Sign up for Rory Smith’s weekly newsletter on world soccer (and, for the foreseeable future, quite a few other topics) at nytimes.com/rory. Watford General Hospital is a couple of minutes’ walk, no more, from Vicarage Road, the neat, slightly frayed home of the town’s representative in the Premier League. Head out of the Graham Taylor […] More
The coronavirus pandemic has upended much, but with a late summer start to the season five months away, the N.F.L. has been one of the few major professional sports leagues to avoid postponing or canceling games. With little else going on in sports, the league has doubled down on holding its annual three-day draft — […] More
With soccer’s global calendar upended by the coronavirus, FIFA is scrambling to draft new regulations for player contracts and transactions between clubs in an effort to create a road map out of the sport’s unprecedented shutdown. Lawyers at FIFA’s Zurich headquarters have huddled (virtually) with representatives from leagues, clubs and players unions to provide a […] More
European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, posted a message on its Twitter account on Friday evening with a seemingly innocuous update: Its European Championship — another sporting casualty of the coronavirus outbreak — would still be known as Euro 2020, even though it has been postponed until 2021. Within minutes, however, the tweet was deleted and […] More
On Monday, the Los Angeles Rams unveiled a new logo, which had been subject to speculation for most of the month. The redesign was the culmination of a two-year process, and the rollout, ahead of the team’s relocation to a new stadium, was clearly important to the Rams. The design process was painstakingly detailed on […] More
The Carolina Panthers portrayed their decision to part after nine seasons with quarterback Cam Newton as a magnanimous gesture. They announced last week that they were granting him, the best player in franchise history, permission to seek a trade. But as teams around the N.F.L. scurried to add quarterbacks, Newton languished in a sort-of purgatory, […] More
There were a handful of thermal-imaging cameras outside Dynamo Brest’s stadium on Friday, intended to pluck out and turn away anyone showing signs of fever. Both Brest and its opponent, Smolevichi, had been given hygiene advice: wash your hands with soap, avoid hugging. The Ministry of Health had decreed that the stadium must be disinfected […] More
He was, according to his unsparing head coach, one of the best ever to play his position, and for more than a decade, game after game, season after season, the New England Patriots relied on him to — in their vernacular — do his job, and he did, about as well as anyone in N.F.L. […] More
