Here are our bold predictions for 2025 in sports. Please note the bold (or should that be bold?) in bold predictions: these are mostly to be taken with a pinch of salt.<\/p>\n
The Luka Don\u010di\u0107-JJ Redick relationship goes south<\/p>\n
Luka Don\u010di\u0107 and JJ Redick\u2019s relationship will crack and become a national storyline. The Lakers\u2019 coach will eventually show public frustration with Luka\u2019s lack of consistent defensive intensity and his inability to fully build chemistry with teammates, including LeBron James. Don\u010di\u0107 initially met Redick\u2019s demand to arrive in \u201cchampionship shape\u201d, but the dynamic feels brittle. A 41-year-old first-time head coach pushing the league\u2019s most ball-dominant star is a combustible mix, and the tension is unlikely to stay private forever. It has the makings of a modern Allen Iverson\u2013Larry Brown saga: mutual respect, visible friction and, eventually, a very loud moment. Only instead of \u201cpractice?\u201d, we will be hearing \u201cdefense\u201d. Nicholas Levine<\/p>\n
The Auston Matthews era will end in Toronto<\/p>\n
Sometime in 2026, Auston Matthews could leave the Toronto Maple Leafs. The spring, prior to the trade deadline, feels early, but one gets the sense that the relationship between Matthews and the Leafs is nearing its end. Yes, true, he just recently re-signed. And yes, that re-signing came with the captain\u2019s \u2018C\u2019. Nevertheless, Matthews (who is likely still playing through a mystery long-term injury) has looked less and less comfortable on and off the ice. Leading into Christmas, Matthews went four straight games without registering a point for the first time since 2018. As for the fans, they\u2019re unimpressed<\/a> with Matthews this season \u2013 and the feeling might be mutual. Toronto sports media are notoriously swivel-eyed about the Leafs, interpreting and re-interpreting each sway of the team as foretelling a different future, so it\u2019s easy to get hooked into false narratives. But increasingly, it looks like Matthews might be thinking about a future outside Toronto. The Leafs could be thinking the same thing. Colin Horgan<\/p>\n Audi Crooks will become a household name<\/p>\n The 21-year-old Crooks is dominating women\u2019s college basketball in a way that is becoming impossible to ignore. The Iowa State junior leads Division I in scoring at nearly 28 points a game, is the only player this season with multiple 40-point performances and recently tied a school record with 41 points in a Big 12 win over Kansas \u2013 for an undefeated Cyclones team currently ranked in the top 10. Since announcing herself nationally with 40 points against Maryland in last year\u2019s NCAA tournament, Crooks has piled up historic nights against Indiana, Iowa and Valparaiso, pouring in 43 points in just 20 minutes. She is on pace to join Joel Embiid as just the second player across Division I, the NBA or the WNBA to average at least one point per minute over a full season.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n But Crooks\u2019 rise is not just statistical. She is a throwback star with modern reach: a dominant low-post force whose joy, humility and commitment to community \u2013 including a foundation delivering food packages to families affected by the SNAP shutdown<\/a> in her home county \u2013 have made her a fan favorite far beyond Ames. As women\u2019s basketball continues its surge into the mainstream, Crooks has the game and the presence to cross over with it. By the time she carries the Cyclones into the NCAA Tournament this March, \u201cAudi-matic\u201d will need no introduction. By year\u2019s end, she\u2019ll be doing what Marty Mauser couldn\u2019t: staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box. Bryan Armen Graham<\/p>\n Multiple major colleges will drop sports entirely<\/p>\n The typical Division I college sports program loses money or only manages to break even<\/a> due to institutional support and student fees. Now consider everything that has changed in the last few years. Donors are being asked to foot the bill for Name\/Image\/Likeness (NIL) deals. College can make direct payments to athletes, and thanks to the transfer portal, any athlete who feels underpaid can pack up and go elsewhere. Conference realignment now forces many colleges to pay for all of their teams to travel from coast to coast several times a year. Colleges now have to ramp up staffing on everything from logistical planners to academic support specialists with the thankless job of figuring out whether someone attending his fourth school in four years can actually graduate. At some point, a college is going to hit the breaking point in the arms race and either drop sports entirely or move down to Division III, where schools don\u2019t offer athletic scholarships and travel is much more manageable. Once one college makes that move, the floodgates will open. Beau Dure<\/p>\n The end of sports\u2019 infinite growth curve<\/p>\n For more than half a century, sports has endured as the most recession-proof of entertainment spectacles. But 2026 is when the sun begins to set on the era of everlasting growth. It used to be that televised sports was nothing but upside, especially in the US. The networks got unscripted dramas with reliable story arcs. The leagues and their partners got rich. Fans could watch big games and their local teams for free or for the nominal price of cable subscription and feel as if they were getting more than their money\u2019s worth. The bigger audiences grew, the more everyone stood to benefit.