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Not many at Old Trafford are suited to the manager’s trusty 3-4-2-1 but replacing them will cost hundreds of millions

Everything always seems clearer in the morning, and in the cold grey light of Thursday, the prognosis for Manchester United is bleak. While Tottenham face an awkward calculation – weighing up whether the delirium of a first European trophy in 41 years offsets their worst league season in terms of proportion of games lost – for Manchester United the equation is far starker.

Ruben Amorim will only play in one way. He is committed absolutely, uncompromisingly, irrevocably to the 3-4-2-1. Liverpool considered him, looked at their squad, realised the two things did not go together, appointed Arne Slot and won the league. Manchester United looked at their squad, flinched at the horror, and seem to have reasoned it was such a mess that it was impossible to find a manager whose philosophy would fit. There was a dissenting voice, Dan Ashworth, but at the court of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, reasoned doubts are as unwelcome as a free lunch.

No one left Spurs’ club celebrations when the lights went on at 3am but will the lights go out on the manager’s tenure?

The Tottenham afterparty was in full swing at the Hotel Carlton in Bilbao; players, management and family members just surrendering to the moment. Many of the players were still in their full match kits, medals draped around their necks and the centrepiece was the Europa League trophy, 15kg of the purest bliss.

It is heavier than you think, according to Son Heung-min. “Very heavy, very heavy,” he said. The Spurs captain had accidentally head-butted it as he hoisted it high into the sky after the 1-0 win over Manchester United, a teammate having pushed into him as he performed the move he had dreamed about ever since signing from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015. The angry red cut on Son’s forehead was a part of the tapestry.

The Blaugrana face Arsenal after what Caroline Graham Hansen calls an ‘emotional’ campaign under a new manager

Normalising the extraordinary. Even in their “worst season”, Barcelona are going for a second quadruple in a row and third consecutive Women’s Champions League title. Few may have predicted that late last year, after a defeat at Manchester City prompted a new narrative: this was the season they were finally not going to win anything.

In the end, they won the Liga F title but only after losing twice. That may not sound terrible but it is the first time since the 2018-19 season they have been defeated more than once in the league. So a crisis of some sort. The loss at City also prompted some soul-searching for a team in their first season with a new manager, Pere Romeu replacing Jonatan Giráldez last summer.

The club is expertly run but if Black Cats defeat Sheffield United, commercial concerns could be a headache

It is May 2024 and Illan Meslier, the Leeds goalkeeper, is singing the praises of a former Lorient youth coach whose astute mentoring shaped his career. But who is this left-field thinker who dispatched his young goalkeepers to undergo professional boxing training, spend hours performing acrobatics on trampolines and talk intensely to sports psychologists? Régis Le Bris eventually became Lorient’s first-team manager in 2022 but, after a promising opening season, the Breton team were relegated from Ligue 1 last spring. No matter; a month on from that chat with Meslier in North Yorkshire, Sunderland named Le Bris as their head coach and, now, the 49-year-old is preparing to lead the club out at Wembley on Saturday.

Former Hull striker on his push to raise awareness, thriving as a pantomime villain and his most famous goal

The framed photograph hangs just inside the front door. It shows Dean Windass, somehow larger than life even with his back turned to the camera, standing with arms aloft on the balcony of Hull City Hall and inhaling the adulation of thousands. Two days earlier he had, at the age of 39, scored a winner for the ages at Wembley and sent his boyhood club to the Premier League. He could not have caught the ball any more sweetly after Fraizer Campbell had chipped it across; it was no hardship that, even then, he knew it would follow him for ever.

“It changed my life,” Windass says, sitting in his living room on a quiet May morning. “I scored 234 goals and everyone only talks about that one.” To this day he swears a scorcher at Wycombe in 1992-93, “volleyed in with my left foot from 950 million yards”, was superior to his museum piece from 2008. But he is synonymous with the playoffs now; they are his thing, a sporting event he still anticipates like few others, and when we meet he correctly predicts Sheffield United will meet Sunderland in Saturday’s Championship final.

