Soccer Page 220 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Arsenal Punked Out Of Yet Another Star Player
If you had to pick a single image to represent Arsenal’s enduring subjugation in English soccer’s hierarchy, you could do a lot worse than one showing Robin van Persie lifting the Premier League trophy. van Persie famously pined for that title after failing to win it with Arsenal after nearly a deca...

Lionel Messi Is A Treasure
“It’s spectacular to watch him every day. He is the best player there is and the best there will ever be,” said first-year Barcelona manager Ernesto Valverde yesterday after witnessing yet another breathtaking display of excellence by Lionel Messi in his team’s 5-0 victory over Real Betis. Messi sco...

Please Do Not Piss In Anyone's Water Bottle, No, Not Even The Opposing Keeper's
A Middlesbrough fan was reportedly arrested after he was caught on video pissing into the water bottle of QPR keeper Alex Smithies during Saturday’s EFL Championship match, and then tossing the bottle back onto the pitch. It should go without saying that you are a deeply weird and antisocial person ...

James McCarthy Suffers Brutal Leg Break While Trying To Block A Shot
Everton midfielder James McCarthy suffered an injury that had his opponent in tears during Saturday’s Everton-West Brom second half. When Salomón Rondón went to take a shot on goal, McCarthy got in between the West Brom player and the ball. So when Rondón took a shot, he ended up kicking McCarthy’s ...

Chelsea Return From Brink Of Despair With Gorgeous Team Goal
Chelsea fans entered today’s game against Brighton and Hove Albion in panic mode. Sitting tied for third in the Premier League but with no shot at winning the title, the team had appeared to have given up. They had scored one goal in their last four games, and had yet to win a match in regulation in...

Young Lad Is Way Too Chill About Scoring The Goal Of His Life
You’d think that even the most seasoned and professional of goalscorers would react to popping the ball into the net with a scorpion kick by frantically running around and losing their mind. But this little Irish lad, after scoring a once-in-a-lifetime scorpion kick, just calmly turned and trudged b...

Brazilian Soccer Team Scores From Ingenious Free Kick Fake-Out
We’ve seen lots of tricky free kick techniques over the years, but this one from Brazil takes the cake in terms of ingenuity and unexpectedness:...

Burnley Manager Denies Eating Worms But Admits To Sucking On Them
Burnley manager Sean Dyche seems like the kind of guy who would munch on a big bowl of tree bark, rocks, and beetles for breakfast every morning and make a big show of it if for no other reason than to prove how much of a hardass he is. Thus it wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe a former teamma...

Dumb Column: Sacramento Shouldn't Pay For MLS Stadium, But Maybe Sacramento Could Pay For MLS Stadium<em></em>
There’s one MLS expansion slot left, and it’ll soon be awarded to Cincinnati, Sacramento, or Detroit. Sacramento once looked like a lock to get an expansion spot, but it’s now rather uncertain, likely because Sacramento’s ownership group isn’t as flamboyantly wealthy as their competitors....

Neymar Is Wasting His Talents In This Bullshit League
Neymar did an amazing thing yesterday in a game you almost certainly didn’t watch and probably didn’t even hear about. At one point in yesterday’s Ligue 1 match against Dijon, Paris Saint-Germain’s brightest star picked up the ball near the center line and sped his way down half the pitch, in the pr...

Argentine Soccer Team Puts Keepers Through Batshit Insane Training Regimen
Sportivo Dock Sud, a team in Argentina’s fourth division, really want their goalkeepers to be prepared for anything. That must be why the team’s keeper coach runs his charges through the wildest training gauntlet imaginable:...

Dimitri Payet Gives Keeper The Business, Literally Injures Him With Sick Dribble Move
Everyone knows about the basketball phrase “breaking one’s ankles,” a metaphorical description for when a defender gets juked so hard by a crossover or the like that, in their spasmodic attempt to stay with the dribbler, they fall over themselves into sad heap of pain and humiliation. Well Dimitri P...

Carlos Tevez On His Time Stealing Money From Chinese Club: "I Was On A Seven-Month Vacation"
Carlos Tevez had about 40 million reasons to love his cushy, high-paid life with Chinese Super League club, Shanghai Shenhua. But, as readers of this site well know, Tevez hated living in China, hated the food (though not so much as to prevent him from packing on the pounds), and hated the soccer cu...

The Liverpool-Man City Match Was A Classic From The Premier League's New Golden Age
The English Premier League has been the most famous and purely entertaining soccer league for ages now. No other domestic league can match England’s in top-to-bottom competitiveness, in the sheer number of historically and consistently great clubs, in blustery, throat-hoarsening fan engagement, in w...

French Soccer Ref Loses His Mind After Getting Accidentally Tripped By Player
Because soccer referees need to be in the thick of the action, every now and then they will be inadvertently tripped up or bowled over by a player. A normal reaction to this is for the ref to clamber back to his feet with a smirk, and maybe laugh about the accident with the sheepish player once play...

Manchester United Need To Stay The Fuck Away From Our Wonderteen
The good thing about having one of the soccer world’s most coveted young attacking prospects is that the eyes of the game’s biggest clubs will be focused on the kid, each team projecting out his possibly incredible future and positioning themselves to snatch it for themselves if they so decide to ma...

These Japanese Kids Suck So Hard At Soccer That Not Even 100 Of Them Can Beat Three Pros
Last time the youth of Japan were given an opportunity to demonstrate their sporting acumen in the whimsical world of Japanese game shows, 55 children tried and failed to best a team of a mere two professional players in soccer. Recently, that same game show gave 100 more kids the chance to redeem t...

Romelu Lukaku Did Not Leave Everton Because Of "Voodoo"
Farhad Moshiri, the majority shareholder of Everton, took some time at a shareholders’ meeting yesterday to explain, according to him, why his club could not convince former Toffee and current Manchester United striker Romelu Lukaku not to leave last summer. Moshiri’s bizarre explanation—that Lukaku...

May All Your Failures End Up As Serendipitously As This Soccer Coach's Attempt To Lean Against A Fence
I don’t think I’ve ever done anything on purpose with the poise and commitment that Marius Sumudica, manager of the Turkish soccer team Kayserispor, brings to playing off this accidental fall so that it looks like he intended all along to lower himself into a metal hammock. Seems comfy. ...

Liverpool Mayor Writes Nutty Letter To The FA Calling For Investigation Of Ross Barkley Transfer
Joe Anderson is the mayor of Liverpool. He is also a diehard and delusional Everton fan. It is presumably this mix of a mayor’s political sway and a fan’s righteous indignation that inspired him to call the cops and ask them to investigate a transfer he didn’t like....