While Mauricio Pochettino is struggling to build a team on the pitch, his Chelsea bosses are finding it equally difficult to build a stadium out of it.

The consortium led by Todd Boehly is not only struggling to match the football success achieved under Roman Abramovich.

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Their new regime is also finding it difficult to solve the biggest problem that even the billionaire Russian failed to solve during his 19-year rule.

Namely, how can we provide a stadium and facilities that suit a club that aspires to be one of the best in the world and is necessary to generate the revenue to keep it that way.

Located in one of the wealthiest postcodes in the country, Chelsea is supposed to be the most glamorous place to watch Premier League football, perhaps in the world.

But it’s not even the top destination in London anymore.

Arsenal, Tottenham and West Ham all moved into 60,000-seater houses, while Roman’s rubles brought the lion’s share of trophies to SW6.

Stamford Bridge, with its three aging stands and a capacity of just over 40,000, now feels shabby and old-fashioned in comparison.

Just as importantly, both Arsenal and Tottenham earn significantly more money per home game than Chelsea: £870,000 and £1.03 million more per match respectively.

And that’s a big reason why Tottenham overtook Chelsea in terms of total revenue for the first time in the latest Deloitte Money League, becoming the highest-earning club in London in 2022-2023 with £549.2 million.

It would be unfair to say that Abramovich and his henchmen and wives did not see the writing on the wall. Battersea Power Station, White City, Chelsea Barracks and the former Earls Court Exhibition Center – all were considered, rejected and, for some, reconsidered.

To finance the move to a new location, Abramovich wanted to sell Stamford Bridge. But a major problem was – and is – that the club does not have full ownership of the stadium itself.

That was sold in 1997 to a fan-run organization called Chelsea Pitch Owners, in a move designed to protect the club and its home after property speculators almost sold it out from under them.

In 2011, Abramovich attempted to buy back the property.

SunSport revealed how a number of people linked to Abramovich, chairman Bruce Buck and other members of the Chelsea hierarchy bought large numbers of CPO shares in the run-up to the vote.

But perhaps because of the atmosphere of distrust that emerged, they failed to secure the 75 percent of shareholder votes needed to approve the sale.

It wasn’t the kind of dick you’d imagine being made by Abramovich’s old friend Vladimir Putin.

It was Abramovich’s ties to Putin’s regime that ultimately derailed plans for a new stadium during his rule – forcing him to sell the problem and pass it on to new owners.

Chelsea received planning permission for a new 60,000-seat ground at Stamford Bridge in early 2017.

The FA thought it was a good idea to move Tottenham from Wembley and welcome another money-hungry tenant.

But the Blues announced in May 2018 that they would suspend their plans indefinitely, not long after the British government refused to grant Abramovich a new visa.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Abramovich was among the accomplices sanctioned and for a while the club’s survival seemed to be at stake.

When Boehly and Clearlake Capital bought Chelsea for £2.5 billion in May 2022, they pledged to invest an additional £1.75 billion in a number of projects, including Stamford Bridge.

They quickly appointed Janet Marie Smith, an architect with extensive experience in renovating major sporting venues in America, to oversee the plans to revamp the Blues stadium.

Last October, Chelsea agreed to buy Stoll Mansions and 1.2 hectares of land next to the ground for £80 million.

Even that was not without controversy, as the Chelsea pensioners living there would have to be relocated.

But much bigger problems remain with Chelsea’s current home.

The District Line runs east to west along one side of it and the main line runs north to south on the other side.

There are major roads, social housing, Brompton Cemetery and all kinds of issues that make the redevelopment of the area a complicated, long and expensive process.

The latest view from within the club is that it would take six years to achieve this, but even that inconvenience would be better than the previous standby plan.

The alternative is to cough up prime real estate elsewhere – and the club appears no closer to finding an affordable, viable location than before. Not if Earls Court cost half a billion.

It is a difficult decision, crucial for the future of the club. Not something to rush.

But the longer Chelsea’s owners wait, the more ground they will lose to their rivals, both on and off the pitch.

At the Kawasaki Disease Clinic at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, under the direction of Dr. Burns, the care of children affected by Kawasaki disease has always been linked to the search for the cause.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Dr. Kirsten Dummer, a pediatric cardiologist, reviewed the heart scans of a 2-year-old child who showed signs of a large aneurysm on the right side of the heart.

“The biggest question from parents is: how did this happen? How did my child get this? That’s what they fundamentally want to know in every patient room,” she said. “Year after year after year they come back and ask us, ‘Do you know anything yet?’”

Dr. Burns, who has continued to see patients herself, said these questions motivated her.

“If we were all PhD students in the lab looking at the etiology of Kawasaki disease,” it would be a different pace, said Dr. Burns. “But there’s an urgency to it, because we’re going back and forth, from the lab to the patients, saying, ‘Damn, I have to answer this question.’ It matters because it matters to these people.”

Later that morning, Inez Maldonado Diega, a four-year-old in a mermaid suit, rolled out balls of Play-Doh with her mother as Dr. Burns broke the news. Seventeen days earlier, the girl’s pediatrician had missed her case of Kawasaki disease. An echocardiogram had come back clear – a sign that her heart was healthy so far – but she still had a fever, meaning the illness could persist.

