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Barcelona’s 125th anniversary: When their star striker was kidnapped for 23 days

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Barcelona’s 125th anniversary: When their star striker was kidnapped for 23 days

Friday, November 29, 2024, marks the 125-year anniversary of the formation of FC Barcelona.

To mark the occasion, The Athletic is running a series of pieces, celebrating the people and the moments who have helped make the club what it is today.

We have told you about the story of Joan Gamper, the man who founded the club, and run through some of the most significant numbers in Barca’s history. Now, we look at the scarcely believable story of when their star striker, Quini, was kidnapped in 1981…


“Quini’s wife called me at four o’clock in the morning. She told me he hadn’t come home that night and that she hadn’t heard anything from him.”

Former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart is talking to The Athletic about one of the most unusual incidents in the club’s history.

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It was Sunday, March 1, 1981, and Gaspart was vice-president. Barca had beaten Hercules 6-0 at the Camp Nou and La Liga’s top scorer Quini had provided two goals. Barca looked on course for the Spanish title — something that had not happened since 1973-74, in Johan Cruyff’s playing days and when Quini was scoring goals for Sporting Gijon instead.

There was a sense of euphoria in the city and among the players, who decided to go for dinner at a restaurant near the ground.

It was the restaurant Can Fuste, a 15-minute walk from Camp Nou. Everyone was waiting for the then 31-year-old star striker Quini, full name Enrique Castro Gonzalez — but he never arrived.

“There were seven or eight of us,” Carles Rexach — one of the players in the squad tells The Athletic. “(Barca centre-back and Quini’s close friend Jose Ramon) Alexanko met us and said he didn’t know where he was or where he had gone.”


Quini was one of Spanish football’s most famous players in the 1980s (FC Barcelona)

The last anyone had heard from Quini was a TV interview in which he spoke about their upcoming game against Atletico Madrid. Atletico were in first place, two points ahead of Barca and the game was crucial.

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Mari Nieves, Quini’s wife, had flown back from Gijon that afternoon with her two children, as she did on many weekends. After the match, her husband stopped by the house to pick up his things before getting in his Ford Granada to head to Barcelona airport to pick her up.

“His wife (when he did not appear at the airport) had called several hospitals, police stations or any place where they might know something,” Gaspart says. “He didn’t show up. Nobody knew anything. We went to his house at five or six o’clock in the morning thinking, ‘Where could he be?’”

Gaspart, then-Barca president Josep Lluis Nunez and Alexanko spent the night at Nieves’ house and immediately called the police.

The next day, the report of Quini’s disappearance became official. The three men stayed with Nieves until she received a call that began to give her answers.

The case caused a stir across the country. It was reported in all the major media outlets and rumours began to spread about whether the Basque separatist group ETA had been involved after terrorising Spain with a number of attacks.

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Nieves received the first of 21 calls from her husband’s kidnappers. It was not ETA but three people with no criminal record and no jobs who had tried to solve their financial problems by kidnapping one of the country’s biggest football stars and demanding a large ransom.

“The news spread like wildfire all over Barcelona,” Josep Maria Minguella, a former agent and a figure who has been closely linked to the club over the years, tells The Athletic.

“There was a lot of consternation. With ETA active, there were a lot of kidnappings at the time, but it had never happened to a player. It was reminiscent of what had happened to (Real Madrid legend Alfredo) Di Stefano a few years earlier (when he was kidnapped by Venezuelan guerrillas in 1963).”

As Rexach puts it 43 years later, “At first we thought it was a joke because it was unimaginable.”

On his way home from the airport, Quini had stopped to fill up his car when the three men suddenly assaulted him and forced him into the vehicle at gunpoint. They later abandoned the car and put Quini in a hood and wooden crate in a van and drove to Zaragoza, around a four-hour drive to the west of Barcelona.

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There they transferred him to a hideout, where he spent 23 days locked up.

Quini had been top scorer five times in La Liga and had scored 73 goals across four seasons with Barcelona.

“He was one of the best players in Spain and was constantly in the media spotlight,” Rexach says. “They knew kidnapping him was going to have a big impact.”

“He was such a charismatic man and he was good to people,” Juan Carlos Perez Rojo, a player who was in the ‘B’ team but trained with Barca’s senior side, tells The Athletic. “They knew everyone was going to step up and give him the money he needed.” Rojo and Quini became friends some time after the kidnapping and he is into his 46th year at Barca, where he works as a scout.

