Arsenal have brought in Spain goalkeeper Misa Rodriguez on a free transfer – their sixth signing of the summer.

The 27-year-old joins the Women’s Super League side after leaving Real Madrid at the end of last season.

Rodriguez will wear the number 16 shirt and will compete for minutes with Daphne van Domselaar and Anneke Borbe, both of whom struggled with injuries last season.

“I’m so proud to join this great club. Arsenal is one of the top clubs in the world and I’m really excited to be part of the team and take on this new challenge,” said Rodriguez.

“I want to help us compete for trophies and make more history, together with our supporters.”

In six years at Real Madrid, Rodriguez made 215 appearances – a club record – and was made captain last year.

Since making her senior international debut in 2021, she has earned 34 caps for Spain including three as her side won the 2023 Women’s World Cup, though she has since lost her starting role to Barcelona’s Cata Coll.

Arsenal have had a busy transfer window as they prepare for the 2026-27 Women’s Super League season, with Georgia Stanway, Ona Batlle, Selina Cerci, Geraldine Reuteler and Lisa Baum all reinforcing Renee Slegers’ squad.

Last season, they finished second in the WSL and reached the semi-finals of the Women’s Champions League.

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — Standing on Centre Court at Wimbledon after winning a second men’s doubles title in three years, British tennis player Henry Patten had something to tell the world.

“The ATP submitted proposals to maybe cut some of the doubles,” Patten, 30, said after he and partner Harri Heliövaara had defeated Croatia’s Mate Pavić and El Salvador’s Marcelo Arévalo.

He got to add, “I am a strong believer that we are here to grow the game. I think this is a fantastic example…” before the crowd interrupted and cheered.

“I think this is a fantastic example of the joy doubles can bring. I believe that we should be growing opportunities in tennis for kids, whether they’re doubles players, singles players, from the UK, from Finland, from Croatia, from El Salvador. We should be growing the sport rather than taking opportunities away,” Patten said.

Patten’s words followed a fortnight of turmoil on the men’s doubles tour. At the start of Wimbledon, doubles players met with the ATP Player Council to discuss proposals first discussed in May. They would halve the size of doubles draws at tour events and redistribute prize money from doubles to singles. At most ATP Tour events, the total prize pool is 80 percent singles, 20 percent doubles; under the new proposals, which are slated for 2028, that would become 90 percent singles, 10 percent doubles.

Draws would also shrink from 32 pairs at ATP Masters 1000 events (the rung below the Grand Slams) to 16, and from 16 to eight at ATP 500 and 250 events, the other two categories of tournament on the main tour outside the Grand Slams.

The consequences, top doubles players said in a joint statement at the end of the first week of Wimbledon, would include making doubles an unviable career for pairs outside the top 30 — as well as shrinking job opportunities in the wider tennis ecosystem, for coaches, trainers, fitness professionals and other members of players’ teams who would eventually no longer have a player to work with. The proposals would not impact Grand Slam doubles events.

“Doubles isn’t a carnival sideshow,” the players said.

“It is one of the most successful parts of tennis — integral to the amateur game — with the potential to do so much more.

“Yet the impact of the ATP’s proposals will be to diminish the sporting excellence that is professional doubles and turn off the pipeline of pro doubles players and the entire infrastructure that supports them.

“Doubles is not an afterthought we fell into. It has always been part of this sport’s identity, not a discount version of it.”

In a statement, the ATP Tour said: “We are assessing the doubles product, draw sizes and player compensation distribution with the aim of creating a more sustainable long-term model while maintaining doubles’ important role on the Tour.

“The review is also assessing whether changes to the doubles model could enable increased investment in early-round singles prize money, helping more players at the highest level to better meet the costs of competing on Tour and build sustainable professional careers.

“Any potential changes will be developed through close consultation with players, tournaments and the ATP Board, with any decisions made in the best long-term interests of the sport and its consumers.”

During a roundtable earlier in the tournament, Patten, who with Heliövaara is joint world No. 1, described the proposals as “shocking.”

“In terms of my career, maybe I would play to 2028, a couple of years past it, if things remained the same, so it won’t really affect me that much,” he said.

“But what it will affect is the number of people that are able to make a living out of tennis. It will reduce that number, and redistribute the funds to people who are already doing well in tennis. So I find that a shocking decision to make tennis a more elitist sport.

“I don’t know what their endgame is. The level of doubles will go down.”

