This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand winning a regional title in women’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the global popularity of volleyball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇳🇿 New Zealand win the 2026 Pacific Four Series

2026 began in an unfamiliar way for New Zealanders: for the first time this century, their country didn’t hold either the men’s or the women’s rugby union World Cup on January 1st. Is their influence on the sport waning? It depends on your point of view.

Among the four versions of the game overseen by World Rugby, New Zealand are the top-rated team in only one — women’s rugby sevens — at present. However, they still produce the widest range of talent: France and Australia are the only two other nations to qualify for ratings in all four codes, and just one of their eight teams currently outranks their Kiwi rivals. After winning the Pacific Four at the weekend, things are on the up for New Zealand (7.6) in women’s 15-a-side rugby union, too.

They have a long way to go to catch England (9.0) at the top, but three wins from three this month cemented their position as the second-best team in the sport. Canada (6.8) were the other major contenders in their regional tournament, having beaten New Zealand convincingly in last year’s World Cup semi-final, but the Black Ferns got their revenge in the second round last week. On Saturday, they beat Australia (3.1) by 35 points to finish the job and retain their title in convincing fashion.

📊 Chart of the week: Is volleyball really that popular?

In quieter weeks for the newsletter so far this year, I’ve been trying to come up with a fair way to condense and summarise a nation’s overall performance level across the 30 team ball sports that I’m following for the ‘Rank the Nations’ project.

One question I’m grappling with is how to weight each of those 30 sports against each other; it feels right for me to give a country more credit for an excellent team in a globally popular game than one in a more niche pursuit. How do you create a framework to apply this sort of judgement consistently? I’ve started by comparing interest in each sport according to Google Trends. The data point I’ve been most surprised by in my first set of popularity rankings: volleyball’s presence near the top.

I don’t know if I buy the governing body’s claim that volleyball is ‘the fourth most popular sport in the world’, but something real is being captured here. For instance, in Brazil — a market of more than 200 million people — it’s much more popular than in most English-speaking countries. Per the FIVB, 16% of the country’s TV audience tuned in to watch the 2025 Nations League, and one match in the competition was “the second most-watched sports broadcast of the year outside [soccer]”.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism

Maybe it’s because I’m recovering from a torn Achilles — mixed netball, if you have to know — or maybe the sport just plays well on social media. Either way, I’m captivated by the athleticism of the handball players who keep appearing on my Instagram feed.

One recent highlight really captures the sport’s unique appeal. During a recent European Championship qualifier, France winger Manon Errard was unmarked in the right-hand corner. After one of her teammates finds her with a short bounce-pass, the 21-year-old moves towards the centre of the court to create a better angle for her left-handed shot. Errard then springs off her right foot, hangs in the air and changes her arm slot in one fluid motion before sending the ball past the goalie’s flailing limbs.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Nick Ames reported on plans to change the qualifying process for men’s soccer’s European Championship. UEFA members are weighing up moving to a structure based on the continent’s Nations League that “would satisfy demand for games between the leading countries”, instituting the ‘Swiss model’ used by the Champions League or retaining the status quo. If either new option is preferred, per Ames, it’s “unlikely to be in place” in time for Euro 2028.

• For ESPNCricinfo, Valkerie Baynes interviewed England women’s head coach Charlotte Edwards about her team’s preparation for the T20I cricket World Cup. (England will host the next edition of the tournament in June.) Unlike rivals, they have not played any competitive fixtures in this format since the conclusion of the ODI World Cup in October; instead, Edwards led “a 30-strong party…to Pretoria last month for training and a series of intra-squad T20 practice matches”.

• For MLB.com, Mike Petriello looked into whether 2026 might turn out to be Shohei Ohtani’s best-ever MLB season. The two-way star has already had more impact than almost every other baseball player who has ever moved to the USA from Japan; however, he has never simultaneously been at his best as both a hitter and a pitcher. Now 31, he is clearly pacing himself when he can: as Petriello notes, Ohtani’s “once-elite Sprint Speed…is down to just the 32nd percentile”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇴 Norway leading the way in women’s handball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing England’s level in age-grade rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vivien Endemann’s unusual skill

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇳🇴 Norway lead the first edition of the women’s handball ratings

When I introduced my first set of rankings for men’s international handball teams a couple of months ago, I wondered how fairly my system rated nations from Europe — the continent that dominates the sport — relative to those from elsewhere.

Are European teams punished by the high level of competition they face in regional tournaments? In the women’s game, the question is immaterial: nations from Europe make up the entire top six of the first set of rankings below. (Brazil (5.5) are the top-ranked team from another continent, sitting seventh; Egypt are in second place in the men’s game.) Two countries from the men’s top three — France (7.0) and Denmark (6.6) — are also present in the women’s, but both trail Norway (7.5) by a distance.

EHF Euro 2026 will be played in December, and the draw has just taken place after the conclusion of the second qualifying phase. Neither Norway nor Denmark featured, having finished in the top three of the 2024 edition; Hungary (5.4) were the other nation to get an automatic berth. Each of the top-six teams above who were required to take part went unbeaten in their qualifiers — but so too did Spain (4.2), whose best finish at a European Championship over the last decade is ninth.

📊 Chart of the week: Why don’t England dominate age-grade rugby?

England took care of Scotland in women’s rugby union on Saturday: they won their Six Nations match 84-7, and an earlier contest at the U21 age-grade by 51 points to 12. Would you expect anything else from the sport’s dominant force?

Actually, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Since 2024, there’s been a formal structure in place for matches at various age-grades between the traditional ‘Six Nations’. Over that period, England have been miles ahead of every other country at senior level: they’ve scored 83% of the points in their matches in the elite competition. Their performances at U18, U20 and U21 level have lagged far behind, though: in roughly 14 games’ worth of action, they’ve scored just 45% of the points.

It’s France — the second-best team at senior level over this stretch — who dominate underage women’s rugby union in Europe. (Their aggregate point share at U18, U20 and U21 level is 84%.) What can we take away from this? My read is that England’s dominance of the sport at senior level is not because of a pipeline from the grassroots game bursting with talent; rather, this analysis suggests that their professional system adds a lot of value as players progress up to and through the senior ranks.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vivien Endemann’s unusual skill

Opta’s soccer data uses the great descriptor ‘other body parts’ for shots at goal which do not directly come off either foot or a player’s head. To me, it conjures a mental image of a ball bundled messily across the line — not put away with control.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think that Vivien Endemann’s goal for Germany in their recent World Cup qualifier against Austria should fall into this category, such was the poise with which the 24-year-old redirected a cross from the right into the back of the net. On closer inspection, though, it was one of the most skilful finishes off the shin I can remember seeing: meeting the ball on the full, Endemann sent it towards the bottom corner as smoothly as if she was completing a pass with the side of her foot.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For the Financial Times, Chris Kay spoke to the chair of the Indian Premier League about its relationship to men’s test, ODI and T20I cricket. The most financially lucrative of the sport’s franchise tournaments is angling to be given more room in its calendar to expand — at the expense of traditional international fixtures. In their vision of the future, there are “fewer bilaterals, more league cricket, and in between you have [International Cricket Council] events, a bit like [soccer]”.

• For The Athletic, Tim Graham continued to cover the professional American football players who hope to play flag football for the USA at the Olympics next year by examining the injury risk associated with changing formats. A former NFL strength and conditioning coach explained: “These are unorthodox movements that aren’t being trained…When you’re not training on a day-in-day-out basis on certain, specific types of movements, you’re always going to be at a higher risk”.

• For Stuff, Merryn Anderson interviewed Grace Kukutai, a rugby league player from New Zealand, after she briefly returned to top-level netball. Kukutai — who has also played elite rugby union and rugby sevens — was granted permission by her NRLW coach to play one ANZ Premiership match for her old team as injury cover. She came through unscathed: “I don’t want to let fear hold me back from doing cool stuff…I’m glad my body was prepared enough that I handled it well.”

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇹🇼 Taiwan winning an Asian title in baseball5

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning an Asian title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the top sources of women’s rugby union talent

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Max Dowman’s magic trick

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇹🇼 Taiwan win the 2026 Baseball5 Asia Cup

Baseball5? It’s not a typo. Back in 2017, the WBSC introduced a quickfire, mixed-gender version of baseball to ‘grow the game’. However, its resemblance to either baseball or softball — the other sport overseen by the WBSC — is questionable.

Each sport’s fundamental component — the contest between pitcher and batter — is eliminated, with baseball5 hitters initiating play by whacking a small rubber ball into the field of play with one hand. Leaving that aside: how successful has it actually been at growing the game? Each of the nations in the top five of the team ratings below has at least some pedigree in men’s baseball: Cuba, Taiwan, Japan and Venezuela also appeared in this year’s WBC, while China had qualified for every previous edition.

The success story of the sport’s first decade might be Thailand (5.6). Their men’s baseball team hasn’t played enough elite matches since 2022 to receive a rating, and their women’s softball team is currently ranked 14th out of 15 qualifying nations; in baseball5, however, they rank sixth overall. In their latest Asia Cup appearance last week, they reached the semi-finals for the first time and finished third overall. Taiwan (7.7) took out the title, but remain far behind global standard-setters Cuba (9.3).

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 Asia Cup

Australia (6.7) continue to dominate women’s 3x3 basketball in Asia: after winning the 2026 edition of the Asia Cup, they have now claimed four consecutive continental titles. They were unbeaten in their five matches, scoring 65% of the total points.

They are yet to excel on the global stage, though; their best-ever World Cup finish is third, and they placed fifth in their only Olympics. China (5.8) — who lost to Australia in these Asia Cup semis — have actually recorded better finishes in both tournaments.

📊 Chart of the week: Where does top women’s rugby talent come from?

Two major international women’s rugby union tournaments will kick off this weekend: the Six Nations — contested by Europe’s top teams — and the Pacific Four Series. To casual followers of the sport, one country will be conspicuously absent: South Africa.

Along with New Zealand and England, they are one of just three nations to have won a World Cup in either men’s or women’s rugby union this century. Both of the others have some pedigree in each version; in South Africa, however, the men’s game is much, much stronger. Consider the ‘Dream Team’ selected annually by the sport’s global governing body since 2021: South Africa account for 29% of all selections in the men’s game — but they’re still waiting to record their first women’s selection.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Max Dowman’s magic trick

I’ve lived in England almost all of my adult life, but over that time I’ve struggled to warm to its sports teams and athletes as much as I do to those from other nations. A number of young prodigies might finally be starting to change that.

One is Henry Pollock, the 21-year-old rugby union player I wrote about last year. Another is 16-year-old Max Dowman. The England under-19 soccer international scored an astounding goal against Portugal during the recent international break: after feinting to let the ball roll past both him and his marker, he dribbled from the halfway line to the edge of the box before shooting low into the corner of the net. Some players are so talented you have no choice but to marvel at them.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Ryan O’Hanlon ranked the 48 international men’s soccer teams set to compete in this year’s FIFA World Cup. By a combination of estimated squad value and Elo rating, current holders Argentina sit in seventh position. How reliant do they remain on Lionel Messi? “In World Cup qualifying, he played only 581 minutes, the 10th most of any Argentine player. Despite that, he led the team in expected possession value added…, expected assists and non-penalty goals.”

• For The Athletic, Tim Graham covered the fallout from the recent Fanatics Flag Football Classic. The USA men’s national team dominated squads containing several NFL stars in an invitational tournament last month. Quarterback Darrell Doucette said: “They were taking it for granted at first until they stepped on the field and saw how different it was. Some [NFL] guys came up to us afterward and said, ‘Man, y’all were right. This isn’t what we thought it was going to be.’”

• For ABC, Simon Smale reported on the surprise defection of one of the top men’s water polo players in Australia to Croatia — one of the strongest teams in the sport. World Aquatics recently reversed changes to its eligibility rules; after increasing its required waiting period to three years in 2023, since March 2025 athletes changing nations have only been required to spend “12 months of uninterrupted residency in [their] new nation”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published in two weeks’ time, on Monday April 20th.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇻🇪 Venezuela winning a world title in men’s baseball

• 🇯🇵 Japan winning an Asian title in women’s soccer

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing France’s level after the FIBA World Cup qualifiers

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kayla Reyneke’s sweet striking for South Africa

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇻🇪 Venezuela win the 2026 World Baseball Classic

One thing I’m eventually planning on analysing as part of this ‘Rank the Nations’ project is the effect of home advantage on match results. Events like the World Baseball Classic are likely to be a bit confounding, though.

Even though the final was played on American soil, it didn’t feel like the USA were at home. Support for South American and Caribbean teams in Miami was overwhelming throughout the tournament, and this continued on Tuesday; Venezuela’s win was greeted with a huge outpouring of joy. Across the two editions of the WBC that have taken place since 2022, the two finalists have performed at a similar underlying level: both teams have scored 65% of the total runs in their matches.