“As a person he was very simple, a good person, kind,” says Minguella, who helped sign Quini from Sporting Gijon. “He didn’t deserve all the things that happened to him and his family. It’s one of those moments when you realise that life can be unfair.”

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Quini with Nieves on the day of his release (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It later emerged the kidnappers’ main target had been the then-Barcelona coach Helenio Herrera. When they found out he had a cold, they changed their plans as they feared he might die during the kidnapping.

In the days that followed, the police worked in secrecy.

“There was a lot of upheaval,” says Minguella. “The police controlled the situation and didn’t want too many people to intervene.”

“The police didn’t want people to get in the way, even if they wanted to help,” adds Rexach. “So they just let Alexanko be the one to help.”

Barcelona asked La Liga to postpone the match against Atletico that weekend. The Spanish top flight denied that request, Barca played and lost 1-0 at the Vicente Calderon, Atletico’s former home. The German midfielder Bernd Schuster, who threatened not to play, blamed Nunez and Herrera for the match going ahead.

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“There were people who didn’t want to play until they found him and there was a bit of a struggle because the coach thought we had to play even if he wasn’t there,” says Rexach. “It was complicated.”

Barca played two more games with Quini still missing, losing 2-1 to Salamanca and drawing 0-0 with Real Zaragoza. They would finish four points behind champions Real Sociedad in fifth place.

“That year we didn’t win La Liga because we spent those three weeks just thinking about Quini,” Rexach says.

Meanwhile, the police continued to do their job. As calls from the kidnappers were made from phone boxes, they asked Telefonica, Spain’s leading telecoms company which owned them, to cooperate.

“The kidnappers went completely unnoticed,” Juan Martinez Ruiz, one of the 20 officers in charge of the case, later told Spanish magazine Libero. “That was the main reason it took so long to locate them. They had never broken a dish, they had no previous convictions, they were not related to criminals… They were absolutely normal.”

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The police issued a statement appealing for the public to help and had to deal with an avalanche of false leads. Telefonica had trouble identifying the origin of the calls.

In one of their calls, the kidnappers told Nieves they were nervous because of how much Quini ate, given they no longer had enough money to buy sandwiches. They were demanding 100 million pesetas for his ransom (worth around €600,000 today), a figure that had risen from the original 70 million pesetas.

In one of the attempts to pay the kidnappers, the police asked Alexanko to go to La Jonquera, a Catalan town close to the French border, with a briefcase full of banknotes. The kidnappers asked him to cross the border, but the police refused because the French authorities would have arrested him on the spot.

On March 20, the three men asked the money to be paid into a Credit Suisse bank account.

“Barca were looking for solutions because the kidnappers were very absent-minded,” Minguella says. “Those who kidnapped him did not have very clear ideas about what ransom they wanted to ask for and were changing their strategy.

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“Nunez’s secretary called me to find out if I had any way of getting money in Switzerland, where the kidnappers asked for the money to be deposited. I was doing business in Luxembourg and Switzerland and I had money there. I said yes and agreed to help with the payment.”

The bank account was in the name of one of the kidnappers, Victor Miguel Diaz Esteban. The Swiss police worked closely with their Spanish counterparts to track him down. Diaz Esteban went to Switzerland to withdraw one million pesetas in U.S. dollars on March 24; within 18 hours, the police had arrested him after finding the hotel where he was staying and following his steps when he left for the airport to catch a plane to Paris. He was interrogated and confessed to holding Quini in a basement in Zaragoza.

In less than a day, the police released him and arrested a second kidnapper.

Quini later told friends this was when he was most afraid because he heard a lot of noise and thought the kidnappers would kill him. But on the night of March 25, radios across Spain announced he had been freed.

When he arrived in Barcelona, a huge crowd was waiting for him at the police station — Quini had to go out to greet them.

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The striker prepares to give a press conference after his release (FC Barcelona)

“When he came out he was in a very bad state, you could see it,” Rexach says. “All I know is that I gave him a hug. He was hidden in a place with no light for 23 days. It’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”

“He wanted to play and get back to normal as soon as possible,” Rojo says. “They gave him psychological support, I heard about it from team-mates some time later.”

Quini returned for the last four games of the La Liga season, playing again barely a week after his release, and was received with full honours at every ground he played at. He played 90 minutes in each of his first three league games after his return — scoring twice in a 5-2 win against Almeria — and still finished as La Liga’s top scorer with 20 goals. He also scored in both legs of the Copa del Rey semi-final and twice in the final against his boyhood side Sporting Gijon in the final as Barca lifted Spain’s national cup.

