Nottingham Forest signed Nigeria defender Ola Aina on a free transfer on Saturday after his departure from Torino.

Aina agreed a one-year contract with Forest as he returns to the Premier League after his spell in Italy.

Aina spent nearly five years with Torino after initially moving there on loan from Chelsea in 2018.

The 26-year-old right-back graduated from Chelsea’s youth academy and made three appearances for the Blues.

During his time with Torino, London-born Aina returned to the English capital for a loan spell with Fulham in the 2020-21 season.

He is the first signing by Forest boss Steve Cooper since the end of last season.

“I’m very excited to be here and I can’t wait to get started. I wanted to be back on English soil again and Forest is a club which has an exciting project and team,” Aina said.

“The manager as well, what he wants from the team is something which I want to buy into. He’s told me it’s a family club, he’s told me we have a great bunch of players and he’s told me I’ll enjoy it here.”

Aina, who has 17 caps for Nigeria, helped Torino to a 10th place finish in Serie A last season.

“He’s a versatile player who has good experience of the Premier League and Serie A,” Cooper said.

“He’s a really good player, but a good athlete as well. He’ll definitely make the team stronger.”

Liverpool legend, Graeme Souness has predicted the position Chelsea will finish next season on the Premier League table under their new manager Mauricio Pochettino.

Chelsea finished in the second half of the Premier League table last season.

The Blues will not play European competition this 2023/24 season.

However, Souness, who believes the 2023/24 season will be difficult for Pochettino, expects Chelsea to maintain the same position this season like last term.

“It’s a very difficult job for the manager at Chelsea this year,” Souness told the Sky Bet Fan Hope Survey.

“I look at that club, and the direction they’ve gone – it just seems to be a mismatch of players that were available and very expensive.

“Chelsea was paying a premium, because of their reputation and standards. I don’t see them doing any different than they did last year.”

[DailyPost]

Hinata Miyazawa scored twice as former champions Japan smashed Women’s World Cup newcomers Zambia 5-0 in a rampant start to their campaign on Saturday.

Japan were a class above the 77th-ranked Africans, creating a slew of chances with their sharp movement and passing in a performance that will have the tournament heavyweights on alert.

Three of the goals came through sweeping upfield movements as Japan scored more than twice in a World Cup game for the first time since the 2011 tournament in Germany, when they lifted the title.

Midfielder Miyazawa bagged her first midway through the first half from an Aoba Fujino assist to put the Nadeshiko a goal up at the break.

Mina Tanaka doubled the lead from Jun Endo’s cross, bringing some relief to the forward, who found the net twice earlier in the match, only to have both strikes ruled out by belated offside rulings.

Tanaka turned provider for Miyazawa’s second goal and Endo drilled home the fourth in front of a crowd of 16,111 in Hamilton.

Substitute Riko Ueki scored the final goal from the penalty spot after she was brought down by goalkeeper Catherine Musonda in the final minute of stoppage time.

It resulted in a second yellow card for Musonda, whose replacement Eunice Sakala made a spectacular save from the spot but was ruled to have moved too early.

Ueki made no mistake with her second attempt as Japan moved to the top of Group C ahead of Spain, who beat Costa Rica 3-0 in Wellington on Friday.

A youthful Zambian side entered the tournament with high hopes after beating Germany in their final warmup game.

However, the lowest-ranked side at the 32-team tournament didn’t create a single clear chance, capping a miserable week in which key attacking midfielder Grace Chanda was ruled out of the tournament with illness.

[Vanguard]

Hublot as official timekeeper for the third consecutive edition of the tournament, and Itaú as bank supporter in Brazil were the last two commercial affiliates to join the partnership programme, taking the number of FIFA Women's World Cup supporters up to 14.

They are joined by FIFA partners Adidas, Coca-Cola, Wanda Group, Hyundai and Qatar Airways, women's football partners Visa and Xero, and nine global FIFA Women's World Cup sponsors.

FIFA has not provided a monetary value for its partnership programme, but it represents an increase from the 12 companies which held sponsorship or supporter status for the last Women's World Cup in France four years ago.

Its chief business officer Romy Gai thanked the partners for their support.

"Together, we all share a commitment to developing women’s football at every level, and everyone involved has built extensive plans to spread the word, develop the game and shine a light on the beautiful game," he said.

