The Women’s Super League returns this weekend and Chelsea are aiming to win a sixth title in a row – but can anyone stop them?

New manager Sonia Bompastor is hoping to pick up her first WSL title but Manchester City, who lost out on goal difference last season, will want revenge.

With Crystal Palace joining the top flight and others spending big money in the summer transfer window, it promises to be another rollercoaster campaign.

Some of BBC Sport’s pundits have predicted their top three for the 2024-25 campaign, along with who they think will be relegated, while Emma Sanders tries to predict where each team will finish this season.

Emi Martinez, Aston Villa, keeper, £5m – home to Wolves

Clean sheets have been so hard to predict this season.

Gameweek four saw six of them from the 10 games, which means we’ve had 18 in 40 games – or clean sheets for 18 teams from a potential 80!

There’s no standout keeper this week but Martinez has been a big-game performer in the past and derby games can be tight affairs.

Yukinari Sugawara, Southampton, defender, £4.5m – home to Ipswich

The Japanese full-back has been flying down the right flank in manager Russell Martin’s progressive style of play where he likes to overload areas of the pitch.

Sugawara has put in 16 crosses, double any of his defensive team-mates and second on the team to Will Smallbone.

He’s created three of Southampton’s five big chances and also scored at Brentford.

Ipswich have been goal shy so far, with just two in their four games and, should Saints turn some impressive periods of play into a 90-minute performance, Sugawara has chances of a return at both ends of the pitch.

Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool, defender, £7m – home to Bournemouth

I may sound like a broken record by now but the attacking returns are on the horizon for the most expensive defender in the game.

Alexander-Arnold was close to another clean sheet last week before Nottingham Forest’s smash-and-grab success at Anfield and it’s amazing he has not got an assist yet.

The right-back’s expected assists (xA) stat is an incredible 1.87 from four games. For context, that is an assist higher than any other defender in the game except Villa left-back Digne (0.94). Tottenham’s Pedro Porro and Sugawara are next with just 0.67.

Josko Gvardiol, Manchester City, defender, £6m – home to Arsenal

Defences are likely to be on top when City host Arsenal on Sunday and you’d expect the Gunners to set up like they did last season, to absorb City pressure and hit on the break.

Rodri should return to City’s line-up which should mean Gvardiol playing a more progressive position down the left like he did at the back-end of last season.

He’ll see plenty of the ball, we know he has a goal or assist in him and, if City do keep a clean sheet, the Croatian will be a strong contender for bonus points.

Manager Sean Dyche is working under “very difficult circumstances” amid Everton’s worst start to a league season in 66 years, says the club’s director of football Kevin Thelwell.

The Toffees are bottom of the Premier League without a point having lost all four of their games so far, conceding 13 goals.

They have the poorest record of the 96 teams in Europe’s top five leagues and were knocked out in the third round of the Carabao Cup on penalties by fellow strugglers Southampton on Tuesday.

In an exclusive interview with BBC Radio Merseyside’s Giulia Bould, Thelwell said: “Sean and I work very closely together, our offices are a metre apart so we are talking regularly and consistently about what things we can do, how we can use the resources we have available to try and make things better going forwards.

“Sean has a responsibility for the preparation and performance of the team and fundamentally the results. My responsibility is the support services that sit around that. It is about us talking through some of the performance problems we have got.”

Dyche’s contract expires at the end of the season and, despite the wretched start, club sources have told BBC Sport the 53-year-old’s job is currently safe.

Thelwell added: “I can promise everybody that there is no stone being left unturned in terms of trying to rectify our current situation. He [Dyche] is working under very difficult circumstances.

“We still have ownership and financial situations to resolve so that makes it very difficult for a manager when we want to take that next step.”

Last week, Everton said there is “some work to be done” for American businessman John Textor to complete his takeover of the club following aborted attempts by 777 Partners and the Friedkin Group this year.

The Blues are also scheduled to move to their new stadium on Bramley Moore-Dock for the start of next season.

The races take place across head-to-head events that are split into two parts.

The first part – the Louis Vuitton Cup – determines which of five challengers will face this year’s defending champion Emirates Team New Zealand in the second, the America’s Cup itself.

Races take approximately 25 minutes and this year start in August and end in October.