“On every pitch, when they said Quini’s name, there was five minutes of applause,” Rojo says. “He had a spectacular reception.”

The three kidnappers were sentenced to 10 years in prison and given a five million peseta fine.

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“They were simple people, without great possibilities,” Quini told a press conference after his release. “They fed me with sandwiches because they couldn’t afford any more.”

“There were team-mates who made jokes after that,” Rojo says. “Sometimes, when we were in hotels after dinner when you go to the room, there were team-mates who would go into his wardrobe to scare him when he arrived.”

Quini spent three more seasons at Barcelona, finishing with 73 goals in 141 appearances for the Catalans. He then returned to Sporting Gijon in 1984, where he spent the last three years of his playing career. He worked as a coach, team delegate and director of institutional relations for them.

The kidnapping had a very real impact on Quini, who died of a heart attack aged 68 in 2018. He was given an emotional tribute by the Camp Nou, with a huge tifo unfurled that read ‘Quini, sempre recordat’ — Quini, always remembered.


The Camp Nou tribute to Quini after his death (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“This affected him a lot throughout his life,” Rexach says. “He spent many days locked underground in a very small cell. He didn’t want to talk about it because every time he did, he relived the trauma.

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“He did tell me that when he was fed by the kidnappers he sometimes kept (the food) to himself. He thought that if they hunted them down and killed them, it would be impossible for anyone to find him there and he would starve to death.

“He had those 23 days in his head until the day he died. People think he forgot it quickly, but he didn’t. When someone would ask him a question (about it), you’d see him change the subject very quickly.

“It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened to Barca in its history.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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The secret behind Xander Schauffele’s career year? ‘I was actually feeling ready to win’

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The secret behind Xander Schauffele’s career year? ‘I was actually feeling ready to win’

Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein. The German proverb, roughly translated into English, means: Steady dripping caves the stone. It appears in other languages and literary forms, but this iteration stuck with Xander Schauffele as a boy.

It’s the one Schauffele’s father, Stefan, reiterated until it seeped into his vocabulary. From the onset of Schauffele’s relationship with golf, motivational allegories and philosophical adages were fed into his psyche. That’s how his father thinks and speaks. It became how the son thinks and speaks, how Schauffele constructed the mind and game that won two major championships in one summer.

Schauffele’s rise was slow and incremental, steadied by the omnipresent hand of his father, who doubled as his swing coach from pre-junior golf to the PGA Tour.

The nature of Schauffele’s climb was exactly what critics pointed to as the potential downfall of his career. If you were taught to lurk, could you win? If you were bred to embrace being an underdog, would it sting always being in the top 10 but never lifting the trophy?

Schauffele didn’t want to say it then, but he’ll admit it now. Those questions reverberated in his mind as the close calls stacked up, as the PGA Tour wins came but he became a supporting actor in the majors: Always on the leaderboard, never on top of it.

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Then he did it. Twice. In 2024, Schauffele shut down a festering, years-long narrative: He won the PGA and Open Championships, and suddenly went from being the best-not-to-win one to a player two trophies away from a career grand slam.

It was always in his subconscious, but he had to remember. There was supposed to be a process — a steady drip. The question was whether he would persist, and whether he’d believe.

“Maybe there was more self-belief this year than ever. And maybe it took me time to get to that point,” Schauffele says. “Everyone’s supposed to believe in themselves, everyone’s supposed to imagine themselves winning. I think until you truly do that and it’s actually a genuine thing, you won’t really see it through. You can say those words, but for me, I was actually feeling ready to win.”

This counts as revelatory for Schauffele, an admission of something other than resolute strength for a 31-year-old who walks the course with a confident swagger. Unwavering consistency was always what Schauffele intended to be his ticket to the top, and it showed in the progression of his game. If you judge it by advanced statistics, he was already the most consistent player in golf. But in 2024 he made bogey or worse on only 9.4 percent of his holes — setting a new PGA Tour record, eclipsing Tiger Woods’ all-time 2000 season.

“I grew this year, but for the most part I’ve been sort of preparing myself my entire life for those moments,” Schauffele says.

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Stefan could see what was coming before Schauffele. A year ago, celebrating Christmas in San Diego, the father/coach sat down with the son/protege for a one-on-one conversation. End-of-year transitions always feel pivotal to Stefan. Time to take accountability. To craft purpose.

