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Tonight’s broadcast of Atlético Madrid v Manchester United is available to watch on Disney+ after they acquired rights across multiple European territories. Tom Garry’s verdict? An intriguing collaboration but room for growth.

Chelsea were in WCL action last night, cruising to a 4-0 win against Paris FC. Sophie Downey was at the Bridge to watch it unfold.

Their pressure eventually told, however, when Nüsken went down in the box with half an hour played. The offence from Le Moguédec was not initially spotted by the referee, Michalina Diakow, but after a brief trip to the VAR monitor, she duly pointed to the spot. Baltimore stepped up to convert for the second week in a row.

Chelsea consolidated their advantage just before the break when Thompson broke forward at pace. A clever turn gave her space to stand up a cross for Rytting Kaneryd to loop a header home. The winger looked slightly bemused that it had ended up in the back of the net, celebrating with an expression that said she is not accustomed to scoring with her head.

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In winning the Premier League manager of the month award for September, Oliver Glasner became the first Crystal Palace gaffer to take the gong since Tony Pulis in April 2014. Of course, Pulis could justifiably claim to have done more to earn his gaudy Perspex commemorative cuboid with four wins and a defeat, compared to his modern-day equivalent’s paltry draw and two wins. However, the man famously commemorated in song for wearing the club shop of whoever he happened to be managing wasn’t subsequently presented with an award for Austria coach of the year at a posh ceremony in Vienna, almost certainly due in no small part to the fact that he is Welsh. “It’s too many awards for me, I don’t feel that important!” protested Glasner in an interview with the Crystal Palace socials team, after beating compatriots in the field of ski-jumping and volleyball to the Niki award, named in honour of a famous Austrian who won two world championships with Ferrari, back in the days when F1 was still good.

For goodness sake, stop all the faffing around. Give the Geopolitics World Cup (and the Sherpa Van Trophy, and everything else) to Trump, and say it’s done. No need to worry about the heat, who’s on The Plane, who’s left on the tarmac, whose metatarsal is hurting, and all the rest of it. Just do it and we can get on with our lives” – Robert Pearce.

As someone in the construction industry, it comes as absolutely no surprise that architects are pretentious and know nothing whatsoever about what makes a good football stadium, or to use Big Website’s words, ‘football stadiums do have an otherworldly aura, as modern colossi looming above huddled neighbourhoods, evocative of Philip Larkin’s “ships up streets”’. However, what completely threw me in the article was the description of Forest Green Rovers as being ‘currently managed by former bad boy Robbie Savage’” – Noble Francis.

Re: Sensible Soccer or Kick Off 2 (yesterday’s last line, full email edition). If you listen to your colleague Max ‘I’ve already got a podcast’ Rushden’s, ahem, other podcast, you would know that Emlyn Hughes International Soccer is currently the hipsters’ choice. But seriously, it’s Sensi, natch” – David Bell.

Newcastle fought to keep Alexander Isak and were linked with Benjamin Sesko, Hugo Ekitike and Viktor Gyökeres. Maybe they have found the right man

By WhoScored

When Alexander Isak sealed his £125m British record transfer to Liverpool, Newcastle fans braced themselves for a period of turbulence. Losing their talismanic striker, who scored 54 goals in 86 Premier League appearances, felt like a decisive blow – until a 6ft6in German forward began to quietly win them over.

Replacing a centre-forward is not as simple as matching goals with goals. Newcastle’s task was to replace a player ​around who​m the team’s attacking identity had been built? The answer was 23-year-old Nick Woltemade, a young, promising forward from VFB Stuttgart but untested at the very top level.

There are supporters and then there was the Bulgarian Marin Levidzhov, who died this week aged 62

Ask any Manchester United fan of a certain age what 26 May 1999 means to them, and they will tell you the date has marked them for life. It was the night injury-time goals from Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjær sealed United’s 2-1 comeback in the Champions League final against Bayern Munich at the Camp Nou. It was also the night the life of one United fan in Bulgaria, who has died this week at the age of 62, changed for ever.

