grand Prix weekend? Comment and let us know.

Recommended Reading

• If you want to understand what community-first sports expansion actually looks like, piece on Portland Hearts of Pine is worth your time.

• ’s guest piece on is a wonderful ode to French rugby’s blend of flair and chaos.

• With Suzuka next on the calendar, makes the case for why the Japanese Grand Prix produces the best fan culture in the sport.

Any Given Monday covers the business, politics and culture of sport. Subscribe for free to get every edition.

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The Headlines

• A chaotic first weekend under the 2026 rules ended with a Mercedes 1-2 as George Russell and Kimi Antonelli flexed the strength of the team’s new power unit.

• Ferrari’s turbocharger design gave them a potent launch advantage that shaped the opening laps, and off-track, their LEGO helmet activation was the weekend's standout.

• The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix are likely to be cancelled due to the Middle East conflict, with no replacements expected. A decision is due by 20th March, which would reduce the calendar from 24 to 22 races.

• F1 has indicated that regulation tweaks could come as early as Suzuka.

Quote of the Weekend

On Track

Mercedes Muscle

Mercedes won the first race of the new era as they meant to go on.

George Russell led Kimi Antonelli to a 1-2 finish. But the race was not a Mercedes procession. Ferrari’s turbocharger design, built for the new start procedures, gave Leclerc and Hamilton a launch advantage that shaped the opening laps. Leclerc surged past both Mercedes cars and led for a significant portion of the race, with Hamilton pressuring Russell for second. Leclerc compared it to “the mushroom in Mario Kart.” For 20-odd laps, Ferrari looked capable of winning on starts and strategy alone.

The virtual safety car changed the complexion. Strategic errors around pitting under the VSC cost Ferrari track position and left both cars behind the Mercedes pair. Leclerc held on for third, Hamilton fourth. Ferrari will take encouragement from their race pace and start advantage, but the strategy calls will sting.

The opening 20 laps delivered what the regulations promised: position changes across the grid, sustained wheel-to-wheel racing, and genuine unpredictability. The broader conversation, though, is whether the new power units make racing artificial. The 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power creates energy deployment decisions that are difficult for drivers to manage and, at times, hard for fans to read.

DRS, degrading tyres, and the removal of refuelling were each criticised in their first season and eventually became part of the furniture. The regulations need three or four races for the field to adapt.

Red Bull and McLaren

Norris finished fifth and made no attempt to dress it up. McLaren looks a step behind both Mercedes and Ferrari on the opening weekend.

Verstappen recovered from 20th on the grid to sixth, earning driver of the day for a combative drive through the field. He and Norris duelled for several laps in the second half of the race before tyre degradation dropped Verstappen back. The pace was encouraging; the qualifying crash and eight-tenths deficit to pole are not. Red Bull’s Ford-backed power unit has potential, but the gap to Mercedes is wide.

Melbourne was unkind to Piastri and Hadjar. Piastri never made the start; an engine surge on the formation lap sent his McLaren into the barriers, echoing Sainz’s exit at the same circuit last year. Hadjar qualified third but retired with a mechanical failure, cutting short a weekend full of promise.

Midfield and the New Entries

Audi and Haas were the story of the midfield. Oliver Bearman took seventh for Haas. Gabriel Bortoleto scored Audi’s first-ever Formula 1 points in ninth. A reminder that Audi built this engine from scratch, and points on debut is a result most new manufacturers rarely achieve. Arvid Lindblad rounded out a strong day for the newcomers, finishing eighth on his F1 debut for Racing Bull, born in 2007, the same year Hamilton first raced in F1.

For Cadillac, getting Pérez’s car to the flag in the team’s first race counted as a result.

Aston Martin’s Crisis

This is the story that will define the early season for at least one team.

The Honda power unit is producing severe vibrations that have been destroying batteries and, according to the team, risk permanent nerve damage to Alonso and Stroll if they complete too many laps. Alonso missed FP1 entirely. Stroll managed three laps on Friday. By Saturday, Aston Martin had burned through two of its four allocated batteries, one per car remaining, with no spares available anywhere.

Newey confirmed the team is limited in how much low-fuel running it can do because fuel acts as a vibration damper for the battery. That restriction means Aston Martin cannot properly learn about its own car. Newey described it as “a self-feeding problem.” The chassis, he believes, has development potential, but until Honda solves the root cause, performance is irrelevant.

