Sports
Nico Gonzalez: ‘Mini Rodri’ shown he will be loved at Newcastle
Gonzalez had a close relationship with Rodri and long humbly recognised that only a select number of players can start in his position at clubs bidding to challenge for the biggest honours.
Rodri was that man at Manchester City under Guardiola and, following the midfielder’s move to Barcelona, new manager Enzo Maresca has signed Ayyoub Bouaddi from Lille, having already brought in Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest.
The club also look set to make a bid for Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez.
It was still not easy for Gonzalez to leave Manchester City, where he felt settled, but Newcastle will give him the platform he has been longing for as a key player.
The enthusiastic Spaniard sees this as an opportunity to develop further, which has always been a driver.
“His mentality is top,” Toure said. “I would review games individually with the players and every time I had my laptop and sat next to him, he was so open to learning.
“He wanted me to show him and I wanted to help him because he was demanding in that way.
“You want to have players like this because they want to see what they do well and not well, and are open to criticism.
“He’s going to keep on improving because of his mentality.”
Gonzalez certainly did so when he left Barcelona, where his professional career started, and has such experience to fall back on.
Having spent a decade at Barca, and risen through the ranks, Gonzalez ultimately had to depart to truly flourish elsewhere.
Following a successful loan spell at Valencia, he joined Porto on a permanent basis at the age of 21 before earning a move to Manchester City.
Former Barcelona B team-mate Roger Riera feels he has developed “another vision” as a result.
“Nico has seen different countries and different styles of football,” he said. “He’s added a lot of things to his game, which have made him a more complete player.
“He is a better package now.”
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Sports
Omar Marmoush: Tottenham sign Manchester City forward on season-long loan
Tottenham have signed Manchester City forward Omar Marmoush on loan until the end of the season, with an obligation to make the deal permanent for £60m next summer.
The 27-year-old Egypt international will join former City team-mate Savio at Spurs, after the Brazilian moved to north London for an initial fee of £75m on Tuesday.
“Tottenham Hotspur is one of the biggest clubs in England, if not the world, and the project was very attractive to me,” said Marmoush
“I’ve spoken with the head coach [Roberto de Zerbi], I loved what he had to say and I’m sure our passion for the game will go very well together.”
Marmoush signed for City from Eintracht Frankfurt for £59m in January 2025 and has scored 16 goals in 62 games for the club in all competitions.
After a bright start to his City career, Marmoush made 13 of his 21 league appearances last term from the bench with Norway international Erling Haaland the club’s preferred central striker.
Marmoush was utilised as a second-half substitute in City’s 3-0 Community Shield defeat by Arsenal and was an unused substitute in their 2-1 Premier League win over Bournemouth last Sunday.
Spurs have spent more than £312m in the transfer window this summer.
They have signed Mateus Fernandes from West Ham, Sandro Tonali from Newcastle and Jan Paul van Hecke from Brighton, while defenders Marcos Senesi and Andy Robertson, plus goalkeeper Martin Dubravka, have arrived on free transfers.
Speaking about their most recent arrival, De Zerbi said: “Omar is exactly the kind of player we want at this club – ambitious, hungry and determined to make a difference.
“He has incredible attacking quality but what I also love is his desire to improve and to win.
“He brings pace, intelligence and a real threat in front of goal, and I believe he can take our attacking play to another level.”
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Sports
Good Good Golf and Callaway are mired in scandal. Can they recover?
After the controversy came the eventual contrition, but by then it was too late. A 15-second advertisement released last week by Good Good Golf, one of the sport’s most influential online platforms, had grasped for engagement with its brand partner Callaway and instead found only trouble.
“Do not touch my new driver,” Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark menacingly warns his female colleague Alexis Miestowski in the ad, which has since been deleted from Good Good’s social channels, after barging her to the ground with a forearm to the back.
The backlash has been intense, with Good Good accused of normalising aggression against women in its ill-conceived promotional video. Callaway, which has subsequently accepted it approved the advert prior to its release, has also come under fire.
Both have issued apologies, but the reputational damage has been vast. It is also starting to have commercial implications: a sponsor (widely reported to be retailer Golf Galaxy) has requested its branding be removed from the Golf Channel’s planned premiere of Big Break x Good Good — a reboot of the reality TV show that last aired in 2015 — which has been postponed to September 1.
