Player revolts, owner exits and what breaks next: our bold sports predictions for 2026

Here are our bold predictions for 2025 in sports. Please note the bold (or should that be bold?) in bold predictions: these are mostly to be taken with a pinch of salt.

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The Luka Dončić-JJ Redick relationship goes south

Luka Dončić and JJ Redick’s relationship will crack and become a national storyline. The Lakers’ coach will eventually show public frustration with Luka’s lack of consistent defensive intensity and his inability to fully build chemistry with teammates, including LeBron James. Dončić initially met Redick’s demand to arrive in “championship shape”, but the dynamic feels brittle. A 41-year-old first-time head coach pushing the league’s most ball-dominant star is a combustible mix, and the tension is unlikely to stay private forever. It has the makings of a modern Allen Iverson–Larry Brown saga: mutual respect, visible friction and, eventually, a very loud moment. Only instead of “practice?”, we will be hearing “defense”. Nicholas Levine

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The Auston Matthews era will end in Toronto

Sometime in 2026, Auston Matthews could leave the Toronto Maple Leafs. The spring, prior to the trade deadline, feels early, but one gets the sense that the relationship between Matthews and the Leafs is nearing its end. Yes, true, he just recently re-signed. And yes, that re-signing came with the captain’s ‘C’. Nevertheless, Matthews (who is likely still playing through a mystery long-term injury) has looked less and less comfortable on and off the ice. Leading into Christmas, Matthews went four straight games without registering a point for the first time since 2018. As for the fans, they’re unimpressed with Matthews this season – and the feeling might be mutual. Toronto sports media are notoriously swivel-eyed about the Leafs, interpreting and re-interpreting each sway of the team as foretelling a different future, so it’s easy to get hooked into false narratives. But increasingly, it looks like Matthews might be thinking about a future outside Toronto. The Leafs could be thinking the same thing. Colin Horgan

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Audi Crooks will become a household name

The 21-year-old Crooks is dominating women’s college basketball in a way that is becoming impossible to ignore. The Iowa State junior leads Division I in scoring at nearly 28 points a game, is the only player this season with multiple 40-point performances and recently tied a school record with 41 points in a Big 12 win over Kansas – for an undefeated Cyclones team currently ranked in the top 10. Since announcing herself nationally with 40 points against Maryland in last year’s NCAA tournament, Crooks has piled up historic nights against Indiana, Iowa and Valparaiso, pouring in 43 points in just 20 minutes. She is on pace to join Joel Embiid as just the second player across Division I, the NBA or the WNBA to average at least one point per minute over a full season.

But Crooks’ rise is not just statistical. She is a throwback star with modern reach: a dominant low-post force whose joy, humility and commitment to community – including a foundation delivering food packages to families affected by the SNAP shutdown in her home county – have made her a fan favorite far beyond Ames. As women’s basketball continues its surge into the mainstream, Crooks has the game and the presence to cross over with it. By the time she carries the Cyclones into the NCAA Tournament this March, “Audi-matic” will need no introduction. By year’s end, she’ll be doing what Marty Mauser couldn’t: staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box. Bryan Armen Graham

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Multiple major colleges will drop sports entirely

The typical Division I college sports program loses money or only manages to break even due to institutional support and student fees. Now consider everything that has changed in the last few years. Donors are being asked to foot the bill for Name/Image/Likeness (NIL) deals. College can make direct payments to athletes, and thanks to the transfer portal, any athlete who feels underpaid can pack up and go elsewhere. Conference realignment now forces many colleges to pay for all of their teams to travel from coast to coast several times a year. Colleges now have to ramp up staffing on everything from logistical planners to academic support specialists with the thankless job of figuring out whether someone attending his fourth school in four years can actually graduate. At some point, a college is going to hit the breaking point in the arms race and either drop sports entirely or move down to Division III, where schools don’t offer athletic scholarships and travel is much more manageable. Once one college makes that move, the floodgates will open. Beau Dure

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The end of sports’ infinite growth curve

For more than half a century, sports has endured as the most recession-proof of entertainment spectacles. But 2026 is when the sun begins to set on the era of everlasting growth. It used to be that televised sports was nothing but upside, especially in the US. The networks got unscripted dramas with reliable story arcs. The leagues and their partners got rich. Fans could watch big games and their local teams for free or for the nominal price of cable subscription and feel as if they were getting more than their money’s worth. The bigger audiences grew, the more everyone stood to benefit.