Neither Alonso nor Stroll finished. Alonso managed 43 laps, far more than the 25 expected, but the problems are structural. Until the vibration issue is resolved, Aston Martin’s season is on hold.

In the Paddock

Calendar Tweaks

The biggest off-track story was the growing certainty that the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix will not go ahead. The escalation of the Middle-East conflict has made the Gulf region too dangerous for F1.

The FIA has already postponed the WEC’s Qatar season opener. A Pirelli tyre test in Bahrain was cancelled. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali met team bosses in Melbourne on Saturday, with safety described as the overriding priority.

There will be no replacement races. Logistics, commercial arrangements, and the absence of any circuit ready to host at short notice make substitutions impossible. If both events fall, and the paddock consensus is that they will, the season drops to 22 races, with a five-week gap between Suzuka and Miami.

A decision is expected by 20th March, when freight plans for the Bahrain weekend would need to be finalised.

Hamilton x Lululemon

Lewis Hamilton launched The Lewis Hamilton Edit at Lululemon’s Emporium Melbourne store on Wednesday, a 74-piece curated capsule spanning menswear and womenswear.

Hamilton appeared in person alongside AFL captain Max Gawn and a guest list of athletes and creators. The edit is ambassador-led, not co-designed. Hamilton selected pieces from Lululemon’s existing range.

Ferrari x LEGO.

Leclerc and Hamilton carried life-sized LEGO brick-built replicas of their 2025 helmets through the paddock to reveal two new display sets, the first to feature both drivers as minifigures in their Ferrari race suits.

Glamour on the Grid

The event celebrated its 10th anniversary on Wednesday night, presented by American Express under the theme “Precious Metals.” The event has evolved into one of Melbourne’s most coveted events.

Turn 6 Gets a New Name.

Albert Park’s Turn 6 was renamed as part of the “In Her Corner” initiative, honouring Hannah Schmitz, Red Bull’s Head of Race Strategy, and Laura Müller, Haas’s race engineer.

This is the second half of my full grid review ahead of the 2026 season. This instalment picks up with Haas and runs through to Williams.

As always, scroll to the end for this week’s recommended reading. which features great articles from , and .

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Haas

Haas is in its strongest position in years.

Toyota Gazoo Racing has elevated from technical partner to title sponsor, rebranding the team as TGR Haas F1 Team. The investment goes well beyond a logo. Toyota is funding simulator upgrades, driver development programmes, and testing infrastructure. As well as rotating its own engineers and mechanics through race weekends to gain live F1 experience. In return, Haas gains the operational depth and technical resources it has never had. It is a genuinely symbiotic arrangement, and one that has reset the team’s ceiling.

Business of Speed

They Spent $3 Billion and Never Won. Now They're Back

The withdrawal came on November 4, 2009, three days after the season finale…

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7 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Will Colahan and Vincenzo Landino

The commercial roster has grown accordingly. IC Markets and Infobip have both joined, adding financial services and communications technology to a portfolio that already includes MoneyGram. For a team that spent years as the grid’s smallest operation, the sponsorship page now looks markedly different.

On track, the VF-26 completed the second-highest lap count in Bahrain at 794 laps. Oliver Bearman posted the ninth-fastest time overall, with Esteban Ocon providing experienced ballast alongside him. Ferrari's power gives the team the same race-start advantage as Hamilton and Leclerc, while Toyota’s technical input has sharpened its sim and manufacturing capabilities. Under Ayao Komatsu’s leadership, the team is targeting its best-ever season.

A podium is not out of the question if the stars align.

McLaren

The defending champions had a solid, if unspectacular, pre-season.

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri accumulated strong mileage, and the MCL40 looked reliable throughout. McLaren deliberately skipped Barcelona’s shakedown to maximise development time, a confident play from Andrea Stella’s operation that signals a belief mid-season upgrades will matter more than launch-spec pace.

Mercedes power gives the team a strong baseline, but the emergence of Red Bull’s engine has shifted the competitive picture. Ferrari’s race-start advantage and Red Bull’s straight-line speed both suggest the title defence will be harder than 2025.

Off track, Zak Brown continues to build what is now comfortably the grid’s strongest commercial operation.

