Football's governing bodies have now split by continent over who controls the World Cup's commercial future. The Confederation of African Football's executive committee voted unanimously late on Thursday to reconfirm its support for Gianni Infantino — on the same day that UEFA said it is committed to boycotting future World Cups at all levels for as long as he remains FIFA president.

CAF's statement was brief and warm: the executive committee "unanimously reconfirmed its support for FIFA President Gianni Infantino and thanked him for his support for African football over the years". Its president, Patrice Motsepe, welcomed FIFA's pledge to review the process that produced the aborted plan to sell a slice of the World Cup's commercial future to private investors, and endorsed the joint update issued by Infantino and secretary general Mattias Grafstrom — while pressing the need for good governance, due process and transparency.

The arithmetic, not the argument, decides this

That leaves Infantino backed in Africa and opposed in Europe, North America and Asia, with a presidential election in Morocco next March. CAF accounts for 54 of FIFA's 211 member associations and has been a reliable bloc for him since he took office in 2016. It is not a majority, but it is the largest single body of votes anyone in this dispute has publicly secured, and it arrived in the week his position looked least safe.

The support was not spontaneous. Five of the continent's most influential football figures had already declared for him earlier in the week — CAF vice-president Fouzi Lekjaa of Morocco, FIFA Council members Hany Abo Rida of Egypt, Hamidou Djibrilla of Niger and Ahmed Yahya of Mauritania, and Veron Mosengo-Omba, the newly elected head of the DR Congo federation and a former CAF general secretary.

Why it matters to the industry

Everyone who builds, supplies or staffs a World Cup now has a governance question sitting underneath their planning: whether the confederation that supplies a large share of the teams intends to be at the next tournaments at all, and whether the president who signs off the commercial model will still be in post a year from now. Neither question gets answered by argument. Both get answered by 211 votes in Morocco in March, and the first bloc has just declared.

FIFA spent Wednesday trying to draw a line under the worst week of Gianni Infantino's presidency. On Thursday Europe told it the line is not there. UEFA said the conditions it set have not been met, that a boycott of FIFA competitions — the World Cup included — could still go ahead, and that FIFA's statement of support for its own president "changes nothing". The English FA has written to FIFA withdrawing its support for Infantino.

The two conditions UEFA set are worth reading closely, because only one of them has been satisfied. The first was that the proposals to sell off the major competitions be withdrawn; they have been. The second was an assurance that "such attempts to disfigure the game in this way will never be made again" — and that is what UEFA says is still missing. An apology for how a plan was handled is not the same as a guarantee it will not return in another form.

An apology is not a governance change

UEFA was blunt about the value of Wednesday's show of unity, noting that the people who declared their confidence in Infantino are employed by him and "whose careers depend on his favour". Its own position, it said, is unchanged from the weekend: it has lost confidence in the presidency, and that stands.

The plan at the centre of this would have channelled private investment into FIFA competitions, including the men's and women's World Cups, through a subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, with $40 million offered to each of the 211 member associations for their backing. It is dead. The argument that followed it plainly is not.

What a boycott would actually mean

This is the part that matters to anyone who works on events rather than watches them. A confederation boycott is not a gesture: it is the withdrawal of the teams that fill the stadiums, sell the broadcast package and justify the ticket price. UEFA supplies a large share of the field at every World Cup and runs its own calendar of tournaments alongside it. A federation-by-federation drift, with England now added to the European associations that have already pulled their backing, changes the arithmetic of every commercial conversation FIFA has between now and the presidential vote in Morocco next March.

Nobody has cancelled anything. But the events industry has just been shown, in public and at the largest possible scale, that the people who own a tournament and the people who supply it are not the same, and that the second group can say no.

The organisation that owns the biggest event in world sport spent the past week discovering how little room it has to sell a piece of it. Gianni Infantino will remain FIFA president after a crisis meeting at the governing body's Africa office in Rabat on Wednesday, but only after apologising in writing to FIFA's vice-presidents, its council and all 211 member associations for what he called errors in a plan to open FIFA's tournaments to private investors.

The plan ran through a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise. It would have taken outside money into FIFA competitions including both the men's and women's World Cups; Reuters reported the target as 20 per cent of the vehicle in exchange for $4.2 billion. Infantino put it to the member associations in late July with an offer of $40 million each if they backed it. The Times made the proposal public on 28 July, and it did not survive the fortnight.

The members were the veto

UEFA said it had lost confidence in Infantino's leadership and called the proposal a "shabby, back room, opaque deal". Criticism came from inside the building too: secretary general Mattias Grafstrom wrote to staff describing "a sad and reproachable series of events". Mark Carney, prime minister of one of the three countries that had just co-hosted the World Cup, said he no longer had confidence in the FIFA president, and the former Portugal winger Luis Figo called on him to resign outright.

