Steelers star TJ Watt linked with shock trade amid $21M contract standoff
Several NFL teams are reportedly considering making trade offers for the Steelers' standout defensive star, TJ Watt.
The pass rusher recently skipped Steelers OTAs and minicamp amid claims he is unhappy with his current contract.
Watt is due to earn a base salary of $21.05million in 2025 and speculation over his future has intensified following the arrival of Jalen Ramsey.
On Monday, the Miami Dolphins traded their defensive star and tight end Jonnu Smith to the Pittsburgh Steelers in exchange for safety Minkah Fitzpatrick.
According to ESPN, a number of teams have held talks about whether they can trade for Watt, the 2021 defensive player of the year.
The Steelers reportedly want Watt to finish his career in Pittsburgh but it is now thought that interest in him will increase following the trade for Ramsey.
Watt is in entering the final year of his contract and there has so far been no breakthrough in talks with the Steelers.
The 30-year-old has been with Pittsburgh for all of his eight years in the NFL and, in 2021, he signed a four-year, $112m deal with Pittsburgh worth an average of $28m a year.
Since then, however, Browns pass rusher Myles Garrett has signed a record deal that includes $123.5m guaranteed and a yearly average salary of $40m. The contract made Garrett the highest-paid non-quarterback in NFL history.
The Steelers have been at the center of some huge offseason moves, most notably the arrival of quarterback Aaron Rodgers after weeks of uncertainty over the quarterback's future.
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Daily Mail
11 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
The US invasion of Wimbledon: Americans descend on SW19 to enjoy a very British tennis experience - and not even the 'killer' heatwave is ruining their spirits
Wimbledon has been invaded by excited Americans who have flown over to enjoy a very British tennis experience this year. The world famous sporting event's queue was inundated with US tennis fans yesterday who were unbothered by the 32C heatwave. Last year, the Championships were streamed live by more than 26million Americans, the highest number since 2019, which may explain the uptake in visitors this year. A group of six best friends, hailing from Florida, New Jersey and Texas, flew eight-and-a-half hours to London to especially for the occasion. Donning matching custom T-shirts, emblazoned with 'Balls, Bubbles and Besties', the women joined the long, winding non-ticket holder queue at 7am yesterday. Having already been waiting four hours, Laurie, Jennie, Amy, Sandra, Lydia and Lindy were all in high spirits, even after being told they faced another three hours before reaching the front. 'It's the first time for some of us, some of us have been a few times, but Lindy is a vet,' Lydia said. She added: 'We can't wait for the games and we are rooting for Coco Gauff.' Fans faced a long wait to enter the grounds amid the record opening day temperatures yesterday The 21-year-old, who is famous for having beaten Venus Williams at Wimbledon in 2019, is one of 35 American players in the singles draw this year - providing plenty of homegrown talent for US attendees to support. One of the best friends, Jennie, said: 'We've been queuing since 7am and we are hoping to get in there today. 'We're want to attend for the next three days so we will be queuing up every day.' Whilst Brits melted in the heat, fanning themselves and swigging bottles of water, the group of best friends were unbothered. 'We're from Florida, so the heat is fine for us,' said Jennie. 'But we were not expecting this in England. We have our umbrellas for shade and plenty booze and card games. We've already had three bottles of bubbly so far this morning!' Elsewhere in Queue Village, Aaron and Anna-Marie from Florida donned classic Wimbledon whites and lounged in the sun. The married couple landed in the UK yesterday morning after making the seven-and a-half-hour flight to attend the Grand Slam's opening day. Having joined crowds at many sporting events back home, tennis was the only sport they had not yet seen live and in-person. Also there yesterday were Bart, Kiah and Cohen, who travelled from Milwaukee in the US and have been crossing Europe for the past fortnight - and who mingled with Britons Brad and Ben Aaron said it was something they wanted to tick off their 'bucket list' and when considering choosing Wimbledon, they both said: 'Let's go.' They too were unfazed by the high tempratures and humidity, with Aaron declaring: 'We're from Florida, it's easy.' The glamorous pair flew back to the States this morning having made the 15-hour round trip just to spend the day at Wimbledon. Cohen, Kiah and Bart travelled from Milwaukee in the US and have been on a tour around Europe for the past fortnight. Bart decided to add Wimbledon as a last minute pit stop after starting in Switzerland and travelling through France to Britain - having last come to Wimbledon five years ago but wanting to return ever since. He described how he took another two days off work with permission from his boss to come to the event, adding: 'It was her idea. 'I told her about the trip and I said, 'If i was to stay two days longer to go to Wimbledon...' and she said, 'Then you go to Wimbledon!'