True Love heads the markets for the 2026 renewal of the Prix Maurice de Gheest – live on Sky Sports Racing at 3.40pm.

3.40 Deauville – True Love headlines strong field of 12 in Prix Maurice de Gheest

Today’s feature on Sky Sports Racing takes us to Deauville, where True Love headlines this afternoon’s Group 1 Prix Maurice de Gheest.

The 1000 Guineas winner was narrowly touched off at the track in last month’s Prix Jean Prat over a mile, with Jersey Stakes winner Thesecretadversary taking out the honours that day. Having won the Cheveley Park Stakes over this distance in September, she clearly has sufficient speed for this test and her versatility will be invaluable in her future career as a broodmare. Wayne Lordan makes the trip to France for the ride, replacing Ryan Moore in the plate.

Stolen Kiss has rapidly improved this year since being dropped back into sprinting trips. The clear improvement also has seen this colt beat last year’s winner, Sajir, on back-to-back occasions as well as finishing a very close fourth in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes. That is probably the best piece of form in the race and although he has to give weight to True Love, he could put it up to her under Alexis Pouchin.

Fresh from a successful Goodwood Festival, Wathnan Racing will be keen to strike again – this time with William Haggas’ Division. This son of Kingman has hit the crossbar a few times this year, finishing second in the Sandy Lane Stakes and then third in the Commonwealth Cup – beaten both times by Venetian Sun. He was a commendable fifth in the July Cup and could easily pop up and win this.

Samangan isn’t dismissed but will have to show more after being beaten last time out by Division and True Love in successive starts, albeit by narrow margins. Take Charge Star represents Johnny Murtagh and enters calculations, having only been beaten by True Love’s conqueror Thesecretadversary by a neck in the aforementioned Jersey Stakes at Royal Ascot.

3.05 Deauville – 2000 Guineas third Distant Storm returns

Distant Storm returns to the track after not being seen since May in the Group 3 Prix Daphnis from Deuaville.

Charlie Appleby is bang in form and sends this son of Night Of Thunder to France in search of a first win since September. In the meantime, he was third in a Dewhurst and began this campaign with a third place finish in the 2000 Guineas. The form of the race has worked out well with fifth place Thesecretadversary taking out the Jersey Stakes and Venetian Prince winning the Italian Derby. The mount of Billy Loughnane today closed the gap on Gstaad in the Irish 2000 Guineas and could progress further in the Godolphin blue.

Komorebi was second in the French 2000 Guineas but subsequently disappointed when stepping up in trip for the Prix du Jockey Club, where he finished 10th. Dropping back to the mile looks to be the way to go and if he repeats his performance when last seen over that distance, he’s a big contender.

Campacite was beaten one place into 11th by Komorebi in the French Derby after also chasing him home in April. However, the form with Hawk Mountain on his penultimate start is interesting and a repeat of that would make him a player.

Lord Clover lacked the turn of foot to mount a meaningful challenge in the German 2000 Guineas the last day, but on his prior French form could trouble the judge.

5.01 Chepstow – Crimson Road bids to follow up course and distance success

Crimson Road rounds off the card on Sunday afternoon at Chepstow, looking to follow up the win over course and distance here last month in the Capital Windscreens Supports Chepstow Centenary Celebrations Handicap.

On his fourth start for John and Rhys Flint, he skipped clear inside the final furlong and has been raised 3lb for that success but could easily go in again here.

Pride Of Nepal disappointed last time out at Epsom but was bang in form prior, winning four in a row – including a course and distance success here in June which completed the hat-trick. Carrying top weight today, this Tony Carroll gelding will surely put it up to Crimson Road.

It was the undignified scrap that marred the World Cup final.

After Spain’s narrow 1-0 win following extra time last month, with coach Luis de la Fuente’s squad celebrating on the pitch, a series of scuffles ensued, leading FIFA to investigate Argentina player Leandro Paredes for three counts of assault and team-mate Nahuel Molina for two.

During the confrontation, Paredes put his right hand on opponent Gavi’s face, with one finger going into his mouth, as he shoved him to the ground. It was a moment that most would not consider any form of ‘art’.

Unless, of course, your name is LJ Rader.

The New Yorker has been linking art and sport since December 2019 on his social media accounts called Art But Make It Sport, building hundreds of thousands of followers.

He compared the flashpoint from the World Cup final with a zoomed-in version of Les Femmes Se Battent (‘women fighting’), a Louis-Leopold Boilly painting from 1818 that shows two ladies in a brawl as others try to break it up.

“The account becomes the most exciting during large-scale events. I put the World Cup up there with the Olympics,” says Rader, whose Instagram and X accounts grew 20 per cent in audience during the five-week tournament.

“What makes them unique is that you’re not just highlighting what happens on the pitch, you’re also highlighting the fans, the colours, the pageantry. There’s a lot of other things that are going on in addition to just the sport itself.”

Rader, who has written a book on his work, is most commonly found comparing moments in American sport to artwork.

While he has posted football/soccer comparisons before, this World Cup was his biggest yet, and he posted several times on the day of the final. Some commenters responded to his choices by calling him a genius.