“I wish we’d seen her sooner,” Dr. Burns said, listening to Inez’s heartbeat. She requested genetic samples for her biobank from both Inez and her mother, explaining that children likely inherit a susceptibility to the disease from their parents.

Inez’s mother, Tiara Diega, assured Dr. Burns said she never had Kawasaki disease as a child – only scarlet fever. Dr. Burns raised her eyebrows and asked Ms. Diega to call her mother on speakerphone.

Had Mrs. Diega had bloodshot eyes during her infection all those years ago, she asked Mrs. Diega’s mother? Yes, said the mother. Dr. Burns exhaled slowly.

“That wasn’t scarlet fever,” she said.

The room was silent for a moment — Ms. Diega still held a stick of Play-Doh in the air — as the risks to both mother and daughter sank in. Then Dr. Burns Mrs. Diega for her own heart scan – to see if there was a serious danger looming all these years.

There are plenty of old mysteries out there that we will almost assuredly never solve. It’s not that we don’t want to or anything; it’s just that in many cases, notable old mysteries and creepy, long-forgotten unexplained events simply happened too far in the past for us to investigate properly. With events decades or centuries old, we can’t interview witnesses and get to the bottom of strange happenings.

So, many of history’s mysteries are best left to wonder about and hypothesize over without truly knowing any answers. It’s a little bit fun in that way, isn’t it? Sure, we’d like to know how the past’s mysteries actually happened, but wondering about the possibilities makes for fun debates and discussions with friends.

And that’s what we are today. In this list, we’ll take a look at ten mysteries that will almost certainly never be solved. From the paranormal to the bizarre and unsettling to the just plain creepy, these mysteries have no known answer. And they probably never will! Unless you feel like jumping in after reading this list and doing a little at-home detective work for yourself, that is!

Related: Top 10 Places On Earth With Reoccurring Unsolved Mysteries

10 The Circleville Letters (1977)

It all began in the summer of 1977 when a woman in the small town of Circleville, Ohio, received an anonymous letter in the mail. She opened it and discovered bizarre, crudely scrawled handwriting. The letter told her that some unnamed person had been observing her house and knew that she had kids.

Furthermore, the letter writer knew something no one else did: that she was having an affair with the local school superintendent. Alarmed, the woman rightly felt fear that somebody was watching her and keeping a close eye on her family. But things would only get so much worse from there.

Several weeks later, the letter writer mailed another letter to the woman’s husband. The writer informed him of the affair and encouraged the husband to kill both his wife and the school administrator with whom she was cheating. After two weeks and no action taken, the letter writer fired off yet another anonymous piece of mail to the husband, goading him to take action.

Enraged, the husband grabbed a gun and jumped into his car, telling witnesses that he was going to go kill the letter writer—implying he knew the person’s identity. But while driving in a furious rush to confront whoever was writing the letters, the man died in a terrible one-car accident.

For years after, the letters kept coming. And they didn’t just come to the woman who got the first one, either. Dozens and dozens of Circleville residents received letters for nearly the next two decades. Shockingly, the letters contained personal information about themselves, which people had no idea how this random stranger had learned.

The letters also contained wild accusations and specific violent threats, too. That got the cops involved. However, they were never able to figure out what was going on. To this day, the letter writer and their motives for turning Circleville upside down both remain a complete mystery.^[1]

9 The Lead Masks Case (1966)

On August 20, 1966, a young boy flying a kite on a remote and tough-to-access hill outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, found the bodies of two men. He ran down the hill and reported the findings to the cops. But because of the treacherous terrain, coroners and first responders weren’t able to get up the hill to recover the bodies until the next day.

When the police and firefighters did arrive, they found a very strange scene: Two men were lying next to each other and partially covered by grass. The weird part was that each deceased man wore a formal suit, a waterproof coat, and a lead eye mask. There was no feasible reason for them to be wearing the waterproof coat or the lead eye mask up on the hill, and cops were quickly very confused.

Alongside the two corpses was an empty water bottle, and a packet with two wet towels inside. Then, most cryptically, there was a small notebook that had a set of timed instructions written inside in Portuguese. The instructions’ rough translation into English was: “16:30 be at the specified location. 18:30 ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask.”

That creeped out investigators even further, of course. The two men were eventually identified as two Brazilian electronic technicians named Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana. They had been last seen by their families three days prior to the boy finding their bodies on the hillside.

But while a coroner’s report might have actually allowed authorities to come up with some answers in the case, it never came through—at least, not in time. The coroner’s office in Rio De Janeiro was very backed up with cases and medical exams at the time. So the bodies sat for days on end, waiting to be autopsied. By the time the coroner was finally able to get around to it, their organs were too badly decomposed to figure out whether the men had ingested any notable substances prior to their deaths. Since then, the discovery has been a bizarre and persistent mystery.^[2]

8 The Green Children of Woolpit (1100s)

At some long-forgotten point in the middle of the 12th century, two young children with green-tinted skin suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the tiny village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. The duo was determined to be brother and sister based on their resemblance and ages. They spoke in a bizarre, unknown language that Woolpit residents couldn’t understand.