• Streaming platform in line to agree five-year deal

• Dazn has shown Champions League for four seasons

The streaming platform Disney+ is set to show live Women’s Champions League matches from next season across multiple European broadcast territories, including the United Kingdom.

It is understood Disney+ has agreed a five-year deal which will mean that it broadcasts every single match in the competition live, which is being perceived as a major step forward for coverage of the European women’s game’s top club competition.

• Laurent Bonadei drops trio from Nations League squad

• It is not a spur of the moment decision, says France coach

France have dropped their captain Wendie Renard, their vice-captain Eugénie Le Sommer and the experienced midfielder Kenza Dali for their upcoming Nations League games with little prospect of either making a return for this summer’s Euros.

Laurent Bonadei’s side face Switzerland and Iceland in the international window. There had been reports of the trio being left out but the announcement still came as a shock. France are one of the favourites for the European Championship in Switzerland but have been drawn in a tough group with England, the Netherlands and Wales.

• Manager wants ‘exceptional’ Partey to sign new contract

• ‘We need a goal threat and we need the firepower,’ he says

Mikel Arteta has said he would like Thomas Partey to stay at Arsenal but admitted his squad needs more “firepower” to win trophies.

Talks are understood to have begun with Partey’s representatives over extending his contract beyond this season. The Ghana midfielder has been one of Arsenal’s best players as they finished as Premier League runners-up for a third season in succession. Arteta has won only the 2020 FA Cup during his five seasons in charge.

• Dozens of injuries reported from recent celebrations

• ‘We’ve seen young children suffering burns,’ club warns

Liverpool Football Club have urged supporters not to bring pyrotechnics to the club’s victory parade on Monday, after 50 incidents of burning were reported after their title-winning victory against Tottenham last month.

Medical staff from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and local police have endorsed the club’s message, reporting that youngsters visited A&E with burns to their hands and scalps after contact with burning flares after the Spurs game.

Football coverage no longer stops after the final whistle. And in this new era, the former Liverpool defender reigns supreme

Jamie Carragher’s legs were aching. He had been speaking to a Sky Sports cameraman for 25 minutes. Usually for a news interview it’s just 10, but today called for something more. Reports were coming out that Trent Alexander-Arnold, who inherited Carragher’s mantle as the local mainstay of Liverpool’s defence, was about to announce his long-expected departure from his boyhood club, and so, as sure as day follows night, a camera crew had been hastily dispatched to Carragher’s whereabouts to find a quiet spot, hit record and get his opinions out to viewers before they’d had a chance to fully form their own.

How much was there to say about a subject that had already been talked about all season long? Quite a lot, it turned out. Like a hunter-gatherer extracting a week’s worth of food from a seemingly arid wilderness, Carragher – occasionally prompted by a Sky Sports anchor in the studio – launched into nearly half an hour of pure, free-flowing, agenda-setting football opinionating. From this monologue, Sky would carve out a TV report, YouTube interview, news article and three short-form videos. When Carragher says something – about Alexander-Arnold’s future, Arsenal’s attack, Chelsea’s owners or Fifa’s executives – we tend to hear about it very shortly after.

Emotion of Europa League final victory hits hard, particularly tangled in with homesickness watching from Australia at 5am

I didn’t really cry until Son Heung-min was handed the trophy – the camera hadn’t cut to him enough at full time. Of all the players who look sad when they’re sad, Sonny really looks sad. Building up to the Europa League final all I could imagine was a disconsolate South Korean walking around the pitch applauding mournfully. The Harry Kane walk. His smile when shiny-shoed Aleksander Ceferin hands him the trophy broke me. Apparently it weighs 15kg – the same as my three-year-old. That trophy certainly looked lighter than when young Ian demands to be carried home from the park.

