Before there were leagues, before there were stadiums, before there were billion-dollar transfer fees and Champions League anthems — there was a ball. Or rather, there was something roughly spherical that people kicked. The story of how that thing evolved into the precisely engineered, aerodynamically calibrated object used in today’s professional game is longer, stranger, … Read more
Sport has always existed in the world, not apart from it. The ancient Olympics were suspended during wars. The 1936 Berlin Games were weaponised as propaganda. The Cold War played out on basketball courts and running tracks as much as in diplomatic cables. Every era produces its own set of forces that bend and reshape … Read more
Let’s start with the honest version of this conversation, because most articles about sports betting don’t bother with it. The majority of people who bet on sport lose money over time. Not because they’re stupid, not because they don’t know sport, and not because they got unlucky. They lose because the bookmakers build a margin … Read more
In 2023, the five major American professional sports leagues — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS — had a combined roster of roughly 4,000 active players. Statistically, if the athletic population reflects the general population, somewhere between 200 and 400 of those players are gay or bisexual. The number who are openly out: a … Read more
Tiger Woods was given a golf club at eighteen months old. Wayne Gretzky was skating at age two. Serena and Venus Williams were on a tennis court in Compton before most children had learned to tie their shoelaces. The stories of sporting greatness almost always begin early — sometimes very early — and this has … Read more
In 1992, when the English Premier League was founded, Manchester United was valued at roughly £47 million. Three decades later, the same club carries a valuation north of five billion dollars. The Dallas Cowboys, worth approximately $50 million when Jerry Jones purchased the franchise in 1989, are now valued at over nine billion dollars — … Read more
Something is happening in women’s sport that feels, for the first time, genuinely irreversible. Not the cautious, incremental progress of previous decades — a slightly larger television audience here, a modest increase in prize money there — but a rapid, structural, commercially driven transformation that is reshaping the landscape of global sport in real time. … Read more
There is a moment in almost every major sporting event — a disputed offside call, a questionable penalty, a line judge’s ruling that changes the outcome of a match — when a significant portion of the watching world simultaneously wonders the same thing: could a machine do this better? The question has moved from idle … Read more
A decade ago, a GPS vest worn during training was considered cutting-edge technology. Today, professional athletes are monitored by ecosystems of interconnected devices that track everything from muscle oxygen levels to sleep quality to the precise biomechanical load on a specific tendon during a sprint. Wearable technology has moved from novelty to necessity in professional … Read more
Artificial intelligence has quietly become one of the most transformative forces in professional sports. What once required entire teams of analysts, hours of video review and mountains of spreadsheets can now be processed in seconds by machine learning algorithms that see patterns no human eye could catch. From the Premier League to the NBA, from … Read more