Reigning Premier League champion Manchester City will be banned from European soccer competitions for two seasons in response to "serious breaches" of financial regulations, Europe's governing soccer body announced Friday.
Why it matters: The restriction means City won't compete in the Champion's League, European soccer's top competition. The club garnered £54 million ( $70 million) in revenue from the competition in the 2017-2018 season. City will also have to pay a fine of €30 million ($32.5 million).
On Wednesday, American kayaker Dane Jackson (see that little red dot above?) safely navigated the 134-foot Salto del Maule waterfall in the mountains of Chile — the second-tallest such descent on record. Here's the video.
What he's saying: I spoke with the 26-year-old national kayaking champion, who is based in Tennessee but spends 10 months out of the year living in an RV or traveling abroad.
Just before Super Bowl LIV, Fox aired a video commemorating the NFL's 100th anniversary. It featured a young boy running a football across America, with various NFL legends telling him to "Take it to the house, kid! before switching to the live broadcast, where the young boy ran onto the field and handed the ref the game ball.
Who is he? The star of the commercial is 13-year-old football and track prodigy, Maxwell "Bunchie" Young, who was named SI's "Sportskid of the Year" in 2017 and was recently featured on "No Days Off," a YouTube show about sports prodigies from Whistle (previously Whistle Sports).
The Astros had three months to craft a thoughtful apology for the team's sign-stealing scandal. Instead, José Altuve and Alex Bregman spoke for a combined 90 seconds — and owner Jim Crane questioned whether sign-stealing even helped his team win games.
The big picture: While baseball grapples with the fallout, don't lose sight of the many other problems Major League Baseball faces as commissioner Rob Manfred enters his sixth season at the helm.
The Houston Astros are very sorry for cheating their way to a World Series win, even as their owner bizarrely flip-flopped on whether their cheating changed any games.
Why it matters: The sign-stealing scandal is among the biggest since the steroid era, spilling over into other clubs and giving MLB some nasty publicity.
A 31-year-old Portuguese hacker named Rui Pinto from 2015 to 2019 leaked a series of anonymous documents that exposed corruption in European soccer, pulling back the curtain on the murky world of soccer finance and resulting in criminal prosecutions of several top players.
Driving the news: Turns out the enormous trove of data that Pinto obtained held a much bigger secret, revealing how Isabel dos Santos, Africa's richest woman and the daughter of Angola's former president, exploited her country's wealth to amass a $2 billion fortune.
100 years ago Thursday, the Negro National League was founded by former pitcher and executive Rube Foster.
Why it matters: The NNL became the first Negro league to achieve stability and last more than one season. It "proved that African American players could play on even terms with their white counterparts — and draw just as much interest from baseball fans," per the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
By the numbers: Basketball shoe sales currently represent less than 5% of the athletic shoe market, a huge drop from their 13% market share in 2014, per research firm NPD.
