Manchester United are set to delay any decision on Joshua Zirkzee‘s future until later in the January window, sources have told ESPN, with Ruben Amorim’s squad stretched due to injuries and Africa Cup of Nations departures.

Amorim’s options have been hit by the loss of Bryan Mbeumo, Amad and Noussair Mazraoui to AFCON and a growing injury list which includes Matthijs de Ligt, Harry Maguire, Bruno Fernandes and Kobbie Mainoo.

It meant the United boss had to hand senior debuts to 18-year-olds Jack Fletcher and Shea Lacey during the 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa on Sunday, as well as using defender Lisandro Martínez as an emergency midfielder in the second half.

Zirkzee, who has struggled for consistent game time so far this season, is the subject of interest from West Ham and Roma, among others.

AC Milan also looked at the Dutchman before they turned their attention to West Ham’s German striker Niclas Füllkrug.

Sources have told ESPN that United are yet to receive any club-to-club contact.

Zirkzee — valued at around £30.5 million ($47m) by United — will explore any offers which arrive in January.

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The 24-year-old is conscious that he needs to be playing more regularly to force his way into the Netherlands squad ahead of next summer’s World Cup.

United, however, are concerned that the squad is already thin and have stressed to Zirkzee and his representatives that he remains a key part of Amorim’s squad, if not always the starting XI.

United, meanwhile, remain in the race for Bournemouth’s Antoine Semenyo.

The winger has a £65m release clause valid for the first 10 days of the January window.

The 25-year-old also has interest from Manchester City and clubs are waiting for the winger to indicate his preference before making contact with Bournemouth.

Semenyo’s release will become valid again in the summer for a lower fee, but there is a growing feeling he will choose to leave the Vitality Stadium next month.

The NWSL on Tuesday implemented a “High Impact Player” rule (HIP), which would allow teams in 2026 to spend up to $1 million outside of the salary cap on star players, such as the Washington Spirit‘s Trinity Rodman, who meet certain criteria.

The news came minutes before the NWSL Players Association voiced their opposition, issuing a statement saying they would now take action to “to enforce the rights of the Players we represent.”

In Tuesday’s statement, the union said: “The NWSL Players Association opposes the League’s decision to move forward without bargaining over the High Impact Player Rule.

“Under federal labor law, changes to compensation under the salary cap are a mandatory subject of bargaining — not a matter of unilateral discretion. Fair pay is realized through fair, collectively bargained compensation systems, not arbitrary classifications.

“A league that truly believes in the value of its Players would not be afraid to bargain over it.

“The NWSLPA has put forward a clear, lawful alternative: raising the Team Salary Cap to compete in a global labor market.

“Additionally, we have proposed that through collective bargaining, we work together to create a system for projecting revenue sharing numbers in future years so that Teams and Players can negotiate multi-year deals with certainty. The Union remains ready and willing to engage in good-faith bargaining.”

Earlier this week, NWSLPA executive director Meghann Burke told ESPN that the creation of any such rule requires collective bargaining and that the union opposed it.

“Our position is actually that this exceeds the scope of the league’s authority,” Burke told Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy on their “Welcome to the Party” podcast. “Our position is that they must bargain with us over this kind of proposal, not that they merely consult with us.”

Burke told ESPN: “The league is trying to control and interfere by trying to dictate which players get paid what with this pot of funds. Our position is that teams — GMs, soccer ops, business folks at the team level — are uniquely positioned to make judgment calls about how to structure their rosters, how to negotiate deals.

The league said on Wednesday that under the new rule, each club may exceed the league’s established salary cap by up to $1M for high impact players beginning in 2026.

The NWSLPA had proposed that the NWSL raise the salary cap by $1M beginning in 2026, which is the same amount of money that the league has now cleared for each team to spend through the HIP rule.

The league said on Wednesday that the threshold will increase year over year at the same base rate as the salary cap. The additional allotment may be applied to a single player or distributed among multiple players, providing clubs with meaningful flexibility to recruit and retain high impact talent while preserving competitive balance. For any contract using this provision, the cap charge of the high-impact player must be a minimum of 12% of the base salary cap.

The league called the new measure a “historic increase in league investment” in a news release, noting that it will increase league-wide player spending by up to $16M and a total potential investment of up to $115M over the term of the current CBA.

“Ensuring our teams can compete for the best players in the world is critical to the continued growth of our league,” NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said in a news release. “The High Impact Player Rule allows teams to invest strategically in top talent, strengthens our ability to retain star players, and demonstrates our commitment to building world-class rosters for fans across the league.”

The league said that teams would be able to sign players under the rule “immediately, provided the contract terms do not require the team to utilize the rule until the effective date.”