Four hours after Wednesday's meeting FIFA issued a statement in which the management board, Grafstrom included, reaffirmed its full support for Infantino. FIFA acknowledged mistakes, said it had not been the intention for the council and members to feel excluded from the process, and accepted that the process should have been handled differently. It also warned that it would no longer tolerate attacks on its integrity and good governance.

Why this matters beyond football

Strip out the personalities and this is a governance question every large event eventually faces: who actually controls the commercial rights, and who has to agree before they are sold. FIFA needs its members and confederations behind a deal of this size, and once its largest confederation refused — with individual European federations withdrawing support behind it — a $4.2 billion transaction was dead inside two weeks. Very few event owners have that check built in, and the ones that do rarely have to test it in public.

Two things remain open. Infantino faces re-election at the FIFA Congress in Morocco next March, a vote that looked settled two months ago. And FIFA has denied a report that it promised Morocco the 2030 World Cup final in return for support, saying a decision on the venue for that final — in a tournament it will co-host with Spain and Portugal — will be made in due course.

The US Open's rebuilt mixed doubles championship has a problem most events would envy: far more stars want in than there is room for. The USTA's latest entry update, published on 3 August, lists 29 teams competing for the 16 places in a main draw that runs across just two days.

Thirteen pairs joined after the initial list of 16 was announced on 27 July. The most eye-catching is Venus Williams, who will partner Alexander Bublik. Elina Svitolina enters alongside her husband Gael Monfils, who is expected to play his final Grand Slam event in New York, and the newly married Katie Boulter and Alex de Minaur have signed up too. Sabalenka and Djokovic still head the list on combined singles ranking, with defending champions Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori and 2025 runners-up Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud also entered.

Half the field is at the organiser's discretion

The scramble is a direct consequence of how the event was rebuilt in 2025: moved out of the second week, compressed into a two-day showcase and given a $1 million winner's cheque explicitly to pull singles players in. It worked, and the qualification maths is now unforgiving. The entry window closes at noon on 17 August, at which point only the top six teams by combined singles ranking are directly accepted. Eight places are handed out as wild cards on a date still to be announced, and the last two are won through an eight-team qualifying draw on Monday 24 August.

That leaves the USTA choosing half the field by hand. With names like Williams and Monfils sitting outside automatic qualification on ranking alone, the wild card announcement becomes a scheduling and box-office decision as much as a sporting one.

What it means on site

The championship is played from Monday 24 to Wednesday 26 August at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, with the main draw on the 25th and 26th in Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium. The first two days carry free-to-attend matches, in the Grandstand on Monday and Louis Armstrong on Tuesday, putting a star-heavy field in front of crowds who have not bought a ticket for it.

It is a useful reminder for anyone programming an event: the fastest way to fill a slot is to make it short, well paid and impossible to ignore. The harder part is what the US Open faces now, which is telling thirteen teams they are not playing.

Tadej Pogačar has confirmed he will line up for the Vuelta a España when it begins in Monaco on 22 August, three weeks after sealing a record-equalling fifth Tour de France title.

The Slovenian has won the Tour and the Giro d'Italia but never the Vuelta, and victory in Spain would give him all three Grand Tours — matching the clean sweep completed by his long-time rival Jonas Vingegaard.

Spain is where his Grand Tour career started. He rode the 2019 Vuelta as a debutant and finished third behind his compatriot Primož Roglič, collecting three stage wins and the young rider classification on the way. "The time is right to go back," he said in confirming his ride.

The decision had been genuinely open. He hinted midway through his Tour defence that he would probably start, after Prince Albert of Monaco said publicly that he expected him to be there — but immediately after winning in Paris he said he did not feel fresh enough, and wanted a fortnight before committing.

The 2026 route gives him room to work: eight mountain stages and more than 40km of individual time trialling. It opens with a time trial in Monaco, crosses to Andorra, follows the Mediterranean coast, then runs through Córdoba, Málaga and Seville before finishing in Granada on 13 September.

Gamescom 2026 has sold out its entire exhibition floor for the first time in the show's history, organisers Koelnmesse and game — the German Games Industry Association — announced, with exhibitor demand for the Cologne trade fair now outstripping the venue's capacity even after last year's expansion.

"That gamescom is completely booked up is a strong signal for the entire industry," said Tim Endres, director of gamescom. "We only just expanded the area last year, so are all the more pleased with the increasing demand." Felix Falk, managing director of game and gamescom co-organiser, added that exhibitor demand "is higher than it has ever been" ahead of the show's August 26–30 run.