That supporter was born Marin Zdravkov Levidzhov in Svishtov, a town on the Danube with a population of 22,000. Growing up in communist Bulgaria adoring football, he dreamed of changing his name to … Manchester United. To claim the name of a football club from the capitalist west, however, was mission impossible. Had Marin tried to do so before the fall of the regime, he would almost certainly have ended up in jail.

Almost three years after his last game the former Barcelona and Everton player is in Udinese’s gym each weekday morning, refusing to give up

The morning light is still sharpening, training its beam through the windows at the far end of the gym. Around the walls, painted black up to halfway, are motivational slogans that have become common currency in training environments. “Go hard or go home,” one of them urges. “Hard work beats talent, when talent chooses not to work hard,” cautions another.

Beneath the second of those messages Gerard Deulofeu stands in conversation with Angel Aceña, Udinese’s rehab fitness coach. They are a team now, working towards a goal that never quite stands still. It is 8.30am and, as always, Deulofeu has been here for half an hour. There has been a session on one set of weights and shortly he will cross the room for another, checking a monitor for the latest notes of optimism. There is not another footballer in sight.

Manchester City and Netherlands player explains why she has become an LGBT Foundation patron and the importance of keeping football free of hate

In April, after scoring for Manchester City against Everton, I kissed a band in the blue, white and pink colours of the transgender flag on my right wrist. I felt very strongly about the supreme court ruling, politically and emotionally. It really hurt me, even though I’m a cisgender woman, and it still hurts me because it targets people within my community.

I really feel part of the queer community because I grew up in a pretty small town in the Netherlands and didn’t have a lot of queer people in my circle or in school, and there wasn’t a lot of representation on TV. I never really felt a part of any community because I didn’t really know it was out there. Growing up and coming out and being in women’s football, which has a very accepting and open environment, and then moving to Manchester, I felt that I could be myself and I became much more in touch with the community. It has been a new, refreshing part of my life.

Aston Villa, Chelsea, Leeds and Nottingham Forest fail to respond to questions sent by the Guardian, while Sunderland refuse to comment

Eleven Premier League clubs will have to find new principal sponsors next season when the ban on front-of-shirt advertising for betting companies takes effect. This will represent a financial blow for the clubs concerned: gambling operators are known to pay a substantial premium on standard industry rates. As Karren Brady told the House of Lords in a debate on the football governance bill last November, “the typical difference between gambling and non-gambling shirt sponsorships is around 40%”. The vice-chair of West Ham warned: “For some Premier League clubs, this decision [to ban front-of-shirt gambling advertising] will mean a reduction of around 20% of their total commercial revenues.”

So how to make for the shortfall? Some clubs seem to have opted for the simplest of solutions: to carry on as before, by adapting the nature of their offer to gambling partners accordingly, which includes hidden partnership deals with Asian-facing operators that are unlicensed in the UK and target illegal markets in China, and south and east Asia. The clubs concerned are Sunderland, Aston Villa, Leeds, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea.

Sports science graduate Alex Revell’s team lead League One with a record unrivalled in the top four divisions

These are heady days at Stevenage. They are top of League One under Alex Revell and a mile or so up the road an Airbus hub is building robots to explore Mars. A couple of months ago, the club’s longstanding chair, Phil Wallace, highlighted how Stevenage were one of the best points-per-pound performers last season – when they finished in mid-table – and after a near-flawless start this time they have the best points-per-game record in England’s top four divisions.

It is fair to say supporters are getting plenty of bang for their buck. A crowd of 7,228 packed into Stevenage’s modest ground for their latest league victory, over Luton, their highest attendance since welcoming Newcastle in the FA Cup fourth round in 1998, when a temporary stand boosted the capacity.

This new realistic, pragmatic approach, with no snags or celebrity bodge-jobs, means that this time could be the one

We’re on our way. We are Tom’s 26. This time, more than any other time, this time. We’re going to find a way. Find a way to get it right. This time. Well, maybe. Next time is also good. And the time after that. You don’t like this time? We have other times. Hey, Spain are pretty good right now aren’t they.

