World Sports

In August 1987, in the midst of one of the darkest periods in English soccer history, a countercultural movement sprung into existence in the stadium of the Manchester City Football Club when a man named Frank Newton brought a five-foot inflatable banana to a game for a laugh. Laughs being rare in the stands at that time, other fans embraced the idea of inflatable bananas and a trend bloomed. Vendors…

It’s Sunday morning, and 26-year-old Ethan Sturm logs on to his computer at home in Boston and begins his search. Scrolling through the thousands of potential competitions he can enter via the daily fantasy sports site FanDuel, Sturm picks out a few contests and starts crafting his lineups. He doesn’t want to get into any of the larger tournaments, preferring to face off against 100 or so competitors…

Halloween is almost here, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve waited until the last possible second to come up with a costume. But have no fear, we’ve got all of the ideas you’ll need to make sure your outfit is on point. 1. LeBron James’ headband All you have to do to achieve this look is wear all white and brag to anyone and everyone around you that…

For a list of all the latest deals, check out the transfers page. Former Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers is being lined up as an interim manager at Chelsea – should they fire under-pressure Jose Mourinho. (Belfast Telegraph)  Alternatively, Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is preparing to replace manager Mourinho with former Blues boss Andre Villas-Boas. (Metro)  Manchester United will…

CHICAGO – The playoffs have come to an end for the Cubs and are a long way off for a few of the other Chicago professional teams. But a bit of “November Madness” is getting started this weekend. That’s the IHSA Football playoffs. 256 teams from around the state are vying for a championship in one of eight classes with the first round starting on Friday night. The playoffs conclude…

On Thursday, ESPN published a very sweet story about two Michigan fans who met in the ESPN.com comments section and bonded over their love of Michigan football. And while anyone who has ever been to a comments section knows that this seems unlikely, it’s definitely not impossible. So for those who want to meet their special someone this way, we have help: We went onto our interoffice Slack chat and spoke to…

State gambling regulators said the fantasy sports industry should have some regulation, but are also wary of stopping the fast-growing sector in its tracks. “If you came in heavy on this, you could crush an industry like this overnight,” Massachusetts Gaming Commission Chairman Stephen Crosby said at a hearing Thursday. Continue reading below The commission has started diving into the complicated laws surrounding online fantasy sports, which charge entry fees…

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Sports and brands are intertwined. It’s impossible to watch a game or sports show without being inundated with sponsored messages during the actual program. But while sponsorship opportunities are ubiquitous, there is still a lot more brands can do in sports. It’s an area that The Kicker, a new sports-focused comedy site from “SNL” co-head writer Bryan Tucker, hopes to take advantage of. “There are a lot of brands that want…

In the Victorian era, women turned to corsets to keep their breasts from moving too much. Those competing at Wimbledon in 1887 returned to their dressing rooms in between matches to “unhitch their bloody corsets,” having been “repeatedly stabbed by the metal and whale bone stays of the cumbersome garments” as they played. By 1911, women got a “sports corset” with flexible material, and thanks to the 1914 tango…

“The defendants are charged in a 124-count indictment with enterprise corruption,” it added, noting that they each face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. Fourteen were arrested Wednesday, including nine in the Los Angeles area. Three others were still being sought, the Queens County, New York, District Attorney Richard Brown’s office said in a statement. Read More Jeb Bush: Daily fantasy sports is…

For a list of all the latest deals, check out the transfers page. Chelsea forward Pedro, 28, has told friends he regrets moving to the club from Spanish giants Barcelona in the summer and would be happy to return to the Nou Camp. (Fichajes,  via Daily Express)  Manchester United target Neymar will be offered a new £500,000-a-week deal by…

Americans have been betting on sports since the first time a Puritan pilgrim boasted that his horse was the fastest in Massachusetts Bay Colony and another said, “Wanna bet?” But fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and government gotta fret about gambling on fantasy sports. Torrential television advertising by DraftKings and FanDuel is creating millions of customers for these sports-fantasy businesses, thereby creating government anxiety lest Americans make unregulated choices…

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While countless hours of preparation are dedicated to major broadcast sports events, incidents like that of the outage at the World Series Game 1 on Tuesday night exemplify Murphy’s Law — if it can go wrong, it will. For about four minutes, millions of television viewers couldn’t watch the Mets play the Royals. At the bottom of the fourth inning, when the Royals were at bat, the picture disappeared. “A…

Ironically, the combination of early specialization, playing on multiple teams during the same season, marathon weekend travel tournaments, and year-round participation, is unlikely to achieve the desired outcome: elite athletes who get accepted for college scholarships and professional careers. Quite the contrary, there is evidence demonstrating that kids who play multiple sports while they’re young and wait to specialize until the early teenage years are actually better athletes. For example,…

Watch out, Donkey Teeth — you’ve got some new competition. Bryan Tucker, co-head writer of Saturday Night Live, and Above Average Productions, the digital arm of Broadway Video, have officially launched their sports-comedy online platform, The Kicker. Built “for sports fans by sports fans,” the website features videos starring athletes and celebrities including Kenan Thompson, Andy Samberg, Perez Hilton, Wyclef Jean, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Jamaal Charles, Odell Beckham Jr. and…

For the past six years, The Wall Street Journal has done society a noble service by providing parents with Halloween costume ideas for their children based on the least inspiring moments from the previous year in sports. Some years we have to dig deep to find enough suitable sports antiheroes to fill an entire display page. 2015 wasn’t one of those years. Here are this year’s “winners.” The FIFA corruption…

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WASHINGTON—The fantasy sports industry, facing a federal criminal probe and scrutiny by state regulators, plans to create an outside control board to ensure ethical behavior in the industry, officials said Tuesday. A Fantasy Sports Control Agency, designed to monitor daily and nondaily fantasy sports companies, will be led by a former Obama administration official, lawyer Seth Harris, who was deputy labor secretary from 2009 to…