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Usually there are four major championships each golf season – all majors are part of both the PGA Tour and European Tour – and they are supposed to go in this order: Masters in April, PGA Championship in May, United States Open in June, and British Open in July.

However, this is anything but a normal year around the planet due to the coronavirus pandemic. The British Open, scheduled to begin July 16 at Royal St. George’s in England, has been flat-out canceled for this year because of it. It’s the first time the tournament won’t be played since World War II. Royal St. George’s will instead host in 2021.

The other three majors have been rescheduled in the hope of playing them, although it’s quite  possible no fans would be allowed in attendance. The Masters was to tee off this Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club but now will run from November 12-15 – smack dab in the middle of the NFL and college football seasons.

Looking for some Esports and Premier League crossover content to while away the Easter weekend? Look no further, as some of England’s best footballers will be taking to the virtual Wembley pitch to battle it out on FIFA20 and prove they are the best Esports player in the England squad.

In what should be a highly entertaining series, 16 international players from the Under 21’s Men’s Seniors and Women’s Seniors squads will take each other on by playing the popular video game FIFA 20 in a tournament designed to thrill fans and test each player’s mettle.

The whole thing is part of the new #FootballsStayingHome initiative, which was announced by England captains Harry Kane and Steph Houghton earlier this week.

Introducing #FootballsStayingHome!

With most of the world operating on a policy of social distancing first and asking questions later, there are concerns that people’s mental health will be affected by the degree of separation we are all experiencing from loved ones right now.

One benefit of the Esports many of us enjoy is the collaborative, colloquial nature of them. They are ways we connect to our friends, they are routes to conversation, camaraderie and true friendship.

That’s never been more important for children than during this crisis.

It’s very good news, then, that the High School Esports League (HSEL) has launched Generation Esports, a new platform for competitive gaming that will help players of all ages connect, have fun and possibly win money too.

The Democratic Presidential primary process is basically over. After months of debates, and a whirlwind primary process, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has admitted defeat, clearing the way for former Vice President Joe Biden to be the presumptive nominee. While there’s still so much to be done before Americans go to the polls and vote for their next president, the question Bodog is asking is, who will be his nominee for Vice President?

Bodog has been offering odds on the potential next VP since March 1, and Kamala Harris has led all contenders in the 6 weeks since. She opened the race at +200, and since Sanders dropped out, she’s become an even bigger favorite at +160. Despite bashing Biden over his prior stances on school bus policies, Harris has stayed active since ending her own presidential run, doing things that are typical of potential VP nominees.

The perhaps surprising candidate currently in second place is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She entered the odds at +2000 on March 1, surging to a current +425. She peaked at +325 when Sanders dropped out, but has dropped down slightly. She may be a solid pick as voters hope for someone with executive experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Third in the race is Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who had more staying power than Harris in her own presidential race. She opened the race at +225, but has now slid to +500, possibly because either Whitmer or Harris look more likely, or because she’s had to deal with her husband catching COVID-19.

No sports league would have arbitrarily shut down their operations if it didn’t believe the move was absolutely and indisputably necessary. The amount of money lost during a forced break in the middle of a season is tremendous, and there’s little chance of ever being able to recuperate the revenue. The coronavirus made the decision to suspend sports activity a requirement, but leagues around the world are now trying to put together contingency plans to get back to work. In the case of the English Premier League (EPL), soccer games could see a relaunch in June, but only under certain conditions. A month and a half will probably seem like an eternity for players and fans.

EPL executives have met with representatives from the league’s 20 teams, as well as health officials, to figure out how to get soccer going again, according to The Daily Mirror. They settled on a plan to get things started in June and, if the plan moves forward, games will be played in empty stadiums and players will be forced to limit contact with anyone outside the league. Additionally, if the two can come up with a mutually-beneficial alternative, the EPL and the sports broadcasting space will reach a deal that could see more games aired on TV, including on over-the-air channels where they’re currently not found.

There’s a lot at stake by keeping the season suspended, although everyone recognizes the health issues that are at risk. The EPL is earning around $5.32 billion by offering broadcast rights to overseas sports broadcasters, money that was already paid for the 2019-22 soccer periods. If the league can’t deliver, those entities could try to sue in order to recuperate part of the investment. Additionally, no soccer means sportsbooks are missing out on their major source of revenue, one that delivered $6.1 billion in fiscal year 2019.

In addition to the financial impact on businesses involved in soccer, there’s also concern for the workers in the industry. Most EPL clubs made the decision to let go much of their staff, which resulted in an increase in unemployment claims. The U.K. created a Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme that provides 80% of the pre-COVID-19 wages to employees, but some argue that this is not the ideal solution. Instead, they want soccer players to step up and provide assistance.

Tennis was put on an indefinite hiatus last week as the grip of Coronavirus on sporting occasions reached a peak. Within days of the indefinite suspension being announced, the All-England LCub released a statement confirming tennis fans’ worst fears – Wimbledon was cancelled and would not be coming back this year. Players won’t play on the famous SW19 grass until June 2021.

