Latest news with #contract
BBC News
6 hours ago
- Business
- BBC News
McLaughlin pens new Mansfield deal
Stephen McLaughlin has signed a new one-year contract at Mansfield Irishman, who turns 35 next month, has made 196 appearances for the Stags since initially joining on a short-term deal in September 2020, predominantly playing at left-back and left former Southend United and Nottingham Forest man made 47 appearances this season, 41 of them coming in League One, and scored in the 3-0 win over Exeter City on the final day of the joins Jordan Bowery in penning a new deal at the One Call Stadium and follows the signing of Tranmere Rovers midfielder Regan Hendry and the re-signing of former captain Ryan finished 17th in League One this season, eight points clear of the relegation zone.
New York Times
8 hours ago
- Business
- New York Times
Lane Hutson's next contract with Canadiens is minefield that might need to wait
As the Montreal Canadiens work on organizing their financial structure for the coming seasons in a rising salary-cap world, there are two players' contracts they will need to plan for that are somewhat abstract. The first is Lane Hutson, and the second is Ivan Demidov. The Canadiens are still a year away from needing to worry about Demidov's contract, and he still has a lot to prove. But in Hutson's case, he could sign a new contract as of July 1, and he has already proven a lot at the NHL level. Advertisement He is the type of play-driving, puck-moving defenceman the modern game requires, but he also doesn't fit the archetype of the big, bruising defenceman that playoff hockey requires. To be fair, there aren't really any defencemen who fit both categories, and there are few in the NHL who fit the first category as well as Hutson. But the second category is something that will also surely come into play in the Canadiens' evaluation of what Hutson's next contract looks like, and there are different examples of how to approach his second contract across the NHL. Hutson mentioned in his exit interview with the media that he would like to have his contract settled sooner rather than later, and part of that is because he is frankly uncomfortable talking about it. The longer his next contract remains unsettled, the longer he will have to answer questions about it. But when general manager Kent Hughes was asked about Hutson's contract at his end-of-season news conference, he didn't make it sound like it was an urgent matter that necessarily required immediate attention and made a point of mentioning that this administration waited for the end of Cole Caufield's entry-level contract before negotiating an extension, while Juraj Slafkovský and Kaiden Guhle each signed as soon as they were eligible last summer. 'For sure we'll talk to his agent,' Hughes said. 'I saw that he mentioned he'd like to get his contract settled sooner rather than later. So we'll call his agent and we'll see. But it's not like it's a priority. I find it's important to communicate, to learn what's important to Lane, and from there we'll see if there's a way to agree on a contract. With Cole, we waited to the end of his (entry-level) contract. With Slaf and Guhle, it happened with a year left. So, I think we'll start talking and see where it goes.' Advertisement What happened with Slafkovský and Guhle was that they accepted contract terms that were viewed as somewhat team-friendly by the Canadiens. They were comfortable with the annual average value for Slafkovský ($7.6 million) and Guhle ($5.55 million), even if it represented a bit of a risk. So when Hughes mentions learning 'what's important to Lane,' this is surely what he means. Is Hutson willing to work with the Canadiens on accepting less money and falling in line with their internal salary structure in exchange for the security of a long-term contract? Or will he look to be paid what his production in his rookie NHL season demonstrated he is worth, particularly in the context of a rising salary cap? Looking at this in the most basic terms possible, it is not very difficult to find a group of comparable players to Hutson that we can use as a basis for this exercise. Filtering NHL defencemen who are 26 years old or younger, played at least 50 games and had at least 0.5 points per game last season (remember, Hutson had 66 points in 82 games as a rookie in his age-20 season) gives us a list of 14 players. Of those, three were still on their entry-level contracts: Hutson, Luke Hughes and Jackson LaCombe. That leaves 11 defencemen playing on their second or third contracts to use as a basis for comparison: Rasmus Dahlin, Cale Makar, Moritz Seider, Mikhail Sergachev, Miro Heiskanen, Owen Power, Jake Sanderson, Quinn Hughes, Noah Dobson, Thomas Harley and Evan Bouchard. That might seem like a random order in which to list those players, but it's not. They are listed in order of the cap hits on their current