That Sporting Week. A look back at some of the last week's top sports stories. In which humanity once again demonstrated its limitless capacity for chaos, triumph, and arguing about ticket prices.

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Let’s begin in Scotland, where Celtic have won the Scottish Double, which is impressive because winning one trophy is hard enough, but winning two suggests you’ve reached that mystical sporting plane where everything you touch turns to silverware. Celtic fans are now wandering around Glasgow in a state of blissful confusion, unsure whether to celebrate, boast, or simply build a shrine out of discarded green-and-white scarves. Meanwhile, Rangers fans are reportedly “fine,” in the same way a person who’s just dropped their phone down a drain is “fine.”

Down south, Hull City have won the play‑off final and are heading to the Premier League, which is the footballing equivalent of being promoted from “mild chaos” to “full‑blown existential crisis.” Hull fans are ecstatic, while the rest of the league is preparing to Google things like “Where is Hull?” and “How do you defend against a team fuelled entirely by spite and chip‑shop vinegar?” The Premier League welcomes them with open arms and a polite reminder that they’ll now be playing at 12:30pm on a Tuesday in front of 900 million viewers in Indonesia.

In tennis, Emma Raducanu’s French Open campaign ended in the first round, which is disappointing but also extremely on‑brand for British tennis, a sport in which we specialise in heartbreak, plucky defeats, and commentators saying things like “She’ll learn from this” while we all stare at the TV like abandoned Labradors. Raducanu lost to Solana Sierra, who played like someone who had accidentally drunk three espressos and remembered she had a train to catch. Emma will bounce back, because she’s talented, determined, and British, which means she has decades of emotional resilience training.

Speaking of emotional resilience, FIFA is once again being asked to explain itself, this time over allegations of “artificially inflating prices” and “misleading fans” during ticket sales for the 2026 World Cup. This is shocking news, in the same way it would be shocking to discover that water is wet or that your cat secretly hates you. FIFA insists everything is above board, which is exactly what you’d expect them to say moments before unveiling a new “dynamic pricing model” that charges £400 for a seat behind a pillar.

Now let’s talk about the Enhanced Games, which is basically the Olympics but with the rules replaced by a shrug emoji. In Las Vegas naturally! Kristian Gkolomeev became the only athlete to break a world record, which is impressive until you remember that the Enhanced Games allow performance‑enhancing drugs. This means the competitors are essentially Marvel characters with better sponsorship deals. Gkolomeev swam so fast that physicists are still trying to determine whether he briefly entered another dimension. The organisers insist the event is “safe,” which is exactly what people say right before something explodes.

Meanwhile, in Morocco, Anna Huang, at 17 years, six months, and 24 days, became the youngest player ever to win three Ladies European Tour tournaments, which is astonishing because when most of us were 17, our greatest achievement was successfully parallel parking or remembering to bring PE kit. Huang is now officially better at golf than 99.9% of the human population, including several people who have been playing since the invention of grass.

And finally, Crystal Palace have won the European Conference League, a sentence so surreal that even Palace fans are checking the news to make sure it wasn’t a typo. The team celebrated with the enthusiasm of people who have just discovered they’re good at something they didn’t know they were trying to do. Roy Hodgson, somewhere, is smiling quietly into a cup of tea.

So that’s your week in sport: Celtic collecting trophies like Pokémon cards, Hull storming into the Premier League, Raducanu suffering the most British defeat imaginable, FIFA being FIFA, chemically‑enhanced athletes breaking the sound barrier, a teenage golf prodigy rewriting history, and Crystal Palace winning Europe.


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