Any sport is within his remit, though he tries to avoid both player injuries and the work of problematic artists.

During the World Cup’s quarter-final between England and Norway, an image of opponents Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham embracing side-by-side with one of Gerard David’s painting Lamentation became Rader’s most-liked comparison.

He says he is conscious of the online discourse surrounding teams and players — in this case, he played up to the ‘bromance’ between Haaland and Bellingham.

The bromance between these two🥹😅

Haaland🤝Bellingham pic.twitter.com/tsEZ5moWVQ

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) July 12, 2026

“You try to keep them tasteful. You don’t want to do anything that doesn’t meet like a high editorial standard, but anytime there’s like additional layers that you can build into a post, it takes it to that next level.”

Another post compared Kylian Mbappe with a portrait of Napoleon by Emanuel Bachrach-Baree, as memes circulated online calling France’s striker and captain a dictator.

Napoleon, by Emanuel Bachrach-Barée, early 20th century pic.twitter.com/TTXwgIJhMu

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 10, 2026

“(In soccer) you don’t get a ton of unique moments,” says Rader, a Tottenham Hotspur fan who also founded sports data company FanFlare Sports. “There’s only so much a soccer player can do with their body at any given moment, but at the World Cup you introduce various jersey colours, the fans and the storylines.”

His personal favourite find was seeing Untitled by Alma Thomas in a sea of Norway fans doing their famous en-masse ‘row’ movement in the stands during a match.

These comparisons do not come by accident.

Rader often visits art galleries and museums — the weekend before talking to The Athletic, he had gone to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “Every time I travel, I try to carve out the time to go see something new,” he says.

He told The Athletic in 2023 that his grandmother would take him to museums and that he almost majored in art history at university, before being talked out of it by his parents — instead choosing a degree in human and organisational development with a minor in corporate strategy.

Large chunks of his mind and camera roll, upwards of 15,000 photos, are made up of artworks ready to be linked to sporting moments.

“There are a bunch that I have memorised and know exactly what I want to post. Others take a little bit more thought, knowing it looks like a certain artistic style or theme and trying to find the right one,” he says.

“So this Paraguay vs France one, this player flying… there are lots of paintings of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata.

St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1400-05, 📸 by Buda Mendes pic.twitter.com/7XWdl4SFGR

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 5, 2026

“I then know that Alma Thomas has symmetry, brush strokes, a similar colour palette, and then landing on the right painting has become the most gratifying, because it’s leveraging my knowledge as opposed to something I’ve just memorised.”

I tested him on the spot with a photo of Michael Skubala, who last season managed Lincoln City (my hometown club) to promotion from League One, the third tier of English football, doing a fist-pump to their fans. Skubala was quickly compared to a statue of Julius Caesar by Nicolas Coustou from the Garden of Versailles near Paris.

It was an apt comparison.

So, it’s not AI?

“AI is never going to be as good as me,” Rader says. “I’ve thrown some images in just to see what happens and it doesn’t come close.

“What my account does is it shows the power of the human brain and what we can be capable of when we study things and memorise things and have a joy for sports.”

It was a passing comment from Liverpool’s new head coach during their pre-season tour to the United States, but one that spoke to a defining theme of football history: a nation’s cultural norms can shape the way it plays the game.

“People often ask why a lot of Basque managers especially have arrived at this level, and why a lot of Spanish teams are winning a lot of things,” Andoni Iraola said in July.

“I always say that a sense of collectiveness is very important.

“Spain has never had the best athletes. If you analyse, in swimming, track and field, they don’t normally win medals. But in collective sports, they are very good. In football, basketball, handball, hockey — we always put the team first.

“An example is someone like Rodri. He didn’t score or make an assist, but at the end, they won the World Cup, and he won best player of the tournament. ‘Team-first’ was always integrated in how we’re raised.”

Spain has shaped the way football has been played in the 21st century — from Pep Guardiola’s paradigm-shifting possession-based style at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City to the dominance of the national team from 2008 to 2012, when they won two European Championship titles either side of their first World Cup.

Yes, star players shone in each of those sides, but Iraola’s point remains pertinent. Spain’s defining strength has long been the collective, with individuals thriving within a wider framework rather than carrying the burden alone.

Spain celebrate winning their first World Cup in 2010 (Ryan Pierse – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

This summer served as a reminder of Spanish dominance as Luis de la Fuente’s side lifted the World Cup, two years on from winning another Euros, with an approach that was not dissimilar to that which brought success with their previous golden generation. Their women are current world champions, too.

Spain’s superpower was a coherent tactical system that no other national team — or their respective talismans — could find an answer to.

At club level, Paris Saint-Germain became back-to-back Champions League winners in May, thanks to Spanish coach Luis Enrique’s fluid attacking style, packed with rotations and a cohesive network of players.

It is no coincidence their European success has come for PSG after star forward Kylian Mbappe, a player who thrives off individual accolades as much as collective success, left for Real Madrid in summer 2024.

The club PSG beat in this year’s final were Arsenal, led by Mikel Arteta, who days earlier became just the second Spanish manager after Guardiola to win a Premier League title.

