Özbəkistan millisinin üzvü Abbosbek Fayzullayev XXI əsrdə dünya çempionatında başla qol vurmuş ən bəstəboy futbolçu olub.

Arena.az xəbər verir ki, 22 yaşlı yarımmüdafiəçi bunu DÇ-2026-nın K qrupunun 1-ci turunda baş tutmuş Kolumbiya ilə oyunda bacarıb.

Türkiyənin “Başakşəhər” klubuna məxsus olan oyunçunun boyu 167 sm-dir.

Əvvəlki rekord 2022-ci ildə baş tutan mundialda Qanaya qol vurmuş uruqvaylı Corcian de Arraskaetaya (173 sm) məxsus olub.

Bundan başqa, Abbosbek Fayzullayev Özbəkistan millisinin mundiallar tarixində ilk qolunun müəllifi olub.

Qarşılaşmada komandasının yeganə qolunun müəllifi olan Fayzullayev nəticədən narazı qaldıqlarını bildirib:

“Nəticəyə görə məyusuq. Heç olmasa bir xal qazana bilərdik. Uşaqlar meydanda sonadək mübarizə apardılar və bütün güclərini ortaya qoydular. İlk dəqiqələrdə həyəcan hiss olunurdu, amma ikinci hissədə yaxşı oynadıq. Rəqibin ikinci qolu bizim öz səhvimizdən sonra vuruldu. Bu, çox üzücü oldu.

Həm stadiona gəlib bizi dəstəkləyən azarkeşlərə, həm də səhər saatlarında ekran qarşısında oyunu izləyən hər kəsə təşəkkür edirəm. İndi bütün diqqətimizi qarşıda qalan iki oyuna yönəltmişik”.

Xatırladaq ki, Özbəkistan millisi Kolumbiyaya 1:3 hesabı ilə uduzub.

Yeri gəlmişkən, eyni gündə Portuqaliya millisinin yarımmüdafiəçisi Joao Neves də XXI əsrdə dünya çempionatlarında başla qol vurmuş ən qısaboylu üçüncü futbolçu kimi adını tarixə yazdırıb. O, DÇ-2026-nın qrup mərhələsinin ilk turunda Konqo Demokratik Respublikası yığmasına qarşı keçirilən oyunda dünya çempionatlarının tarixinə düşüb. Portuqaliyalı yarımmüdafiəçinin boyu 174 santimetrdir.

Portuqaliya – Konqo DR matçı 1:1 hesabıyla başa çatıb.

İspaniyalı futbol mütəxəssisi Benyat San Xose La Liqada mübarizə aparan “Rayo Valyekano”nun baş məşqçisi təyin edilib.

Arena.az xəbər verir ki, bu barədə Madrid təmsilçisi rəsmi saytı vasitəsilə məlumat yayıb.

46 yaşlı mütəxəssislə müqavilənin müddəti və digər detalları açıqlanmayıb. O, bu postda 2025/2026-cı illər mövsümü bitən kimi komandadan ayrılmış İnyiqo Peresi əvəz edib. Hansı ki, o, “Rayo Valyekano”dan ayrılandan sonra “Vilyarreal”a baş məşqçi təyin edilib.

İnyiqo Peres 2024-cü ilin fevral ayından “Rayo Valyekano”ya rəhbərlik edirdi. Sözügedən komanda bu mütəxəssisin rəhbərliyi altında 113 oyuna çıxıb, 44 qələbə, 33 heç-heçə, 36 məğlubiyyət görüb.

La Liqa təmsilçisi geridə qalmış 2025/2026-cı illər mövsümündə 50 xalla 8-ci yeri tutub və avrokuboklardan kənarda qalıb. Əvəzində, İnyiqo Peres komandanı Avropa Konfrans Liqasının finalına çıxarıb. Lakin İspaniya təmsilçisi həlledici oyunda İngiltərənin “Kristal Pelas” komandasına uduzub.

Benyat San Xose isə son olaraq “Eybar”ı çalışdırıb. O, “Atlas”, “Bolivar”, “Mazatlan”, “Eupen”, “Əl-Nəsr”, “Universidad Katolika”, “Əl-İttihad”, “Əl-İttifaq”, “Deportes Antofaqasta” kimi komandalara da rəhbərlik edib.

DÇ-2026-nın qrup mərhələsinin II turuna start veriləcək.

Futbolpress.az xəbər verir ki, A qrupunda Çexiya CAR ilə üz-üzə gələcək. Qrupun digər matçında Meksika ilə Cənubi Koreya münasibətlərinə aydınlıq gətirəcək.

B qrupunda İsveçrə Bosniya və Herseqovina ilə qarşılaşacaq. Qrupun digər görüşündə meydan sahiblərindən Kanada Qətərin müqavimətini qırmağa çalışacaq.

DÇ-2026
Qrup mərhələsi

18 iyun

A qrupu

20:00 Çexiya – CAR 1:0
Qol: Sadilek, 6

05:00 Meksika – Cənubi Koreya

Xal durumu: Meksika –  3, Cənubi Koreya – 3, Çexiya – 0, CAR – 0

B qrupu

23:00 İsveçrə – Bosniya və Herseqovina
02:00 Kanada – Qətər

Xal durumu: Bosniya və Herseqovina – 1, Qətər – 1, Kanada – 1, İsveçrə  1.

“Neftçi”nin akademiyasının koordinatoru Sənan Qurbanovun “Dordoy”dan təklif aldığını xəbər vermişdik.

Mütəxəssis klubla anlaşma əldə etməyib. Bu barədə Qurbanov “Futbolpress.az“a açıqlamasında bildirib:

“Dordoy”la danışıqlar apardıq, ancaq anlaşma əldə etmədik. Həm “Kəpəz”, həm də qırğızlardan təklif gəldi, lakin maliyyə məsələsində razılaşa bilmədik”. 

Qurbanov məşqçi kimi “Keşlə” (indiki “Şamaxı”) və “Qəbələ”də çalışıb.

Şahin Cəfərov

İspaniyanın “Valyekano” klubunun yeni baş məşqçisi açıqlanıb.

Futbolpress.az xəbər verir ki, komandanın “sükanı” Benyat San-Xose Xiliə tapşırılıb. Bu barədə klubun mətbuat xidməti məlumat yayıb. 

“Valyekano” ötən mövsüm La Liqanı 8-ci sırada başa vurub. Komanda Konfrans Liqasında gümüş medal qazanıb.

Brazil are preparing to take on Haiti in their second group stage match of the 2026 World Cup, but Carlo Ancelotti will once again have to go without star attacker Neymar, who will not be available despite his recent return to training. 

Still no Neymar for Brazil and Ancelotti

Neymar did not feature for Brazil in their 1-1 draw against Morocco in their opening match at the 2026 World Cup after picking up a new injury almost immediately after reporting for national team duty. 

The former Barcelona and PSG star has recently returned to training with the rest of his teammates, but this was not enough for him to be considered for selection for Brazil’s upcoming match against Haiti, which will kick-off at 1.30 BST in the early hours of Saturday morning. 

According to the latest updates from Sky Sport Italia’s Gianluca Di Marzio, Neymar has remained at Brazil’s base camp in New Jersey to continue his recovery work while the rest of the squad have set off for their match against Haiti, which will be played in Philadelphia. 

There is still some optimism that Neymar may be fit enough to feature against Scott McTominay’s Scotland on Wednesday, June 24.

Francesco Camarda is now officially a Milan player again as the Rossoneri have exercised their buy-back option to bring the teenager home from Lecce just two days after his loan deal was made permanent. 

Official: Lecce confirm Milan have activated Camarda buy-back clause

Camarda spent the 2025-26 season on loan with Lecce in order to experience a full season playing regularly in the Italian top flight. Curiously, that loan deal included a low-cost option to buy for Lecce and another low-cost buy-back option in favour of the Rossoneri. 

Lecce confirmed on Tuesday that they had activated their option to buy to sign Camarda on a permanent basis. 

However, Lecce have since confirmed on Thursday that Milan have exercised their buy-back option, which means that the 18-year-old spent less than two days as a full-time Lecce player. 

Milan have since confirmed the deal in a statement of their own, which reads: “Milan announces that it has exercised the buy-back option relating to the ownership of Francesco Camarda. The striker will return to the Rossoneri starting from July 1, 2026.”

Reports on Wednesday indicated that Milan’s buy-back option was set at just above €500,000 and that they only had a brief period between June 18 and June 20 to activate the clause.

Reports in Germany claim that Milan offered Eintracht Frankfurt director Markus Krösche a staggering salary of €10m per season for four years and a transfer budget of €700m in order to transform the Rossoneri, but this was still not enough to convince the German to move to San Siro. 

BILD: Milan’s handling of Krösche negotiations were ‘amateurish’

Milan have recently learned that Krösche will not be joining the club in the role of ‘head of football’. The Eintracht Frankfurt director had been linked with a move to take over the sporting sector of the club but seems set to stay on in his current role with the Bundesliga outfit. 

• Read more: Who is Milan-linked Krösche and who are his best signings?

That is despite the fact that Milan were willing to offer Krösche €40m in salary over a four-year period, equating to €10m net per season according to reports from German outlet BILD. 

A €10m-per-season salary would have been significantly higher than any of the current players in the Rossoneri squad: The likes of Rafael Leao and Mike Maignan believed to be earning somewhere in the region of €7m net per season. 

BILD also claims that Milan were willing to give Krösche a budget of €700m over a four-year period to completely transform the playing staff, coaching staff and the general sporting side of the club.  

Thursday’s report points out that there was a release clause in Krösche’s contract with Eintracht Frankfurt, believed to be worth €7m, but this would have only been valid during the winter, not the summer. 

That means that Milan would have had to negotiate with Frankfurt, who reportedly set their price at €10m to free Krösche from his current contract. 

In the end, the German executive decided to stay where he is, and BILD claims that part of his decision was due to the fact that he did not want to ‘let down’ a club that has treated him so well so close to the beginning of the transfer window, nor did he want to disappoint the 600 staff that work under him at the Deutsche Bank Park. 

BILD also claims that Krösche was ‘annoyed’ at the reports that came out in the Italian press regarding his talks with Milan when an agreement had not been reached. The German outlet claims that the handling of the situation was ‘amateurish’ from such a respected and world-renowned club.

Czechia and South Africa are hoping to get off the mark at the 2026 World Cup when they face each other in Atlanta as the second round of group stage fixtures gets underway on Thursday evening. 

Both nations fell to defeats in their first matches in Group A: South Africa fell to a 3-1 defeat against co-hosts Mexico in the opening game of the 2026 World Cup while Czechia were defeated 2-1 by South Korea shortly afterwards. 

South Africa’s defeat was particularly costly as they had two players sent off in the process and will therefore be without Yaya Sithole and Themba Zwane against Czechia on Thursday. 

The Czech outfit has made a handful of changes, most notably leaving West Ham United midfielder Tomas Soucek among the substitutes. 

There are no Serie A representatives involved in today’s game

Kick-off is due at 17.00 BST.

Czechia vs. South Africa: Confirmed line-ups 

Czechia (5-3-2): Kovar; Coufal, Holes, Hranac, Krejci, Sojka; Sadilek, Darida, Cerv; Hlozek, Schick.

Subs: Stanek, Hornicek, Zima, Chaloupek, Zeleny, Doudera, Provod, Soucek, Sochurek, Kuchta, Chytil, Sulc, Chory, Visinsky.

South Africa (4-3-3): Williams; Mudau, Okon, Mbokazi, Modiba; Mokoena, Mbatha, Adams; Maseko, Rayners, Appollis.

Subs: Chaine, Goss, Matuludi, Ndamane, Kabini, Sibisi, Makhanya, Cross, Moremi, Foster, Mofokeng, Makgopa, Sebelebele.

Suspended: Sithole, Zwane

NEW YORK (AP) — The NHL said Thursday it completed a review of Mike Babcock’s tenure in Columbus, cleared him to coach the Edmonton Oilers if they opt to hire him.

The league launched an investigation at the request of the NHL Players’ Association in light of the Edmonton Oilers’ interest in hiring Babcock. The league in a statement said even in the least favorable light, there was no basis to restrict Babcock’s employment.

It was not immediately clear if or when the Oilers would name Babcock coach. They have been looking for a replacement since firing Kris Knoblauch following a first-round playoff exit that came after back-to-back trips to the Stanley Cup Final.

A message sent to union representatives was not immediately returned.

Babcock, 63, has not coached in the NHL since 2019, when he was fired by Toronto 23 games into his fifth season in charge. The Blue Jackets hired him on July 1, 2023, and Babcock resigned in September after his requests for personal photos from players in an attempt to get to know them drew criticism as an invasion of privacy.

The NHL dropped its planned investigation at the time because Babcock stepped down. It got underway this week after the final ended

Babcock coached Detroit to the Stanley Cup in 2008 and has made two other trips to the final, along with guiding Canada to Olympic gold medals in 2010 and ’14.

___

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/NHL

Ismael Saibari has successfully completed his medical in the United States of America ahead of his impending move to Bayern Munich.

The versatile attacker's medical took place in recent days during the Moroccan national team's training camp in New Jersey.

A digital signing of the contract which is expected to run until 2031 is now being prepared by the German record champions.

Saibari's physical signing of the contract is scheduled to take place in Munich after the 2026 World Cup concludes.

Furthermore, it's believed the transfer fee is understood to be around €52 to 55million for the 25-year-old.

Saibari was one of Morocco's standout players in their opening game against Brazil, scoring their only goal in the first half. 

Norwich City have signed Cruzeiro defender Bruno Alves on a season-long loan with the option to make the move permanent.

The Brazil Under-20 international has played through the youth ranks for his club side but has yet to make his senior debut.

"He is a player of real potential," Canaries sporting director Ben Knapper told the club website.

"Whilst it will of course be a process for him to adapt to both our club and English football more broadly, he is an exciting talent with an extremely high ceiling.

"He is a player we have followed for a considerable amount of time."

The 20-year-old is the Canaries' first signing of the summer.

• Latest Norwich City news and analysis

Scandinavia chased down Trawlerman to win the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot and land ⁠trainer Aidan O'Brien his 100th winner at the festival.

Locked in a neck-and-neck battle with long-term leader Trawlerman - who won the race last year - Scandinavia came through at the end to win, with Sweet William in third.

O'Brien, who had his first Ascot winner in 1997, called the horse "relentless".

"We felt he was very brave. He ‌always showed that in every race," ‌said O'Brien.

"He's relentless. It's an honour and a privilege for me to be involved in the team, to ⁠be the small part that I am with everybody.

"Even this week, it's literally one race at a time and you don't even think about what it could be or whether it could ‌happen because it's so competitive, so hard ​to win races here."

Winning jockey Ryan Moore said he was made to work hard after being jostled by Caballo De Mar, who finished last.

"He should've won easier," Moore said. "I had to work to get to Trawlerman and I thought I had him, and then I had to go again. Trawlerman's a brave horse and kept coming."

Earlier in the day Nola Soul won the Chesham Stakes, with Enceladus taking the King George V Stakes.

• Latest horse racing results

Ex-Red Sox Pitcher To Undergo Season-Ending Suregry originally appeared on NESN. Add NESN as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Boston Red Sox traded Quinn Priester to the Milwaukee Brewers last season, and he ended up being a dominant arm for them. However, his season is over this year, before he made a single start.

The Red Sox originally acquired Priester from the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he pitched in just one big league game for them. He had a 5.40 ERA for the WooSox in 2024 after the trade. He made one start for the WooSox last season before he was dealt to the Brewers. For the Brewers, he had a 3.32 ERA in 29 games and was one of the best starters on the team.

The Brewers won 21 of the 29 games he pitched in, and he was expected to be a key member of their rotation this year. However, he had been dealing with thoracic outlet syndrome symptoms since spring training and started the year on the injured list. After trying everything, Priester will undergo thoracic outlet decompression surgery on Monday, per himself via MLB.com's Adam McCalvy.

It is expected to take him eight to ten months to get back to 100%, but he is confident that he will be back by next season, and he will come back even better.

Priester noted that the team tried everything to get him back on the mound this season, trying to avoid surgery. They were able to relieve some of the pain he was having, but he was unable to command the baseball like he did last season. The Brewers are once again one of the best teams in baseball, but will have to finish this season without Priester.

While Prister is out, another ex-Red Sox arm is dominating for Milwaukee. Kyle Harrison has pitched like an All-Star this season, and he, Priester and Jacob Misiorowski could be a dominant trio next season.

More MLB: Red Sox's Chad Tracy Shoots Down 'Radical' Change Despite Offensive Woes

South Africa had already gone behind early in the World Cup opener against Mexico. And in the second group match against the Czech Republic, Bafana Bafana also made a poor start. 

By contrast, the Czechs boosted their ambitions of reaching the knockout stage early on. Faster than any team at the current World Cup.

It took Miroslav Koubek’s team just five minutes and seven seconds. Michal Sadílek of Slavia Prague was in the right place at the right time. After a pass from Alexandr Sojka, the 27-year-old finished calmly.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.

Over the years, the legend of Luka Vuskovic has grown and grown. His prodigious leap and a physique well beyond his age, combined with two successful loan spells, have only added to the hype. Three years on from his £12m signing, many are ready to kneel before Luka and name him the solution to all our defensive issues without ever having seen him play in the flesh.

Last night in Dallas, Luka had an opportunity to add to that reputation and prove that he is ready, but a chastening opening-game defeat at the hands of players he will be expected to face week in, week out did not go to plan. The legend took a serious hit.

Luka's rise to becoming a major talking point is down to a breakout season in Germany with Hamburger SV. The Croatian took the opportunity with both hands. He finished the season as the top-scoring defender and was named in the 2025-26 Team of the Season.

His success coincided with another disappointing season at N17. As we battled relegation with centre-backs who looked uninterested in the fight, over in Europe Luka was crashing through opposition strikers as though they were made of paper.

His strong performances propelled him into the media limelight, the Croatian national team and the consciousness of every Spurs fan. Suddenly, Luka was viewed as an option, no longer a protégé.

What has always made Luka stand out is his frame. It is what gives him the edge in duels and makes him such an asset at set-pieces, but his size comes at a cost. His lack of recovery pace was there for all to see as Jude Bellingham stormed through to slot home England's third. His lack of pace, speed on the turn and mobility are genuine concerns.

Not every defender needs to be as fast as Micky van de Ven, but you need to be able to maximise your strengths and hide your weaknesses. Tottenham, right now, are not in a position to offer him the minutes he needs to grow from being a prospect into a genuine top-level centre-back.

Hopefully, given time to reflect on what happened in Dallas, his team of advisers will make the correct decision. Demanding to start at Spurs when we have already added Marco Senesi and are about to announce Jan Paul van Hecke is not realistic.

Vuskovic remains an exciting prospect, but one in need of playing time and strong guidance on and off the training pitch. The most sensible decision for all parties would be a loan at a Premier League club with a similar style of football.

The hard work and focus needed to turn the legend into reality starts now.

Find more from Bardi at The Extra Inch - a Spurs podcast

The World Cup match between Czech Republic and South Africa - which you can follow here - is now under way.

You can rate both sets of players out of 10 below and come back 30 minutes after full-time to see the final ratings.

• World Cup fixtures and group standings
• How to watch the World Cup on the BBC
• Everything you need to know about the World Cup

When Florida offered Tre Geathers in early April, Tennessee was the team to beat.

The Volunteers had been involved from the beginning. They had built strong relationships, hosted multiple visits and spent months setting the pace for one of the Carolinas’ top linebackers.

Two months later, Florida completed one of the more impressive recruiting surges of the cycle.

The Gators landed a commitment from Geathers, a three-star linebacker out of Charlotte (N.C.) Providence Day School, beating Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina for his pledge.

The battle went down to the wire.

Florida’s official visit proved to be the turning point.

“I think after my official visit, just getting to be around everyone and getting to see the culture and stuff like that put Florida on top,” Geathers told Rivals. “The academics, the school history, and learning more about the scheme all helped Florida move up.

“The official visit is when they overtook Tennessee. On that visit, things changed. It was a great visit.”

[ $19.99 gets you a FULL year of On3 | Rivals national coverage ]

The visit gave Geathers a chance to see the program from a different perspective.

What stood out most was the energy inside the building.

“The energy within the building really stood out. When I went there for my official visit, it was highly motivating. It felt like they had a chip on their shoulder. Everyone is ready to turn the program around. It’s a new slate.”

Geathers believes in the staff in Gainesville

Geathers also believes Jon Sumrall and the current staff has a clear vision for the future.

“No matter what, this is probably the coaching staff that’s going to be there my entire time there,” he said. “That stability was key. I think I fit really well in what they do. I think it’s the best opportunity for me and my family. The people, the energy, and the culture at Florida were all right for me.”

Linebackers coach Greg Gasparato played a major role in the decision.

