Manchester United are in talks with local rivals Manchester City over a potential move for England midfielder Jess Park.
The 23-year-old has 20 appearances for England and was part of the squad who retained their title at Euro 2025.
She has been at Manchester City for eight years, impressing in a loan spell at Everton during the 2022-23 season.
Park has become a regular for City but United are looking to strengthen their squad as they prepare for a season in the Women’s Champions League main stage if they win their two-legged play-off against Brann this month.
Elsewhere, there has been reports of interest in Manchester United midfielder Grace Clinton, including from Manchester City, with a year remaining on her contract.
As it stands, there is no indication England international Clinton will leave United before Thursday’s 23:00 BST transfer deadline but the club may have to consider significant offers if it remains unlikely she will sign a contract extension.
City have been weighing up options in midfield throughout the summer and have enquired about a few players in that position.
Ellie Kildunne’s lovely bit of skill sets up Jess Breach to score her second try for England against USA during the opening game of the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup at the Stadium of Light.
Speaking about the impact the abuse had on her, Carter said: “It makes you feel really small. It makes you feel like you’re not important, that you’re not valuable.
“It makes you second guess everything that you do – it’s not a nice place to be. It doesn’t make me feel confident going back on to the pitch. My family was so devastated by it as well and so sad.”
FA chief executive Mark Bullingham said during the tournament that the governing body had referred the “abhorrent” abuse to UK police.
Carter stepped back from social media following the abuse, though she said the support received from the England fans “meant everything”.
The England team decided to stop taking the knee before matches, with manager Sarina Wiegman saying the impact of the anti-racism gesture was “not good enough”.
Carter said the psychological impact of the abuse she suffered made her feel “scared” when Wiegman told her she had been selected to play in the final.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever been scared – too scared to play,” she added.
“I think it was a mixture of such a big game, but then on top of that [I was] scared of whatever abuse might come with it, whether it’s football based or whether it was going to be the racial abuse that was going to come with it because I did something wrong.”
“Doctors ‘hold patients to ransom’ with pay demand” reads the headline of the Daily Express, with resident doctors planning to walk out for five consecutive days from 25 July until 30 July in a dispute about pay. Prince George is pictured smiling on the front page ahead of his twelfth birthday tomorrow.
The Daily Mail has also lead on the planned strike, writing that the British Medical Association has built up a £1m “war chest”‘ to fund the campaign for resident doctors to get a pay rise of 29%.
The Water Commission is set to give its review of the industry on Monday morning, but the Metro warns that it will “fail to end a national scandal”. There has been public outcry over rising bills and an increase into sewage discharge into UK waterways.
The Guardian’s main story is about failings in NHS maternity care, writing that the health service is facing a potential bill of £27bn for negligence in England since 2019. The paper says the number of families taking legal action against the NHS for obstetrics errors in 2023 was double the number of those doing so in 2007. A woman is pictured on the front page mourning the death of her three-month-old baby in Gaza, amid reports that 85 people had died in aid queues on Sunday.
The Mirror says “We stand with Jess” after England defender Jess Carter was racially abused online following the Euros quarter final. FA chiefs called the slurs “disgusting” and said they were working with police to find those responsible.
Carter is also pictured front and centre of the Daily Telegraph. The paper’s main headline reads “Farage: I’ll build more jails to clean up the streets”, with the Reform leader set to make a speech on Monday that positions his party as “the toughest party on law and order that this country has ever seen”.
Lioness Jess Carter is also the feature image for the The Times, with the caption “Standing up to racism”. The paper’s top story states “Reeves set to defy left over call for wealth tax”. It reports Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to reject pressure to implement a tax on high-income earners. Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock has claimed that a 2% tax on assets worth more than £10m could bring in as much as £11bn, but cabinet ministers have pointed to other countries as evidence to their warning that wealth taxes do not work.
The battle between Apple and the Home Office is the lead story for the Financial Times. The FT states Downing Street is facing a “forced retreat” due to pressure from senior leaders in Washington. Earlier this year, Apple was ordered to grant access to secure customer data under the Investigatory Powers Act. The paper reports two senior officials as saying that forcing the tech giant to break its end-to-end encryption could impede technology partnerships with the US.
The i Paper warns that the “state pension age could rise once again”. A government review will look at whether to increase the pension age to 68 before the planned rollout date of 2046.
The Sun reports on “fears over Gazza dash to A&E”. The paper says football legend Paul Gascoigne was rushed into intensive care on Friday evening but that his condition is now “stable”.
“Footie now prescribed on the NHS!” reads the Daily Star, claiming that doctors are set to hand out tickets to football matches to patients suffering from depression.
England defender Jess Carter says she will take a step back from social media after experiencing “a lot of racial abuse” during Euro 2025.
In a statement on Sunday, the Lionesses also said they would now stop the anti-racism move of taking a knee before matches, saying it was “clear we and football need to find another way to tackle racism”.
“From the start of the tournament I have experienced a lot of racial abuse,” said the 27-year-old Carter.
“While I feel every fan is entitled to their opinion on performance and result I don’t agree or think it’s OK to target someone’s appearance or race.
“As a result of this I will be taking a step back from social media and leaving it to a team to deal with.”
The Football Association said it was “working with police to ensure those responsible for this hate crime are brought to justice”.
Lena Dunham, of “Girls” fame, with her husband Luis Felber, has created a romantic comedy, “Too Much,” premiering Thursday on Netflix. It’s lighter in tone than that previous show but still comes with plenty of dysfunction, self-sabotage and sex. (Drugs too, though it doesn’t make a case for them.) The titles of the episodes establish a negative relation to the genre: “Terms of Resentment,” “Enough, Actually,” “Notting Kill,” “Nonsense and Sensibility,” “Pity Woman,” “Ignore Sunrise,” “To Doubt a Boy.” But in the end, it wants what they’re having.