.' The trio, who were shading themselves under Union Jack umbrellas, had befriended Brits Ben and Brad sat next to them in the line. Over at the camping queue, another group of Americans explained how they flew six and a half hours from their home states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Buffalo, New York, especially for Wimbledon. Aiden, Abigail and Mary McGovern and Alice and Maureen Curtis pitched up their tent yesterday morning with hopes of making it in to today's games. 'I think flying here for Wimbledon started off as a joke,' Aiden said. Alice, who plays tennis competitively back home in the states, said: 'My daughter actually lives in London and I was already planning to come and visit her. Then I read about the queue and I said we should come over and do it!' Speaking about the 32C heat yesterday, Aiden said: 'We just had a heatwave back home, so this is a breeze in the park for us.' The tennis fanatics said are rooting for Coco Guaff, Jessica Pegula and Carlos Alcaraz. Aiden added: 'I'd like to see Shelton get far this year too! We've gotta root for the Americans, of course!' Alice said she was surprised how 'easy' the process of setting up their camp was and Abigail was impressed with how 'well organised' it all is. 'Our flat is just a short walk away, so we headed over, asked two people for help and they told us "Just walk until you see the flag and the tents and have a goodnight!",' Aiden explained. They were passing the time with card games and planned to 'do shifts in the tent', adding: 'Whoever pulls the short straw has to sleep outside.' This years influx of American tennis fans comes after last year's Championships reached the highest viewing numbers on TV since 2019. ESPN's coverage of the ladies' singles final attracted just over 2 million viewers, a 40 per cent increase from 2023, whilst the gentlemen's singles final had a peak audience of 3.2 million.
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Club World Cup that wasn't: how fake highlights took over the internet
This story was reported by Indicator, a publication that investigates digital deception, and co-published with the Guardian. It was Thursday morning in America and something didn't look right in the highlights of the Club World Cup match between Manchester City and Juventus. The video in front of me was the top result on both YouTube and Google Search's video tab for the game in Orlando. More than 700,000 people had already watched the best moments of the riveting 3-2 matchup. And yet, footage showed City head coach Pep Guardiola all bundled up in a puffer jacket ill-suited to humid Florida summers. On a couple of occasions, the commentators on the video referred to the Juventus goalkeeper as Martin Dúbravka. He actually plays for Newcastle, a totally unrelated team that wears a black-and-white jersey similar to that worn by the Italian side. Oh, also? The match wasn't on until several hours later. The Club World Cup is the controversial brainchild of Fifa president Gianni Infantino, pitting 32 clubs from around the world in a replica of the World Cup played by national sides. Attendance numbers have been so-so, but the money at stake is huge. Crucially, online interest has been strong. Globally, Google searches for the tournament have dwarfed those for Donald Trump, even on the day the US president announced America would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. YouTube has long failed to keep fake highlights and livestreams of football games off its platform. But these have typically been recreated from video games, making them easy to spot as soon as you've opened the video. Now, a group of gaming creators based in Egypt developed a winning formula that combined repackaged clips from old games, obsessive interest in star players like Lionel Messi, and data voids, to get clicks and ad revenue. Earlier this year, the Egyptian gaming creator Mohamed Reda started posting highlight reels of the MLS team Inter Miami on his YouTube channel Reda Bow. These videos always promised a 'Crazy Hat-Trick' by eight-time Ballon d'Or winner Lionel Messi and atypical score lines like 9-3 or 7-4. Like the Man City v Juventus highlights above, the clips were in reality just medleys of old goals. Reda Bow's fake highlights did increasingly well: videos posted in April got 40,000 to 60,000 views but by June his videos were being seen 300,000 times. Then came the Club World Cup. Reda and two other Egyptian gaming creators started posting the same templated highlights across several YouTube accounts they managed. They focused on the buzzier games that featured Messi or top European teams like Manchester City and Real Madrid. Crucially, they posted the fake highlights 24 to 48 hours before the matches started. There was little competition for video content about the game before the game. The channels were also verified and had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The content was fresh and seemingly authoritative, so Google and YouTube's algorithms ranked it highly. So what if the videos defied not only the time continuum but also basic math by promising a 'Messi Hat-Trick' even when Inter Miami had only purportedly scored two goals. The operation's takeover was absolutely comprehensive – just