Did you imagine being this exhausted as 2024 comes to a close? Heading into an election year like this one, I had imagined, once it was over, I’d be either outraged and terrified or giddily relieved. But now I find myself mostly wanting to find several thick blankets under which I might sleep as long as humanly possible. It’s the sort of mind-set that welcomes distractions, and sports will provide plenty going forward. It will also help to look back and try, as difficult as it may be, to remember 2024 more for its transcendent sports moments than for its depressing political developments. Here, a look back at the ten biggest sports stories of the year.
10. Juan Soto signs the biggest contract ever.
Soto, still only 26, could not have asked for better circumstances in his contract walk year. He helped get the Yankees back to their first World Series in 15 years while having perhaps the best season of his already illustrious career. Most important, he hit free agency at the exact moment baseball’s juggernauts were most eager to spend — and stick it to each other. The Dodgers wanted him. The Red Sox wanted him. The Yankees couldn’t afford to lose him. But the ace in the hole was Mets owner Steve Cohen, who has said he’d be willing to spend whatever it took to get his team a World Series title. He went and proved it by giving Soto roughly $46 million a year until 2039. Cohen wants to make the Mets New York’s indispensable baseball team, like they were in the ’80s. If Soto can help him do that, all those millions will have been well spent.
9. Idiots trying to turn sports into a transgender culture war.
If you work really hard, you can find earnest people trying to have a real discussion about transgender athletes in women’s sports — about physical advantages (or lack thereof), about inclusion, about fair play. But you sure have to dig through a whole bunch of bad-faith bullshit to get there. 2024 featured one moronic “transgender conversation” after another, culminating in a “controversy” involving Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, who is not transgender, was born a woman and has remained a woman, and has never identified as anything else. (Khelif’s primary offense seemed to be having high cheekbones and punching hard.) Athletes and executives tried as hard as ever — with varying amounts of success, as we’ll discuss below in this list — to stay out of current affairs this year. The Khelif kerfuffle was a reminder that this is impossible: Sports will get dragged into politics no matter what, even if people are just making shit up.
8. Shohei Ohtani’s wild and ultimately perfect year.
2023 ended with Shohei Ohtani signing what was (very briefly, it turned out) the most lucrative contract in baseball history. Three months later, just before his first game as a Dodger, Ohtani was thrust into what initially looked like an apocalyptic scandal involving his translator. But he was instead cleared of any wrongdoing, went on to have yet another MVP season, and seemed to loosen up for the first time since arriving in America. (We even met his very cute dog.) By the end of the year, he’d won his first World Series and was the sport’s global ambassador. And in 2025: He gets to pitch again.
7. Jake Paul and Mike Tyson remind us that we’re all morons.
The pitch was irresistible: a relentlessly obnoxious influencer pretending to be a boxer, signing up to have a past-his-prime-but-still-presumably-lethal legend — the only boxer most Americans even know by name anymore — stand in front of millions and punch the influencer’s nose through the back of his brain. Streamed on Netflix, no less. It’s free, so whaddya got to lose? But it turned out that the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight, such as it was, served as the worst possible advertisement for a sport that has long been considered a joke and now might have been confirmed as one. The fight humiliated one of the most compelling sports figures of the last 50 years, made everyone worry that Netflix can’t handle streaming live sports, wasted a whole Friday night for hundreds of millions of people … and seriously, we didn’t get to see Jake Paul’s face get caved in, dammit. You get what you pay for.
6. The Chiefs go back-to-back, much to the NFL’s delight.
The NFL had a splendid year in every way. It got Taylor Swift to show up at a whole bunch of games; its television ratings were so high that Roger Goodell is now basically America’s czar of entertainment; it didn’t contend with any major controversies; and, best of all, its most marketable team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won their second consecutive Super Bowl in a thrilling overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers. The Chiefs are still good this season and will have a legitimate chance in February to become the first team ever to win three straight Super Bowls. And the NFL is soaking up every available dollar from every available wallet. The league has never felt more invincible.
