The stories that defined sport in 2023

Manchester City's Treble

What Manchester United achieved in 1999 under Sir Alex Ferguson was replicated by neighbours City in 2023 under Pep Guardiola as the Spaniard’s all-conquering side – all-conquering except for the Carabao Cup which was lifted by United after City suffered a quarter-final exit at the hands of Southampton – claiming the Premier League, FA Cup and then their holy grail of the Champions League.

Powered by Pep’s tactics and Erling Haaland’s goals, City finished five points clear of Arsenal in the Premier League. They racked up 89 points as Haaland struck 36 times, the most goals by anyone in a single season in the competition’s history, with the Norwegian carrying over the ruthlessness in front of goal he had shown at previous clubs Red Bull Salzburg and Borussia Dortmund as well as for his country.

City’s form from the turn of the year until May was staggering – Guardiola’s men collecting 53 points out of a possible 66, during which they scored the most goals (50) and conceded the fewest (17).

They were aided by assist king Kevin De Bruyne, who set up 16 Premier League goals in 2022/23.

That tally increased to 31 for the Belgian across all competitions, with two of those coming in the FA Cup final as he teed up both of Ilkay Gundogan’s goals in a 2-1 win over United, a week before City went on to grab the Champions League trophy for the first time with a 1-0 victory over Inter Milan.

They had gone close before, most notably when they lost to Chelsea in the 2021 final by dint of a solitary goal from Mason Mount. This time around Rodri’s strike was enough to see off Inter and complete a tremendous achievement.

It was, though, Jack Grealish who stole the show at the open-top bus parade through Manchester that followed with dancing, jokes and a shirtless pose.

Stumping-gate sets Men’s Ashes ablaze

The 2023 Men’s Ashes was an absorbing watch before Jonny Bairstow’s controversial stumping in the second Test at Lord’s but it ignited after it.

Conversation turned to the nebulous notion of the ‘spirit of cricket’, Prime Ministers Rishi Sunak and Anthony Albanese had their say and a galvanised England came from 2-0 down to draw one of the most incident-packed Test series of all time 2-2. If not for rain, they may have won it 3-2.

Bairstow had dawdled out of his crease at the end of a Cameron Green over, believing the ball was dead, and was out of his ground when Australia wicketkeeper Alex Carey shot down the stumps.

Visiting captain Pat Cummins opted not to withdraw the appeal and a seething Bairstow was sent packing, to a dismissal Cummins and Carey have since said they would happily recreate in the future.

The dismissal did not breach the Laws of cricket – and the Sky Sports pundits felt Bairstow had been dozy rather than the victim of a heinous sporting crime – but England clearly felt wronged, with Stuart Broad chief rabble rouser as he told Carey, “that’s all you’ll be remembered for”.

The frustration extended into the Lord’s Long Room with the unedifying scenes of MCC members clashing with Australia’s Usman Khawaja and David Warner as the players headed in for lunch.

One member was subsequently banned for life and two others suspended for four and a half years and 30 months respectively after using “abusive, offensive or inappropriate behaviour or language”.

England managed to channel their anger into match-winning performances, with Broad bowing out in style during the series-levelling win at The Kia Oval, his last match before retirement.

He smacked the final ball he faced for six and then took a wicket with his final ball – Carey, quite aptly – to end his Test career with 604 wickets. His 603rd had come four overs earlier, with Todd Murphy snicking behind to Bairstow after Broad cheekily switched the bails over.

It was Carey’s removal of the bails on which the series arguably hinged, though. It helped put Australia 2-0 up but it was all England from that point on, with Broad providing a fairy-tale finish.

World Cup kiss scandal mars Spain's triumph

What should have been the greatest night in the history of women’s football in Spain was overshadowed by a kiss that caused shock around the world and rocked a nation.

Spain had just won the Women’s World Cup for the first time thanks to Olga Carmona’s strike in a 1-0 triumph over England in Sydney and were in the process of celebrating their historic achievement.