He looked at Schauffele, days before the pair would travel to Hawaii for the 2024 opening tournament, and came forward with a proclamation: “The team is ready for you to win a major.”

Then he stepped away, becoming just dad.


For this next stage of life, Stefan decided to move as far away as possible from his younger son, which is why he finds himself pausing mid-sentence at the sight of a pod of whales breaching in the Pacific Ocean.

Standing on a plot of farmland in Kauai, Hawaii, Stefan is working on building a family compound. The “Ogre,” as he’s known on the PGA Tour, always sporting a fedora, black shades and a linen polo, timed his expedition intentionally.

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For a year and a half, Stefan lived in a 20-foot shipping container with no electricity, hot water or bathroom, away from his wife and Xander’s mother, Ping-Yi, for months at a time. He recently moved onto a second piece of property that includes a real house, so she can visit more often, and a warehouse, so tradesmen can come in and out from Hawaii’s mainland to assist the project.

Stefan is preparing the land to grow tuberous roots, like taro, araimo and satoimo. He’ll plant avocado trees for an oil supply. Everything will be ready for the Schauffeles in two to three years, perfect timing for their grandchildren to play with the animals. Yes, there will be livestock — Shetland ponies and miniature highland cows. Xander and his older brother, Nico, aren’t allowed to see it until it’s done.


Stefan Schauffele, left, held dual roles in Xander’s life: Father and coach. That changed in 2024. (Andrew Redington / Getty Images)

There’s a vision. There’s a process. It began with the decision to step away from being Xander’s coach, a departure he wished had happened sooner. He knew the time would come, when he could no longer serve his son’s needs in his expertise. The question of how to make the transition was harder.

Which is why as Xander lifted his first major championship trophy, Stefan was closer to Tokyo than Louisville, Ky., resigned to watch the moment on television from one of Hawaii’s farthest outlying islands.

“I cannot explain to you how close (Xander and I) are,” he says. “It is stupid. I had to literally do what I’m doing right now in order to create separation.”

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An accomplished decathlete in his prime, Stefan cultivated his son’s competitive drive the only way he knew. “He basically treated me as a young pro from a really young age,” Xander says.

The father viewed golf as a multidisciplinary game, just like his 10-event sport. Stefan took so much pride in his will to win, he used unusual tactics in an effort to bring it out of his son — ones he knew shouldn’t be implemented in most parent-child relationships.

“I had to find ways for Xander to openly oppose me and fight with me, not physically, but oppose me strongly. I worked hard on that, sometimes with unfair methods: I would cheat in ping pong until he got so upset that he started standing up to me at a pretty young age,” Stefan says.

A bond of mutual respect led to persistence becoming part of Xander’s nature. That was the precursor to the father and son’s on-course relationship and to Xander’s trek to the top.

As a boy, Stefan asked his son if he wanted to be like Fred Couples or Tiger Woods. Play the game by feel or study its intricacies? Xander chose the latter. He wanted to know everything about the mechanics of his swing. Stefan would explain the concepts to him, but he had to prove the basis of his knowledge with evidence. Xander acted with the kind of stubbornness that Stefan felt was necessary. In turn, Xander listened to his father’s philosophies about demeanor and body language. It all connected back to a central principle.

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If you are playing alone — Stefan would ask his son — on a golf course in the middle of a forest, and you miss a three-foot putt, are you going to throw a tantrum? “The answer is no. When you do it on TV, it’s all fake. It’s all an act. We cut out all of the acting and the fakeness,” Schauffele said.

“Golf is a long career,” he continued. “You can almost guarantee that anybody that is pretentious will eventually suffer some kind of defeat by his own ego.”


Xander Schauffele’s PGA Championship win made even the stoic Schauffele smile. (Ross Kinnaird / Getty Images)

The same themes were hammered into Xander’s mind through college golf, the Web.com Tour and the PGA Tour.

At the qualifier for the 2017 U.S. Open, a PGA Tour rookie Schauffele was paired with Steve Stricker, the latter vying for a spot in the national championship in his home state, Wisconsin’s Erin Hills. He watched as the 50-year-old put together a string of birdies in the latter half of the 36-hole day, turning a slow start into a highlight reel. It was the perfect microcosm of the old German proverb. Stefan’s lurk-in-the-shadows strategy had come to life. Schauffele was just finally seeing it for himself.

Schauffele qualified for that U.S. Open too, resulting in a tie for fifth place in his first major start. Three weeks later, he won his first PGA Tour event.