There is an entire multilayered history of Englishness in the basic tone and mood of English World Cup excitement. It is easy to forget that when the 1982 squad, AKA Ron’s 22, released the song This Time, a tortured paean to finally erasing their own ancestral agony, England had actually won the World Cup only 16 years earlier.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed he could take World Cup matches away from US cities he deems ‘unsafe’. Here’s what he said – and what powers he does and doesn’t have

Angel City and New Zealand defender on injury pain, losing her childhood home in LA’s wildfires and why the sport needs to talk more about IVF

Under a blazing-hot sun, among a crowd of 90,185 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on 10 July 1999, an 11-year-old girl was standing behind the goal where Brandi Chastain struck the penalty that won the World Cup for the United States, soaking in pure inspiration. Ali Riley, now 37, captain of New Zealand and a veteran of five World Cup campaigns, looks back on witnessing that moment in person and says: “That made me want to be a strong woman that could show her abs in front of the entire world and be on the front page of a newspaper. I think about how uncool it was to be good at sports, back then, and that moment was pivotal for me to see those women do what they did and be celebrated for it.”

On Sunday it will be Riley being celebrated at what is being billed as her farewell match at her home-town club Angel City, who named her as their first captain in 2022. She is retiring at the end of this season after a remarkable career that has included 163 international caps, four Olympic Games and spells with Rosengård, Bayern Munich and Chelsea, and Sunday is poised to be Angel City’s final home game of a season in which the playoffs appear to be beyond them. Her decision to retire comes after a year in which she has been through IVF, seen her childhood Los Angeles home burn down and got married, all while attempting to rehabilitate from a chronic nerve injury, so being able to hang up her boots on her own terms, back in Angel City’s squad, may be her biggest achievement.

• England captain missed penalty in 2022 quarter-final exit

• Kane: ‘It’s definitely helped me to become a better player’

Harry Kane has said that his penalty heartbreak against France at the last World Cup has changed him as a player and given him extra motivation to lead England to glory at the tournament next summer.

The captain missed from the spot in the 84th minute of the quarter‑final in Qatar in 2022 as England slipped to a 2-1 defeat – a moment Kane describes as the lowest of his career, worse than losing any club final. The Bayern Munich striker lost three of them with his previous club, Tottenham, including the Champions League final in 2019.

Chelsea kickstarted their European campaign with a comfortable victory over Paris FC. Alyssa Thompson scored her first goal in west London as Sonia Bompastor’s side dominated proceedings. Sandy Baltimore opened the scoring from the penalty spot while Johanna Rytting Kaneryd and Erin Cuthbert also got on the scoresheet.

It was a memorable night for Thompson who added the hosts’ third immediately after the break. The 20-year-old has enjoyed a bright start to her Chelsea career since making a high-profile £1.1m move from Angel City this summer. She played an integral role in getting Chelsea this Champions League win at Stamford Bridge and Bompastor was delighted with her progression.

• German coach follows Steven Gerrard in dropping out

• Muscat is currently in charge of China’s Shanghai Port

Rangers face increased pressure to complete a deal for Kevin Muscat to become their new manager after another leading candidate, Danny Röhl, made it known he has withdrawn from the process.

Röhl, who left Sheffield Wednesday in the summer, becomes the second coach after Steven Gerrard to remove his name from consideration following detailed talks with the Rangers board. The messiness of this situation is unlikely to placate an already angry fanbase. There was, however, an increased confidence from Rangers sources on Wednesday that Muscat could be delivered.

• Fishlock is Wales’ record caps winner and goalscorer

• She will continue to play for NWSL club Seattle Reign

Jess Fishlock, widely regarded as the Wales women’s national team’s greatest player, has announced she will retire from international football after the home friendly against Australia this month.

The 38-year-old is Wales’s record goalscorer, despite playing predominantly as a midfielder, and their most‑capped player, with 165 international appearances and 48 goals.

• Angel City forward to end 14-year pro career

• Press played 155 times for the US, scoring 64 times

One of the most electrifying players in US women’s soccer has called it a career.

Christen Press, who starred for the US women’s national team over 155 appearances from 2013 to 2021, announced on Wednesday that she would be retiring as a player at the conclusion of the 2025 NWSL season with Angel City FC.

