Stuart Broad had the right idea.

The legendary England cricketer ended his playing days by hitting a six off his final ball with the bat and taking a wicket from his final delivery with the ball to win a match. Against Australia, his country’s most historic rivals, no less.

But he is the exception, not the rule. Thousands of professional sportsmen and women retire every year in circumstances far less celebrated and completely out of their control. But there are some controllables, right? Like bowing out at the top? Growing old gracefully? Or even just retaining your dignity?

There is another way — let’s call it the Cristiano Ronaldo way.

This way involves moving to a retirement league for a humungous payday and playing with and against vastly inferior opponents in a league where 14 of the 18 clubs have an average attendance of fewer than 9,000.

OK, fine, who is realistically going to turn down a reported £173million-a-year salary and king-like status? But there is still a way of behaving in a sophisticated, cultured manner while pocketing said cash.

All of which begs the question: Cristiano Ronaldo, what are you doing?

During Al Nassr’s Saudi Super Cup semi-final…

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…

The 2023 Women’s World Cup gets under way in Australia and New Zealand on July 20, with the U.S. hoping to navigate an expanded 32-team tournament to become the first country to win football’s biggest prize three times in a row.

They are the favourites, but will the four-time winners actually pull off the ‘three-peat’? What of England, European champions but decimated by injuries to key players as they attempt to win the tournament for the first time? Will Germany bounce back from losing the final of the Euros to lift the game’s biggest prize?

How will the likes of France, Spain and Canada perform after their preparations have been disrupted by disputes with their federations over the past few months?

And can we expect any surprises from any of the eight countries — Haiti, Morocco, Panama, Philippines, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Vietnam and Zambia — making their World Cup debuts?

Our expert writers give their verdicts on what they think will happen over the next five weeks.

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Flo Lloyd-Hughes, women’s football reporter

Winner: Germany. This is a very open tournament and there are four or five teams that have a good chance of winning the title. Germany are often the masters of their own downfall, but given their disappointment at the Euros last summer and their…

Let’s start with a few fun facts. 

Asisat Oshoala has been African women’s footballer of the year five times. She has won the Africa Cup of Nations three times. She has two Golden Boots and two Golden Balls at international tournaments: two each at AFCON and the Under-20 World Cup. 

She was the top scorer in Spain in 2021-22 and last season, notched a personal-best 21 goals for Barcelona — accompanied by three assists, which was comfortably more than her team-mates.

In 2019, she became the first African woman to score in a Champions League final. Two years later she became the first African woman to win a Champions League title. A year after that, she became the first African woman to be nominated for the Ballon d’Or. 

We could go on. There will certainly be better players at this World Cup, but there won’t be many as exciting to watch, or indeed many with a more interesting career story, than Oshoala. 

Born in Ikorodu, a coastal city about an hour’s drive from the Nigerian capital Lagos, Oshoala wasn’t exactly encouraged to pursue her sporting dreams as a child. Her parents would frequently not give her any food if she disobeyed them and went to play football, considering it a waste of time. They wanted her to become a lawyer instead. 

But when she was…