contracts, from a high of $11 million for Dahlin to a low of $3.9 million for Bouchard. That list represents three different approaches to a second NHL contract. The bottom three names on the list — Dobson, Harley and Bouchard — as well as Dahlin and Sergachev, signed two- or three-year bridge contracts out of entry-level, with Dobson and Bouchard due for new contracts this summer and Harley up next summer. All three of them are about to become very rich men. Sergachev signed his third contract in 2022 for eight years at $8.5 million per coming off a three-year bridge deal at $4.8 million a year. Dahlin signed his eight-year, $88 million contract in 2023, also coming off a three-year bridge at $6 million a year. Dobson, Harley and Bouchard each signed bridge deals at or just below $4 million a year, with Dobson signing for three years and the other two for two years. Advertisement Both Makar and Hughes signed six-year deals out of entry-level a couple of months apart in 2021 that walked them right to unrestricted free agency, with Makar's contract buying one UFA year and Hughes' none. They signed for $9 million and $7.85 million a year, respectively, and both can hit the UFA market in 2027. Their next contracts will be monsters, but they also demonstrate a mechanism to keep the cap hit reasonable while locking in prime years. The trade-off is the stress in Vancouver about what Hughes will choose to do when his contract expires, and the Avalanche having to trade away Mikko Rantanen in anticipation of Makar's next contract. The rest of the players on that list — Seider, Heiskanen, Power and Sanderson — signed long-term right out of entry-level. For many reasons aside from this very rudimentary exercise, Sanderson's eight-year contract worth $8.05 million a year signed in 2023 can serve as a basis for comparison here, and demonstrates why this could be a complicated negotiation between Hutson's camp and the Canadiens. It would be easy for Hutson's representatives to argue he is a more productive player than Sanderson and is therefore worth more than him. That's not a knock on Sanderson, of course, since only three defencemen in NHL history had a more productive rookie season than Hutson's 66 points this season. But it would be just as easy for the Canadiens to argue Sanderson fits both categories of defencemen described above, merging a play-driving puck-mover with a big body who can drive playoff success. For instance, no defenceman who played at least 75 minutes at five-on-five in these playoffs had a higher offensive zone start percentage than Hutson's 87.5 percent, according to Natural Stat Trick. In fact, only two skaters were higher, Washington's Dylan Strome and Alex Ovechkin at 97.3 (!) percent. The next highest defenceman was Carolina's Shayne Gostisbehere at 78.6 percent. Sanderson, however, only started 47.62 percent of his shifts in the offensive zone in the playoffs, suggesting his value to the Senators goes beyond his production, which is also evident in Sanderson's predominant role on both the power play and penalty kill. The same argument could be made about Seider ($8.55 million) and Power ($8.35 million), though neither of them played in the playoffs. The reality of the NHL, however, is that offence gets you paid, and Hutson's offence is truly special. Combine that reality with the new financial landscape of the NHL with the salary cap expected to rise to $113.5 million by 2027-28 — which would be the second season of Hutson's next contract — and the conditions are ripe for Hutson to seek a big payday based on what he's already demonstrated and also what he is expected to do offensively in the future. Advertisement Sanderson was in the first year of his new contract this season, and it took up 9.15 percent of the $88 million salary cap. That same percentage in 2026-27 — when the cap is expected to be set at $104 million — would represent an AAV of just over $9.5 million on a long-term contract, and that's assuming Hutson's camp doesn't feel he should be paid more than Sanderson. It should also be noted that of the 11 defencemen we are looking at here, Sanderson was one of only two — Power is the other — who signed his second contract before the entry-level deals expired. So if the Canadiens and/or Hutson decided to wait until next year, it would hardly be unprecedented. Something else Hughes said at his end-of-season news conference seems to apply, when he evaluated Slafkovský's season coming off his big contract extension last summer. 'I think he came in this year with new expectations, a new contract, and also sometimes, when you have success for the first time, sometimes you get here and you're not ready for what's waiting for you,' Hughes said. 