From PSG’s Ibrahim Mbaye to Brazil’s next hope, we select some of the most talented players born in 2008. Check the progress of our classes of 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 … and go even further back. Here’s our Premier League class of 2025

We pick the best youngsters at each club born between 1 September 2008 and 31 August 2009, an age band known as first-year scholars. Check the progress of our classes of 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 … and go even further back. Here’s our 2025 world picks

The world of soccer throws up no shortage of questions on a regular basis. In today’s column, Graham Ruthven endeavors to answer three of them

By the time next summer’s World Cup kicks off, it’ll have been 12 years since Italy last played at the tournament they have won more times (four) than any other nation besides Brazil (five) and Germany (also four). The way things are going, the Azzurri’s 12-year wait for World Cup qualification could become a 16-year one at the very least.

Watching footballers for a living is not as glamorous as it may seem and, as this book extract reveals, the job is changing with technology

“I once travelled from Greece to Denmark to scout a goalkeeper. I went straight from the airport to the stadium, only for him to face zero shots. After away fans rioted, the match was abandoned, and the police had to intervene. My phone battery died, and I only made it to my hotel late at night, just in time for four hours of sleep before flying back. Despite the chaos, that game still provided valuable insights: I saw first-hand how much the home fans adored the player and observed his leadership and quality, even if all his shot-stopping happened in the warm-up.”

Here, then, is the life of those involved in one of the most misunderstood aspects of the game. Their stories reveal a side of football that rarely makes headlines – one of adaptability, forbearance, and sometimes, outright audacity.

More than half the 26 places appear to be locked down but big names are at risk with qualification secured and the tournament looming

Fresh from breaking Gordon Banks’s record for consecutive England clean sheets, Jordan Pickford remains the undisputed pick in goal. A miserly defensive record is a positive for Thomas Tuchel, even if the shutouts have come against poor sides. John Stones, such an elegant centre-back, is back in the team and will start at the World Cup if he stays fit. But who will partner him? Tuchel likes Ezri Konsa, whose versatility also makes him an option at right-back, and Marc Guéhi; big Dan Burn also looks established after making his international debut in March. It is more uncertain at left-back, but Reece James will play at right-back as long as his body does not let him down.

Plus: more players ignoring tactical instructions, free-kick flurries and Wembley Stadium’s first resident club

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Last month, Jeremy Ngakia scored twice for Watford against Oxford to take his career goals total to three from 116 senior club appearances. Excluding players who scored only once, has anybody with 100+ appearances managed a higher percentage of their career goals in a single match?” wonders Peter Skilton.

Denis Boone writes in with the tale of Matthieu Chalmé. “French right-back Chalmé played 362 professional matches during his career, mostly for Lille and Bordeaux,” Denis writes. “He scored four career goals, with three of them coming in a single game. Chalmé netted all three goals in Lille’s 3-0 win at Ajaccio in March 2004, recording the most unlikely of hat-tricks.”

Any more for any more? Mail us with your suggestions.

Qualification has been so easy it gives little indication how the side will fare against big hitters at the World Cup

As Harry Kane stepped up to make it 3-0 to England with the final kick of the first half at a wet, chilly and deflated Daugava Stadium it was strange to think that there was a time when the very act of reaching a major tournament was an event in its own right.

It is not supposed to be this much of a doddle. Qualifying was once a nerve-shredding experience. It could make or break reputations and even provided some of the most iconic moments in the history of English football: the euphoria of David Beckham’s free-kick against Greece in 2001, the bloody‑minded defiance of Paul Ince in Rome in 1997 or, at the other end of the spectrum, the farce of Steve McClaren’s umbrella at Wembley in 2007, the agony of Graham Taylor in Rotterdam in 1993 and the shock of Jan Tomaszewski’s heroics in goal for Poland against Sir Alf Ramsey’s England in 1973.

The average Premier League game lasts 100 minutes and 36 seconds, but the ball is only in play for 54.7% of that

By Opta Analyst

The start of every football match brings a little flutter in the stomach. Will the stars perform? Will the referee have a good game by giving your players every decision? And will the football gods shine down on your team? A more pertinent question to ask this season, though, is how much football will we actually see?