<\/p>\n But now that Netflix, Apple and other digital platforms are crashing into the rights holding game, prepare for sports to run the same attention deficits that movies and TV shows have been slogging through since Silicon Valley stormed Hollywood. The more sports migrate to streaming \u2013 MLB<\/a>.TV for local market games, Prime Video for the NFL and NBA, Apple TV for F1 \u2013 and force fans to shell out hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with action that was once virtually given away, the more the audience shrinks from subscription fees and general inconvenience and the frustration of having to search out entertainment that was once a remote click away. Eventually, new fans stop regenerating, interest flags, advertising dries up and the sports leagues that once counted on ever increasing budgets and resources suddenly find themselves having to figure out how to continue eking out a business in an attention economy where all digital content has the same negligible value. Andrew Lawrence<\/p>\n MLB will play through 2027 despite lockout threats<\/p>\n It is still a little way off, but circle 1 December on the calendar. That is the date Major League Baseball<\/a> owners could lock out players and begin the great work stoppage of 2027. The most contentious divide between the sides is, as ever in collective bargaining negotiations, player salaries. Some owners \u2013 particularly those not named the Mets or Dodgers \u2013 want a salary cap, arguing they cannot compete with the sport\u2019s biggest spenders. Even Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner has recently complained about rising payrolls, despite his stadium being largely funded by the public. Players, for their part, will refuse a cap of any kind.<\/p>\n Most observers point toward a work stoppage. I do not. Baseball will play in 2027, and the sides will settle well before the deadline. Off the back of an epic 2025 World Series and a World Baseball Classic likely to draw huge global audiences, both parties will understand that going dark would only choke off the spout shooting cash into the game. With momentum on their side, they will find a way to strike a deal and keep the sport moving forward. David Lengel<\/p>\n Auston Matthews\u2019 time in Toronto may be running short. Photograph: Claus Andersen\/Getty ImagesThe beginning of the end will come for sports stadium giveaways<\/p>\n The close of 2025 brought the continuation of a long-running trend, as the Kansas City Chiefs ($6.2bn in value according to Forbes) and owners the Hunt family (net worth of around $25bn) successfully worked the state of Kansas to the tune of nearly $2bn in public money for a new, $3bn domed stadium, which the state will finance via the sale of municipal bonds. Kansas will own the development, whose revenue they mostly can\u2019t use to pay back the bonds, and the rent from which will be deposited into a fund only the Chiefs can use. Countless economists and studies have shown that these sorts of deals do not bring any real, tangible benefit to the locality at hand. And the funding mechanism enabling them to happen weren\u2019t even meant to be used this way; they were meant to fund things like bridges, roads and parks but have been used since the \u201880s for private sports stadiums thanks to a loophole that has yet to be closed despite multiple proposed federal bills banning the practice.<\/p>\n There appears to be no momentum towards any of this stopping; not after the Kansas City deal, or ones of similar scale in Nashville or Buffalo, or any number of smaller deals in which the public is made to pay for the benefit of a private business. But 2026 will be different. The coming leftward reaction to the far-right and billionaire-friendly ways of the current administration will make voters especially attuned to the ways they are getting fleeced. This is a dynamic that Zohran Mamdani combined with sports masterfully in his campaign against Fifa\u2019s World Cup ticket pricing, creating a conversation that went national and won him even more momentum in a victorious campaign. It\u2019s one of the few aspects of his strategy that could reasonably be adapted for campaigns