As a very sleep-deprived middle-aged dad of young kids, the emotion of football back home hits a lot harder than it used to. I found myself weeping at the videos of Crystal Palace fans after the FA Cup final. Someone focused from person to person, pausing for just enough time on each of them to give you the impression that you could see the etched lines of disappointment they’d experienced over the years just evaporating into the air.

• Insults were directed towards Brazilian in December 2022

• La Liga hails judgment as ‘unprecedented milestone’

• Luka Modric to leave Real Madrid after Club World Cup

Five Valladolid fans who abused the Real Madrid forward Vinícius Júnior have been given suspended prison sentences, in what La Liga described as a landmark ruling that condemned racist insults hurled in a football stadium as a hate crime.

The case goes back to Madrid’s 2-0 win in December 2022 at Real Valladolid’s José Zorrilla Stadium, during which several fans hurled racist abuse at the Brazilian. The individuals were later identified using images and videos published on social media.

Steepest drop in nearly eight months as club misses out on lucrative place in next season’s Champions League

Manchester United shares have slumped after the football club was defeated in the final of Europe’s second-tier tournament, which will ultimately lead to £100m in lost revenues.

United lost 1-0 to Tottenham Hotspur in the Uefa Europa League final in Bilbao on Wednesday night, dealing a further blow to its billionaire owners, the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe. It means the club has failed to qualify for next season’s lucrative Uefa Champions League, Europe’s top-tier football competition.

• John Textor-owned Lyon could also reach competition
• Uefa’s club financial control body set to look into case

Crystal Palace are confident they will be cleared to play in next season’s Europa League even if Lyon also qualify despite concerns that they could contravene Uefa’s rules about multi-club ownership.

No individual is permitted to control two clubs that are competing in the same Uefa-run competition, with Lyon owner John Textor also listed as Palace’s largest shareholder at 45%, through his company Eagle Football Holdings. Victory for Paris Saint-Germain against Reims in the French Cup final this weekend would confirm that Lyon qualify for the Europa League after finishing sixth in Ligue 1.

• Southampton said they were not prepared to discuss deal
• London City apologised and cooperated with FA process

London City Lionesses have been fined £15,000 for making an approach to a Southampton player via social media, without her club’s permission.

The club newly promoted to the Women’s Super League (WSL) admitted to the Football Association’s charge, which related to an attempt to sign the player from their Women’s Championship rivals during last summer’s transfer window. The player’s name was redacted from the published written findings of an independent regulatory commission. The hearing took place in March 2025.

• Pulisic will miss Gold Cup along with Fulham’s Antonee Robinson

• Squad will play two friendlies before the tournament begins

The US men’s national team’s pre-Gold Cup training camp roster does not include many of the team’s biggest stars, including Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah, Weston McKennie, Tim Weah, Gio Reyna, Antonee Robinson and Josh Sargent.

Some of the above absences were expected, as McKennie, Weah, and Reyna will each be with their clubs as they compete in the Club World Cup, which takes place at the same time as the Gold Cup and for which Fifa has given clubs priority over national teams.

Mauricio Pochettino faces an uphill battle to change the USMNT’s culture without their most important players.

If the 2022 World Cup was the debutante ball for a shiny new generation of United States men’s national team players, the 2025 Gold Cup was supposed to be a general rehearsal for the big dance: next summer’s World Cup.

Instead, still-somewhat-newish US manager Mauricio Pochettino will go into this summer tournament for the continental title shorn of a great many of his leading players. As such, his first and only chance to work with his team for an extended period of time before the start of the 2026 World Cup will present all kinds of challenges.

The players – and the few fans in attendance – seemed to enjoy the first day of the new, lucrative tournament but can it become a permanent fixture in the women’s calendar?

There are rolling substitutes, you cannot be offside and smoke cannons erupt from behind the goal when you score. Women’s football’s newest competition, with its $5m (£3.7m) prize pool, is highly lucrative for the teams involved but is not taking itself too seriously. Perhaps that will become its greatest selling point, as this end-of-season party on the Portuguese Riviera seeks to show that women’s football can thrive if it is different.

