Soccer Page 160 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Mohamed Salah is on one
I suppose being as analytic-minded as I can get that I’m going to be hypocritical here. It doesn’t help (or hurt, depending on your point of view) that I love Mohamed Salah in every sense of the word, to an extent that my vulnerability is teetering on “highly damaging.” So take that as you will....
This is what it can be
It is hard to remember in the moment, especially when that is the first moment of a qualifier like last night against Costa Rica and the USMNT is giving up yet another stupid goal before coming back for a 2-1 win and you haven’t even cracked that beer that you’re firing against the wall, that this w...
The USMNT can’t live without Tyler Adams
When this World Cup qualifying cycle began, we had hoped that the U.S. would surprise us and break new ground on what they could do. And they’ve done that, we just didn’t know it would be showing us how bad they can play at times. ...
Women's soccer players protested sexual harassment and were cheered — great… but that rarely happens when athletes protest racism
Protesting is American as capitalism. However, the support your protest will — or won’t — receive in this country is always determined by the race and gender of the protesters....
Liverpool and Manchester City hurl everything at each other in game of the season
It’s rare that games between the top-table inhabitants of soccer can live up to the billing. They usually cancel each other out, the fear of losing greatly outweighing the benefit of winning, and you might get the odd goal here or there in contests that are high on tension and intrigue but low on an...
NWSL shows how to deliver actual accountability
First, The Athletic reported on Thursday about allegations of sexual coercion and misconduct by North Carolina Courage head coach Paul Riley....
Houdini, thy name is Ole Gunnar
While most every Manchester United supporter you know will scream at you about what a sneaky good manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær is, and certainly never in a tone or volume that will make you think they’re trying to convince themselves as much as they are you, the urge for all of us who don’t support t...
A hot mess without Messi
Good lord is Barcelona awful....
We said depth would be the main thing
If it feels like World Cup qualifiers are boomeranging right back into your consciousness after not much of a break from the last ones, you’re not alone. This is the normal calendar, you just had a year off from it thanks to the pandemic, but just wait until qualifiers are crammed into January and F...
Real Madrid goes down in Champion’s League shocker
The main headlines of Tuesday’s Champions League will be Lionel Messi scoring his first for PSG. But fuck that, Messi scores every goddamn day. The real story is FC Sheriff, from a country that kind of doesn’t exist, in their first Champions League campaign ever, just beat Real Madrid in the Bernabe...
They’re still Manchester Damn City
It’s a little surprising, just a bit, how a team that cantered to the Premier League title and was a Champions League finalist just a few months ago can somehow fly under the radar. But with the noise of Cristiano Ronaldo and his rape accusations landing across town, or Romelu Lukaku giving Chelsea ...
CONCACAF just CONCACAF’d like never before
The most CONCACAF thing happened on Tuesday night, which is an enormous statement to make if you know anything about how CONCACAF works....
New Liga MX-MLS Cup is way cool, and might set up more cool stuff (I said ‘might’… this <i>is</i> MLS after all)
If I were the cynical sort (perish the thought!), I might suggest that MLS realizes its main stream of income, expansion, might be drying up in the coming years. That’s if you go by the “MLS is a Ponzi scheme” theory, which one has to admit has some legs. Charlotte and St. Louis join the league in t...
Can we please get promotion/relegation in women’s soccer now?
The growth of women’s soccer in this country took another step forward with the announcement that the USL, which runs the second tier league on the men’s side, will form a second-tier women’s league in 2023, the USL Super League (are we seriously going with this term now? Whatever.)...
Someone should get Harvey Barnes a GPS, or a sense of purpose
It’s been a pretty woeful start for Leicester City in the Premier League this season after being the surprise package the past two. While both ended in final-day heartbreak, as they missed out on the Champions League at the final hurdle, they were still fun to watch as they sparred with and bloodied...
This biennial World Cup mumbo jumbo is soccer’s next big fight
Last spring, when news of the Super League first started to break, I was pretty dismissive. Heard it all before — that type of leak tended to break on a cycle of every few years or so, and would quickly fade into the background. In reality, it did fade into the background pretty quickly. It just did...
Your 2021-2022 Champions League Guide
Despite the attempt to kill it from Europe’s leading clubs last spring (and UEFA’s eventual success in doing so in the coming years), the Champions League returns today in its usual form. While it has become the nexus point in all that’s wrong with soccer and has certainly widened the gap between th...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
At halftime last night, you could forgive any USMNT fan for thinking they had never left 1997. I know I did. Here we all were, too late on a school night, watching a US team getting paddled in Central America with the crowd going nuts and the American manager looking utterly clueless and his players...
We totally forgot that this USMNT hasn’t played very well
Perhaps I doomed them last Wednesday when I told my editor the US Men’s National Team would qualify for the World Cup easily. The power of the motherfuck grows every day. That won’t comfort anyone, especially me, as the US has certainly stubbed its toe in its first two qualifiers, even if it hasn’t ...
It’s showtime!
It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to dodge the bags of piss...wait, those aren’t the original lyrics, are they? Well, for the USMNT they might as well be. ...