Chelsea have completed the signing of France forward Sandy Baltimore on a free transfer from Paris Saint-Germain.

The 24-year-old has signed a four-year deal with the Women’s Super League champions to keep her at the club until 2028, as reported by The Athletic last month.

The move will see Baltimore link up with new Chelsea head coach Sonia Bompastor after the former Lyon boss was confirmed as Emma Hayes’ successor last month. Chelsea, however, had been keeping tabs on the talented winger way before the appointment of compatriot Bompastor.

Baltimore, who has made over 200 appearances for PSG and has a fair amount of Champions League experience, is a versatile attacking midfielder who can play on either wing. As a left-footed player, she will provide more balance to the squad.

“I’m very happy to join Chelsea,” said Baltimore. “It feels incredible. I have always wanted to play for Chelsea and now look, it has happened!”

Baltimore and new Chelsea coach Bompastor know each other from their battles in France (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

General manager Paul Green added: “Sandy has gained a wealth of experience in France including within the UEFA…

The Champions League final is the biggest club game on the calendar and the climax of the football season.

On June 1, Real Madrid, the 14-time winners of Europe’s elite club competition, will play German club Borussia Dortmund at Wembley Stadium in London. According to UEFA, the game will be shown in more than 200 territories and will reach 450million people worldwide, with an estimated global average viewership of around 145m.

The most ardent of football supporters, be it in the United States or the United Kingdom, will devour any match if it is on TV, whether that is the Premier League, Ligue 1, Major League Soccer (MLS) or the Women’s Super League (WSL).

Fortunately for fans, most games are now available on TV — but just how much do those in the U.S. and the UK pay to tune in?

As part of TNT Sports’ deal with UEFA, the broadcaster has to make the Champions League final free to view in the UK, giving supporters a small reprieve from the monthly costs associated with watching football on TV.

Regular fixtures, however, are seldom made available for free, and following your team on TV, or another league, is not cheap.

For the figures in this article, the platform’s baseline cost is not factored in. For example, the cost of basic cable in the U.S. is not included in the…

European football is closed for winter. The stadiums are empty and the training pitches are dusted with snow. But in northern France, with a tactics board over his shoulder and red and blue counters plotting his next move, Lille head coach Paulo Fonseca is ready for the game to return.

And why not? Fonseca, 50, is in his second season at Lille (LOSC) and his side are playing some of the most watchable attacking football in Ligue 1. LOSC were fifth at the turn of the year, spent almost three months unbeaten, and have qualified for the knockout stages of the Europa Conference League. They have defeated Monaco. They held Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain.

This is the fourth country in which Fonseca has coached. After leaving Portugal in 2016, he restored Shakhtar Donetsk to the top of Ukrainian football, building a team admired across Europe, before then experiencing the crosswinds of life at Roma. One good season, one less so. After leaving Italy, he was ensnared by Tottenham’s chaotic coaching search during the summer of 2021. The following year, Fonseca, his wife, Katerina, and their young child fled Kyiv in the early hours of a February morning, escaping the Ukrainian capital as Russian bombing devastated the city.

Then in 2022, he arrived in Lille. They had won the Ligue 1…

Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) has sold a minority stake in Paris Saint-Germain to U.S. based private investment firm Arctos Partners.

Arctos is purchasing a 12.5 per cent stake of the Ligue 1 club in a move that would value PSG at around €4.25billion (£3.64bn, $4.58bn), according to sources close to the deal.

PSG state that QSI will continue to have full control of all decisions at the club, while Arctos will not influence any on-field matters.

PSG state the investment from Arctos will support the club’s “operations and real estate initiatives”, including in relation to the stadium and their Poissy training ground, which opened this year. Arctos will also focus on the development of PSG’s women’s side and provide strategic services to help the club expand into new markets.

PSG are not Arctos’ first venture into sporting investment, with the firm already holding minority stakes in over 30 sports properties across MLB, NBA, NHL, Formula 1 and football including the LA Dodgers, the Golden State Warriors and Aston Martin. Arctos is also an investor in Fenway Sports Group, the owners of Liverpool, while it acquired a £29.2m stake in Italian club Atalanta in May 2022.

PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi said: “As a club and institution, we are entering the next exciting…

Arsenal and Wolfsburg have two things in common: they made the UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) semi-finals last season and were knocked out of this year’s competition in the qualifying rounds by Paris FC.

It was not a surprise, according to those working at the French club, rather a just reward for their commitment to a long-term project. Considered the third force in women’s football in France, Paris FC have long-lived in the shadows of heavyweights Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG).

“We’re used to saying that when you don’t necessarily have money, you have ideas,” says Antoine Ferreira, the club’s head of recruitment.

Paris FC are relatively unknown outside of France, but following their victories against Arsenal and Wolfsburg, they are now in the spotlight. Before their second UWCL group-stage game against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Thursday, people are asking: who are Paris FC and where did they come from?

In 2017, Paris FC (whose men’s team play in Ligue 2) bought local side Juvisy to become part of its women’s section, transforming the club from an amateur setup into a professional, full-time outfit. A year later, Sandrine Soubeyrand, France’s most capped…

After moving back to Paris Saint-Germain from Spain in the summer of 2021, midfielders Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo had lots in common.

Both France internationals, they followed the same Muslim faith, stayed in the same hotel in their first few weeks at the Paris club and shared a summer holiday to Tanzania. They were also in the same place at the same time when a brutal attack occurred in Chatou, west of Paris, on November 4, 2021.

On that day, two years ago, the footballers’ lives took very different paths.

On the journey back home from a team dinner, Hamraoui and Diallo were stopped by two masked men. One hit Hamraoui with an iron bar, targeting her legs, and the other held Diallo to the steering wheel.

Reports soon emerged that Diallo was linked to the attack so she could take Hamraoui’s place in the PSG team.

In September 2022, 10 months on, Diallo and five men were arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy. According to a police report, Diallo instigated the attack on Hamraoui, her motive being “violent jealousy”.

One man admitted to beating up Hamraoui and another is suspected of pinning Diallo to the steering wheel. The men…

Welcome to The Athletic Mini, a short format you will see in the coming weeks on some of our soccer coverage. 

On November 4 2021, on the way home from a Paris Saint-Germain team dinner, Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo were stopped by two masked men. One hit Hamraoui with an iron bar, targeting her legs, and the other held Diallo to the steering wheel.

Ten months on, Diallo and five men were arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy. According to a police report, Diallo instigated the attack on Hamraoui, her motive being “violent jealousy”. Diallo, now playing for Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia (employers of Cristiano Ronaldo), has always maintained she is innocent.

The Athletic’s Charlotte Harpur has spoken to those close to PSG, the players’ lawyers and the public prosecutor to unpick the tangled web of what has happened to the former PSG team-mates in the last two years.

Hamraoui, who joined Club America in Mexico in September, has written a book and is filming a documentary and it’s little surprise: this extraordinary web of claim and counter-claim has had ramifications far beyond PSG’s women’s team.