Harri Heliövaara (left) and Henry Patten won the season-ending ATP Tour Finals in 2025. (Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images)

In 2024, the ATP introduced changes to doubles events designed to encourage more singles vs. doubles matchups, allowing more pairs of singles players to use their singles rankings to enter and making the entry deadline later than it had been previously. At the tour’s flagship ATP Masters 1000 events, all but two of which now last 12 days, rather than seven, doubles matches on outside courts are key to offering fans who buy grounds passes value in the second week, because they would otherwise have little or no tennis to watch.

Tickets are rarely bought for doubles specifically, and the compelling singles vs. doubles matchups — or just singles stars playing doubles on top of singles — do not happen with any frequency. But grounds passes are also rarely bought for any kind of tennis specifically — the experience of watching tennis, whatever kind it may be, is the point.

Singles players routinely withdraw from exciting doubles pairings if one or both of them do well in their main discipline, creating large holes in doubles draws. The increasingly physical nature of singles competition only adds to this, and stops leading singles players from prioritizing, or even considering doubles as a viable part of their careers. High-profile matchups, like Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal being given a lesson in court geometry by Rajeev Ram and Austin Krajicek at the 2024 Paris Olympics, do capture the imagination, but they are vanishingly rare even at the biggest events and essentially impossible to manufacture on the ATP Tour.

For the doubles players who issued a statement against the proposals, there is an additional problem. The statement referenced “lackluster marketing of doubles, failure to exploit broadcast and other commercial partnerships, and poor event staging and promotion.”

In the roundtable at Wimbledon, Patten described the ATP’s marketing as “shambolic.” Tennis TV, the ATP-Media operated streaming platform, did not post about the men’s doubles final at Wimbledon on its Instagram grid. The official ATP Tour Instagram account made three posts about Patten and Heliövaara’s win.

At Wimbledon, tennis fans who watched doubles said that men’s doubles is crucial to the ecosystem, and also more relatable to recreational tennis players and fans, with doubles a common discipline at clubs.

“When you look at club level, most people play doubles,” Lenny Cornwall said during an interview. “I want to be able to see good doubles so I can learn.” Other fans disagreed, describing doubles as “not functional.”

While Wimbledon — and the other three majors — act as showcases for doubles, this is largely due to the huge amounts of spillover attendance generated by the size of the tournaments that even the biggest ATP events, cannot match.

The next ATP Masters 1000 event is the Canadian Open, which starts August 2 in Montreal. In last year’s doubles event, rising singles stars Ben Shelton and Arthur Fils paired up. They defeated top doubles players Hugo Nys and Edouard Roger-Vasselin, before withdrawing from their quarterfinal against Kevin Krawietz and Tim Pütz because Shelton had reached the quarterfinals in singles. He ultimately won the tournament, and over $1.1 million dollars. Doubles champions Julian Cash and Lloyd Glasspool split just over $457,000.

For Patten and other doubles players, the proposals remain proposals. He is optimistic meetings with the ATP will bring discussion about how to move doubles forward. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “We’re trying.”

Ingrid Harbaugh, self-proclaimed bird nerd, was in her suburban Baltimore yard when her Merlin app identified the first-time visitor flying alone as a common raven.

A few days later, right before her husband’s football team played the Pittsburgh Steelers for the AFC North title, Ingrid was stopped at a traffic light when she saw the very same bird.

“It was huge, and when it was swooping down, I thought it was going to hit the windshield,” she recalled in February. “It swooped over the car, and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw it sitting behind me in the street. I drove off with the bird sitting there before it flew off above the traffic.

“I said to John, ‘I wonder if that means the Ravens are in the rearview mirror, already behind us.’”

John Harbaugh wondered whether he had his own sign that the end of an 18-year run was near. He was reading the Book of Acts a couple of days before that win-or-else game in Pittsburgh when this New Testament line struck him: “His office let another take.”

Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti took Harbaugh’s office after that 26-24 loss to the Steelers, and Harbaugh immediately turned his attention to the New York Giants. Even before he was fired, Harbaugh had ranked the Giants as his top choice among the teams expected to pursue him if he left Baltimore.

Harbaugh was aware the Giants had held internal discussions about his possible candidacy before their seasons had ended. He wanted them, and they wanted him.

Brian Daboll’s Giants were 13-38 over the last three years, and Harbaugh’s Ravens were 33-18. The Giants were 60 games under .500 over the last nine years, and Harbaugh was 41 games over .500 with Baltimore. The Giants have won only one playoff game over the last 14 years; Harbaugh had claimed eight of his 13 postseason victories, including a Super Bowl, in that time.

It seemed the perfect union of a coach who adored NFL history and a flagship franchise that had completely forgotten how to win. The Giants had past champs like Tom Coughlin, Eli Manning and Michael Strahan to sell Harbaugh on the glories of winning it all in New York. They had longtime senior executive Chris Mara to hold two private in-person meetings with Harbaugh and to persuade his brother, John, to give the coach the direct report to ownership he needed to take the job.