Mastercard has come on board as the team’s naming partner in a deal reportedly worth around $100m per season. They will now race as the McLaren Mastercard F1 Team, their first naming deal since Vodafone in 2013.

The deal sits atop a stacked partner roster. It already includes Google, which has renewed as a primary partner, shifting from Chrome branding to its Gemini AI assistant. The crypto exchange, OKX, has joined on a multi-year deal valued in the hundreds of millions. Brown has stated the team now has over 100 brand partners and has likely generated the most commercial revenue in F1 history. For context, Ferrari and Red Bull’s respective title deals with HP and Oracle are thought to be worth between $60m and $70m per season.

Mercedes

If there is a pre-season favourite, it is Mercedes.

The W17 topped the overall mileage charts with more than 6,100km. George Russell set some of the quickest times during the first Bahrain test, while Kimi Antonelli looked composed across both weeks. The team ran its entire programme with the kind of controlled confidence that characterised its dominant years.

Commercially, the off-season has had similar success. They landed Microsoft as a principal partner in a deal reportedly worth $60m per year. The partnership has real technical depth: Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AI tools are being embedded across the team.

With Petronas continuing as title sponsor at an estimated $75m per season and Ineos as principal partner, Mercedes now has one of the strongest commercial rosters on the grid. Toto Wolff’s recent sale of a 15% stake to CrowdStrike co-founder George Kurtz, a deal that reportedly values the team at over £4.6 billion, has further strengthened the financial position.

The one cloud is the compression ratio saga. On Saturday, the FIA confirmed a rule change. From 1st June, the compression ratio must be measured at both ambient temperature and at 130°C. From 2027, the hot measurement alone will apply. The vote among the five manufacturers was unanimous. That gives Mercedes a seven-race window before the loophole closes. Whether that early advantage proves decisive or merely delays the inevitable will be one of the defining subplots of the season.

On testing alone, Mercedes looks formidable.

Racing Bulls

Arvid Lindblad topped the individual mileage charts with 240 laps in the second Bahrain test, an astonishing workload for a rookie. Alongside Liam Lawson, the young line-up should be capable of regular points. The team logged 733 laps across Bahrain, and the RBPT-Ford engine gives Racing Bulls access to what appears to be the grid’s strongest power unit.

Commercially, the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls identity is now locked in through 2030, following Visa's renewal and expansion of its title sponsorship across both Red Bull teams.

There is the lingering question of ownership. Red Bull reportedly rejected two bids for Racing Bulls during 2025, the second valued at around €2.3 billion. The team is not currently for sale. However, valuations have risen sharply, and with F1 becoming an attractive investment, Red Bull, under new leadership, could be tempted to cash in.

Red Bull

The big surprise of the off-season.

Red Bull Powertrains’ debut engine, the DM01, named after late founder Dietrich Mateschitz, has been the story of testing. For an entirely new power unit, built in-house by a division that did not exist five years ago, the performance has been remarkable.

Technical director Ben Hodgkinson, recruited from Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains division in 2021 alongside several key engineers, deserves significant credit. Ford’s partnership has contributed expertise in battery and electric motor technology, areas that matter enormously under the new 50/50 power split. The DM01’s straight-line advantage appears to extend well beyond any regulatory grey area.

The commercial picture is anchored by Oracle, whose title sponsorship is reportedly worth around $100m per year. The joint launch at Ford’s HQ in Detroit was a deliberate statement, tying the Red Bull brand to Ford’s storied racing heritage. The glossy blue livery, a callback to the team’s 2005 entry into F1, was designed to mark the new era.

Max Verstappen’s decision to stay, resisting Mercedes’ overtures throughout 2025, now looks vindicated. With Laurent Mekies at the helm following Christian Horner’s departure, Red Bull enters the new era with fresh leadership and an engine that could define the early championship battle.

Williams

The FW48 missed the entire Barcelona shakedown due to production delays. The car is reportedly overweight by as much as 20–30kg, which at an estimated 0.3 seconds per 10kg represents a serious performance handicap.

Commercially, however, the trajectory under Vowles has been impressive. Barclays has signed a multi-year deal as the official banking partner, marking the British bank’s first involvement in F1.

The deal also caps a period of sustained commercial growth. Over the past three years, Williams has added Atlassian as a title partner, alongside Komatsu, VAST Data, Kraken, and Duracell. Heading into 2026, the team has announced further partnerships with Anthropic, BNY, Wilkinson Sword, and Nuveen.