We wrote about ball-in-play time a few seasons ago, revealing that fans were not seeing as much football as in previous years. We’re not saying our data nosiness led to referees adding more stoppage time, but there was a notable rise in ball-in-play time over the next two campaigns. It went up from 54 minutes and 49 seconds in 2022-23 to 58 minutes and 11 seconds in 2023-24. It’s still early in the 2025-26 season, but the pendulum may be swinging back the other way.

The undefeated streak may have ended, but Australia’s first loss under this coach against USA confirms they’re set on the right path

Australia’s men were always going to lose a game in the Tony Popovic era, one supposes. How does that little idiom go again? Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened?

After last week’s win over Canada took him one clear of Joe Vlasits’ start in the 1960s, only Terry Venables had put together a longer undefeated start to life as Socceroos boss than the one Popovic took into Tuesday’s fixture against the USA – the 52-year-old was unbeaten in the eleven games of his year-long tenure, with seven straight wins. But thanks to two goals from American striker Haji Wright, it was in the mile-high surrounds of Denver where this run ended.

• Mosengo-Omba said to run CAF as a ‘proprietorship’

• Employee: ‘Anyone who dares speak up is terminated’

The Confederation of African Football’s general secretary, Véron Mosengo-Omba, has been accused of running the organisation as his “proprietorship” and creating a toxic culture of fear where employees are fired for speaking out against him.

Several former and current members of staff have told the Guardian there is an atmosphere of intimidation and paranoia at the Caf headquarters in Cairo, where Mosengo-Omba is accused of sidelining colleagues and silencing whistleblowers.

• Como insist relocating Milan game ‘not a matter of greed’

• Italian side highlight gulf in revenues to Premier League

The Italian club Como have released a statement on their potential Serie A match against Milan in Australia, claiming that taking games abroad is about “ensuring survival” for the league.

Uefa has reluctantly given approval for the match – a home league fixture for Milan – to take place in Perth next February. In addition, Villarreal’s La Liga match against Barcelona in December is set to take place in Miami, Florida.

The club will finally begin playing in Miami next season. For local fans near Chase Stadium there are mixed emotions

From an abandoned and derelict symbol of failed efforts to establish professional football in south Florida, to the arena where Lionel Messi has dazzled MLS while attracting visitors from around the globe. It has been a unique journey for the site where Fort Lauderdale’s Lockhart Stadium once stood.

“Even after all these years it’s so funny to me that Lionel Messi, one of the most famous faces in the history of mankind, is not only playing for our club but playing in this stadium that was abandoned,” said Nico Abad, a member of The Siege supporters’ group and a native of Broward County, where Chase Stadium stands on the former site of Lockhart. “It’s where kids would go to do doughnuts and to smoke and drink.”

In this mailbag edition of his newsletter, Jonathan answers questions about the evolution of tactics, heat and World Cup outsiders

• Sign up for Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here

Do you believe playing styles are developing incrementally or cyclically? Will things naturally come back around, or is it more a matter of rock, paper, scissors where one style counters another for a short while, as the current style gets broadly adopted? – Paul

I dislike the term “cyclical” for tactics because it implies inevitability. Winter, spring, summer, autumn is a cycle; what happens in football tactics is not. When older ideas are repurposed for the modern age, they come with knowledge of what went before. So, to take an extreme example, when Pep Guardiola started fielding teams in a sort of 3-2-2-3 shape, it wasn’t the W-M used by Herbert Chapman in the late 1920s, because in the 100 years since, football has changed enormously: players are fitter, pitches are better, kit is better, we understand pressing, we have data and sophisticated analytical modelling.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.

Manager learned at PSG to ignore star power in pursuit of a winning formula that prioritises brotherhood

Thomas Tuchel once stood on the touchline at Anfield, watching in disbelief as his self-indulgent Paris Saint-Germain players refused to put in the hard yards against Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool. “Guys, what is this?” he said, but there was never going to be a reaction from individuals with too much power and not enough respect for the basic concepts of teamwork.

