Each site

Football is changing.You don’t need to be Grampa Simpson shouting at a cloud to realise things are not what they used to be. The top level of the men’s game is widely different from how it was even 10 years ago.Many things are disappearing from football, some of which are slightly intangible — raucous atmospheres, community, the feeling that having so much football available to watch is dulling our senses and making us numb to the excitement of it — but some of them are more measurable.So we’ve measured them. Here are some things that nobody does anymore in football. Or, at least, are doing an awful lot less…1) We will not be playing 4-4-f*cking-2For a long time, the good old-fashioned 4-4-2 formation was the default way of setting a team up, in English football at least. The backbone of O...

A Biden administration official said on Friday that efforts to get Americans and other foreign nationals out of Gaza, a process that finally began on Wednesday, had been held up by Hamas trying to get its own wounded fighters included among those to be escorted into Egypt through the Rafah gate.The explanation offered the first window into the kinds of details that were being negotiated with the leadership of Hamas, even as Israel began a campaign of airstrikes in response to the slaughter of 1,400 people and the taking of more than 200 hostages by Hamas terrorists in attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 launched from Gaza. Hamas rules Gaza politically and also has an armed wing whose fighters are embedded within the enclave’s civilian population.People holding dual, U.S. or other foreign citizensh...

The story starts with a message. Everything that has followed and everything that might yet — the glory and the acclaim, the opportunity and the revolution — has unspooled from a simple text. Everyone involved can agree on that. What is not entirely clear, though, is precisely which message was the one that counted.The official version runs like this. One night in April last year, the soccer coach Fernando Diniz sent a message to Mario Bittencourt, the president of Fluminense, one of the traditional giants of Brazilian soccer. It was not the usual modus operandi for Diniz: In more than a decade as a manager, he had tended to wait for clubs to come to him. It was a point of professional pride.In this case, though, he was prepared to make an exception. Fluminense had just fired its coach. Di...