A strong defensive foundation was at the heart of Arteta’s success, but their victorious season saw them share the attacking load across 18 different goalscorers — their most since he was appointed in December 2019. Summer signing Viktor Gyokeres was their most prolific player with 14 goals in the top flight, the second-lowest leading-scorer total of any Premier League champions since 2000.

Mikel Arteta’s Premier League champions Arsenal spread the attacking load across the team (Michael Regan/Getty Images For Premier League)

The Europa League champions last season? That would be Arsenal’s fellow Premier League side Aston Villa, led by another meticulous Spanish manager in Unai Emery. Amazingly, all three are from the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, population 750,000, in northern Spain.

Each of those teams had a co-operative effort woven into their style by their head coach or manager.

Iraola’s perspective on the cultural importance of football will be music to the ears of Liverpool fans, who have consistently used the sport as a shield to fight against political, social or financial adversity throughout the club’s history — an approach that reflects the values of the Merseyside city as a whole.

“Things work in general when we aren’t just selfish, when we prioritise the situations of those who have less. That happens as well in football,” Iraola said.

“The ones who don’t play, the ones who come from the academy, the ones who earn less, it’s a reference if you want to compare it with society.”

Football can shape the culture within a city, region or country, but the relationship works in both directions.

As Iraola implies, society impacts football as much as the game impacts society.

Expanding on Iraola’s comments, there are methods to measure how different countries integrate individuals into groups. One method is to look at the sociological differences between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’.

Individualist societies typically focus on independence within social groups, encouraging personal expression, and are more accepting of differences — and are typically found in Western countries, according to studies.

By contrast, collectivist societies focus more on social harmony and prioritise the group over individual goals, with decisions made based on what is best for the wider community. These have been found to typically be most prevalent among African and South Asian nations.

The research on this topic is extensive and widely debated, but a 2026 study has re-modelled a global individualism-collectivism scale to measure where each country falls.

Across a sample of 102 nations, Nordic ones (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland) come out as the most individualist. Spain’s index score still falls within the upper echelons of an individualist culture, but is lower than some of its fellow major footballing nations, including France, Germany, Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and the Netherlands.

If cultural norms do shape footballing identities, that gap may help explain why the Spanish game has historically placed a greater premium on collective structures than some of its European neighbours.

How much these psychosocial factors directly correlate with on-pitch success remains unclear, but this would not be the first time cultural links are made between football and national identity.

In England, Scott Murray’s playful article in the first edition of magazine The Blizzard, titled How Roy Race Ruined English Football, highlighted how much the comic book Roy of the Rovers has created an unrealistic expectation of national identity that relies on the heroic acts of an individual rather than wider teamwork or tactical systems.

The comic was first published in the 1950s, but the emphasis on last-gasp winners and talismanic performances continued until the mid-1990s — with narratives that cascaded through English football culture in the decades in between.

How often have the hopes of the nation fallen on the shoulders of Kevin Keegan, Paul Gascoigne, David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or Harry Kane? Each generation has had a star individual who rose above the collective, with Jude Bellingham seemingly the next in line after his starring role at this year’s World Cup.

That individualist approach tallies with comments by former England captain Steven Gerrard’s last year. He told ex-England team-mate Rio Ferdinand’s podcast that the so-called ‘Golden generation’ of talented English players in the mid-2000s, which they were both part of, were “all egotistical losers”.

“It was down to the culture within England,” Gerrard said. “We weren’t friendly or connected. We weren’t a team. We never, at any stage, became a really good, strong team.”

Steven Gerrard said England’s ‘Golden generation’ at the start of this century were not a ‘friendly or connected’ unit (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

The failures of England’s previous generations were multi-faceted, but how much did the national culture feed into the acceptance of their behaviour? Gareth Southgate’s recent success as England coach was made even more impressive by the way he curated a squad made up of rival players at club level who worked together in harmony for the national team.

With the help of team psychologist Dr Pippa Grange, England cultivated a team ethos in a manner that was incongruous to generations before them — and felt somewhat jarring, based on English societal norms.

In the Netherlands, David Winner’s excellent book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football reflects the deeply-rooted societal influence towards the style that was synonymous with ‘Total Football’ from that country’s sides in the 1960s and 1970s.

Beyond historical and political analogies, Winner makes a fascinating link between architecture and football in the Netherlands — in which its flat landscape and crowded cities meant the optimisation of space and appreciation of geometry became an inherently Dutch trait.

It was that same appreciation of geometry that became the foundation of the Netherlands’ on-pitch success, pioneered by coach Rinus Michels and player Johan Cruyff.

While it is difficult to accurately measure its direct impact, football can often act as a mirror held up to reflect society.

The culture a manager grows up in can inevitably shape their ideas, and that becomes particularly intriguing when they take those principles to a new club or national team.

Going full circle back to Liverpool, Mohamed Salah’s summer exit means there is a gap in their squad for a new star of the show — but maybe they do not need a single individual leading the way to find new success. Team-first, as Iraola says.

If he brings the same values of his Basque and Spanish roots to Anfield, there is every reason to believe Liverpool’s new head coach will have similar success to his fellow countrymen.