“We are going to compete for the playoffs and for championships,” John Harbaugh told The Athletic a half-hour after accepting. “I expect and want to make the playoffs next year.”

Harbaugh already knew it would be a monumental challenge to restore the Giants’ credibility before he endured an offseason that would surely remind him of just how far they have to go.

With the start of training camp a week away, Cam Skattebo’s viral backflip and tumble onto his rump at Fanatics Fest — after suffering a gruesome season-ending leg injury last fall — was a fitting punctuation mark on the six-month Harbaugh honeymoon, as it were.

When the coach saw the clip on his phone, he told Bob Papa and Carl Banks of the “Bleav in Giants” podcast that his reaction was: “Dude, at least stick it. You know what I mean? Land the thing if you’re going to do it.”

The Giants have missed a few landings since hiring Harbaugh, who has had his hands full while assembling a bigger, more physical team that he hopes will deliver the franchise’s first season of double-digit victories in a decade. The coach has answered questions about football and non-football concerns that he wished were never in play.

Football: The Giants’ best player, Dexter Lawrence, forced his way out of town. Three players suffered Achilles tendon tears in the spring. Malik Nabers criticized Harbaugh’s NFL Draft picks while his return from a serious knee injury remained a mystery.

Non-football: Co-owner Steve Tisch’s disclosed ties to Jeffrey Epstein blitzed Harbaugh before he’d even settled into the job. Jaxson Dart’s decision to introduce President Donald Trump at a Rockland County, N.Y., rally (without properly informing his employer of his role) compelled teammate Abdul Carter to criticize his quarterback on social media and moved Harbaugh to extinguish a spreading fire.

John Harbaugh’s consistency of winning with Lamar Jackson and the Ravens tells a lot about the coach. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

The good news is that Harbaugh, 63, has been coaching NFL or Division I college ball since 1984. He faced his share of on- and off-field crises in Baltimore, where, as a former Philadelphia Eagles assistant, he took over a divided team and a defense that wanted coordinator Rex Ryan to get the job.

Harbaugh had tense standoffs with legacy defenders Ed Reed, Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs and, during the 2012 season, held a sitdown with his players to address their vicious and personal attacks on his approach. “The meeting we just had,” Harbaugh told them, “would happen in no other meeting room in the National Football League. There’s no other coach who would tolerate what was said in here.”

Those Ravens players went out and won the Super Bowl.

Harbaugh has seen the good, the bad and the ugly in the NFL, and he knows what buttons to push to inspire athletes to come together and achieve things they weren’t sure they could.

The bad news? The Giants’ young, talented players have become high-profile figures without winning games. Rookies Dart, Skattebo and Carter, who didn’t exactly produce a clean sheet as the No. 3 pick in the 2025 draft, all contributed to a 4-13 record a year after Nabers, the No. 6 pick in 2024, was a big part of a 3-14 team.

Did they happen to notice that Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns did their pro-wrestling thing after the Knicks’ drought-busting championship?

By the definition of his position, Dart is the Giants’ first-rounder who needs to be held to the highest standard. The franchise’s OG of Super Bowl coaches, Bill Parcells, used to tell Phil Simms: “I don’t need any celebrity quarterback. I need a battlefield commander.”

Dart is a modern-day Broadway Joe. He has every right to enjoy the spoils of New York in the social media age as long as he understands that every decision he makes — as a potential franchise quarterback — will impact the locker room, the coaching staff, the front office and the fan base.

Dart is a primary reason Harbaugh accepted the Giants’ $100 million offer. At Fanatics Fest, Dart said his new coach has had a profound impact on the team’s culture. “Like how Harbs establishes the camaraderie between the team, the coaching staff, the standard,” the quarterback said. “It’s a different feeling. It’s a refreshing feeling.”

But it’s a daunting feeling, too, for anyone who has watched Giants football for most of the last 15 years. Months before Mike Brown led the Knicks on their magical run, Coughlin told Harbaugh a ticker-tape parade in the big city “is the most incredible thing ever.”

Harbaugh had a vision of what that would look like. “I want to be in that parade,” he said in the winter. “But with that being said, what I’m thinking about is what the team looks like that earns the right to be in that parade someday. What do we have to build to get there? That’s what I’m really consumed with.”

After 18 years as a head coach in Baltimore and another 10 as an assistant in Philadelphia, the new guy believes he’s ready for this ultimate challenge. When practice starts next Wednesday at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, millions of fans in the New York area will be wishing Harbaugh the best of luck.

He’ll definitely need it.