5. Sports gambling starts to fray a bit.
Gambling’s takeover of the sports world was our top story last year, and while FanDuel ads and discussions of betting odds remain frequent, there are signs that this boom may be more of a boomlet. The NBA permanently banned a player for placing prop bets on himself; a baseball player suffered the same fate, and Notre Dame’s men’s swimming team had their season suspended. (MLB also caught a betting umpire, a very scary prospect.) But the real problems were more worrisome than scandals. Players and coaches complained constantly about being insulted and even threatened by gamblers — one NBA coach said he received text messages from them every night — studies showed gambling addictions skyrocketing, and, most ominously on the business side, sports books began tightening their purse strings and offering fewer deals, a sign that the market may already be saturated. Sports leagues and networks have gone all in on gambling since the Supreme Court allowed it nationwide. It looks more and more like a move they will regret.
4. The end of athlete election activism, for now.
2020 was the most politically active election year in sports history. 2024 marked an extreme turn in the opposite direction. Like much of the rest of the country, the world of sports tried to pretend an election wasn’t happening this year. Four years ago, NBA arenas hosted early voting, and athletes publicly lined up behind the Biden-Harris campaign. Harris 2024 found no such fertile ground — even “Athletes for Harris” were almost entirely retired ones. In fact, it seemed that more active athletes publicly endorsed Trump than Harris, which would have seemed unfathomable four years ago. But hey: A lot of things that happened this election year would have felt unfathomable four years ago, and yet here we are.
3. College football goes nuts.
California is now in the same conference as Boston College; Rutgers is now in the same conference as UCLA. A feeling of displacement and disconnectedness has become the norm in college football, and it reached a zenith in 2024. This was the first year of realignment and of the college-football playoff, a format that juiced ratings but further reinforced that these athletes — and their multimillion-dollar NIL deals — don’t have much to do with college anymore. There may be something more honest about that, but it has rendered the sport mostly unrecognizable to its most devoted fans. Those fans are enjoying the head rush of what has been an entertaining season. Yet there are storm clouds on the horizon, not least of which is a revenue-sharing deal between schools and players that goes into effect next year and is sure to sow even more chaos. Also: Bill Belichick is coaching college football now?
2. Caitlin Clark and the explosion of women’s sports.
Here’s how you know women’s sports is the growth industry in sports right now: A whole bunch of people who otherwise don’t think or care about sports very much are all yelling at each other about it. Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA, a league that was already expanding rapidly, provoked the sorts of angry debates and pseudo-controversies that Michael Jordan did when he entered the NBA and ushered in that league’s new era. It’s a sign that everything is starting to get serious and go huge: Women’s soccer, tennis, basketball, you name it. For the first time, women’s sports brought in more than $1 billion in 2024, up 300 percent from just three years ago. There is no peak in sight. There is simply an arrow pointing up.
1. Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, and the 2024 Olympics
This was the most fun Olympics in memory, no? Part of it was just the way we consumed it: The hugely successful Olympic “Gold Zone” channel crisscrossed the Games, cutting out all the boring parts and just giving us the good stuff. Part of it was the setting, with the glories of Paris making for irresistible visuals. Part of it was simply having fans cheering on the competitors, which was conspicuously missing in Tokyo in 2021. Part of it was the extraordinary athletes, particularly American stars like Katie Ledecky, the American basketball teams, and, especially, Simone Biles. But mostly: The Olympics were, in a time of strife, simply a goofy distraction, with oddly casual South Korea airgun shooters, breakdancing Australians, and Snoop Dogg serving as the perfect fan avatar (just a guy watching, chilling, enjoying the whole thing like you’re supposed to). We needed the Olympics this year more than we have needed the Olympics in a long time. Alas: We’ll have no such luck in 2025, when we’ll probably need a lot more.