'You hear often about a sophomore slump, and I think that's something we'll need to pay attention to as a team and not expect we'll be back next season and it will be easy.' All of that could easily apply to Hutson, though if we're being honest, it doesn't seem all that likely. Hutson's ability to adjust and find creative ways to not only survive at his size but find new and innovative ways to thrive has defined his hockey career. There's no reason to believe that will change. But one possible reason why Hughes seemed unrushed in talking about Hutson's next contract is the list of defencemen we looked at for this basic exercise. It is a group of the best young defencemen in the NHL, one that doesn't include Adam Fox because he was a year too old to be included, even if he is likely to be Hutson's closest comparable in terms of size, impact and production. Fox, it is worth noting, signed his seven-year deal at $9.5 million a year in November of 2021, in the midst of a career-high 74-point season and before the expiry of his entry-level contract. If Hutson were able to follow up his tremendous rookie season with an even better sophomore season, would those comparables change much? He's already put himself in very select company. Advertisement If we look at the contracts signed by Hughes since he arrived, one theme has emerged: He often gets what he wants. He wanted a short term on Sam Montembeault's contract, and that's what he got. He wanted a certain number for Jake Evans' contract, and that's what he got. But most notably, he wanted Caufield's and Slafkovský's second contracts to come in under Nick Suzuki's $7.875 million cap number, and that's what he got in both cases. If Hughes wants that to happen again with Hutson, it seems rather evident it won't happen this summer because Hutson would be leaving a significant amount of money on the table if he agreed to something like that, perhaps as much as $2 million a year, or even more. And the threat of a potential offer sheet didn't impact nine of the 11 defencemen we looked at here signing their second contracts at the end of their entry-level deals. In other words, as Hughes suggested a few weeks ago, there is nothing pressing, and it would appear to be in the best interests of both parties to wait and let things play out a little longer.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Lorraine Kelly ‘left insulted' by GMB offer ahead of major presenting shakeup
Lorraine Kelly was 'left insulted' by an offer made by ITV in relation to her daytime series Lorraine. Last week, it was revealed that the channel is shortening Kelly's show by half and will reallocate those 30 minutes to Good Morning Britain instead, as part of a cost-cutting drive. From January 2026, Kelly's breakfast programme, which she has hosted for the past 15 years, will air from 9.30am until 10am for 30 weeks – instead of filling its usual 9-10am slot. Meanwhile, Good Morning Britain will run from 6am until 9.30am instead of 6am to 9am. It's now been claimed that Kelly, who appeared at Hay Festival earlier this week, was originally told that ITV wanted to merge her show with GMB – an idea that she reportedly rejected. According to MailOnline, the host 'was pulled into a meeting with bosses where she was told about Good Morning Britain'. 'It was proposed that her show would merge with GMB so that she presented the last 30 minutes of the broadcast, which is what happened when a reduced team were working during lockdown.' It's claimed Kelly 'told them no and said it wasn't even a possibility'. The reshuffle was made weeks later. A source told the outlet: 'The entire thing has been an insult and she's certain to leave when the year-long contract ends.' Kelly's programme will only run seasonally, with Good Morning Britain entirely taking over her original slot for the remaining 22 weeks of the year. The TV host will present her programme five days a week, with her Friday stand-ins Ranvir Singh and Christine Lampard no longer needed. This Morning and Loose Women will be unaffected by the scheduling changes and remain in their usual respective time slots. A source close to ITV told MailOnline: 'We were very open about the challenges in the industry and so several options were discussed – the key was ensuring Lorraine was retained and was as comfortable as possible in a changing landscape. 'Her show is still hugely valued – the show recently had its highest audience share in four years and still reaches 2.7 million people. Kevin Lygo, Managing Director of ITV's Media and Entertainment Division, said: 'Daytime is a really important part of what we do, and these scheduling and production changes will enable us to continue to deliver a schedule providing viewers with the news, debate and discussion they love from the presenters they know and trust as well generating savings which will allow us to reinvest across the programme budget in other genres. 