Yet as the post-match presentation progressed on the pitch with the winning team handed their medals and passing by various dignitaries in turn ahead of the World Cup trophy lift, Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales kissed midfielder Jenni Hermoso on the lips.

Rubiales' kiss, which Hermoso said was not consensual, sparked outrage far beyond Spain. Despite growing pressure on Rubiales to resign in the days that followed, including condemnation from the Spanish government officials, a suspension by FIFA and the launch of investigations by other bodies, he insisted the kiss had been “spontaneous, mutual and consented” and that he would not stand down from his role. Eighty-one players, including all 23 members of the World Cup-winning squad, indicated they would not play for the national team again while Rubiales remained in position.

He eventually quit on September 10, three weeks into the scandal. After an initial provisional suspension, FIFA banned Rubiales, who is also under investigation by Spain's High Court, on October 30 from all football-related activities at national and international levels for three years. Spanish World Cup-winning coach Jorge Vilda also lost his job as fallout from the scandal continued.

The scandal led to the hashtag #SeAcabo [It’s over] and put the spotlight on sexism both in and out of football, and of the need to improve equality.

Hermoso, who scored a record-extending 52nd goal on her return to the national team against Italy in October, said in a recent interview with GQ that “although I’ve reached the peak in my sporting career by winning a World Cup, there is much more to do. Having the voice that I have now is a real responsibility. I want to make the most of it.”

Europe reign supreme in dramatic Solheim-Ryder Cup double header

While there had been lots to enjoy throughout 2023 in the golfing world, both the men’s and women’s games were ultimately building to an autumn crescendo, with the Solheim Cup and Ryder Cup being held in back-to-back weeks in continental Europe. 

First up was the Solheim Cup in Andalusia, which saw Europe’s attempt to retain the trophy get off to the worst possible start as Suzann Pettersen’s team went 4-0 down to the USA in the opening morning foursomes.

With their backs to the wall, Europe summoned a couple of special moments as Emily Kristine Pedersen made the second hole-in-one in the competition’s history and Leona Maguire holed a crucial chip on the 18th to reduce the overnight deficit to two points in a nail-biting session that saw three of four matches go down the last hole. 

More European grit on Saturday saw the scores levelled at 8-8, setting up a thrilling Sunday singles. 

The contest was in the balance throughout, with the pendulum appearing to have swung the way of the USA until a pair of Europeans produced remarkable finishes. 

Caroline Hedwall, controversially selected by Pettersen despite being ranked 121st in the world, delivered four birdies and an eagle across the final six holes to seal her point. 

There was still work to be done though, with Europe’s only Spanish representative facing the prospect of going one down with two holes to play when opponent Nelly Korda hit a fantastic approach to the 16th.

It was at that moment Carlota Ciganda caught fire, hitting her own approach to near-gimmie range and forcing a miss from Korda to go 1UP, before the Spaniard then hit her approach at the par-three 17th even closer, leaving a tap-in to keep the trophy in European hands. 

The Ryder Cup, taking place in Rome, would also start with a 4-0 session as Europe came out hot to take advantage of a rusty start from the visitors. 

Luke Donald, who had stepped in at short notice as European captain in place of LIV-bound Henrik Stenson, never allowed his team to relent, and they had increased their advantage to seven points going into the final fourballs on Saturday afternoon.

It was only at this point that the contest really ignited, with a furore around why Patrick Cantlay wasn’t wearing his USA team cap lighting a fire under the American, his team-mates, and most of all, his caddie Joe LaCava. 

After Cantlay holed what proved to be a match-winning putt from long range at the 18th, LaCava’s elongated celebration irked the European team and resulted in a confrontation on the green, before a furious McIlroy needed to be held back in the car park as he raged at members of the visiting team. 

Despite Europe needing just four points to regain the trophy, there was real tension as play began on Sunday morning, before the hosts came through a late scare to seal a 16.5-11.5 victory. 