outside of the unique American metropolis that is NYC, and somebody, somewhere, is going to gain some votes and start a serious movement against these giveaways using similar tactics. Alexander Abnos<\/p>\n Miriam Adelson will sell the Dallas Mavericks<\/p>\n As Dallas Mavericks fans protested outside the American Airlines Center after the stunning Luka Don\u010di\u0107 trade, their threnody moved beyond sport into something almost sacrosanct: basketball\u2019s peculiar ability to turn a player from across the world into family. That was Don\u010di\u0107 in Dallas. Nico Harrison orchestrated the trade and became public enemy No 1 across North Texas, and though he was fired in early November, the franchise remains haunted. You can remove an executive; you cannot unwind a rupture. Harrison was the face of the decision, but responsibility ultimately lies with owner Miriam Adelson, the dual-citizen billionaire casino magnate (and Trump mega-donor<\/a>) for whom franchises are assets in a portfolio rather than civic trusts. Rarely seen at games and showing scant concern for fan grievance, Adelson now presides over a team stripped of its generational star and much of its goodwill. What if the past year and a half was not the billion-dollar bargain she expected? What if she sold? A sale would not bring Don\u010di\u0107 back, but it could free Dallas from a hollowed-out era of remote ownership and offer something rare in modern sport: not competitive redemption, but moral closure. Lee Escobedo<\/p>\n The 2026 WNBA season will happen \u2013 but only after the league nearly self-destructs<\/p>\n The WNBA and the WNBPA have been negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement since the 2020 deal expired in October, and as of now there is no agreement in place that guarantees a 2026 season \u2013 or allows expansion teams in Toronto and Portland to move forward with business as usual. While fears of a lost season are real, no one involved actually wants that outcome.<\/p>\n The 2026 WNBA season will happen, but only after a confrontation that brings the league to the brink. With players newly unified after a strike authorization vote and alternative structures already in place, the leverage has shifted. Unrivaled \u2013 the fast-growing women\u2019s professional league founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart \u2013 has shown there is both demand and infrastructure beyond the traditional model. The mere possibility of players organizing outside the WNBA, even temporarily, would be a negotiating weapon the league could not ignore.<\/p>\n There is no evidence of a ready-made replacement league waiting in the wings, and organizing one overnight would be enormously difficult. But the point is not whether a parallel season actually launches. It is that, for the first time, players plausibly believe they would have options. That belief \u2013 and the pressure it creates \u2013 will force a deal. The season will arrive, bruised but intact, after a fight that permanently reshapes who truly holds power in women\u2019s basketball. Stephanie Kaloi<\/p>\n An official tennis governing body \u201chires\u201d an AI-generated content creator<\/p>\n Even when the tennis is brilliant and fans are flocking, the sport has a maddening habit of marketing itself in ever more busted ways. Never has a tennis documentary shown so little tennis as Netflix\u2019s Break Point. The US Open saw record attendance and decided what it really needed was a YouTube dating series<\/a> whose only connection to tennis was that it took place on tournament grounds. In February, the ATP Tour announced a \u201cgroundbreaking\u201d partnership with Overtime, effectively a social-media conglomerate for sports fans. November brought the Tennis Creator Network<\/a>, \u201ca selection of dynamic TikTok creators from around the world\u201d granted \u201cunprecedented behind-the-scenes access\u201d at the season finale in Turin.<\/p>\n God forbid a skilled storyteller \u2013 with knowledge of the sport and actual writing chops \u2013 be given access for a longform profile that might reveal something new about the players or the game. Instead, tennis has chosen short-form mush in hopes of turning an ongoing boom into a \u2026 bigger boom. There\u2019s only one step left in this righteous pursuit of mediocrity: remove humans from the creative process entirely. I won\u2019t be surprised when the ATP or another governing body unveils an AI commentator, an interactive chatbot, or quietly outsources match recaps to ChatGPT. As longtime broadcaster and recent Saudi tourism booster<\/a> Robbie Koenig might say: water covers 70% of the earth \u2013 and the other 30% is covered by the tears of unemployed tennis writers. Owen Lewis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here are our bold predictions for 2025 in sports. 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