Venezuela (7.4) have the higher team rating, however, having won eight of their 10 matches. (The USA (6.8) have only won 10 of their 14 in aggregate.) The Dominican Republic (7.3) are in roughly the same tier as the current champions, but both teams are a step behind 2023 WBC winners Japan (8.2). If the sport’s top players are available, the 2028 Olympic tournament should be hotly contested; at this point, I’m definitely taking the field over the USA — even with home advantage in Los Angeles.

🇯🇵 Japan win the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup

Japan’s journey to their third Asian Cup title in four tournaments was a remarkably impressive one. In this year’s edition, they won all six of their games — by an aggregate scoreline of 29 goals to one.

Their excellent form over the last few weeks has vaulted them into the top three of my international women’s soccer rankings; their team rating had improved from 7.0 at the start of this tournament to 7.9 by the end.

📊 Chart of the week: Are France a true FIBA World Cup contender?

The qualifiers for the women’s basketball World Cup are unusual: all of the sport’s strongest nations compete, regardless of whether or not they’ve already qualified. My takeaway from the latest edition? Look out for France at the main event in September.

The expansion of the Qualifying Tournament from 16 teams in 2022 to 24 in 2026 meant that most major nations improved their performance level this time around; no one took a bigger leap forward than the silver medallists from the last Olympics, though. France won all five of their games on home soil, after recording a 1-2 win-loss record back in 2022. Their ‘point share’ improved out of sight, too: they scored only 47% of the points in their matches four years ago, but 59% of them this year.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kayla Reyneke’s sweet striking for South Africa

For a second consecutive week, my featured highlight is as much about what you can hear as what you can see. In this case, though, it wasn’t crowd noise that drew me in: it was the sound the ball makes when it comes off the middle of Kayla Reyneke’s bat.

The 20-year-old has now faced 71 balls in T20I cricket since making her debut for South Africa — and she’s hit 10 of them beyond the boundary for six. Only nine South Africans have hit more in the history of the format, and she’s only been playing international cricket for a couple of months. Facing the second delivery of the final over of the team’s innings against New Zealand last Tuesday, Reyneke got a ball in the slot and sent it high over the rope at cow corner with a bang.

You can watch a replay of this shot on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For the Boston Globe, Alex Speier laid out some of the challenges faced by Major League Baseball players from WBC champions Venezuela as a result of the US government’s immigration policy. Since December 2025, their visas have only covered a single entry to their country of employment; “if a Venezuelan player with a newly issued visa were to go home mid-season for a family emergency, he might need weeks to meet the requirements of returning to the United States”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Chris Barrett and Iain Payten explained the Australian government’s proposed ‘sports diplomacy’ deal with Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The nations would receive A$150mn for the development of rugby union — mirroring a similar deal for rugby league struck last year. Other context: the Chinese government has already begun funding sports infrastructure projects in the region, including a “[A]$40 million national sports complex” in Tonga.

• For The Athletic, Dermot Corrigan, Felipe Cárdenas and Guillermo Rai reported on the cancellation of men’s soccer’s Finalissima — the quadrennial fixture between the winner of the Copa América and the Euros. Spain were set to play Argentina in Qatar on Friday, but after the Iran war began an agreement on alternative arrangements couldn’t be reached: “[t]wo weeks of negotiations between the stakeholders involved…ended in an exchange of acrimonious statements”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published in two weeks’ time, on Monday April 6th.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning an international trophy in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning an international trophy in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇫🇷 France winning a European title in men’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Italy’s trajectory in men’s rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Fernando Tatís Jr.’s WBC grand slam

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 Champions Cup

3x3 basketball has been an Olympic sport since Tokyo in 2021. Over its first two Games, seven different nations have filled the eight slots in the ‘final four’ of the women’s tournament — with five different nations winning medals.

Having won gold in Tokyo and bronze in Paris, the USA (7.1) are the only country to have won multiple Olympic medals. Despite being the top-ranked nation in the sport, however, they were knocked out of this year’s Champions Cup — an annual contest of top international teams — by Azerbaijan, who haven’t yet played enough matches to qualify for a rating in this system. That should change soon: they have already qualified for the 2026 FIBA 3x3 World Cup, which is taking place in Poland in June.

The USA’s roster was made up of four current WNBA players, but they had to settle for a third-place finish over the weekend. They did manage to beat eventual Cup winners the Netherlands (6.2) in the group stages, by 21 points to 18; the Dutch team went on to comfortably beat Azerbaijan 21-12 in yesterday’s final. They will head to Poland later this year having won three straight major tournaments: last year, they won both the 3x3 Europe Cup and the previous edition of the 3x3 World Cup.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FIBA Men’s 3x3 Champions Cup

Serbia (6.5) and the Netherlands (6.0) were the two nations to go undefeated in the group stages of the men’s edition of this year’s Champions Cup, but both ended up being knocked out in the semi-finals.

The USA (6.6) are yet to medal in men’s 3x3 basketball at the Olympics, but beat Spain in the Champions Cup final yesterday to claim the sport’s top overall rating. The next men’s 3x3 World Cup will take place alongside the women’s later this year.

🇫🇷 France win the 2026 Men’s Six Nations Championship

Victory wasn’t secured until the final seconds of Saturday’s final round, but France (7.3) have won another European title in men’s rugby union. The French are the sport’s top-rated nation since 2022, and started this Six Nations with a trio of big wins.

However, their final two games raised question marks over their play without the ball. After conceding a total of 34 points through three rounds, they shipped 50 in a Round 4 loss — and won their final game this weekend despite giving up 46 points at home.

📊 Chart of the week: Are Italy finally on the up in men’s rugby union?

Italy lost their last Six Nations game this year, but I don’t think their overall performance — two wins out of five — should be considered as another false dawn. In the history of the tournament, they’ve never had this good a five-year spell.

Since 2022, they’ve scored 36% of the total points in their Six Nations games. This stretch, remarkably, has immediately followed their poorest period since they joined the tournament: over the five years to 2021, that figure had fallen as low as 25%. Wales beat them in Cardiff on Saturday, but by the end of this year’s tournament had slipped to a five-year point share of 35% themselves. For the first time in history, Italy aren’t the weakest team in the men’s Six Nations by this measure.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Fernando Tatís Jr.’s WBC grand slam

It’s the sounds of the World Baseball Classic that stay with me as much as the sights. Even before the knockout stages got underway on Friday, the competition had been pure joy and drama. The emotions have been addictive to consume vicariously.

At its best, international sport doesn’t just replicate what competitors and fans know and love about their game; it introduces them to a completely new dynamic. As Shawn Spradling — who’s covering the WBC on X — put it: it’s not been a ‘World Series atmosphere’, but a ‘World Cup atmosphere’. This is more true at the Dominican Republic’s games in Miami than anywhere else. Just watch a clip of Fernando Tatís Jr. hitting a grand slam against the Netherlands — and listen to the crowd go wild.

You can watch a replay of this home run on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On Substack, Jeremias Engelmann broke down the impressive rookie season that Spain international Hugo González is having in the NBA. When the 20-year-old got off to a fast start, it was unclear if his statistical performance was sustainable. However, he’s continued to play winning basketball off the bench for the Boston Celtics: “[e]ven the metrics that tame the noise by pushing the ratings towards zero…have been overwhelmed by the strength of González’s on-off numbers”.

• For The Guardian, Jeff Rueter summarised how the USA’s women’s soccer team are looking after winning the annual invitational SheBelieves Cup. Without the ball, the USWNT have been formidable: they have now gone 804 minutes without conceding. They have largely kept the action far away from their own goal, too; as Rueter notes, goalies Claudia Dickey and Phallon Tullis-Joyce “weren’t tested often this window”, facing only three shots on target in total over three games.

• For ESPNCricinfo, Osman Samiuddin focused on one of the subplots of India’s recent win over New Zealand in the final of the T20I cricket World Cup: their effective use of slower balls. As with so many stories about recent Indian cricketing successes, this is really a story about their star fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah. Samiuddin has the numbers: “New Zealand collectively conceded 90 off their 31 pace-off deliveries. Bumrah conceded 12 off his 21.”

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday March 23rd.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇮🇳 India winning a world title in men’s T20I cricket

• 🇲🇽 Mexico winning a Pan American title in men’s softball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the sources of women’s soccer’s top players

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Lucy Hamilton’s first wicket for Australia

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇮🇳 India win the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup

One of my strongest sporting opinions is that many other codes would benefit from adopting the North American tradition of deciding the winners of major competitions by contesting multi-game playoff series.

If I was in charge of T20I cricket, such a format change might be the first thing I would implement. Twenty20 can be a volatile game, and a single-elimination final therefore isn’t a great way to pick the winner of an important tournament like the recently concluded Men’s T20 World Cup. This year, that didn’t matter all that much: India (7.1) have outplayed every other team in the sport over the last five years, and thoroughly outplayed New Zealand (5.6) in yesterday’s final.

For consistency with other sports, bilateral series — which India have dominated — are excluded from this ranking system. Their excellence still shines through, though: in retaining the trophy this year, they became the first team to win two consecutive World Cup titles. (They were knocked out in the semi-finals in 2022.) What sets them apart from the rest is their aggressive approach to batting: over the last few weeks, they have scored three of the five highest team run totals in T20 World Cup history.

🇲🇽 Mexico win the 2026 Men’s Softball Pan American Championship

A slightly late update on some men’s softball from last month: the Pan American Championship concluded at the end of February. Argentina (7.8) are comfortably the highest-rated team in the sport — but they didn’t manage to win the competition.

The South American nation were hoping for a third consecutive title, but they were upset 0-1 by Mexico (5.2) in the final. Canada (6.7) and the USA (6.7) were the two strongest other nations competing, but respectively finished fourth and fifth overall.

📊 Chart of the week: Where are women’s soccer’s top players from?

For ‘Rank the Nations’, I’ll also be tracking the ‘player of the year’ and ‘team of the year’ awards handed out by global governing bodies. As the Asian Cup kicked off, this week I was interested in looking at where top players in women’s soccer come from.

At first glance, there is more diversity in the women’s game: since 2020, players from nations outside Europe make up 26% of FIFA World 11 selections. (In men’s soccer, it’s 20%.) The real story, though, is within Europe. In the men’s game, many countries outside the ‘big five’ — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — churn out lots of top talent. In the women’s game, though, their pipelines are not currently producing at the same rate: those smaller nations account for just 8% of World 11 selections.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Lucy Hamilton’s first wicket for Australia

Unless and until some sort of structure of regular competition is set up by the ICC for women’s test cricket, I won’t be able to put together any team ratings for this format. Currently, fixtures are just too infrequent — even over a five-year time period.

The rare tests which do take place still make for great viewing, though. During last week’s match between India and Australia, I enjoyed watching young left-arm fast bowler Lucy Hamilton excel in only her second international appearance. Her first wicket for Australia was quite the scalp: in the sixth over of the first innings, she pitched the ball up to Smriti Mandhana and nipped it between the opener’s bat and her front pad. Middle stump was pegged back, and the 19-year-old let out a roar.

You can watch a replay of this dismissal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Tanya Aldred reported on T20I cricket in China, where more resources are allocated to the women’s game than to the men’s. The women are still far from good enough to qualify for the Olympic Games, but — according to a Chinese academic who spoke at a conference in England last month — this atypical disparity reflects the nation’s view of “the promotion of women’s sport as an efficient pathway to maximise China’s performance in the global medal race”.

• For the Irish Times, Nathan Johns investigated how Ireland were able to recruit one of the top rugby union prospects in South Africa away from their rivals. The Irish governing body is always alert for opportunities to widen its player pool, but the family circumstances of back-row forward Josh Neill are unique: his “older brother, Jordan, made a similar decision a few years earlier…for cricket, rather than rugby, representing Ireland at an Under-19 World Cup”.

• On Substack, Neil Paine showed just how dominant Japan have been over the 20-year history of the World Baseball Classic. Coming into this year’s tournament, the defending champions had won 79% of their WBC matches and had “roughly double the cumulative run differential of the next-highest nation”. (At 71%, the Dominican Republic have the next-best win rate.) So far in 2026, they have won all three of their pool-stage games and outscored their opponents 25-9.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands leading the way in women’s field hockey

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands leading the way in men’s field hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing New Zealand’s form in women’s rugby sevens

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sam Kerr’s return for the Matildas

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands lead the first edition of the women’s field hockey ratings

Some of the team ratings that emerge from this project inspire more confidence than others do. Performing this type of analysis has given me an appreciation for just how much more robust the international calendar is in certain team ball sports.

