Manchester United’s final game of 2024 felt like the moment the big top on the Old Trafford circus started to sink.

Before now, United’s calamities in the last decade or so have been incubated to a tier most other clubs can only dream of: finishing bottom of a Champions League group; coming eighth in the Premier League but winning the FA Cup; losing a Europa League final 11-10 on penalties.

As we turn into 2025, however, the ground on which this weekly entertainment show is built is crumbling to a base level.

After Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth, Newcastle’s 2-0 win inflicted on United a third straight league loss at home for the first time since 1979. It was their sixth defeat in all competitions this December, the most they’ve suffered in a single calendar month since September 1930. They will end the year in 14th place, their lowest position at this stage since 1989.

United are performing like an inverse trapeze artist — “Roll up, roll up, be dazzled at how low we can go!”

Amid such a spiral, the relegation places are looming into the rear view, just seven points behind. Rather than reject the proposal of a scrap for survival, Ruben Amorim is leaning into it. “We have to acknowledge our position,” he said. “I think people are tired of excuses in this club. Sometimes I talk about relegation. Because our club needs a shock.”

Amorim, charming as he continues to be, gives full and frank answers. It is what has got him this far, winning two titles in Portugal and landing him the job to replace Erik ten Hag. Still, it is startling to hear a United manager talk in these terms and the effect on his team will be interesting to observe.

A sardonic take might be that a trip to the Championship would provide the cover required for further INEOS streamlining, but nobody is seriously planning for a 1974-style jolt to reboot the club.

Amorim also suggested United would have to change coach before he compromised his 3-4-2-1 approach, and the mitigation for him is huge. He has had only four full training sessions with a squad built for a different system — the quality and athleticism of which is being exposed as the weeks go on.

United’s fans gave their view, heartily singing “Amorim’s Red and White Army,” either side of the break.

The man himself said: “I have to sell my idea, I don’t have another one. If I’m going to change all the time it is going to be even worse.”

Amorim’s commitment is commendable. But starting Casemiro and Christian Eriksen in midfield was an idea that had gone stale by the start of last season, let alone midway through this one. Newcastle, as expected, were far too strong for Amorim’s side in the middle of the pitch.

The sight of Bruno Guimaraes passing the ball round Eriksen on the way to Newcastle’s second goal was painful from a United perspective.

It was one of the most catastrophic openings at Old Trafford in recent memory. At 25 minutes, with United failing to register a single attempt at goal, Newcastle had recorded eight shots, with four on target, three of them Opta-defined big chances. That didn’t include two wicked corners from Kieran Trippier that could be counted as real efforts to score given recent goals against United. By the time Sandro Tonali walked into United’s box for a clear strike, only to hit the post, the atmosphere was mutinous.

Rather than either one of the two 32-year-olds in midfield coming off, and with United needing goals, it was Joshua Zirkzee replaced, a player ostensibly bought as a striker. Amorim acted on 33 minutes in what became a brutal, surreal spectacle.

Loud cheers greeted Zirkzee’s number going up, and although some supporters booed that cruel response as a way of showing solidarity, the 23-year-old, a £36.5million ($45.8m) summer signing, headed straight down the tunnel. He did emerge a few minutes later, although his hood was up as he took his seat on the bench.

Zirkzee walks off after being substituted in the first half (Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

Kobbie Mainoo came on, and helped prevent a hammering, but some light comedy continued. Casemiro delivered quite plausibly the most off-target shot humanly possible, and then skewed a much closer finish wide too. Mainoo, gifted the ball by Fabian Schar, had chosen to go to him over Rasmus Hojlund or Amad when four on two, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

At one point Harry Maguire tried to inject urgency, bursting forward with the ball and urging Alejandro Garnacho and Diogo Dalot to run ahead. In apparent frustration, his pass went behind both and out of play. (It is notable United have not scored in three successive games that Dalot and Noussair Mazraoui have started as wing-backs.) Even Amad was afflicted, wasting a good counter-attack by passing the ball into touch.

United resorted to set pieces, with Eriksen seizing on free kicks around halfway as a chance to get the ball into the box. A long throw from Dalot caused some chaos. From one of these situations, Maguire went closest to scoring with a header that hit the post.

Hojlund cut a forlorn figure, a combination of his own limitations and poor service presenting him with one chance, which he put wide.

Up to the final whistle, Marcus Rashford remained on the bench. It was his first appearance in a matchday squad after four omissions. He scored a brace on his last Premier League start, against Everton at the beginning of this long December, but there are good reasons why Amorim has kept him out.

Marcus Rashford was an unused substitute against Newcastle (Carl Recine/Getty Images)

He was brought back to the squad against Newcastle with Bruno Fernandes and Manuel Ugarte suspended. But despite the circumstances, he stayed in his seat. More humbling than not being involved at all? Or the first step towards reintegration? Time will tell.

“I’m not making a point,” Amorim said. “I think about the team. You think a lot about Marcus. I just want to win the game and you can feel it. I’m talking about the idea and the fight for relegation and I want to make a point during a game? No, I just want to win the game.”

The buoyancy of that 4-0 win over Everton, when Rashford and Zirkzee each scored twice, has popped, and so much about United right now feels like a tightrope walk.

(Top photo: Molly Darlington/Copa/Getty Images)

Travis Kelce has not put up his typical numbers in the 2024 football season, but apparently it doesn’t matter much to his fans.