“Ever since they offered me, he’s done a great job recruiting me,” Geathers said. “He’s calling me pretty much every day, checking on me and seeing how I’m doing.

“After getting to know him, I feel like he truly cares about his players, not just on the field but off the field too. The way he teaches the game is something I understand, and I think he can help me reach my maximum potential.”

Geathers is excited to play for Sumrall.

“I think he sets the tone for the whole program. After getting to interact with him, I think he’s setting the standard for what he wants the program to be like, and he’s holding everyone to that standard.

“What I really like is how he’s a very straightforward guy. He’s not going to play games or beat around the bush. He’s going to be straightforward with you, and that’s something I really respect in a coach.”

Before Florida entered the picture, Tennessee appeared to have the edge.

By the end of the official visit process, the Gators had changed the conversation.

“Florida is right for me,” Geathers said. “It is the fit for me. I love the vision Coach Sumrall has for the program. The culture is right.”

The Denver Broncos hosted eight tryout players at mandatory minicamp this week, including quarterback Sawyer Robertson. It sounds like the team has made decisions on those tryout players, and Robertson won't be signed (at least not right now).

Instead, the Broncos are signing offensive lineman Reid Holskey (according to ESPN's Jeremy Fowler) and cornerback Blake Cotton (according to the Denver Post's Parker Gabriel). Holskey (6-6, 306 pounds) spent time on the Houston Texans' practice squad in 2025 before joining the New York Giants in January. He was cut by New York last month. Cotton (6-2, 195 pounds) is a rookie who spent last fall at Utah, totaling 30 tackles and seven pass breakups in 13 games.

The two moves came one day after Denver wrapped up minicamp. The 91-man offseason roster was already full, so the Broncos will need to make corresponding moves to make room for Holskey and Cotton on the roster.

Social: Follow Broncos Wire on Facebook and Twitter/X! Did you know: These 25 celebrities are Broncos fans.

This article originally appeared on Broncos Wire: Denver Broncos news: 2 tryout players sign after minicamp

Declan Rice is expected to be available for England's World Cup match against Ghana after suffering from lower back pain during the win over Croatia.

The midfielder was substituted midway through the second half, raising concerns about his fitness.

But it is understood the back issue is unlikely to prevent Rice from playing against Ghana in Boston on Tuesday (21:00).

The complaint is one that the Arsenal midfielder, 27, has been carrying for a while and will require managing during the tournament.

Speaking after the game, manager Thomas Tuchel said: "Declan had some unusual ball losses and I saw a bit of discomfort.

"And then I asked him, and he pointed directly to his lower back, upper hamstring, that he feels the discomfort.

"I didn't want to take any risks, I hope it's nothing more. Declan just reassured me at the end.

"We will take care of it, and it's nothing big to worry about."

• Tactical analysis: England look exciting but how can they tighten up?
• Kane is England's greatest striker, says Lineker

• World Cup fixtures and group standings
• How to watch the World Cup on the BBC
• Everything you need to know about the World Cup

The New York Knicks celebrated their first NBA title in 53 years with a ticker-tape parade on the streets of Manhattan on Thursday morning.

“Good Morning America” caught up with the champions ahead of the parade, including former Georgia Tech star Jose Alvarado.

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He is the fourth former Yellow Jacket to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy, joining Chris Bosh, Iman Shumpert and John Salley. The 6-foot point guard is also a native New Yorker.

“It just hits home different. You know, I’ve been a Knicks fan since I was, since I was born. My parents have been Knicks fans. And just seeing the, the progress of everything happening, I can’t really put in words. It’s just special to me. It’s special, real special,” Alvarado told GMA.

The Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in five games. They trailed in each game and erased a 29-point deficit in Game 4 at home.

“That was one, that’s my favorite game of all time,” he said.

Alvarado not only represented his hometown, but his heritage as well. He’s only the third Puerto Rican to win NBA championship and he says it’s amazing to have his community look up to him.

“You know, just to put that my island on the on the biggest platform," he said. “You know, we win, we come back and as a Puerto Rican parade, it was meant to happen.”

But his biggest support comes from his two young daughters. “Good Morning America” asked Alvarado about the voicemail they left him before the championship-clinching Game 5.

“Like I watch it on a repeat and I’m always going to watch it because that’s what you do it for, right?"

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The last few months have been rather odd for the Denver Nuggets.

Denver entered the playoffs as true contenders, only to be comfortably defeated in the first round by an injury-ravaged Minnesota Timberwolves squad. Since then, nearly every player on the roster, outside of Nikola Jokić, continues to be involved in trade rumors.

In March, the Nuggets were a true threat. Now, fans have no idea who will even be in their starting lineup next year.

They could bring back Peyton Watson or let him walk. They could trade either Christian Braun or Cameron Johnson to make room for Watson, or to move on from either. Frankly, dealing Jamal Murray or Aaron Gordon for another star is also in the cards for the Nuggets. Simply put, as of now, it’s anyone’s guess what the final roster will look like.

However, starting lineups don’t win championships alone. Depth does. Here’s an updated look at all the rumors regarding Denver’s starting five and their bench. Or, more accurately, who the Nuggets could add to it.

The State of the Denver Nuggets’ Bench

Last season, the Nuggets’ bench unit included Bruce Brown, Tim Hardaway Jr., Peyton Watson, Spencer Jones, and Jonas Valančiūnas. Meanwhile, Julian Strawther, Zeke Nnaji, and others were sprinkled in here and there.

Unfortunately, due to a variety of injuries, this unit was often incomplete. Watson missed significant time due to injury. Jones only began playing in his absence. So, evaluating them at face value is tricky.

Regardless of whether Watson stays or leaves, it is highly unlikely he comes off the bench next year. The odds of Denver keeping Watson, along with Braun, Johnson, and Gordon, seem implausible. As of now, Strawther would likely take Watson’s bench spot.

Overall, that’s still a decent bench, but it’s not perfect.

Strawther has been inconsistent, Brown isn’t a true point guard, and nobody in the unit is a true shot creator. There’s also the fact that Hardaway and Brown are currently unrestricted free agents, while Jones is a restricted free agent. Neither of the aforementioned trio is guaranteed to be on the team next year. So, what can Denver do to secure a championship-caliber bench unit?

Bruce Brown’s Uncertain Future with the Nuggets

Denver Nuggets fans love Brown. He played a crucial role as the sixth man on Denver’s 2023 championship team. His aggressive defense, solid shooting, and overall fun personality continue to make him a fan favorite.

However, his future may not align with Denver’s or the NBA’s.

Looking at team building, two archetypes of backup guards are becoming increasingly popular in the league. The first kind is the true sixth-man type that can create their own shots and put points on the board. For example, Dylan Harper, Ayo Dosunmu, and Payton Pritchard. The other type is a true point guard who hustles, defends, and makes plays. Players like Jose Alvarado, T.J. McConnell, and Cason Wallace come to mind.

Unfortunately, Brown lacks the scoring ability required to enter the first team. He also lacks the ball handling and passing to enter the second. 

Potential New Guard Options for the Nuggets

Naturally, Denver could look into getting a new guard to replace Brown. Unfortunately, the team has so much money tied up with their starters that, as of now, they will not be able to pay much for any bench player.

When filtering by guards they can afford, the list of guys better than Brown becomes quite small. At a certain point, it may make sense to bring him back. Still, there may be some available veterans or unproven players willing to take a smaller deal who could fulfill that backup guard role.

One player Denver could afford who falls into the second tier of guards is Jordan Goodwin.

Goodwin played a crucial role as a backup guard for the Phoenix Suns. He played a career-high 70 games and averaged 8.7 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 1.5 steals per game. As a true point guard and a better ball handler, he could be a solid addition for the Nuggets.

The only catch: the Suns may not be too eager to let him go. Reports indicate negotiations are already underway between Goodwin and Phoenix.

Another interesting name for the Nuggets is Jordan Clarkson. The former Sixth Man of the Year has been one of the best bench scorers over the last decade.

He wasn’t as ball-dominant on the New York Knicks. That said, he can still be a go-to scorer in a limited role, if needed. Additionally, he substantially improved his defense and rebounding in New York. With Clarkson heading into his age-34 season, the Nuggets could easily get him to take a smaller deal.

Denver Needs More Help on the Wing

The Denver Nuggets’ wing situation remains incredibly tricky.

Strawther is under contract for next season, but he’s not shown the ability to be a consistent contributor. Meanwhile, Hardaway Jr. just had a phenomenal season. He finished third in 6MOTY voting and averaged 13.5 points per game on over 40% shooting from three. Hardaway Jr. played so well, in fact, that he will likely go elsewhere to collect money, which the Nuggets cannot afford to give.

Thankfully for Denver, the team found a diamond in the rough in Spencer Jones, whom they will likely bring back.

That leaves the Nuggets with whatever they decide to do at point guard, plus Strawther and Jones. Clearly, they need more help.

One interesting option for Denver could be Cleveland Cavaliers forward Dean Wade. By no means is he a prolific scorer, but he brings tenacious defense, consistent rebounding, and solid shooting. Without Watson and Gordon against Minnesota, Denver’s lack of physicality proved to be a major weakness. Considering Denver may not be entering the season with both, Wade perfectly supplements that need.

Another interesting target is Khris Middleton of the Dallas Mavericks.

Middleton is coming off the last year of his three-year, $93 million contract. However, at age 34 and with a long history of injuries, he will not be commanding that amount of money this offseason.

Middleton would bring much-needed shot creation, three-point shooting, defense, and a veteran presence to the Nuggets. Having spent the last two years in disastrous situations in Washington and Dallas, it’s somewhat forgotten how much of a contributor he could be on a winning team. He was even once rumored to join Denver last season. If given a shot, he could put his two-way talent back on display.

Other wings Denver could look into are Josh Okogie, Keon Ellis, and Matisse Thybulle. All are solid role players who can defend at a high level and knock down threes.

The Center of Attention

The Denver Nuggets’ bench lineup will likely appear in one of two ways. One is with Brown, Jones, a free agent, then either Strawther or free agent number two. The other is a free agent point guard, another free agent, Strawther, and Jones. Either way, positions one through four will be addressed in these scenarios. But what about the center spot?

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As of now, Denver has Valančiūnas under contract for one more year at $10 million. The Nuggets are strongly likely to waive him.

Valančiūnas played his role well last season, but Denver can find someone else to protect the rim in limited minutes for way less money. Additionally, the Nuggets will need to save every penny they can. On that note, they are still suffering the consequences of Zeke Nnaji’s four-year, $32 million contract, which still has two years left. Expect Denver to do everything it can to move on from both.

Doing so would only leave DaRon Holmes II, Denver’s 2024 first-round pick, backing up Jokic. Holmes II missed his entire rookie season due to injury, then spent his sophomore year as a backup to the backups. He is young, athletic, and dependable around the rim. Most importantly, Holmes II remains on a cheap deal for the next two years.

Assuming the Nuggets move on from Nnaji and Valančiūnas, they’ll probably let Holmes and an incoming veteran center compete for the primary backup five role.

Nick Richards is a perfect option. Richards is a better rim protector than other targets around his price range, like Andre Drummond, Jock Landale, or Thomas Bryant. All Denver needs is someone cheap who can contest shots and grab boards while Jokić is off the floor. Richards can do exactly that. Holmes is definitely a flashier option with more upside, but Richards is a perfect safety net for the Nuggets.

Building Out the Nuggets’ Bench

Denver Nuggets’ fans will be waiting on pins and needles until July 6th, when free agent contracts can officially be signed. Until then, theories and projections remain.

Though bringing him back is unlikely, the Nuggets should do everything they can to keep Hardaway Jr., as he was tremendous last season. They have no excuse not to bring back Jones, as he was also fantastic, and doing so will not break the bank. Without Hardaway Jr., Denver should really consider Middleton or perhaps Thybulle to supplement their shooting. Middleton’s shot creation is a massive bonus. Goodwin would also be a solid get as a true point guard. The same goes for Richards at center.

Don’t be surprised, though, if Denver decides to stay quiet in free agency. If they want to add new players, there are plenty of options, as previously mentioned. But the Nuggets may opt to stay in-house.

Jalen Pickett has been consistently developing for the Nuggets. He’ll be in contention for the backup point guard role. Similarly, this could finally be the year Strawther steps up and claims a solid role in the rotation. Holmes, as a former first-rounder, could also attempt to unlock some of his potential next season.

Denver enters the offseason as a team full of question marks. There are countless ways the franchise could attack this offseason. Nevertheless, fans and the media will stay focused on the starters, but don’t forget that benches win championships, too.

The post Which Free Agents Can Nuggets Pursue to Improve Bench? appeared first on The Lead.

Arman Tsarukyan wasn’t around to watch a major bout unfold in his weight class on Sunday night, even though it could have serious implications for his next move.

Many fans believe Tsarukyan has been unfairly overlooked by the UFC, arguing that he should be next in line for a shot at the winner of the fight held at the White House.

Justin Gaethje defeated Ilia Topuria at UFC Freedom 250 to become the undisputed champion. If he chooses not to retire and decides to defend his title, Tsarukyan is expected to be his first challenger.

But even though the outcome could determine who he faces next, Tsarukyan wasn’t able to tune in live and had to wait several hours before finding out the result from Washington, DC.

Arman Tsarukyan missed Justin Gaethje’s UFC Freedom 250 win over Ilia Topuria

Tsarukyan was initially set to be the backup for the White House event, ready to step in if either fighter had to pull out. But instead of weighing in, he found himself across the country, tied up with another commitment.

Fresh off a win over Tony Ferguson at RAF 10, his travel schedule kept him from catching one of the year’s most talked-about fights live.

Speaking on The Ariel Helwani Show, Tsarukyan explained that his flight back had no WiFi, leaving him out of the loop for hours on how things had played out between Topuria and Gaethje.

“They didn’t have WiFi on the plane, and I was just sitting and saying: ‘No way. How can I miss this fight?’ For eight hours I was thinking: ‘What happened? What happened?’”

“When we landed my friend was like: ‘Justin won.’ I couldn’t believe it. To be honest. I was happy.”

He told the UFC again that he should be next in line for a shot at Gaethje, still frustrated after missing out earlier in the year when they gave Paddy Pimblett an interim title shot instead.

The ball is now in Dana White’s court to finally give Tsarukyan what he wants or continue overlooking him based on some of his recent behaviour outside of the Octagon.

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Wrexham’s experienced defender Sarah Harvey believes the club’s historic Women’s Champions League debut can be just the start, saying, “We’re not shy of the big games any more.”

Jenny Sugarman’s side, crowned Welsh champions last spring, have been handed a tough first qualifying round assignment against Pyunik, the Armenian champions for the past three years.

Under a format now into its second season, the winners of the July 22 showdown will then meet whoever prevails in the other semi-final between Glentoran and Riga, champions of Northern Ireland and Latvia, for a place in the next qualifying stage.

All the ties will be staged at the same venue, possibly the Racecourse Ground. A decision will be announced on Friday following a meeting of the four clubs.

Should unseeded Wrexham upset the odds and progress, a semi-final against Danish champions Koge would be next up in another mini-tournament also featuring Gintra of Lithuania and Scotland’s Hearts.

To underline the size of the task facing the club owned by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac, no Welsh team has won a Champions League qualifying match since Cardiff Met in 2019 and even then, they failed to progress from a four-team group.

It’s also five years — and eight games — since an Adran Premier League side even scored in Europe’s premier competition, Chloe Chivers the last to do so when netting for Swansea City in a 4-1 defeat to CSKA Moscow.

“It’s so exciting to see the calibre of teams from all the different countries,” says Harvey, speaking to The Athletic after joining her team-mates to follow a live feed of Thursday’s draw at the House of European Football in Nyon, Switzerland.

“As soon as we pulled Pyunik, I’m, like, ‘Where are they from?’. It’s very exciting to look at their history. We’re coming off a double-winning season (Wrexham also lifted the Adran Welsh Cup), how do we play against them? What’s our tactics?”

Competing in the Champions League qualifiers will be the latest notable step forward for a women’s setup that was effectively mothballed just a decade ago due to lack of funds.

Relaunched in 2018, Wrexham’s revival gathered pace following Reynolds and Mac’s takeover three years later. Promotion to the Welsh top flight — a primarily amateur and semi-professional competition, in contrast to the fully professional Women’s Super League (WSL) in England — followed in 2023.

Since then, further investment has secured a long-term permanent home for the team at the Rock, the 3,000-capacity former home of Cefn Druids bought by Wrexham last year, as well as the signings that helped land the club’s first league title when Cardiff City, champions in each of the previous three seasons, were thrashed 4-1 in March.

“To win one (trophy) is amazing,” says Harvey. “To win two is indescribable. To do it with a club like Wrexham, that has the community and the fans like we do, is so special and meaningful.

“My friends in Canada or my family in Ireland and Scotland can follow us and get behind us because of how well Wrexham promotes the women’s teams. It’s like our 12th man.”

Next month’s foray into Europe will stir memories of previous European campaigns for the men’s team, Wrexham having competed in eight editions of the European Cup Winners’ Cup between 1972 and 1995.

Along the way, notable scalps were claimed by the serial Welsh Cup winners, with the aggregate victory over Porto in 1984 a clear highlight along with reaching the quarter-finals eight years earlier.

Now, Sugarman’s side have an opportunity to create their own history in a competition where half of the 18 teams who will compete in the league phase come late September are already known, including holders Barcelona and Manchester City, the English champions.

Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Roma, Paris FC, Lyon, Benfica and Europa Cup winners Hacken have also all qualified.

The route to joining those big names can be long and testing, particularly for teams such as Wrexham entering at the earliest of three qualification stages. The first two of these rounds take the form of mini-tournaments, while the final qualifying stage will be a two-legged play-off also featuring teams such as Chelsea, Inter and Real Madrid.

Signed last February from Lewes in England, Harvey boasts Champions League experience, having played for Georgian side Samegrelo in the 2023-24 campaign.

After edging past NS Mura, the dominant force in Slovenian football, on penalties after a goalless draw, they bowed out of qualifying to Cypriot side Apollon Limassol.

“No one had money on us to win and rightly so,” she says about taking on Mura. “We went down to nine players (due to two red cards), got through extra time and then won it on penalties.

“That was amazing. Luckily, my dad came. It was really special to play in that game and have a family member there to share the moment. Then, our second game (against Apollon), due to the red cards, we had maybe one player on the bench.

“We were told to play everything in our half, pretty much ‘park the bus’. We were hoping for another penalty shootout but we lost 3-0. The whole experience, though, made me want to do it all again.”

Wrexham already boast several notable firsts for women’s football in Wales, including the first to own their stadium outright and the first to buy a player for a fee from a league rival when snapping up Maria Francis Jones from The New Saints.

Can this trailblazing stretch to becoming the country’s first qualifiers for the Champions League group stage? It’s a very, very tall order on debut, especially with first-round opponents Pyunik having claimed 18 wins from as many league games in 2025-26, in the process racking up a goal difference of plus 99.

But Harvey adds: “I’m fortunate that this is my second time. It’s not like a nervous feeling, like last time. I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the Champions League, such a big stage and one of the tournaments not a lot of players get to play in’.

“All those nerves are out the door. Now, we have our playing style and are coming off a successful season. The majority of our players have been retained so our core and culture is very much there.

“It’s another big game for us and we’re not shy of the big games any more.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Wrexham FC, Women's Soccer, Women's Champions League, Championship

2026 The Athletic Media Company

While there has long been an expectation that the future of Giannis Antetokounmpo, whether with the Milwaukee Bucks or via trade, would be resolved by the NBA Draft, growing reporting suggests the situation may remain unresolved well beyond next week and into free agency beginning June 30. The Bucks have been in talks with the Miami Heat for several months but have signaled they are unwilling to accept what has been offered for Antetokounmpo. "So far, from what I've been told, the Bucks have yet to receive an offer they are willing to accept for Giannis Antetokounmpo," said Brian Windhorst on Thursday's episode of Get Up. "Which is somewhat mirroring what happened at the trade deadline last February. Where they had the market open, didn't agree to a deal, and ended up keeping Giannis.

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This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Bucks have yet to receive an offer they are willing to accept for Giannis Antetokounmpo

"While there is this deadline of the draft, and I'm told they intend to trade him by the draft, I think it's possible, there's some percentage chance, that they don't find a deal that they like. "Miami has been the team most aggressive in trying to get him. But they have seven or eight different pieces that they can trade, none of them that I consider super-premium and I think the Bucks probably want all of them."

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This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: "While there is this deadline of the draft, and I'm …

NBC 4 Sports: "He's communicated to me a strong interest in being part of what we're building" In a one-on-one with @JPFinlayNBCS , Monumental Basketball President Michael Winger discusses Anthony Davis and his future More of their interview this afternoon on News4

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Run It Back: On a 1-10 scale, Sam Amick thinks the Lakers' chances for bringing back LeBron & Reaves are a 6 👀 "If Austin gets paid... then there's not enough money for LeBron to feel respected, and then I could see him going up the coast to the Warriors."