Having been left in tears of disappointment when Europe were humbled at Whistling Straits two years earlier, McIlroy was this time overcome with joy and relief as he and his team-mates celebrated a victory against a side many thought would have too much talent for them to overcome. 

The nine-darter heard around the world

“Michael may miss, and Michael may hit.

“They're both on nines. They're both on a nine. This is insane. Come on now!

“One man misses, does the other man get?

“That is the most amazing leg of darts you will ever see in your life. I can't speyk, I can't speyk."

Michael Smith and Michael van Gerwen were in the moment, targeting nine-dart finishes in the World Championship final, but commentator Wayne Mardle called the moment to perfection.

Michael did miss – Van Gerwen that is – with his ninth dart just north of the double 12 bed but Michael then did hit – Smith that is – with Bully Boy pinning double 12 to cap a remarkable leg of darts, one that arguably turned the sport into a global phenomenon.

It certainly helped turn Smith into a world champion for the first time, with that leg seeing him move 2-1 up in the second set before he took it 3-1 to level up his match with Mighty Mike at 1-1.

The St Helens thrower went on to win the contest 7-4, fulfilling a dream he had long since been touted to complete and denying namesake Van Gerwen a fourth world title.

Smith had been the nearly man of darts, regularly reaching finals in the sport’s biggest events but unable to land a trophy, with two of those second-placed finishes coming at the World Championship in 2019 and 2022.

However, after claiming the Grand Slam crown in November 2022, his duck was broken. The Sid Waddell Trophy followed two months later, with “the most amazing leg of darts you will ever see in your life” setting Smith on his way.

Saudi Pro League makes summer transfer splash

When 2022 ended with Cristiano Ronaldo joining Al Nassr, the move appeared to signal the Saudi Pro League’s emergence as a rival to America’s Major League Soccer, providing an even more lucrative destination for stars of the game to finish their careers. 

By the time the division’s summer transfer window opened on July 1, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) had taken 75 per cent stakes in four clubs, and it would soon become apparent that the Saudi Pro League was much more than a retirement home. 

Neymar, Karim Benzema, Sadio Mane were perhaps the most eye-catching names to sign for Saudi sides, while several Premier League stars also moved, with Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez and Aymeric Laporte signing deals along with Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante and Edouard Mendy. 

Also notable were the decisions of Ruben Neves (26) and Aleksandr Mitrovic (29) to leave Wolves and Fulham, respectively, amid speculation linking them to top Premier League clubs while still in the primes of their careers. 

But perhaps the most significant acquisition for the Saudi Pro League was that of Liverpool captain and England vice-captain Jordan Henderson. 

With Henderson having been a consistent advocate for human rights and one of men’s football’s most vocal supporters of the LGBTQ+ community, his decision to move to play in a country where homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death, was seen as highly controversial. 

While Al Hilal’s failure to sign Kylian Mbappe from Paris Saint Germain with a world record £257m bid suggested that the very best players might still be out of reach for the Saudi Pro League, Henderson’s move made it clear that ethical concerns are unlikely to prevent just about any player from turning down the eye-watering sums of money on offer.

With Saudi clubs currently operating outside the restraints of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, one wonders how many more transfer windows like summer 2023 European clubs will accept before demanding regulation.

It is a situation to watch very closely heading into 2024. 

The PGA Tour-LIV saga and the deal that stunned golf

June 6 delivered the shock announcement that no one saw coming. It was the day when the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the backers of LIV Golf, announced they planned to unite the golfing world after an unprecedented period of acrimony and form one unified commercial entity.

“After two years of disruption and distraction, this is a historic day for the game we all know and love,” declared PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan as a stunned sporting world dissected the unexpected news.

It came just three days shy of the first anniversary of LIV’s first tournament at St Albans’ Centurion Club, the point when golf’s growing split had truly started to feel palpable after a series of big-name defections towards the big-spending disruptor.