Most unusual, though, was that their skin was tinted green and gave off a very unsettling appearance. And they would only eat raw broad beans when prompted to take food. Even more bizarrely, they had entered the village from somewhere completely unobserved, and nobody knew from where they came or what their lives had been like before they showed up.

Over time, the villagers tried to get the pair to settle into a new life. Sadly, the boy died soon after he reached the village. He had been sickly, and he wasn’t long for this world, no matter what the villagers could offer him. The girl was eventually nursed back to full health, though, and as she got better, she even lost the green tint on her skin.

In time, she was baptized, and she even learned to speak English, too! As the legend goes, upon learning English, she reportedly told villagers that she had come from a land where the sun never shone, the earth was covered in permanent twilight, and everything there was green. According to one report from the time, she claimed the place was called Saint Martin’s Land.

Obviously, there is a lot to be skeptical about with that story. For one, it happened nearly a thousand years ago, so there’s no way we can get any more reliable information than the reports that came out from that long-ago time. Plus, historians aren’t even completely sure when it happened!

Experts know it was in the 12th century without a doubt, and they think it was during King Stephen’s reign, which lasted from 1135 to 1154, but they aren’t even 100% sure on that part. So we will pretty clearly never know the real story behind the Green Children of Woolpit. That’s a shame because it makes for an incredibly creepy tale!^[3]

7 The Mary Celeste (1872)

On December 4, 1872, travelers in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of the Azores a few hundred miles west of Portugal came across the Mary Celeste. The Mary Celeste was a Canadian-built ship that was owned and registered by an American merchant brigantine firm. It had been filled with valuable cargo and was supposed to be on its way to Europe at the time.

About a month before, on November 7, the ship had left New York City with a plan to go to Genoa, Italy. It had a full stock of alcohol that it was going to drop off in Genoa—expensive provisions that were still on the ship when the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia found the Mary Celeste floating off the Azores.

The creepy part was that when the Dei Gratia came up to it, they found absolutely no human activity on board the Mary Celeste. The alcohol stocks were full, and the crew provisions were equally full, suggesting nobody was starving to death or anything like that.

Furthermore, all the crew’s personal belongings on the Mary Celeste were left completely undisturbed. But the crewmen who were supposed to be working the ship were nowhere to be found. Every last one of them was missing, having vanished without a trace! The ship’s log didn’t give further clues, either, with its last entry having come ten days earlier.

It was even more bizarre that the ship was still seaworthy and still floating just fine. It had been under partial sail when the Dei Gratia found it, and interestingly, its lifeboat was missing. But with nothing else gone and the ship showing no signs of having been battered about in a storm, what could have happened?

The men who had crewed up in New York to work on that fateful voyage of the Mary Celeste were never heard from again, and nobody knows what happened. Was it a mutiny? Piracy? An insurance scam by the ship’s owners seeking to salvage its goods and needing to kill the crew to make it happen? The mystery will likely live on forever.^[4]

6 The Flannan Isles Lighthouse Mystery (1900)

On December 15, 1900, a steamship named Archtor, on its way from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Leith, Scotland, noted that a lighthouse that was supposed to be operational on Scotland’s far-flung Flannan Isles was not in good working order during a rough storm. Three days later, when the Archtor docked in Leith, they reported the bad lighthouse situation to the Northern Lighthouse Board.

Immediately, the board sent a relief ship out to the remote Scottish isle to figure out what was going on. Due to adverse weather, though, the relief ship did not reach the lighthouse until nearly ten days later, on December 26. Once there, they expected to find three men working at the lighthouse—James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur—as they were tasked to do at the time. But when the relief ship’s men came up to the lighthouse at noon on December 26, they couldn’t find any of the three men anywhere around the island.

The mystery was unsettling from the star. For one, the lighthouse’s flagstaff had no flag. None of the lighthouse’s provision boxes were left on the landing stage to re-stock as they should have been. And the relief ship’s men could find no sign of the lighthouse’s three-person crew anywhere nearby.

When the relief men reached the compound itself, they found the entrance gate closed, the beds inside unmade, and the rest room’s clock unwound. They also found lamps that had been cleaned and refilled but sitting harmlessly inside. Wherever the lighthouse’s vanished staffers had gone, they hadn’t thought to take the lamps with them.

No sign of the three keepers was ever found beyond that discovery. And their bodies never washed on shore or were otherwise discovered, either. It’s unclear what happened to the men. To this day, despite several different theories, including opinions that they could have set out on their own to live a new life or possibly been met with some unforeseen tragedy that swept them into the ocean, their whereabouts are completely unknown.^[5]

5 Patomskiy Crater (1949)

In 1949, a Russian geologist named Vadim Kolpakov discovered a massive and extremely bizarre crater located in a rural part of southeastern Siberia not far from Lake Baikal. This rock formation has come to be known as the Patomskiy Crater—and even though it’s massive and completely unique to the area, geologists and other scientists have no idea how it got there.