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Sean Highkin: new name that’s started to circulate in the last day or two in connection to the Blazers’ coaching opening, in addition to confirmed finalists Micah Nori and Tyler Lashbrook: Knicks associate HC Chris Jent.

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Omari Sankofa II: Langdon: "This is the weirdest Finals I’ve ever seen in my life ... I was 0-5 on what was going to happen and how it was going to happen, even during the games. The resilience the Knicks had getting down 15 points in every game whether it was home or on the road was wild."

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Omari Sankofa II: Langdon: "You have to have a guy who’s mentally different than damn near anybody I’ve ever seen in Jalen Brunson. That performance was crazy. He was big time and special to watch. That’s the kind of mental toughness that teams and players have to have to win at that level."

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Hunter Patterson: Langdon mentions the Pistons are having a voluntary camp this week and they have about 10 or 11 guys back in the building.

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This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Langdon mentions the Pistons are having a voluntary …

Hunter Patterson: Langdon says the Pistons know they need to be more equipped to compete in the postseason. Notes he wants to develop “championship habits” but says he doesn’t gauge the team’s success on whether they win a championship.

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Omari Sankofa II: Langdon: "When you have more ballhandlers and more shooters on the floor it opens it up for our three best players. Those are things we’re looking at."

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Omari Sankofa II: Langdon smiled when asked about extension talks with Duren and Thompson: "There haven’t been, at this point … and to be honest you’ll never know how those conversations are going."

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This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: "There haven’t been, at this point … and to be honest …

Omari Sankofa II: Langdon on if he's talked to Malik Beasley's agent: "No, I have not. He doesn’t have an agent right now, so that would make it hard." On if he's personally talked to Beasley: "I have not talked to him about coming back."

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Omari Sankofa II: Langdon on how aggressive they'll be in the trade market: "We have to look at everything and that’s what we’re going to do, in trade and free agency."

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Shamit Dua: Pelicans have hired AJ Meyer as Director of Analytics. Meyer comes from the Suns with previous stints in Dallas and San Antonio.

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Cam Smith: As the 25th head coach in Chicago Bulls history, what do you think that you can bring to this story franchise that can make this group, this organization a consistent winner? Tiago Splitter: Well, I think it's all small steps, right? You got to now we got to finish our staff. We’re going to have the draft coming up, a free agency coming up. Once we have the group of guys that we want, we're going to start the plans and day by day, small steps, we're going to get better. It's not smart by me saying we're going to win this, we're going to do that, we're going to shoot 50 percent from the three-point line. No, that's not it. It's step by step, smart in every step, doing everything with excellence, high standards, and create this culture that is needed.

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It's never too early to look forward to the next recruiting class, especially when the top recruit in the class is in consideration.

2028 five-star wide receiver Jett Harrison is only a sophomore at St. Joseph's Prep School in Philadelphia, but programs are now able to pursue him. He is the No. 1 recruit in the early rankings for the 2028 cycle, per Rivals, and the Oregon Ducks are one of the suitors standing out early in the process.

Oregon, Ohio State and Miami are the teams standing out the Harrison early in the process. Harrison is the son of NFL Hall of Famer Marvin Harrison and the younger brother of Arizona Cardinals wideout and former Ohio State Buckeye Marvin Harrison Jr. That's an obvious link for the Buckeyes to land the elite pass-catcher, but there is still a long way to go.

WR Jett Harrison is the No. 1 player in the 2028 Rivals300, and he is embracing his own path to greatness.

The 5-star has a lot of eyes on him and he visited Miami, Ohio State and Oregon earlier this spring.

Read: https://t.co/S9QdBruBI3pic.twitter.com/SPnTsWqtHf

— ChadSimmons (@ChadSimmons_) June 17, 2026

Rivals' Steve Wiltfong logged an early prediction for Harrison to wind up with Ohio State, but the 6-foot-1 receiver noted that he is looking to carve his own path, which could give the Ducks a shot at him down the line.

“My brother told me not to go to Ohio State just because he went there,” Harrison told Rivals. “Be yourself and go where you can see yourself. If I go to Ohio State, it won’t be because of him. This decision will be about what I feel is best for me.”

Harrison has already taken trips to Eugene and Miami, and they are clear contenders despite the family connection in Columbus. The first steps in any recruitment are making sure the coaching staff forms a deep connection with the player

"My time at Oregon was great," Harrison said. "I liked the facilities, the people and how they competed at practice. Dan Lanning was teaching everyone. Coach Ross Douglas was great too."

With a Hall of Famer as a father and an NFL wideout brother to learn from, the youngest Harrison brother has two role models to work with. The elder Harrison has been through the modern recruiting process already, so he knows what to look for. Fortunately, Oregon is checking all the right boxes so far.

“I can tell you it’s two things,” Marvin Harrison told Rivals. “There’s a difference between offering a scholarship and recruiting a kid and they’re heavily recruiting the kid.

“Number two, the thing that stood out most about those three schools, all three wide receiver coaches are very knowledgeable at that position. They are excellent. Ross (Douglas) at Oregon, Cortez (Hankton) at Ohio State and KB (Kevin Beard) down at Miami. Very knowledgeable and that’s when Jett is having the most fun. He had a lot of fun talking to each receiver coach. That’s been the most impressive thing.”

While Oregon, Ohio State, and Miami are the early leaders, Harrison will also be interested in visiting programs like Alabama, Texas A&M, and USC in the future.

Given the fact that the recruitment is so early, it's hard to tell which direction it may go. But, if Harrison truly does want to carve his own path rather than follow in his brother's footsteps at Ohio State, Oregon could make a play for him and get him on campus as often as possible.

Contact/Follow @Ducks_Wire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Oregon Ducks news, notes, and opinions.

This article originally appeared on Ducks Wire: 2028 WR Jett Harrison considering Oregon, Ohio State, Miami early in process

Former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Denzel Mims is signing with the Dallas Cowboys, per Todd Archer of ESPN. The former second-round pick of the New York Jets spent the 2026 UFL season with the Dallas Renegades.

Mims signed with the Steelers’ practice squad back in October, 2023 and was waived in June, 2024.

Mims had a terrific career at Baylor, hauling in 186 passes for just under 3,000 yards and 28 touchdowns, which led to him being selected by the Jets in the second round of the 2020 NFL Draft. In three seasons with New York, he caught just 42 passes in 30 games. He was traded to the Detroit Lions in 2023, but waived before the season kicked off.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Be sure to bookmark Behind the Steel Curtain for all the latest news, breakdowns, and more!

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England’s 4-2 win against Croatia in their World Cup 2026 Group L opener had a peak television audience of 15.4 million, according to ITV, as the country gets behind Thomas Tuchel’s side in their quest for glory.

Harry Kane’s double and second-half strikes from Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford set the Three Lions on their way in Dallas on Wednesday night, with Tuchel raving about his team’s second-half performance having been labelled “confused” by assistant coach Anthony Barry during the break.

ITV said that an average of 14.2 million tuned in for the match with an average of 10 million for their entire broadcast from 8pm BST to 11.35pm BST. The broadcaster added that 2.3 million were in the 16-34 age bracket, but their figures did not include those who streamed the action on personal devices.

“The peak audience on a TV set is the highest peak audience of 2026 (ahead of The Traitors, 9.8 million), and the highest peak audience on any channel or streamer since the Uefa Euro 2024 tournament,” ITV added in a statement.

England’s next encounter, against Ghana on Tuesday night, will be live on BBC One from Boston with the match kicking off at 9pm BST.

Between matches, England have returned to their camp in Kansas City, with Tuchel offering specific praise to captain Kane after the Croatia win.

“If you see the commitment of our captain, of our number nine, in extra time to block a crucial shot after a set piece with all his body and his commitment to buy into a defensive action like this, then you know everything about his performance today,” said Tuchel.

“Complete performance, absolute leader and he is all in – he’s all in physically, he’s all in mentally, and he’s all in.”

Tuchel also hailed Bellingham’s ability to turn up when it matters most.

“You can rely on Jude in these moments,” Tuchel added. “He loves these pressure games. That brings out the best in him, so that’s an easy decision to let him play and to trust him.

“Also, because of the last 16 days, 17 days, how he bought into the idea of team spirit and brotherhood, and into the idea of how we want to play football, which is slightly different to his position in Real Madrid.”

NEED TO KNOW

• Minor league baseball team the York Revolution canceled and forfeited their game on Thursday, June 18 after players refused to wear the Pride Night jerseys
• York Revolution said the decision "was not reached lightly" in a statement, adding that players "are not comfortable with" wearing the jerseys
• A local LGBTQ+ resource center said it was "disappointed" by the team's decision to cancel

A minor league baseball team has canceled and forfeited its Pride Night game after several players refused to wear the themed jerseys.

The York Revolution said in a statement on Wednesday, June 17, "it is with great disappointment" that the game would not go on as planned.

The team said the decision to cancel and forfeit "was not reached lightly."

"Unfortunately, several of our players have refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jersey and the club decided that hosting the event is more important than forcing players to wear jerseys they are not comfortable with and playing the game," the team said.

"As a result, and out of respect for the Pride Community and the York community as a whole, the York Revolution has decided that the game on Thursday, June 18 will be forfeited and that Pride Night will continue on as the feature element of the evening at WellSpan Park."

York Revolution said it feels "this is the best way to stay consistent with our long-standing partnerships with the Rainbow Rose Center, JLS Automation and the long list of allies that have always been key partners of the York Revolution's success in York, Pennsylvania."

The team added, "To be clear; this action by the players is completely inconsistent with our vision as the Most Welcoming Place in York."

"As a small token of our regret for the last-minute change of plans and support for our LGBTQIA+ representing partners we are making a $10,000 donation to the Rainbow Rose Center to support and further their work in making sure the York community is as inclusive as we strive to make WellSpan Park in York, Pennsylvania."

Tickets for the game will be treated as a rainout and can be redeemed for a future game, the club told ticket holders.

The Pride Night jerseys, as seen on the team's website, feature rainbow sleeves.

The Rainbow Rose Center said they're "disappointed" in a statement on Thursday, June 18. "This situation has been difficult for many members of the LGBTQIA+ community, our supporters, and our organization. While we are disappointed that circumstances led to this outcome, we appreciate the York Revolution's commitment to ensuring that Pride in the Park will still take place," the statement said.

Read the original article on People

The Seattle Seahawks made several promotions within their front office ranks on Wednesday.

According to ESPN’s Brady Henderson, the Seahawks replaced former assistant general manager Nolan Teasley with their pro scouting director Willie Schneider and vice president of player acquisition Matt Berry, along with four other promotions.

“Aaron Hineline goes from director of college scouting to director of player personnel,” Henderson said. “Armani Perez goes from assistant director of pro personnel to director of pro personnel. Jason Barnes goes from assistant director of college scouting to director of college scouting.”

The Seahawks also promoted Patrick Ward to vice president and director of research and analytics as the team’s sixth appointment. All six personnel contributed toward the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl at the end of the 2025 season.

Teasley, a participant in this year’s NFL accelerator program, left Seattle to be the Minnesota Vikings’ new general manager on June 1 after being with the franchise for 13 seasons. The Seahawks respond to the move with a front office shuffle ahead of the 2026 season.

This article originally appeared on Seahawks Wire: Seattle Seahawks announce six internal promotions for key jobs

The Detroit Red Wings are navigating a difficult situation with Dylan Larkin. After Larkin requested a trade from Detroit, the organization is looking to find a package that fits a player of his caliber. However, the Red Wings might be facing some challenges, leading to a new report from an NHL insider.

If and when the Red Wings trade Larkin, it might have to include a third team to satisfy general manager Steve Yzerman, as reported by The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun on Oilers Now. Yzerman has proven that he won’t relent in these types of situations, making a third team more likely in a trade.

However, which organizations would make sense if Detroit can make it a two-team deal?

Potential two-team deals for Detroit Red Wings with Dylan Larkin

Countless three-team trades would make sense for Detroit, but the first agenda is finding one organization that gives everything it wants. Larkin is a first-line center who can elevate a contending team to a championship favorite. While the Minnesota Wild might be the favorite, other organizations have more assets.

For example, the Anaheim Ducks and Utah Mammoth would have the resources to acquire Larkin without having to involve a third team. The Ducks have plenty of young players, such as Mason McTavish, who could appeal to Yzerman. Meanwhile, the Mammoth arguably have the best farm system in the NHL.

Utah could include Tij Iginla or Caleb Desnoyers as headliners in a Larkin deal. If the Mammoth are willing to use their prospects to acquire a win-now player, the Red Wings need to be convinced. More likely than not, Yzerman would want a package that helps Detroit make the playoffs during the 2026-27 NHL season.

However, there is no doubt that Detroit can acquire a really good package for Larkin containing top prospects and first-round picks. It is a tough line to balance, but Larkin has to approve any deal. If Utah, Anaheim, or another team doesn’t come to the table, an organization like Minnesota or the Florida Panthers could attempt a three-team trade.

Yzerman and the Red Wings front office don’t have to rush a Larkin deal. The main priority is getting this move correct. However, it may take more than just two teams to get it done.

Read More: Blockbuster Trade Incoming? What the Detroit Red Wings Should Do After Dylan Larkin’s Trade Request

Police arrested six people during England’s 4-2 World Cup win over Croatia – including one for criminal trespass.

Arlington Police Department said officers also responded to two reports of fights inside the AT&T Stadium on Wednesday but neither incident resulted in an arrest.

Three people were arrested on suspicion of drugs offences, one on suspicion of public intoxication and another on suspicion of trademark counterfeiting involving goods valued at between $2,500 and $30,000.

None of those arrested are British nationals, the force confirmed.

Police said stadium staff usually deal with “unruly” spectators before requesting assistance from officers, adding that security staff often resolve incidents without police intervention.

Drones were used to monitor crowds and some officers made their way around the stadium’s perimeter on Segways hours before kick-off.

The arrest for criminal trespass came after eyewitnesses claimed scores of fans breached security and entered the venue without checks.

FIFA said it was unaware of any supporters entering the stadium without tickets.

Tailgating at football matches in the UK is now a criminal offence following thousands of ticketless fans storming Wembley ahead of the Euro 2020 final.

Lives were put at risk when supporters broke into Wembley Stadium, a subsequent review by Baroness Louise Casey found.

Tadej Pogačar narrowly missed a second stage win at the Tour de Suisse on Thursday amid concern for his partner Urška Žigart who had a heavy crash on the women's race.

Four time Tour de France champion Pogačar played catch-up in the 157.7 kilometres second stage around the city of Locarno but missed first place by a mere four seconds as Frenchman Romain Gregoire won from a six-strong escape group.

The group had led by around two minutes before Pogačar fought back on the final two category three climbs.

Pogačar had won the first stage with a big advantage on Wednesday and retained the overall lead 2 minutes 50 seconds ahead of Olympic champion and former Giro d'Italia winner Richard Carapaz of Ecuador.

Žigart had earlier crashed around one kilometre from the finish when she fell on a hump and broke her jaw, according to her team.

The 89th edition of the Tour de Suisse takes place over five instead of previously eight stages. It concludes on Sunday with a gruelling mountain stage where riders have to cross the Col de la Croix three times.

It is a tune-up for the the Tour de France starts on July 4 in Barcelona and runs until July 26.

Angels' 3.68 ERA starter has MLB teams 'incredibly enticed' in trade market originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

With how the 2026 season has gone, it would not be a surprise if the Los Angeles Angels were sellers by the 2026 MLB trade deadline.

The big question, though, will be how far their sell-off goes. Jo Adell might be a realistic trade candidate, as would any player who is set to hit free agency after 2026. But there is one pitcher who is seemingly garnering some serious trade interest this summer.

According to MLB insider Robert Murray of Fansided.com, the Angels' 3.68 ERA left-handed starter Reid Detmers is reportedly getting MLB teams "incredibly enticed" about the chance to add him in a trade this summer.

Reid Detmers has MLB teams 'incredibly enticed' in trade market

"Tarik Skubal, Freddy Peralta, and Joe Ryan will dominate the headlines in July and early August," Murray writes. "But the other pitcher that teams are incredibly enticed by is Los Angeles Angels left-hander Reid Detmers."

Detmers is a 26-year-old left-handed starting pitcher who has seen his trade stock soar recently after a few very strong starts.

In his last five outings, Detmers has a 2-0 record with 39 strikeouts and a 1.36 ERA in 33 innings pitched. He has a 3.68 ERA this season and has been pitching his best in the last month or so.

With teams around baseball always in need of starting pitching, it should be no surprise that Detmers is drawing serious trade interest this season.

MORE: Tarik Skubal being traded by Tigers would help him in free agency

But what makes Detmers so intriguing as a trade chip is that, unlike Skubal, Peralta, and even Ryan, Detmers is under club control through the 2028 season.

Not only is that a lot more appealing than a rental, but it should also help some teams, like the Chicago White Sox, that maybe aren't World Series contenders this season but still want to buy, add a player who can help in 2026 and beyond.

Teams around MLB are "incredibly enticed" about the prospect of adding Detmers in a trade. The Angels might be able to receive a massive haul if they do move on from the former 32nd round-pick by the Atlanta Braves in 2017.

More MLB news:

• 5 reasons to believe in Jordan Walker's breakout for Cardinals
• Ex-MLB GM projects White Sox to sell at trade deadline despite 2026 success
• Cubs’ cost to trade for Tarik Skubal from Tigers revealed by ex-MLB GM
• Yankees’ Ryan McMahon problem has a $25 million release solution
• Phillies extending Cristopher Sanchez to his $107 million deal was genius

(Nebraska Athletic Department Press Release by Matt Smith):

2026 Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Class Announced

Six accomplished student-athletes and one legendary head coach make up the 2026 University of Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame class, announced on June 18.

The 2026 class includes: Matt Hopper (baseball, 2000-03); Cassandra Leuthold (bowling, 2007-10); Dean Steinkuhler (football, 1979-83); Taylor Edwards (softball, 2011-14); Amber Holmquist (volleyball, 1999-2002); Ineta Radevica (women’s track and field, 2003-04); and John Cook (volleyball head coach, 2000-24).

The six student-athletes in the 2026 Hall of Fame Class combined for 21 All-America accolades, three individual NCAA titles and seven team national championships. Cook, the seventh head coach selected for the Hall of Fame, led Nebraska to a 722-103 record in his 25 seasons with 14 conference titles and four national championships.

“When you look at the list of accomplishments for the members of this year’s Hall of Fame class, it is a reminder of how extraordinary it is to be selected for the Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame,” Nebraska Athletic Director Troy Dannen said. “The individual accolades and team success the class achieved not only added to the rich history of Husker athletics, but these distinguished individuals serve as an inspiration for our current student-athletes and coaches. We look forward to welcoming each of them back to Lincoln and celebrating their legendary careers.”

The 2026 Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame class will be inducted in a ceremony on Friday, Oct. 2 before being recognized during the Nebraska-Maryland football game on Saturday, Oct. 3.The class will be permanently enshrined on a granite plaque with the names of the seven members added to the University of Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Plaza.

The Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Plaza is located on a walkway near the Osborne Legacy Complex, stretching from outside of East Memorial Stadium and continuing to the historic NU Coliseum. The University of Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Plaza is accessible to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week at no charge and is lit for night viewing. The plaza recognizes each annual Hall of Fame class, along with columns dedicated to the history and successes of each of Nebraska’s athletic programs.

2026 Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Class

Matt Hopper, Baseball (2000-03)

Cassandra Leuthold, Bowling (2006-10)

Dean Steinkuhler, Football (1979-83)

Taylor Edwards, Softball (2011-14)

Amber Holmquist, Volleyball (1999-2002)

Ineta Radevica, Women’s Track & Field (2003-04)

John Cook, Volleyball Head Coach (2000-24)

2026 Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame Class Bios

Matt Hopper, Baseball (2000-03), Golden, Colorado

A three-time All-American, Matt Hopper put up historic offensive numbers during his four-year Husker career from 2000 to 2003. Hopper started 247 games and posted a .350 career batting average with 338 hits, 55 doubles, 64 home runs, 271 RBIs and 246 runs scored. He ended his career with Nebraska and Big 12 records for career hits, home runs, RBIs and runs scored. Hopper burst onto the scene as a freshman in 2000, when he was a third-team All-American and the Big 12 Freshman of the Year. Hopper was a first-team All-American in 2001 when the Huskers made the College World Series for the first time in school history. After he helped the Huskers to a second straight trip to the CWS in 2002, Hopper ended his career as the 2003 Big 12 Player of the Year and a second-team All-American. During Hopper’s career, Nebraska won 195 games, captured two Big 12 regular-season championships and two Big 12 Tournament titles and advanced to the College World Series twice. Hopper earned his degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska in 2003.