Despite the – by his standards – subpar season, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end managed to garner the most votes by fans for the 2025 Pro Bowl.

He racked up 252,200 votes from fans, and it’s fair to say that his relationship with Taylor Swift likely boosted that number.

Kelce and Swift began dating in September last year, significantly increasing his already sky-high popularity, but outside of football circles.

After winning Super Bowl LVII, Kelce was tabbed to host Saturday Night Live, and he had already dipped his toes in reality television, but dating Swift took his name to a whole new level.

This year would be Kelce’s 10th Pro Bowl selection. He has 97 receptions for 823 yards and three touchdowns this season.

However, this will in all likelihood be the first time since 2015 that Kelce will play at least 16 games and fail to get 1,000 yards. Kelce played in 15 last year, missing his first game due to injury since his rookie season, and garnered 984.

Jahmyr Gibbs had just under 2,000 fewer votes than Kelce as the second-highest vote getter.

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce warms up before the game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Acrisure Stadium. (Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images)

NFL TEAMS DOING ‘EXTENSIVE HOMEWORK’ ON JON GRUDEN SINCE CONTROVERSIAL EMAILS AS OFFSEASON APPROACHES: REPORT

Kelce isn’t the only member of the Chiefs to slow down on offense. In fact, it’s been a team-wide epidemic. However, an elite defense and balls bouncing the right way, sometimes quite literally, have propelled them to a 15-1 season so far and the No. 1 seed in the AFC after back-to-back Super Bowl championships.

Jayden Daniels, Joe Burrow and Jared Goff rounded out the top five.

This is the third year of the Pro Bowl Games after the NFL eliminated its full-contact all-star contest and replaced it with a week of skills competitions and a flag football game.

The games take place in Central Florida and finish with a 7-on-7 flag football game between the AFC and NFC at Camping World Stadium in Orlando on Feb. 2.

Kansas City Chiefs (Scott Galvin-Imagn Images)

Retired Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning will be back as head coaches for the two conferences.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Days after Dana Stubblefield’s 2020 rape conviction was reversed by an appellate court because of “racially discriminatory language” by the prosecution during the trial, an attorney for the former San Francisco 49ers star said he expects Stubblefield to be released from custody within days.

Attorney Allen Sawyer told The Times that he and Kenneth Rosenfeld, a fellow attorney also representing Stubblefield, filed a motion Tuesday with the Superior Court of Santa Clara for Stubblefield’s release. A hearing could be held by the end of this week, Sawyer said.

“This hearing is just going to be addressing the status of his custody now that the appellate court has reversed his conviction and he’s not at this point convicted of anything, not even a parking ticket,” Sawyer said. “We expect that he should be released until the time when it eventually comes back under what they call a remittitur from the appellate court to the trial court, officially notifying them of the reversal and instructing them on how to proceed”

Sawyer said he expects the remittitur to take place in February, at which time it will be decided if a retrial might be heard.

Stubblefield played 11 seasons in the NFL for San Francisco, Washington and Oakland, earning defensive rookie of the year (1993) and defensive player of the year (1997) honors during his time with the 49ers.

In May 2016, Stubblefield was charged with raping a woman at gunpoint the previous year. During his trial, Stubblefield’s defense argued that the sex was consensual. He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in October 2020 after a jury found him guilty of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and false imprisonment, and that he had used a firearm in committing the first two offenses.

Last week, California’s Sixth Court of Appeals reversed Stubblefield’s conviction based on the California Racial Justice Act of 2020, which prohibits judges, attorneys, law enforcement officer, among others, from exhibiting “bias or animus towards the defendant because of the defendant’s race, ethnicity, or national origin.”

The appellate court’s decision was based on language used in the prosecution’s closing argument, which began nearly two months after a white police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and sparked a summer of protests nationwide.

“In closing arguments, the prosecutor asserted the police made the decision not to search Stubblefield’s house [for a gun] based partly on the fact that he was a famous Black man,” the opinion reads. “The prosecutor claimed a search would have opened up ‘a storm of controversy,’ and added, ‘Can you imagine in Morgan Hill when they search an African-American —,” whereupon defense counsel objected. The trial court sustained the objection but gave the jury no admonishments or instructions with respect to this part of the prosecutor’s arguments.”

The opinon continued: “We find the prosecution violated the Racial Justice Act as codified in part at Penal Code section 745. The prosecution explicitly asserted Stubblefield’s race was a factor in law enforcement’s decision not to search his house. The statement implied the house might have been searched and a gun found had Stubblefield not been Black, and that Stubblefield therefore gained an undeserved advantage at trial because he was a Black man.

“Second, the claim that a search would ‘open up a storm of controversy’ implicitly referenced the events that followed George Floyd’s then-recent killing, appealing to racially biased perceptions of those events and associating Stubblefield with them based on his race. We find the prosecution’s statements constituted ‘racially discriminatory language about’ Stubblefield’s race within the meaning of Penal Code section 745, subdivision (a)(2), and we conclude his conviction was sought or obtained in violation of subdivision (a). … We are required to vacate the conviction and sentence, find that it is legally invalid, and order new proceedings consistent with subdivision (a).”

The Santa Clara County Office of the District Attorney told The Times in a statement Tuesday that it is “studying the opinion.”

In an interview with TMZ on Monday, Rosenfeld said Stubblefield is “euphoric” over the reversal of his conviction and Sawyer added that their client is looking forward to being with his family upon his release.