Rafael Nadal is roughly midway through his clay-court rampage, having lengthened his consecutive set streak to a record 46, and just had some time off between tournaments in Barcelona and Madrid. He spent some of that precious downtime watching soccer, which he loves deeply.

Spain’s El Clásico remains the biggest and best rivalry in all of soccer. Especially during the last decade, when matches between Barcelona and Real Madrid practically always meant matches between two historically great teams who desired nothing more than to stick a shiv into their most hated foes’ guts—only partially…

Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi. It’s an argument as old as time itself, with diehard fans of these two all-time greats throwing out stats and facts in support of their preferred candidate to make their case for superiority—Messianiacs pointing to his better scoring record, his better passing, his better dribbling…

An incredible comeback from Roma took down Barcelona today in the Champions League quarterfinals, as the Serie A side scored thrice at home in the second leg to beat Lionel Messi and friends on the away goals rule, 4-4.

If you care about soccer at all, you were definitely glued to your TV today, watching to see if a certain team could do the impossible by overturning a huge first-leg deficit. And while one team did do just that by pulling off an enormous comeback, it was almost certainly not the team you expected.

Lionel Messi came on as a substitute in the 58th minute of Barcelona’s match against Sevilla on Saturday with express orders not to run around too much. He obeyed, meandered around for the better part of his 30-minute cameo, before picking his moment and bursting forth from out of nowhere to score the game-tying goal…

Just a couple of months before June’s World Cup begins, a next-generation Spain squad incinerated a mostly full-strength Argentina in Madrid today, riding an Isco hat trick to a 6-1 laugher. It’s only a friendly, but still, it wasn’t good, and Argentina star Lionel Messi, missing the game with a hamstring injury,…

Chelsea went to Camp Nou and got slapped out of the Champions League by Barcelona yesterday, and some of the Chelsea fans were feeling a bit sore after the match.

We’ll probably never know whether or not Lionel Messi really could do it on cold, wet nights in Stoke, but today we’ve been given even more evidence that he is pretty good at doing it on early spring nights in and against teams from elsewhere around England.

It helps to take a step back now, after Barcelona have all but assured themselves yet another league title by beating second-place Atlético Madrid at home yesterday, to accurately appreciate the enormity of the situation and the incomparable superiority of Lionel Messi.

Lionel Messi is so incomprehensibly great because he has an almost unlimited arsenal of match-deciding, soul-snatching, title-winning skills and attributes—so many, in fact, that some of them threaten to go under-appreciated. Perfect example: some of his deceptively simple but actually staggeringly effective moves in…

Because soccer fans are a famously circumspect, magnanimous, and selfless bunch, they often continue to wish the best for players that once represented their beloved clubs but have since moved on to pastures new. Hence why Liverpool fans have to be downright brimming with pride and delight after seeing former Red…

Sunday’s La Liga match between Barcelona and Espanyol was an eventful affair. The animosity-fueled Catalan Derby was as charged as usual, and this one in particular had some notable flashpoints that inspired the league office to open an investigation. Just, not into any of the actual bad stuff that happened.

It only took a couple months for everyone to realize what had seemed obvious from the outset: that Gerard Deulofeu had made a big mistake coming back to Barcelona. Despite the Neymar departure and Barça’s subsequent struggles to lock down a replacement opening up an unexpectedly perfect avenue for Deulofeu to sprint…

“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 scored twice, assisted…

In a metaphorical sense, Barcelona are almost always playing above their competition. But today against Levante, Lionel Messi and Jordi Alba combined for some play that was literally untouchable. Their give-and-go was almost as suited to volleyball as it was to a soccer pitch, and it was good for Messi’s 365th La Liga…

The once-dead Coutinho-to-Barcelona transfer, a hot rumor of the post-Neywatch soccer landscape, is now, suddenly, a done deal: today Barcelona and Liverpool reportedly agreed to a £142 million transfer fee that will send the midfielder to Catalonia. Per ESPN:

This past summer was a great one for aficionados of melodramatic transfer window soap operas. The most passion-inflamed and drama-filled ones were the two Barcelona-based series, NeyWatch and One Life to Liverpool. NeyWatch, you probably remember, starred the impossibly hunky Neymar and detailed the dissolution of…

Kudos to the lowlight reel maker here for backing this hilariously embarrassing moment from Wednesday’s Barcelona-Gintra Women’s Champions League match—which features one sort of big screwup followed by a ginormous one—with an appropriately vaudevillian score. We present: The Three Stoogettes.

By now, you’ve probably seen the images on Twitter or Facebook of Spanish police in riot gear breaking a Catalan woman’s fingers, beating people as they sought medical attention, and even battling firemen. The shocking violence came as Spanish authorities tried, in vain, to block the referendum for Catalan…