In addition, Golf Galaxy and its parent company, Dick’s Sporting Goods, have withdrawn Good Good merchandise from its online retail platforms, with reports also claiming merchandise is being pulled from the shelves of its stores. The Athletic contacted Good Good and Dick’s Sporting Goods for comment.
The PGA Tour is also surveying the damage. Good Good was last year named as the title sponsor of an event set to be played in November at Omni Barton Creek in Austin, Texas, but the PGA Tour has been noncommittal on the future of the partnership. “It’s a bit of a fluid situation,” PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp told a news conference ahead of this week’s Tour Championship.
The disappointment in Good Good’s actions, though, was obvious. “I think what we saw was concerning (and) is clearly not aligned with PGA Tour values,” Rolapp said. “We take it very seriously.”
The “fluid situation” referenced by Rolapp amounts to crisis management for Good Good. A platform that was at the vanguard of golf’s YouTube era — on which a wave of young, brash and often male influencers sought to overhaul the coverage of a sport previously considered stuffy and conservative — has grown into an independent company capable of raising $45million in a funding round last year. The self-inflicted wound is deep.
“The ad feels like a very public version of the ‘locker-room talk’ or ‘golf-course talk’ women have been subjected to for decades,” says Ellen Hyslop, co-founder of The GIST, a sports media startup with the mission of providing equal coverage to women’s and men’s sports.
“For women who have spent years pushing for greater visibility and respect in sports, seeing a female athlete used as the punchline of a violent joke can reinforce exactly the culture the industry has been trying to move away from.
Alexis Miestowski is shoved over in the controversial Good Good advert (Good Good Golf)
“What makes this particularly damaging is that Good Good represents the new generation of golf. The company’s entire rise has been built around making golf feel younger, more accessible and more culturally relevant. And that’s why so many traditional golf brands have turned to Good Good as a partner.”
Good Good has plenty at stake. It’s built a subscriber base of more than 2.1m on YouTube since it was founded in 2020, with some of golf’s biggest names, including Bryson DeChambeau and Rickie Fowler, among its guests. Initially, at least, the content veered towards frat-boy boisterousness. But more recently, Good Good has been pitching itself towards a more family-friendly audience. Some of Good Good’s videos have been watched as many as 11million times, and on the back of that rise has been the launch of a clothing range.
An attempt to justify the ad’s content was made by Good Good’s chief executive Matt Kendrick earlier this week, with a post on LinkedIn claiming its intention was to “parody a scene from the (horror) movie Obsession”.
“The execution missed the mark,” he added. “I understand why people found it insensitive, and I want to be clear that neither I nor anyone at Good Good condones violence of any kind.”
There was a promise to “be better” and to change their approval process for output from the company’s marketing teams. An internal memo sent by Kendrick and obtained by Front Office Sports — but not verified by The Athletic — added that it was the company’s plan to donate all proceeds from the driver’s sale to “an organisation supporting women in our local community”.
Callaway, one of golf’s biggest brands, has also worked with Good Good since 2023, with the release of a branded driver promoted in the now-infamous video, the latest step in their union. “The approval should never have happened,” said Callaway Golf CEO Chip Brewer in a company statement. “Mistakes were made, and we are taking the matter very seriously. I want to make it clear that we sincerely apologize for the video.“
Brian Rolapp, CEO of the PGA TOUR, was critical of Good Good’s advert (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The stock response from those who saw the advert has been a sense of bafflement that it was ever signed off in the first place, although some industry experts were not so shocked.
“Knowing how content creation like this happens, you can understand to a certain degree how these people make those missteps,” says Owen Laverty, chief brand officer at the UK-based sports marketing agency Ear to the Ground.
“They’re under pressure to create things that they think will get cut-through and get attention. And to me it reeks of something that’s not been properly tested. It reeks of something that’s trying to go viral. So (you have) something that wants to go viral versus something that will actually resonate with audiences. That doesn’t feel like where Good Good have been in the past.”
There is no disputing the damage caused by the scandal. The question now is: Can these brands recover? And, if so, how?