Intensity? Tracking back? Not for us, thanks. Too many wanted to do their own thing and it ground Tuchel down in the end. The German is a coach who wants structure, identity, sacrifice and energy. At PSG, though, he saw how individualism can bring a dressing room down. How could Tuchel make his mark when he had players who would moan if a teammate looked at them the wrong way?

Dynamic pricing, crypto detritus and corporate doublespeak have made the task of buying 2026 World Cup tickets a grim case study in the monetization of emotion

When the first tickets for the 2026 World Cup went on sale last week, millions of fans joined online queues only to discover what Gianni Infantino’s assurance that “the world will be welcome” really means. The cheapest face-value seat for next summer’s final, somewhere in the gods of New Jersey’s 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium where the players are specks and the football’s a rumor, comes at a cost of $2,030 (oxygen tank not included). Most upper-deck seats range from $2,790 to $4,210, according to customers who finally glimpsed the prices that had been closely guarded. The much-touted $60 tickets for group-stage games, propped up by Fifa as evidence of affordability, exist only as comically tiny green smudges on the edge of digital seating maps, little more than mirages of inclusivity.

Fifa had kept the costs under wraps until the very moment of sale, replacing the usual published table of price points with a digital lottery that decided who even got the chance to buy. Millions spent hours staring at a queue screen as algorithms determined their place in line. When access finally came for most, the lower-priced sections had already vanished, many presumably hoovered up by bots and bulk-buyers (and that’s before Fifa quietly raised the prices of at least nine matches after only one day of sales). The whole process resembled less a ticket release than a psyop to calibrate how much frustration and scarcity the public will tolerate.

An easy target for accusations of luxury hypocrisy, Neville has at least tried to address an issue that has everything to do with aggressively flag-draped and militarised modern sport

“At the far end of the food counter a group of men were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. A group that had arrived earlier was singing The Star-Spangled Banner in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there.”

Welcome to our own Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, another real-time demonstration of the fact every satirical absurdity described in Catch-22 has become, yeah, pretty much totally plausible. The nation is now fully hostage to bad actors and phoney rage. And as ever football must act as a key amplifier of all this, a public echo chamber for the anxieties of what we must, out of a sense of duty, still call the real world.

Our cartoonist on a smooth journey towards the World Cup for England against a backdrop of flags and uproar

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• David’s latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Clubs’ plan to open new ground in 2031 has been met by local opposition but is required for hosts to stay competitive

A protester outside held a sign insisting “San Siro belongs to the citizens” but Milan’s city council was about to change all that, voting to sell one of the world’s most famous football stadiums to tenants who plan to tear it down. Milan have played home games at what is officially the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza since 1926. Inter moved in with them 21 years later. They propose to build a shared home on the same grounds.

It has been a long time coming. The clubs announced joint plans for a new stadium as long ago as June 2019, with an intention to complete work within three years. International architecture firms were consulted and designs made public, but they never progressed out of this first phase.

Optimistic in August under Steve Bruce, Blackpool are now managerless and 23rd in League One after Stockport’s win

The Mick McCarthy “it can” meme is known far and wide as social media shorthand for woeful underperformance, although the full context is not.

When McCarthy was infamously asked if a miserable run of one win in 17 games could continue and issued the deadpan response “it can”, he was the Blackpool manager struggling through his ill-fated 2023 spell.

Veteran commentator answers your questions on famous lines, favourite stadiums and being told ‘Not for me, Clive’

What is the best sporting accomplishment or achievement you have commentated on and did you ever harbour personal ambitions to be a professional in any sport? Tony Medlock

I was never good enough at any sport to kid myself that I had a career at elite level. My parents would have told you that from an early age any sporting ambitions I entertained were in the area I ended up in; describing and commentating on top-level sport. I always resist any grading of goals or players or matches because I have a belief that sport belongs in its moment. Sport creates memories – we can recall vividly where we were, who we were with, what we were thinking, when our team won a trophy or an athlete won an Olympic gold medal … or Shane Lowry sunk a putt to seal the Ryder Cup. Those moments are very personal, and the job of the commentator is to try to add something to the memory of those moments. And those moments are unique and should remain separate from one another.

