kylian-mbappe Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Oakland A’s want to build the Sydney Opera House
Leave it to the A’s and John Fisher to be three months late on the renderings for a ballpark that still feels like it has a better chance of being built in Narnia than it does in Vegas, and then to have it leak out a day after they meant it to:...
An ode to the enigma that was Paul Pogba
With the news that Paul Pogba has been suspended for four years (pending appeal), it almost certainly ends his career. Should he have to serve the full four seasons, he’ll be 35 and not have played in forever. The question of whether he’s a legend or left far too much on the table would depend on wh...
Nikita Kucherov exposed NHL All-Star weekend for the farce that it is
There’s a fallacy out there that any All-Star Game is “for the fans.” That idea flew out the window long ago, especially for the NBA and NHL. The All-Star Game is merely a junket for the league’s biggest sponsors to get the chance to hobnob with the game’s top stars, a reward for their support of th...
Soccer’s had load management for some time — now there just might be more of it
As if on cue, one of soccer’s biggest stars on one of the world’s biggest clubs went down with injury in the Africa Cup of Nations. While there’s not a diagnosis yet, Mohamed Salah limped off just before the half in Egypt’s draw against Ghana on Thursday. This comes a day after Kylian Mbappé warned ...
Mbappe bemoans lack of 'load management' in European soccer
Ligue 1 and the NBA are two leagues that usually don’t go together, but French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé is worried that European soccer is starting to mimic professional basketball in one very specific way....
The Champions League group stage went out with a bang
The Champions League group stage spent most of its time getting maligned, some of that in bad faith from the biggest clubs who just wanted to mold the competition to their whims. But their main argument held a lot of water, which was that it lacked drama or suspense, as for the most part the top clu...
Paul Pogba's career could be done after 4-year doping ban
Juventus midfielder and French National team player Paul Pogba’s future career remains uncertain after Italy’s national anti-doping prosecutors requested a four-year ban from soccer after testing positive for testosterone in September. ...
The week in random sports news: Mbappe could be gone, the Bears, well, are the Bears and what were the Yankees thinking?
In the end, the Chicago Bears screwed up what could have been something historic. Last week they managed to be the first team to lose while winning the turnover battle by three and holding the ball for 40 minutes. They had the chance to do it two weeks in a row and live forever. Instead, they’re jus...
The case <i>against</i> Deion Sanders as Sportsperson of the Year
We are on the brink of our last full college football Saturday slate before bowl season. So, it’s apropos that Deion Sanders’ overhype earned him Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year. After announcing Sanders as the recipient of the honor, Sports Illustrated is dodging tomatoes from the Int...
It's tough to watch, but PSG is doing the right thing
On the one hand, the architects of this PSG team probably should be applauded for actually taking the time to step back and try to create a team instead of collecting players. Messi left, Neymar decamped for Saudi Arabia and PSG didn’t chase whatever shiny thing they could find to plug the holes, no...
Trade talk is the nadir of sports journalism
Imagine being a Chicago Bears fan — I know empathy is hard, but just try — and going through what they did Thursday only to open ESPN on Friday and see a bunch of misguided, braindead analysts talking about trading Justin Fields. Over his past two starts, the Chicago QB is 43-for-64 for 627 yards wi...
Is there any point in playing this Champions League?
Nope, not really! But my editors and management insist that these posts are longer than three words, so I guess I’ll have to explain. If Manchester City waltzed to last year’s trophy, only really sweating in the final for about an hour against a stubborn Inter, they very well may never get out of a ...
It's one franchise QB, how much could it cost? $10?
Sports has reached a level of spending that makes Joe Burrow’s record contract look cute. The Cincinnati Bengal quarterback’s $275 million deal is laughable if it wasn’t all too real. English Premier League clubs spent $2.97 billion in the most recent transfer window. Tiger Woods was reportedly offe...
Arsenal are the Premier League’s new chaos masters and Chelsea can’t buy goals
It used to be Jürgen Klopp’s first Liverpool teams, and possibly the current one, that were considered the most raucous chaos merchants in the Premier League. They were equally capable of the most destructive football, going in both directions, equally capable of howitzer-ing their opponents or thei...
Saudi money putting an expiration date on soccer stars’ charisma
There’s a weird gray area for soccer stars after they turn 30. They’re still good, maybe not great, yet are so established that they command larger sums of money than a younger player or two who is not yet a household name and could Moneyball their teams the same production. In past instances, those...
Giannis Antetokounmpo sounds more excited to play in Saudi Arabia than Milwaukee
Giannis Antetokoumpo is already the savior of pro basketball in Milwaukee. Bucks ownership was threatening to relocate to Seattle while the city hedged on providing the funding for a stadium upgrade before The Greek Freak singlehandedly yanked them out of basketball purgatory. Nearly a decade later,...
Juan Soto provides the perfect metaphor for the Padres season, and Neymar ends up where he was always meant to be
The San Diego Padres are running out of time. They seemed to know it, as Juan Soto blew up at them last week after another dispiriting loss. It’s clear that something is amiss below the surface for San Diego, and Soto was doing his best to try and get everyone focused on what really matters, closing...
Saudi Arabia poaching NBA talent is possible, but unlikely
In a jocular response to the Saudi Public Investment Fund offering a record $1.1 billion to PSG and Kylian Mbappé for the French icon to play one season in Saudi Arabia, two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo offered up his services to the Al Hilal club. ...
Here we go with this Kylian Mbappe nonsense again
Some transfer/trade/free agency stories go on for years, which is what it appears Kylian Mbappe is intent on creating. We all knew about LeBron James’s first free agency three years beforehand as ESPN turned it into its own Odyssey. And his second one a couple years before. Kevin Durant’s next desti...
The USMNT wins its last game in the pre-Balogun era
International soccer, especially this season, is highly weird. So while the USMNT’s 1-0 win over El Salvador to clinch a spot in the semifinals of the Nations League doesn’t look like much — and it isn’t — one must consider that most of the squad has been run ragged with their club teams, had a Worl...