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“Stricker didn’t panic when things weren’t going his way. He stayed the course, and all of sudden rattled off eight or nine birdies and he was leading the tournament. Where did that come from? For me, my career doesn’t feel too dissimilar from that sort of mentality,” Schauffele says.


Schauffele was never “the guy.” He’s one of 16 players to win The Open and another major in one year, and he still isn’t. When his peers were asked to name the PGA Tour Player of the Year, 91 percent said Scottie Scheffler.

A phenomenal year by anyone’s standards has somehow still left him steeped in a shadow, cast by the potentially generational talent, Scheffler.

But Schauffele’s game wasn’t designed for him to be “the guy.” Persistence means evolution. And evolution isn’t always flashy.

When Schauffele seemed to be stuck as the player always hanging around the top five on a leaderboard, he could have stopped there. Instead, he continued to push, as he has always been taught to do.

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Sometimes that push — the art of never being satisfied — requires tough decisions. At the end of 2023, the Schauffeles hired Chris Como, a leading professional golf instructor, to the inner circle that from the outside looked like it could never be cracked. A personal trainer, David Sundberg, and a physiotherapist, Marnus Marais, came on board too. Stefan backed away. He retreated, literally, into the jungle.

In 2024, Schauffele’s new team and improved process helped him gain 10 yards off the tee, meaning shorter iron shots, more birdies, and in turn, the big wins. But really, Schauffele could keep things rolling until that epiphany. That’s what got him there.

“When you’re so close, it’s such a finite thing. You’re trying to improve by a quarter of a shot in a certain part of your game,” Schauffele says. “It doesn’t seem like much on paper, but it could do the world of difference over the course of a year.”

Schauffele’s missing self-belief was found in his process.

“I think mentally, dealing with everything that led up to this year — failing and failing and having everyone say you’re potentially one of the best to have never won a major, at least in this modern era, all those things finally were just kind of put to rest,” Schauffele says.

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Now he’s entering new territory. The Schauffeles evaluate progress with a year-over-year eye. Since first emerging on tour in 2017, Schauffele has rarely regressed in the official world golf rankings. He’s essentially maintained or improved his position, steadily. But now he’s No. 2.

Heading into The Sentry, the opening event of the 2025 PGA Tour season at Kapalua, Hawaii, this week as the second-best player in the world, Schauffele has an opportunity. Eighty-four weeks into a world No. 1 streak that has put Scheffler on a seemingly unreachable peak, he is out with an injured hand. Stefan will be lingering close to his son in Hawaii, taking a break from his Kauai camp to temporarily fill in as Schauffele’s manager. But as intended, the relationship is different. Schauffele is playing the best golf of his life. He’s in control.

“It’s crazy. I’m super fired up to go practice. I’m super fired up to go see my trainer. I’m super fired up to get to Hawaii,” Schauffele says. “I think it’s my eighth or ninth year on tour. And I’m still feeling that way.”

If there was ever a time to carry on, it’s now. Schauffele is ready for it. He is ready to keep caving the stone.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Ben Jared / PGA Tour, Tom Shaw / R&A via Getty Images)

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You read it here first: 22 predictions for the 2025 men’s golf season

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You read it here first: 22 predictions for the 2025 men’s golf season

The PGA Tour season begins Thursday at The Sentry in Hawaii, with many of the top players in the world — but not an injured Scottie Scheffler — playing the obscenely hilly Plantation Course at Kapalua. So let’s have some fun. Here’s what will happen in golf in 2025.

Jon Rahm wins a major: There’s a middle ground between “Yeah, Rahm didn’t emotionally handle the criticism from his LIV departure well,” and “Rahm is still one of the three or four best golfers in the world.”

He had a strange, frustrating major campaign. That included missing Pinehurst with a foot infection. But take a look at the whole year. You’re welcome to downplay LIV results, but at some point, you’re just playing golf. Ten top fives. He should have won an Olympic gold medal but gave it away. He’s still Jon Rahm. He’s just getting over the change from being loved to being criticized.

Scottie Scheffler remains the best golfer, but the honeymoon ends: People are going to start getting irrational. He’s going to remain the clear best player. He’ll rack up top fives and top 10s and win multiple tournaments. He might even win a major!