With the floor full, Koelnmesse and game say they are already scoping expansion plans for 2027 to accommodate further growth. The newly confirmed 2026 exhibitor list adds Konami, Tencent Games, Embark Studios, Level Infinite, GIANTS Software and aerosoft to an already-booked roster that includes Xbox, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, CD Projekt Red, Sega, Bandai Namco, HoYoverse, Krafton and NetEase.

The show opens on the evening of August 25 with gamescom Opening Night Live, hosted by Geoff Keighley, alongside an expanded indie showcase and the European debut of the speedrunning charity event Games Done Quick — underscoring gamescom's dual role as both the games industry's biggest annual trade floor and its largest consumer-facing spectacle.

EAA AirVenture Oshkosh closed its 2026 edition as the largest in the fly-in convention's history, drawing an estimated 734,000 attendees to Wittman Regional Airport over the seven-day run — surpassing the previous record of 704,000 set in 2025.

The Experimental Aircraft Association reported more than 10,000 aircraft arrived for the event, with Wittman Regional Airport alone logging 15,527 operations, an average of roughly 101 takeoffs and landings per hour during open hours. A total of 2,851 showplanes were on static and flight-line display, spanning vintage aircraft, homebuilts, warbirds and seaplanes. Visitors travelled from 98 countries.

On the business side, AirVenture also set a record for commercial exhibitor presence, with 1,021 companies on site — a signal of the event's weight as a trade and sourcing venue for the aviation industry, not just a spectator airshow. EAA said the week generated an estimated $257 million in economic impact across the five-county Oshkosh region.

The EAA Aviation Foundation's annual fundraising dinner, The Gathering, also set a record, raising $2.85 million to support aviation education programs. EAA chairman and CEO Jack Pelton said the organization's goal each year is "not to chase numbers but to showcase EAA's community" and aviation's broader impact.

The Calgary Stampede closed its 114th edition on Sunday with organizers estimating more than 1.4 million visitors over the 10-day run, placing 2026 as the third-best attendance in the event's history behind back-to-back records set in 2024 and 2025.

Stampede president and CEO Joel Cowley told reporters that surpassing 1.4 million guests was "quite the achievement, given the ongoing economic uncertainty [and] the affordability concerns of Canadians that have persisted for quite some time." To ease the pressure on visitors' wallets, organizers offered four free-admission days alongside off-park community activations, including pancake breakfasts and downtown events, rather than relying solely on gate sales.

The parade that opens the festival was, by organizers' own account, the largest in recent memory, fielding 125 entries and drawing an estimated crowd of roughly 315,000 people lining downtown Calgary's streets.

The numbers point to how one of North America's biggest annual fairs is managing a cost-of-living squeeze without shrinking in scale — free days and off-site programming widening the funnel even as ticketed attendance settled just shy of the two prior record years.

Tadej Pogačar has won the 2026 Tour de France, the fifth overall victory of his career and one that lifts the Slovenian into cycling's most exclusive company. He rolled into Paris on Sunday with the yellow jersey secure, ending three weeks of racing as the race's dominant figure once again.

Pogačar finished 6 minutes and 26 seconds clear of Belgium's Remco Evenepoel, with his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate Isaac Del Toro completing the podium. The margin underlined a Tour he controlled through the mountains, having seized command in the Alps and defended the lead all the way to the French capital.

The fifth title ties Pogačar with the sport's all-time greats: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin are the only other riders to have won the Tour five times. At 27, he now moves within reach of an outright record sixth in the years ahead.

The Paris finale was not without drama beyond the racing: wildfires in the south of France cast a shadow over the closing day, forcing organisers to adapt the run-in around the Montmartre circuit. The disruption did nothing to change the general classification, which had effectively been settled in the high mountains.

The 2026 Tour de France reached Paris on Sunday under extraordinary circumstances, with organisers forced to cut the race's traditional finale by roughly a third so police could be redeployed to fight the wildfires sweeping southwestern France and the wider region.

Race organiser ASO confirmed the closing stage would be trimmed from about 133 kilometres to 89 kilometres. The planned start in Thoiry, west of the capital, was scrapped and the stage held entirely within Paris on a circuit — riders taking extra laps of the Champs-Élysées while keeping the three ascents of the Butte Montmartre that have become the modern signature of the closing day. Paris police and the organisers thanked "the riders, the teams, the local authorities, the partners and the public for their understanding regarding these exceptional measures made necessary by the situation."

The blazes, burning near the Bordeaux wine region and displacing more than 250,000 people across southern Europe, reshaped one of sport's most-watched processions. On the road, Tadej Pogačar carried a lead of around six and a half minutes over Remco Evenepoel into the finale, leaving the Slovenian poised — barring mishap — to claim a record-equalling fifth Tour de France title and join Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Jacques Anquetil and Miguel Indurain on the sport's most exclusive list.