look at the Google Search video tab results for three CWC matches held last week. Videos from the Egyptian creators appear in the top four slots across every game, each with a slightly different scoreline for games that had yet to be played. The scheme worked. Collectively, 30-odd videos pushed out by the trio were seen 14m times over two weeks. All of the channels were monetized and ran ads for everything from Chase and B&H to Grubhub and Spectrum. Ironically, the videos also made money from ads for tickets for Club World Cup matches. (Fifa ignored multiple requests for comment.) Because no deep dive into scams is complete without some AI garbage, the videos also ran ads for questionable diets fronted by a synthetically edited Oprah Winfrey (and many other AI-generated personas). The hundreds of comments on the videos fall into two categories. About 40% of users don't appear to recognize the deception and post enthusiastic remarks about Lionel Messi or putdowns of his archnemesis Cristiano Ronaldo. The remainder call out the fact that the highlights aren't real. One despairing viewer wrote 'can't believe 800k+ people clicked on this and the game has not happened yet.' My personal favorite is a user who wrote 'You are very good at making hundreds of thousands or millions of moths come to watch.' (I'm assuming it sounds even better in the original Thai.) All of the videos in this scheme included a few minutes at the end that showed the channel owner playing a video game like eFootball. After the games falsely represented in the videos were played, the creators updated the title to the actual score. When view growth started slowing down because interest in the game faded, they trimmed the entire highlights element out of the video and left only the final clip of them playing the video game. This bait-and-switch served to both drive ad revenue and juice up historical numbers on the channel for newcomers. I reached out to YouTube about the videos and was acknowledged on Friday. By that evening, the platform had removed all videos under its policies against spam, deceptive practices and scams. It also terminated all the channels involved but by the time of publication had not gotten back to me on the motivation. At least one fake highlight reel with almost 1m views was still live, however. The fake highlights scheme was juicy enough that several other YouTube channels got in on the fun, scraping the Egyptians' fake highlights or making some of their own. (Some of this stuff also made it on TikTok, collecting millions of views there.) The videos appear on channels whose purpose is entirely unrelated to football – including cooking, fishing, farming and bird breeding channels. I assume these are old accounts taken over by a scam operation, but I haven't had time to dig any further. Here are some pigeon videos in case that's your thing. The stakes here appear lower than the average Indicator story about deceptive behavior online. Viewers who fell for these videos may have been a little disappointed to realize what happened. At a stretch, some may have even gambled one way or another based on the videos. But if a user didn't know what time the game was on, failed to recognize the outdated spliced clips, and went on to comment 'MESSI' underneath the videos, they probably weren't in the market for sophisticated football analysis anyway. YouTube and its advertisers definitely lost some money from this deceptive operation, but it's hard to feel too bad for either of them. What matters here is less the fake content itself than the behavioral deception that enabled it to succeed. On one of the most searched topics of the moment, a group of young YouTube creators were able to outwit Google's ranking and moderation and surge to the top of results. By trimming videos after publication, they also showed the vulnerability of a functionality that can very easily be abused for more nefarious purposes – for instance, posting incendiary remarks to drive referral traffic from other platforms then trim them out in time to avoid getting flagged for any policy violation. For what it's worth, Manchester City actually trounced Juventus 5-2. Suzi Ragheb provided research support and translation of one of the videos in Arabic.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Guardiola's perfect record ends in haphazard fashion
The Club World Cup group stage had been plain sailing for Manchester City, winning all three games, but they fell at the first knockout hurdle following a haphazard defensive Guardiola's side were often opened up on the counter-attack and made to pay heavily for their sloppiness at both ends of the pitch - failing to take a host of first-half result also ends Guardiola's flawless record at the Club World Cup as manager of Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Spaniard had won all 11 of his previous matches at the tournament, conceding just four goals - but that total doubled in the space of 120 thrilling minutes in Orlando."It wasn't a fluke but really worrying signs," former City goalkeeper Shay Given said on Dazn."Al-HIlal could have scored even more. It is a real worry the chances they gave up."For Guardiola, the task now is to sort out the issues they faced in Florida before the Premier League opener at Wolves on 16 August.