The crater is basically a very large mound made up of shattered limestone blocks. It sits on the slopes of Russia’s Patom Highlands within that nation’s Irkutsk reason. At its base, the crater’s diameter is about 520 feet (158.5 meters), and its off-shoots are more than 40 feet (12 meters) high. In the center of the crater is a cone with a ring-shaped crown, and the height of that smaller mound is nearly just as tall as the carter’s outside walls.

The entire thing is absolutely massive, with its inside volume estimated to be well over 8 million cubic feet (226,534 cubic meters) and its weight tabbed at approximately one million tons. Yet, despite being so big and so unbelievably out of place relative to the rest of its surroundings, nobody knows how it got there or from where it came. There are theories, of course, with the leading one being that it was a meteorite that landed on Earth in a flourish. Others claim it came about from volcanic activity, or even is caused by a deep pocket of unusual natural gas flow.

The most vocal theorists believe the Patoskiy crater is an off-shoot fragment from the same meteorite that landed in nearby Tunguska in the early 20th century. But if that were the case, the crater’s determined age wouldn’t match up—science has found it to be about 300 years old, and not roughly 40 like Tunguska at the time that Patomskiy was discovered.

Regardless, whatever event caused the Patomskiy crater is completely unknown still to this day. Scientists continue to observe it to see if they can learn more about it, but so far, no dice.^[6]

4 The Disappearance of Flight 19 (1945)

On December 5, 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers flying for the U.S. Navy as Flight 19 on a mission just off the coast of Florida completely disappeared and were never heard from again. The five bombers had been sent out on a training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in south Florida. At some point in the flight, though, the main navigator in the first plane became disoriented as to where the group was going, and they lost track of their direction heading back to the mainland.

Tragically, the planes were never seen again, and all 14 men who were flying as part of the crew on those five planes that day were lost forever. To make matters even worse, a Martin PBM Mariner flying boat was dispatched to go search for the men on a recovery mission—and it, too, was lost along with its 13 crew members during the search for Flight 19.

There have been many theories about what happened to Flight 19. Some say the tricky situation in the Bermuda Triangle was the thing that caused those planes to disappear. Others say they were attacked and swooped up by aliens or other even more fanciful (and frankly, ridiculous) theories.

The most common and sensible prevailing theory is that the flight leader, Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, struggled to navigate after his compasses stopped working. Then, he mistakenly thought a series of small off-shore islands east of land was the Florida Keys to the south. So he continued heading out over the open sea and away from land. As for the PBM search aircraft, the Navy officially believes it was lost in an explosion in mid-air that occurred while it was searching.

Of course, the strange thing about all this is that no parts of the airplane wreckage or anything else were ever found. Nothing washed ashore, no wreckage or remains were ever uncovered, and nobody has any idea where or even if the planes and the men who died inside them are somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. The actual fate of the crews involved and the specific timeline of events regarding what happened that day, will likely forever remain a mystery.^[7]

3 The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion (1987)

On the night of November 22, 1987, television viewers in Chicago, Illinois, were treated to quite a spectacle. An unknown person hijacked two different broadcast signals in the major midwestern city—and their identity has never been discovered. First came the short hijacking of a major network. It was the 9:00 pm newscast hour for WGN-TV.

The station was in the middle of a sports segment when suddenly, a person wearing a Max Headroom mask and swaying erratically in front of a metal panel appeared on screen. There was a loud buzzing sound that accompanied the video hacking. The interruption lasted only 17 seconds, though, as WGN had engineers actively working that night, and those staffers were able to regain control of their channel and get the screens pointed back to their newscast.

Two hours later, the second and much larger intrusion occurred. It happened on PBS affiliate WTTW during a broadcast of a Doctor Who” episode called “Horror of Fang Rock.” PBS didn’t have any engineers on duty at the time, as they were simply running canned shows. So the signal takeover was more sustained, lasting for more than 90 seconds in total.

When the Max Headroom-masked figure appeared on screen, he made bizarre references to things like New Coke, the cartoon TV show Clutch Cargo, a local Chicago-area sportscaster, and other random topics. Then, a woman’s hand spanked the masked figure’s bare butt with a flyswatter while he yelled, “They’re coming to get me!” The hijackers then ended the pirated transmission on their own and disappeared away into the night.

Whoever was behind the Max Headroom stunt has never been found. The Federal Communications Commission looked into the stunt, but they were unable to figure out who might have done it or what their motives were.

Now, nearly 40 years on, it’s unlikely we will ever know who was behind the shocking and exceedingly random hacking. Even if it was a harmless prank, the FCC and major television networks were rightly concerned that other hackers could use mass broadcasting like that for nefarious purposes. (And then social media came around, and now, well, here we are…)^[8]

2 The Lost Colony of Greenland (1400s)

The Norse settled Greenland in about the tenth century or sometime earlier. For the next five hundred-ish years, they kept an active colony on the unforgiving terrain. But then, in the very late 15th century, that colony completely disappeared.

All the people in it left and left behind a good deal of their supplies and other things as though they just vanished into thin air. Now, well over 500 years after the colony’s complete loss, historians and archaeologists are still at a standstill over why it happened and what became of the people who lived there.

There are many competing theories as to why the lost colony of Greenland became, well, lost. Some believe environmental changes made life there harder, forcing people to flee. Others think local Inuit and other indigenous populations raided the colony to such a great degree that people were murdered and taken prisoner.

