Ed Woodward, the former Manchester United chief, has been approached about joining the vehicle which owns stakes in clubs including Crystal Palace and Olympique Lyonnais.

Sky News has learnt that Mr Woodward, who left Old Trafford in 2022, a year after United’s involvement in the ill-fated European Super League project, is being lined up as an independent director of Eagle Football Holdings as it prepares to list in the US.

Sources said on Thursday that it was not certain that Mr Woodward’s appointment would go ahead, but confirmed that he had been approached about his first mainstream football directorship since ending his long stint at the former Premier League champions.

Mr Woodward spent 17 years at Old Trafford, having played a key role in the Glazer family’s debt-fuelled takeover of the club in 2005.

Money latest: UK’s favourite DIY shops ranked

Eagle Football, which is controlled by the American businessman John Textor, is expected to file confidentially with US regulators for an initial public offering in the next fortnight.

The vehicle owns a 45% stake in Crystal Palace, which it has been trying to sell for months but may now retain as a result of the club’s improved performance in English football’s top flight.

Last summer, Sky News revealed that Eagle Football had hired investment banks including Stifel and TD Cowen to advise on the IPO, with Bloomberg News adding this week that UBS is also working on the deal.

The Eagle Football board is understood to have added Mr Textor’s former FuboTV colleague Alex Bafer, the Trilith Studios president and chief executive Frank Patterson and finance executive Sam Lynn as directors in recent weeks.

Its lenders are currently represented on the board, although these directors are expected to step down in the event of the company becoming publicly traded.

If the IPO proceeds, Eagle Football is expected to try to raise several hundred million dollars at a valuation of more than $2bn.

The vehicle also owns the Brazilian champions Botafogo, RW Molenbeek in Belgium and FC Florida.

Last year, Mr Textor held talks about buying Everton FC, but was eventually outbid by the AS Roma owner, Dan Friedkin.

Had he been successful, Mr Textor would have had to complete the sale of his Palace stake under Premier League ownership rules.

Raine Group, which handled the sale of Chelsea in 2022 and a minority stake in Manchester United to Sir Jim Ratcliffe the following year, has been overseeing the potential disposal of Eagle Football’s Crystal Palace stake.

A number of parties have expressed serious interest, including a group advised by the football financier Keith Harris.

However, a transaction is not thought to be imminent.

In the past, Mr Textor has spoken about his belief that public ownership of football teams provides fans with greater transparency about the running of their clubs.

He has described this as the democratisation of ownership – an issue likely to be at the heart of a bill on football regulation when it is reintroduced to parliament by the new Labour government.

If Eagle Football’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission proceeds in the coming weeks, its stock would be expected to commence trading several months later.

Mr Textor could not be reached for comment, while Mr Woodward did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Nvidia has signalled no drop in demand for its flagship chips among big artificial intelligence (AI) spenders despite the low-cost challenge posed by Chinese rival DeepSeek.

The leading AI chipmaker said it expected Blackwell sales to continue to grow after its latest earnings beat market expectations.

Nvidia forecast revenue of around $43bn (£34bn) for its first quarter after achieving a figure of $39.3bn (£31bn) over its last three months – up 12% from the previous quarter and 78% from one year ago.

Just a month ago, its shares took a hammering when it emerged DeepSeek‘s primary chatbot, which uses lower-cost chips, had become the most popular free application on Apple’s App Store across the US.

Nvidia’s shares lost almost $600bn in market value in a day.

It also prompted investors to question whether the AI-led stock market rally of recent years was overblown.

There was anxiety ahead of Nvidia’s earnings report though shares only fell fractionally in after-hours dealing.

Market analysts suggested demand from Microsoft, Amazon and other heavyweight tech companies racing to build
AI infrastructure remained robust, given Nvidia’s revenue guidance even though the bulk of it is accounted for through data centres.

Read more: What is DeepSeek?

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said Nvidia has ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell and achieved “billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter”.

“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law – increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter.

“AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionise the largest industries,” he said.

Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said of the report: “The longer-term investment case for the driver of the AI train is looking difficult to pick holes in, with Meta’s $200bn just one of the latest mega investments in data centres to be unveiled recently.

“By virtue of scale, growth may be slowing a little but upgrades to analysts full-year numbers can be expected off the back of today’s results. At a around 30x forward earnings, the valuation still doesn’t look overcooked.”

How much have America, Britain and the rest paid Ukraine in aid since the Russian invasion? And do they have any hope of getting money back in return?

These are big questions, and they’re likely to dominate much of the discussion in the coming months as Donald Trump pressurises his Ukrainian counterparts for a deal on ending the war. So let’s go through some of the answers.

First off, the question of who has given the most money to Ukraine rather depends on what you’re counting.

War latest: Ukraine agrees minerals deal with US – source

If you’re looking solely at the amount of military support extended since 2022, the US has provided €64bn, compared with €62bn from European nations (including the UK).

But now include other types of support, such as humanitarian and financial assistance, and European support exceeds American (€132bn in total, compared with €114bn from the US).

Divide Europe into its constituent nations, on the other hand, and none of them individually comes anywhere close to the US quantity of aid.

That being said, simple cash numbers aren’t an especially good measure of a country’s ability to pay.

Look at US support as a percentage of gross domestic product and it comes to 0.5% of GDP. That’s almost precisely the same as the aid from the UK.

Looked at through this prism, it’s other countries which are clearly the most generous: Denmark, Estonia and much of the Baltics providing around 2% of their GDP – a far bigger amount versus their ability to finance it.

Still, compare the aid this time around with previous amounts spent in other conflicts and they are nowhere close.

Lend-Lease during WWII, aid during the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and even the first Gulf War, involved significantly bigger outlays than currently being spent on Ukraine.

That goes not just for the US but also for the UK, Germany and Japan, all of which provided more aid to the Kuwaitis and other affected nations during the first Gulf War.

Even so, it’s clear that the US and others have put significant resources towards Ukraine.

President Trump has been talking recently about recouping $500bn from Ukraine in the form of revenues from mining rare earth metals.

This is, on the face of it, slightly odd. Rare earth metals represent an obscure corner of the periodic table and play a small if important role in electronics and military manufacturing.

The entire market is small – making it essentially implausible that, even if Ukraine suddenly produced the majority of the world’s supply, the president could expect that amount of revenue back in return.

More to the point, while there are a couple of rare earth deposits in Ukraine, they have languished, unexploited, for years. They are so expensive to mine no-one has worked out how to extract the elements and make a profit at the same time.

And even if you presumed they could do, Ukraine would still be a relative minnow in global rare earths production.

Read more:
What minerals does Ukraine have?

Assuming, as one probably should, that Donald Trump didn’t just mean rare earths, but was talking more broadly about “critical minerals” (the two are different things, but let’s not get too pedantic here), there are also one or two other promising mine sites in the country.

There is an old, shuttered alumina plant seized from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a large lithium resource which could, if all went well, be the single biggest lithium mine in Europe.

Yet even taking this into account, Ukraine would still be a relatively small player in global lithium. Not nothing – but not world changing either. Certainly not enough to generate the hundreds of billions of dollars Mr Trump is seeking.

Then again, Ukraine has other resources at its disposal too: vast seams of coal in the Donbas, large iron ore reserves in the south of the country.

Both of these are in or close to Russian occupied areas – which might, from the Ukrainians’ perspective, actually be the point. Old fashioned as this stuff is, it does actually generate significant revenue. It might be Donald Trump’s best hope for some payback.