Of any code I’ve featured to date, field hockey might have the best-established calendar. As well as a World Cup, the Olympics and other regional tournaments, top nations play in a round-robin competition called the Pro League every year. I’m more confident that the women’s ratings below, then, give an accurate picture of relative strength than those in men’s ice hockey that I deconstructed last week. As a result, I’m also as impressed by the Netherlands (8.7) as I have been by any team so far.

The latest round of 2025-26 Pro League fixtures concluded this week, and the Netherlands are still unbeaten — with a goal difference far beyond their closest challenger. Their competitive record is truly remarkable: they’ve won five out of six possible Pro League titles, the last five EuroHockey Championships, the last three World Cups and the last two Olympic gold medals. They host the 2026 World Cup on home soil in August; anything but another Dutch win would leave me hugely surprised.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands lead the first edition of the men’s field hockey ratings

The Netherlands (7.0) are also the top-rated team in men’s field hockey. While their overall level is well short of their female compatriots, there is still a considerable gap between them and Belgium (6.4) — the next-best team right now.

Overall, ratings in the men’s game are much more compressed. In the women’s, only the six teams in the table above have a rating above 5.0; there are eight such nations on the men’s side, with six of them currently sitting between 5.1 and 6.0.

📊 Chart of the week: Are New Zealand improving in women’s sevens?

Conversely, women’s rugby sevens seems to be moving further away from parity. In recent years, Australia (7.9) have been close behind New Zealand (8.5) at the top; in 2026, the Kiwis have played at a level their nearest challenger can’t match.

In their games at the two HSBC SVNS Series tournaments held this calendar year, New Zealand have scored 84% of the total points. After a drop-off between 2023 and 2024, they have improved their ‘point share’ by significant increments in both 2025 and 2026. Meanwhile, Australia — who were effectively going point for point with their biggest rivals as recently as 2023 — have dropped well off the pace by this metric: their point share of 65% so far in 2026 would be their lowest mark of this era.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sam Kerr’s return for the Matildas

In happier news for Australian sports fans, Matildas superstar Sam Kerr is back in action at the Asian Cup. The continent’s major women’s soccer tournament kicked off yesterday in Perth, and only Japan (7.0) are rated more highly than the hosts (6.2).

Kerr spent well over a year on the sidelines for her club Chelsea after rupturing a knee ligament in January 2024, and her goal in the Asian Cup opener this weekend against the Philippines was her first for Australia in 851 days. It was a very pleasing striker’s goal: as a cross sailed over her head in the six-yard box, Kerr stayed put and let the two defenders around her swarm towards the ball. A headed pass from a teammate sent it back in her direction, and she nodded the ball home from a few yards out.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Samantha Lewis reported on North Korea’s return to a major international soccer competition — for the first time since 2012 — at the Asian Cup. Despite this long absence at senior level, they have a lot of talent to build a team around: “[t]hanks to their decades-long investment in women’s football, particularly the opening of the Pyongyang International Football School in 2013, the nation’s youth teams are experiencing a second wave of success”.

• For MLB.com, Mike Petriello compared the last of the World Baseball Classic in 2023 to the baseball most fans are used to watching in the major leagues. One statistic in particular foreshadowed a change at MLB level: the frequency and effectiveness with which pitchers from Japan threw split-finger fastballs. Per Petriello, their pitchers “threw approximately 62% of all splitters in the tournament themselves; more than half the teams didn’t throw a single one”.

• For Good Areas, Jarrod Kimber quantified what makes India’s T20I cricket opener Abhishek Sharma different from other aggressive batters in the format. He scores more quickly in the first 10 balls of his innings than anyone else, and does so by hitting the ball in the air much more frequently than anyone else — while maintaining elite levels of control. As Kimber puts it: “[h]e’s taking more risk than anyone ever has, and being rewarded more than any ever has”.

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In today’s special edition of The Week in International Sport, focused on the ice hockey tournaments at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games:

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning gold in the women’s tournament

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning gold in the men’s tournament

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the competitiveness of the women’s ‘final four’

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitch Marner’s overtime game-winner

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇺🇸 The USA win Olympic gold in the women’s ice hockey tournament

Coming into the women’s tournament at this Olympics, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The USA were neck-and-neck with Canada in my ratings; however, I exclude bilateral fixtures from this system to avoid skewing teams’ relative schedule strength too much.

Why is that relevant? Late last year, the Americans comfortably won all four matches in the two teams’ annual ‘Rivalry Series’. In retrospect, this was a strong indicator of their quality: after going undefeated on their way to gold, there’s now no doubt that the USA (8.5) are the world’s strongest women’s ice hockey team. While there was jeopardy in their gold-medal game against Canada (8.0) — it was decided in sudden-death overtime — a win by their neighbours would have been a definite upset.

Below the two standout teams at the top, Switzerland (3.2) won bronze after beating Sweden (5.0) in overtime. Currently rated as the sport’s sixth-best team by this system, the Swiss snuck through three low-scoring games in the knockouts by an aggregate of four goals to three. (Two one-goal victories offset a 2-1 loss to Canada in their semi-final.) This marked a real turnaround from their preliminary-stage performance: they lost their first four matches at the Games 5-15 in aggregate.

🇺🇸 The USA win Olympic gold in the men’s ice hockey tournament

Unlike in the women’s game, the gold-medal-winning team from the USA (7.1) hasn’t been the top-rated team in men’s ice hockey over the last five years. The rankings below have Canada (7.2) as slightly better in competitive fixtures since 2022.

Each North American team is comfortably clear of Sweden (6.6) in third place. However, these ratings include a number of annual tournaments which top NHL players are either unavailable for or opt not to participate in: the IIHF World Championship, and — for European nations only — the Euro Hockey Tour. As well as Canada, both Sweden and Switzerland (5.4) have won a higher percentage of their World Championship games over this period than the USA have.

If we consider only the two ‘best-on-best’ tournaments that have taken place in the last year or so, though, the Americans come out on top. Across this month’s Olympic tournament and last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, Canada and the USA have each won eight of their 10 games. However, yesterday’s gold medallists have scored 70% of the goals in these games; despite their strength with the puck — scoring 4.1 goals per game to the USA’s 3.8 — silver medallists Canada sit at a ‘goal share’ of just 66%.

📊 Chart of the week: How tight were games in the women’s ‘final four’?

It’s too early to assess the impact of the PWHL on international ice hockey; this was the first Games since it was set up in North America in 2023. For now, all we can say is that the ‘final four’ of the 2026 edition was the closest the Olympics has ever seen.

Across the two semi-finals and the two medal matches this year, the average winning margin was just two goals per game — despite the dominant USA team winning their semi-final against Sweden 5-0. This is lower than the average margin at this stage of each of the six previous editions that were decided in this format. (There were no semi-finals in the first edition in 1998.) The drop from four years ago was notable: in 2022, ‘final four’ games were decided by a margin of almost four goals on average.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitch Marner’s overtime game-winner

It’s no secret to long-time readers that I have a lot of contempt for ‘psychobabble’. With that in mind, I enjoyed seeing several players who often cop flak at NHL level putting in performances during the men’s tournament that challenged such narratives.

Goalie Connor Hellebuyck — who apparently can’t handle the pressure of the NHL playoffs — pulled off some incredible saves to keep the USA in the gold-medal game. On Canada’s side, Mitch Marner has faced similar criticisms in the postseason. His team didn’t end the Games how they wanted, but Marner came good in a high-stakes moment: during overtime in their quarter-final, the forward scythed through the defence and flipped a backhand into the net to win the game almost single-handedly.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Bluesky here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Ryan S. Clark profiled 22-year-old Laila Edwards — one of a number of college athletes on the USA’s women’s team at this Olympics, and the first Black woman ever to represent her country in ice hockey.

• For theScore, Kyle Cushman laid out where Canada could go from here to try and put their women’s program back on top of the world. A first step: giving more chances to their own young talent, like 19-year-old Chloe Primerano.

• For the Boston Globe, Katie McInerney looked ahead to the resumption of the third season of the PWHL this week. USA forward Kendall Coyne Schofield told McInerney: “women’s hockey isn’t going to go silent, it’s not going to go dark”.

• For The Athletic, James Mirtle examined how few NHL games goalies from Canada are playing. Their share of the league-wide total “has dipped from 65% at the turn of the millennium down to an all-time low of 24.9% this season.”

• For the Hockey PDOcast, Dimitri Filipovic tracked some key statistics during the men’s tournament. One finding: Canada’s reliance on their ‘big three’ — Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Macklin Celebrini — to create chances.

• For The Athletic, Pierre LeBrun and Dom Luszczyszyn tried to work out how strong Russia’s men’s squad would have been, had they been free to compete. Their best guess: “[a] team that would’ve likely been the bronze medal favorite”.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning a European title in women’s water polo

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a European title in men’s futsal

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing India’s success in youth ODI cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kristýna Kaltounková’s first Olympic point

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2026 Women’s European Water Polo Championship

Already, this project has been useful for highlighting sports where playing talent in the men’s game appears to be differently distributed to the women’s version. (Why these differences arise is another question, which I’ll try and answer as the year goes on.)

Water polo is one sport that it’s helpful to look at through this lens. Like in the men’s game, Spain (7.3) have been the top-rated women’s side since 2022; however, only two other nations from the men’s top six are also present at the top of the women’s rankings. There is much more geographical diversity on the other side of the sport: whereas the men’s top six featured only European nations, two countries from other continents — the USA (7.2) and Australia (6.0) — feature in the table below.

They’re not shown here, but Canada (5.5), Brazil (4.3) and New Zealand (3.8) also round out the women’s game’s top 10. (Only two non-European nations makes it into the men’s top 10.) I’m keen to learn more about water polo in the Netherlands, too. They have one of the highest-rated women’s teams in the world (6.9), and won a second consecutive European title last Thursday. Their men’s team, in contrast, hasn’t even played enough top-level games over the last five years to qualify for a rating.

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 men’s European Futsal Championship

For the second weekend in a row, two of the top nations in men’s futsal went head to head in a continental final. While the favourite won last week’s Copa América decider, the last game at UEFA Futsal Euro 2026 was won by the lower-rated team.

On Saturday, Spain (7.5) beat Portugal (7.9) 5-3 to win their first European title in a decade. Both teams were unbeaten heading into the final; in fact, Portugal hadn’t lost at the Euros since 2016 — when Spain knocked them out on the way to their last title.

📊 Chart of the week: Are India unstoppable in youth ODI cricket?

As well as cross-gender comparisons, I’m also interested in using this database to compare nations’ performances across age-grades. With the conclusion of the men’s under-19 World Cup last week, I thought ODI cricket was a good place to start.

Here, I’ve compared each nation’s win rate in U19 World Cup matches to their win rate in senior men’s World Cups since 1998. India and Australia are the top two at each level, but the much larger country does much better at U19 level. This lines up with my expectation: bigger populations should churn out more talent on a year-to-year basis, but a bottleneck effect exists at the top of international sport. It doesn’t matter if you have 50 cricketers of international quality; only 11 can play at any one time.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kristýna Kaltounková’s first Olympic point

Europeans aren’t just moving to North America to play professional women’s ice hockey, as we saw last week; many emigrate to play at collegiate level, too. One such player is Kristýna Kaltounková, a 23-year-old forward from the Czech Republic.

Kaltounková was the first selection in last year’s PWHL Draft out of Colgate University, and has already established herself at senior level: she was an All-Star at last year’s World Championship, and — per The Athletic’s player-value model, at least — is the best player at this year’s Olympics not on the roster of the USA or Canada. She got her first point at the Games on Friday by putting her body on the line, throwing herself towards a rebound and spearing the puck between the Swiss goalie’s legs into the net.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Athletic, Dom Luszczyszyn analysed the strength of every elite nation’s men’s ice hockey team at past major tournaments. One interesting takeaway from this work is that — despite their squad’s enviable depth this year — Sweden’s best players at this Olympics don’t match up to their stars of the past. Per Luszczyszyn: “Sweden’s top four forwards and top defenseman usually combine for 70 goals of value. The 2026 roster sits at 55.”

• For The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh looked back over the history of the rosters picked by the USA for the World Baseball Classic. This year, things look particularly good for the country that will host the WBC’s knockout rounds — especially on the pitching mound, where the Americans have generally failed to persuade top eligible players to join their team. Lindbergh concludes that this is “the first time that an American club in the WBC can truly aspire to a “Dream Team” label”.

