分类： sports

One of the most iconic sibling pairs in tennis history is set to return to the sport’s most famous grass court, as Venus and Serena Williams have received a wildcard entry to compete in the 2025 Wimbledon women’s doubles draw. The surprise announcement has sent ripples of excitement through the global tennis community, marking Serena Williams’ first Grand Slam appearance since her widely assumed retirement after the 2022 US Open.

Now 44 years old, Serena, a 23-time Grand Slam singles champion with seven Wimbledon singles titles to her name, launched her competitive comeback last week at the Queen’s Club Championship, and is currently competing in doubles in Berlin alongside top-ranked Karolina Muchova. Her reunion with older sister Venus at the All England Club will be the pair’s first Grand Slam appearance together since that 2022 US Open run.

At 45, five-time Wimbledon singles champion Venus Williams has maintained limited competitive play in recent seasons. Though she has dropped all seven of her singles matches in 2025, she notched a doubles win at the Madrid Open in April alongside Britain’s Katie Boulter, and previously made history in 2024 as the second-oldest woman to claim a WTA Tour-level singles match win at the Washington Open. Speaking ahead of Serena’s comeback, Venus expressed nothing but confidence in her sister’s form, telling reporters: “The quality of her stroke is obviously there. She is a natural — she is very tenacious.”

The Williams sisters’ legacy at Wimbledon is unmatched by any active pair. Between them, they have claimed 12 Wimbledon singles titles, and partnered together to take home six women’s doubles crowns at the tournament — their first coming in 2000, and their most recent in 2016. Three decades after they first burst onto the professional tennis scene as teenage prodigies, revolutionizing the women’s game with their power, athleticism and aggressive style, their return has become one of the most anticipated storylines of the 2025 grass court season.

Notably, neither sister was selected for a singles wildcard, though one women’s singles spot remains unassigned. The wildcard announcement also brought disappointment for several high-profile players heading into the tournament, which kicks off on June 29.

Former British number one Dan Evans, who announced that 2025 will be the final season of his professional career, was not awarded a wildcard into the men’s singles main draw. Unless he claims one of the two remaining wildcard spots to be allocated over the next two weeks, he will need to navigate the qualifying draw to secure a spot in his final Wimbledon singles appearance. The 36-year-old, who helped Britain claim its first Davis Cup title in 79 years in 2015 and has reached the Wimbledon third round three times, voiced his frustration after being overlooked for a Queen’s Club wildcard earlier this month, saying he feels he has not been taken seriously as a competitor. He did receive a consolation doubles wildcard, however, paired with 2023 Wimbledon boys’ champion Henry Searle for that draw.

In contrast, three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka, who is also retiring at the end of the 2025 season, received a men’s singles wildcard, alongside Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov, a 2014 Wimbledon semi-finalist who was forced to retire from a 2024 fourth-round match against eventual champion Jannik Sinner while holding a two-set lead.

Other notable players who missed out on men’s singles wildcards include 2021 runner-up Matteo Berrettini, 2022 finalist Nick Kyrgios, and retiring French veteran Gael Monfils. Berrettini is heavily favored to claim a main draw spot as the first alternate if a player withdraws before the tournament, while Kyrgios did receive a doubles wildcard, paired with Kazakhstan’s Alexander Bublik.

In the women’s singles draw, recently crowned French Open runner-up Maja Chwalinska earned a wildcard following her breakthrough run at Roland Garros, alongside six British players who received wildcard entries. Six British players, including 2021 US Open champion Emma Raducanu, earned direct entry to the singles draws based on their ranking, alongside four British men who received wildcard entries on Tuesday. Wildcards for the tournament are selected at the discretion of the Wimbledon committee, which notes selections are typically based “on the basis of past performance at Wimbledon or to increase British interest.”

Five days into the historic 2026 FIFA World Cup, the first tournament co-hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, fans from across the globe have opened up to the BBC about the eye-watering total costs of chasing their football dreams at the global sporting event. For countless supporters, a World Cup experience is framed as a priceless, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – but those who have travelled to matches across the three host nations have encountered price tags that stretch well beyond typical sporting event budgets, with even casual attendance running into thousands of dollars for just one or two fixtures.

Morten Oftedal, a Norwegian football fan based in Atlanta, Georgia, did not hesitate to pull out all the stops when Norway qualified for the tournament for the first time in 28 years. He knew this summer would likely be the only chance his 82-year-old father – who sparked Oftedal’s lifelong love of the sport – would ever get to see his home nation compete on the World Cup stage. “I’ve been a huge soccer fan my whole life, and it’s mostly due to dad,” Oftedal explained. “I can’t be like, ‘no, let’s do it next time, or somewhere else’. So, we’re very excited.”