'These changes also allow us to consolidate our news operations and expand our national, international and regional news output and to build upon our proud history of trusted journalism at a time when our viewers need accurate, unbiased news coverage more than ever.' It comes after ITV announced earlier this year that it would be minimising its soap schedule to try to reduce costs on Coronation Street and Emmerdale. From January 2026, the two much-loved dramas will air as half an hour episodes in a so-called soap 'power hour' from Monday to Friday each week. RedBird IMI and Banijay have reportedly approached the broadcaster with offers for its ITV Studios production arm, which makes programmes including the reality dating show Love Island, talent competition The Voice, and Jilly Cooper adaptation Rivals, among others. Andrew Cosslett, ITV chairman, said at the broadcaster's AGM last week, per The Sun: 'If someone approaches the company with an offer to talk, that's something we have to take seriously because we're representing your interests. 'And it's very clear from the room that there is a high level of interest in the share price and the value of the business. So we have to accommodate any requests and conversations that take place. 'But our current strategy is very clear and it's making the best of what we have in combination.' The Independent has contacted Kelly and ITV for comment.
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
£10m for a month of Alexander-Arnold exposes absurdity of Club World Cup
Hmm. Ten million pounds. What does that work out to in booing, and boo-deletion? What's the exchange rate here? How much un-booing does £10m get you, in a highly emotive run‑your‑contract-down local‑lad‑departure scenario? This and many more equally strange questions will presumably have to be debated now Real Madrid have agreed a small but significant early release payment for Trent Alexander-Arnold, which will in turn allow his participation at the most heinous footballing entity yet devised, the new Fifa Club World Cup. The whole thing seems less important now. The Trent-Exit saga was something to talk about because the league was done. Time moves on, often in deeply strange ways. For what it's worth, I for one had no issue at all with some Liverpool fans barracking when they realised their favourite player was going to leave for free at the end of his contract. That is, I could see it was illogical and irrational. The answer to which is, duh. Meet: football. This is how the game survives, why absurd amounts of money swill across its decks every day, why the good stuff about connection and collectivism and moments of beauty can also happen. If we all just sat around taking the rational view and refusing to Become Emotional the whole thing would last about three minutes before everyone cleared their throats, looked at their watches and walked off to do some more sensible activity, like picking up litter or preserving hedgehogs. For now Madrid in the mini-window feels like a good thing for everyone. Good for Trent, who is 26, who had those luminous, oddly distant years under Jürgen Klopp, the most creatively brilliant piece of elite tactical freedom in recent times, the invention of a highly new effective role, the flank-libero, the walk‑cross man, the assist-mooch king. Liverpool aren't really a Trent team in the more orderly champion era. Whereas Real Madrid remain an oddly formless entity, a divvying up of roles, super‑strengths, star-freedoms. Madrid want him to play full-back but also to act as a rewilding element, a recreation of the Kroos-era passing range, which already sounds like a recipe for a dreamy kind of chaos. So it's good for the neutral too, good for the basic sounds and colours, the mouthwatering story arc of Trent inside that deeply vicious media‑superstar complex. This is a footballer who will always be an object of confusion, whose passing is brilliant, sui generis and thrillingly odd in its angles, but who continues to wander about the pitch like a man trying very hard not to spill his Pot Noodle. Mainly, though, this is all very good for the Club World Cup, which is of course the real story here. And at bottom this is a Fifa story, the first significant act of the CWC 2.0, a first hum of the destructor ray for this strange new source of gravity. Most immediately, it brings us one step closer to the prospect next month of a mouthwateringly inane Madrid-al-Hilal Trent-Ronaldo celebrity face-off, the descent on the Hard Rock Stadium of a vast ant colony of weeping superfans, lookalikes, holy relic seekers and confused adolescents who really do appear to spend their days poring over the weirdly robotic CR7 Instagram feed as though communing with some plasticised ideal of show, gloss, nature-less acquisitiveness. So, there's that. Otherwise, being good for the CWC is an issue for anyone who loves the game in its existing form. Because this competition is not just a sporting abomination, a skewer of leagues, a force for stratification with its vast