 A year on and the sudden apparent thawing of relations – and even a truce, as some suggested - had surprised no one more than the players. Rory McIlroy, arguably the arch-critic of LIV and of the rivals who had defected over the previous year, put it like this: “I knew lines of communication had been opened up… I obviously didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did." Tiger Woods’ subsequent arrival in August onto the PGA Tour’s Policy Board as a sixth player director was significant as the members demanded greater say and transparency over future decisions made by the PGA Tour, crucially including what the future of the game looked like in this proposed brave new world.

 What had been agreed between the tours and LIV in June was a ‘framework agreement’, a term that became something of a buzzword in golf as the second half of 2023 progressed and time fast ticked down to the December 31 deadline agreed between the parties to strike ‘definitive agreement’ on the deal.

It was against this backdrop, and just 24 days before this deadline, that LIV unveiled arguably its most significant signing yet. After weeks of speculation, and despite previous public assistance that he would not switch, Masters champion and world No 3 Jon Rahm announced he was joining up.

 Will Rahm’s move lead to more defections? Or will it be ultimately the move that leads to the PGA Tour and LIV getting a deal over the line? 2022 and 2023’s biggest off-course story in golf is far from finished yet.

Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff emerge as Novak Djokovic makes history

2023 provided a look at tennis’ here and now as well as its future.

Novak Djokovic remains the pre-eminent men’s player, even at the age of 36, with his 10th Australian Open title, third French Open crown and fourth US Open success taking him to a leading 24 Grand Slam singles trophies, two clear of Rafael Nadal and four ahead of Roger Federer.

The one Slam Djokovic did not win this year was Wimbledon – for the first time since 2017 – with the Serb edged out by Carlos Alcaraz in a five-set classic as his hopes of a fifth title in a row at the All England Club were dashed by the dashing Spaniard, a man 16 years his junior.

Alcaraz lost the first set 6-1 before taking the second on a tiebreak and then drubbing Djokovic 6-1 in the third. Djokovic forced a decider, only for Alcaraz to come through, becoming the third-youngest man to win Wimbledon in the Open era after 17-year-old Boris Becker and 20-year-old Bjorn Borg.

Djokovic spoke afterwards about wanting his rivalry with Alcaraz to continue and the pair met two further times in 2023 with Djokovic triumphing on both occasions, in the final of the Cincinnati Masters and the semi-finals of the season-ending ATP Finals in Turin.

Djokovic remains the man but Alcaraz is the coming man and we can probably put Jannik Sinner in that category, too, with the 22-year-old winning two of his last three clashes with Djokovic - at the group stage in Turin and then the Davis Cup semi-finals in Malaga.

This year also saw American teenager Coco Gauff go from top talent to title winner in the women’s game, with her maiden WTA 500 and 1000 crowns followed by Grand Slam glory at the US Open in New York.

Like Alcaraz and Sinner, Gauff may carry the sport moving forward and a rivalry with 22-year-old world No 1 Iga Swiatek could prove lengthy and engrossing.

Max Verstappen's perfect 10

In a season when Max Verstappen was seemingly setting a new Formula 1 record every race weekend, it was the Dutchman’s record sequence of 10 consecutive Grand Prix victories that impressively stood out.

From the Miami Grand Prix on May 7 to the Italian Grand Prix on September 3, Max was simply unbeatable. His 10 wins in a row came 10 years on from the only other driver to win the world title in a Red Bull, Sebastian Vettel, recording a then record-breaking sequence of nine in the closing months of the 2013 season.

Not the prospect of Verstappen kicking off such a sequence in Miami looked especially on when he qualified only ninth for that race, after an error was followed by an untimely red flag in Q3, and team-mate Sergio Perez, then flying high on the back of two wins from the opening four rounds, was on pole position. Yet win from row five is exactly what Verstappen managed that day and that set him on his path to the sequence that would ultimately end any notion he had an intra-team rival for the title.

Miami was followed was followed by a sequence of five wins from pole [Monaco, Spain, Canada, Austria and Great Britain] in which he led all but 14 of the combined 337 laps. A surprise pole for Lewis Hamilton in Hungary ultimately couldn’t deny Verstappen a seventh win on the trot; neither could a five-place gearbox grid penalty stop him a week later in Belgium.