• For The Athletic, Colin Millar and Felipe Cárdenas reported on measures brought in by Argentina’s national governing body to prevent soccer players who sign their first professional contracts overseas from being called up for international squads. This initiative is designed to keep their best youth players on home soil; “[s]even players who have been called up to the [men’s] senior squad since the September international window would not qualify for selection under this rule”.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇪🇬 Egypt winning an African title in men’s handball

• 🇩🇰 Denmark winning a European title in men’s handball

• 🇧🇷 Brazil winning a South American title in men’s futsal

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the fall of Wales in men’s rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Emma Sears’ sharp near-post finish

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇪🇬 Egypt win the 2026 African Men’s Handball Championship

How to define the geographical scope of the ‘Rank the Nations’ database was something I puzzled over at the beginning of this project. I wanted the rating system to fairly represent the global spread of each sport, while retaining its descriptive value.

Simply including results from every regional competition in a given sport would jeopardise a fair amount of that utility; a win in a tournament between clearly weaker nations shouldn’t be worth as much as a win in one contested by stronger teams. Men’s handball is a good example of this puzzle. To recap, I landed on including the results of any regional tournament contested by at least two nations that have reached the semi-final stage of an Olympic tournament or a World Cup since 2000.

Egypt (7.0) won a fourth straight African title on Saturday, and now have the second-best rating in the sport. As the only team from Africa in the top eight, though, they have an easier path to regional success than their European rivals. I may revisit this scoping decision in future, but for now I’m content that it doesn’t overrate Egypt too much: at both the 2024 Olympics and the 2025 World Championship, the eventual third-place finishers eliminated them in the quarter-finals by a one-goal margin.

🇩🇰 Denmark win the 2026 European Men’s Handball Championship

Just how competitive is European men’s handball, then? Denmark (7.2) won four consecutive World Championships between 2019 and 2025, but failed to place better than second at the European Championship over the same period.

That changed yesterday: on home soil, they took out the 2026 title with a 34-27 win over Germany (5.9). Despite a shock group-stage loss here to Portugal (5.1), there’s no real dispute over their status as the sport’s top team; they also hold Olympic gold.

🇧🇷 Brazil win the 2026 men’s Copa América de Futsal

Brazil (8.7) defeated Argentina (7.3) 2-1 yesterday to win a second consecutive South American title in men’s futsal. This was a repeat of both the 2024 Copa América final and the 2024 World Cup final; Brazil have won all three times.

The current world champions have been one of the most dominant men’s teams in the ‘Rank the Nations’ database: they have won 92% of their matches in top-level competition since the start of 2022, and scored 83% of the goals in their fixtures.

📊 Chart of the week: Can Wales bounce back in the Men’s Six Nations?

The chart below reveals a number of interesting recent trends in men’s rugby union in Europe: France’s recent revival, for example, and Ireland’s steady rise to the top. This year, however, I’ll be watching the bottom of the Six Nations table just as closely.

Italy have consistently been the weakest of Europe’s six elite teams since they joined the competition in 2000: on a five-year rolling basis, they’ve always had a lower point share than every other nation. As they have improved their level of performance in recent seasons, however, Wales have declined precipitously. As recently as 2016, they were the strongest Six Nations team by this measure; by the end of the 2026 edition, it’s not out of the question that they will have fallen all the way to the bottom.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Emma Sears’ sharp near-post finish

Compared to 2027 and 2028 — a World Cup year and an Olympic year — 2026 will be a quiet one for the USA’s women’s soccer team. Their January fixtures were fairly low-profile, too: their stars who are contracted to European clubs were unavailable.

In two friendlies against Paraguay and Chile, however, the USWNT’s domestic-based players took care of business: they won both comfortably, by an aggregate of 11 goals to nil. Forward Emma Sears — who plays for Racing Louisville in the NWSL, and made her international debut after the last Olympics in 2024 — continued to impress. In the 46th minute against Chile, she broke into the box from the right and gave the team a 4-0 lead with a pinpoint finish over the goalkeeper’s left shoulder at the near post.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Alex Malcolm provided some background on the rigorous process that led to Australia naming Sophie Molineux as their new captain in women’s test cricket, ODI cricket and T20I cricket. A number of details stood out. Malcolm reported that Molineux was invited to apply, rather than putting herself forward, and that she took part in “multiple interviews with [selector Shawn] Flegler and coach Shelley Nitschke, as well as the Cricket Australia board”.

• For USA Today, Cydney Henderson previewed the impact that the PWHL — the top professional competition in North American women’s ice hockey — could have on the upcoming Winter Olympics. (This is the first tournament since its establishment in 2024.) The PWHL has not just provided players from the USA and Canada with opportunities; “22 players from the league are set to represent six European countries”, including eight who will play for the Czech Republic.

• For The Athletic, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich summarised why some stars of men’s baseball might miss the upcoming World Baseball Classic. In general, if a player gets injured at the WBC, their MLB team is covered by insurance; however, coverage is now more difficult to obtain for those with a recent history of injury. Puerto Rico could be badly affected: “they might withdraw the team from the tournament after learning eight to 10 of their players would be denied coverage”.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇷🇸 Serbia winning a European title in men’s water polo

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Fiji’s trajectory in men’s rugby sevens

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Abhishek Sharma’s statement of intent

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇷🇸 Serbia win the 2026 Men’s European Water Polo Championship

In yesterday’s final of the Men’s European Water Polo Championship were two of the most decorated nations in the competition’s history: Serbia and Hungary. In recent years, though, both have been overshadowed by other continental rivals.

This situation is a good example of these rankings providing a valuable alternative slant on the landscape of a sport. Men’s water polo has typically been dominated by European countries, and the continent’s major tournament has just concluded; however, none of the four top-rated teams according to my ‘Rank the Nations’ model reached the final. In fact, there is daylight between Spain (7.2) and the two teams behind them — Greece (6.6) and Italy (6.6), both losing semi-finalists last week.

What happened to the defending world and European champions in this tournament? They were drawn in a pool with eventual winners Serbia (5.9) and runners-up Hungary (6.3); all three teams — as well as Montenegro (4.9) — finished that stage with three wins out of five, and Spain had comfortably the best goal difference overall. However, Hungary pipped them in a shootout in their last pool match, and they didn’t qualify for the final four. It seems that water polo is a funny old game, too.

📊 Chart of the week: Are Fiji on a downward trajectory in men’s sevens?

You can’t talk about rugby sevens without talking about Fiji. The Melanesian island nation has won all four of its Olympic medals in the sport that was introduced in 2016: a bronze in the women’s event in Tokyo, to go with two golds and a silver in the men’s.

That silver came in Paris, where they were comprehensively beaten by hosts France. Are they on track to reclaim the top spot in the men’s game in a couple of years’ time? Not if their performances on World Rugby’s sevens circuit are anything to go by: the team has been on a downward trajectory for a number of years. During 2022, they were responsible for 68% of all of the points scored in their competitive matches; this figure fell to around 60% for 2023 and 2024, and further to 56% during 2025.

Ahead of this weekend’s event in Singapore, they have the sport’s third-best rating — 6.6, behind New Zealand (6.7) and Argentina (6.8). However, it is worth noting the unusual lack of dispersion in the performance levels of competing nations last year. This hints at how competition structure can influence such a rating system; the annual ‘SVNS’ series was reduced from 12 teams to eight midway through 2025. With fewer matches against weaker opponents, it’s harder for top teams to separate themselves.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Abhishek Sharma’s statement of intent

As we saw last week, India aren’t currently dominating men’s test cricket. They’ve been exceptionally strong in the two white-ball formats in recent years, though — and Abhishek Sharma is one of the drivers of their remarkable record in T20I cricket.

The ultra-aggressive left-handed batter has featured in 34 matches so far in his international career, and his team have won 29 of them. Abhishek’s commitment to attacking cricket is remarkable. In the second match of their current bilateral series against New Zealand, he was caught on the boundary off the first delivery he faced. In the third match yesterday, he was undeterred. At the very beginning of his innings, the opener advanced down the pitch and launched the ball well beyond the rope.

You can watch a replay of this shot on the BCCI website here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Athletic, Chris Weatherspoon broke down Deloitte’s recent report into the finances of some of the top clubs in women’s soccer. As on the men’s side, England is the biggest market in the European game. (Seven of the top 10 clubs by annual revenues come from the WSL.) The drivers of income are different, though. Broadcast deals helped the Premier League surge to the top; “for women’s teams, it is sponsorship deals and partnerships doing the heavy lifting”.

• For the Financial Times, Daniel Thomas and Samuel Agini reported on the NFL’s plan to kickstart growth outside the USA. The Head of NFL International told the paper: “Nobody’s interested if you just show up once a year, have a game and then leave”. Flag football — which is set to debut at the Olympics in 2028 — is one key plank, and franchises are encouraged to pursue their own marketing campaigns: “[t]he New York Jets, for example, run a girls’ flag league in the UK”.

• At NHL.com, Mike Morreale published a profile of Albert Šmits — an 18-year-old from Latvia who will be the youngest men’s ice hockey player at the Winter Olympics. (He may also become the highest-ever Latvian NHL Draft pick later this year.) With experience in Finland’s top men’s league, Šmits won’t face as much of an adjustment as other teenagers might; Morreale notes that the defender “averages 19:58 of ice time in 33 games with Jukurit this season”.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia leading the way in men’s test cricket

• 🇩🇪 Germany winning a European title in women’s indoor hockey

• 🇦🇹 Austria winning a European title in men’s indoor hockey

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning an Asia-Pacific title in men’s field lacrosse

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Ukraine’s standing at Futsal Euro 2026

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nela Lopušanová’s record-tying goal

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇦🇺 Australia lead the first edition of the men’s test cricket ratings

With the conclusion of the Ashes series between England and Australia earlier this month, men’s test cricket is now entering a fallow period: there will be no more matches in the World Test Championship until the start of June.

It’s a good time, then, to check in on the current competitive shape of the sport. The rating system I’ve settled on for this project was designed to be universally applicable, but it’s certainly tougher to adapt to some sports than to others. For test cricket, the ‘win rate’ that goes into each team rating remains self-explanatory; the ‘point share’ component, however, required a bit of thought. For now, I’ve settled on using each team’s average number of runs scored per wicket in a match as the inputs.

Consider the final test of the Ashes series: the away team scored 726 runs for the loss of 20 wickets, giving them an average of 36.3; the home side scored 728 for 15, for an average of 48.5. In this case, Australia’s ‘point share’ for the match would be 57%, or 48.5 / (48.5 + 36.3). It’s a crude measure, but rewards scoreboard dominance in the way I had hoped; in this first set of rankings, it is the reason that Australia (6.1) have pulled away from South Africa (5.8) at the top despite the teams’ similar win rates.

🇩🇪 Germany win the 2026 Women’s EuroHockey Indoor Championship

At the elite level, indoor hockey — a six-a-side version of the traditional field sport — is effectively a European pursuit; South Africa (in 2023) are the only team from outside the continent to make the top four of any edition of the women’s World Cup.

Germany have just won a second straight European title, raising their team rating to 7.9 — well above the Czech Republic (5.9), who they beat in the final yesterday. Absent, however, were the Netherlands: three-time former world champions.

🇦🇹 Austria win the 2026 Men’s EuroHockey Indoor Championship

In order to manage player workloads, the Dutch federation withdrew their (highly competitive) teams from international competition in indoor hockey in 2024. On the men’s side, the Netherlands had reached the World Cup final as recently as 2023.

In their absence, Austria (7.0) won last Sunday’s final against Poland (5.3) after a penalty shootout. At the semi-final stage, the runners-up did manage to upset the higher-rated hosts of the competition, Germany (6.7), by a single goal.

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Asia-Pacific Men’s Lacrosse Championship

First, a correction to Friday’s post: I will in fact be tracking three different sports administered by World Lacrosse as part of this project. In addition to field lacrosse — the traditional form of the sport — and box lacrosse, I will also be recording international results in lacrosse sixes; this is the version of the sport that will be played at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Apologies for the error!

International men’s field lacrosse has typically been dominated by teams from North America, but a couple of nations from Asia and Oceania gave creditable showings at the last World Championship in 2023: Australia finished fourth, and Japan fifth.

Both competed at the latest edition of the Asia-Pacific Championship, which recently concluded in New Zealand. Australia won all four of their matches to claim the title, raising their team rating to 6.0 along the way — still some way short of the USA (8.8).

📊 Chart of the week: Are Ukraine the team to watch at Futsal Euro 2026?

The 2026 European championship of men’s international futsal begins later this week. The recent track record of Portugal (8.1) is comfortably better than any other competing nation, but Ukraine (5.6) also deserve to be treated as contenders.

After finishing in fourth at Futsal Euro 2022, they managed to win the third-place playoff at the 2024 World Cup — beating France to record the best placement of any European side. They did suffer a heavy 7-1 defeat to Argentina in the pool stage of that tournament, but only lost their semi-final against Brazil after a late penalty. It should be largely the same team on the pitch over the coming weeks, too: 10 of the 14 players named for a recent warm-up were also in the World Cup squad two years ago.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nela Lopušanová’s record-tying goal

How special an ice hockey player is Nela Lopušanová? The 17-year-old from Slovakia equalled the individual scoring record at the U18 Women’s Worlds on Thursday, recording her 33rd career point in her 19th game at the tournament.