and destabilising income stream for the top clubs, but a kind of top-down heist. Above all, the first significant piece of mini-window business is a wonderful moment for Gianni Infantino, because this really is Infantino's baby, gestated, midwifed into being and now clasped, damp and slithering, to the Fifa president's chest through the Trump-centred brand building of the last few months. There is no secret about any of this. The Club World Cup does not need to exist. It is in effect a one-man reordering of the global calendar, a product of Fifa's unique style of government whereby a single random Swiss man is given an autocratic degree of power over the global game. Infantino even looks at times as if he can't quite believe how this thing has happened to him, staring out at the world with those flat, startled eyes, as though there is actually another man inside this man, encased in some compacted substance, a blend of processed ham, varnish and mendacity, mummified into a man-shape, squeezed into a blue suit and given the keys to the world. And now we have this, a competition that exists solely because Infantino wants access to the funds currently being harvested by club football. It fails on a basic level of sporting robustness. This is an invite-only star fest, a financial grenade chucked into every league in the world, and something Fifa has no real mandate for. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Here we have the game's keepers acting with entrepreneurial self-interest, creating not just a competing format, but a competing way of perceiving the sport, a setup that invites only the biggest clubs, and marketing a vision of the game as a kind of star‑driven celebrity circus, sold through the social media feeds of its star players. Why would the clubs go along with this? The obvious reason is that interestingly sourced $1bn prize fund, the first chunk of which is now on its way to Liverpool. But it isn't just greed. There is a more subtle energy in play here, a coincidence of Infantino's ambition and the dynamic of football's new breed of owners. Todd Boehly gave a significant speech at the recent Financial Times Football Leaders conference. Despite giving the appearance of having been sedated shortly before taking the stage, Boehly kept turning to two key themes. First, the urge to create out of football's global cut-through some kind of future streaming platform, a tech behemoth, which is where the real Zuckerberg money is, not mucking about with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall's sell-on value. And second, his bafflement with football's existing culture, its fan-based conservatism. Football wants to grow, to dig its teeth into the wider global market. This is the real key to the Club World Cup, and it speaks again to Trent, to extreme, irrational loyalty, to geographical ties, to all those elements that lasso this thing into its existing shape. The Club World Cup is the first competition where it makes little difference if you boycott it or simply don't watch. It's not about getting you to like it. It's about power and ownership, driven by broadcasting money that exists outside normal market rules, that is basically a bribe to the clubs. It is instead about the dissolution of those old bonds, of the ties to physical place, about players as mobile marketing tools, teams not as mobile brands. It wants you to like it enough to subscribe and click, but not to feel any sense of obstructive ownership. This is also why the booing matters. Booing at least makes sense, speaks to those old sustaining structures, the link to place, colours, family, something that is the opposite of pop-up moves and individualism as a Fifa sales technique. It will be impossible to ignore this thing, to no-platform it, because it's already here, already eating away at the ground beneath football's feet. And who knows, in time Trent to Real Madrid in the mini-window might come to look like a first step, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment, the day the world shifted just a little on its axis.
BBC News
a day ago
- General
- BBC News
Cardiff centre Jennings signs new contract
Cardiff centre Rory Jennings has signed a new deal to stay at the Arms 29, arrived from Newcastle Falcons in the summer of 2024 and made 17 appearances during his debut season."Rory has added massive value to the club both on and off the field," said Cardiff head coach Matt Sherratt."His input to our game off the field has been excellent and has brought exactly what we'd hoped for on the field."Jennings will continue to compete with Ben Thomas, while helping to bring the likes of Wales Under-20s centre Steffan Emanuel through."It was an easy decision for me to make in the end," said Jennings."We have a squad with a huge amount of talent and potential, and I have been impressed with the staff and players from the moment I joined."
