association-football Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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...
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...
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 ...
Mama said there’d be days like this
I kind of knew that being so jonesed about the U.S.’ first qualifier would lead to something of a dry-heave of a game last night. This is CONCACAF, after all. Winning on the road is incredibly hard. It’s even harder when you’re taking a squad full of players that haven’t been on the road in CONCACAF...
It’s hard to know who’s king twit of dumb mountain between Real Madrid, PSG, and Barcelona
The transfer window in soccer closed yesterday evening, and after Cristiano Ronaldo took his rape accusations to Manchester United, there weren’t too many surprises. Man City didn’t find the striker they were after, Chelsea added to an already ridiculous squad, blah blah blah. Perhaps everyone was j...
So is Ronaldo to United actually going to work?
You’d think if you were going to take on the burden of bringing back a twice-accused rapist to your club, the hierarchy would have to be pretty sure that it would make a huge difference on the field. But you’re not the Glazer family, who are so desperate to get Manchester United fans to stop burning...
Sporting Kansas City and the Rapids were unclear on the concept last night
As I’ve said in the past, I’m still something of an MLS novice. This is the first season I’ve truly tried to work against my “europhile” ways and really get in up to the elbow in America’s domestic league....
So what’s to be done with Alexander Zverev?
The U.S. Open has a problem. The ATP has a problem. And neither is likely to do much about it. And no, it’s not the ranks of players pulling out of the tournament. ...
With World Cup qualifying imminent, let's check in on how many rakes Berhalter is stepping on
Good God, would someone take the air out Tim Ream’s tires or barricade his apartment door for a couple days so Gregg Berhalter will stop picking him for the national team?...
Time to take the 2026 World Cup out of Mexico
It’s probably high time to strip the 2026 World Cup from Mexico. ...
Harry Kane decides to stay with Tottenham
It just might not be as violent as we thought. But maybe weirder. ...
'Red' storm rising
The Premier League might be headed for something of a row with FIFA and international teams next week. Yesterday, the league announced that teams won’t be releasing players that have to travel to countries on the U.K.’s “red list,” which is pretty much all of South America and a lot of Africa....
David Moyes must be having a midlife crisis with West Ham
Maybe it was pandemic football that blinded me. After all, it was hard to fully invest in in the same way with the canned noise and lessened verve that each game had. Everything started to look and feel the same, and hence I couldn’t see what was really going on. ...
The Malice South of Paris
There was a-doings a-transpirin’ in southern France yesterday. Perhaps in tribute to the release of the documentary “Malice At The Palace,” fans in Nice thought they would reenact it....