Others think that a lack of support over time from European Norsemen frustrated the colonists, who then set out looking for a new life elsewhere. A late 15th-century plague that swept through Iceland and Norway is even thought to be a cause, as it left many farms and homesteads available for the taking and could have inspired colonists to return home and settle down.

The most bizarre part of the entire mystery is that people seem to have left the colony in a very orderly, measured fashion. If Inuit raids were to blame for the disappearance, the colony itself would have been left a trashed and messy disaster when Viking sailors later came upon it to discover it had been deserted. It wasn’t trashed, though, and no current-day archaeological evidence from these ancient farm sites indicates any sign of attack.

Starvation is thought to be unlikely, too. Were the colonists impoverished to the point that they simply wanted to flee for better land further south? Did they grow weary of the difficult world of living in Greenland? It’s been so many centuries now, and we will almost certainly never know the answer.^[9]

1 The Dancing Plague (1518)

In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea reportedly began dancing uncontrollably in the city of Strasbourg, Alsace, in what is now modern-day France. She took to the streets and, for days on end, never stopped dancing. There was no apparent motive behind her dancing—at least none that people could readily figure out.

Before too long, other people started joining her in the streets doing their dances, too. In total, the dancing situation ended up turning into a very notable and very strange event of mass hysteria. Based on records documenting the situation, historians today estimate that anywhere between 50 and 400 people took part in the dancing plague. And it lasted for weeks on end!

There is obviously plenty of confusion regarding why this “plague” occurred, and why Frau Troffea ever was compelled to dance in such a way for so long. The most common theory is that it was the manifestation of some sort of stress-induced mass hysteria.

Other competing theories include things like the population suffering from ergotism caused by fungi present in the rye they farmed and used for sustenance. Some even question whether there was a religious explanation for all the dancing. In the end, some historians have even found documents claiming that dozens (or even hundreds!) of people may have died from exhaustion after weeks of endless dancing.

Whatever the case may be, the Dancing Plague of 1518 remains one of the strangest human-centered phenomena ever recorded. While it was almost certainly some form of mass hysteria or mass psychosis (and not, like, aliens forcing them to dance), the exact causes of and reasons behind this “plague” and its beginnings will likely never be known.^[10]

It's the aquarium mystery that has gripped the world: How did a 'virgin stingray' become pregnant while living alone in an aquarium?

But after months of investigation – and a male shark falsely accused of sexual assault – it appears the mystery has finally been solved.

Charlotte the stingray at a North Carolina aquarium has been revealed to have parthenogenesis – a rare form of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs.

Experts at the aquarium have now admitted it would have been 'impossible' for her to mate with any of the five small sharks that share her tank.

Now questions will inevitably be asked of the zoo, which has enjoyed wall-to-wall publicity since the story first broke.

This is despite claims that an interspecies encounter between Charlotte and a shark could have taken place earlier this month.

Questions will inevitably be asked about the aquarium, which has enjoyed wall-to-wall publicity since the story first broke.

Parthenogenesis can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not in mammals.

Documented examples include California condors, Komodo dragons, and yellow-bellied water snakes.

Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, said Charlotte's pregnancy is the only documented example she knows of of round stingrays, although other species of sharks, rays and rays have had these types of pregnancies under human care.

“I'm not surprised because nature finds a way to make this happen,” she said.

'We don't know why it's happening. Just that it's a really fun phenomenon that they seem to be capable of.

“We need to make it clear that there are no shark ray scandals happening here.”

Charlotte the stingray hasn't shared a water tank with a male of her species for at least eight years.

She lives in a tank at Aquarium and Shark Lab in Hendersonville, North Carolina, which is about 5,000 gallons, about the size of a construction dumpster.

But staff are hoping to get a tank almost twice as big to house Charlotte's offspring.

Brenda Ramer, executive director of the lab that encourages children to take an interest in science, said they can also install live cameras for an online livestream.

She said lab staff first thought Charlotte had a tumor in September when they noticed a lump on her back that “blowed up like a cookie” before an ultrasound revealed the pregnancy.

Ms Ramer said: 'We were all like, 'Close the back door. There is no way'.

'We thought we were feeding her too much. But we gave her too much food because she has more mouths to feed.

'It's very rare. But it's happening in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean.”

Round stingrays such as Charlotte are abundant on the Pacific coasts of Southern California and Mexico, often resting on the sandy bottom of the ocean near the coastline.

In the wild, they are usually the size of a small dinner plate and come in all shades of brown.

They eat small worms, crabs and mollusks, and are preyed upon by certain species of sharks, seals and giant sea bass.

Like other species of stingrays, the round stingray is aptly named for the venomous serrated spine on the tail.

Although stingrays do not attack humans, the tail spines can cause painful wounds if stepped on or handled without care.

One day, the brilliant TV executives will all unite and bring their programming under one roof. It solves all your sports watching problems. They'll call it cable.

This new venture from ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. It's not Discovery. At least not yet.

It's still important that three of the biggest brands in sports are teaming up this fall to give fans another option. The Great Rebundling is just around the corner, but it is far from being resolved.