The rule was implemented in the wake of the contract impasse involving Rodman, as well as the departures of United States women’s national team stars Alyssa Thompson and Naomi Girma earlier this year. Both Thompson and Girma left for transfers of over $1M to join English side Chelsea.

In Rodman’s case, her contract expires at the end of December, meaning she could sign elsewhere without the Spirit receiving any compensation.

The NWSL recently rejected a proposed contract between the Spirit and Rodman, alleging that the deal violated the “spirit” of the rules and accusing Rodman of preemptive “salary cap circumvention.”

The NWSL Players Association then filed a grievance on behalf of Rodman against the league on Dec. 3. In the grievance, the PA said that the contract was legal and that the league’s veto of the deal violated at least five points of the collective bargaining agreement. It is unclear the extent to which the NWSL Players Association is on board with the NWSL’s latest announcement.

In Wednesday’s news release, the NWSL said that per the terms of the current collective bargaining agreement, the league had “exercised its discretion” to implement the new rule following “consultation” with the NWSLPA.

ESPN’s Jeff Kassouf contributed to this story.

Kiyan Anthony has never had a typical life.

He grew up fist-bumping LeBron James and Kevin Durant in NBA locker rooms, he texts Hollywood star Michael B. Jordan to talk ball and he calls Kim Kardashian his “aunt.” It takes a lot to make the 18-year-old college freshman starstruck. But at an event full of Hollywood A-listers, he was left speechless when music icons Jay-Z and Beyoncé were just across the room.

“In the locker room with my dad at the NBA All-Star Game, seeing the best players in the world, I thought that was normal,” Kiyan told ESPN. “My mom had me in a different world.”

When you grow up in the center of two celebrities’ spotlights — Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony is Kiyan’s father, actress and model La La Anthony his mother — you’re used to attention. But the nature of that attention intensifies when you choose to play for the same university where your dad became a legend.

For much of his life, Kiyan lived with the expectation that he would one day follow in his father’s footsteps. Having led Syracuse to its only men’s national basketball title in 2003, Carmelo left behind massive shoes to fill — his jersey hanging in the rafters next to a practice facility named after him. That legacy is both a boost and a burden for his son, whose 1 million-plus Instagram followers made Kiyan a unique four-star high school recruit.

His commitment seemed like the anointing of a prince. But as Kiyan finally steps into his own spotlight, he is determined to chase his own dreams — and prove that he’s more than his father’s son.

“When they talk about me, I just want them to talk about my development and how I keep getting better,” he said. “And how I could rise to the top.”

It’s almost eerie when you watch the videos side by side.

Early in his famous 33-point torching of Texas in the 2003 Final Four, Carmelo drove through the lane, took a bump from an opposing player, maintained his balance as the ball left his fingertips, and fell to the floor.

In a game against Drexel this November, Kiyan dribbled left, rose into the air, drew contact, then kept floating before he scored and stumbled to the floor.

At the end of both plays, father and son looked up from the ground to witness the beauty of their handiwork — then got back up, seemingly ready for more.

“I learned almost everything from him, so it just makes the game so much easier,” said Kiyan, who shares his father’s love for the midrange game. “It just makes it easier knowing what to do.”

You can clearly see similarities between them on film.

You can also see their differences.

Carmelo was listed at 6-foot-8, 220 pounds when he led the Orange to the title. He averaged 22.2 points and 10 rebounds that season and made 48% of his 3-point attempts during the NCAA tournament before going No. 3 in the 2003 NBA draft, two spots behind LeBron.

Kiyan is 6-5 and 185 pounds, averaging 11.5 points in 22.9 minutes per game off the bench. He can’t bully every opposing player the way his father could, but even if Kiyan develops into an elite player, what would that mean when his father is the greatest the school has ever produced?

“Yeah, the comparison is a little unfair,” said Jim Boeheim, the legendary former Syracuse coach.

Kiyan has learned early in his career, though, that his father’s legacy will always loom overhead. He is hounded for pictures on campus. When he showed up for a recent practice, a couple of fans were waiting for him in the facility’s lobby. And during home games, people will ask for autographs even when he’s in the layup line.

His hopes of having a full college experience and living in the dorms like his teammates lasted only a week before fans were knocking on his door. That short-lived choice summed up the difference between his journey at Syracuse and everyone else’s.

“I was like, ‘No, don’t put me off-campus. I want to stay in the dorm,'” Kiyan said. “[But] it’s hard for me just going around campus. I go to class through a different door now. It is different for me. I learned quickly that I’m normal, but I can’t portray myself that way.”

It’s inescapable. Every time Kiyan dons a Syracuse jersey with “Anthony” across the back and the No. 7 — the same one his father wore for the New York Knicks — Orange fans see Carmelo’s son.

“The work has been put in, so he should be prepared for these moments and these environments, but I tell him every single game, it’s just basketball,” Carmelo told ESPN. “That’s it. That’s my message to him. ‘You know how to play. Go out there, be better, develop, play the right way. Shoot when you’re open, pass when you’re not.'”