She’s done so despite her team winning only five times over this period, and conceding twice as many goals as they’ve scored in those games. Midway through their loss to Sweden, Lopušanová effortlessly controlled a pass with her right skate as she coasted into the offensive zone. The tempo then changed sharply: the winger accelerated towards the centre of the ice with a swift stride, and used the space created by a turning defender to snap a shot beyond the reach of the goalie’s blocker.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On LinkedIn, Omar Chaudhuri of consultancy Twenty First Group pointed out how much closer the England men’s test cricket team’s recent 4-1 series loss to Australia was by the underlying metrics: by average differential, the gap between the two sides was only around half as wide as it was in the equivalent five-match series that took place four years prior. In fact, per Chaudhuri, “it was a 50-75% improvement on the five other away defeats this century”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald late last year, Iain Payten documented that at least 30 talented young rugby union players eligible for Australia are now contracted to professional clubs in France. It’s a particularly valuable type of athlete that’s in demand, too: “though many of the 30 weren’t first-choice stars of junior rep teams, their vast physical dimensions still made them targets…over half of the group are tight forwards”.

• For the Financial Times, Simon Kuper wrote about the extent to which the Africa Cup of Nations — the continent’s major men’s soccer competition, which held its latest final yesterday — is becoming a tournament of the diaspora. According to Kuper, “[a]bout a third of players in the tournament were born to African immigrant families outside Africa”. In this case, France are a major exporter of talent: “107 players in the tournament are French-born, about one in six”.

The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday January 26th.

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What have I learned over the last four? Above the many little things that I’ve shared with subscribers to this newsletter — about Jasprit Bumrah’s genius, for instance, or Spain’s passing skill — stands one basic principle I keep returning to. There is so much value in using simple but rigorous methods to try and accurately describe the world around us. Many sporting debates are still conducted untethered from facts that are often straightforwardly revealed by the statistical record, but I hope that the work I’ve published here since 2022 has helped readers conduct better conversations about the teams and athletes they enjoy watching compete.

Over the last few months, I have been laying the foundations for a major project that is a pure reflection of this principle. Helping readers to appreciate athletic quality and introducing them to new sources of joy will continue to be goals of this newsletter. In 2026, however, I also have a more ambitious goal: the creation of a framework that will help us all better understand the entire landscape of international team sport.

🌍 Introducing ‘Rank the Nations’

Is England the ‘home of women’s sport’? Does New Zealand punch further above its weight than any other country of its size? How does the competitive balance of men’s international soccer compare to that of other sporting codes?

I think these are fascinating questions — but not ones I would know how to go about answering comprehensively based on readily available public data.

So: I’ve decided to create such a data set myself.

The practical objective of this project — which I’m dubbing ‘Rank the Nations’ — is to create a comprehensive archive of senior international match results in every major team ball sport.

Using this archive, I will create basic team ratings for every nation that competes at the top level of each of these sports.

Aggregating team ratings across nations and across sports, I will try and answer interesting questions like those above in this newsletter.

Establishing the scope

How have I gone about scoping this project?

16 team ball sports have featured in the Olympic Games or Commonwealth Games since 2000; those sports are administered by 14 separate global governing bodies.

Those governing bodies administer another 14 ball sports. That gives us 30 sports in total:

• Basketball and 3x3 basketball, administered by FIBA;

• Soccer, beach soccer and futsal, administered by FIFA;

• Field hockey, indoor hockey and hockey5s, administered by the FIH;

• Volleyball, administered by the FIVB;

• T20I cricket, ODI cricket and test cricket, administered by the ICC;

• Flag football and American football, administered by the IFAF;

• Handball and beach handball, administered by the IHF;

• Ice hockey, administered by the IIHF;

• Rugby league nines and rugby league, administered by the IRL;

• Water polo, administered by World Aquatics;

• Baseball, softball and baseball5, administered by the WBSC;

• Lacrosse sixes1, field lacrosse and box lacrosse, administered by World Lacrosse;

• Netball and fast5 netball, administered by World Netball; and

• Rugby sevens and rugby union, administered by World Rugby.

Each of these sports — other than baseball5, in which competition is mixed — has both a men’s and a women’s code, meaning that I will be tracking results across 59 different categories.

In each category, I will track every match result in official global competitions (such as a ‘World Cup’ or the Olympic Games itself) as well as those in top regional competitions (like a ‘European Championship’). I have defined a given sport’s ‘top’ regions as those which have provided at least two top-four finishers in any World Cup or edition of the Olympic Games since 2000.

Finally, any matches in competitions which are artificially restricted in some way — by the exclusion of certain stronger nations, for example, or an official requirement that underage, development or amateur squads compete — will also be left out.

Calculating team ratings

To come up with a nation’s rating in a given sport, I will aggregate these results over a five-year period and calculate:

1. The percentage of matches played that they have won; and

2. The percentage of the total points in those matches that they have scored.

The average of those two percentages is then converted to a 10-point scale.

Consider, for example, the England women’s rugby union team. In official competitions between 2021 and 2025:

• They won 40 of their 41 matches, for a ‘win rate’ of 97.6%; and

• They scored 2,045 points and conceded 435 in these matches, for a ‘point share’ of 82.5%.

The average of their win rate and their point share over this period is 90.1%; converted to a 10-point scale, this gives them a team rating of 9.0 as at the end of last year.

Comparison to other systems

Why not use an Elo system, or simply collate official world rankings in each sport?

The advantage that I see in this method over others is that I can point to any single output — England’s team rating in women’s rugby union above, for instance — and explain clearly in a couple of sentences how it was calculated and what it means.

It’s also worth noting that older match results are not decayed as they might be in a predictive model. This is because I intend these team ratings to function primarily as a description of a team’s performance in top-level competition over the medium term.

Why now?

I think the beginning of 2026 is a great time to launch Rank the Nations for a number of reasons.

Several sports in which global competition already featured prominently have moved to give their calendar more coherence in recent years. UEFA has established the Nations League in both men’s and women’s soccer over the last decade, for example, while test cricket introduced the World Test Championship in 2019; the first edition of the Nations Championship in men’s rugby union will also take place this year.

And even in those where it has typically taken a back seat to franchise or club competition — like the four major North American sports — the international game is taking on greater prominence.

NBA basketball now draws on a greater geographical diversity of talent than ever before; NHL stars will return to the men’s ice hockey competition at the Winter Olympics in February; some of baseball’s biggest names will feature again in the World Baseball Classic in March; and a variant of American football — flag football — will even appear in the next Summer Olympics for the first time, with the door still open for NFL players to feature.

Throughout the year, I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter using this data set to help you follow and contextualise the biggest team events in international sport.

Then, at the end of 2026, I’ll be revealing Plot the Ball’s first-ever ranking of the world’s top sporting nations.

You certainly can’t tell every important story about international team sport using only match results, but I believe that you have to refer to this historical record to explain any meaningful trend faithfully.

This record is the skeleton that our entire understanding of any sport is built upon: there is much more to any organism than just the skeleton, but you can’t hope to understand that organism without documenting it accurately.

I don’t think a similar project exists anywhere in the public domain, so I’m really excited for Rank the Nations to kick off next week. If you’re not already subscribed to Plot the Ball, make sure you sign up at the link below.

I believe this is insight into international sport that you won’t get anywhere else.

Subscribe now

The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday January 19th.

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What I’ve learned over the last three months

🏏 Harry Brook’s ability to pair intent with batting skill is unmatched in modern test cricket

No one else combines attacking intent and high skill like Brook does. His adjusted average — 18 runs per dismissal above expectation — is in the same tier as Root’s, but he scores at a much faster rate than other elite test batters.

🏏 Phoebe Litchfield is having her best year as a T20 boundary-hitter

So far in 2025, the 22-year-old has recorded an effective boundary rate 10.3 percentage points higher than other batters in her matches.

🏏 Davina Perrin is already one of England’s best top-order hitters in T20

Perrin recorded an effective boundary rate 5.0 percentage points higher than the other batters in her games.

🏏 Ahead of a home World Cup, Indian opener Smriti Mandhana is ticking along in top gear

Along with Laura Wolvaardt of South Africa and Tammy Beaumont of England, Mandhana is one of three active players to have averaged at least 10 runs per dismissal more than the other top-order batters in their games.

🏏 No other T20I opener has ever scored as quickly as Abhishek Sharma

Abhishek’s strike rate is 60 runs per 100 balls better than the other openers in the matches that he’s played.

🏏 Australia run the other top teams in women’s cricket off their feet

Over this period, their non-boundary strike rate is 48 runs per 100 balls; other top teams in aggregate score just 43.

🏏 Kuldeep Yadav’s exemplary record might make India rethink their conservative test approach

[D]uring the World Test Championship era, both his bowling average and strike rate have been miles better than the other spin bowlers who have played in the same tests as he has.

🏏 Leg-spinner Alana King is nailing her restrictive role at this World Cup

Across her 32 overs, she has conceded an average of 3.8 runs per over; other spin bowlers in her games have gone at an economy rate of 5.3 in aggregate.

🏏 South Africa captain Laura Wolvaardt has matured into a multi-faceted ODI batter

Wolvaardt’s last two years have been her best yet: in both 2024 and 2025, she has scored over eight runs per 100 balls more than the other top-order batters in the ODIs she has played.

🏏 Entering the Ashes with an ageing pace attack, Australia might need Nathan Lyon to step up

He’s bowled more overs than anyone else since the start of the World Test Championship in August 2019 — and his wickets have cost 12 runs less than those of other spinners in the matches he’s played, on average.

🏏 Teen all-rounder Caoimhe Bray is already contributing as a bowler

[S]he has bowled 70% of her available allocation over this period — the third-highest usage rate of any bowler on her team.

⚽ Spain’s approach in attack was much more focused at Euro 2025

This year, they were more focused: Esther González had 34% of the team’s xG by herself — and only one other player was above 10% of the team’s total.

⚽️ Leading the line for Real Madrid, star forward Kylian Mbappé has prioritised quantity over quality

He moved further away from goal as his career in Ligue 1 progressed, and this has continued so far in La Liga: the average quality of his non-penalty shots at Madrid has been lower than it ever was at PSG.

⚽️ Accurate shooting underpins Clàudia Pina’s xG outperformance

[O]nly one player in Europe’s top five leagues added more value in aggregate to their open-play shots…than Pina did last season.

⚽ Erling Haaland is taking even better shots despite a heavier workload

Haaland’s average non-penalty shot has been worth 0.30 expected goals so far this season — in the same ballpark as his best year at Dortmund.

⚽️ Despite the club’s financial issues, Barça Femení are back on track — for now

After this week’s big win over Bayern Munich in Europe, Barcelona have climbed to a mark of +3.4 adjusted goals per game across their last 20 — with almost all of their improvement coming in attack.

⚽ Xabi Alonso’s improved Real Madrid are still short of full strength

[T]wo players who appeared in more than two thirds of the available minutes last season…have played fewer than 25% in 2025-26.

⚽️ Seeking another Nations League title under a new manager, Spain can rely on a familiar strength

According to data released by Hudl Statsbomb, Spain were by far the most accurate European team with the ball under pressure for the third major tournament in a row.

⚽️ Consistent selection made Arsenal a contender — and new talent might finally take them to a title

By 2022-23, it was clearly trending upward — and they were selecting the most consistent line-ups of the ‘big three’ for almost the entirety of the next two seasons. So far in 2025-26, however, this number has slightly dropped off.

⚽️ Vicky López and Barça’s other teenagers are playing more this season

[P]layers aged 19 or younger have accounted for just over 16% of all minutes…so far in 2025-26 — up from a 6% share last season.

🏀 Dominique Malonga is playing more — and staying close to the basket

Malonga has shot only 13 three-pointers all season, and her field-goal attempts so far have been taken from 6.7 feet away on average.

🏀 With characteristic flair, Marine Johannès is building her case as the best shooter in the WNBA

No one who can match or better her career success rate of 38.1% takes as many threes per 36 minutes as she does — and none of the five players who shoot them more frequently are anywhere near as accurate.

🏀 Luka Dončić is carrying a heavier load than ever for Slovenia at EuroBasket 2025

During their historic run to gold at EuroBasket 2017, the 18-year-old Dončić was an important player for Slovenia — but not a dominant one. Two tournaments later, he’s indispensable.

🏀 The Fever improved a lot this season — even without Caitlin Clark

Even without Clark, the team did manage to step up another level in 2025: their average scoring margin was +3.4 points per game this regular season.