"This promises to be a special tournament, and I thank all of our supporters, sponsors and partners for joining us on this journey."

Chief women's football officer Sarai Bareman said "at every level, they will help us grow the game and give more women and girls the opportunity to play".

In the days leading up to the tournament, FIFA finalised deals with Mengniu Group and Booking.com as Women's World Cup sponsors and the Government Employees Insurance Company (GEICO) as a Women's World Cup supporter.

Chinese dairy product manufacturer Mengniu previously sponsored the men's FIFA World Cups in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, and was already a partner of China's team which is making its eighth appearance from nine editions of the women's tournament.

The Booking.com deal is expected to provide easier access to accommodation for supporters in the tournament's nine host cities, with 60,000 listed on the travel agency's platform in Australia and New Zealand.

Insurance company GEICO is set to serve as a supporter of the tournament in North America, which includes a commercial campaign with the legendary Carli Lloyd, who won two Olympic gold medals and back-to-back Women's World Cups for the United States before retiring in 2021.

FIFA has also revealed details of its plans with Visa to make the tournament in Australia and New Zealand the first-ever cashless World Cup.

It claimed this will allow fans to "benefit from the speed, convenience and security of digital payments", and Visa cardholders will receive offers including a 10 per cent discount on FIFA retail and fan festival purchases when they use Visa to pay.

Critics argue cashless retailers penalise people without access to bank accounts or debit or credit cards and fear there are risks related to privacy and cybersecurity.

Fans carrying cash at the FIFA Women's World Cup can exchange local currencies to AUD$25 (£13/$17/€15) or NZD$25 (£12/$15/€14) and AUD$100 (£52/$67/€61) or NZD$100 (£48/$62/€56) pre-paid Visa cards.

The FIFA Women's World Cup is featuring 32 teams for the first time, and is set to run until August 20.

Record-breaking ticket sales have been reported, although FIFA is believed to have fallen around $100 million (£78 million/€90 million) short of its target for broadcast rights fees.

[insidethegames]

Managers don't matter. Just ask the best manager in the world.

"I will tell you a secret," Pep Guardiola said in October. "The main thing is the quality of the players." He went on: "I try to figure out things, but at the end the players ... the success we had is because we have top players. This is the secret, no more than that."

Now, "managers don't matter" is a bit of a rhetorical overstatement. Manchester City wouldn't have won as many points last season if you were managing the team. Meanwhile, Chelsea probably wouldn't have finished higher in the table had they given you the reins rather than Frank Lampard after firing Graham Potter. Rather, what Guardiola is suggesting is that talent is the main driver of team success. Framed another way, player skill overwhelmingly decides what wins games. In fact, the authors of the book "The Numbers Game" found that player skill (as represented by wages paid) accounts for 70% of team performance. Somewhere in that remaining 30% sits the effect of the manager, along with other factors like, say, the random, and flummoxing bounce of the ball.

Managers do matter -- just way less than we think. And the limited impact makes that impact even harder to measure. In a league without a salary cap, and with massive team-to-team financial inequality and vastly differing team-building ideals, we can't just look at where a team finished and say, "The best manager finished first, the worst manager finished 20th."

Instead, we have to try to control for all of the other factors that influence winning. We can't do that with anything resembling precision because of all of the unknown factors that influence winning -- for example, is a player great because he's inherently great or because the manager deployed him in a way that made him great? -- so we're going to try a slightly different exercise.

And so, I've ranked and tiered all 20 Premier League managers by how confident I'd be that they would improve the 10th-richest team in the Premier League.

No-doubt improvers

Among the 20 managers in the Premier League, there are only two who I'm sure would improve the 10th-best team in the Premier League beyond their talent level. And those are the two best managers in the world: Pep Guardiola (Man City) and Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool). This exercise requires a ton of projection, and I really only have a small degree of confidence in all of the other tiers, but there's really no argument that anyone else belongs in this tier.

That said, such is the shape-shifting nature of managerial influence that there are some arguments against both of these coaches being in this tier.

With Pep, it's simply that we've never seen him do it. He's by far the most successful and most influential modern manager in the world. The ClubElo coach ratings also rank him as the best coach -- by a combination of how good his teams were and how much they improved after he arrived -- in the history of the sport. It's just that, well, he first had maybe the greatest player and the greatest midfield in the history of the sport at the same time, at Barcelona. At Bayern Munich, well, they have so much more money than everyone else, and they've won every league title since he left. And at Manchester City, he has the near-unlimited funding of a sovereign wealth fund.