But now that Netflix, Apple and other digital platforms are crashing into the rights holding game, prepare for sports to run the same attention deficits that movies and TV shows have been slogging through since Silicon Valley stormed Hollywood. The more sports migrate to streaming – MLB.TV for local market games, Prime Video for the NFL and NBA, Apple TV for F1 – and force fans to shell out hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with action that was once virtually given away, the more the audience shrinks from subscription fees and general inconvenience and the frustration of having to search out entertainment that was once a remote click away. Eventually, new fans stop regenerating, interest flags, advertising dries up and the sports leagues that once counted on ever increasing budgets and resources suddenly find themselves having to figure out how to continue eking out a business in an attention economy where all digital content has the same negligible value. Andrew Lawrence

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MLB will play through 2027 despite lockout threats

It is still a little way off, but circle 1 December on the calendar. That is the date Major League Baseball owners could lock out players and begin the great work stoppage of 2027. The most contentious divide between the sides is, as ever in collective bargaining negotiations, player salaries. Some owners – particularly those not named the Mets or Dodgers – want a salary cap, arguing they cannot compete with the sport’s biggest spenders. Even Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner has recently complained about rising payrolls, despite his stadium being largely funded by the public. Players, for their part, will refuse a cap of any kind.

Most observers point toward a work stoppage. I do not. Baseball will play in 2027, and the sides will settle well before the deadline. Off the back of an epic 2025 World Series and a World Baseball Classic likely to draw huge global audiences, both parties will understand that going dark would only choke off the spout shooting cash into the game. With momentum on their side, they will find a way to strike a deal and keep the sport moving forward. David Lengel

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The beginning of the end will come for sports stadium giveaways

The close of 2025 brought the continuation of a long-running trend, as the Kansas City Chiefs ($6.2bn in value according to Forbes) and owners the Hunt family (net worth of around $25bn) successfully worked the state of Kansas to the tune of nearly $2bn in public money for a new, $3bn domed stadium, which the state will finance via the sale of municipal bonds. Kansas will own the development, whose revenue they mostly can’t use to pay back the bonds, and the rent from which will be deposited into a fund only the Chiefs can use. Countless economists and studies have shown that these sorts of deals do not bring any real, tangible benefit to the locality at hand. And the funding mechanism enabling them to happen weren’t even meant to be used this way; they were meant to fund things like bridges, roads and parks but have been used since the ‘80s for private sports stadiums thanks to a loophole that has yet to be closed despite multiple proposed federal bills banning the practice.

There appears to be no momentum towards any of this stopping; not after the Kansas City deal, or ones of similar scale in Nashville or Buffalo, or any number of smaller deals in which the public is made to pay for the benefit of a private business. But 2026 will be different. The coming leftward reaction to the far-right and billionaire-friendly ways of the current administration will make voters especially attuned to the ways they are getting fleeced. This is a dynamic that Zohran Mamdani combined with sports masterfully in his campaign against Fifa’s World Cup ticket pricing, creating a conversation that went national and won him even more momentum in a victorious campaign. It’s one of the few aspects of his strategy that could reasonably be adapted for campaigns outside of the unique American metropolis that is NYC, and somebody, somewhere, is going to gain some votes and start a serious movement against these giveaways using similar tactics. Alexander Abnos

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Miriam Adelson will sell the Dallas Mavericks

As Dallas Mavericks fans protested outside the American Airlines Center after the stunning Luka Dončić trade, their threnody moved beyond sport into something almost sacrosanct: basketball’s peculiar ability to turn a player from across the world into family. That was Dončić in Dallas. Nico Harrison orchestrated the trade and became public enemy No 1 across North Texas, and though he was fired in early November, the franchise remains haunted. You can remove an executive; you cannot unwind a rupture. Harrison was the face of the decision, but responsibility ultimately lies with owner Miriam Adelson, the dual-citizen billionaire casino magnate (and Trump mega-donor) for whom franchises are assets in a portfolio rather than civic trusts. Rarely seen at games and showing scant concern for fan grievance, Adelson now presides over a team stripped of its generational star and much of its goodwill. What if the past year and a half was not the billion-dollar bargain she expected? What if she sold? A sale would not bring Dončić back, but it could free Dallas from a hollowed-out era of remote ownership and offer something rare in modern sport: not competitive redemption, but moral closure. Lee Escobedo

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The 2026 WNBA season will happen – but only after the league nearly self-destructs

The WNBA and the WNBPA have been negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement since the 2020 deal expired in October, and as of now there is no agreement in place that guarantees a 2026 season – or allows expansion teams in Toronto and Portland to move forward with business as usual. While fears of a lost season are real, no one involved actually wants that outcome.

The 2026 WNBA season will happen, but only after a confrontation that brings the league to the brink. With players newly unified after a strike authorization vote and alternative structures already in place, the leverage has shifted. Unrivaled – the fast-growing women’s professional league founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart – has shown there is both demand and infrastructure beyond the traditional model. The mere possibility of players organizing outside the WNBA, even temporarily, would be a negotiating weapon the league could not ignore.

There is no evidence of a ready-made replacement league waiting in the wings, and organizing one overnight would be enormously difficult. But the point is not whether a parallel season actually launches. It is that, for the first time, players plausibly believe they would have options. That belief – and the pressure it creates – will force a deal. The season will arrive, bruised but intact, after a fight that permanently reshapes who truly holds power in women’s basketball. Stephanie Kaloi