But it’s going to be the year the masses start forgetting that nobody wins at Tiger Woods levels in this era, and they might never again. It will become, “Oh, Scottie, why aren’t you winning more majors?” … “Oh, Scottie, is your hand bothering you?” … “What’s up with the putting?” each time he finishes third instead of winning. Because that’s his standard now. The discourse will take the horrible transition from the coronation of 2024 to the unfair new expectations of 2025.

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A repeat strange run of early winners: Last year, the entire start of the year was filled with journeyman winners or super-young surprises. This year will be the same.

Everything for the top stars will be about easing into form for the majors, and you’ll see tournaments like the Sony, the American Express, Torrey Pines and others won by cool rising studs like Max Greyserman or grinders like Denny McCarthy, and we’ll have the same conversation we had in March before all the top stars went on runs.

A PGA Tour-LIV deal will still not be finalized: But! Reports of an agreement will come out early in 2025. We just won’t get any details or real information until it goes through government approval, which will drag on until 2026.

Viktor Hovland will work with many more coaches: At the time this was typed, Hovland told a European outlet he is no longer working with coach Joe Mayo. After the wild 2024 season of Hovland working with four different instructors (that we know of), he’ll have another bizarre year of tinkering and trying to have the perfect season. It will be a better year than 2024, but still not near what we hoped in fall 2023 when he looked like the best player in the year.

Justin Thomas will have a big year: (We talked about this already).

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Jordan Spieth will not: Wrist injuries are tough!

The Waste Management Open will be much less chaotic: It jumped the shark last year, and now tournament organizers know they have to rein it in or players will stop wanting to come.

The Ryder Cup will be more chaotic than ever: After hat-gate. After LIV drama. After events like the Waste Management and the general American golf social media culture only make the heckling, bro-ey, debaucherous fan experience seem like something to strive for to large chunks of the population — on top of the very real conversation already happening about the New York crowds at Bethpage being unruly — and the U.S. fans will play up to the fears. They’ll treat it as a challenge, and it will lead to a chaotic Ryder Cup week that goes perhaps too far. Something bad might happen.

A Højgaard will win a PGA Tour event: But not the one you think.

Bryson DeChambeau won’t have quite the same major success: DeChambeau as a top-10 golfer is here to stay. But there is a gap between DeChambeau’s returning to form and the discussion that he’s in the same conversation as Scheffler, Xander Schauffele or Rory McIlroy. He’s not quite in that group, and he won’t have a major top five.

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Collin Morikawa again takes his place in golf’s top tier: Morikawa was the best golfer nobody talked about last year. He had 14 top 20s and seven top fives. He played in the final Sunday group at the Masters and the PGA Championship. He finished second behind Scheffler at the Tour Championship. He was as steady as anyone not named Scheffler or Schauffele. But he didn’t win once, and those Sunday struggles at Augusta and Valhalla were concerning.

But in 2025, Morikawa will win more tournaments than Schauffele or McIlroy. There’s always a mini-pantheon at the top of golf each year. In 2023, it was Rahm, Scheffler, McIlroy and Hovland. In 2024, it was Scheffler, Schauffele, McIlroy and arguably DeChambeau. In 2025, it will be Scheffler, Rahm, Schauffele and Morikawa. The question is, will Morikawa win a major?


Scottie Scheffler, left, winner of the 2024 Masters Tournament, sits with Jon Rahm at the Green Jacket Ceremony. (Warren Little / Getty Images)

Xander Schauffele wins the green jacket: This is the only specific prediction we’ll make. It’s golf. Predicting specific tournaments is nonsense. But Schauffele is suddenly a guy you know you have to fear in majors, and Augusta is the one major he plays best at. He’s gone T2, T3, 8, T10. And now he knows how to win. Schauffele wins a competitive Masters, and suddenly people will be recontextualizing his going from no majors to three in four starts. (Then, he won’t win again for a bit.)

Sam Burns plays in two major final Sunday pairings: He doesn’t win.

Quail Hollow will strangely deliver: Quail Hollow has become one of the more dunked-on big courses in the U.S., which will only increase at this year’s PGA Championship. The reason is probably just overexposure. It has an annual PGA Tour event. It hosted the 2022 Presidents Cup. And a lot of golf nerds just don’t like it. But it tends to create great winners and good golf tournaments, and Quail will give us a strangely riveting PGA that leads to some referendums on what we use to determine “good” professional courses.

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Much will be written about Oakmont returning us to above-par U.S. Opens: It will not. That is just not how the USGA seems to set up the U.S. Opens anymore. Somebody will win at 8-under. The majority of the field will be above par, and it will be an incredible Open, playing with the perfect mix of risk and reward, but most of the contenders actually shoot below par most days.