Vettel’s record was equalled in impressive fashion on home soil in Zandvoort as Verstappen kept his composure while others didn’t amid race-long on-off rain, before the Red Bull driver overcame stubborn early resistance from Carlos Sainz to beat the Ferraris in front of their fans at Monza to bring up the landmark 10.

The run eventually ended two weeks later in Singapore when the RB19 showed fallibility for what proved the only time in 2023 and Verstappen was only fifth. How did he respond? By winning all seven subsequent races to the end of the season, meaning he will start 2024 just three away from another 10 in a row.

Ireland and France fall short as South Africa retain Rugby World Cup

Even in the moments after South Africa’s exceptionally narrow Rugby World Cup title defence in Paris in October, the major storyline of the tournament felt like the quarter-final exits of No 1-ranked Ireland and hosts France on a stunning Saturday of rugby earlier that month.

Having picked up several victories over New Zealand and South Africa in the years before the World Cup – and then during the 2023 pool stages themselves – as they built to a position of arguably the world’s two best sides, France and Ireland were left with familiar senses of World Cup dismay, with both still never having won rugby’s greatest prize.

Ireland succumbed 28-24 to the All Blacks in a rip-roaring contest that saw the men in green finish the stronger but just fall short, while France were beaten 29-28 by the Springboks to the agony of the home support. Whether either will get a better chance felt like the pertinent question at the close of a stunning few weeks of knockout Test rugby.

In 2003, England built to the status of best side in the world, winning A Six Nations Grand Slam, beating the All Blacks in New Zealand and reaching No 1 in the rankings. They travelled to the World Cup in Australia that year and delivered, winning England’s first and only Webb Ellis title to date.

Ireland won a Six Nations Grand Slam in 2023, beat the All Blacks twice in New Zealand to win a brilliant series 2-1, and even defeated South Africa twice – November 2022 and during the 2023 World Cup pool stages – in the lead-up. But the best side in the world fell at an all-too-familiar hurdle on the biggest stage of all. It felt like their real chance and it has come and gone.

France have a young enough squad that they should be able to come again, led by half-backs Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack, but will not get the chance to make history on home soil. Ireland said farewell to leader and playmaker Johnny Sexton and now face an uphill task to rebuild and return to their position at the top of rugby’s tree.

Eubank Jr avenges Smith defeat in spectacular style

While boxing is often criticised for moving too slowly, this rivalry proved that a lot can happen in the space of a year. 

After an intense - and at times extremely unsavoury - build-up, Liam Smith defied the pre-fight odds to force an astonishing fourth-round stoppage against Chris Eubank Jr at the Manchester Arena in January. 

The brutal nature of Smith’s victory left questions over whether Eubank, who had suffered his third defeat in 35 professional bouts, should continue his career, let alone take up a rematch clause against an opponent he appeared to be overmatched by. 

Little more than three weeks on, Eubank wished Smith a happy Valentine's Day as he announced on social media that he had activated the clause. 

This time around Smith was the favourite and spent the build-up to the September bout, which was extended by an injury to the Liverpudlian, reminding Eubank what had happened in their first meeting and questioning the Brighton-born fighter’s toughness. 

But then, in a complete reversal of fortunes, Eubank ignored the jeers of the heavily pro-Smith crowd in Manchester to take control of the fight by scoring a knockdown with a sweetly timed uppercut in the fourth round. 

From that moment on, there was only ever going to be one winner, as Eubank dominated the sluggish Smith until the referee eventually stepped in to put an end to the one-sided contest after 10 rounds. 

"I had to prove to the fans and the boxing public that I am who I say I am," Eubank said. "I'm not a pretender, I'm not a fake. I do the things I say I'm going to do."

From the brink of irrelevance, Eubank’s star was left shining brighter than perhaps ever before, with the 34-year-old reigniting hopes of securing an elusive world title.