Shanghai tournament: Davidovich Fokina defeats Khodar... and wins the title

Today, Sunday, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina ended Rafael Khodar's brilliant career in the Shanghai Masters Tennis Championship when he came back from losing the first set to defeat his Spanish compatriot 1-6, 7-6, 6-4 to win the biggest title of his career.

At the age of 27, Davidovich won his first title in the Masters tournament, which is the most important in his professional career. “I don't know what to say,” Davidovich said. I don't know what to feel. "It's just a huge relief." He added during the cup handover ceremony: “This will be a memory for the rest of my life.” He also praised his rival, saying: “You are 20 years old, but you have a future ahead of you.” "She will be here many times."

The Malaga-born player earlier this year won his first two ATP titles, in Mallorca on grass and Chengdu on hard courts, but he had never won a 1,000-point Masters title before Shanghai.

As for Khodar, who is 20 years old, he missed the opportunity to enter the top ten in the world for the first time. He also missed the opportunity to overtake three competitors in the race to qualify for the final ATP tournament of the season, scheduled to be held in Turin from 15 to 22 November.

The conflict between Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, and Javier Tebas, president of the Spanish Football League, is no longer just a renewed dispute over match schedules or organizational decisions, but rather has turned into a confrontation that reflects a broader crisis in modern football, where the interests of major clubs clash with the rules that are supposed to govern competition and maintain its balance.

According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, the latest episode of this conflict came after Tebas likened the coverage methods broadcast by Real Madrid TV, along with some media outlets sympathetic to the club, to the propaganda mechanisms used by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. The Royal Club responded with an official statement in which it demanded the resignation of the association’s president, denouncing the comparison, which it considered offensive, in a new escalation of the tense relationship between the two parties.

All eyes are on the confrontation between Manchester United and its host, Leeds United, on Sunday, in light of the mounting pressure on coach Michael Carrick, who finds himself facing an important test to correct the team’s path, only 10 months after the dismissal of his Portuguese predecessor, Ruben Amorim, following the team’s last visit to Elland Road Stadium. United returns to the Leeds stronghold in circumstances that recall the atmosphere that preceded Amorim's departure last January, after the team entered a whirlpool of fluctuating results, amid increasing questions about the club's management, the level of the players, and their ability to compete.