There has been no patient buildup and nobody is sitting deep in a low block; it is just attack after attack. In simple terms, the first day at World Sevens Football felt like a throwback to what sport is supposed to be about: fun.

Deployed in central midfield rather than a more familiar No 10 role, the playmaker failed to make his mark in Bilbao

Wanted desperately: a system that allows Manchester United to create a cornucopia of chances, plus a Bruno Fernandes who does not go missing precisely when this one-man Ruben Amorim outfit needs him – in a major European final.

Cumbersome, toothless and lacking flair: this has been Amorim’s 3-4-3 formation since he took over in early November, and was Fernandes on Wednesday night, alongside the (again) impotent Rasmus Højlund, plus the anonymous Mason Mount, Amad Diallo and too many others in United colours.

Veterans are using sport as a form of rehabilitation from severe injuries and, as one organiser explains: ‘It’s about emotional gain, helping them rediscover this will to live’

A little more than four months ago, Konstantyn Moskal arrived at a new position close to Ukraine’s frontline. He had been serving in the army for six years and, as a native of the almost entirely occupied Luhansk region, knew the price of war better than most. It was soon to take a horrifying toll from him. Moskal stepped on a landmine shortly after the rotation and life changed irrevocably. The evacuation procedure went smoothly, in the circumstances, but his lower left leg could not be saved. It was hard not to think dark thoughts after two operations; tougher still given a prosthetic was nowhere on the horizon.

Now it is mid-May. Wearing the red, yellow-trimmed shirt of FK Khrestonostsi, Moskal puffs out his cheeks before sitting in the dugout. He props his crutch against the neighbouring seat. The second half of the final is starting and he will take a breather. He smiles at his wife, Alina, who watches from the front row. This time he has remembered to wear his talisman, a metallic cross fastened around his neck, and he tells her it is the reason for his two goals. Soon he will almost certainly win his first football tournament. “Rest up or you won’t be able to lift the trophy,” a teammate advises.

While the top and bottom of the Premier League are resolved, European spots are very much up for grabs

Intrigue on the final day of the Premier League season is concentrated solely on who qualifies for Europe, but there is plenty of it. Seven clubs will enter the last round of matches unsure of which European competition they will be playing in next season, or in some cases whether they will be playing in Europe at all, with half of the division potentially competing in Uefa tournaments in 2025-26. Here is what is at stake on Sunday …

Plus: more strange player-of-the-match awards and shot-shy winners; and did Brian Clough deliberately go down to 10 men?

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“In terms of aggregate league position, will Tottenham v Manchester United be the worst European final ever?” asks Phil Taylor (and dozens of others).

Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, who meet in Bilbao tonight, put all their eggs in the Europa League basket sometime before the clocks went back. They are 17th and 16th in the Premier League respectively, giving them an aggregate position of 33. It is, to take a couple of unashamedly gratuitous examples, equivalent to Oldham Athletic playing Southampton in the Uefa Cup final of 1992, or Sabadell meeting Racing Santander in the same competition in 1987.

• Late winner seals City women’s 1-0 win over Incheon Red Angels
• City play Wuhan Jiangda for $2m pay day in final on Saturday

Teenager Shelby McMahon produced a wonder goal at the death to steer Melbourne City to a 1-0 win over Incheon Red Angels and into the Women’s Asian Champions League Final.

With a huge prize packet on the line, City appeared bound for extra-time against the South Koreans at the Wuhan Sports Center Stadium on Wednesday night.

The Yellow Submarine won at Barcelona to seal fifth place and vindication for a manager they sacked nine years ago

Villarreal had given everything all season when with one game left the roof fell in on them, but not like that. It had been 10 long, hard months of “solidarity and commitment … methodology, work, honesty and dedication”, their manager said, yet this was no late lament, all that for nothing; instead, this was reward and release, “time to enjoy it”, to let go, so they did. Outside at Montjuïc, Barcelona had begun their party, even 2025’s first league defeat and killjoy keeper Wojciech Szczesny saving an outrageous overhead kick from his own son not spoiling the fun; inside the dressing room, the club from the small town 200 miles south had begun theirs too, and nothing could ruin this either. Someone put La Morocha on and the players were bouncing about, drumming the rhythm on the ceiling when, in another triumph for cheap construction, the first beam came down. Captain Juan Foyth, looking like a kid who’d put a football through the neighbour’s window, raised his arm to protect his teammates, quietly laid it to one side, and they carried on.

