Enjoying this newsletter every week? Forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. A few hours after Danny Drinkwater joined Aston Villa in the first week of January, a friend asked if he wanted to go watch his new club in action. Aston Villa was playing at Leicester City in […] More
When he left a broadcasting career three years ago for his first job in an N.F.L. front office, with the San Francisco 49ers, John Lynch sought to model his partnership with Coach Kyle Shanahan on what he considered the paragon of general manager-coach alliances: Ozzie Newsome and John Harbaugh’s Super Bowl-winning work in Baltimore. And […] More
Back in Week 1, the Chiefs expected to be playing this weekend, and the Packers were certainly hoping to still be alive. The 49ers, however, did not start to feel like a real contender until they had strung quite a few wins together, and the Titans were still fighting for a playoff spot in Week […] More
David Baker, the executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, has always been clear about his mission: to celebrate the exploits of players and coaches on the field and the N.F.L. executives who helped build the league. The rest of it — the messy private lives, the criminal activity, the treatment of players […] More
In years to come, this might be the week this age of sports came to be known as the “asterisk era.” During a decade that brought eye-in-the-sky cameras, rogue chemists, executives with malleable morals and Soviet-era spy craft, those two-fisted disrupters — science and technology — have given cheaters seemingly limitless tools to secure victory […] More
In the video announcing his retirement on Tuesday, Luke Kuechly thanked his Carolina Panthers teammates and coaches, his parents and his two brothers, his girlfriend and all the fans who supported him as he became the best middle linebacker in the N.F.L. Left out of his speech were two men who almost certainly influenced his […] More
The summer before last, Barcelona made the sort of business decision that few — if any — outside the relatively niche world of sports merchandising would have noticed. Since 2001, Barcelona’s merchandising operation had been subcontracted out to Nike, the team’s jersey sponsor. Through a subsidiary company, Nike ran three official Barcelona stores and 15 […] More
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Late in the Kansas City Chiefs’ demolition of the Houston Texans on Sunday, the team posted a note on the video screen at Arrowhead Stadium telling fans that thanks to the Chiefs’ 51-point outburst, all the fireworks shot off after each score were gone. “Chiefs fans, we are sorry to report, […] More