Laverty makes the point that “the past is littered with individuals and organisations who have made missteps and moved on” but there is no doubt that many have lost faith in Good Good, and it will take time to rebuild. For Callaway, one of the biggest names in golf equipment with annual revenues of more than $2bn, the damage could be even worse.
“A mistake like this is exceptionally damaging for the future of Callaway,” says Hyslop. “There’s enough reputational damage that consumers, athletes, creators, and business partners are going to be asking themselves whether they want to be associated with Callaway, or Good Good for that matter.
“From a business perspective, we’re already seeing it in action: the Golf Channel is postponing Big Break. This is no longer confined to social media backlash; it’s becoming a business and partnership issue.
“Trust won’t be rebuilt through another campaign telling women the brand values them. It’s rebuilt over time, and maybe lots of time in this case, and through actions. At some point, consumers and partners will decide whether those actions are enough. And in the meantime, women can continue showing up for the sport while deciding that their money, attention, and loyalty are better spent elsewhere. That’s the power brands need to understand.”
Good Good Golf co-founder Garrett Clark is under pressure (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Alienating part of their audience might turn out to be Good Good and Callaway’s greatest mistake. Participation numbers of female golfers have spiked in recent years, with the sport shedding its image as a purely male domain.
“I went to both the men’s and women’s Open (Championship) last month and saw a number of women wearing Good Good merchandise and products,” says Laverty. “They won’t have chosen to alienate that audience, but this has been a massive blind spot in the process of chasing something that’ll go big.
“I imagine there will be brands and individuals who might want to take a step back from Good Good because it’s the nature of the subject that they’ve unintentionally leaned into. If Good Good and Calloway are going to move forward, they need to be really clear on what they want to do together long term. Taking time to make sense of that will be important.”
Good Good, at the time of writing, had not published any video content to its YouTube channel since the advertisement was released on Friday. It remains unclear where they will go from here as they look to bounce back from their misstep.
“Good Good have certainly been very brand safe,” says Rich Johnson, a sports marketing expert based in the UK. “It’s a puzzling advert because it’s so disconnected from their brand and the story they’ve built.
“For Good Good, it’s damaging but I’d be surprised if this finishes them. I don’t see that happening.
“It’ll be interesting to see how other brands respond and if the backlash goes on. The lack of a strong response quickly seems to have exacerbated the situation but Good Good’s saving grace might be that there didn’t seem to be any real ill-intent or malice behind it. It was just incredibly ill-judged.”
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Sports
Julian Alvarez transfer news: Arsenal only likely exit after Atletico say no to Barcelona
Julian Alvarez has not attended Atletico Madrid training since being told privately the club would not sell him to Barcelona and it appears the striker’s only way out is with a move to Arsenal.
Sources told BBC Sport that Atletico communicated privately to Alvarez and his advisors earlier this week that they will not negotiate with the Catalan club over a move for the Argentina international.
The 26-year-old has since missed two consecutive days of training citing illness.
The La Liga club also released two public statements in the space of 24 hours reiterating their stance that Alvarez will not be granted his wish to join Barca in the coming days.
Atletico, however, are open to selling Alvarez to Arsenal and have held direct talks with the Premier League champions over what would be one of the biggest transfers of the summer.
Atleti director Mateu Alemany was in London last week, where he is understood to have met with Arsenal counterparts – and made clear his side would seek a fee of 150m Euros (£128m).
Mikel Arteta is desperate to sign Alvarez this month but his steadfast desire to join Barcelona has seen Arsenal‘s pursuit halted.
However, it is understood discussions between Atletico and Arsenal over a club-to-club agreement for Alvarez have been positive.
Indeed, in the event of Alvarez giving Arsenal the green light to proceed with his signing in the coming days, a deal should move quickly.
On Wednesday, in response to comments from Barcelona president Joan Laporte in which he insisted they still wanted to sign Alvarez, Atletico released a statement that read: “There is 0% chance of selling him to Barca.”
The Atleico board doubled down on their stance on Thursday, releasing their own statement that read: “The members of Atletico de Madrid’s board of directors have unanimously expressed their absolute support for the club’s decision to not negotiate the transfer of Julian Alvarez to FC Barcelona.”
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