The car will improve. The question is how quickly.

Recommended Reading

• NFL free agency starts next week. This piece by is a helpful explainer on how the salary cap works.

• I enjoyed the featured article on by about LVMH’s first year in F1.

• The World Baseball Classic is underway, and breaks down how a lesser-known insurance company is dictating participation.

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We are less than a week away from Formula One cars returning to the track in Melbourne. A lot has changed over the winter: new engines, new regulations, and a reshaped commercial landscape across the grid. So it felt like the right moment to step back and take stock.

This is part one of a full grid review, covering Alpine through Ferrari. Part two, covering Haas through Williams, will follow later this weekend. If you want a breakdown of the technical changes underpinning the new era, you can read that here.

With the season about to begin, this also marks the return of The Weekend Brief. If you are new here, The Weekend Brief is my Monday summary of every F1 race weekend, not just who won, but everything else that mattered on and off the track. A Grand Prix weekend generates a huge amount of noise, and easy to miss so much. My promise is simple: every Monday at 18:30 GMT, you get the full picture in your inbox.

As always, scroll to the end for this week’s recommended reading. which features great articles from , and .

If you’re enjoying Any Given Monday, tap subscribe and follow on Instagram.

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Alpine

Alpine’s transformation from a works team to a customer outfit is complete.

The Enstone squad has ditched Renault power after decades and will now run Mercedes engines and gearboxes, a switch pushed through by Flavio Briatore as part of a broader restructuring. Renault still owns the team and remains closely involved, but it no longer supplies the power unit. For a manufacturer that has been building F1 engines, on and off, since the 1970s, that is a profound shift.

Alpine finished last in 2025, a result that reflected a deliberate choice to sacrifice the season and focus entirely on 2026 development. On track, Briatore declared the team “competitive” after testing and warned his drivers there would be no more excuses. The Mercedes engine should at least guarantee a reliable baseline, and with four customer teams now feeding data back from the same power unit, Alpine stands to benefit from a much steeper collective learning curve.

Commercially, the rebuild is still ongoing. Microsoft’s departure to Mercedes was a visible blow, and Mercado Libree, closely tied to Franco Colapinto, has disappeared from the A526’s livery despite the Argentine being retained. Those are significant gaps.

But new deals have arrived. MSC Cruises has elevated to premium partner status and hosted the team’s launch in Barcelona. Investment platform eToro has signed on in its first F1 deal. Italian energy firm Eni has returned as Alpine’s fuel supplier after a 25‑year absence. BWT remains as title sponsor, its pink‑on‑blue branding still dominating the car. The wider roster includes Castore, Qatar Airways, Boeing, and New Era.

Alpine enter the season with stability but anything less than being the lead midfield car will be a disapointment.

Aston Martin

This has been the pre‑season’s disaster story.

Despite heavy investment, a state‑of‑the‑art campus, and an exclusive Honda works engine deal, Aston Martin recorded the lowest mileage of any team across testing. They completed just 334 laps in Bahrain, compared to Mercedes’ 1,204. Honda’s power unit suffered persistent battery failures, internal combustion issues, and a shortage of spare parts. On the final day, Lance Stroll managed only six laps.

Honda began this cycle at a disadvantage. The manufacturer had been out of F1 for nearly two years and entered the 2026 development programme late, effectively starting from scratch. Being the sole Honda customer compounds the problem: data accumulation is painfully slow compared to Mercedes or Ferrari, where four teams are feeding information back into the same architecture.

The commercial picture is far healthier. Aramco is locked in as title sponsor under a five‑year deal, supplying FIA‑compliant sustainable fuels and collaborating technically with Honda and Valvoline. Cognizant remains a strategic partner, while newer additions include AI coding firm Cognition, fashion house Boss, mining company Ma’aden, and Coinbase. The livery launch at Aramco’s facilities in Dhahran underlined just how central that relationship has become.

Cognizant continues as a strategic partner, visible on the rear wing and nose, while newer additions include AI coding agent Cognition, fashion brand Boss, mining company Ma’aden, and Coinbase. The livery launch took place at Aramco’s facilities in Dhahran, underlining how central that relationship has become to the team’s identity and finances.