Cassandra Leuthold, Bowling (2006-10), Black Hawk, South Dakota

Cassandra Leuthold posted one of the most distinguished bowling careers in Nebraska and NCAA history during her four-year career from 2006 to 2010. Individually, Leuthold was an All-American in each of her four seasons. She was the National Collegiate Rookie of the Year and a second-team All-American in 2007. Leuthold was a first-team All-American in both 2008 and 2009, and she was the NCAA Championship Most Outstanding Player in 2009 as Nebraska captured the national championship. Leuthold ended her career as the 2010 National Collegiate Bowler of the Year while earning her third consecutive first-team All-America honor. In her four seasons, Leuthold won 11 individual titles and helped Nebraska to one NCAA championship, one runner-up finish and one third-place finish. Leuthold earned her degree in nutrition, exercise & health science from the University of Nebraska in 2010.

Dean Steinkuhler, Football (1979-83), Burr, Nebraska

A standout offensive lineman at Nebraska, Dean Steinkuhler was a major award winner, a first-team All-American, an All-Century Team selection and a first-round NFL Draft pick. As a senior in 1983, Steinkuhler won the Outland Trophy, awarded annually to the top lineman in the country, and the Lombardi Award, given to the nation’s most outstanding interior player. He was just the sixth player in NCAA history to win both awards in the same season. In his two seasons as a starter on the offensive line (1982, 1983), Steinkuhler helped the Huskers to a 24-2 record, two Big Eight titles and a No. 3 final ranking in 1982 and No. 2 in 1983. Following his Husker career, Steinkuhler was the No. 2 overall pick in the 1984 NFL Draft, tying for the distinction of the highest-drafted offensive or defensive lineman in school history. In 1999, the Walter Camp Football Foundation named Steinkuhler to its All-Century Team. Steinkuhler was one of six offensive guards and 15 offensive linemen named to the All-Century team. His No. 71 jersey was retired in 1983, when Steinkuhler became just the sixth Husker to have his jersey retired.

Taylor Edwards, Softball (2011-14), Murrieta, California

Taylor Edwards rewrote the Nebraska softball offensive record book during her four standout seasons as a Husker from 2011 to 2014. A two-time All-American, Edwards started 231 games in her career and hit .327 with 220 hits, 41 doubles, 54 home runs and 202 RBIs. She ended her career with 17 all-time Nebraska records and a share of two NCAA records. Edwards earned third-team All-America honors as a freshman in 2011, becoming the first catcher to earn All-America recognition in program history. She was also one of 25 finalists for the 2011 USA Softball Player of the Year Award. In 2013, Edwards helped the Huskers to Oklahoma City, where she was a member of the Women’s College World Series All-Tournament team. As a senior in 2014, Edwards was a first-team All-American and the NFCA Division I Catcher of the Year, and she helped Nebraska to its first Big Ten regular-season title. Following her Husker career, Edwards played professionally and for the United States National Team and was an alternate for the 2020 Olympics. Her No. 12 jersey was retired in 2024. Edwards earned her degree in sociology from the University of Nebraska in 2015.

Amber Holmquist, Volleyball (1999-2002), Houston, Texas

Amber Holmquist was a national champion, an All-American, an Academic All-American and a conference player of the year during her decorated Nebraska career from 1999 to 2002. Holmquist totaled 1,122 kills on a .396 career hitting percentage while producing 728 career blocks. Holmquist ended her career as Nebraska’s all-time blocks leader among her nearly 20 school records and eight Big 12 records. In 2000, Holmquist led the nation in blocks and ranked fourth nationally in hitting percentage en route to second-team All-America accolades. Her play helped the Huskers to a 34-0 record and a national championship. Holmquist earned first-team All-America accolades in both 2001 and 2002, ranking second nationally in blocks in 2001 and third in 2002. As a senior, she shared the 2002 Big 12 Player of the Year award with two of her senior teammates. Holmquist was also named a second-team Academic All-American as a senior. In addition to helping the Huskers to the program’s second national championship, Nebraska won the Big 12 title every year of Holmquist’s career while boasting a 123-10 overall record and a 77-3 mark in conference play. Holmquist earned her degree in communication studies from the University of Nebraska in 2003.

Ineta Radevica, Women’s Track & Field (2003-04), Kraslava, Latvia

Ineta Radevica made the most of her two seasons as a Husker, winning three individual national championships, eight conference titles and earning eight All-America honors. Radevica was the Big 12 indoor and outdoor champion in both the triple jump and long jump in each of her two seasons at Nebraska (2003, 2004). In her first season at Nebraska in 2003, Radevica was an NCAA Indoor All-American in both the triple jump and long jump, finishing in the top five in both events. At the 2003 NCAA Outdoor Championships, Radevica won the triple jump and finished fourth in the long jump. The next season Radevica won both the NCAA indoor and outdoor triple jump titles while finishing third in the long jump at the indoor championships and fourth at the outdoor championships. Despite competing only two seasons, Radevica ended her career as Nebraska’s third-leading point scorer all-time at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. Following her time at Nebraska, Radevica went on to be a three-time Olympian who just missed the podium at the 2012 Olympics, finishing fourth in the long jump. Radevica earned her degree in economics from the University of Nebraska in 2005.

John Cook, Volleyball Head Coach (2000-24)

John Cook had a remarkably successful 25-year tenure as the head coach of Nebraska volleyball from 2000 to 2024. Cook guided the Huskers to four national championships, 14 conference titles, 12 NCAA Semifinals appearances and eight trips to the NCAA Final. He posted an incredible 722-103 record at Nebraska, winning nearly 88 percent of his matches as the Huskers’ head coach. With Cook at the helm, Nebraska produced numerous individual honors, including five Olympians, three AVCA Division I National Players of the Year, 72 All-Americans, three Academic All-Americans of the Year, 25 Academic All-Americans and 10 conference players of the year. Cook himself was a three-time AVCA National Coach of the Year and was a seven-time conference coach of the year. In addition to the victories and titles, Cook spurred Nebraska volleyball’s rise to national prominence. The Huskers’ NCAA record sellout streak began during Cook’s second season and continued through the remainder of his career. The growth of Nebraska volleyball was on display for the world to see on Aug. 30, 2023, when 92,003 fans packed Memorial Stadium to watch Nebraska defeat Omaha in front of the largest crowd to ever attend a women’s sporting event. Prior to his 25 years as Nebraska’s head coach, Cook served as a Husker assistant coach from 1988 to 1990 and as the Huskers’ associate head coach in 1999.

Campbell University sophomore transfer right-handed pitcher Katelyn Hubley has committed to Auburn, announced via her socials on Wednesday, June 17.

Hubley played one season at Campbell under former Auburn star and assistant coach Emily Carosone, where she recorded 163 innings with 150 strikeouts, 2.28 ERA, and one win in the circle. Her best of the season came in a game against Hofstra, where she tossed 11 strikeouts in 7 innings pitched.

Playing high school at Mills Godwin in Henrico, Virginia. She earned 1st Team All State Pitcher honors (2025), Region 5C Player of the Year (2025), and was a four-time All Region.

She now joins a Tigers team to continue to build under the head coaching duo of Chris and Kate Malveaux. Auburn has now added two pitchers this portal cycle with Hubley and Mak Stephens to replace the outgoing SJ Geurin and Malayna Tamborra. The pair will work alongside ace Ella Harrison to form a quality, experienced pitching staff for the 2027 season.

Check out the latest Auburn softball transfer portal moves by visiting Auburn Wire's Auburn softball transfer portal tracker.

Contact/Follow us @TheAuburnWire on  X (Twitter), and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Auburn news, notes, and opinions. You can also follow Jac on Twitter@Jac_Myrick

This article originally appeared on Auburn Wire: Auburn softball adds Campbell's Katelyn Hubley from transfer portal

Zohran Mamdani had already made himself part of the Knicks’ postseason story before the championship parade. The New York City mayor was seen at major playoff games, including the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs.

His presence around the team had become a talking point during the run, especially after reports about how his office arranged tickets for high-demand games at Madison Square Garden.

Mamdani was not watching from a distance as the Knicks chased history. So, once New York ended its 53-year title wait, his parade appearance felt inevitable.

The mayor confirmed that by joining the Knicks’ float, where his standout moment came alongside Karl-Anthony Towns.

Zohran Mamdani dances “Lean Back” with Karl-Anthony Towns at Knicks parade

Mamdani was spotted dancing “Lean Back” with Towns on the championship float, giving the parade a moment that felt unmistakably New York.

The song was released by Terror Squad in 2004 and became one of the defining club records of that era. Led by Fat Joe and Remy Ma, it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and became tied to its simple shoulder-driven dance.

Terror Squad are part of New York hip hop culture, while “Lean Back” has long carried the feel of a city anthem rather than just a chart hit.

For Towns, it was another relaxed moment in a week built around celebration, but it was different for Mamdani.

As politicians are used to a more measured world in their public appearances, it was a moment for him to showcase his connection to the city’s culture in an unusual way: dancing.

Read more:

RC Strasbourg Alsace have reached an agreement with IFK Göteborg regarding the transfer of Benjamin Brantlind (17), according to reports from journalist Fabrizio Romano.

The young Swedish talent, who was also reported to have been courted by numerous clubs, including Club Brugge KV, is said to have ultimately chosen the BlueCo project to continue his career.

Having come through the IFKG academy, Brantlind made his professional debut there in March 2024. Since then, the attacking midfielder has made 30 appearances for the club, including 12 this season, during which he has found the net once. A Sweden Under-19 international, he has already represented his country four times and scored five goals.

A new signing with an eye to the future, whose profile fits in with Racing’s recruitment strategy over recent seasons – a young player with huge potential who can play a part in the club’s plans in the medium term.

GFFN | Léo Aschi

Hearts have signed former Dundee and Dunfermline Athletic defender Malachi Fagan-Walcott from York City for an undisclosed fee.

The 24-year-old, who has agreed a four-year contract, was at the time Tottenham Hotspur's youngest-ever player when he made his debut in the Champions League round of 16 defeat by RB Leipzig in 2020.

But last season he helped York win the National League title, scoring eight goals and providing four assists in 37 appearances.

Overall, Fagan-Walcott has scored 14 times in 79 games for the club he joined nearly two years ago from Cardiff City.

The London-born defender first arrived in Scotland on loan to Dundee from Spurs in 2021, but his time at Dens Park was cut short by injury after just two games.

He joined Cardiff on his release by Spurs but only made one start and two substitute appearances and was sold to York after a successful six-month loan spell.

Before then, Fagan-Walcott had also had a loan spell with Dunfermline, making 15 appearances and scoring three goals in the latter half of 2023-24 season for the Championship club.

He becomes Hearts' fifth signing of the summer and comes the day after head coach Derek McInnes left to join Rangers.

Gears of War E-Day highlights Unreal Engine 5’s latest tech at State of Unreal 2026 Gears of War: E-Day is shaping up to be one of Unreal Engine 5’s flagship game releases. At State of Unreal 2026, The Coalition showcased how Gears of War: E-Day runs at 60 FPS on Xbox Series X with Unreal […]

The post Gears of War E-Day runs at 60 FPS with UE5 MegaLights on Xbox Series X appeared first on OC3D.

The Honor X80 Pro Max is scheduled to debut in China on June 22 with an 11,000mAh battery and a display rated for 10,000 nits of peak brightness. Ahead of the launch, the handset has appeared on the China Telecom website, revealing more of its specifications. According to the China Telecom listing, the Honor X80 Pro Max will be powered by the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 chipset and run Android 16-based MagicOS 10.0 out of the box. The listing also reveals that the handset will feature a 6.8-inch display, a specification Honor had not previously disclosed when announcing the panel's...

Today, Oppo has started teasing the upcoming global Reno16 phones through its official account on X. The company has partnered with K-pop girl group BABYMONSTER for the occasion. The phones are showcased in the video you can see below. Set the trend with BABYMONSTER and the stylish #OPPOReno16Series☄️#OPPOReno16SeriesxBABYMONSTER pic.twitter.com/JmQgderbei— OPPO (@oppo) June 18, 2026 With the teaser image you can see below, Oppo has confirmed the presence of a 50MP "Ultra Wide Selfie Camera" as well as the AI Remix Collage feature, and it's also revealed that the phones will be...

When Crime Boss: Rockay City launched in 2023, first on PC via the Epic Games Store and later on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, it seemed like the latest celebrity-backed dud. It was critically panned on launch, and despite its Hollywood star power getting a lot of eyes on it, lacking gameplay and several severe technical issues earned it low scores across the board. But that was three years ago. Now, it's reached over 1 million copies sold and is celebrating its two-year Steam anniversary with a major free 2.0 update. Wccftech's Alessio Palumbo called Rockay City a "half-baked, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/crime-boss-rockay-city-1m-copies-sold-2-0-update/

ASML CEO, Christophe Fouquet, believes that the demand from Elon Musk's Terafab project will be similar to fabrication plants capable of manufacturing millions of wafers per month. The executive spoke to Bloomberg, and his discussion ranged from data centers in space to the current stage of the semiconductor industry in the context of major demand from the AI buildout and Europe's position in the AI race. ASML CEO Says Europe Is Quite Behind In The AI Race The Terafab project was announced by Musk earlier this year as part of his efforts to procure chips for Tesla's edge computing and […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/asml-ceo-warns-europe-is-quite-behind-in-ai-race-as-us-buys-80-of-advanced-chips/

DON'T NOD, the studio behind the recently released Aphelion and the team behind the first two Life is Strange titles, is currently looking for a way to secure its future after Tencent decided against further short-term investment in the narrative-focused studio. Following claims made by French reporter Gauthier 'Gautoz' Andres that the studio is rapidly approaching a situation where it would be "out of cash," DON'T NOD responded to the claims in a statement sent to Game Developer. Though the studio did not claim the situation to be as dire as Andres put it, it confirmed that Tencent had decided […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/dont-nod-looking-to-extend-cash-runway-as-tencent-pulls-additional-funding/

Through one way or another, Huawei manages to source its goods from overseas manufacturers, despite the U.S. trade ban in place. Sadly, while the Chinese firm has successfully circumvented these sanctions, its other partners are suffering, with one of them agreeing to pay a $36 million fine due to its business alliance with the technology giant. German titan Bosch will pay $36 million to U.S. authorities because it was learned that Huawei purchased a truckload of smartphone parts It has been nearly seven years since Huawei was placed on the U.S. Export Control list, but efforts are still being made […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/us-trade-sanctions-are-having-everyone-else-except-huawei/

More Fake GPUs are circulating online marketplaces, which use plastic chips to imitate NVIDIA RTX GPUs and scrap memory dies. You Need To Be Extra Cautious of Graphics Cards Being Sold Online As NVIDIA RTX Graphics Cards Have Been Spotted With Glued Plastic GPUs Over the years, we have seen several instances of fake graphics cards appearing online. Most of these graphics cards are sold through online marketplaces, & the region most affected by such products is the Asia Pacific. Previously, we have seen graphics cards with missing components and different GPUs, but this time, scammers have gone an extra […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/scammers-selling-fake-nvidia-rtx-graphics-cards-glued-plastic-gpus-scrap-memory/

Google AI Overviews cited self-promotional “best” listicles while excluding the brands behind them from recommendations in 69% of cases, according to a new analysis of B2B software queries by Lily Ray.

Brands have used self-serving listicles to influence AI search results, but Ray found Google often cited those pages while recommending competitors instead.

By the numbers. Ray analyzed 100 B2B “best [category] software” queries in Google AI Overviews across three dates: April 15, May 15, and June 8.

• Of the 80 prompts that triggered an AI Overview, self-promotional listicles were cited 323 times.
• In 224 cases, Google cited a brand’s own page but didn’t recommend that brand.

Competitors get recommended. Ray documented several cases where Google cited a brand’s “best” listicle while recommending better-known competitors.

• For “best LMS for selling courses,” Google cited Oasis LMS but did not recommend it. Instead, it recommended Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and Teachable — all of which are named in the Oasis LMS article.
• Similar patterns appeared in queries for help desk, task management, survey, CRM, and SEO software.

Stronger brands still appeared. Brands that already led their categories, were widely mentioned by third-party sources, and had stronger link profiles were more likely to appear in AI Overview recommendations, according to Ray.

• The data showed a consistent split between citations and recommendations. A brand’s page could appear as a source while competitors received the recommendation.

Organic visibility fell. Ray also reported organic search declines for many sites that relied heavily on self-promotional listicles.

• The declines began around Jan. 20, across dozens of sites she analyzed. Many also scaled other SEO- and GEO-focused content formats, including AI-generated articles, comparison pages, and large volumes of “best” pages ranking their own brand first.
• Those declines continued and accelerated during Google’s May 2026 core update, according to Ray.

Review sites gained citations. Ray found Google relied heavily on third-party and user-generated-content sites for “best” queries, with Reddit citations increasing sharply in recent months.

• Forbes, Reddit, and YouTube were among the most-cited domains in AI Overview responses containing “best.”

Why we care. A citation is not a recommendation. Your content can appear in an AI answer while helping competitors capture the visibility that matters most.

Catch up quick. Search Engine Land previously reported that some SaaS and B2B brands lost 30% to 50% of their visibility after relying heavily on self-ranked “best” pages, based on earlier research from Ray.

• Search Engine Land also reported that the tactic may create legal risk under the FTC’s Consumer Review Rule when company-controlled content is presented as independent reviews, reviews are not based on real use, or material relationships are not clearly disclosed.

About the data. Using Ahrefs Brand Radar, Ray collected AI Overview answer text and cited sources for 100 B2B “best [category] software” queries at three checkpoints between April and June. The analysis measured two outcomes: whether a self-promotional listicle was cited and whether the brand behind it was recommended.

The report. Why Calling Yourself the Best Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI Search

PPC budgeting in 2026 isn’t just about setting spend levels. It’s about knowing when to adjust budgets, when to scale campaigns, and how the data feeding Google’s automation influences those decisions.

Google’s automation systems have always followed the signals you give them. In 2026, they follow them faster and with more confidence than before, which means clean signal architecture matters more than ever.

The fundamentals of budget management haven’t changed. What has changed is how quickly a poorly architected account can waste budget.

Two budget mechanics you need to understand right now

Before you adjust targets, audiences, or bid strategies, make sure you understand how these two budget controls work.

The ad scheduling pacing change

Google now paces all campaigns with ad scheduling toward the full 30.4x monthly billing cap, regardless of how many days your ads actually run. Before this change, a $100 daily budget on a weekday-only campaign targeted roughly $2,200 in monthly spend across 22 active days. 

Now it targets $3,040, compressed into those same weekdays. The billing ceiling hasn’t changed. The system pursues it more aggressively within your active windows.

If your campaigns use ad scheduling, recalculate your daily budget based on your intended monthly spend rather than active days: divide your monthly target by 30.4 and set that as your daily limit. A $2,200 monthly target becomes a $72 daily budget. Campaigns running 24/7 aren’t affected.

Campaign total budgets

Available for Demand Gen, Search, Standard Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube campaigns, campaign total budgets let you set a fixed spend ceiling for a defined period rather than managing a daily limit. 

For Search, Standard Shopping, and PMax, the window is three to 90 days. For Demand Gen and YouTube, it can run up to a year. 

Unlike daily budgets, there’s no daily spending cap. The system can front-load or back-load spend within the flight to hit the total, which makes these useful for promotions and product launches, but worth monitoring closely when run alongside always-on campaigns. 

Budget type can’t be changed after campaign creation, so the decision is final at setup.

What actually controls how Google Ads spends your budget

Efficiency targets usually constrain spend before budgets do

Smart Bidding treats your efficiency target as the primary constraint and your daily budget as the secondary one. 

If you set a $50 tCPA and market conditions are returning leads at $80,the system restricts bids rather than generating conversions above your target. The daily budget cap never gets hit because the efficiency target is stopping spend first. What looks like a budget problem is usually a target problem.

When the gap between target and market reality is that wide, set your initial target closer to where the market is actually converting. Let the system accumulate conversion data and establish what efficiency looks like for your account, then gradually tighten toward your real goal. 

The 10%-20% margin above target is a fine-tuning tool. It gives Smart Bidding enough room to find conversion opportunities when you’re already close to where you want to be, not when you’re $30 away.

Performance Max decides where your budget goes

Performance Max automatically distributes budget across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, and Discover. You set the total. Google decides the split. 

Without brand exclusions, PMax will serve branded queries that would have converted through Search campaigns at a lower cost, which inflates its apparent efficiency while increasing your overall costs.

Campaign-level negative keyword lists for PMax have been available since January 2025, with the per-campaign limit expanded to 10,000 in March 2025. If your PMax campaigns predate that rollout, audit whether you have categorical exclusion lists built at the campaign level. 

Jobs, salary, free, login, reviews, and any vertical-specific non-customer queries should be in there before the campaign launches, not added reactively from the search term report.

