I am not yelling but with Drupal you can do easily many things once you get the hang of it. In fact all the things you say can be done by Drupal ( try downloading Drupal 5x) more or less easily with the help of some modules. In fact certain things can be done which a paid script or a hired company may never do for you provided you do some labor and spice up some imagination. Read this interesting story for some inspiration : http://drupal.org/node/261340
All of these these which you say can be done with Drupal 5x or even 6x 1, Professional sports news display.- - Yes, plenty of themes 2, Easy manage articles, topics,... - Very much Yes, make them sticky, promote them, demote them, change authorship, 3, Easy to manage and customize, modifications such as table league, top players... - With Blocks, CCK, Panels and Views you can do amazing things 4, Alternative to choose templates. - Yes, plenty of these. 5, Ads system. - Yes 6, SEO with friendly url... - Yes And whether with a free or paid script or even hired company you may still need some extra labor or extra developer for that nittygritty 'extra' things An important thing MISSING IN PHPCOW I found was that while adding article they do not allow to add tags ( or make the tags editable by the readers) if you want . Any active user of Phpcow will be able to confirm or deny it.
Thank you, rebekka. I did search a news publishing template a couple of days for Drupal but I could not. Do you know where can I find it?
Any of the templates available at Drupal can serve as news site. There are many successful and topranking crowd heavy sites using Drupal. You can invest at least one day or just half a day of your life browsing through drupal.org. Any amount of handholding you need you can ask me or at the forums there - surely you will have some useful knowledge even if you do not use Drupal eventually.
You can see these themes - http://drupal.org/project/Themes Download Drupal 5x or 6x [ 5 minutes to download and install and test in your localhost ] Then add the necessary modules. You are up and ready
Looks alot like the phpcow skins to me like this one for example As for the tags question Rebekka asked, yes, when you insert articles with the cow you don't get to insert tags, but it is very SEO friendly from my use. I've risen up to top rankings with my website but it would be nice to have that feature available.
On any CMS if you don;t want your site to look like the others built on limited number of templates available for them, custom design will cost money.