Pep Guardiola said Friday that the "real season starts now" as Manchester City seek to hunt down Arsenal at the top of the Premier League.

City closed the gap to the Gunners to four points before the recent international break, thumping champions Liverpool 3-0 after Arsenal dropped points in a 2-2 draw at Sunderland.

Paul Pogba has lost none of his "vision and technique" despite not playing for more than two years, his Monaco coach Sebastien Pocognoli said on Friday, as he weighs up whether to hand the 2018 World Cup winner his club debut.

The 32-year-old is widely expected to make his first appearance on a football pitch since September 2023, when Monaco travel to Rennes on Saturday.

A super-sized World Cup has paved the way for tiny Curaçao and Cape Verde to book their places at sport's biggest global event next year.

Just as FIFA president Gianni Infantino predicted.

Three months in and it has already been a season of extreme highs and lows for Liverpool.

A run of five straight wins to start the Premier League title defense. Then a streak of four consecutive losses.

Italy will first host Northern Ireland in a World Cup qualifying playoff in March but then would go on the road to reach its first tournament after back-to-back failures at this stage.

FIFA made the playoffs draw on Thursday that will send the winner between four-time champion Italy and the Northern Irish on March 26 to travel to face Wales or Bosnia-Herzegovina five days later. At stake was a place at the first 48-team finals tournament in north America.

UEFA has given Barcelona the go-ahead to play Champions League matches at their partially rebuilt Camp Nou stadium, the La Liga giants said on Wednesday.

A stunning bicycle kick and two stoppage-time goals sealed Scotland's dramatic return to the World Cup after a 28-year wait.

Neither Kylian Mbappé nor his former club Paris Saint-Germain are ready to back down as their legal dispute reaches a new climax — with gigantic sums at stake.

Lawyers for both sides argued on Monday before an industrial court in Paris, each demanding hundreds of millions of euros from the other as they sought to settle a score over the end of the player's contract before his move to Real Madrid in the summer of 2024.

LeBron James certainly didn't look like he had been away from an NBA court for nearly seven months when he began his unprecedented 23rd season Tuesday night — even if his burning lungs told him otherwise.

After reaching another landmark in what is now officially the longest career in league history, James was not at all surprised to return from his lengthy injury absence by fitting in seamlessly with the surging Los Angeles Lakers in yet another victory.

The tiny Caribbean island country Curaçao will go to the 2026 World Cup as the smallest nation by population ever to qualify for the marquee event in men's football.

Curaçao, an autonomous territory of about 156,000 people within the Netherlands kingdom, takes the record of Iceland, with a population of just over 350,000, which was the previous smallest country to reach the World Cup when it qualified for Russia 2018.