AI Max expands where your ads can appear

AI Max for Search, generally available since April, expands query matching beyond your keyword list, generates ad copy from your existing assets, and adjusts landing page targeting dynamically. 

The budget risk is query drift: spend that was concentrated on your defined keywords now competes with AI-generated matches. AI Max provides search term reporting, which makes monitoring tractable. Review it closely during the first 60 days and proactively build categorical negatives.

The signal problem that makes budget allocation fail

An insurance broker running Smart Bidding toward form completions saw conversion volume rise 416% year over year while revenue stayed flat. The conversion action was firing on form starts, not form submissions. 

The system had found the most efficient path to form page interactions and was scaling it confidently. A significant portion of those interactions were Cyrillic-language spam submissions from outside the service area. The dashboard was green. The pipeline was empty.

This is the core mechanism behind most budget waste in lead generation: identical conversion values across all form fills leave Smart Bidding with no basis to distinguish a qualified lead from a bounced session. 

The system optimizes for volume and finds the cheapest path to completions. It follows its instructions precisely. The instructions are the problem.

Primary conversions should be high-intent, high-value actions that directly train Smart Bidding. Secondary conversions, such as newsletter signups, page views, and soft engagement, belong in reporting but should not influence bidding. Getting this distinction right is more consequential for budget efficiency than any adjustment to bid strategy.

Journey-aware bidding, currently in beta for Search campaigns on Target CPA, addresses the delayed-conversion problem that compounds this issue for B2B accounts. 

Instead of optimizing only toward front-end actions, the system learns from the full lead-to-sale funnel — form submissions through closed deals — using intermediate stages as learning signals without counting them as biddable conversions. 

The feature requires first-party CRM data, connected via Offline Conversion Import or Enhanced Conversions for Leads, to function. Without that pipeline data, there’s nothing for the system to learn beyond the form fills it was already optimizing toward. 

For accounts not yet in the beta, extending your conversion window to 90 days and evaluating performance over 60- to 90-day periods is the right workaround.

First-party data as budget guidance

Customer Match is the most direct way to tell automation what valuable traffic looks like. Google enforces a 540-day maximum membership duration for Customer Match lists, effective April 2025. Any record not refreshed within that window expires, which shrinks your list over time without regular uploads or a continuous CRM sync.

The most effective use of Customer Match for budget allocation is to exclude before expanding. 

Apply your existing customer list as an exclusion on acquisition campaigns so the acquisition budget reaches new customers rather than people who are already buying from you. 

Run retention separately, with its own budget, targets, and messaging. Mixing both in the same campaign with identical conversion goals produces a blended signal. Smart Bidding typically settles on the segment that converts most cheaply, which is rarely the most valuable one.

Note that using Customer Match for targeting and bid adjustments requires at least 90 days of account history and $50,000 in lifetime spend. Exclusions are available to all compliant accounts regardless of spend history.

Scaling in 2026

For always-on daily budget campaigns, the 10-20% weekly increase guidance still applies. For campaigns using ad scheduling, work in monthly targets and divide by 30.4 rather than scaling daily limits.

Smart Bidding Exploration is now in open beta for Performance Max, with Shopping expansion announced at GML 2026. On Search campaigns, it generates, on average, 27% more unique converting users by pursuing queries the account wasn’t previously winning, temporarily relaxing efficiency targets to test new conversion sources. Short-term CPA or ROAS fluctuations during the exploration phase are expected. Evaluate on a 60-day window before drawing conclusions.

Demand-led pacing, announced at GML 2026 and rolling out for Search and Shopping campaigns, dynamically shifts daily spend toward periods of predicted higher consumer demand within your existing budget parameters. It’s a complement to daily budget management, not a replacement. Monitor your account for rollout availability.

For B2B accounts, scale on 60- to 90-day evaluation windows, not 30-day ones. Short windows systematically undervalue campaigns with long sales cycles by cutting spend before the attribution data has time to accumulate.

Adobe announced a new solution to help businesses ensure their brands are visible, trusted, and chosen across AI surfaces.

Called Adobe Brand Visibility, the product is part of Adobe CX Enterprise, an agentic AI system designed to simplify customer lifecycle management — from acquisition and prospect engagement to conversion and long-term loyalty.

AI traffic is exploding. The use of LLMs to identify and research products and services marks a significant shift for both marketers and consumers. Alongside the announcement, Adobe released data showing substantial growth in LLM usage. AI traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026. In the travel sector, AI traffic increased 2,215% over the same period.

• “We used to get back the same thing (a SERP page with links on it). Now, the answers appear to be random, but they aren’t at scale. But companies don’t have tools to do it,” Loni Stark, vice president of strategy and product, Adobe, told MarTech.

Measuring brand visibility in AI search. Adobe Brand Visibility is Adobe’s first generative engine optimization (GEO) product since its acquisition of Semrush in May. It combines Adobe LLM Optimizer with Semrush’s AI Optimization tool.

Adobe Brand Visibility draws on nearly 300 million real-world AI search prompts, which Adobe says is the largest global database of its kind, helping teams identify which prompts they’re winning or losing.

Combined with Adobe’s first-party signals from owned channels, the platform gives marketers a view of how their brands appear across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity. Metrics include mention frequency, audience reach, competitive share of voice, and content gaps. AI agents then surface prioritized recommendations, enabling teams to deploy updates quickly and measure their impact directly in the platform.

Competitive intelligence. Adobe Brand Visibility includes competitive brand comparison tools that let marketers benchmark against competitors, identify where their brands are cited, track brand mentions, and analyze historical trends.

The platform also includes SEO intelligence, reflecting the continued importance of SEO fundamentals in AI search visibility. Powered by Semrush data spanning 28.5 billion keywords and 43 trillion backlinks collected over 17 years, it shows where existing search authority should be generating AI citations and where content investments can close gaps across both channels.

There’s still much to learn about how LLMs work and how brands can improve visibility, but Star is confident Adobe is well positioned to lead in this space.

• “Adobe had owned data. Semrush had data and trends. We don’t have all of the answers, but we have the best data,” Stark said.

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini to “review my on-page SEO,” and you’ll get a perfectly reasonable answer.

Reasonable. Generic. Boring. Uninspired. And almost identical to the answer your competitors get when they ask the same question.

That’s the problem with AI out of the box. It’s a generalist. It knows a little about everything and nothing about you — your business, your customers, your market, or the way you do SEO. The questions are loosely framed and inevitably come back with general answers.

The good news is that’s also the opportunity. The same tools that produce generic answers can become specialist assistants that encode your knowledge, process, and standards. No code required.

Building one is simpler than most people think. With tools like GPTs, Gems, and Claude Projects, you can package your SEO process into a reusable assistant that helps identify opportunities, automate repetitive tasks, and apply your expertise consistently.

Why generic AI gives generic answers

You don’t need a computer science degree here, but a basic understanding of how AI works helps explain the benefits of this approach.

Large language models are prediction engines. They’ve been trained on a huge slice of the internet and human knowledge, and when you ask a question, they predict the most plausible response based on everything they’ve seen.

In other words, by default, you get something close to the internet’s average opinion on a topic.

For SEO, the internet’s average opinion is … fine. It’s the same advice repeated across a million articles. Check your title tags. Improve your content. Build some links. Blah.

What the model doesn’t know is anything about your specific situation:

• Your business, services, and commercial priorities.
• Your marketplace and competitors.
• Your customers and the problems they’re trying to solve.
• Your way of working — the checklists, thresholds, and judgment calls you’ve refined over years.

The output is only as contextual as the input. Give it nothing, and you get the average. Give it your knowledge, and you get something far more useful.

It’s a computing problem as old as computing itself: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

From generalist to specialist

There are a few ways to add that missing context, in increasing order of effort:

• Better prompts: Include context in your question: who you are, what the business does, who the customer is, and what good looks like. This works, but you end up pasting the same 500-word preamble into every chat. It’s tedious and easy to skip when you’re busy, which impacts the quality of the output.
• Custom instructions and knowledge files: Most AI platforms now let you save a set of standing instructions and upload reference documents. The AI reads these every time, so you set the context once and it persists.
• Simple AI apps: Package those instructions and documents into a named, reusable tool with a specific job. This is where GPTs and Gems come in.
• Actual software: Use AI coding tools to build real scripts and applications when you need automation beyond a chat interface.

The great thing is that the jump from a “big prompt” to a “simple app” is smaller than it sounds.

The skill is the same: clearly describing the job, the process, and the standards. If you can write a good brief for a junior team member, or a standard operating procedure (SOP), you can absolutely build one of these.

This is an important point because most people assume this is far more complicated than it is, and that assumption is holding them back. You don’t need to be a developer to do this.

The development of custom tools is no longer a heavily technical job. It’s becoming more of a creative endeavor enabled by these new AI tools and the simple, descriptive way of building apps.

If you can document your process, you can build an AI app.

The platforms: GPTs, Gems, Claude, and Replit

A quick tour of the main options for building simple AI apps:

• GPTs (ChatGPT): Custom versions of ChatGPT with their own instructions, knowledge files, and capabilities. They’re shareable via the GPT Store, which is handy if you want to publish a tool for clients or your audience.
• Gems (Gemini): Google’s equivalent. Custom versions of Gemini with instructions and knowledge files, with the obvious appeal for SEOs living in the Google ecosystem alongside Search Console, Analytics, Drive, and Sheets.
• Claude Projects (Claude): Anthropic’s take. Project-level instructions and knowledge with a large context window, so it can hold a lot of your documentation in mind at once. My personal favorite at the moment.
• Replit: A browser-based platform where you describe an app in plain English, and AI builds and deploys actual working software. Use this when a chat interface isn’t enough and you want a real tool with a real interface processing real data.
• Claude Code: An agentic coding tool from Anthropic where you delegate coding tasks in plain language, and it writes, runs, and fixes the code. It’s brilliant for building scripts that crunch large exports — say, processing a 100,000-row Search Console export that would choke a chat window.

For most SEO and marketing professionals dealing with day-to-day optimization work, the sweet spot is the first tier: GPTs, Gems, or Claude Projects. They take minutes to build, require no code, and capture 80% of the value.

I’ll use Gemini Gems for the worked example below, as it’s the closest to home for those of us who live in Google’s world. The principles transfer directly to GPTs and Claude, and if you want to build something a little more advanced, have a play with Replit.

Why not use existing SEO tools?

Standard SEO tools are brilliant at what they do — crawling, rank tracking, and link data. I use them every day. But they share a weakness: They’re generic by design, while your business is totally unique (or at least it should be). They have to work for every business in every industry, so they can’t know what matters to you. Everyone sees the same scores, the same recommendations, and the same “issues,” many of which don’t matter for your situation.

The tools are also largely focused on analysis and opportunity. The kinds of tools you can build with AI are more focused on the actual work.

Vanilla AI has the same problem from a different direction. Hugely capable, zero context.

The strength of building your own simple AI tools is personalization:

• Your business: The AI knows your services, priorities, and commercial goals.
• Your marketplace: It understands your competitors, customers, and niche.
• Your knowledge: It applies your process — the way you’ve learned to do this work over the years — rather than the internet’s average.

That last point is the big one. After 30 years of doing this, my honest take is that the value isn’t the AI. The value is the knowledge and process you encode into it. Your experience is what matters — the AI is just your superpower.

What should you automate?

A simple rule: Automate repetitive tasks. Good candidates are tasks that are:

• Repetitive: You do them the same way, over and over.
• Process-driven: You could write the steps down for a junior team member to follow.
• Data-heavy: They involve staring at exports and spotting patterns — exactly what machines are good at and humans get bored with and subsequently do poorly.

Reviewing Search Console data ticks all three boxes. So do first-pass on-page reviews, log file triage, internal link analysis, and monthly reporting prep.

What you don’t automate is judgment: strategy, prioritization against business goals, and the final call on what actually ships. The AI does the legwork and surfaces the candidates. You decide.

Example: Search Console quick-wins Gem

Let’s build a simple tool to help you mine Google Search Console for content ideas and easy wins.

I wrote “How to unlock easy wins in Google Search Console” two years ago, covering the creaky old human way of doing it. Let’s automate it to free up time for the really valuable creative work.

Note: This is a purposely simple example that’s ideal for AI and automation because the task is repetitive and the data is free.

Step 1: Define the job

Write one sentence describing what the tool does:

• “Review Google Search Console performance data and identify prioritized quick-win opportunities, with specific recommended actions for each.”

Simple enough.

Step 2: Document your process

This is the important bit, and it’s where you have to think about the process.

What do you actually do here? What process do you follow? What easy wins and opportunities are you looking for?

• Striking-distance keywords: Queries ranking just off page one (or just off the top positions) with meaningful impressions. Small improvements here can have an outsized impact.
• High impressions, low CTR: You’re visible but not winning the click — usually a title and meta description problem, or a SERP feature is eating your lunch.
• Declining queries and pages: Anything trending down versus the previous period that deserves attention before it becomes a problem.
• Query-page mismatches: Queries landing on the wrong page, or multiple pages competing for the same query.
• Unexpected queries: Things you rank for accidentally that hint at content opportunities.

For each of these, also note the thresholds and judgment calls. What counts as “meaningful impressions” — 100? 500? What CTR is “low” for position 3 versus position 8?

This is your experience being made explicit, possibly for the first time.

Step 3: Write the Gem instructions

Now open Gemini, create a new Gem, and translate that process into instructions. A solid structure is:

• Role: Who the Gem is.
• Task: What it does with the data it’s given.
• Process: The steps, checks, and thresholds — your documented process from Step 2.
• Output: The exact format you want back.
• Guardrails: What it should never do.

Here’s an abridged example to adapt:

Role: You are an experienced SEO analyst. You are methodical, skeptical, and prioritize commercial impact over vanity metrics.

Task: I will provide an export of Google Search Console performance data (queries and/or pages, with clicks, impressions, CTR, and position). Review it and identify quick-win opportunities.

Process: Check for, in priority order:

1. Striking-distance queries — average position 5–15 with 100+ impressions.
2. High-impression, low-CTR queries — flag where CTR is significantly below what you’d expect for that position.
3. Pages or queries declining versus the comparison period.
4. Multiple pages ranking for the same query.

Output: A prioritized table with opportunity, query/page, current metrics, recommended action, and expected impact (high/medium/low). Maximum 15 rows. Quality over quantity.

Below the table, provide a short plain-English summary of the three actions I should take first.

Guardrails: Only use the data provided. Never invent queries, pages, or metrics. If the data is insufficient to assess something, say so. Ask clarifying questions if the export format is unclear.

That guardrails section matters more than people realize. “Only use the data provided” is your main defense against the AI confidently inventing things.

Step 4: Add knowledge files

Gems can reference uploaded knowledge files. This is where you fine-tune things and add depth without bloating the instructions.

Examples include:

• Your on-page optimization checklist (for when the Gem recommends title or content changes).
• Your title and meta description guidelines, so suggested rewrites follow your standards.
• A short brand and business context document — who the client is, what they sell, and which products or services are commercial priorities.

This lets the Gem prioritize opportunities that matter, not just opportunities that exist. That’s especially important when reviewing Search Console data, as most sites show up for a wide range of searches that aren’t aligned with the client’s core goals.

Step 5: Save it

It really is that simple. Hit save, and you’ve created an AI app.

Step 6: Feed it data and test

Export your performance data from Search Console (Performance report > Export, or via the API or Sheets if you want more rows), then start a chat with your Gem and upload the file.

Browse to the Performance report and click Export in the upper-right corner. In this example, I use Google Sheets to keep everything in the Google ecosystem.

Then upload the file and ask for the output you want.

The Gem’s output — a prioritized quick-wins table for a real site

If at first you don’t succeed: The first output here wasn’t terribly useful for this site.

The recommendations didn’t align with the client’s goals. I had to revisit my third knowledge file regarding the business’s commercial goals and priorities.

After refining that document and running the analysis again, the suggestions became much more useful.

Step 7: Iterate like you would with a junior team member

The first version will get things wrong. That’s expected, and it’s actually the useful part.

A bad recommendation is a way to identify what could be improved. Whatever your answer is, that’s a rule that was missing from the instructions. Add it, and the Gem gets a little closer to working the way you do.

Treat it like a new team member. Review its work, correct it, and update the brief. After a few rounds, you’ll have something that delivers a genuinely useful first pass in seconds — and a documented process that’s valuable in its own right.

A note of caution

Some honesty before you let this loose on client work:

• AI gets things wrong: Confidently. Always verify recommendations against the actual data before acting, and never let AI output go straight to a client without review.
• Mind the data: GSC exports are business data. Check the privacy and data settings on whatever platform you use, especially when client information is involved, and make sure your approach aligns with any agreements you have in place.
• It’s a first pass, not a final answer: The tool surfaces candidates. You supply the judgment. The moment you stop checking is the moment you make a mistake.

More simple SEO tools to build

Once you’ve built one, the pattern repeats. Same recipe — role, task, process, output, guardrails, and knowledge files — different job.

Any manual task you do repeatedly is a good candidate for this type of tooling. Examples include:

• Keyword research assistant. Feed it seed terms and keyword exports. It clusters by intent and maps keywords to your site structure using your intent categories and customer personas.
• On-page optimization reviewer. Paste a URL’s content and target query. It reviews the page against your checklist and suggests improvements in your preferred style.
• Technical SEO triage. Feed it crawl exports. It prioritizes issues based on actual impact for your site rather than default tool severity scores.
• Link opportunity finder. Feed it competitor backlink exports. It identifies realistic, relevant prospects based on your criteria and drafts outreach angles.
• Content strategist. Load it with your personas and content strategy frameworks. It generates briefs and ideas anchored to real customer problems rather than generic topics.
• Analytics insight reviewer. Feed it GA4 exports. It summarizes what changed, why it might have changed, and what’s worth investigating in plain English.
• Search Console opportunity finder. The example we just built, easily extended into variants for content decay, cannibalization, or indexing reviews.

Each of these is an afternoon’s work.

The constraint isn’t technical. It’s whether you’ve documented your process clearly enough to hand it over. If not, this is a good opportunity to systemize your business and accelerate the work with a simple app.

You can also apply the same approach across digital marketing: building personas, improving your homepage for AI-driven search, comparing SEO, PPC, and AI strategies, or tackling whatever else falls under the modern marketer’s remit.

Your knowledge is the product

The AI was never the valuable part. Anyone can open Gemini. What they can’t do is replicate the process you’ve built over years of doing the work.

Your knowledge, experience, and process are the product. AI helps you apply them at scale.

Tools come and go. Knowledge compounds. Write yours down, encode it, and let the machines do the boring bits.

Content operations can run on instinct at a small scale. With a strong editorial team, a handful of trusted writers, and an understanding of voice, there’s usually enough discipline to keep the calendar moving.

But some businesses aren’t built that way. For media rollups, large affiliate networks, entertainment properties, sports brands, and other content-led businesses, publishing at triple-digit volumes per day makes sense. 

In some cases, it’s necessary to survive because content is the operating model rather than a marketing function, as it is in many B2B organizations.

At that scale, content strategies don’t break because of content. More often, they break because economics, systems, and editorial judgment stop speaking to each other.

Not every content category can support that scale

That B2B distinction is important. If you sell a niche manufacturing ERP, you simply don’t need that scale of content. There’s not enough to publish. You’d be burning cash and operating outside the market.

Some categories have the depth and audience appetite required to sustain hundreds of daily articles. Sports is an obvious example. There are games, trades, injuries, recaps, rankings, interviews, opinion pieces, explainers, storylines, and the list goes on.

A business like The Athletic can support significant publishing volume because audience demand is real, while the revenue model includes subscriptions, direct sales, programmatic display, affiliate revenue, and likely other sources under the hood.

In Q2 2025, The Athletic generated $54 million in revenue, according to its last standalone financial report. Of that, 64% came from subscriptions, 26% from advertising, and 10% from affiliate and licensing revenue.

When most revenue comes from people actively choosing to pay, editorial quality is no longer a judgment call. It’s the most important commercial requirement. Economics, systems, and editorial judgment are forced to speak the same language.

Other models are more fragile. The clearest example is when monetization is driven primarily by programmatic display measured by RPM (say, more than 70% of revenue), with content rewritten from existing coverage or produced around short-term search and social opportunities, where margins require high output and very low production costs.

The formula is simple:

• Revenue = (Pageviews ÷ 1,000) × RPM
• Profit = ((Pageviews ÷ 1,000) × RPM) − Production Cost

So if a website earns 4,000 pageviews per article at a $16 RPM, it generates $64 in revenue.

Subtract production costs. The margin gets thin fast.

To generate meaningful profit, the organization has little choice but to publish hundreds of articles per day while doing everything it can to maintain quality, discoverability, and audience trust.

That’s where these content strategies break.

A content model that breaks under its own weight

More content can look like more revenue. But the spreadsheet tells only a fraction of the story.