This does not apply to the consumer need this venture will be named later and my first guess is that most of you will choose that option. The service will be equally owned by the three parties, but each partner will receive the same compensation as they earn through cable or YouTubeTV, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. Only ESPN, the unique network, receives about $12 per month from cable subscribers.

So what does that mean for you? The estimated price for the new venture if you add ESPN, Fox and WBD Sports together will likely be around $40 to $50 per month. There are probably sports fans who want to save some money with this scheme, but it's hard to believe there are many.

You can already watch almost everything this trio offers through places like YouTube TV for around $70 and change per month. If you want this option, it's already available, with even more channels to boot.

After a year of talks between the three parties, it is valuable to see these superpowers coming together, and it is very understandable why they did so. It is not a risk at all for them, but a reward. This “sports skinny bundle” – as the cool media kids like to call it – is worth a try.

With this small step, Fox Sports is entering the sports subscription space for the first time. They've been the ones to watch their competitors sink billions into subscription streaming while patiently waiting their time on the sidelines. Their executives thought rebundling was the best choice, so this gives them a first chance.

ESPN plans to go direct-to-consumer with its entire product by 2025, with the possibility of 2024. Now it will start with tag team partners this fall.

This new arrangement does not deter ESPN's previous plans. The network still plans to have a standalone ESPN direct-to-consumer product next year. Additionally, it could still move forward with an equity partnership with the NFL or other leagues and/or digital players.

WBD Sports has an ever-underrated menu of rights for its new product, from the NBA and MLB playoffs to March Madness.

But the reason these entities don't have anything complete here yet is the exclusion of other major players – like CBS for example.

This “sports skinny bundle” is a little too skinny to include Patrick Mahomes, Christian McCaffrey, and Taylor Swift this weekend since CBS has the Super Bowl this year. More problematic when you compare this new product to YouTube: If you want to watch March Madness, the CBS games aren't on it. It won't be one-stop shopping.

The significance of this deal could increase over time, as the names in the press release suggested. The quotes were from the top: Disney's Bob Iger, Fox's Lachlan Murdoch and WBD's David Zaslav.

However, if they want to fight the almost unlimited pockets of Amazon, Apple or Netflix, if these digital giants become even more serious about sports rights, Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav as a trio could have a stronger hand.

The new entity will have its own CEO and will reportedly operate independently. However, his or her bosses will still be Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav, so how independent will it be? What could this lead to in the future? Will they get along? If the questions can be answered positively, it could lead to something even bigger.

For you, the fan, maybe this new CEO will find a way to bring everything you want to watch under one simple service. Until then, this endeavor won't change much for most of you.

(Photo of Fox Sports' Michael Strahan interviewing Christian McCaffrey of the San Francisco 49ers after last month's NFC Championship Game: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)

Do you and your partner argue? Most of us assume that a couple who argues has a less solid relationship and is less likely to stick together for the long haul than a couple that doesn’t. We tend to equate low levels of conflict with happiness, after all.

But that just isn’t true. Indeed, the reverse may well be the case — low conflict relationships are often more, not less, fragile, as we’ll explain later.

It’s not whether there’s conflict in your relationship that makes it or breaks it. Even the happiest couples fight. It’s how you do it.

We’ve been studying the science of love for five decades, John as a researcher and Julie a practising clinical psychologist. And we’ve also been happily married to each other for 36 years.

We’ve made it our life’s work to help couples who love one another and want to stay together, but need useful tools to keep their relationship thriving, and published more than ten books.

Three decades ago, we launched our ‘Love Lab’ on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, where we ourselves met and fell in love. More than 3,000 couples have now passed through it, with 130 couples even living for a while in an Airbnb-style flat, rigged up with cameras.

By videotaping their interactions, and analysing them down to one one-hundredth of a second, we’ve been able to code every gesture, sigh, smile, pause, change of heart-rate or tone of voice, and then we’ve followed those couples for years, even decades, to track the status of their relationship.

Zeroing in on conflict and how couples interact before, during, and after fights, here are the astonishing things we discovered . . .

• The first three minutes of a fight can predict the status of the relationship six years later.

• During an argument, couples who exhibited four key behaviours frequently (criticism, contempt, stonewalling and defensiveness) and never repaired them were more likely to split an average of five years post-wedding. We call these The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: criticism is an attack on a person rather than a complaint about an issue; contempt, an eyeroll or sarcastic tone; stonewalling is shutting down and refusing to communicate; and defensiveness is where you make bad excuses or reverse blame.

• Avoiding conflict isn’t the answer. After that five-year mark, our research witnessed another wave of divorces at 16 years. These couples did not criticise or show contempt. What they showed was . . . nothing. There were no major conflicts, sure. But also, no humour. No question asking. No interest in one another. What might have looked like a positive indicator for a strong relationship — low conflict levels — was anything but.

• There’s no ‘right number’ of fights to have a month. Some perfectly happy couples are both volatile characters and row a lot; others much less so — but the key point we want you to understand is that arguing isn’t bad in itself. If you fight with a sense of curiosity about your partner, you strengthen your relationship, not weaken it. Successful couples ask their partner questions about their beliefs, history and meaning attached to their position on an issue.