The Guardian’s fans’ network on the opening stages of 2025-26: their toughest opponents, biggest setbacks and tips for the next manager sacked

Story so far Top of the table, looking down at our rivals, despite still not really firing on all cylinders … it’s early days, but we’re struggling to keep a lid on the excitement here. Having star turns such as Havertz, Madueke and now Ødegaard succumb to long-term injury is a reminder of the risk of being derailed, but it does feel like we’ve never been better equipped to cope with the slings and arrows. Arteta is still unwrapping his new toys and figuring out the best way to use them – can’t wait to see how the chemistry develops.

Bernard Azulay onlinegooner.com; @GoonerN5

Jonathan Pritchard

I had high hopes of making a difference when I joined Halifax Women but ended up feeling let down. Clubs have a responsibility to look after their players – at all levels

Football has given me some wonderful experiences. As a young Arab and Egyptian woman playing for Stoke City from 2017 to 2021 I broke barriers and that paved the way for some exciting opportunities. Fifa selected me as a 2022 World Cup ambassador and put me in a film with David Beckham; I also became an Adidas ambassador and worked as an Afcon pundit for the BBC.

But there have been less easy times as well. As an Egyptian international, representing a country that stands 95th in the Fifa rankings, there are obstacles to playing in the biggest leagues. Because of the points system for international players I left Stoke for the chance of playing second-tier football in Spain with Albacete. And since coming back to England, I’ve seen a world very distant from the new riches of the WSL.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Paul Watson and Ben Fisher as the Premier League returns this weekend

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook and email.

On the podcast today: the panel preview the upcoming round of fixtures including Liverpool at home to Manchester United in a game that feels significant for both sides. Arne Slot has some big decisions to make while a win for Ruben Amorim would potentially blast his side up to the dizzying heights of sixth.

Faye Carruthers is joined by Suzy Wrack, Robyn Cowen and Tom Garry to reflect on Millie Bright’s international retirement, a busy weekend in the WSL and a mixed start for English clubs in the Champions League

On today’s pod: Millie Bright calls time on her England career and the panel reflect on her legacy, leadership and unforgettable moments in a Lionesses shirt.

Plus, the panel runs through all the latest WSL action as Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City all pick up wins, but not without drama. They talk Jess Park’s purple patch, Spurs’ growing resilience, and what’s not clicking yet for West Ham and Everton.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jordan Jarrett-Bryan and George Elek to discuss the World Cup qualifiers as Scotland’s 2-1 win against Belarus disguised a dismal performance

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On today’s pod: Scotland edged closer to World Cup qualification with an ugly win against Belarus at Hampden Park. “We know we have got to be better” was Scott McTominay’s verdict, but Scotland are now two wins away from securing a return to the tournament they have not appeared at since 1998.

Everton continue to struggle at home, Leicester’s long wait for an away win goes on but Spurs can take pride in defeat

The disquiet over Kyra Cooney-Cross’s lack of action has grown louder by the week and her 27-minute cameo in Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat of Brighton fuelled her case for a start. The Australian midfielder impressed when she featured last season and there were high hopes for her going into this campaign, but four games glued to the bench have been followed by 54 minutes as a substitute across the following three matches. Brighton were, by their own admission, tiring towards the end of their 1-0 defeat and Cooney-Cross’s ball-carrying and front-foot approach caught the eye as the Gunners tried to extend their lead. “When there’s a drop-off [in] minute 60 or 75 and intensity goes down in games and space becomes bigger, the gamechangers can make a real impact, and that’s 100% what Kyra did,” said the Arsenal manager Renée Slegers. “She capitalised on the spaces and the fatigue and the opposition team and she plays with a lot of confidence and forward intent and she brings all her best qualities to life today, so I’m really pleased.” The preferred midfield trio this season has been Kim Little, Mariona Caldentey and Frida Maanum, with Victoria Pelova also featuring and Alessia Russo dropping into the 10 on occasion. It is hard to see where Cooney-Cross fits into the equation, but with Arsenal struggling to assert authority, change may not be a bad thing. Suzanne Wrack

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