That excitement, however, came with a shocking bill. Oftedal paid $380 per person for three tickets to Norway’s group stage match against Iraq in Massachusetts. He redeemed 180,000 frequent flyer points for three round-trip flights from Atlanta to Boston, and calculated round-trip stadium transport would add another $80 per person. When adding up all associated costs, the total value of cash and redeemed points for just one match for himself, his father and his wife hit roughly $3,600 – a figure Oftedal calls “insane”. Reflecting on the pricing structure of the 2026 tournament, he argued that “it’s not really for individuals, I feel like it’s for corporate America”.

Oftedal is far from the only fan paying four-figure sums to attend matches. Multiple supporters who spoke to the BBC reported total attendance costs falling in the low thousands of dollars, but most said their lifelong passion for football and the chance to make irreplaceable memories softened the blow of the high prices.

Iain Bagwell, a 58-year-old British expat living in Atlanta, is taking his son on a road trip to Dallas to watch England face Croatia, and paid roughly $1,200 per Category 2 ticket. “At the time I thought it was like daylight robbery,” he said. “But looking at the way it’s going, and the way that Fifa handled it, it probably wasn’t such a bad deal.” To cut down on overall accommodation costs, the pair are camping along their route, a choice that adds adventure as well as savings. After the England match, they will drive on to Kansas City to catch the Tunisia-Netherlands group stage fixture, for which they paid $235 per ticket.

While many American sports fans have grown accustomed to exorbitant ticket prices for top-tier domestic events, such as the recent NBA Finals where the cheapest tickets for New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden started around $3,500, the 2026 World Cup’s price points have come as a major shock to international travelling fans.

Admir and Alisa Maric, travelling from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Toronto to watch their national team face Canada, admitted their trip was far more expensive than they expected, but said the experience was irreplaceable. “It’s an amazing feeling, I never thought I was going to a World Cup game,” Admir said. “I always wanted to experience it.” The pair secured last-minute third-row tickets for CAD$1,250 (US$890) per seat, on top of $600 per night for accommodation and $1,150 per person for flights, bringing their total trip cost to roughly CAD$5,400.

Fellow Bosnia and Herzegovina supporters Aida and Emina Tucic, who live just outside Toronto in Hamilton, knew they would attend the match the second their nation qualified. But they too were caught off guard by soaring pricing. “We were a little trepidatious just because the tickets prices started to become, like, crazy,” Aida explained. After monitoring resale platforms for weeks, they purchased tickets three days before kickoff for CAD$1,200 per seat. When asked if the price was fair, Aida said “probably not”, noting that “football should be accessible to the fans” – but added that the experience itself was “priceless for me”. Emina echoed the sentiment, saying: “It’s once-in-a-lifetime. Both the countries you love, one where you were raised, one where you were born – getting to see them both play on the world stage, it’s amazing.”

In Mexico, the pricing barrier is even starker for local fans, with roughly 30% of the country’s population living below the poverty line. For many ordinary Mexicans, the closest they can get to World Cup action is watching impromptu street pickup matches in popular districts like Mexico City’s Zona Rosa. Ticket prices for the tournament’s opening match at Mexico City’s iconic Azteca Stadium were far out of reach for most locals: few fans paid less than the equivalent of $1,500 USD per ticket, and some resale tickets hit $4,000 or more, with only a small handful of fans receiving free complimentary tickets through employers or gifts.

Aaron Vieyra, a member of Mexican supporters’ group Furia Azteca, paid 30,000 pesos ($1,750 USD) per ticket for himself and his girlfriend, purchasing the pair through a personal contact. He noted that a single ticket at that price equals roughly three months’ rent for the average Mexico City resident. Having attended previous World Cups in Brazil and Russia, Vieyra said he spent more on this single match in his home country than he paid for all his match tickets combined at the two prior tournaments. “The game itself was historic and we were so happy to be in the Azteca for that moment, I still get goosebumps,” he said. But when asked if the ticket was good value, he hesitated: “It was worth it, but only just. It worked out for us because I didn’t have to pay for flights or hotels. If we’d have had to pay for those costs on top, then there is no way I’d have spent that kind of money on a ticket.”

Beyond match tickets, ancillary costs inside and outside stadiums also vary widely across host venues, with some seeing extreme markup. Concession pricing inside venues largely aligns with what fans expect at top-tier U.S. arenas, but there are wide gaps between locations: an investigation by The Athletic found that a 16oz American beer costs $16 at New York New Jersey Stadium, the venue set to host the 2026 World Cup final, with a 20oz bottle of water priced at $5. By comparison, at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a 12oz domestic beer costs just $5, a 20oz beer is $9, and a 20oz water is only $3.

Local transit costs have also drawn criticism for extreme markup: a single train ticket from New York City’s Penn Station to NYNJ Stadium for World Cup matches costs $98, a massive jump from the usual $12.90 fare. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill defended the price hike, explaining that the increase is intended to stop local residents from shouldering the $48 million cost of expanded World Cup transit service, and added that FIFA is not contributing any funding to the project.