I raised this idea to a former Premier League manager a few months ago, and he ... completely rejected it. Guardiola is easily the best coach we've ever seen at maximizing top-level talent, but as he suggested, so many other teams farther down the table have adopted some of his principles, too. If Brighton can play possession soccer and succeed with it, you can't really say that Pep Guardiola wouldn't do a great job at Brighton.

Klopp, meanwhile, has never coached the richest team in his own league. He's the last manager to beat Bayern Munich and Manchester City across a full domestic season. And he did a fantastic job at Mainz before Borussia Dortmund, too. Last season was probably his "worst" season as a manager -- he didn't really seem to figure out how Liverpool should play until the last couple of months -- but on the whole, he's just fantastic. One of the all-time greats. He's probably the best culture-builder in the sport, too.

These guys both now have decade-plus track records of success across multiple leagues, multiple countries and multiple tactical eras. No one else on this list comes close to that.

Failed at PSG -- but succeeded (almost) everywhere else

Mauricio Pochettino (Chelsea) and Unai Emery (Aston Villa) are sort of the anti-Guardiolas. Like every other manager in Paris since Qatar took over, they both flamed out at PSG. But the rest of their careers have mostly seen steady improvements at lesser-resourced clubs.

Pochettino was fine with Espanyol; then he seemed to transform Southampton into one of the most exciting teams in the Premier League, and then he seemed to transform Tottenham into one of the most exciting teams in the Premier League. We've already seen him succeed with two teams right around the realm of resources we'd be restricting him to in this exercise.

So why am I not more confident? Well, Ronald Koeman was quite successful for Southampton right after Poch, and this was during the club's golden age of recruiting. Then: How much credit should he get for coming in at Tottenham right when homegrown Harry Kane was blossoming into a superstar?

Emery, meanwhile, failed at Arsenal, but it's not like Mikel Arteta immediately did much better; they were awful the following season, too. Plus, taking over for Arsene Wenger was a near-impossible job, given that he was the last remaining capital-M manager, the kind who had a say in everything major that happened at the club. Outside of that, Emery has overseen improvements at Almeria, Valencia, Sevilla, Villarreal, and now Aston Villa. The latter featured an incredible in-season turnaround last year -- but how much credit should he get for it?

I'm pretty confident that neither Emery nor Pochettino would make our hypothetical team worse. I'm less confident in just how much they'll improve the performance.

Bruno Fernandes’ first outing as Manchester United captain may have come as a shock, but the Portugal star says he is honoured to be given the job on a permanent basis.

Fernandes’ raised eyebrows said it all when manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer revealed that he would stand in for skipper Harry Maguire during a press conference video call before United played Paris Saint-Germain in 2020.

The 28-year-old captained United 45 times last season in Maguire’s prolonged absences, and was the obvious choice when Erik ten Hag decided to take the armband off the England defender this summer.

Fernandes said: ‘The first time was in the Champions League against PSG. I was a little bit surprised by Ole, but obviously I said to him at the time it's just such an honour for me.

‘I still have the armband and the shirt from that game, because I wanted to keep it for me, because this is something that is not for everyone.

Chiamaka Nnadozie is making headlines in the ongoing Women’s World Cup after her save from the penalty spot earned the Super Falcons a point against Canada at the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium

Super Falcons head coach Randy Waldrum has heaped praises on Chiamaka Nnadozie following her crucial role in Nigeria’s goalless draw against Canada on Friday morning, Soccernet.ng reports

Nnadozie was awarded the Man of the Match after her starring role in the clash against the Olympic Champions, earning the Super Falcons a point.

Waldrum’s Falcons put up a spirited display against the CONCACAF nation in their first game of the 2023 Women’s World Cup at the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium.

The game’s key moment came in the 50th minute when the Paris FC goalkeeper denied Canada’s all-time scorer Christine Sinclair from the penalty spot.

Nnadozie also made other vital saves to keep the Super Falcons in the game. Following this, Waldrum was full of praise for his goalkeeper after the game.

“Chiamaka has done this before, and I will say this, and I will embarrass her in front of you all, but I think she’s one of the best young goalkeepers in the World right now,” Randy said

The draw result now has both Canada and Nigeria trailing Australia with two points. The co-hosts had earlier beaten the Republic of Ireland in the group’s other game.