🏀 Deandre Ayton was a top NBA Draft pick — but the Lakers don’t need him to play like one

Earlier in his career, though, Ayton proved that he can be an efficient complementary piece on a competitive NBA team. In two of his five seasons with the Phoenix Suns, his scoring efficiency ranked in the 85th percentile among ‘bigs’.

🏀 Luka Dončić has improved his scoring — without getting to the rim

[A]round 20% of his shot attempts have come from between 10 and 16 feet — and he’s converted 58% of them.

🏀 Victor Wembanyama’s midrange shooting has dropped off this year

[H]is shooting from the short midrange has deteriorated: he’s taking 18% of his attempts from between three and 10 feet, but converting only 36% of them.

🏉 On the eve of a Rugby World Cup, some of New Zealand’s top talent is playing by different rules

A contract only lasting a few months isn’t enough to make a living. As a result, it’s not a surprise that players who don’t earn full-time Black Ferns deals look elsewhere for income — including to the 13-a-side version of the game.

🏉 The Springboks remain the strongest team in the world — despite mixed results so far in 2025

South Africa come out well ahead of their peers in the men’s game: their recent performances make them 12.2 points per game better than the average ‘Tier 1’ side.

🏉 Ireland don’t need to dominate with the ball to top their World Cup pool

During the WXV 1 competition in Vancouver last year, Ireland overcame New Zealand despite being outperformed in the running game.

🏉 Canada have earned their place in the Rugby World Cup final by excelling with ball in hand

Of the two teams in tomorrow’s final, it’s Canada — and not favourites England — who are more reliant on their running game to progress the ball upfield: 58% of their metres gained this tournament have come from carries.

🏉 Passing is still a weak point in Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s game

The Springboks’ other two 10s have completed 3.6 passes for every carry they’ve made; Sacha has completed just 0.7.

🏉 Reece Walsh — the NRL’s most dangerous attacker — is getting his chance for the Kangaroos

Walsh has scored or assisted 1.7 tries per 80 minutes since joining the Broncos at the start of 2023; during this period, he has also created 2.4 line breaks per 80 for himself and others.

🏉 Ireland’s attack has declined considerably since the 2023 World Cup

[T]hey scored six points per game more than average at that time, but today — after losing to New Zealand last week — the team sits at an ‘attack rating’ of +2.

🏉 Sevens star Jorja Miller was as explosive an attacker as advertised at the Rugby World Cup

According to data published by Opta during the tournament, Miller beat a defender once every 1.2 carries she made — a better rate than stars like Ellie Kildunne, Portia Woodman-Wickliffe and Asia Hogan-Rochester.

⚾️ No one gives MLB hitters less time to think than Jacob Misiorowski

Put simply, the lithe 23-year-old throws extremely hard: his average fastball velocity is in the 99th percentile among MLB pitchers.

⚾️ By one key metric, Yoshinobu Yamamoto has barely regressed in MLB

[H]is K-BB% so far in MLB is 21.2% — well above league-average, and only a single point lower than what he managed over his final three NPB seasons.

⚾️ With the Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani is throwing harder — and pitching better — than ever before

Ohtani’s underlying performance has also been excellent. He is striking out more batters than he did in an Angels uniform, while also allowing fewer walks and giving up fewer ‘hard-hit’ batted balls.

⚾️ Working out of the Dodgers bullpen, Roki Sasaki is back in control

Heading into Game 1 of the World Series…Sasaki has already faced 29 batters in the postseason — and only issued two walks.

⚾️ Yoshinobu Yamamoto doubled his workload during LA’s playoff run

During this regular season, Yamamoto…completed 12% of all innings pitched by the Dodgers. In the playoffs, his share almost doubled to 23%.

⚾️ Munetaka Murakami’s contact skills might not be good enough in MLB

The Fangraphs verdict was blunt: unless he is able to improve the mechanics of his swing, “he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter”.

🏈 Arch Manning is now behind his uncles on the QB development curve

Peyton and Eli respectively recorded 586 and 482 combined passing and rushing attempts; so far at Texas, Arch has registered just 123.

🏈 Patrick Mahomes is relying on his legs an unusual amount this season

Mahomes’ 123 rushing yards so far account for 22.6% of his total yardage — the highest share over any two-game stretch of his career to date.

🏈 The Jaguars still aren’t sure how to deploy Travis Hunter on defence

[H]e has featured on more than 60% of the team’s defensive plays twice in five games — and twice he has featured on fewer than 20% of them.

🏈 Patrick Mahomes is attempting deeper passes again for the Chiefs

[H]is completed passes have travelled a yard further in the air than they did in 2024 — and his incompletions are averaging two more air yards per attempt.

🏈 Drake Maye is one of the few NFL QBs bringing back the deep ball

So far this season, each attempt of Maye’s is travelling 8.9 yards in the air — one of the highest marks in the league, and up 23% from last year.

🏒 Connor Bedard’s shot rate has remained low to start the NHL season

Bedard has taken 12 total attempts in 86 even-strength minutes — a rate of around 8 per 60, down from 13 per 60 last year and 15 in 2024-25.

🏒 18-year-old Matthew Schaefer already looks a solid NHL defender

[O]nly two players at Schaefer’s position have immediately stepped up to the NHL level after being drafted and taken on such a heavy workload.

🏒 Macklin Celebrini is already great at getting his team on the power play

Celebrini is one of 99 forwards to have played at least 1,600 minutes…he’s drawn a penalty offence from an opponent more frequently than all but four of them.

🏒 For the first time in his NHL career, Connor Bedard is showing glimpses of elite finishing skill

For the first time in his career, his shooting percentage is several percentage points higher than you’d expect based on the location of his attempts, per Evolving Hockey.

🏒 Already a Canadian hockey legend, Sidney Crosby has earned his shot at another gold medal

Over this period, the Pittsburgh Penguins veteran has provided around 319 goals of value above the average NHL skater in aggregate — 64 more than the next-best player.

⛳️ Scottie Scheffler’s PGA Tour success is still all about his approach play

No one else comes close in this skill category: the next-best player gains just 0.9 shots per round over the average tour pro.

⛳️ Standout amateur Jackson Koivun might be America’s next top golfer

Since 2011, per Data Golf, only three amateur golfers have bettered Jackson Koivun’s current skill level.

⛳️ American star Nelly Korda has regained her consistency — if not her winning habit — in 2025

That hasn’t been a recurring feature of her close losses, though: according to the advanced data available at LPGA.com, she has gained strokes on the greens in four of her other five top-five tournament finishes.

🎾 Carlos Alcaraz has edged ahead of Jannik Sinner after outserving his rival at the US Open

In the short term, though, there are ominous signs for Sinner. On average, his rival landed 63% of his first serves in at the US Open, and won 84% of the resulting points; the Italian landed 56% of his own in play, and won 81% of them.

This is the final edition of the newsletter for 2025. Plot the Ball will be back in your inbox on a regular basis in January.

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Covered in this edition: 🏒 Sidney Crosby, 🏉 Jorja Miller, 🏏 Caoimhe Bray, 🏀 Victor Wembanyama and 🏈 Drake Maye.

🏒 Already a Canadian hockey legend, Sidney Crosby has earned his shot at another gold medal

Connor Bedard — who featured in last week’s newsletter — is one of several young Canadian hockey players putting themselves in the mix for a trip to the 2026 Winter Olympics. If any of them make it, however, it won’t be at Sidney Crosby’s expense.

If you’re not aware of Crosby’s longevity, consider that he captained Team Canada at the 2014 Olympics — and at the Four Nations Face-Off earlier in 2025. If you don’t have a sense of how consistent a force the 38-year-old centre has been at the top level of the sport, let Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic help you. He has estimated the on-ice impact of every player in every NHL season since 2007-08 — and, over the summer, made his historical data publicly available to other analysts.

By Luszczyszyn’s ‘net rating’ — which measures a player’s impact on their team’s goal difference using a mix of traditional and advanced statistics — Crosby is unmatched. Over this period, the Pittsburgh Penguins veteran has provided around 319 goals of value above the average NHL skater in aggregate — 64 more than the next-best player. Adjust his output for the number of games he has played, and his record still stands up: only two players have a higher ‘per-82’ average than Crosby does.

One of those two is Connor McDavid; like Crosby, he has already been officially named to the Olympic team. The 28-year-old McDavid has had peaks that a younger Crosby wasn’t able to match. (In the available record, at least; the necessary data isn’t available to estimate his net impact during his first two seasons in the NHL.) But even during 2024-25 — one of the three weakest seasons of his career — Crosby remained one of the top 25 skaters in the NHL by net rating.

Per Luszczyszyn, he was Canada’s most impactful player at the Four Nations, too. It will be nearly impossible for Crosby to have a more iconic moment at this Olympics than his ‘Golden Goal’ on home ice back in 2010; if it meant leaving Turin with another gold medal, he’d likely be content to cede the ice to McDavid. (Or, indeed, Bedard.) Regardless, it’s remarkable that — after playing for 21 NHL seasons and in more than 1,500 professional games — Crosby will even be there, let alone on merit.

🏉 Sevens star Jorja Miller was as explosive an attacker as advertised at the Rugby World Cup

New Zealand didn’t make this year’s Rugby World Cup final, but Jorja Miller — on secondment from the nation’s world-beating international rugby sevens program — certainly lived up to the hype in the 15-a-side game.

She was particularly effective with ball in hand: playing as an undersized back-row forward, the 21-year-old made opposing tacklers miss more frequently than the world’s most dangerous outside backs. According to data published by Opta during the tournament, Miller beat a defender once every 1.2 carries she made — a better rate than stars like Ellie Kildunne, Portia Woodman-Wickliffe and Asia Hogan-Rochester. (She was also a particularly effective offloader of the ball in contact.)

For now, Miller has gone back to the seven-a-side game; the 2025-26 edition of the code’s world tour kicks off in Dubai next weekend. She should be back in action for the Black Ferns next year, though. A change to New Zealand Rugby’s annual calendar opens up the possibility of their top talent playing regularly in each format. If anyone can excel at both, it’s Miller: after winning World Rugby’s ‘Player of the Year’ award for sevens in May this year, she was named in their 15-a-side ‘Dream Team’ in October.

What else I learned last week

🏏 Teen all-rounder Caoimhe Bray is already contributing as a bowler

Australian cricket prodigy Caoimhe Bray burst onto the scene during last year’s WBBL with a batting cameo. Only three games into her second season, the 16-year-old all-rounder took a hat trick for the Sydney Sixers with the ball, too.

It’s the second discipline that has been far more prominent so far, though. Despite her fast start, Bray has faced only 3.1 balls per game as a batter in her first two seasons. (At the same age, Phoebe Litchfield was facing 17.5 per game.) However, she has already delivered more balls than any other 16-year-old fast bowler in WBBL history. Bray is a valued part of the Sixers’ attack, too: she has bowled 70% of her available allocation over this period — the third-highest usage rate of any bowler on her team.

🏀 Victor Wembanyama’s midrange shooting has dropped off this year

After looking at Luka Dončić in this section last week, we can perform a similar exercise with Victor Wembanyama. Before the Frenchman suffered a calf injury, his San Antonio Spurs had begun the season like one of the NBA’s most improved teams.

Despite an abrupt shift in his shot profile — the average distance of his field-goal attempts was 17.0ft last year, but just 12.4ft this year — Wembanyama has actually been less efficient from the field so far in 2025-26. (His effective FG percentage is 54.8%, down from 55.9%.) While he’s been a slightly better finisher at the rim in his third season, his shooting from the short midrange has deteriorated: he’s taking 18% of his attempts from between three and 10 feet, but converting only 36% of them.

🏈 Drake Maye is one of the few NFL QBs bringing back the deep ball

Has the deep passing game returned to the NFL this season? Really, it depends who you’re watching. Through Week 11, the average pass attempt was travelling 7.7 yards through the air to its intended recipient — an increase of 2% from last year.

A number of QBs are much more focused on throwing downfield, though. One of them is Patrick Mahomes; another is Drake Maye, a second-year starter for the New England Patriots. Advanced metrics rate Maye’s play highly; as has highlighted in his work at Unexpected Points, a major factor in this is the value he adds on deep passes. So far this season, each attempt of Maye’s is travelling 8.9 yards in the air — one of the highest marks in the league, and up 23% from last year.

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Covered in this edition: 🏏 Nathan Lyon, 🏒 Connor Bedard, 🏀 Luka Dončić, ⚽️ Vicky López and ⚾️ Munetaka Murakami.

🏏 Entering the Ashes with an ageing pace attack, Australia might need Nathan Lyon to step up

To understand the danger of reading too much into the outcomes of warm-up games, all you need to do is watch some highlights of Ben Stokes’ bowling performance for the England men’s test cricket team in their pre-Ashes intra-squad fixture yesterday.