• None of this is easy. When feelings run high, our first instinct is to get defensive and dismiss our partner’s emotions out of hand, especially when they’re negative. But conflict needn’t be distressing. Its goal is mutual understanding. Without conflict, without fighting, we aren’t able to understand each other fully or love each other fully.

• All couples have a set of issues over which they will inevitably argue. For any given couple, any given topic — from finances to housework to parenting to how to load the dishwasher — might be the thing that sets you off. Sometimes it’s solvable and sometimes it’s one of those rows that goes on and on.

Don’t worry if it’s the latter! One of the biggest misconceptions about conflict is this persistent and pervasive belief that all conflicts should be resolved or there’s something wrong with the relationship. That’s pure myth.

Most of your arguments will never be fully resolved, and that’s OK. In fact, it’s normal and healthy — 69 per cent of couples’ issues are perpetual because they are based on difference in personality or lifestyle preferences. The goal is to live well with the points of conflict we all have.

Whether you’re in a bad patch or life’s rosy, whether your relationship is new or decades old, you can learn how to fight constructively, not destructively. Using thousands of hours of research, we’ll show you the five arguments we all have, where we go wrong — and how to put it right.

FIGHT ONE: THE BOMB DROP

Mistake: Starting off wrong.

180 seconds: that’s how long we have to get off on the right foot. After that, the tone and trajectory of the fight is pretty much set. And if we begin the wrong way, the odds we’ll be able to turn things around are slim to nil.

The way a conflict begins predicts how the rest of the discussion will go 96 per cent of the time. If the pattern is a negative one, it’s much more likely that a couple will divorce six years down the road.

Say, for example, your partner is late home after having a drink with friends and his phone died an hour ago. He walks in the door ready to apologise, but you’re waiting to lob your bomb: ‘Where the hell have you been? I guess it wouldn’t occur to you that I’d be worried, since you don’t seem to think about anybody but yourself.’

That’s what we call a ‘harsh start-up’. And the problem is that it’s hard to respond in any other way but defensively. They’re almost bound to lash back or withdraw completely.

Here’s the formula for a successful start to a fight:

I feel… x.

The problem is… y.

I need… z.

Here’s how it works in practice. First, you raise an issue by talking about yourself and your own feelings, not by talking about your partner’s bad behaviour and character flaws. Then you describe the problem or situation factually and neutrally, without assigning blame. And finally, you state what you need in positive terms for the situation to get better.

Harsh start-up: ‘You overspent again! When are you going to stop being so irresponsible with our money?’

Softened start-up: ‘I feel really stressed (the feeling) about our budget this month — it looks like we’re going to be short again (the situation). Can we sit down together and plan how to cut some of our expenses? (the need).

Pretty simple, but highly effective.

FIGHT TWO: THE FLOOD

Mistake: Attacking, defending, withdrawing.

Picture this common scenario: A conversation with your partner starts to get prickly. Maybe it’s about going to see your parents (again) this weekend. Maybe it’s about what to have for dinner. Whatever the topic — and perhaps even if you started softly — it’s getting contentious. Now you feel attacked, misunderstood, wronged, angry, trapped, or all of the above.

Your heart is beating fast, over 100 beats a minute; you’re in fight or flight; your palms go sweaty.

Your brain feels frantic; you can’t even focus on what your partner is saying anymore.

Maybe you lash out and say something harsh, meet fire with fire.

Or maybe you shut down to protect yourself from attack.

We call this flooding. Flooding happens when we get overwhelmed in conflict, hijacked by our own nervous system in response to negativity from our partners. When we see a pattern of flooding in a couple in the Love Lab, we know that without intervention, their relationship is in trouble. Because when you’re flooded, you are incapable of fighting well.

How to Stop the Flood

First, learn to identify the signs you’re flooding so you can act early:

• Shortness of breath
• Gritted teeth
• Heat anywhere in the body
• You feel ‘kicked in the gut’
• Muscles tighten
• Heartbeat races or pounds
• Stomach feels queasy
• Mind is ‘spinning’

The minute you sense one of those early physical warning signs, stop the discussion and ask to take a break. You’re not stonewalling, you’re taking control. Tell your partner what time you’ll be back to continue the conversation.

Now do something soothing that takes your mind off the fight. Take the dog for a walk while listening to music or a podcast.

And finally: come back. Flooding is not a reason to indefinitely park the conversation. Return to the discussion when you said you would and try again. Ideally, the break should last at least 20 minutes (that’s the minimum amount of time it takes for the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol to start leaving your body), but should not last longer than 24 hours. And yes, you can go to bed without resolving this conflict. Sometimes it’s the best thing to do. But don’t let more than a day pass. Longer than that, and it starts to feel like a punishment.

FIGHT THREE: THE SHALLOWS

Mistake: Skimming the surface

Our conflicts are like icebergs: sometimes we’re only seeing the very top. We have no idea how far down, and how big, this obstacle goes. Ever found your partner has a surprising reaction to a discussion?

You think you’re having a routine logistical conversation about plans for the weekend and they get flooded or angry all of a sudden.