Randy Waldrum’s side will play Australia in their next game on Thursday, July 31, at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane.

[soccernet]

FC Barcelona have an obvious weakness in their squad, as they do not have a natural right-back capable of performing at the level that Xavi wants. Sergino Dest and Julian Araujo will be available to Xavi for the next season, but the club is looking for a more impactful player in this position.

In fact, according to SPORT, the Catalan club hierarchy is clear that the next signing for Barcelona should be a right-back, and an attacker or attacking midfielder can be obtained later if time and money allow it.

More precisely, the Catalans are looking for an option that would not cost too much, specializes in playing at the right-back position, and, if possible, also has room for further growth. One such option that meets this criteria and has been identified by the club is Real Valladolid’s Ivan Fresneda.

Xavi and his coaching staff are planning to go into the next season by moving Kounde into the center of the backline. The club is already taking steps in this regard, but the key here is the transfer of Clement Lenglet to Tottenham. The negotiations for his sale are getting increasingly complicated because the two clubs are unable to come to an economic agreement.

Meanwhile, Deco has a list of fullbacks and is of the opinion that the club should go for a player keeping both the present and the future in mind. Joao Cancelo is still an option, but the finances involved in his transfer make an approach for him difficult for the club.

Thus, Ivan Fresneda remains the favorite target of the club in this regard. However, there are a number of Premier League clubs already interested in the youngster, and Valladolid may have to make a decision about him soon.

[barcanewsnetwork]

With the start of the Premier League season now just three weeks away, Liverpool may have to appoint a new club captain.

The current skipper, Jordan Henderson, appears set to leave the club after the Reds agreed a $15m (£12m/€14m) deal with Saudi Pro League club Al-Ettifaq (as per the ECHO).

Virgil van Dijk, who was previously third in line behind Henderson and the now-departed James Milner, looks like the natural successor.

It just so happens that Manchester United, the Reds' arch-rival, has made a change too, but this one wasn't enforced.

Erik ten Hag has opted to take the armband off center-back Harry Maguire, who slipped well down the pecking order last season, and award it instead to Bruno Fernandes.

Fernandes is used to leading the team out — he did so on 42 occasions last season — but this is a momentous step nonetheless, one that left Maguire 'extremely disappointed' (via Eurosport). 

The Portuguese is doubtless a magnificent player, scoring 64 goals and providing 54 assists in 185 games for the club since his $89m (£68m/€80m) move from Sporting in January 2020. He featured in the PFA Team of the Year in 2020/21 and has twice been voted player of the year by United's fanbase.

But still, his attitude, and consequently the decision to award him the captaincy, have to be called into question.

There was no better reflection of this than his conduct on United's trip to Anfield in March for what was arguably the biggest game of their season.

As United came apart in the second half, conceding six times to fall to a historic 7-0 drubbing, Fernandes unraveled.

He went down holding his face in an attempt to get Ibrahima Konaté punished even though the Frenchman didn't make contact, he appeared to push the linesman as he grew frustrated at a delay and he stopped in his tracks after Stefan Bajčetić went past him, which pundit Ian Wright called the 'last straw' (via Mirror).

 

Sky Sports' Gary Neville even claimed while on commentary duty that Fernandes asked the coaching staff to bring him off, though the player himself insisted this wasn't the case.

"I think some of his behavior in the second half has been a disgrace," Neville, one of Fernandes' predecessors as captain, said.

In a scathing attack on the attacking midfielder, Neville also dubbed him 'embarrassing' and 'a shambles'.

Another United legend in Roy Keane offered a similarly damning verdict, suggesting he'd let his teammates down.

"Fernandes' body language was nothing short of disgraceful," the Irishman said. "He's a really talented boy but he's your captain. So much talent but his body language of waving his arms about and not running back? You wouldn't be happy with him in your dressing room."

The United players needed leadership more than ever in this scenario, but instead, Fernandes' behavior was nothing short of petulant.

It seemed that he almost gave up, regardless of whether or not he requested a substitution, and you wonder how the squad can be expected to rally behind someone who may desert them when the going gets tough.

Ultimately, Erik ten Hag has made a mistake in his appointment, and Liverpool has seen the evidence first-hand.

[Liverpool]