Soccer Page 150 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Here comes Newcastle… maybe
As Manchester City have bulldozed their way through the second half of the season that gives off the feeling that they’re simply strolling to a Treble, if bulldozing, and strolling can be the same thing, there’s been a question of what anyone can do to stop them in the years to come. Sadly, for ever...
What’s next for Arsenal?
When you’ve spent 248 days on top of the Premier League (somewhat aided by the World Cup break, of course), getting not just passed but utterly dusted in the last month or so of the season can feel pretty deflating. That’s where Arsenal find themselves, and certainly conceding the title by getting o...
Putting the World Cup Final in New Jersey would be great, if you like cruel and unusual punishment
The states of New York and New Jersey launched a joint successful campaign to be a host city for the 2026 World Cup a while back. And yeah, of course the world’s biggest individual sporting event couldn’t have the most populous region of the country left out when the United States, Mexico, and Canad...
Black magic is no match for perfection
It’s impossible to be neutral on Manchester City. If you support a club that has to compete with them in England or in Europe, it’s likely they are a symbol of all that’s wrong with the modern game, given their state ownership, and bottomless financial resources. If you don’t belong to one of those ...
Brentford’s Ivan Toney breached FA rules 262 times for betting
Breaking the rules once is bad. “But why stop there,” you could imagine Ivan Toney saying, probably, because he breached FA rules 262 times when it came to sports betting. This resulted in the Brentford striker being suspended from all team activities for the next eight months — less than one day pe...
This time for sure!
When I was growing up, it was understood that the Chicago Cubs would never have a third baseman. Or center fielder as well, but the third base gap was the more hallowed one because it followed Ron Santo. There was no universally beloved centerfielder whose legacy the team could never tread upon and ...
Ilkay Gündoğan joins the chorus line and cinches another title for Manchester City
A lot of the joy of sports comes from watching men and women do things we can’t possibly do, or would never have been able to do. We live to be amazed, and sometimes can’t even conceive of how a particular play is made. The logistics just don’t add up, with where the ball was landing or the speed it...
Here’s a shovel, Mauricio Pochettino
If you’re a manager who loves to tell players to do one out of a club, especially as an example to the rest of the squad how things are going to work under your leadership, then boy is Chelsea the place for you. And as Mauricio Pochettino, now the new manager at Stamford Bridge, is known to wield on...
Colorado Rapids’ Max Alves suspended for alleged unlawful sports gambling
The Colorado Rapids have suspended attacker Max Alves in connection to a match-fixing ring in Brazil, per an ESPN report. The Major League Soccer club made a statement acknowledging the situation but did not name Alves for any player in the remarks. The MLS’ official account made a similar statement...
Real Madrid and Manchester City trapped each other, or so they’d have you believe
When you’ve been as dominant in the Champions League as Real Madrid have for the past decade, or as dominant in the Premier League as Manchester City have, you can convince everyone that whatever you do is part of the plan, part of a higher genius we can’t quite understand. It must be, otherwise, ho...
The Gang Enters The Soccer Tournament
This is a fever dream for soccer, or a fever nightmare depending on what team you root for. The Soccer Tournament, or TST for short, was announced this week as a 32-team showcase taking place in early June in North Carolina. Based on The Basketball Tournament, it’s a winner-take-all, 7-on-7, $1 mill...
Real Madrid enter the next Galactico Era with the capture of Jude Bellingham
“The best players in the world must play for Real Madrid.”...
There are cheaper ways to tell us you’re friends with Ryan Reynolds
Everybody’s favorite spinoff to We Bought a Zoo — Famous Person Buys an EPL Team — just got a new character as retired NFL star J.J. Watt and his wife, NWSL player Kealia Watt, announced they’re the proud minority owners of Burnley FC. The Bears are set to return to the Premier League after finishin...
America’s darling Wrexham A.F.C. would get creamed in Major League Soccer
There truly hasn’t been a team to carve out their own slice of Americana in quite the way Wrexham A.F.C. has. Three years ago, if you’d heard of Wrexham and you didn’t live in the United Kingdom or have any family lineage in Wales, I’ll brand you a liar. The former-fifth-division side in the UK just...
Weston McKennie is not having a good time
Soccer moves fast, and it moves faster in the January transfer window. All the things Weston McKennie had to consider when a move to Leeds United from Juventus was probably thrown at him in a matter of days, if not hours. Questions of role, money, future, and the allure of moving to a country where ...
Pep Guardiola is about to complete his masterpiece
My brother had a college friend who had an overarching theory of Led Zeppelin. This isn’t much of a surprise, as I assume college students for some 40 years all had their own theory of Led Zeppelin. I remember telling a friend that I had to have a serious talk with him, made it sound really grave, t...
The Women’s World Cup is already a battle of attrition
The World Cup is always a measure of health and a team’s ability to deal with it. It comes at the end of a long season — unless you’ve fisted it into a desert, totalitarian country that makes you have it in the middle of the season — and players have logged the most possible miles before they play i...
US Soccer might have actually made a good decision
There is always a suspicion that US Soccer has fucked up. They’re too insular, too greedy, too cheap, and too weird to ever get out of their own way. Even when it looks like they’re taking a step forward, they’ll find a way to sabotage it. The Berhalter-Reyna mess is perhaps the perfect example of j...
Whether genuine, stunt, larf, documentary fodder, or indulgence, Wrexham delivered to those who matter
As I said in an initial review, Welcome To Wrexham, the show isn’t really for me and my ilk (nor should most anything be, really, we’re a broody bunch). It wasn’t meant for the diehard soccer fan, who already is at least somewhat familiar with promotion, and relegation, the football pyramid in Engla...
The Gang Possibly Gets a Promotion
As season one of FX’s Welcome to Wrexham concluded, we saw the Welsh football club narrowly miss out on a promotion to the top four tiers of England’s professional football pyramid. And for those living under a rock, Wrexham is a small United Kingdom team that got that spotlight because they’re owne...