Odd things happen in sport all the time — especially in odd competitive circumstances. It might be possible to draw some conclusions about England’s approach to selection from this warm-up, though. Missing from their ‘first team’ was their first-choice spin bowler, Shoaib Bashir. It’s an understandable omission: spinners were marginalised in the last major test series hosted by Australia, accounting for only 17 of the 165 wickets taken by bowlers in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

Even Nathan Lyon — the hosts’ own first-choice off-spinner — had relatively little influence. At 37, Lyon has much more test experience than the 21-year-old Bashir. In fact, there isn’t a spin bowler in this era of test cricket with a more impressive track record than Lyon’s. He’s bowled more overs than anyone else since the start of the World Test Championship in August 2019 — and his wickets have cost 12 runs less than those of other spinners in the matches he’s played, on average.

Lyon has been particularly useful in Australian conditions, which are generally challenging for spin bowlers. Over this period, visiting spinners have taken their wickets at an average cost of 55.3 runs; Lyon’s have cost only 27.3. Really, his relegation to a minor role in last year’s series against India said more about the quality of Australia’s veteran pace attack than his own effectiveness in home tests. However, the bodies of those fast bowlers might finally be starting to creak.

Pat Cummins — the team’s captain, who accounted for a quarter of Australia’s overs in last year’s BGT series by himself — has already been ruled out of next week’s first test; Josh Hazlewood also had a recent injury scare. As a consequence, it’s likely that Lyon will be asked to deliver more over the course of this five-match series than he did against India. One of England’s major weaknesses is that they don’t have a spinner with such proven quality to match him.

🏒 For the first time in his NHL career, Connor Bedard is showing glimpses of elite finishing skill

Maybe it’s not too late. Back in February, I cast doubt on Connor Bedard’s chances of making Canada’s roster for the 2026 Winter Olympics. After a strong start to the NHL season, however, he has forced his way into team management’s thinking.

Bedard’s inability to generate shots in his first few games was just a blip; recently, he’s also been finishing his scoring chances at an efficient rate. For the first time in his career, his shooting percentage is several percentage points higher than you’d expect based on the location of his attempts, per Evolving Hockey. Will this trend stick? Despite his shot being lauded by scouts — and opposing goalies — he’s been a roughly average finisher in aggregate across his first three seasons in the league.

Among recent top draft picks, how well a player finished their chances early in their NHL career is a pretty good predictor of shooting efficiency in future seasons. While Bedard (+3% so far) clearly hasn’t come out of the blocks like Steven Stamkos or Auston Matthews, the trajectory of players like Patrick Kane, Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid should give fans of the Blackhawks hope. All three players began their careers at a similar level to Bedard, before developing into clearly plus finishers.

What else I learned last week

🏀 Luka Dončić has improved his scoring — without getting to the rim

Seven games into his second season with the Los Angeles Lakers, Luka Dončić has looked a different player. By Basketball Reference’s all-in-one impact metric — Box Plus/Minus — he has taken a big leap forward from 2024-25 on the offensive end.

Earlier in the year, I looked into the declining proportion of his shots that came near the basket; his improvement hasn’t been a result of taking more of those high-value attempts, though. (The share which have been taken within three feet of the rim is roughly in line with last year.) Rather, he has been excellent from the midrange: around 20% of his shot attempts have come from between 10 and 16 feet — and he’s converted 58% of them. Last year, those figures were 17% and 45% respectively.

⚽️ Vicky López and Barça’s other teenagers are playing more this season

One beneficiary of Barça Femení’s reduced depth has been 19-year-old Spanish international Vicky López. Already in her fourth season with the club’s first team, she has played 67% of the available Liga F and Champions League minutes so far.

López’s allocated minutes have steadily increased year by year. She featured 13% of the time in her first season, 36% in her second and 45% last season; she would likely have filled a more important role even if Barça hadn’t been facing a financial crunch. However, the club’s other teenage talents have also benefited from a smaller squad: players aged 19 or younger have accounted for just over 16% of all minutes across those two major competitions so far in 2025-26 — up from a 6% share last season.

⚾️ Munetaka Murakami’s contact skills might not be good enough in MLB

Another member of Japan’s title-winning World Baseball Classic squad is headed for North America. 25-year-old third baseman Munetaka Murakami — who hit 56 home runs in a single NPB season in 2022 — is now free to negotiate with MLB teams.

Murakami can certainly hit the ball hard: as David Adler noted at MLB.com earlier this week, only nine-left handed hitters in the Majors recorded an exit velocity on any batted ball faster than the 116.5 mph mark he reached this year. How often Murakami can make such good contact with the ball is the real question; he swung and missed alarmingly frequently at NPB level. The Fangraphs verdict was blunt: unless he is able to improve the mechanics of his swing, “he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter”.

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Covered in this edition: ⚽️ Arsenal, 🏏 Laura Wolvaardt, 🏉 Ireland, ⚾️ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and 🏒 Macklin Celebrini.

⚽️ Consistent selection made Arsenal a contender — and new talent might finally take them to a title

I’ve got no idea whether Mikel Arteta has ever heard of Ivan Cleary. They’d have a lot to talk about together, though: I’d be surprised if Arteta didn’t recognise some of the team-building principles Cleary’s Penrith Panthers have put in place in the NRL.

Like Arteta’s Arsenal, the Panthers have become one of their league’s best teams in recent years on the back of a dominant defence. Like Penrith, Arsenal constructed a strong spine by consistently selecting talented players in key positions. The chart below plots the ‘similarity score’ of the team’s Premier League starting line-ups since Arteta took over, and compares their score to their rivals. I’ve used this metric before to roughly gauge whether a coach is doing what they can to build on-field cohesion.

When the Spaniard took over at the end of 2019, Arsenal’s score was trailing behind those of Liverpool and Man City. By 2022-23, it was clearly trending upward — and they were selecting the most consistent line-ups of the ‘big three’ for almost the entirety of the next two seasons. So far in 2025-26, however, this number has slightly dropped off. Despite a commanding lead in the table, they’re now actually trailing Liverpool — who are in third place — by a number of percentage points in this metric.

How can we explain this? Regarding Liverpool, I might point to the fact that their two most important players — who have played almost every minute for the team in the Premier League this season — are now over the age of 33, and likely on the decline. In Arsenal’s case, I’d be inclined to credit the defensive talent of the players Arteta is now featuring regularly. Since his arrival from Real Sociedad this past summer, for instance, Martín Zubimendi has been nearly ever-present in their midfield.

In addition, highly-rated defensive recruits Jurriën Timber and Riccardo Calafiori are both playing more than 80% of the minutes. (Before the current campaign, they had combined to play just 34% of the available minutes since signing with the club.) Even ardent advocates of a cohesion-based approach to squad-building acknowledge that talent remains a key driver of performance; however, we shouldn’t underestimate the stability of the surrounding system that is allowing Arsenal’s new additions to thrive.

🏏 South Africa captain Laura Wolvaardt has matured into a multi-faceted ODI batter

Smriti Mandhana and India won the Cricket World Cup final last Sunday. The top-order batter had a solid tournament — but it was the captain of the losing finalists, South Africa, who really stole the show in its latter stages.

Laura Wolvaardt was this World Cup’s highest run-scorer overall, and recorded centuries in both of her team’s knockout fixtures. She and Mandhana are set to be the standout batters of their generation; a couple of months ago, though, I wrote about how Mandhana had displayed a broad range of white-ball skills more consistently than Wolvaardt. While the Indian’s career aggregate remains more impressive, this tournament allowed Wolvaardt to show off how much her own game has grown.

Wolvaardt debuted at 16, and immediately proved herself as a reliable run-scorer. (She has never recorded an ODI average lower than expectation in a calendar year.) At the start of her career, she accumulated those runs at a much slower pace than her peers — but, over the years, her strike rate has trended upwards. And Wolvaardt’s last two years have been her best yet: in both 2024 and 2025, she has scored over eight runs per 100 balls more than the other top-order batters in the ODIs she has played.

What else I learned last week

🏉 Ireland’s attack has declined considerably since the 2023 World Cup

The last men’s Rugby World Cup ended in failure for Ireland and their retiring fly-half, Jonny Sexton. I’ve previously made the case that they were nonetheless the best team in the world at the end of 2023; that case is a lot more difficult to make now.

My team strength model currently rates Ireland as nine points per game better than the average ‘Tier 1’ side — down from a mark of +14 two years ago. Almost all of that regression has been with the ball: they scored six points per game more than average at that time, but today — after losing to New Zealand last week — the team sits at an ‘attack rating’ of +2. Sexton is now an assistant coach, and earlier this week made the comparison to 2023 himself: “If you looked at Saturday, you’d say we’re miles away.”

⚾️ Yoshinobu Yamamoto doubled his workload during LA’s playoff run

I’ve written before about how NBA teams change their distribution of minutes in a simple way during the playoffs: their stars tend to play more than they did in the regular season. In this year’s MLB postseason, there was a similar trend at play.

The Los Angeles Dodgers took out a second consecutive World Series last Saturday, and star pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was credited with three of their four wins. We can capture how much influence the 27-year-old had on this year’s playoffs more precisely with another simple metric, though. During this regular season, Yamamoto — who started more games than anyone else on the team — completed 12% of all innings pitched by the Dodgers. In the playoffs, his share almost doubled to 23%.

🏒 Macklin Celebrini is already great at getting his team on the power play

The San Jose Sharks still aren’t a sustainably good hockey team with teenage starlet Macklin Celebrini on the ice. This season, they have accounted for 60% of the goals scored in his even-strength minutes — but only 40% of the expected goals created.

However, Celebrini has already shown enough that his peers believe he will become the next face of the NHL. What makes him special? I looked at his ability to progress the puck up the ice last year; since entering the league, he has also been great at generating power-play opportunities for his team. Celebrini is one of 99 forwards to have played at least 1,600 minutes since the start of the 2024-25 season — and he’s drawn a penalty offence from an opponent more frequently than all but four of them.

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Covered in this edition: 🏉 Reece Walsh, ⚽️ Spain, 🏏 Alana King, ⚾️ Roki Sasaki and 🏒 Matthew Schaefer.

🏉 Reece Walsh — the NRL’s most dangerous attacker — is getting his chance for the Kangaroos

For many sports, international competition is the pinnacle. Bluntly, rugby league isn’t yet one of them. Australia — who run the 13-a-side code’s elite club tournaments — have lost just one of their 29 men’s World Cup matches this century.

While the NRL does attract talent from all over the rugby world, the advantage that the Kangaroos possess over every other team they face is astonishing. This does make their squad selection particularly interesting, though. When there are four or five stars who could plausibly be selected at a given position, how difficult is it for any one player to stand out? Over the last few years, it’s been hard to imagine anyone building a stronger case than 23-year-old fullback Reece Walsh.

His dominant performance for the Brisbane Broncos in this year’s NRL Grand Final capped off a three-season stretch during which he was the most productive attacker in the league — by some distance. Walsh has scored or assisted 1.7 tries per 80 minutes since joining the Broncos at the start of 2023; during this period, he has also created 2.4 line breaks per 80 for himself and others. There is clear daylight between him and every other NRL player on both metrics — including his direct competition.

Walsh’s selection in the Kangaroos squad for their three-match tour of England was still far from guaranteed. For starters, he was fortunate that James Tedesco removed himself from contention last month. The 32-year-old started the last World Cup final at fullback for Australia, and was one of the strongest players at the position in the NRL this season — neck and neck with the Bronco — according to one of The Rugby League Eye Test’s advanced metrics.

Even after making the touring squad, it wasn’t clear that he would unseat last year’s starter Dylan Edwards. (Per the chart above, his attacking impact is less impressive.) Ultimately, though, Kangaroos coach Kevin Walters couldn’t ignore the production: Walsh has been picked in the green and gold ‘1’ jersey for tomorrow’s first test at Wembley. If the young fullback takes his chance this year, he’ll be well placed for the 2026 World Cup; somehow, I think he’d have a good chance of winning a medal.

⚽️ Seeking another Nations League title under a new manager, Spain can rely on a familiar strength

Later today, Spain will play their first game since losing to England in the final of Euro 2025. While it will also be the team’s first game under new head coach Sonia Bermúdez, it’s unclear how different we should expect them to look.

Her promotion from within the RFEF has frustrated those who wish to see the Spanish federation make more substantial changes to their women’s programme. She replaces Montse Tomé, who was herself elevated from an assistant role after the 2023 World Cup. To me, the on-field success that followed this previous continuity appointment indicates that it’s the skill of the country’s playing talent that deserves the attention — not whoever is on the sideline. And even at the Euros, that talent shone through.