The track was changed, Handel now, and they lined up. Some tipped their heads back, gazing at the ceiling they had broken. Others put hands on hearts. Most laughed. All of them scatted and sang, at least the word they knew: maybe not die meister, maybe not die besten or les grandes équipes, and definitely not eine grosse sportliche veranstaltung, but certainly the champions. The flag they carried read “the village wants the Champions League” and now they had it. Villarreal, the team from the place whose population could fit into Montjuïc, had come to Catalonia, handed the newly crowned champions a guard of honour and then beaten them 3-2, helped by Barça’s hangovers, to secure fifth and a return to Europe’s biggest competition with a week to spare. The season, Santi Comesaña said, had been “almost perfect”.

• Emma Hayes named a 24-player squad for upcoming games
• US set to play China on 31 May, and Jamaica on 3 June

US women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes has named a 24-player squad that will play two friendlies during the next international window. The squad is notable for first-time call-ups from two of the best teams in recent NWSL seasons: Kansas City Current midfielder Lo’eau LaBonta and Orlando Pride defender Kerry Abello. Claudia Dickey, goalkeeper for Seattle Reign, has also received her first call-up to the national team.

“First of all I think she’s deserving of the call-up. It’s the right moment to do it,” Hayes said of LaBonta said on Tuesday, adding that she thought Abello has been one of the most consistent performers for one of the NWSL’s best teams and that Dickey has been “the best performing goalkeeper in the NWSL this season.”

The 37-year-old former Chelsea winger had the final say amid controversy, bitterness and regret in Milan and Parma

Antonio Conte looked like a man who just wanted to be tucked up in bed, sinking into his seat in the Stadio Tardini’s press conference room instead and dropping his head between his hands. “Very tired,” he replied when a journalist asked how he was feeling. He kept repeating those words while the next question was being asked, a quiet little chant: “Very tired. Very tired. Very tired.”

Even a neutral spectator might have felt exhausted from keeping up with all the twists and turns on a night when Conte’s Napoli twice lost control of the Serie A title race and twice got it back – all without scoring or conceding any goals. A night of VAR controversies, penalties awarded then unawarded and deep, bitter regret.

As my body begins to show undeniable signs of decay, it’s time to reflect on a profoundly underwhelming sporting life

There are the nights when the 10-minute walk to the tube station takes half an hour. There are the crossbow bolts of knee pain at 3am. There are the evenings when you convince yourself the recycling doesn’t actually need to be taken out tonight. We can wait a couple of days, squash it down a bit, crush that box flat. And secretly, it’s because you can’t handle the stairs.

There are the mornings when the bus is coming and the kids shout “Come on!” and start running, but you can’t, you just can’t, and you don’t know how to tell them. There is the very particular indignity of the 39-year-old man crossing the road in socks because blisters and swellings have rendered his boots useless. There are the fitness fads – hot yoga, reformer pilates, cold plunge – adopted at great expense and with the sole purpose of pushing back oblivion, of rendering the intolerable fleetingly tolerable.

A final red card and parting of ways for broadcaster’s star performer after several warnings and uneasy relationship

For a footballer who went through an entire career without receiving a yellow card, it may seem like an unlikely end.

On Sunday night, Gary Lineker will be dispatched from the BBC’s studios, having acknowledged making a serious error of judgment – and one that BBC insiders said had left his position untenable.