For a team that Lawrence Stroll has invested hundreds of millions into, the messaging has shifted rapidly. By the end of Bahrain, the messaging had shifted. They are now framing 2026 as a development year, with 2027 and 2028 positioned as the real targets. Whether that was always the plan, or the plan changed once the parts started breaking, depends on who you ask.

Audi

The former Sauber operation enters 2026 as a works manufacturer for the first time, completing a transformation that began with Audi’s full takeover of the Swiss outfit.

The team now operates across three sites: the power unit facility in Neuburg an der Donau, the chassis and race operations base in Hinwil, and a new technology centre in Bicester, Oxfordshire. It is a genuinely multi‑national operation, built to mirror Audi’s broader motorsport structure.

On track, testing offered cautious encouragement. Gabriel Bortoleto posted the tenth‑fastest time overall, and alongside Nico Hülkenberg the driver pairing blends youth with experience. The power unit, however, still appears to trail the more established manufacturers.

Commercially, Audi has taken a deliberately restrained approach. Team principal Jonathan Wheatley has spoken about pursuing a “premium partner” model, favouring a clean, uncluttered livery over the logo‑dense designs now common on the grid. Revolut is the title sponsor. Visit Qatar has joined as a principal partner, a deal closely tied to the Qatar Investment Authority’s minority stake in Sauber Holding. Adidas is the official kit supplier, with Paulaner Brewery and AI workplace platform Perk also on board.

Audi has more financial runway than most newcomers. However, history suggests that money alone is rarely enough.

Cadillac

F1’s newest entry has exceeded expectations.

Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas completed 586 laps across Bahrain, more than Aston Martin, and the car ran without catastrophic failures. For a team that barely existed 18 months ago, with a Silverstone facility still under construction and fewer than 600 staff, that is a genuine achievement.

The commercial portfolio is particularly impressive. Tommy Hilfiger, announced as the team’s first partner in 2025, serves as kit and lifestyle sponsor, leaning into a shared American heritage narrative. Jim Beam has signed on as official spirits partner, while América Móvil brings its Telcel, Infinitum, and Claro brands into the fold, extending the team’s reach across Latin America.

On the technical side, Tenneco supplies powertrain and ignition technologies, Core Scientific serves as data centre partner, and IFS is embedded across supply chain, production, and quality management systems.

Cadillac is still searching for a title sponsor, with CEO Dan Towriss confirming an asking price of $55–70m per year over five years. Even without that deal, the breadth of the roster already rivals several established midfield teams. With three US races on the calendar and American F1 fandom continuing to grow, Cadillac is uniquely positioned to capture sponsorship dollars that have historically gone elsewhere.

Execution, rather than ambition, will be the real test.

Ferrari

Ferrari ended testing on a high.

Charles Leclerc set the fastest lap of the entire pre‑season, a 1:31.992, nearly eight‑tenths clear of the field. Lewis Hamilton has sounded more positive than at any point during his difficult debut season in red, saying his “DNA is within” the SF‑26 and that the car is simply more enjoyable to drive.

Ferrari may also hold an early advantage at race starts. Its smaller turbo spools up faster than rivals’, helping Hamilton and Leclerc avoid the turbo lag that disrupted others during practice starts. That edge extends to customer teams Haas and Cadillac, giving the wider Ferrari ecosystem a collective benefit. The team has also introduced a radical exhaust‑wing concept that rivals cannot replicate this season.

Commercially, stability is the story. HP remains as title partner, giving its name to Scuderia Ferrari HP. Shell has renewed its near‑century‑old partnership in a multi‑year deal spanning F1, Le Mans Hypercar, and the Ferrari Challenge, with a focus on sustainable fuels. UniCredit has replaced Santander as banking partner, and BingX has joined as Ferrari’s first crypto exchange sponsor.

One unresolved issue remains operational. After a difficult first season, Ferrari moved Hamilton’s race engineer Riccardo Adami into a different role. For now, Hamilton is supported on an interim basis, with a permanent solution expected only a few races into the season. In a year where clarity over the radio may matter as much as outright speed, that relationship could prove as important as the car itself.

Ferrari enters 2026 in its strongest pre‑season position for years. Turning that into a title fight is another question entirely.

Recommended Reading

• One topic I’m finding increasingly fascinating is Apple’s growing relationship with F1. has a sharp explainer on some of the more intriguing recent announcements, and why they matter.