In response to widespread outcry over inflated pricing, local officials across the three host nations have pushed back against FIFA to secure more affordable options for ordinary fans. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani negotiated with FIFA to reserve 1,000 $50 match tickets for local residents, distributed via a public lottery. The Canadian province of Ontario passed the Putting Fans First Act to cap exorbitant resale ticket markups, and Dallas has introduced complimentary public transit to and from its host stadium for all match attendees.

Despite the widespread sticker shock and criticism of the tournament’s pricing structure, nearly all of the fans who spoke to the BBC said they still view the experience as worth the cost, with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and irreplaceable memories outweighing the financial strain. For Oftedal, the chance to share the tournament with his father trumps any budget concern: “creating memories with my father would be the most important thing, and the worry about money goes away after a while.”

The 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage fixture between Iran and New Zealand at Los Angeles Stadium was billed as a routine international football matchup on paper, but the day was defined far more by deep political divisions among Iranian spectators than the action on the pitch. On the field, Iran fought back twice from falling behind to secure a dramatic 2-2 draw, but outside the stadium and scattered through the stands, stark splits between pro-regime and dissident Iranian fans turned the match into a public stage for long-simmering political tensions.

Outside the arena, hundreds of Iranian diaspora protesters, many of them Iranian-Americans, gathered to demonstrate against Iran’s ruling Islamic Republic and the national team they argue represents the state rather than the Iranian people. The most prominent symbol at the protest was the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag, a widely recognized emblem of opposition to the current Tehran regime that FIFA has banned from stadium grounds as an explicitly political symbol. Despite the ban, the flag was still visible inside the venue, printed on clothing and waved by spectators.

Protesters chanted slogans calling for regime change in Iran and rejected the national team as a representative of the ruling government. “Mullahs’ team is not my team,” protesters chanted, before breaking into the pre-revolutionary Iranian national anthem. One young protester summed up the anthem’s meaning to the crowd simply: “It means freedom and pride.” Outside the stadium, many activists linked their protest to ongoing human rights abuses in Iran, with one protester hanging a makeshift noose around his neck to protest the execution of dissidents in the country, and others arguing that recent diplomatic talks between Washington and Tehran cannot normalize the violence carried out by the Iranian regime against its own people.

The divisions that played out outside the stadium only continued inside the stands, where spectators waved both the official Islamic Republic flag and the dissident Lion and Sun flag, all clad in Iran’s national team colors. This split between competing visions of Iranian identity created an impossible pressure for the Iranian squad, which has long maintained that football should be a unifying force rather than a political platform. Striker Mehdi Taremi clarified the team’s position ahead of the match, stating the squad plays for all Iranians both inside the country and in the diaspora, and that the team does not seek to engage in partisan politics.

The split among fans left many Iranian-Americans in attendance caught between conflicting loyalties. “It’s complicated,” explained Samaneh, an Iranian-American who has lived in the U.S. for a decade. “I’m here to support Iran, not the regime. I miss my country.” Samaneh added that she still cried when the official national anthem played, and that ongoing travel restrictions imposed by the Trump administration have left her mother stranded in Iran, leaving her constantly worried about her family and unable to return home to visit. Even when New Zealand scored to take the lead during the match, some anti-regime spectators were captured celebrating the goal, highlighting how deeply politics had infiltrated the contest.

Other fans argued for a clear separation between the national team and the ruling government, saying football should remain a space to bring people together across political divides. Mostafa, an Iranian-American living in the U.S., said that “Soccer is about friendship, cultural connections and putting politics aside.” Pourmand, a lifelong Iran fan who has attended the past two World Cups in Qatar and Russia and traveled from San Diego to the team’s training camp in Tijuana, echoed this view. “The people of Iran are represented by these players,” he said. “They’re here to show we’re worthy of being here – a message of friendship and human values.” For other fans like Elika, supporting the team is tied to personal connection rather than politics: she attended the match in honor of her late father, who shared a love of watching Iran compete at the World Cup, and said “I felt compelled to come in honour of my dad, and in honour of Iranians who just want peace and the chance to enjoy a game like this.”

Even before the match kicked off, politics had already disrupted Iran’s World Cup campaign. Visa issues forced the team to relocate its pre-tournament training base from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico, forcing players to cross the border for matches in the U.S. while staying in Mexico. While a recent ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran has lowered fears of open military escalation between the two nations, underlying tensions remain high, and those tensions spilled directly into the World Cup fixture in Los Angeles.

After the final whistle, the day’s events made one fact clear: despite the Iranian team’s stated goal of uniting all Iranians through football, deep political divisions within the global Iranian community have made that unity impossible to achieve at this 2026 World Cup. Outside the stadium, it was clear that for this community, separating football from politics was no longer an option.