There was a sense of disbelief at Wembley as the team I support ended a wait of almost 120 years to win a major trophy

When Marc Guéhi and Joel Ward went up to collect the FA Cup, we were there. Although it still seems like a dream. The sense of disbelief Crystal Palace supporters felt when the full-time whistle at Wembley ended their wait to win a major trophy will probably take a few more days to fade away given it’s taken almost 120 years to become a reality. But with most of the 30,000 wearing red and blue having travelled from south London in hope rather than expectation, finally, it was our moment.

After an agonising 10 minutes of stoppage time that seemed to take an eternity, the emotions of defeat in Palace’s two previous FA Cup finals came pouring out. Everywhere you looked there were grown men – including me and the former Guardian stalwart Dominic Fifield – moved to tears. The comedian Mark Steel just kept shaking his head, unable to comprehend what had just transpired. It even spread to the royal box, where the chair, Steve Parish, who had been pictured with his head in his hands moments earlier, was greeted with a bear hug from Palace’s largest shareholder, John Textor.

The departure of the men’s team from the ground marks the end of an era for many. Will new hosts Everton Women continue its legacy?

Jamie Yates was heavily medicated, in a secure mental health unit, and in the middle of a breakdown when he had a profound dream. He was back in Liverpool, walking with his daughter along the tightly packed terraced streets which surround Goodison Park, home of the football club he had supported all his life.

When he left the hospital he took out a map, drew a half-mile radius around Everton’s ground and started looking for somewhere to rent.

Our cartoonist looks at the Tottenham coach fulfilling his prophecy by lifting a trophy in his second year with the club

Sound the tram bells, unleash the smoke plumes from the Tasty Jerk shack – Crystal Palace have finally won a major trophy

As the final whistle was blown at Wembley there was a moment that seemed to stretch out and become frozen in time. The Crystal Palace players collapsed where they were standing, crumpled across the grass like a battle scene fresco. The colours made it beautiful, red and blue against the deep green, new optics, new names, the unstyled celebrations of players unused to these moments, Jean-Philippe Mateta face down, Will Hughes flat on his back, arms spread like a snow angel.

There was a rush of noise as the clock began to tick again. And that was that. Sound the tram bells, unleash the smoke plumes from the Tasty Jerk shack – 119 years into Crystal Palace’s existence this mercurial club with the clanky corrugated stadium has finally won a major trophy.

Opinionated football journalist, who has died aged 93, loved the sport but detested much about the modern game

Brian Glanville, who has died aged 93, was what Groucho Marx might have been had the old master of the one-liner shown any interest in football. I doubt if the greatest soccer scribbler of them all – the London-born son of a Dublin dentist and an Old Carthusian expensively educated in literature and song – met Groucho (Brian knew a host of famous people), but their exchanges would surely have blistered the paint off the walls.

Nobody swore so elegantly as Glanville, who hovered in the press box like Banquo’s ghost, the gathering’s invisible conscience, ready to deliver a scathing observation, relayed, sotto voce, to a nearby colleague like a chorus baritone in one of his favourite operas.

As ‘The Grand Old Lady’ prepares to host its last men’s match, Everton fans reveal what the ground means to them

An era lasting 133 years comes to an end this Sunday as Everton’s men’s team play their final game at Goodison Park. In 1892 the team left their former home at Anfield – which Liverpool FC adopted soon after – upping sticks due to an argument over rent, to set up a new home, a short walk across Stanley Park. Goodison Park became the first major football venue built in England and since then no other English football ground has staged more top-level men’s matches.

But it seems the impending bulldozers have performed a welcome U-turn – a deal to have the women’s team playing there has just been announced. Despite the US owners confirming the ground will become the country’s first major stadium to be dedicated to a women’s team, everyone knows it won’t be quite the same place. It seems like there will have to be structural changes including the taking out of seats in the top decks to reduce the capacity. Perhaps Everton will also turn Goodison into some sort of museum, where in 20 or 30 years people will still be wandering in, scratching their heads at the way football used to be watched.

An aerial view of Goodison Park, circa 1965, and flags commemorating the stadium on sale outside the ground in 2025.

