On days like these, as the calendar ticks around, as we link hands and sing of our joy at being one notch further on the doomsday clock, it is customary to talk about hopes for the future and life lessons learned from the last 12 months of kicking balls, running around tracks, driving fast cars and all the rest.

Except of course, there are no actual lessons to be learned from professional sport, which is basically lighted shapes moving on a screen, digital celebrity worship, a confusion of desires coopted into a pay-per-view entertainment product.

Ralf Rangnick happy with reaction after warning players over body languageRead more

Perhaps at if we dig a little deeper and adopt a twinkly, world-weary frown, we might sa…

Having hogged countless column inches with increasingly frantic speculation over a summer move to a famous European club – which in fairness was not his fault, and entirely ours – Victor Osimhen looks poised to do the old switcheroo and sign a contract extension with the Italian champions, Napoli, instead.

Bayern fly in for more Harry Kane talks but PSG interest complicates pursuitRead more

Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester United and Chelsea were among the raft of clubs linked with the Nigeria international, whose goals helped fire the Partenopei to their third Scudetto last season. Sky Italia report Napoli want a €200m (£171m) release clause included in the terms of the new deal, while Osimhen and his people are aiming for a more modest …

Yankees GM Brian Cashman is well aware of how old and bad his team is, and now it looks like he's starting to get a bit desperate. While speaking to reporters at spring training today, Cashman made it known that he wants to bring Chipper Jones out of retirement to play for the Yanks. The only problem is that Cashman doesn't have Jones's phone number: Sitting in the dugout before the Yankees’ exhibition game with the St. Louis Cardinals, Cashman confirmed to three reporters that he asked Derrek Lee to come out of retirement, and then said he would be just as happy to sign Chipper Jones, who retired last year after 19 years with the Braves. But Cashman said he did not have a working telephone number for Jones’s agent, B.B. Abbott, so he told the reporters they could re…

A week and a half ago, The Daily Beast ran an article, missed by some because it dropped on a Friday evening, reporting on the largely forgotten 2006 groping allegations against Vince McMahon. What made the case newsworthy again was that while McMahon was never charged with assaulting the Florida tanning salon employee, a newly unearthed police report revealed that the local cops felt there was probable cause to believe he did it. While the Boca Raton Police Department report had not previously been published, I had been working on my own story about the case that was already close to publication when we got scooped about the report’s findings. That’s not the end of the story, though, because the report contained not just the “probable cause” note, but also the witnesses’ n…