Numbers don’t show editorial quality, whether thinner work is being produced to feed the machine, or whether monetization decisions are inadvertently weakening the asset.

Data surfaces where that drift starts. Points captured within a CMS include:

• Content types.
• Categories.
• Tags.
• Author and editor attribution.

Cross-referenced with sessions, pageviews, pageviews per session, session duration, RPM, source/medium, and other metrics.

That lets analysts drill into content types by source, category, and tag, while providing visibility into top performers, opportunities to optimize the ad stack by content type, and more.

Here are some simple scenarios that highlight what that looks like in practice:

• An analyst runs a pivot table on an entertainment property and notices higher pageviews from Google Discover per article among list content in the reality television category tagged to a specific show. Since traffic equals more revenue, the conclusion is to write more lists about that show.
• An analyst notices RPM is lower on features than lists, even though average word counts are the same. The reason is that the ad stack serves programmatic display after each image, and features have four times fewer images than lists. Since images drive higher RPM, the conclusion is to increase the number of images in features or reduce the number of published features in favor of more lists.

Fairly simple stuff on the surface. However, this is where judgment becomes the difference between a healthy operation and one that’s quietly eating itself.

The systems that prevent failure

Scaling these operations past 100 writers is mainly a question of whether the business has the systems, data, and judgment required to keep the operation from collapsing under its own volume.

It’s worth noting that 100 writers is rarely just 100 writers. For many of these businesses, it’s 100 writers across a dozen properties, which is actually more than 1,000 writers when you account for the full footprint.

Independent publishers don’t typically hit that scale because the infrastructure requires a level of investment they most likely don’t have access to.

That infrastructure includes clearly defined communication structures for editors, project management ownership, and comprehensive guides covering writing, linking, imagery, social, and CMS usage.

Without them, standards can degrade unpredictably across properties, and editors lose the ability to diagnose why or quickly point people toward resources when putting out fires.

On the data side, granularity is a must. Without consistent tagging and categorization built into the CMS from the start, analytics can become too fuzzy to act on.

Performance needs to be attributable at every level, rolled up into a P&L for each property, and then rolled up again across the conglomerate.

Technical infrastructure is essential as well, often in ways editorial teams wouldn’t expect.

If you consider how to get images into Google Discover, for example, it requires CDN delivery within specific guidelines. That’s more of an engineering problem than an editorial one. User roles and permissions across CMS and revenue dashboards are another example, along with the development resources required to implement the CMS architecture needed for data capture and reporting in the first place.

Proprietary systems can also be beneficial depending on a business’s scale. If you’re a rollup with a dozen properties operating on one or two CMS templates, it’s much easier to make bulk optimizations or accelerate the integration of newly acquired properties.

Channel distribution isn’t static either. Platform value to publishers shifts. Think about when Facebook stopped sharing news links in Canada. It changes the economics of whether a platform is worth optimizing for. Consistent monitoring and testing need to be built in.

The judgment that keeps it from collapsing

The systems above create favorable conditions, but they don’t guarantee sound judgment.

Let’s revisit one of the examples above:

• The ad stack serves programmatic display after each image. Editorial guidelines require one image per entry in a list. This generates higher RPM across Google Discover traffic for lists with 20 thin entries at 1,000 words than for a well-constructed feature.

If you’re looking only at the spreadsheet, you’d favor doing as much of that as possible. That’s tempting, especially if employers incentivize target RPMs or sessions per article as KPIs tied to bonus compensation.

However, thin content at volume isn’t ideal for organic visibility. Once readers and search engines encounter too much low-quality output, the traffic disappears.

You’d essentially optimize for short-term yield, reinforce that behavior through employee bonuses, and damage the asset in the process.

Or another example:

• An editor notices that updating a datePublished timestamp drives a short-term bump in traffic. The conclusion is to roll out timestamp updates across hundreds of pages.

The problem is that doing it at scale without substantive edits and strict guidelines may create distrust. That’s the judgment call.

Three things need to be held in tension: economic logic, infrastructure and systems, and the judgment not to sacrifice long-term gains for short-term wins.

While that sounds like common sense, these responsibilities are often owned by different people who don’t speak the same language.

Finding a way to bridge that gap is the most important challenge in a scaled content operation. Diversified revenue streams like The Athletic’s help enforce that alignment.

Otherwise, your content strategy will probably fail when you scale past 100 writers. And the examples above are just two of hundreds of scenarios where the spreadsheet points one way, and the right decision points another.

Get it right, and you can scale to 1,000 writers.

For the past two years, the SEO industry has been asking Google for two things: more visibility into AI traffic and more control over how content appears in AI experiences.

Last week, Google started delivering both.

They announced new controls that allow site owners to opt out of AI-powered experiences (AI Overviews, AI Mode, etc.) and introduced new AI reporting within Google Search Console. (Note that both of these are in early beta and are not yet available for everyone.)

On paper, this is a victory for things moving in the right direction for publishers.

Instead, the conversation immediately split into camps. Some focused on the new reporting. Others focused on the new controls and began debating whether to opt out of AI altogether.

What caught my attention wasn’t the announcement itself. It was how quickly the conversation shifted from gaining visibility to voluntarily giving it up.

View embedded content

What this actually means

Before we go any further, let’s clear up what Google actually announced.

The new controls do not turn off AI Overviews, stop people from using AI Mode, or slow AI adoption. Users are still going to search and ask questions, and increasingly do so through AI-powered experiences.

Google introduced a way for publishers to have more control over whether their content can be surfaced in those experiences. (Was this the plan all along, or was it exclusively because of the UK Competition and Markets Authority demanding it?)

That’s an important distinction because many people are treating this as a decision about AI itself. It isn’t.

• AI Mode doesn’t disappear because a publisher opts out.
• AI Overviews don’t disappear when a website decides not to participate.

The user experience remains largely unchanged. The only thing that changes is which brands are eligible to appear.

If Expedia opted out tomorrow, people wouldn’t stop planning vacations. If NerdWallet opted out tomorrow (like I did their stock), people wouldn’t stop researching credit cards. Google would simply surface someone else in its place.

This isn’t a decision about whether AI succeeds or fails. It’s a decision about whether your brand is present when customers choose to use it.

Why AI opt-out sounds good but is actually a trap

I understand the appeal. Publishers are worried about losing more clicks, frustrated by changing search behavior, and concerned about how AI systems use their content.

Those concerns are beyond valid.

Where I disagree is with the assumption that opting out changes user behavior.

It doesn’t.

Users aren’t deciding whether to use AI based on your participation. They’re deciding whether AI helps them get answers faster. For a growing number of searches, it does.

That’s why opting out of AI inclusion and opting users out of AI experiences are two different things.

A publisher can choose not to participate. Users can still use AI Mode. Google can still answer the question. The only thing that changes is which brands are eligible to appear.

That’s the trap.

The practical outcome isn’t less AI. It’s more visibility for your competitors. They gain citations, exposure, and the opportunity to become the trusted answer, while your brand becomes less visible.

If the concern is that AI is changing how customers discover information, disappearing from AI-powered experiences feels like a pretty dumb move.

The challenge isn’t finding ways to be less visible. It’s finding ways to remain visible as search behavior continues to evolve.

Google finally gives us AI data… and SEOs still complain.

The other part of Google’s announcement that received less attention was the reporting.

For years, the industry has been asking for more visibility into AI-driven search experiences. We wanted better attribution, better reporting, and a clearer understanding of how users interact with AI-powered search.

Now Google is beginning to provide some of that visibility, and almost immediately the conversation shifted to why it isn’t enough. Note that many of these screenshots are illustrative and are even from industry friends and well-respected search practitioners in our space. No shade intended to any one individual, simply wanting to illustrate the movement.

Maybe that’s true. The data isn’t perfect. The reporting doesn’t answer every question. I’d love more visibility into citations, AI Mode interactions, and better any sort of attribution modeling.

I especially agree with Dan’s post above, but waiting for perfect data has never been a winning strategy.

SEO has always operated with imperfect data. We’ve spent years making decisions based on estimated search volume, incomplete attribution, and reporting limitations. Some of the biggest wins in my career came from acting on directional signals rather than perfect certainty.

The same applies here.

The mistake is treating every reporting enhancement as either perfect or useless. We’re getting more visibility than we had six months ago, and we’ll likely have more six months from now.

My reporting approach: SEO+ reporting

Part of the reason this debate exists is that many teams are still measuring success through a traditional SEO lens.

Traditional reporting focuses on clicks, rankings (ewww), traffic, and conversions. Those metrics still matter, and I don’t see them disappearing anytime soon. The problem is that they’re no longer telling the entire story.

Users are discovering brands across more surfaces than ever before, especially outside of the Google ecosystem. Traditional organic search still matters, but so do AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Reddit, YouTube, and a growing list of ecosystems users rely on in their purchasing journey.

That’s why I’ve started thinking about reporting as “SEO+” rather than just SEO. (Yeah, I’m lazy and used the streaming naming convention “+” because… yeah, lazy.)

The goal isn’t to abandon traditional metrics. The goal is to expand what we’re measuring. Alongside traffic and conversions, I want to understand where brands are being cited, how often they’re being mentioned, how many unique URLs are being cited, whether branded search demand is increasing, how AI platforms reference them, and whether visibility is expanding even when attribution remains borked.

This is where I think many organizations are making the same mistake they made with content years ago.

With one of my clients, a lot of our content influences revenue months before a customer converts. Looking only at last-click reporting dramatically understates the impact. That’s why I started reporting on “content assists” as a key metric in their reporting. AI visibility is creating a similar challenge. A customer might first encounter your brand through an AI Overview, revisit you through traditional search, and ultimately convert through a completely different channel (probably a paid channel… ‘cause everyone loves ROAS).

The influence is real even when the attribution path is messy.

That’s why I’m less interested in measuring traffic alone and more interested in measuring discoverability. The brands that consistently appear across search, AI, and recommendation platforms are building familiarity long before a conversion occurs.

The wrong question

Most of the discussion around Google’s announcement has centered on a single question:

Should I opt out of AI?

I think that’s the wrong question.

The better question is whether you can afford to be absent from the places where customers increasingly discover information, products, and brands.

Users aren’t waiting for the SEO industry to decide whether AI is good or bad. They’re already using it.

That’s why I view Google’s announcement less as an AI opt-out feature and more as a strategic decision point. Opting out doesn’t remove AI from the equation. It simply increases the likelihood that someone else becomes the answer instead.

Some brands will use it.

Their competitors are hoping they do

Will you lean into change, or will you be another person complaining that Google owes them free clicks?

This post first appeared on the author’s website and is republished here with permission.

The pressure is already mounting ahead of a crucial Group A showdown between Czechia and South Africa at the 2026 World Cup. With both national teams seeking their first points of the tournament, another storyline has also emerged around Tori Penso, whose appointment for the match has attracted significant attention.

Both teams arrive in Atlanta after disappointing opening defeats. Czechia surrendered a lead in a 2-1 loss to South Korea, while South Africa fell 2-0 to co-host Mexico, leaving little margin for error heading into the second round of group-stage matches. The expanded 48-team World Cup offers more opportunities to advance, but neither Czechia nor South Africa can afford another setback.

A victory would place either national team back in contention for a place in the knockout rounds. However, finishing third is no guarantee of progression, as only the best-performing third-place teams across the tournament will move forward.

The Czech Republic initially showed promise against South Korea. The European side took the lead through captain Ladislav Krejci and appeared on course for a positive result before conceding twice during the closing stages.

South Africa endured an even more difficult opening match. The African representative struggled to impose itself against Mexico and eventually finished the game with only nine players after two red cards compounded an already challenging evening.

Who is Tori Penso?

While the focus naturally falls on the players, the referee assigned to the contest has become a major talking point. Tori Penso of the United States will officiate the Group A encounter, making history as the first American woman ever selected to referee a men’s FIFA World Cup match.

The appointment represents another milestone in a career that has consistently broken new ground. Born in Florida, Penso first gained widespread recognition in 2020 when she became the first woman in two decades to referee a Major League Soccer match. Her rise has continued rapidly since then.

In 2023, she officiated the FIFA Women’s World Cup final between Spain and England, becoming the first American referee to oversee that showpiece event. She is also one of only two female on-field referees appointed for the 2026 World Cup.

Tori Penso and her officiating team set unprecedented World Cup milestone

Penso arrives at the tournament with extensive experience across both domestic and international soccer. Since joining FIFA’s international referees list in 2021, she has worked in Major League Soccer, the National Women’s Soccer League, Olympic competitions, FIFA Club World Cups, and numerous international tournaments.

Statistics suggest she prefers a balanced approach to officiating. Across 109 matches in various competitions, she has issued 423 yellow cards and only four red cards, indicating a willingness to manage games without excessive disciplinary intervention.

Her officiating team will also make history. Assistant referees Brooke Mayo and Kathryn Nesbitt will join Penso, creating the only all-female on-field officiating trio at the 2026 World Cup. The group previously worked together during the 2025 U.S. Open Cup final and has become one of the most respected officiating crews in international soccer.

The road back to soccer’s biggest stage has been a long and demanding one for the Czech Republic. After two decades away from the tournament, the national team finally secured its place at the 2026 World Cup through a campaign filled with resilience, dramatic comebacks, and nerve-shredding penalty shootouts. Now, with a talented squad and renewed belief, Czechia arrives in North America eager to show that its return is more than a brief appearance.

The Czech Republic enters the competition carrying a mixture of expectation and opportunity. While the nation has enjoyed regular appearances at the European Championship, qualification for the World Cup had remained elusive since 2006. That drought finally ended thanks to a group of players determined to restore the country’s standing on the international stage.

The Repre finished second behind Croatia in UEFA Group L, forcing the team into the playoffs. Their route to qualification was anything but comfortable, but it revealed a side capable of handling pressure and adversity.

The playoff semifinal against Ireland looked lost after the Czech Republic fell 2-0 behind within the opening 23 minutes. However, a penalty from Patrik Schick gave the team hope before Ladislav Krejci struck an 86th-minute equalizer, forcing extra time and eventually a penalty shootout victory.

A similar story unfolded in the playoff final against Denmark. The Czech Republic twice saw its lead erased, but remained composed during another tense shootout in Prague, eventually securing a place at the tournament after converting its chances from the spot.

What’s Czechia’s FIFA world ranking?

After years of inconsistency, the Czech Republic arrives at the tournament with a respectable standing in international soccer. The national team is currently ranked 40th in the FIFA Men’s World Ranking, having climbed several places before the tournament began.

While the ranking places the Czech Republic below some of the competition’s heavyweights, it also reflects a team that has regained stability after a turbulent qualifying campaign. The squad sits alongside other competitive nations and enters the tournament knowing that rankings alone rarely determine World Cup success.

Historically, the Czech Republic has reached far greater heights. The nation previously climbed as high as second in the FIFA rankings during the late 1990s and again in the mid-2000s, a period widely considered the golden era of modern Czech soccer.

Chance to surprise again

The Czech Republic enters Group A alongside Mexico, South Korea, and South Africa. None of those opponents can be taken lightly, but neither are they considered among the tournament’s leading favorites.

That creates a realistic opportunity for the Czech Republic to reach the knockout stage. The team’s recent performances suggest it can compete effectively in tight, physical matches where organization and mentality become decisive factors.

History suggests that the underdog role often suits the Czech Republic. Whether as modern Czechia or as former Czechoslovakia, the nation has frequently produced its best tournament performances when expectations were low.

After a 20-year absence, the Czech Republic finally has another opportunity to write its story on the global stage. With Miroslav Koubek guiding the team, Patrik Schick leading the attack, and a squad built on resilience and determination, the nation will hope its long-awaited return becomes one of the tournament’s most memorable stories.

South Africa returns to the FIFA World Cup after a 16-year absence, carrying renewed belief that this tournament could mark the beginning of a new chapter. While supporters are eager to discover South Africa’s current FIFA world ranking, the squad’s immediate focus remains on proving it belongs among the world’s elite as it prepares for another challenging campaign.

The South Africa national team enters the tournament under the guidance of veteran coach Hugo Broos, while key figures such as Lyle Foster, Ronwen Williams, Oswin Appollis, and Teboho Mokoena are expected to play crucial roles. After ending a 16-year absence from the competition, the squad now faces the challenge of turning promise into results on the global stage.

Bafana Bafana’s journey to the World Cup was anything but straightforward. The campaign became controversial when the team was penalized for fielding an ineligible player, Teboho Mokoena, during a qualifying victory over Lesotho.

The sanction transformed a 2-0 win into a 3-0 defeat and cost South Africa three valuable points. As a result, the race for qualification suddenly became far tighter, with Benin moving level and increasing pressure on the team heading into the final stretch. Despite the setback, South Africa responded impressively.

While Nigeria defeated Benin 4-0 in a decisive match, South Africa secured a convincing 3-0 victory over Rwanda to book a place at the World Cup. It ultimately finished top of CAF Group C and qualified for its fourth World Cup appearance, and its first since hosting the tournament in 2010.

What’s South Africa’s FIFA world ranking?

Heading into the tournament, South Africa is ranked 60th in the latest FIFA World Rankings, making it the 10th-highest-ranked nation in Africa. Within Group A, the national team enters as the lowest-ranked side, alongside higher-ranked opponents such as Mexico, the Czech Republic and South Korea.

Although rankings indicate recent performances, World Cup history has repeatedly shown that they do not always determine results. South Africa will hope disciplined performances and tactical organization can outweigh any statistical disadvantage against stronger opposition

Chance to make history

South Africa has appeared at three previous World Cups, in 1998, 2002, and 2010. On each occasion, the national team failed to progress beyond the group stage. That history serves as motivation for the current squad. The primary objective is clear: reach the knockout rounds for the first time in the country’s history.

With a disciplined tactical setup, an experienced coach, and a talented group of players drawn from both domestic and international soccer, South Africa believes it has the tools to challenge expectations.

Whether Bafana Bafana can finally break through remains to be seen, but after a 16-year absence, their return has already reignited excitement across the country. The next challenge is transforming that excitement into a memorable World Cup campaign.

Brazil heads into a crucial 2026 World Cup Group C clash against Haiti with plenty of questions to answer after an underwhelming opening performance, while Neymar‘s availability continues to dominate the headlines surrounding Carlo Ancelotti’s squad. As the five-time world champion looks to get its campaign back on track, fresh details have emerged regarding the superstar forward’s situation ahead of the must-win encounter.

The 1-1 draw against Morocco in the opening game exposed several weaknesses in Brazil’s performance. While there were flashes of individual brilliance, particularly from Vinicius Junior, the overall display left supporters concerned about whether the team has developed the cohesion needed to challenge for another world title.

Brazil entered the tournament among the favorites, but Morocco provided a stern examination. The African champion took an early lead through Ismael Saibari and looked the more organized and confident side for large periods of the contest. The Selecao struggled to establish control in midfield and found itself pinned back more often than expected.

The equalizer eventually arrived through Vinicius, whose moment of quality rescued a point and prevented what would have been a damaging opening defeat. Several of Ancelotti’s selections came under scrutiny afterward. Igor Thiago and Roger Ibanez were handed starting roles, while experienced midfielders Casemiro and Lucas Paqueta endured difficult first halves that highlighted Brazil’s lack of balance.

Changes after halftime helped stabilize the side. The introductions of Danilo, Fabinho, and Matheus Cunha brought additional energy and composure, giving the South American giant a platform to finish the match more strongly.

Neymar’s status vs Haiti comes to light

The Haiti fixture, therefore, carries importance beyond simply earning three points. It represents an opportunity to show that the Morocco performance was an isolated setback rather than a sign of deeper structural problems.

While Brazil searches for its first victory of the tournament, the biggest update concerns Neymar’s availability. The veteran forward has been recovering from a calf injury suffered while playing for Santos in May. Although he recently returned to portions of training and has begun increasing his workload, Brazil has decided not to rush him back into competitive action.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) confirmed that Neymar will not travel with the squad for the Haiti match and will remain in New Jersey to continue the final phase of his rehabilitation. In an official statement, the federation explained the reasoning behind the decision: “He will remain in New Jersey to make the most of the final stage of his recovery, making use of the excellent facilities at The Ridge hotel and the Columbia Park training centre.”

Reports from ESPN Brasil and Globo indicate the 34-year-old has resumed field work and participated in selected drills with teammates, but Brazil remains determined to avoid any setback. The coaching staff views his long-term availability as more important than forcing an early return during the group stage.

Haiti will not arrive intimidated as pressure builds on Brazil

Although Haiti opened the tournament with a narrow 1-0 defeat to Scotland, the Caribbean side demonstrated enough quality to suggest it cannot be underestimated. The Bicolor showed attacking ambition throughout much of that match and created several promising moments despite failing to find the net.

