Soccer Page 145 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

First rule of team social media: Don’t s**tpost your own player

It didn’t take long for SSC Napoli to crash from the dizzying heights of their third-ever Scudetto last spring. First, manager Luciano Spalletti left the club and eventually took the Italian national team manager’s job. And then the team got off to a very wonky start this season in Serie A, collecti...

Darwin Nunez may be figuring it out

The overriding factor in judging Darwin Nunez last year had nothing to do with him. He had the misfortune of being a big-money forward purchased at the same time as Erling Haaland. ...

Is there any point in playing this Champions League?

Nope, not really! But my editors and management insist that these posts are longer than three words, so I guess I’ll have to explain. If Manchester City waltzed to last year’s trophy, only really sweating in the final for about an hour against a stubborn Inter, they very well may never get out of a ...

Manchester United are doing that thing again

Yes, we have been here before. It was the beginning of last season that Manchester United started like ass, got utterly thwacked by Brighton, manager Erik Ten Hag made them run a few more miles in training, and then it was fine for a while. It was mostly fine because Marcus Rashford turned into the ...

Here is what we kind of learned from the USMNT’s week

As we and many others stress, international friendlies are weird. Especially when everyone has to fly over from Europe for two games that don’t count for anything while trying to not get hurt. And for the USMNT, there weren’t really too many players trying to carve out a role, or a bigger role, with...

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are still the heroes in <i>Welcome to Wrexham</i>, even when they’re the villains

The problem with Wrexham becoming such a story within the soccer world, thanks to the efforts of Ryan Reynolds, and Rob McElhenney making them so, is that the suspense is kind of removed from Season 2 of Welcome To Wrexham. We know how this one ends. Wrexham win the National League, and get promoted...

Oh right, Gregg Berhalter returns to USMNT this weekend

Mostly, the international break is just a water break for fans. Qualification for various tournaments doesn’t really matter until the end, or to a handful of countries on the bubble, if it matters at all. That’s doubly true for the USMNT, who don’t have anything to play for and anyone to play right ...

Lionel Messi coming to MLS has had the effect you’d think

One of the bonuses for both MLS and Apple TV having an exclusive streaming deal is that they’re not forced to tell us how it’s going. Or they can decide what they want to say. Without usual ratings to gauge how the revolutionary deal is fairing, we’re usually left guessing. There were whispers that ...

Arsenal are the Premier League’s new chaos masters and Chelsea can’t buy goals

It used to be Jürgen Klopp’s first Liverpool teams, and possibly the current one, that were considered the most raucous chaos merchants in the Premier League. They were equally capable of the most destructive football, going in both directions, equally capable of howitzer-ing their opponents or thei...

Saudi money putting an expiration date on soccer stars’ charisma

There’s a weird gray area for soccer stars after they turn 30. They’re still good, maybe not great, yet are so established that they command larger sums of money than a younger player or two who is not yet a household name and could Moneyball their teams the same production. In past instances, those...

Luis Rubiales' mom locked herself in a church and is on a hunger strike

Newcastle keeps being Newcastle, which isn't quite good enough

What Newcastle’s “problems” are depend on what their own expectations are. While they’ve certainly cemented themselves as one of the land’s biggest clubs, they’ve rarely, if ever, been touted as potential title challengers this season. Certainly none of that noise is coming from within. It appears t...

Christian Pulisic is having fun

If you’ve found yourself lost on soccer Twitter the past week, and it is a haven for the truly wayward as we’ve all had our brains addled by too many pre-dawn wakeups and day beers, you’ve probably seen a lot of “Pulisic is so back!” tweets and hashtags. Whether Pulisic is actually “back” is another...

Luis Rubiales finally resigns over forced-kiss of Jenni Hermoso [Updated]

UPDATE Sep. 10, 5:20 p.m. EST...

Luis Rubiales is going down kicking and screaming

Spanish soccer chief Luis Rubiales was expected to resign Thursday amid backlash over his kiss on the lips of soccer player Jennifer Hermoso during the country’s World Cup medal ceremony. Instead, he attacked the spin head-on, said he won’t step down, called the process a “witch hunt,” claimed there...

The grunt work for Lionel Messi’s stay in South Beach is about to begin

Lionel Messi’s Major League Soccer debut is Saturday. Since signing for Inter Miami officially on July 15, he hasn’t actually played in a game for the league he intended to play in. The Leagues Cup and US Open Cup have taken his focus. All of the dazzling moments that have taken over North America h...

USWNT captain Lindsey Horan said the quiet part out loud

It started to percolate during the latest Summer Olympics, delayed a year to 2021 because of the pandemic. The United States women’s national team — the former two-time-defending World Cup champions — not only looked vulnerable, but they also appeared average. Not average for the Stars and Stripes —...

Man United prove a team can be shamed, as long as it's also incompetent

Make no mistake, Manchester United wanted to bring Mason Greenwood back. They wanted to follow the cynical path of pretty much every other sporting entity in the world, the calculation that fans will eventually forget what a player has been credibly accused of or has done as long as the totals on th...

What if Man City have Kevin De Bruyne II, but faster?

Hello again! This is the second iteration of something we’re trying every Monday, wrapping up the Premier League weekend through five things we learned or liked or bothered us or confused us (we’re always confused). Hope you like it, and if you do please share it around to that guy who supports the ...

World Cup Final: What if the managers switched brains?

There’s some lesson to be learned that Spain won the World Cup with a manager they reviled, while the USWNT faceplanted in the round of 16 with a manager who got hired mostly because all the players loved him. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it probably has to do with what really matters is the...