Soccer Page 159 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
COVID could make next FIFA international window a bigger mess than usual
The club vs. country fight is a long and storied one in soccer, with clubs always more than a little peeved about releasing the players they’re paying millions to travel to different training schedules and medical staffs, for games they aren’t compensated for. Players getting hurt on national team d...
Is it bad that Barça’s CEO, lawyer, and former president got arrested?
This week on “What’s Gone Wrong At Barcelona Now?” we watch current and former execs go to the can!...
Has boring-ass La Liga replaced previous snoozefest Serie A?
It wasn’t a terribly good couple of weeks for La Liga teams in the Champions League. Barcelona got ritually sacrificed by Kylian Mbappe and PSG. Sevilla got an even bigger foot in their ass from Dortmund. Atletico Madrid, the current leader in La Liga, were held at arm’s length by Chelsea and lost 1...
SEE IT: Olivier Giroud scores everyone’s backyard goal with bicycle kick
Boy, did this match need this. Today’s Champions League round-of-16 first leg between Chelsea and Atletico Madrid was a chore. Atletico can always be that, as their identity for the past decade has been to be defiantly, sneeringly obstinate. Chelsea are still finding their feet under new manager Tho...
In more optimistic stadium news, England races to host Euro 2020 fans (in 2021)
While the NFL begins to lick its chops about having full capacities for the 2021 season, and MLB try to find every break and crack they can to start getting fans in from Opening Day, across the pond they’re planning for big returns too....
Romelu Lukaku is the best striker in the world
Few fixtures suffer from the lack of fans more than the Milan derby, especially this latest iteration. A split stadium, 80,000 fans baying for blood and justice, tifos galore, all in service to a top of the table contest, it would have been an epic occasion. Inter Milan came into this leading Serie ...
SEE IT: Surprising goal is why you don’t ever sleep on Sunderland
It’s still a long way back to the Premier League for Sunderland, the club whose fall from the top flight to the third tier of English soccer was chronicled in the Netflix documentary Sunderland ’Til I Die....
It only takes Juventus a minute to give up the dumbest goal
It hasn’t been a vintage season for Juventus, who look like they might surrender the Serie A title for the first time in 10 years. Their pursuit of the Champions League the past few years has moved beyond obsession, which led them to pay $120 million for Christiano Ronaldo a few years ago. That has ...
Kylian Mbappé ends Barcelona as we know it with hat trick
There really isn’t a better wielder of the axe that struck the final blow on this era of Barcelona than Kylian Mbappé and his three-goal night. While it’s been Lionel Messi’s world for so long, any minute now it’s going to be Mbappé’s to do with how he sees fit. That is, if it isn’t already....
The Champions League returns this week... all over the place
One of the rites of...well, not spring exactly, but a rite of reminding you that spring might actually arrive at some point before the light within you has completely extinguished, is the knockout stage of the Champions League. It drops into the sporting scene at the end of February, right after you...
Alisson kicks Premier League to Manchester City
Two and a half months ago or so, I wrote this. I certainly wasn’t the only one, and perhaps I let my red-colored view of the world get the better of me just a touch as well. While Pep Guardiola was coming under more fire than he ever had while in charge of Manchester City, possibly at any of his sto...
Market correction has come for Liverpool … violently
There’s a lot to pick through in the rubble of Liverpool’s season at the moment. It’s a good thing they’ve left so much rubble to house all of it. A team that was top of the Premier League on New Year’s Day has landed back to Earth with such a thud over the past month that even Wile E. Coyote is tug...
Another armada of soccer-playing Yanks is heading to Europe
The January transfer window closed yesterday — sometimes it closes in February, sometimes it snows in April — and a plethora of American players left their MLS digs behind for European riches. Some will be back, some are real longshots, some have very bright futures. The fact that this has become so...
SEE IT: Liverpool go double Air Coryell to score second against West Ham
It looked to be a pretty tricky game for Liverpool. Only three days after a win at Tottenham that might have saved their season, they had to be back in London just three days later to face one the Premier League’s in-form teams in West Ham. Making it worse, Sadio Mane couldn’t make the bell with a m...
Jizz Hornkamp does Dutch team dirty on pitch, finds longer-than-four-hours of fame on social media
If you’re playing against Den Bosch in Dutch soccer’s second division, you have to be ready for them to come hard from behind....
MLS is all grown up, on the verge of its very own work stoppage
Can you be a legitimate league in North America and not have a work stoppage? Apparently MLS doesn’t think so, as it is on the verge of careening into their first one in their 25 years of existence....
$1.5B in debt, Barcelona are broke-ass broke — and royally FC'd
We’ve spent the past year casting doubt upon American sports franchises’ claims of just how much an effect the pandemic had on their finances. They claim “biblical” losses left and right, while never bothering to provide any information to confirm that. Well, thankfully, unless you’re a Barcelona su...
Frank Lampard could do the first job, but he couldn’t do the second at Chelsea
The thing about getting a dream job is that most likely it’ll turn into just another job, i.e. it won’t feel like a dream after some time, and you’ll probably get fired. The latter is even more likely in sports, even more so in soccer, and yet even more so at Chelsea. They cycle through managers lik...
SEE IT: Newport County keeper scores from Narnia, sets new record
There’s few things hockey fans love more than a goalie goal. You might get one per season, and they’re met with joyous celebrations, as we’ve all just seen something rare and beautiful. Like the perfect breakfast sandwich where the egg yolk runoff is still contained within the sandwich (yes, I’m hun...