Within minutes of this announcement, a ripple of worry went around the tennis world – not for players at the top of the tree such as Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic, but for the grass roots players who struggle to put food on the table thanks to their tennis skills.

Step forward the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) then, and in some style, with a pretty comprehensive £20 million compensation package.

Working alongside the tennis associations of both Scotland and Wales, the LTA have put together a plan to help players survive during the COVID-19 crisis. The idea is to help players of all levels in Britain make it through this extended shutdown to the sport. Just as the Premier League have donated money to the lower leagues who prop them up, tennis has acted t protect those who are most in need.

So far in our series covering the best Premier League teams seen this century, we’ve covered the Manchester United side who kicked off the Millennium in dominating fashion, visited the Arsenal teams that conquered Britain in both 2002 and 2004 and considered the might of Mourinho’s first Chelsea side who broke records.

In 2006/07, however, the re-emergence of Manchester United would once again change the way we looked at the legacy of Sir Alex Ferguson. It was one thing to turn United, perennial league underachievers, from a side hopeful of a cup victory at best in the 1980’s into a ruthless title-winning machine in the 1990’s. It was quite another to go on and win the fabled treble of the League, F.A. Cup and European Cup in 1998/99, paving the way for three titles in a row at the turn of the new century.

To overcome an Arsenal side who had their pick of some of the best French players in the country’s history as well as a Chelsea team bankrolled by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was something completely different. So how did Ferguson and United achieve what they did in 2007 and beyond, putting together their second run of three titles in a row?

Looking back at the start of that season now, 14 years on, it’s hard to see how United could even rely on their two biggest stars in Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. The two men had clashed in what was the flashpoint of the 2006 World Cup in a game between England and Portugal that saw Rooney sent off in disgrace, a decision helped along by a winking Ronaldo.

The Iberian team-owned One Tap League launched this week, with the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competition offering plenty of rewards for participating players in the Spanish and Portuguese region.

Tapping into the hotbed of Esports players in Iberia has always felt like something CS:GO companies needed to do more, with the region one of enormous growth in the area of competitive online gaming.  The eight founders of the league are as follows:

Vodafone Giants

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The Sportsbetting market for Esports fans has grown and grown in recent times. Now a study carried out by Loot with research into their own internal statistics and a poll of their customers habits sent out by email has yielded some very interesting results.

Loot themselves are growing as a business in line with Esports sportsbetting itself. Paul Brel, Head of Communications for Livestream, Loot’s operating company published the results of the poll as Loot gears up for what is a very busy period for the company founded in 2016.

“The difference between esports bettors and traditional bookmakers’ clients is huge,” said Brel. “The matter is not just – and not even so much – in the age gap which in itself implies certain distinctions. Esports fans breathe cutting-edge technologies; they are very mobile, yet so involved with the community; they are more likely to rely on their knowledge and skills rather than on luck; for them, esports is not just a hobby but a lifestyle – which you wouldn’t say about a regular classic sports bettor.”

As Brel hints at, it takes a modern, progressive attitude to attracting new bettors to Esports platforms to be successful. This information will be important to those betting businesses who want to step forward into the next quarter with the drive to grow.

A major row has been rumbling all week about the controversial steps taken – or not taken – by Premier League clubs and players when it comes to the vast wages that they take home and whether they should still do so during a global pandemic.

It’s a minefield of misdirection, egotistical explosions and hypocritical hubris and it doesn’t look anywhere near a resolution.

As we reported last week, Premier League players were doing their bit to reach out to the fans and convince them to stay at home in order to slow the spread of Coronavirus. In the past seven days, however, the public mood has turned in some quarters from admiration and solidarity with their idols to wondering if the millionaires who often live in mansions by comparison to football fans could be doing a bit more to help with the millions that they have made.

In a decision made on Friday, Premier League clubs agreed that an indefinite postponement of the English Premier League was the only choice they could make with no immediate end in sight to the global pandemic of COVID-19. The 2019/20 Premier League season will only resume when it is completely safe to do so.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 Wimbledon Championship tennis tournament, officially making the novel coronavirus as bad as Hitler.

On Wednesday, the All England Club (AELTC) announced that it was officially cancelling this year’s Wimbledon event “due to public health concerns linked to the coronavirus epidemic.” The 134th Wimbledon will instead be staged from June 28 to July 11, 2021.

The original plan was to postpone the event until later this summer but the UK government’s increasingly dire forecasts and Tuesday’s one-day death toll of 563 quashed those ideas. AELTC chairman Ian Hewitt noted that it usually took a World War to result in Wimbledon’s cancellation, so Britons will likely find some way to blame this on Boris Becker or Steffi Graf.

Wimbledon’s absence will leave yet another giant hole on bookmakers’ calendar, and more holes may appear if other Grand Slam events such as the French Open (currently delayed to September) and the US Open (holding firm for the moment for late August) follow Wimbledon’s lead.