Endurance is the key metric for cyclors, who need to be able to consistently produce a high wattage during the races themselves and maintain their form across 10 weeks.

“We just want a huge reliable engine for the three months that we’re going to be racing,” Van Velthooven says.

“Big days are big days and easy days are still big days because they still need heaps of power. It’s relentless.”

The UK’s Ineos Britannia team, led by Sir Ben Ainslie, might not have recruited professional cyclists to their crew like some of their rivals but they have the next best thing – an affiliation with the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, formerly Team Sky and winner of seven Tours de France.

Matt Gotrel is part of Ineos Britannia’s crew. This year will be his second America’s Cup, but his first as a cyclor rather than grinder. A former Olympic gold medal-winning rower, having been part of Great Britain’s eight at Rio 2016, Gotrel has found it a “big challenge” to train a different muscle group, even if recreationally he considered himself a cyclist already.

“As rowers, we had an upside-down pyramid [body shape] before, but it’s flipped around now,” Gotrel says.

As grinders, his crew would aim to produce 400 watts of power over 20 minutes. As cyclors they are now “well north of that”.

Training for the past two years has predominantly taken place on the road or in the gym, rather than on water. Volume blocks can consist of four to six-hour-long rides, three times a week, interspersed with high-intensity intervals on a static bike and weight training.

Gotrel, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, compares powering the boats in a race to a cycling time trial, but with repeated sprint efforts throughout.

“You want to have a really good aerobic base where you can sit at as high a power as possible without producing too much lactate, and then you have your big spikes and need to be able to recover from those,” he says.

The connection to Ineos’ cycling team has been a “massive” resource for Gotrel and his fellow cyclors, enabling them to share training and nutritional insight on a training camp in Spain together.

“I had a chat with [sprinter Elia] Viviani about some sprinting technique, and then there are Filippo Ganna and Dan Bigham who have been really good on some of the strategy and fuelling things and what they did to push on the hour record,” says Gotrel

Bookmakers, usually protected and in profit thanks to margins and finely-tuned odds, were losing on National League South.

They were seeing floods of money on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world – tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy.

More money was reportedly placed on the total goals in one November 2012 National League South game than on the equivalent market for a Champions League match involving Barcelona.

Bookmakers started refusing to take wagers on some teams, scrubbing them off the coupon. The Football Association launched an investigation into betting patterns in the division.

As the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans were suspecting their own players, accusing them from the stands.

The situation couldn’t last. The net was closing in. Swaibu’s final Bromley fix – ensuring they lost an April 2013 fixture away to Maidenhead by two clear goals – bordered on farce.

Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game’s first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.

An incensed team-mate who wasn’t in on the fix was sitting on the bench, telling the manager that something suspicious was unfolding in front of them.

“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu says.

“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.

“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.

“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.

“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”

Swaibu left the club two games later, at the end of the season.

He wasn’t the only fixer who realised the National League South had come under too much scrutiny.

A clutch of players left Hornchurch – another team in the league – and travelled around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league team based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.

Their arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Sportradar – a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events – had suspicions. The players’ social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them.

The Australian police were tipped off and the Southern Stars’ dressing room, clubhouse and even goalposts were rigged with hidden microphones.

Undercover officers posed as fans, phone calls were intercepted and bank transfers examined.

It led to a string of convictions, a clutch of leads and, ultimately, a sting operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.

By then, Swaibu could well have been out of the game, both legal and illegal.

He says he had saved up around £200,000 from fixing football.

And, at 24, playing football seemed to be over. Two short-term deals with Sutton and Whitehawk led nowhere.

“But I was addicted at this point, something was pulling me back in.”

One of Swaibu’s contacts had been tapped up by a new group of fixers – a gang trying to break into match-rigging and put together a network of players to pull it off.

Swaibu had his suspicions. The new fixers didn’t seem to know the rules. They seemed naive and inexperienced, with little idea of what was possible.

They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu’s previous bosses.

Some were also white, British and middle-aged, an unlikely profile for hi-tech gambling conspiracies, invariably leveraged from Asia.

Swaibu wanted to believe though. Because if they were new to fixing, they could be fleeced.

Swaibu says he took a photo of his local five-a-side team and told the fixers they were players in his pocket. He invited his new contacts to a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge and told them it was rigged. It would end, Swaibu said, in a 1-0 win for Wimbledon.