Field of dreams

The site reports on American football, basketball and other sports in more than 100 colleges and universities as well as focusing on high school sporting prospects.

The site competes with Scout.com, which was bought by News Corp for $60m last year.

College sports are highly popular in the US and information about them has significant commercial value.

Users of the Rivals website, which has about 185,000 subscribers, pay about $10 (£5) a month to access information on results, drafts and scholarships.

Critics of Yahoo have accused it of a lack of innovation and flat footedness in the face of rival Google's growing ascendancy.

Nevertheless, Yahoo still generates more advertising revenue than any other internet search firm except Google, and has more than 500 million worldwide users.

Yahoo's sports section attracted more than 15 million visitors last year.