Or perhaps you have an argument that comes back round again and again, and you find yourself thinking: why are we still arguing about this? There’s your iceberg. Although some rows are just about how you load the forks into the dishwasher, many aren’t. They’re about something much bigger: our hopes and dreams, now and in the future.

Sometimes we’ve articulated those dreams to our partners, but a lot of the time we haven’t. Maybe we haven’t even articulated them to ourselves. Then something our partner says or does fuels a row.

If you think you’ve hit an iceberg with your partner, first of all, slow down. Then channel your curiosity by asking these questions:

1. What do you believe about this issue? Do you have some values or ethics that relate to it?

2. Does it relate to your history or childhood?

3. Why is it important to you?

4. What do you feel about it?

5. What’s your ideal dream here?

6. Is there a deeper purpose in this for you? Listening — without jumping in defensively — is just as important as speaking in this exercise. By the time you’ve finished, you should have exposed the iceberg completely, and be starting to melt it.

FIGHT FOUR: THE STANDOFF

Mistake: Competing to win.

Rows often seem like a simple matter of us being right and them being wrong. You should do the dishes when I’ve cooked dinner!

In our minds, we are logical, neutral, correct — our partners just need to be convinced. Why would we compromise when their position is so clearly incorrect?

But we don’t want to exist in opposition to our partners. We want to allow them to influence us — both in and out of conflict – because that’s how we strengthen our relationship. Though it sounds paradoxical, the more you allow yourself to be influenced by your partner, the more capacity you have to influence them. Accepting their influence does not mean giving in. It’s being open to your partner’s ideas and willing to change your perspective as you learn more about how they feel.

In the Love Lab, our studies found that men who refused to share power and decision-making with their wives had a higher probability of splitting up. This shows how an old-fashioned dynamic in a marriage just doesn’t work today.

For men and women, when you can’t be moved or influenced, you lose all power in the relationship. If you always say ‘no’ to whatever your partner wants or proposes, you become an obstacle. You’re a dead end for them.

Here’s our strategy to navigate the standoff. First, both identify the non-negotiable aspects of whatever it is you’re rowing about. For example:

You think: ‘When I retire, I want to live near our grown-up children to help with the grandkids.’

They think: ‘When I retire, I want to travel the world.’

This is the core of your dream or need in terms of your own identity and how you want to live your life.

Next, think about your areas of flexibility related to this issue. These are often the details of how you fulfil this dream. You’ll be surprised by how often they reveal areas of overlap you can agree on. ‘We can look after the grandchildren during school holidays and travel during termtime.’

‘And flights are cheaper then!’

FIGHT FIVE: THE CHASM IN THE ROOM

Mistake: Stewing about the fight.

No matter how much we want to fight right, sometimes we hurt each other. Badly. But here’s where we really go wrong: we don’t process the fight. Over time, rows that go unprocessed force a wedge between you, in the form of more conflict or less connection.

Sit down and take the heat out of it. Zoom out and observe your fight as if you’re in the audience at a play. Take turns to describe how you see the argument, using these tips:

• Remember there is no factual transcript of what occurred. Each of your realities has validity. Perception is everything.
• Talk about yourself and your feelings. Don’t say: ‘You were angry at me.’ Say: ‘I imagined you were cross with me.’ It’s a small but critical pivot.
• Validate your partner’s feelings (‘I can see why that upset you’) and identify the triggers if you can (‘I felt judged and I’m very sensitive to that’).
• Acknowledge your role in the fight (‘I was overly critical’) and make a constructive plan together to discuss the issue differently and better. Good luck!

Adapted from Fight Right by Dr John Schwartz Gottman and Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman (£16.99, Penguin Life) to be published February 1. © Dr John Schwartz Gottman and Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman 2024. 

To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid to 17/02/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

BIG gamers have realized there's a better way to get around their PS5 controller battery issues.

Powering the DualSense controller should last between three and six hours.

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But the life of the internal batteries will decrease over time, meaning it will hold much less power and need to be charged more regularly.

Rumor has it that Sony is launching a brand new controller with a big battery boost and 12 hours of battery life.

Until that becomes a reality, you're stuck with the current device.

Fortunately, there are some tricks that can help with quickly draining batteries.

The most obvious thing, of course, is to connect your PS5 controller to the console so that it has a constant power supply.

But the cable is not long enough for everyone.

Looking for a solution, one Reddit user wrote: “If my PS5 controller dies, I literally have to stop gaming and charge it, or I can sit next to my PS5 and charge it while I play.

“Does anyone know any tips/tricks to extend battery life?”

Fellow gamers shared a simple trick: use a power bank that will keep their controller going without the limitations of a short cable connected to the PS5.

“Whaaaaaat, that's genius, that's what I'm going to do from now on,” the original poster responded.

Others warned that not all power banks might work and could further damage the controller's battery if it doesn't have the correct voltage.

So be sure to check whether they match.

“Make sure you get the right charger,” one person responded.

“Don't use lightning charging or whatever they're called as it can damage the battery. I believe you need about 5 volts. It's probably just a basic charger but look it up. This idea seems genius lol.”

• Discover all the latest PS5 news, stories and updates