According to data released by Hudl Statsbomb, Spain were by far the most accurate European team with the ball under pressure for the third major tournament in a row. This summer, they successfully completed 82% of their pressured passes — over 10 percentage points better than France, the next-best team by this metric. I’d expect this current generation of Spanish players — bolstered by a couple of returning stars — to continue to demonstrate their supreme on-ball skill in this international window.

What else I learned last week

🏏 Leg-spinner Alana King is nailing her restrictive role at this World Cup

Spin bowlers have played an unusually large part in this year’s ODI World Cup. So far, they have delivered 59 balls out of every 100 bowled — up from a share of 47% in the 2022 edition hosted by Australia, and a 53% mark at the 2012 tournament in England.

Alana King — Australia’s first-choice leg-spinner — has been exceptional in their five completed matches to date. While she hasn’t taken wickets all that frequently, King has managed to restrict the flow of runs expertly. Across her 32 overs, she has conceded an average of 3.8 runs per over; other spin bowlers in her games have gone at an economy rate of 5.3 in aggregate. That makes King’s economy rate 1.5 runs per over better than expectation — a differential twice as large as the next best spinner’s.

⚾️ Working out of the Dodgers bullpen, Roki Sasaki is back in control

I hope you don’t need me to tell you anything about Shohei Ohtani’s recent exploits in the MLB playoffs. Let’s focus on one of his Japanese teammates instead. As I briefly mentioned last month, Roki Sasaki’s path back to the Majors has been remarkable.

A drop in the velocity of his fastball was a major warning sign for the 23-year-old earlier in the year; so far in the playoffs, he’s back above 99 mph. Sasaki was also wayward during the regular season, however; his inability to throw strikes meant that, on average, every seventh batter he faced got a free pass to first base. That has also changed in October. Heading into Game 1 of the World Series tonight, Sasaki has already faced 29 batters in the postseason — and only issued two walks.

🏒 18-year-old Matthew Schaefer already looks a solid NHL defender

Matthew Schaefer only turned 18 last month, but the aggressive defender hasn’t seemed fazed by his transition to the top level. He was the first-overall selection in this year’s NHL Draft — and he’s already playing 22 minutes a night for the Islanders.

Since the league expanded to 30 teams in 2000, only two players at Schaefer’s position have immediately stepped up to the NHL level after being drafted and taken on such a heavy workload. (This excludes players who appeared in fewer than 41 games.) Most impressively, the Islanders have been solid in the minutes he’s played: heading into yesterday’s game, the team had a 61% share of the even-strength goals scored — and a 50% share of the total xG generated — with Schaefer on the ice.

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Covered in this edition: 🏀 Deandre Ayton, 🏏 Kuldeep Yadav, 🏈 Patrick Mahomes, ⚽ Real Madrid and 🏒 Connor Bedard.

🏀 Deandre Ayton was a top NBA Draft pick — but the Lakers don’t need him to play like one

Passing judgement on an obvious draft ‘bust’ is easy; so, relatively speaking, is identifying a star. Assessing those players who fall somewhere between the two extremes of that spectrum is where things gets interesting.

The Los Angeles Lakers now have two of the top three picks from the 2018 NBA Draft on their roster. One is a five-time All-NBA selection; the other’s career has been nowhere near as impressive. That’s not to say Deandre Ayton — selected first overall in the same year that Luka Dončić went third — has been a bust, though. He’s already played more than 12,000 NBA minutes, and has been an above-average contributor (according to ‘Box Plus/Minus’) in six of his seven seasons in the league so far.

Ayton isn’t thought of as an excellent interior defender, but his seven-foot frame and rebounding ability should allow him to make some meaningful contributions when the Lakers don’t have possession. At the other end of the court, his career to date has been similarly mixed. His last NBA stop was in Portland with the Trail Blazers, where he didn’t use the ball particularly efficiently: the 27-year-old didn’t get to the rim often enough for someone his size, and was a below-average scorer as a consequence.

Earlier in his career, though, Ayton proved that he can be an efficient complementary piece on a competitive NBA team. In two of his five seasons with the Phoenix Suns, his scoring efficiency ranked in the 85th percentile among ‘bigs’. As Kevin Pelton of ESPN noted when the Lakers signed him, Ayton was especially effective as the second player in pick-and-roll actions during those two years — and those are the sequences where Dončić’s singular talent shines most brightly.

From the Lakers’ perspective, Ayton is a low-risk addition; they don’t need him to be much more than a solid contributor next to their new ball-dominant star. For Ayton, though, the stakes are higher. There’s always a nagging question with top picks who haven’t yet lived up to the highest hopes — even those who carve out respectable pro careers. Can Deandre Ayton do better than that? The NBA season starts on Tuesday; we’ll soon find out if he can raise his new team’s ceiling — as well as their floor.

🏏 Kuldeep Yadav’s exemplary record might make India rethink their conservative test approach

I’m always surprised to hear a top team honestly acknowledge a possible tactical mistake. It was refreshing, then, to hear one of India’s coaches speak last week about the decision to omit Kuldeep Yadav from their test 11 against England earlier this year.

“[I]t does maybe make you think…what happens if we had played him at Headingley?” Whenever he’s been given an opportunity, the left-arm wrist-spinner has repeatedly demonstrated his quality. In the team’s recent two-test series at home against the West Indies, Kuldeep’s return of 12 wickets was better than any other player’s; during the World Test Championship era, both his bowling average and strike rate have been miles better than the other spin bowlers who have played in the same tests as he has.

On average, each of his test wickets has cost around 15 runs less than his peers’ have. (No other Indian has a differential in double figures.) I’ll believe that the team has deviated from their conservative selection strategy when I see actual proof of it; for now, though, it’s at least notable that the coaching staff has publicly changed its tune. “[L]ooking forward,” an assistant said, “if we do have to make the brave call where we want to win Test matches, maybe we do go a batter light and play Kuldeep”.

What else I learned last week

🏈 Patrick Mahomes is attempting deeper passes again for the Chiefs

After a slow start to the season, the Kansas City Chiefs are back on track. Things are looking up for their star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, too: six games in, one of the most interesting trends in recent NFL history might be reversing direction.

Back in January, we examined how the league’s stylistic evolution was impacting Mahomes more than most other QBs. Over his first seven full seasons, the average distance that his pass attempts travelled in the air before reaching their intended target had fallen from comfortably above the NFL average to well below. So far this year, however, his completed passes have travelled a yard further in the air than they did in 2024 — and his incompletions are averaging two more air yards per attempt.

⚽ Xabi Alonso’s improved Real Madrid are still short of full strength

After eight La Liga matches, you can make a case that Real Madrid already look stronger than they did last season. By adjusted goal difference — a metric I explored last week — they have improved from a mark of +0.9 per game in 2024-25 to +1.1.

As the players become more familiar with Xabi Alonso’s approach, we might expect their performance to tick further upwards. Even in the absence of a coach effect, though, I’d be surprised if the team didn’t get better from here. Why? Some of their best talent has barely seen the field. As well as injured recruit Trent Alexander-Arnold, two players who appeared in more than two thirds of the available minutes last season — Jude Bellingham and Antonio Rüdiger — have played fewer than 25% in 2025-26.

🏒 Connor Bedard’s shot rate has remained low to start the NHL season

It’s still very early in the NHL season; no team has played more than six games yet. There are certain things I’ve already been keeping a relatively close eye on, though — like former first-overall draft pick Connor Bedard’s shot numbers.

In February, I noted that the rate of attempts on goal that Bedard was generating for himself had dropped off considerably since his rookie year with the Blackhawks. How has this part of his game looked in his third season in the league? Given that it’s early, let’s also include shot attempts that missed the net to broaden our sample. The signs aren’t too promising: Bedard has taken 12 total attempts in 86 even-strength minutes — a rate of around 8 per 60, down from 13 per 60 last year and 15 in 2024-25.

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Covered in this edition: ⚽️ Barça Femení, ⛳️ Nelly Korda, 🏏 Australia, 🏈 Travis Hunter and 🏉 Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu.

⚽️ Despite the club’s financial issues, Barça Femení are back on track — for now

Do I have too much faith in Spain’s top footballers? Just as Euro 2025 hasn’t convinced me that their national team was anything but the continent’s best, last season’s Champions League final didn’t drastically alter my opinion of Barça Femení.

I’ll admit that I wavered slightly over the summer, when the superclub’s financial constraints — and the knock-on effect on their world-leading women’s side — were widely reported in the football media. I needn’t have worried too much, though. Despite starting the Liga F season with only 17 registered players, head coach Pere Romeu — now in his second season in charge of the team — has Barcelona back on an impressive upward trajectory.

Shortly after I wrote about them back in February, Barça hit a relative low point by a metric called ‘adjusted goal differential’ — a blend of expected goals (with a 70% weighting) and actual goals (30%) often used by of ESPN in his analysis given its relatively strong predictive power. At that point in time, they had an adjusted differential of +2.6 goals per game over their last 20 Liga F and UWCL fixtures. This was their worst rating by that metric since September 2023.

After this week’s big win over Bayern Munich in Europe, Barcelona have climbed to a mark of +3.4 adjusted goals per game across their last 20 — with almost all of their improvement coming in attack. (They have averaged 3.8 adjusted goals per game over this period, up from 3.1 as at the end of March.) Tuesday’s performance in particular — and their start to the season in general — certainly backed up their position as clear favourites to take home the Champions League trophy once again.

Beyond this year, though, their undisputed status as the best team in Europe is much more precarious. Six of their 11 most-used players in 2024-25 — including two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas — are out of contract at the end of this season. If a considerable chunk of that playing talent gets redistributed across the continent’s other top clubs, there’s little chance that Barça will be as heavily favoured — or that my belief in their ability will be as strong — in 12 months’ time.

⛳️ American star Nelly Korda has regained her consistency — if not her winning habit — in 2025

Every golfer — amateur or professional — is on a never-ending quest for more consistent play. After an up-and-down season last year, Nelly Korda has certainly been steadier so far in 2025; she’s yet to be rewarded for that consistency, though.

In 2024, Korda won seven times in 17 LPGA Tour starts — but also missed the cut three times, as she struggled with her approach play over the second half of the season. In the same number of starts so far this year, she has made every cut. (If she can sustain this streak, it would be the first year of her pro career without a miss.) However, tournament victories have eluded her all season. Is this just a quirk — or is there an underlying pattern as Korda continues to come up short?

When she faded late at this year’s US Open, it was Korda’s putting that let her down. That hasn’t been a recurring feature of her close losses, though: according to the advanced data available at LPGA.com, she has gained strokes on the greens in four of her other five top-five tournament finishes. Quirk it is, then. And it’s a credit to Korda that she knows there’s nothing else for it but to keep chipping away. As she said last week after another fourth-place finish in Hawai’i: “I just love the grind.”

What else I learned last week

🏏 Australia run the other top teams in women’s cricket off their feet

Australia — despite a washout against Sri Lanka and a scare against Pakistan — are off to a solid start in this year’s ODI World Cup. For all the praise the team gets, their mastery of every aspect of run-scoring sometimes goes under-appreciated.

As well as being the format’s best boundary-hitters — in top-tier fixtures since mid 2017, their effective boundary rate is several points better than anyone else’s — they also score efficiently in singles, twos and threes. Over this period, their non-boundary strike rate is 48 runs per 100 balls; other top teams in aggregate score just 43. They don’t take undue risk while running between the wickets, though: the other seven teams at this World Cup lose batters to run-outs around twice as often as Australia do.

🏈 The Jaguars still aren’t sure how to deploy Travis Hunter on defence

Five games into his NFL career, two-way college star Travis Hunter has settled into one role for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Having played 59% of the team’s offensive snaps, he is clearly the team’s second-choice wide receiver behind Brian Thomas.

However, the team are still trying to work out how best to use him when they don’t have the ball. Overall, he has played 39% of the Jaguars’ defensive snaps so far this season — a figure which effectively makes him their third-choice cornerback. His deployment has varied drastically from game to game, though: he has featured on more than 60% of the team’s defensive plays twice in five games — and twice he has featured on fewer than 20% of them.

🏉 Passing is still a weak point in Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s game

Three players have started at fly-half for South Africa in their ‘Tier 1’ tests so far this year. 23-year-old Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu is the one who has grabbed the rugby world’s attention — and generated some hyperbolic headlines in the process.

Earlier this year, I explored how he was playing a different type of game to other players at his position; this unique style has also been evident in his test appearances in recent months. The Springboks’ other two 10s have completed 3.6 passes for every carry they’ve made; Sacha has completed just 0.7. He’s been less accurate with the ball, too: one in four of his passes this year has been tagged as a ‘Bad Pass’. Per Oval’s data, his peers have executed only one out of every 11 of their passes poorly.

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