Brazil’s vulnerability in wide areas could offer encouragement. If Sebastien Migne and his players approach the game with confidence, they may be capable of creating problems similar to those Morocco exposed in the opening round.

Brazil enters the contest with only one point after its draw against Morocco. Haiti remains without a point after losing to Scotland, meaning both teams desperately need a positive result for different reasons.

Match Overview

Switzerland enters this critical Group B match with a sense of urgency after a frustrating opening draw. Despite completely dominating Qatar with 26 shots and an expected goals (xG) figure of 3.2, a late own-goal forced them to settle for a 1-1 tie. The Swiss must now turn that statistical dominance into a decisive result to get their tournament campaign back on track.

Bosnia and Herzegovina arrive with quiet confidence, riding an eight-match unbeaten streak. They also secured a valuable point in their opener, drawing 1-1 with host nation Canada. With all four teams in the group level on one point, this clash is a high-stakes affair. A victory for either side would provide a massive advantage and a clear path toward the knockout stages.

Tactical Analysis & Match Context

The tournament trajectories of these two nations are a study in contrasts. Switzerland, the pre-tournament group favorite, stumbled out of the gate despite underlying metrics suggesting a powerful performance. Their challenge is converting creative play into goals. Meanwhile, Bosnia and Herzegovina, considered an underdog, have proven their resilience and ability to grind out results, making them a difficult opponent to break down.

The tactical battle will likely pit Swiss possession against Bosnian defensive organization. Switzerland controlled 68% of the ball against Qatar and will expect to do the same here. Bosnia, however, is comfortable ceding possession and striking on the counter-attack, as they did against Canada. The key for Switzerland is clinical finishing from their front three, while Bosnia will look to exploit set-pieces and the physical presence of their forwards.

Motivation is sky-high for both squads. After drawing their opening games, neither team can afford to drop points. Given the new tournament format where some third-placed teams advance, a win would all but guarantee a spot in the Round of 32. Expect both teams to push for the victory, creating an open and compelling contest.

Head-to-Head Record & Historic Trends

Historically, there is very little to separate these two European nations, as they have only met on one prior occasion. That single encounter was an international friendly back in March 2016, where Bosnia and Herzegovina emerged with a 2-0 victory in Zürich.

In that 2016 match, goals from Edin Dzeko and Miralem Pjanic secured the win for the visitors. While Dzeko is still a pivotal part of the Bosnian squad, much has changed for both teams in the years since. This will be their first-ever competitive meeting and, notably, Bosnia’s first match against a fellow UEFA nation at a global tournament.

From a data perspective, Bosnia and Herzegovina have built a reputation for being defensively robust, conceding four or more goals just once in their last 20 international fixtures. Switzerland‘s recent competitive matches have shown a trend of lower tackle counts, suggesting a more tactical, less physical game could unfold.

Squad News & Projected Lineups

Both teams enter this crucial fixture with relatively clean bills of health, though key players’ availability could shape the outcome.

Switzerland reported no new injuries following their demanding opener against Qatar. Manager Murat Yakin may be tempted to switch from a back three to a more attacking 4-3-3 formation to ensure his side’s dominance in possession translates into goals. The pressure will be on the front line to be far more clinical.

Bosnia and Herzegovina will be without forward Haris Tabakovic due to an ankle injury. However, they could receive a massive boost with the return of veteran striker Edin Dzeko, who is expected to be available from the bench. Coach Sergej Barbarez will likely stick with the same core lineup that performed so well against Canada.

Switzerland Projected XI (4-3-3):
Kobel; Rodríguez, Akanji, Elvedi, Zakaria; Aebischer, Freuler, Xhaka; Vargas, Embolo, Ndoye.
This setup allows Switzerland to maximize its attacking firepower. With Granit Xhaka controlling the midfield, wingers Ruben Vargas and Dan Ndoye will be tasked with creating chances for central striker Breel Embolo, who scored their only goal in the first match.

Bosnia & Herzegovina Projected XI (4-4-2):
Vasilj; Kolašinac, Katić, Muharemović, Dedić; Memić, Bašić, Tahirović, Bajraktarević; Demirović, Lukić.
This formation provides a solid defensive foundation designed to frustrate the Swiss attack. The plan will be to absorb pressure and use the forward pairing of Ermedin Demirović and Jovo Lukić to threaten on the break, with the game-changing option of Dzeko in reserve.

More details on how to watch

You can watch the Switzerland vs Bosnia & Herzegovina match on Fubo. The service is compatible with most of your favorite devices, including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, and mobile devices running iOS or Android.

In addition to the 2026 tournament, a subscription to Fubo gives you access to a wide array of other soccer competitions. You can stream leagues and tournaments such as LaLiga and Liga MX.

The service is available for a monthly fee of $14.99/month, offering comprehensive coverage of world soccer all year round.

Beyond soccer, the platform also features a deep library of movies, TV shows, and other live sports, making it a complete entertainment package for the entire family.

SEE MORE: Complete World Cup TV schedule.

How to watch anywhere with VPN

If you’re abroad, you may need to use a virtual private network (VPN) in order to watch games using your usual streaming service. A VPN, such as Nord VPN, allows you to establish a secure connection online when streaming.

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GÜNEY AFRİKA:Williams, Modiba, Mbokazi, Mudau, Okon, Mokoena, Mbatha, Adams, Appollis, Maseko, Rayners.

Real Madrid'in Fransız yıldızı Eduardo Camavinga, PSG'nin astronomik ilgisine "hayır" dedi. Son günlerde adı Galatasaray ile de anılan 23 yaşındaki orta sahanın geleceğiyle ilgili kararını AS Gazetesi duyurdu.

AS Gazetesi'nin haberine göre, PSG'nin Eduardo Camavinga’yı kadrosuna katmak istediği, ancak Fransız yıldızın Real Madrid'den ayrılmaya kesinlikle sıcak bakmadığı belirtildi.

Son dönemde Türk medyasında ve sosyal medyada Camavinga'nın adı Galatasaray ile sıkça anılmaya başlanmıştı. Özellikle taraftarlar arasında büyük bir heyecan yaratan bu iddialar, "yılın transfer bombası" şeklinde köpürtülüyordu. Real Madrid'in vazgeçilmez parçalarından biri olan ve PSG gibi devlerin bile ikna edemediği 23 yaşındaki bir dünya yıldızının, şu aşamada Galatasaray'a transfer olması gerçekçi görünmüyor.

Camavinga, PSG'yi bile reddederek Real Madrid'de kalmak istiyor; Galatasaray iddiaları ise tamamen asılsız transfer fısıltılarından ibaret.

Galatasaray'ın Kolombiyalı stoperi Davinson Sanchez, Dünya Kupası'ndaki ilk maçına Özbekistan karşısında çıktı. Bu arada tribünlerde onu takip eden bazı kişiler bulunuyordu!

Kolombiya, Dünya Kupası'nın grup aşamasına 3-1'lik Özbekistan galibiyetiyle başladı. Galatasaray'ın tecrübeli savunmacısı Davinson Sanchez, 90 dakika sahada kaldı:

Topla buluşma: 88

Pas: 66/76 (%87)

Kilit pas: 2

Uzun pas: 2/8

Şut: 1(0)

İkili mücadele: 6(3)

Top çalma: 1

Pas arası: 1

Uzaklaştırma: 6

Geri kazanma: 3

COMO GÖZLEMCİLERİ

Kolombiya'nın gollerini Daniel Munoz (40), Luis Diaz (65) ve Jaminton Campaz (90+9) kaydetti. Özbekistan'ın tek sayısı Feyzullayev'den (60) geldi. Davinson Sanchez, ülkesi adına iyi bir performans sergiledi. Bu arada onu tribünden izleyen bazı kişiler vardı: Como gözlemcileri...

PEŞİNİ BIRAKMADILAR

Serie A'yı 4. sırada bitiren Como, Şampiyonlar Ligi biletini almıştı. İtalyan ekibi, Davinson Sanchez konusunda son derece ciddi. Bu sebeple onun peşini Dünya Kupası'nda da bırakmadılar. Galatasaray'ın 30 yaşındaki stoperden yaklaşık 30 milyon euroluk bir beklentisi bulunuyor. Satılırsa, onun yerine takviye yapılacak.

Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri ekibi Al-Wahda ile yollarını ayıran Dusan Tadic, futbolu bırakıyor mu? Sırp yıldızın, eski teknik direktörü İsmail Kartal'ın ekibine antrenör olarak katılacağı iddiası gündeme bomba gibi düştü.

Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri ekibi Al-Wahda, Sırp yıldız Dusan Tadic ile yollarını ayırdı. 37 yaşındaki tecrübeli oyuncunun, İsmail Kartal’ın teknik ekibine katılacağı iddia ediliyor.

Fenerbahçe'den ayrıldıktan sonra sezon başında BAE temsilcisi Al-Wahda'ya transfer olan Dusan Tadic, körfez macerasını erken noktaladı. Kulüp, tecrübeli yıldızın kendi isteği doğrultusunda yapılan görüşmeler neticesinde sözleşmenin karşılıklı olarak feshedildiğini duyurdu.

Al-Wahda formasıyla bu sezon 40 resmi maçta 5 gol ve 20 asist üreterek kalitesini bir kez daha kanıtlayan Tadic'in bu ani ayrılığı, transfer kulislerini hareketlendirdi.

Sözleşme feshinin arkasında yatan nedenlere dair sıcak bir iddia ortaya atıldı. Futbolculuk kariyerinin son dönemine gelen Tadic'in, Fenerbahçe'de birlikte çalıştığı teknik direktör İsmail Kartal'ın yeni kuracağı teknik ekibe antrenör olarak dahil olacağı ileri sürüldü. Sırp liderin yeşil sahalara veda edip etmeyeceği ve antrenörlük kariyerine Kartal'ın yanında başlayıp başlamayacağı önümüzdeki günlerde netlik kazanacak.

Fenerbahçe'de İsmail Kartal'ın birinci yardımcısı olacağı açıklanan Dirk Kuyt için kulübü Dordrecht'ten resmi açıklama geldi: Kuyt izin istedi ancak ayrılık için ciddi bir mali tazminat talep ediyoruz.

Fenerbahçe’de teknik direktörlüğe yeniden İsmail Kartal’ın getirilmesinin ardından, teknik ekibe kulübün efsane ismi Dirk Kuyt’ın dahil edildiği resmen açıklandı.

Kulüp yöneticisi Cihan Kamer, Hollandalı futbol adamıyla birinci yardımcı antrenörlük görevi için anlaşma sağlandığını ve Kuyt'ın bu tekliften büyük heyecan duyduğunu belirtti.

Şu anda Hollanda 2. Lig ekibi FC Dordrecht'i çalıştıran Kuyt'ın bu hamlesine kulübünden resmi yanıt geldi. Dordrecht Sportif Direktörü Sjoerd Ars, Kuyt’ın ayrılmak için kendilerinden izin istediğini ve yarın takımla sahaya çıkma ihtimalinin düşük olduğunu doğruladı.

Ancak sözleşmesi süren teknik adamı bırakmak için Fenerbahçe’den henüz resmi bir adım gelmediğini belirten Ars, transferin gerçekleşmesi için ciddi bir mali tazminat talep ettiklerini açıkladı. Kulüp CEO'su Hans de Zeeuw ise tarafların tamamen anlaştığı yönündeki iddiaları yalanlayarak resmi prosedürlerin tamamlanması gerektiğinin altını çizdi.

Beşiktaş, Sevilla'nın İsviçreli orta sahası Djibril Sow için resmi transfer teklifini yaptı! Siyah-beyazlıların, 29 yaşındaki deneyimli futbolcu için bonuslar dahil 7 milyon euroluk bir paket sunduğu ileri sürüldü.

Beşiktaş, orta saha rotasyonunu güçlendirmek için rotayı İspanya’ya çevirdi. İspanyol basınından Ficherio'nun haberine göre Beşiktaş, Sevilla forması giyen İsviçreli orta saha oyuncusu Djibril Sow için resmi transfer teklifinde bulundu.

Beşiktaş, 29 yaşındaki deneyimli futbolcu için bonuslar da dahil olmak üzere 7 milyon euro seviyesinde bir paket sundu.

Tempolu oyunu, iki yönlü orta saha becerileri ve yüksek pas yüzdesiyle tanınan Sow, Sevilla’nın yanı sıra İsviçre Milli Takımı'nın da önemli isimleri arasında yer alıyor.

Sevilla cephesinin bu teklife vereceği yanıt merakla beklenirken, Beşiktaş yönetiminin transferi kısa sürede bitirmek için yoğun mesai harcadığı belirtiliyor.

Transferin olumlu sonuçlanması halinde Djibril Sow’un önümüzdeki günlerde sağlık kontrolleri ve resmi imza için İstanbul’a gelmesi bekleniyor.

Ankara'daki 5. koşuda 'Liderkatı' isimli safkanın tökezlemesi sonucu sert bir şekilde düşen ünlü jokey Gökhan Kocakaya hastaneye kaldırıldı; resmi açıklama bekleniyor.

Türkiye’nin önde gelen jokeylerinden Gökhan Kocakaya, Ankara’da düzenlenen yarışlarda talihsiz bir kaza yaşadı. Günün 5. koşusunda Liderkatı isimli safkanla mücadele eden tecrübeli jokey, atının tökezlemesi sonucu sert bir şekilde pistte düştü.

Olayın hemen ardından pistteki sağlık ekipleri Kocakaya’ya ilk müdahaleyi yaptı ve başarılı jokey ambulansla hastaneye kaldırıldı. Gökhan Kocakaya’nın sağlık durumuna ilişkin henüz resmi bir açıklama yapılmadı.

Usta jokeye geçmiş olsun dileklerimizi iletiyor, acil şifalar diliyoruz.

Galatasaray savunmadaki havuzu güçlendirmek için Ümit Akdağ'la ilgileniyor. 22 yaşındaki futbolcu, rotasyonda düşünülüyor. Alanyaspor'un talep ettiği bonservis ise "ilk 11" tadında...

Galatasaray transferde sadece yabancı isimlerle ilgilenmiyor. Yerli alternatifler de var. Ve bunlardan biri; Alanyaspor forması giyen Ümit Akdağ... 22 yaşındaki solak stoper, Abdülkerim Bardakcı'nın yedeği olarak düşünülüyor. Galatasaray'ın mevcut kadrosundaki tek solak stoper; Abdülkerim...

RAKAMI YÜKSEK BULUYORLAR

Bu sebeple Ümit konusunda bazı girişimler yapıldı. Ancak Alanyaspor'un bonservis beklentisi 10 milyon euro civarında... Sarı-Kırmızılılar, rotasyonda kullanılacak bir oyuncu için talep edilen rakamın yüksek olduğunu düşünüyor. Bu arada 1.92 boyundaki futbolcuyla Beşiktaş ve Fenerbahçe de ilgileniyor.

KESİNLİKLE DÜŞÜNMÜYORLAR

Cim-Bom, Ümit konusunda çift hanelere çıkmayı düşünmüyor. Alanyaspor indirime gitmezse bu dosya kapatılacak. Akdeniz temsilcisi ise Fenerbahçe ve Beşiktaş'ın da tekliflerini görmek istiyor. Alanyaspor'un eli rahat... Çünkü oyuncunun mukavelesi sürüyor. Kısa süre içinde Ümit'le ilgili somut bir gelişmenin yaşanması beklenmiyor.

Gençlerbirliği Sportif Direktörü Cem Can, M'Baye Niang'ın sözleşmesinin feshedildiğini açıkladı.

Cem Can, 31 yaşındaki Senegalli forvet M'Baye Niang ile karşılıklı anlaşarak yolların ayrıldığını dile getirdi.

Fıratcan Üzüm'ün sözleşmesini ise uzattıklarını aktaran Can, "Fıratcan ve menajeriyle bir görüşme gerçekleştirdik. Yeni sözleşme için anlaştık." dedi.

Can, performansıyla dikkati çeken Franco Tongya ile Ousmane Diabate'nin takımda kalıp kalmayacağına ilişkin ise "Eksik, ihtiyaç duyulan bölgelerimiz var. Önceliğimiz takıma katacağımız oyuncular. Bu süreçte de her oyuncu değerini bulursa, bir teklif gelirse değerlendirilebilir. Henüz yazılı teklif yok. Zaten mevcut oyuncularımız, onlarla kampta beraber olacağız." bilgilerini verdi.

Bahçeşehir Koleji Erkek Basketbol Takımı, ABD'li basketbolcu Trevion Williams'ın 2026-2027 sezonunda da takımda yer alacağını duyurdu.

Kulübün sosyal medya hesaplarından yapılan açıklamada, "2025-2026 sezonu öncesinde takımımıza katılan oyuncumuz Trevion Williams, 2026-2027 sezonunda da formamız için mücadeleye devam edecek." ifadeleri kullanıldı.

Voleybol Sultanlar Ligi ekiplerinden Aras Kargo, Defne Başyolcu ile Kolombiyalı Ana Karina Olaya'nın sözleşmesini uzattı.

Kulüpten yapılan açıklamada, "Defne'yle hikayemiz devam ediyor. A Milli Takımda da görev alan milli sporcumuz, gururumuz Defne Başyolcu ile yeni sezonda da yolumuza devam ediyoruz. Hep beraber nice başarılara Defne." ifadeleri kullanıldı.

Kolombiya milli takımı forması giyen Ana Karina Olaya'nın sözleşmesinin de uzatıldığı belirtilerek "Sultanlar Ligi'ndeki ilk sezonumuzdan bu yana beraber mücadele ettiğimiz başarılı smaçörümüz Ana Karina Olaya ile yeni sezonda da yolumuza devam ediyoruz. Hep beraber nice başarılara Olaya." denildi.

Fenerbahçe, eski golcüsü Vedat Muriqi'in bu akşam saat 21.00'de İstanbul'da olacağını resmen açıkladı.

Fenerbahçe, eski golcüsü Vedat Muriqi’in transferini bitirdi. Sarı-lacivertli kulüpten yapılan resmi açıklamaya göre, Kosovalı santrfor bu akşam saat 21.00’de İstanbul Havalimanı’nda olacak.

Sağlık kontrollerinin ardından resmi sözleşmeye imza atması beklenen Muriqi, yeniden Kadıköy çimlerine çıkmaya hazırlanıyor.

Son Dakika Bilgisi: Taraftarların, golcü oyuncuyu karşılamak için havalimanına akın etmesi bekleniyor.

Turkcell, A Milli Futbol Takımı'nın 2026 Dünya Kupası'ndaki Paraguay karşılaşmasını Dolmabahçe Park Alanı'nda dev ekranda taraftarlarla buluşturacak.

Şirketten yapılan açıklamaya göre, Turkcell, 25 yıldır A Milli Futbol Takımı'nın yanında yer alıyor.

Şirket, Dünya Kupası grup maçları kapsamındaki Türkiye-Paraguay karşılaşmasını dev ekranda taraftarlarla buluşturuyor.

Futbolseverler, 20 Haziran Cumartesi günü saat 6.00'da oynanacak maç için İstanbul'un Beşiktaş ilçesindeki Dolmabahçe Park Alanı'nda bir araya gelerek milli heyecana ortak olabilecek.

Türk bayrakları ve marşlar eşliğinde gerçekleşecek etkinlikte, taraftarlar karşılaşmayı dev ekrandan takip ederken, kupa coşkusunu da birlikte yaşayabilecek.

Futbol üzrə İngiltərə yığmasının hücumçusu Harri Keyn DÇ-2026-da keçirdikləri ilk oyunda dubla imza atmaqla bir neçə ilki gerçələşdirib.

Arena.az xəbər verir ki, ABŞ, Kanada və Meksikanın birgə ev sahibliyi etdiyi dünya çempionatının qrup mərhələsinin ilk turunda İngiltərə yığması Xorvatiya millisinə 4:2 hesabıyla qalib gəlib.

Keyn bu görüşdə iki qol vurmaqla tarixi nailiyyətə imza atıb. 32 yaşlı futbolçu əvvəlcə matçın 12-ci dəqiqəsində penaltidən fərqlənərək dünya çempionatları tarixində ən çox penalti qolu vuran oyunçu olub. Keyn mundiallarda vurduğu penalti qollarının sayını 5-ə çatdıraraq bu göstəricidə indiyədək liderliyi bölüşdüyü Eysebio, Rob Rensenbrink, Qabriel Batistuta və Lionel Messini geridə qoyub.

Bu qol Keyn üçün dünya çempionatlarındakı 9-cu qol olub. Bununla da İngiltərə millisinin kapitanı mundial qollarının sayına görə Kristiano Ronaldonu (8 qol) arxada qoyub. O, eyni zamanda dünya çempionatlarında ən azı 9 qol vurmuş 26-cı futbolçu kimi tarixə düşüb.