• Building on earlier discussion around sponsorship, has an excellent piece on the importance of journalists properly scrutinising commercial deals as F1’s ecosystem becomes more complex.

• And finally, has a lovely write‑up on football culture in Buenos Aires, capturing the city’s rhythm and emotion in a way that’s easy to get lost in.

This week, I have two articles coming your way. The first is an interruption to my usual schedule after I felt compelled to write about English rugby following a disappointing two weeks. I tend not to write about rugby because it’s a sport where I struggle to separate emotion from analysis. Whatever your feelings on the game, let me know your thoughts on what is clearly a significant topic.

Usual programming will continue later this week with a breakdown of the F1 off-season. Recommended reading is also available if you scroll to the end, some great articlestoday from , and

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Rugby is a sport I love and usually avoid writing about, because I’ve never been able to separate the emotion from the analysis. It’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Wilkinson’s drop goal in 2003 is my earliest sporting memory. Saturdays are reserved for watching Harlequins at the Stoop, something I started doing with my father, and now do with my wife and daughter. It runs through my family and through my weekends.

Which is why the last two weekends have been so hard to stomach.

England lost 31–20 to Scotland at Murrayfield, conceding 17 unanswered points inside the first 15 minutes. Then came Saturday’s 42–21 defeat to Ireland at Twickenham, the worst home loss in the fixture’s history, where Ireland raced into a 22–0 lead inside 30 minutes, and England never looked like recovering.

But it’s not just the results. I’ve watched worse scorelines.

It’s how England is losing: the lack of adaptability, the absence of any visible identity, and how stark the gap looks when you set it against the best teams in the world.

I felt compelled to write something because I don’t think this is a blip. I think it’s a symptom of deeper, structural problems across English rugby.

This sport has been in something close to managed decline since 2003. I was at Twickenham for Wales in Round 1, and even in a 48–7 victory, I left feeling flat. It was the first time I’d walked out of that ground unhappy after a win, deflated by the atmosphere and unconvinced by the performance.

What follows is an open letter to everyone involved in the English game. It comes from a place of love, not bitterness.

To the RFU

Start with the fundamentals. The single most effective way to get people to watch, to care, and to show up is to win in a way that’s entertaining and to build a genuine connection between the team and its fans. Everything else is secondary.

Spend time understanding who your fans actually are and what they want from a matchday experience, not what you think they want, and not whatever the NFL or the Premier League happen to be doing.

Look at what Liberty Media did with F1. They didn’t stumble into that growth. They invested in understanding their existing audience, worked out what would attract new ones, and built from there. The RFU could learn from that.

Family tickets at Twickenham can run past £350. For that kind of money, the basics have to be right. The queues for food and drink shouldn’t take 30 minutes. The transport out of the ground shouldn’t mean an hour’s wait for a train. The seats shouldn’t feel like they were designed for someone half your size. There’s a £650 million redevelopment planned for 2027, which is welcome, but right now, the gap between ticket price and experience quality is too wide.

Then there’s the governance question. Bill Sweeney survived last year’s no-confidence vote with around 66 per cent of the vote. But that still means a third of voting members wanted him gone, and the anger that triggered the revolt hasn’t disappeared. The bonus scandal, the record £37.9 million operating loss, the 42 redundancies, all while the executive team collected millions in pay. The grassroots don’t forget that easily.

More fundamentally, there’s a structural problem: the same organisation cannot effectively manage thousands of amateur clubs and the elite international pathway. That dual mandate stretches leadership too thin and dilutes focus at both ends: the promised governance reforms, greater devolution, and more regional autonomy need to actually materialise. France, Ireland, and New Zealand have all found ways to separate the community game from the professional game. There is no good reason England can’t do the same.

To the Coaches

Stop trying to make players fit your game plan and your view of how the sport should be played. Start building a game plan around the players you have.

The best teams in the world right now, South Africa, France, and Ireland, all do the same thing. They identify the specific talents at their disposal and design systems that bring out the best in those individuals. These coaches adapt to talent. Too often in England, from age-group level right through to the senior team, the opposite happens. Physical attributes are rewarded over rugby intelligence. Players are selected because they fit a predetermined structure, not because they are the most talented. We don’t nurture instinct. We look for physical traits and then coach players to work within a rigid game plan.