It also helps that Kiyan can phone a friend uniquely suited to understand: Bronny James, whom the freshman calls a confidant.

“I feel like throughout this process, you could feel like you’re alone,” Kiyan said. “You feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and there is nobody behind you. But then having friends like that, that are going through the same thing that I’m going through, somebody like [Bronny] — he is way ahead of me and already in the NBA and going through way worse, so it always could be worse. I feel like pressure is just an opportunity for success.”

Whenever he needs support, Kiyan turns to his best friend: his mother.

Even without pressure from either of his parents to sign with Syracuse — Carmelo and La La divorced in 2021 — Kiyan needed his mom most when it was time to pick a school.

“I told him, ‘It’s not just about doing what your dad did,'” La La said. “‘You’re a different player from your dad.’ I was like, ‘If it’s Syracuse, you go there and you pave your own way.'”

The host of MTV’s “Total Request Live” in the early 2000s, La La was the first celebrity in the family. She is Kiyan’s anchor, too. The two make trips back and forth between Syracuse and New York City to visit each other as time allows.

“I went to go visit him and I think I ended up washing eight big garbage bags of clothes,” La La said. “I’m like, ‘What is going on here?’ But I know that’s typical college stuff. It’s fine. I want him to focus on school and basketball.”

La La didn’t raise Kiyan exclusively around glitz and glamour. She made sure he had normal experiences, too. He tagged along with her on trips to Rikers Island — New York City’s largest jail — where La La’s ThreeSixty program offers mentorship to young inmates. She took him to play in the city so he could develop the same grit that has molded NYC basketball legends. And they hosted family game nights that Kiyan said would “get crazy.”

Now, Kiyan just wants to be one of the guys in the locker room. You could see the down-to-earth persona his parents encouraged after his team upset Tennessee in early December and Kiyan took over the postgame celebration video.

“Nah, let me hold the mic,” he said before he began to praise his teammates.

“Yo, I just want to say, this the best shooter in the country right here!”

“I just want to say, this the best combo guard in the country right here!”

“If you under that rim, he gonna dunk on you, bro!”

“That’s Kiyan, man,” said his Syracuse teammate Sadiq White Jr. “That’s the Kiyan that we see every day, man. He comes in here and he’s just himself. We accept him. We let him be himself. We let him let his guard down around us. We’re his brothers.”

At the Park MGM in Las Vegas — a city full of stars — Kiyan was the biggest one during Feast Week.

As he moved through a private hallway at the Players Era Festival headquarters, opposing players and coaches stopped to greet him. It was a nonstop series of head nods, handshakes and side hugs for Kiyan, who was clearly the most recognizable player in the 18-team field despite having played only four college games at the time.

He picked preparation over socializing, even declining his mom’s invitation to meet her at the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix so he could focus on basketball.

“I sent him pictures and videos. I was like, ‘I wish you were here,'” La La said. “But Kiyan needed to be locked in the gym and with his team, which is understandable.”

Despite that dedication, Kiyan wasn’t the same star on the court in Vegas that he was off of it. During Syracuse’s 0-3 run at the tournament, he finished 1-for-14 from the 3-point line. After registering double digits in three of his first four games this season, the shots stopped falling in Sin City, where his mother and father sat courtside like the event’s unofficial queen and king.

Kiyan is still molding himself into the player he wants to be.

Syracuse strength coach Rob Harris — who worked with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Devin Booker and more NBA All-Stars over a decade-long stint at Kentucky — said Kiyan is developing the work ethic that made those players great, all with the goal of packing on the muscle that elevated his father’s game.

“He has really taken pride into the weight room,” Harris said. “He’s coming to me on off days to get extra work. That’s a huge testament to him and obviously, he’s seen his dad. You can’t grow up with that and then just be lazy. That would be disrespectful to his parents.”

Kiyan has turned a corner since his shaky play in Vegas, scoring in double figures in three straight games heading into Monday’s win over Stonehill College, posting an efficient 18 points in 20 minutes against Northeastern on Sunday.

“I love where he’s at,” Syracuse coach Adrian Autry said. “He’s going to be fine. We need him. He’s a big part of what we do. He has a maturity about him as far as the game. … He’s going to keep working and he always tries to step up to the challenge, so that’s what I love about him.”

The arc of Kiyan’s season so far highlights the most important component of his story: It’s his and his alone.

His father’s run at Syracuse was remarkable and, to date, unmatched.

But this is The Kiyan Anthony Story — and it’s just getting started.

Only he can write the next lines of this script, a weight his father prepared him to carry.

“We know that there is going to be a spotlight,” Carmelo said. “He’s been in the spotlight all of his life.”