Keyn ikinci qolunu da vuraraq dünya çempionatlarındakı qollarının sayını 10-a yüksəldib. Beləliklə, o, İngiltərə millisinin mundiallar tarixində ən məhsuldar futbolçusu olan Qari Linekerin rekorduna şərik çıxıb. Hər iki futbolçunun hesabında 10 qol var və onlar bu göstəriciyə 12 oyunda nail olublar.

Keyn bu mundialda növbəti qolunu vuracağı təqdirdə bu göstəricidə Linekeri geridə qoyaraq təkbaşına lider olacaq.

İngiltərə yığmasının lideri həmçinin dünya çempionatlarında 10 qol həddinə çatmış 16-cı futbolçu olub. Bundan başqa, o, Devid Bekhemdən sonra üç müxtəlif dünya çempionatında qol vurmağı bacaran ikinci ingilis futbolçu kimi tarixə düşüb.

Qeyd edək ki, Harri Keyn hazırda Almaniyanın “Bayern” klubunda çıxış edir. O, 81 qolla İngiltərə millisinin tarixində ən yaxşı bombardirdir. Hücumçu 2018-ci ildə Rusiyada keçirilmiş dünya çempionatında 6 qol vuraraq turnirin bombardiri olmuşdu.

Beləliklə, Xorvatiya ilə qarşılaşma Harri Keyn üçün təkcə uğurlu start deyil, həm də dünya çempionatları tarixində bir neçə mühüm rekordu yenilədiyi unudulmaz oyun kimi yadda qalıb.

“Neftçi”nin qadın futbolçulardan ibarət komandasının UEFA Çempionlar Liqasının (ÇL) 1-ci təsnifat mərhələsindəki rəqibi müəyyənləşib.

Arena.az bu barədə UEFA-nın rəsmi saytına istinadən xəbər verir.

Belə ki, bu gün keçirilmiş püşkatmanın nəticəsinə əsasən, Bakı təmsilçisi bu mərhələnin 1-ci qrupunun yarımfinalında Monteneqronun “Buduçnost” komandası ilə qarşılaşacaq.

Cütün qalibi finalda PAOK (Yunanıstan) – “Hapoel” (Yerusəlim, İsrail) cütünün qalibi ilə üz-üzə gələcək. Qalib komanda 2-ci təsnifat mərhələsinə yüksələcək.

“Neftçi”nin yer aldığı bu qrupun oyunlarının hansı ölkədə təşkil ediləcəyi hələlik məlum deyil. Bir oyundan ibarət olacaq bütün görüşlər eyni məkanda təşkil ediləcək.

Xatırladaq ki, ÇL-in 1-ci təsnifat mərhələsinin yarımfinal oyunları iyulun 22-də, final görüşüi isə eyni ayın 25-də keçiriləcək.

“Qəbələ”nin futbolçusu Mehrac Baxşalı və “Şamaxı”dan ayrılmış Ravil Qafarov bundan sonra “Şahdağ Qusar”ın uğurları üçün çalışacaqlar.

Arena.az xəbər verir ki, bu barədə Qusar klubunun mətbuat xidməti məlumat yayıb.

Xəbərdə bildirilir ki, klub Premyer Liqa təmsilçisi “Qəbələ”dən Mehrac Baxşalını icarə əsasında heyətinə cəlb edib. 23 yaşlı hücumçu cari mövsümün sonuna qədər yeni komandasında çıxış edəcək.

Əyalət klubu azad agent statusuna malik Ravil Qafarov ilə də müqavilə imzalayıb. 20 yaşlı futbolçunun müqaviləsinin müddəti 2026/2027-ci illər mövsümünün sonuna qədər nəzərdə tutulub.

Ravilin son klubu “Şamaxı” olub. O, həmçinin 21 yaşadək futbolçulardan ibarət milli komandamızın da üzvüdür.

“Şahdağ Qusar” Gülağa Əsədovu da heyətinə cəlb edib. 23 yaşlı yarımmüdafiəçi ilə 1+1 illik sözləşmə imzalanıb. Əsədovun son klubu “Ordu” olub.

Ötən mövsümü “Səbail”in heyətində keçirmiş Fəxri Məmmədli də “Şahdağ Qusar”a keçib. 21 yaşadək futbolçulardan ibarət milli komandamızın da üzvü olan futbolçunun müqaviləsinin müddəti mövsümün sonuna qədər nəzərdə tutulub.

Daha bir yeni transferi Ürfan İsmayılovdur. 30 yaşlı futbolçu ilə 1+1 illik sözləşmə imzalanıb. Təcrübəli yarımmüdafiəçi ötən mövsümü “Şəfa”da keçirib.

Qusar təmsilçisi qapıçı Elməddin Sultanovu da heyətinə qatıb. Qolkiper növbəti mövsümü bu komandanın heyətində keçirəcək. 25 yaşlı qapıçı “Qəbələ”nin yetirməsidir. Onun son klubu “Baku Sportinq” olub.

“Şahdağ Qusar” iki futbolçusu ilə də yeni müqavilə bağlayıb. Qapıçı Müşviq Nadirov və hücumçu Famil Camalovla müqavilənin müddəti artırılıb. Hər iki futbolçu növbəti mövsümün sonuna qədər bu komandanın uğurları üçün çalışacaq.

Birinci Liqanı tərk edərək növbəti mövsümdən İkinci Liqada mübarizə aparacaq “Difai” komandasının yeni baş məşqçisi müəyyənləşib.

Arena.az xəbər verir ki, sözügedən komandanı bundan sonra Şəhriyar Məmmədov çalışdıracaq.

Bu barədə klubun mətbuat xidməti məlumat yayıb. Tərəflər arasındakı müqavilənin müddəti açıqlanmayıb. Amma böyük ehtimalla, gənc mütəxəssis yeni klubu ilə 1 illik sözləşməyə imza atıb.

Xatırladaq ki, Şəhriyar Məmmədov daha əvvəl “Araz Saatlı” və MOİK-də çalışıb.

Qeyd edək ki, “Difai” Birinci Liqada 2025/2026-cı illər mövsümünü sonuncu sırada başa vuraraq İkinci Liqaya düşüb. Bu komanda ötən mövsüm keçirdiyi 27 oyunda cəmi 4 qələbə qazanıb, 6 heç-heçə edib, 17 məğlubiyyətə üzülüb. Cəmi 18 xal toplamış kollektiv 10 iştirakçı arasında sonuncu yeri tutub.

Ruben Amorim has a rebuild job on his hands as the recently-appointed head coach of Milan, as the Rossoneri have a list of nine players whose futures remain unsettled including the likes of Rafael Leao, Luka Modric and Adrien Rabiot. 

Amorim has nine potential transfer headaches at Milan

It was a bitterly disappointing end to the 2025-26 season for Milan, who missed out on qualification to the Champions League despite having spent much of the campaign in second place. 

The collapse in form in the final in the final weeks of the season led to the departures of head coach Massimiliano Allegri, sporting director Igli Tare, technical director Geoffrey Moncada and CEO Giorgio Furlani, who were all dismissed in one brutal statement the day after the Serie A campaign came to an end. 

It took several weeks for Milan to make any new appointments, but have since landed on former Manchester United and Sporting CP tactician Amorim to take over from Allegri. A new set of directors are still yet to be appointed. 

Before the new coach starts thinking about potential signings, he already has a list of nine players whose futures need to be sorted as a matter of priority. 

Perhaps the biggest issue for Milan is the future of Leao, who has made it clear in a series of interviews during the off-season that he feels ready to take on a new challenge elsewhere. 

The issue is finding a willing buyer, as La Gazzetta dello Sport claims that Milan are still hoping to bring in a fee of €50m if they are to sell the Portugal international this summer. 

La Gazzetta dello Sport suggests that Amorim may not be the best fit for Leao as a head coach, especially if he intends to deploy his usual 3-4-2-1 formation, which would not get the best out of Leao’s characteristics. 

Additionally, it remains to be seen what Luka Modric will decide to do after the 2026 World Cup comes to an end. He joined Milan on a free transfer last summer, signing a one-year contract with an option to extend, but many signs point towards him potentially calling it a day on his playing career at the age of 40 this summer.

Then there is Rabiot, who was brought to the club by his former Juventus coach Allegri last summer. Allegri has since taken over from Antonio Conte as head coach of Napoli, and Rabiot continues to be linked with a potential move to join his trusted leader at the Stadio Maradona. 

As per La Gazzetta dello Sport, Milan  have no intention of letting Christian Pulisic go this summer, but the fact that he has not yet put pen to paper on a new contract is not a particularly encouraging sign. 

The USMNT star is under contract until 2027 with a club option to extend for a further 12 months, so there is still time to negotiate a renewal, and US-based owner Gerry Cardinale is said to be particularly keen on keeping ‘Captain America’ on board. 

There are also doubts surrounding goalkeeper Mike Maignan, who has often been linked with big-money moves to some of Europe’s biggest clubs. La Gazzetta dello Sport suggests that a season without Champions League football and an unclear direction at boardroom level is not particularly appealing to the Frenchman. 

Then, there are a set of returning loanees who appear unlikely to reclaim their places in the Rossoneri first team. They include Samuel Chukwueze, who could still potentially join Fulham on a permanent basis, Ismael Bennacer, set to return from Dinamo Zagreb, Yunus Musah, set to return from Atalanta, Warren Bondo, set to return from Cremonese. 

Reports in Italy claim that Jonathan David does not want to give up on his Juventus career after one disappointing season in Serie A, but the Canada international’s stance could complicate the club’s chances of bringing in a new centre-forward during the summer transfer window. 

Juventus could struggle to sign a new striker if both David and Openda stay

David joined Juventus on a free transfer during the 2025 summer transfer window, signing on a five-year contract running until the summer of 2030. The 26-year-old earns a reported wage of €6m per season plus up to €2m in bonuses in Turin. 

Despite delivering a consistent return during his time in Ligue 1 with Lille, averaging above 17 league goals per season during his time in France, David struggled to hit the ground running in Serie A and for the first time in his professional career, ended a season without hitting double figures (six goals from 35 Serie A appearances, eight goals from 46 appearances across all competitions). 

With Juventus missing out on qualification to the Champions League and with Dusan Vlahovic’s contract expiring at the end of June, Juventus have been keen to bring in a new centre-forward to add to Luciano Spalletti’s ranks. 

Given that David arrived on a free transfer, any sale would be recorded as a capital gain for Juventus if they were to sell the Canadian this summer. 

However, according to reports from La Gazzetta dello Sport, David is unwilling to give up on his Bianconeri career after just one season and is determined to prove his worth at the Allianz Stadium. 

However, this could complicate Juventus’s search to bring in another centre-forward, given that David still earns a significant salary and selling Lois Openda outright this summer seems like an impossible task. 

And, with an expected drop in budget of around €50m-€60m without access to the Champions League, stumping up the cash to sign a new, starting centre-forward while keeping both David and Openda on board is a difficult task to say the least.

Spain had one of the most disappointing starts to the 2026 FIFA World Cup as they were held to a goalless draw by minnows Cabo Verde.

It was a toothless attacking display from La Roja, who were missing the attacking flair of Lamine Yamal. The youngster was benched on account of his caution over his injury, though he did later come on as a substitute.

Following Spain’s mishap against Cabo Verde, there are calls for Yamal to start the next game against Saudi Arabia, in what could be a must-win encounter for Luis de la Fuente’s men.

Yamal’s chances of starting against Saudi Arabia

According to COPE, Yamal’s chances of starting against Saudi Arabia are increasing as Spain is more anxious about the need to win their first match of the World Cup.

Will Yamal start vs Saudi Arabia? (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

As evident after the match against Cabo Verde, the decision to deploy Gavi on the flanks did not quite work, while Ferran Torres and Mikel Oyarzabal offered little to no productivity upfront.

That is where Yamal’s flair and ability to create something out of nothing could come in handy for Spain as they look to secure an early breakthrough.

Yamal featured for 19 minutes as a substitute against Cabo Verde. So he should be fit enough to start against Saudi Arabia.

What’s the catch?

All eyes on Yamal’s fitness heading into the Saudi Arabia game. (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

However, the report adds that Yamal, even if he starts the game against Saudi Arabia, may not feature in more than 45 minutes.

That means the Spanish international could be taken off at half-time by de la Fuente, as the Spanish team does not want to take any risks with his fitness.

That means Spain must start the game well if they decide to go ahead and put Yamal in the starting eleven. Yamal, for his part, is keen on starting against Saudi Arabia as well.

The onus will be on the Barcelona superstar to create chances or even score a goal himself, knowing Spain lacks the presence of a potent number nine that other big teams have.

Tyler Reddick still leads the NASCAR Cup Series standings, but Denny Hamlin has quietly turned the regular-season championship battle into one of the biggest storylines heading into NASCAR’s inaugural San Diego weekend.

Following Pocono Raceway, Reddick sits atop the standings with 704 points. Hamlin is second with 685, trimming the gap to just 19 points with 10 races remaining before the playoffs begin.

Now the series heads to Naval Base Coronado, where NASCAR will compete on a temporary street circuit unlike anything currently on the Cup Series schedule. While every driver will face a learning curve, the track type could play directly into one driver’s strengths.

And that’s not Hamlin.

Tyler Reddick’s Track Record Makes Him a Favorite

Over the past several seasons, Reddick has established himself as one of NASCAR’s premier road-course racers.

The 23XI Racing driver owns four career Cup Series victories on road-course and street-style circuits, including wins at Road America, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course, and two victories at Circuit of The Americas.

His recent results on similar tracks are even more impressive.

In his last six road-course starts entering San Diego, Reddick has finished fifth, first, tenth, ninth, sixth, and third. He also opened the 2026 season by winning at COTA, further cementing his reputation as one of the sport’s most complete road racers.

Those numbers help explain why many observers will view Reddick as one of the favorites this weekend despite the unknowns surrounding NASCAR’s newest venue.

For the No. 45 team, San Diego also represents an opportunity to regain momentum in the standings race. While Reddick still holds the lead, Hamlin has steadily chipped away at his advantage over the past several weeks.

A strong finish Sunday could help create some breathing room once again.

Hamlin Has Closed the Gap, but San Diego Could Be a Challenge

Hamlin arrives in Southern California carrying plenty of momentum.

The Joe Gibbs Racing veteran has four victories this season and remains firmly in the hunt for the regular-season championship. More importantly, he has reduced Reddick’s lead to fewer than 20 points, putting real pressure on the standings leader entering the second half of the season.

The challenge is that road courses have not produced the same level of consistency.

Hamlin’s lone Cup Series road-course victory came at Watkins Glen in 2016. More recently, he has recorded just one top-10 finish in his last five road-course starts entering San Diego, a stretch that includes finishes of 10th, 16th, 23rd, 25th, and 20th.

Those results are respectable, but they do not match the standard Reddick has established on similar circuits.

That is what makes this weekend so intriguing.

If Reddick performs like he has throughout much of his road-course career, he could leave San Diego with a larger cushion atop the standings. But if Hamlin can match or beat Reddick on a track type that has historically favored the No. 45 team, the fight for the regular-season championship could tighten even further.

With 10 races remaining before the playoffs begin, every point matters.

Reddick still holds the advantage.

Hamlin keeps getting closer.

The Milwaukee Brewers are looking for a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians on Thursday afternoon, as they’ll also look to lock up a 5-1 homestand against the Phillies and Guards.

After a closely fought 2-1 win in Tuesday’s series opener, the Brewer bats came alive last night to win 9-4 against Cleveland ace Gavin Williams. They’ll try to keep things rolling today in a matchup of rookie southpaws, with Shane Drohan getting the start opposite the Guardians’ Parker Messick.

Drohan, 27, is making his fifth start of the season and fourth consecutive appearance from the rotation. In those last three outings, he’s totaled 15 1/3 innings against the Giants, Rockies, and Phillies, allowing nine runs on 17 hits and three walks while striking out 16 in a pair of blowout victories and a high-scoring loss. For the season, he has a 3.59 ERA, 2.72 FIP, and 44 strikeouts over 42 2/3 innings.

Messick, 25, was a second-round pick in 2022 out of Florida State. He debuted last August but held rookie status through this season. His stats in 2025 and 2026 are nearly identical, so I’ll summarize them as a whole: over 21 career starts, he has a 2.69 ERA, 3.21 FIP, and 120 strikeouts across 120 1/3 innings, totaling 3.7 bWAR. He’s coming off a pair of losses, though, as he allowed eight runs (seven earned) on 10 hits and four walks over 11 1/3 innings in losses to the Rangers and Yankees. He struck out four batters in both of those outings.

In some negative injury news, we’ve learned that Quinn Priester, who has missed the entire season while dealing with thoracic outlet syndrome, has opted for “season-ending first rib removal surgery,” that will keep him out eight to 10 months until he’s fully healthy. Priester has had multiple rehab stints in the last two months, but he’s struggled with command, with a 15.75 ERA on 24 walks and 22 hits over just 16 innings over eight appearances. Here’s what he had to say about the injury:

First pitch is slated for 1:10 p.m. on Brewers.TV and the Brewers Radio Network.

1903
The White Sox badly lost their first trade ever with the Reds, sending Cozy Dolan and Tom Daly to Cincinnati for second baseman George Magoon.

Magoon was awful for the White Sox for the remainder of 1903, slashing .228/.303/.278 for 0.0 WAR; before the 1904 season, the team dumped Magoon on Indianapolis of the American Association for a player to be named later. He would never return to the majors.

Daly, though long in the tooth for the time (37 years old), finished what would be his final season in the majors well enough, logging 0.7 WAR and slashing a formidable .293/.332/.407 at second base. Right fielder Dolan was the lone player in the trade to play in the majors beyond 1903, lasting until 1906; while never a standout and playing poorly for Cincy to finish out 1903, Cozy would rebound in 1904 for a career-high 1.7 WAR and 115 OPS+.

1933
Right in the middle of a 24-game homestand (!), the White Sox drew the biggest crowd in Chicago history at the time, 53,398, to a doubleheader split against the Yankees.

The White Sox, surprisingly playing better than .500 during the dark ages of 1920-50, dropped the first contest vs. New York, 6-4, with Ted Lyons taking the loss. But in the nightcap, the South Siders rewarded their faithful with a 5-4, walk-off win to move to 30-27 and 5 1⁄2 back of first in the American League.

It was a furious finish for Chicago, who trailed all game but score one in the seventh and then a game-tying three in the bottom of the ninth. Evar Swanson knotted the game, 4-4, with a two-run single with one out in the ninth.

In the 10th, Whit Wyatt sat the Yankees down three straight, and the White Sox immediately set to rallying. Luke Appling led the inning off with a double, and after an intentional walk to Red Kress, Jimmy Dykes laid down a bunt to move the runners over that he beat out; on pitcher Wilcy Moore’s overthrow to first base, Appling came around to score.

The next season, Dykes would become player-manager of the White Sox, and would stay at the helm of the team until 1946.

The White Sox would surpass this attendance mark seven times at Comiskey Park after this, but this game remains the eighth-biggest crowd in White Sox (and Chicago baseball) history.

1961
Eddie Gaedel, who came to fame as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 and a Martian leader who landed in Comiskey Park and kidnapped Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox eight years later, was found dead at his apartment on the South Side of Chicago.

The centerpiece of Bill Veeck’s follies had endured a difficult life, unemployed and alcoholic at the time of his passing. The 3´7´´owner of a 1.000 career MLB OBP was followed home from a bowling alley and beaten and/or mugged, and it was his mother who discovered him dead, in his bed, bruised. A coroner found that Gaedel had suffered a heart attack during or after the assault.

Only one representative of Major League Baseball attended Gaedel’s funeral: Bob Cain, the Tigers pitcher who walked Gaedel in 1951. (Cain had been traded to Detroit from the White Sox three months before the infamous Gaedel game.)

2000
A 17-4 mauling of the Yankees at Yankee Stadium capped the first and only 7-0 road trip in White Sox history. The club jumped on future White Sox starter Orlando Hernández for nine runs in the first inning, knocking him out of the game with two outs in the first; the onslaught was capped by a José Valentín grand slam.

The win pushed the South Siders to a season-high 20 games better than .500 at 44-24, and 7 ½ up in the AL Central.

2006
Jon Garland became the first White Sox pitcher since 1971 to homer in a regular season game when he hit a two-run shot off of Esteban Yan in the eighth inning in Cincinnati. The Sox won easily, 8-1. Garlandscored two runs in the game, as well.

2019
It was a huge moment, and seemingly a big step forward for the rebuilding White Sox. In a 1-1 tie at Wrigley Field, former top Cubs prospect Eloy Jiménez blasted a two-run home run into the left-field bleachers, giving the Sox what turned out to be a 3-1 win. The shot came in the ninth inning, and he did it while breaking his bat! Jiménez was acquired by the Sox along with top pitching prospect Dylan Cease for pitcher José Quintana on July 13, 2007.

2023
A brilliant individual performance by Sox starting pitcher Lance Lynn was all for naught.