Rory McIlroy does not win a major: I’m sorry. Pinehurst pushed me too far. I cannot predict it until it happens.

Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth will be left off the Ryder Cup team: Neither will play well enough to truly be in contention at all, leaving captain Keegan Bradley’s hands tied.

Aaron Rai makes the Ryder Cup team: There’s always one or two “Huh, really?” golfers on the European team, and this year it will be an Englishman who can play some of the hottest rounds on tour. He’s an exceptional ball striker and has been around for a long time. He’ll be this year’s version of Russell Henley on the U.S. Presidents Cup team. Speaking of …

Russell Henley remains the Scheffler partner: Henley and Scheffler were a surprisingly perfect pairing at Royal Montreal, and Bradley was on the team to see it up close. He sticks with it, and they still thrive.

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Keegan Bradley will play well enough to earn a captain’s pick, but he won’t do it: Chaos prediction! Bradley will end the year as one of the seven to 12 best American players and put himself in a position to easily make the team most years, but he’ll be so focused on not being the guy who picked himself he will leave himself off. And the man he does pick instead will end up being what costs the U.S. Bradley’s selflessness will be his most criticized choice.

That’s right. The U.S. loses on home soil: After the last few years when the golf world has seemed to conclude the Ryder Cup is broken because nobody can ever win overseas anymore, the Europeans will knock off a messy U.S. team at Bethpage.

The world will melt down.

(Top photo of Collin Morikawa, right, with Patrick Cantlay: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

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The best women’s basketball games and performances from 2024 … and what’s next in 2025

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The best women’s basketball games and performances from 2024 … and what’s next in 2025

Caitlin Clark. A’ja Wilson. Breanna Stewart.

Ratings growth. Increased attendance. Record merchandise sales.

It was a historic year across women’s basketball with professional and college games breaking into the broader cultural zeitgeist like never before. Before turning the page to 2025, our team of The Athletic women’s basketball writers are handing out their superlatives from the year that was. They highlight some of their favorite games and performances, and even tell you what they’re watching for as the new year gets underway.

Best game

Sabreena Merchant: Game 1 of the WNBA Finals. The drama of Minnesota’s comeback (and the fourth-quarter replay reviews) set the stage for a tense, back-and-forth five games with so many big moments, highlighted by Courtney Williams’ four-point play. Even though the Lynx didn’t win the championship, they gave us a series that will live on in our memories.

Chantel Jennings: National title game between Iowa and South Carolina. This game was most memorable because of how historic it felt in the moment. Sitting courtside, even as it became clear that South Carolina would cap its undefeated season in style, everyone understood we were witnessing history. My guess of 15 million viewers (a number that would’ve felt unbelievable even a few years earlier) was still nearly 4 million short of the women’s title game viewership totals.

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Ben Pickman: I agree with Sabreena here. While Sabrina Ionescu’s game winner in Game 3 of the 2024 WNBA Finals makes this a close discussion, the madness that ensued in Game 1, coupled with Williams’ heroics at the end of regulation, lift that game above all others.

Best individual performance

Pickman: With all due respect to the countless records broken by Clark, Wilson and Angel Reese this year, Arike Ogunbowale orchestrated the best individual performance of the year. Sure, it came in the WNBA All-Star Game, but going up against Team USA, Ogunbowale set an All-Star Game record with 34 points, all of which came in the second half. Her 21 points in the third quarter were the most in a quarter in All-Star Game history, and the variety in which she scored was the best stretch of offensive basketball I saw in 2024.

Merchant: Nyara Sabally’s third quarter in Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. Not the most prolific performance by any means, but her 9 points in less than five minutes — as New York busted out a previously unused three-big lineup — changed the game and helped the Liberty win their first title in franchise history.

Jennings: Clark’s first quarter against Michigan. Barring any kind of historic meltdown, everyone knew Clark would break the Division I scoring record against Michigan in February. But it was her unbelievable first quarter, starting the game 3-of-3 from the floor and capping it with a logo 3 to break the record, that felt like something out of a movie. She ended the night with a program-record 49 points (breaking teammate Hannah Stuelke’s record of 48 from just a few games earlier).

