Another week is in the books. One that saw Cameroon crowned WAFCON 2026 champions, while Nigeria suffered a shock quarter-final exit and is gonna miss out on next year’s FIFA Women's World Cup 2027. Elsewhere, clubs are slowly gearing up for the start of their domestic campaigns with pre-season friendlies. It’s time for QB Weekly.

La Tigre. A nickname Carolina Morace earned thanks to her performances on the pitch. Her teammates said that during matches they could see the determination and ferocity of a killer in her eyes. She had displayed the same tenacity even as a little girl growing up in Venice. The daughter of a naval officer spent every afternoon with a ball at her feet, alongside her brother Davide, who is two years her senior.

Real Madrid have secured the future of one of the most promising players to emerge from their academy, La Fábrica, with Noe Bejarano signing a first-team contract until June 30, 2030.

While most leagues in the world allow clubs to spend as much as they’re willing to build their squad, the NWSL in the United States follows a time-honored American sports tradition: a salary cap. Let's deep dive into it.

“Tiny but incredibly strong. Unstoppable. When you say ‘Siria Crotti’, you actually mean ‘Rome’. It’s her against everyone.” That was how Italian journalist Andrea Barilaro described the performance of Barcelona’s brand-new signing, Siria Crotti.

This week was dominated mainly by the change in the Manchester United dugout, where Marc Skinner left after six years. Unfortunately, we also have a sad injury new from OL Lyonnes. But there’s good news too: WAFCON has moved into the playoffs, and Brighton Women gonna enter the season not only with some interesting new signings, but also with a brand new sponsor.

Rayo Vallecano's story is one of the clearest examples of how neglect can bring down a historic women's football team. In 2026, the club's decline reached a new low as Rayo's women's side were relegated to Tercera RFEF, the fourth tier of Spanish women's football.

The path to professional football is relatively simple in Europe: players come up through professional clubs’ youth academies where they play for free and then join a senior club squad once they graduate from their academy. In the US, with most professional women’s clubs not having affiliated youth clubs, the landscape is a little more complicated. What does youth football development look like in the United States, and what are the different pathways to going pro?