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There’s research backing this up. Studies of English rugby’s age-grade pathways consistently find that players born early in the selection year, the bigger, more physically mature children, are heavily overrepresented at the academy level. Physicality gets you noticed. Rugby instinct and decision-making under pressure, the things that actually separate good international players from great ones, are harder to measure and easier to overlook. The result is a production line that turns out physically impressive athletes who struggle to think on their feet when structure breaks down.

Coaching at the highest level is not about control. It’s about empowerment. The reason Ireland and South Africa can go to the well time and again in tight matches is not that they have a better playbook. It’s because Andy Farrell and Rassie Erasmus are leaders who build belief. They give their players the confidence to make decisions in the moment, to trust their instincts, and to know they have what it takes when it matters. Against Ireland on Saturday, when the score blew out, there was no visible response from England’s leaders on the pitch.

To the Media

There is more to the state of English rugby than the endless, circular debate about who should start.

Beyond the selection arguments, there’s a constant tendency to assume the grass is greener elsewhere. When France and South Africa have multiple fly-halves with different skill sets, it’s celebrated as depth. When England has George Ford, Marcus Smith, and Fin Smith, three genuinely strong options at number 10, it’s treated as a crisis. When South Africa rotates their bench, we praise their tactical sophistication and applaud the bench players. But when England try something similar, we still clamour to praise the starters and never give the replacements the respect they deserve. The double standard is glaring.

There’s a deeper problem, too. The media builds individual players up as saviours and tears them down the moment they have a bad game. Marcus Smith was going to transform English rugby. Then it was Fin Smith. Now it’s Henry Pollock. Each name gets hyped as the silver bullet, only to be discarded the moment they have a difficult afternoon. No single player is going to fix systemic issues. The constant churn of narratives around individuals distracts from the structural questions that actually matter.

And while we’re at it: please retire the 2003 panel. Stop rolling out the same World Cup winners to say, “Well, in 2003 we did it this way.” England won that tournament because Clive Woodward was ahead of the curve on professionalism and had a group of players who peaked at the right moment. That was over two decades ago. The game has changed.

Above all, spending every available minute telling the public that the game is in crisis does not make people want to watch it. Negativity is not a growth strategy. If rugby wants to compete for attention in an increasingly crowded market, it has to sell what’s exciting about the sport, not wallow in what’s broken.

To the Fans

I have every sympathy for anyone who spent serious money to watch what happened at Twickenham on Saturday. The frustration is justified. But when we lose, spending the rest of the weekend on social media ripping apart individual players and reducing everything to selection debates does no one any good. These are human beings. They make mistakes. They do not need a pile-on from the people who are supposed to be behind them.

More broadly, rugby is about far more than the Six Nations and the Autumn Internationals. If you care about the state of English rugby, you can’t show up to one match a year at Twickenham and then complain about the game between February and November.

Go and watch your local Prem club. Watch how the players you’re criticising actually perform across a full season. The decisions coaches make about the national team are not based on 80 minutes at Twickenham; they’re based on what they see week in, week out. If you’d been following the Prem, you’d know that Fin Smith’s form has dipped since last year’s Six Nations, that Elliot Daly has had an inconsistent season coming back from his Lions injury, and that, despite one poor England outing, Cadan Murley has been one of the best wingers in the Premiership for years. Context matters.

The domestic game needs supporters more than ever. If you love the sport, support the sport, all of it, not just the headline fixtures.

To the Players

Trust yourselves. The talent is there. Two bad weekends do not erase what you are capable of. But you have to back your own instincts when the game plan stops working. The best teams in the world have players who recognise when something isn’t working and adjust in real time, without waiting for an instruction from the coaching box.

And challenge your coaches. The best player-coach relationships in world rugby are built on honest, two-way dialogue. If something is not working on the pitch, you are the ones who know it first. Speak up. Demand more. You owe it to yourselves and to the shirt.

Recommended Reading:

This week is all about sponsorships in F1 and the Olympics.

• has a great breakdown of all the sponsorship announcements over the F1 off-season (it’s a huge list).

• goes deeper into Cadillac’s strategy, which has one of the most interesting commercial approaches on the grid.

• looks at how the commercial platform of the Olympics has changed, with a greater willingness to embrace it.