Favorite reporting moment

Jennings: Gold medal game between Team USA and France. Diana Taurasi started the Olympic cycle by saying that not enough people were talking about the challenge of playing France in France, and Team USA got a taste of that in the gold medal game this summer. The energy and electricity in Bercy Arena was unforgettable, and hearing the French fans sing their national anthem ahead of the game gave me chills. It was nail-biter of a game, and for a decent portion of the second half, I wondered if I was really going to be writing a game story on how the run of eight straight gold medals for the American women was ending. But Team USA pulled out the victory as Gabby Williams’ shot that would’ve tied the game was just a few inches short of the 3-point line. The arena’s energy ebbed and flowed with every possession and was unlike anything I’d ever felt.

Pickman: I know I speak for the three of us in saying how fortunate we were to attend so many memorable moments in women’s basketball in 2024. But if we’re narrowing it down to just one moment of our own reporting, I’ll take breaking the news of Candace Parker’s retirement to Breanna Stewart. Parker retired on the first day of WNBA training camp, and the Aces announced the news not even three minutes before Stewart’s first media scrum of the season. I remember reading the release about Parker’s retirement over and over in the intervening minutes because I was so surprised by its timing — and really to ensure I wasn’t being punked. Then, I asked Stewart about it, and her reaction was one that I and the internet will remember for a while.

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Merchant: Covering the last Pac-12 tournament. For all of the conference’s lifers, like Tara VanDerveer, it gave the strange feeling of attending one’s own funeral. It was emotional to celebrate the greatness of the conference with past legends in attendance, especially in a year when there were so many individual highs for the Pac-12. It was a reminder of how our job in covering this sport is to tell the stories of the people involved, and when those people (broadcasters, administrators, families, etc.) are seeing their lives change in a meaningful way because of forces beyond their control, it hits you.

Best quote

Pickman: I’ll throw two out there. The first came in the WNBA Finals when I asked Courtney Williams if she knew what it meant to be “Minnesota nice.” She laughed and responded, “I ain’t never heard that.” Chantel is the Midwesterner in this roundtable, but I — as a New Yorker — had just assumed it was a rite of passage for anyone living in the state to know what “Minnesota nice” means. But alas. On another note, Cheryl Miller gave a rare news conference ahead of coaching Team WNBA in July’s All-Star Game and gave a particularly strong response when I asked her about the WNBA receiving a $2.2 billion TV rights contract. The line that stands out: “A two’s nice, an eight would be better,” referring to her belief the WNBA is still not receiving enough in its media rights deals.

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Merchant: Everything Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said in her postgame presser after losing Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. From calling out the referees and saying the game was “stolen” to subtly shading New York for needing 28 years to win one title while Minnesota was chasing its fifth, the full 15 minutes was raw emotion at its finest.

Jennings: By the time coaches and players get to the Final Four, there aren’t many questions that can be asked in a news conference that they haven’t heard already. But Dawn Staley decided to switch things up in Cleveland when she kicked off her Final Four presser with a highly serious question for reporters: Is it lay down or lie down? And then, she dropped this gem: “Someone taught me you lie to get laid, right? Sorry. So excited to be here!”

What we’re looking forward to in 2025

Merchant: How do the Las Vegas Aces respond after coming up short of their expectations in 2024? If New York and Las Vegas are supposed to be the great rivals of this generation, then it’s the Aces’ turn to elevate their game and figure out how to once again play championship-worthy basketball for a full season. On a related note, the South Carolina Gamecocks lost their first game in more than a calendar year to UCLA, but they still appear poised to claim their second straight title. Can they end the eight-year repeat drought in the NCAA Tournament?

Jennings: The finances of women’s college hoops are going to drastically change in 2025. For starters, women’s college basketball will finally receive units starting during the 2025 NCAA Tournament (assuming the Division I membership approves the plan in January). Also during the 2025-26 academic year, revenue sharing will hit college sports. It’s an unprecedented moment in NCAA history, and it could shift the power balance in women’s college basketball. The name, image and likeness model will change significantly as the NCAA will need to approve all NIL deals, and the “pay-to-play” NIL model, as many coaches have called the current structure, will fall by the wayside. Money makes the college sports world go ’round, and 2025 is a year in which the money — especially in women’s college basketball — is going to change.

Pickman: One on-court matter: After an All-WNBA first-team season, what happens with Clark’s development and the Indiana Fever, more broadly, under new coach Stephanie White? One off-court: After a year of explosive growth in women’s basketball in 2024, what will TV ratings, attendance, merchandise sales and overall business changes look like next year?

(Photos of Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson: Scott Taetsch / NCAA Photos via Getty Images, Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

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