Dunham, who wrote or co-wrote all 10 episodes and directed several, has elected not to star, but has brought in Megan Stalter, from “Hacks” as her stand-in, Jessica. (Dunham plays Nora, Jessica’s depressed older sister, mostly from a bed.) Like Jessica, Dunham is an American living in England, in a relationship with a musician, so we may credit at least some details to the authority of their shared experience.
Jessica once wanted to direct films, to “say something about the female experience,” but she has been working for 15 years as a line producer for an ad agency, a job at which she is evidently good, but which means little to her. When her New York firm merges with a British company, she’s sent to London for three months to help make a Christmas commercial, starring Rita Ora. Having been left six months before by her longtime boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen) for willowy knitting influencer Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski), to whom he’s become engaged, she is ready to go — all the more so because her happy place is “love stories set in pastoral England.”
On her first night in town, Jessica discovers that the “estate” she thought she was renting is not Pemberley but public housing; she takes a taxi to a random pub, where Felix (Will Sharpe), the boy in this 30-something love story, is performing a sad song to a few patrons. They meet-cute in the bathroom. He walks her home. They talk. He lends her his coat. (There is, interestingly, no attempt to convince us that Felix is a major talent; indeed, the suggestion is that such career as he had is on a downward slope.)
People fall out of love on television almost as often as they fall into it, sometimes as a prelude to falling back into it, or falling for someone else, and less often deciding that they are in fact happier on their own. From the wealth of self-help books, advice columns, therapists, country songs and, yes, romantic comedies that fill our culture, I reckon the messier elements of “Too Much” will feel familiar to many. There is plenty of chaos in this comedy, but its best moments come in passages of relative calm. (They are something of a relief from the dominant emotional mishigas.) A long, wordless scene consisting of a single overhead shot of Felix and Jess on a bed, as she listens to a mix he made her, is remarkably moving, not least because the actors are doing so much while doing so little.
“Too Much” on Netflix first look.
(Netflix)
Even as she becomes involved with Felix, Jessica continues her practice of recording private videos on her phone, on TikTok, as a sort of therapeutic diary, ranting about Zev; many are addressed directly to Wendy Jones. Meanwhile, she deals with Andrew Scott as a pretentious director (“We’ve got to make this feel like it’s Ken Loach doing a Christmas film”) and mucks in with new boss Jonno (Richard E. Grant) and colleagues Josie (Daisy Bevan), Kim (Janicza Bravo), who is interested in Josie, and chatterbox Boss (Leo Reich), who has published an “experimental PDF novel, to much acclaim” and broke up with someone because “he did not have the emotional intelligence necessary to deal with someone whose love language is being a b— in a fun way.” She confounds them with her loud, childlike American energy, filling empty spaces with words, making jokes that don’t come off. (“Just kidding” is a thing she says a lot.)
Recently sober, Felix has his own complement of bandmates, friends and friendly ex-girlfriends, including three women named Polly — Adèle Exarchopoulos plays the important one — whose history with Felix makes Jess nervous. (Jennifer Saunders is a bit of a surprise.) Sharpe, last seen on TV in the second season of “The White Lotus,” plays him quietly, a little melancholy, perhaps, but not unduly moody; even in a difficult situation — he’s carrying just as much baggage as Jessica — his energy remains low-key and relatively grounded, though he will be called upon to do some panicked running.
If the series has a fault, it’s that there’s possibly too much “Too Much.” In the movies, the business of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” (substitute your preferred genders), has traditionally been settled in under two hours. The streaming economy, however, has stretched the narrative timeline, elongated the arc, padding out a predetermined number of episodes with extraneous digressions, giving minor characters things to do that don’t necessarily contribute to the story, while not developing into much on their own. There are brief cutaways to Jonno’s home life, which at least has the benefit of giving us more Grant, plus Naomi Watts as his wife, Ann; scenes back in New York likewise give us unrelated time with Rita Wilson as Jessica’s mother, Lois; Rhea Perlman her mouthy grandmother, Dottie; Dunham’s Nora and Andrew Rannells as her ex-husband, Jameson, who left her in favor of “exploring non-monogamy with a couple both named Cody.”
More problematic, an exasperating character like Jessica, lived with at such length, can become exhausting, and she does. Dunham mitigates this, and the roller coaster of Jessica and Felix’s relationship, by employing an episodic structure, setting whole or nearly whole episodes against different backdrops: a wedding, a work trip, a dinner party, Felix at home with his parents (Stephen Fry and Kaori Momoi), Jess and Felix up all night (having sex, watching “Paddington”) when she has to be fresh for work in the morning, and a flashback to Jess’ history with Zev (he’s been made a “writer,” shorthand for pathetic). Taken individually, as discrete stories, they’re easier to digest. The writing is sharp, the performances spot-on.
Stalter, who is in her fourth season stealing scenes on “Hacks,” plays a character halfway around the world from her character there. Where her Kayla is brash, entitled and self-confident to a fault, Jess is needy, full of second thoughts and self-doubts, even as she projects a kind of frantic cheerfulness. (“I’m a chill girl, I’m normal,” she tells herself, doubtfully.) Dunham often shoots Stalter straight on, filling the screen with her face, which pays benefits; she has great presence. (And sings very sweetly too, better than her boyfriend.)
The endgame, when we get to it, could not be any more conventional — which, I imagine, is the idea. One might think it parodic if it hadn’t been established that this is the dream in which Jessica lives; anything less would be unkind.
I see I’ve neglected to mention the dog. There is a little dog too, who plays an important part.
