The Championship returns, Palace v Liverpool at Wembley and tennis in Cincinatti

Saturday

Football

8am (all times BST) Matchday live Our essential Saturday morning gateway to the weekend’s football returns and Yara El-Shaboury is your host as the Championship launches with a flurry of matches. Readers are invited to get in touch with their plans for the day; we spin through the headlines from overnight, including Friday night’s Birmingham v Ipswich curtain-raiser; and we flag the day’s big Championship, Football League and Scottish Premiership matches, with team news and all the latest breaking transfer stories. Post your thoughts and questions to Ben Fisher for our Football League Q&A at 11am. Send your queries to matchday.live@theguardian.com from 9.30am. Ben sets the scene on the new Championship season – the contenders, hopefuls and youngsters to watch – here.

Championship

12.30pm Southampton v Wrexham Wrexham return to the second tier for the first time in 43 years. Three consecutive promotions have taken the Red Dragons – the Welsh club with Hollywood backing and an unlikely global following – from the National League to an opening-day fixture at Southampton, freshly relegated from the Premier League. While some fans have been dreaming that Wrexham can make it four promotions in succession there is the danger that, after such a rapid rise, they find their ceiling – the jump from League One to the Championship is bigger than those they have bridged in the past couple of years. Ben Fisher reports from St Mary’s.

Football

12.45pm Manchester United v Fiorentina The noise around United never ceases and Ruben Amorin’s outlay on players to refresh a team that struggled so glaringly in the Premier League last season has kept them at the forefront of the transfer agenda over the summer. So for United’s final warm-up match, plenty of attention will be on his new signings, the boyhood supporter Bryan Mbeumo among them. Mbeumo was handed the chance to fulfil a dream with a £70m switch from Brentford. Amorim will hope the 25-year-old Cameroon forward adds pace, creativity and goals – he scored 20 in the league last season – as he attempts to improve upon last campaign’s desperately disappointing 15th-place finish. Will Unwin reports.

Championship

3pm Middlesbrough v Swansea Next up in our coverage of the opening Championship weekend are another Welsh club with North American connections. Comparisons with Wrexham, who are owned by the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, have been unavoidable since the 53-year-old American rapper Snoop Dogg joined a growing list of celebrity investors in British football last month by becoming part of a Swansea ownership group that already included the Croatia midfield great Luka Modric. Snoop said Swansea’s “underdog” story “really struck a chord with me” and his vast following on social media – 89 million on Instagram and 20.5 million on X – quickly learned about the Welsh club and his love for Joe’s ice-cream in the city. A docu-series tracking life at Swansea, on similar lines to the Welcome to Wrexham, is understood to be already in the pipeline. Louise Taylor reports.

Women’s rugby union

8.10pm France v England England’s final warm-up match before the Women’s Rugby World Cup takes John Mitchell’s side to the Stade Guy Boniface to take on old foes France, but again without the experienced Emily Scarratt, Claudia Moloney-MacDonald and Holly Aitchison. Also absent will be Marlie Packer following last weekend’s red card against Spain. Packer sparked fears about her availability for the first fixture of England’s home World Cup against the USA on 22 August after she was sent off in a 97-7 win for a clumsy clearout. A two-week suspension would have ruled the former Red Roses captain out of the opener at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, but she will miss only this fixture after World Rugby handed out a one-match ban. Raphaël Jucobin reports from Mont-de-Marsan.

Tennis

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