Dan Ndoye’s goal secures a 1-0 win over Milan and sparks scenes of joy in the Piazza Maggiore once again

Vincenzo Italiano knew there was a little bit of poison in the chalice offered to him last summer but accepted it anyway. The opportunity to manage Bologna was a chance to lead a Champions League team for the first time in his career. It was also an invitation to become the public face of a project that had nowhere to go but backwards.

What could he possibly do to improve on the work of the previous manager, Thiago Motta, who led Bologna back into Europe’s top club competition for the first time in 60 years? Italiano would not even have the same group of players to work with. Joshua Zirkzee, the top scorer, was on his way to Manchester United and the newly capped Italy defender Riccardo Calafiori to Arsenal. Lewis Ferguson would be out for months with a cruciate ligament tear.

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You won, [Ange]. Enjoy [Bigger Vase], I hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little [final]. You ruined my night completely so you could have [Bigger Vase] and I hope now you can spend it on lessons in [tactics] and [recruitment]. Because [your team] had all the [season] of a reversing dump truck without any tyres on. So Ange, take your [Bigger Vase] and get off my [TV screen].

Whether fans were celebrating, saying goodbye to an old home or remembering those no longer with us, the game’s power was on show this weekend

• Sign up for Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here

What was striking on Saturday, after Crystal Palace had beaten Manchester City to win the FA Cup, was how many people were in tears. The camera roamed the stands, capturing the images of Palace fans in disbelief after winning their first ever major trophy. Some were hugging those next to them, some waved their arms incoherently and others just stared, overcome. But a significant proportion were sobbing. Soccer can often seem an angry game, with crowds fuelled by rage; this was something very different, very hard to explain.

Palace’s pre-match tifo had shown an image of a father hugging his two sons in the stand at Old Trafford after Darren Ambrose had scored a 35-yard drive there for Palace in a League Cup quarter-final in 2011-12. It turned out the two lads were among the Palace fans at Wembley and that their father had passed away in the intervening 13 years. They were, needless to say, also in tears.

Emily Husband, one of only two female coaches in the league, can create history against Melbourne Victory on Sunday

The Central Coast Mariners weren’t supposed to crash the A-League Women grand final, but they face Melbourne Victory at AAMI Park on Sunday.

Two years ago they didn’t even exist. The Mariners’ women’s programme was in its 13th year of inactivity after being mothballed for financial reasons (serious concerns over the ever-impecunious club’s viability still linger). On the field, they made a celebrated return for the 2023–24 season, riding the wave of momentum born from Australia hosting the 2023 Women’s World Cup to stun Victory in an elimination final, before running into the eventual champions Sydney FC in the semi-finals.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Seb Hutchinson and Dan Bardell as Manchester City move closer to sealing Champions League football with a 3-1 win over Bournemouth

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On the podcast today: Omar Marmoush scores a goal of the season contender as Manchester City move into third place in the Premier League, before the race for Champions League football concludes with the final round of fixtures this Sunday.

Faye Carruthers is joined by Suzy Wrack, Robyn Cowen, Freddie Cardy and Lucy Bronze to break down Chelsea’s FA Cup final win and preview Arsenal’s huge Champions League final against Barcelona

On the podcast today: Sonia Bompastor’s stunning debut season is hailed after Chelsea complete a domestic treble with a 3-0 win over Manchester United in the FA Cup final. The panel review the game, which featured a Wembley brace from Sandy Baltimore and a cathartic goal for Catarina Macário, and ask what’s next for a side that insists the job isn’t finished without European glory. Plus, Chelsea and England star Lucy Bronze joins the show to reflect on an impressive first season for Chelsea and look ahead to Euro 2025 this summer.

The panel also assess Manchester United’s campaign, dissect Marc Skinner’s post-match comments, and reflect on the contrasting scenes between Chelsea’s ownership and United’s absent leadership.

As Crystal Palace and Manchester City prepare to meet at Wembley, how well do you recall the previous 143 finals?

By The Football Mine