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So here’s this year’s Champions League group of death
The group-stage draw for the UEFA Champions League is always a strange, exciting, but mostly strange day. The path to European glory becomes more in focus with a straightforward goal: finish in the top half of your group and you make it to the knockout stage that begins next year. If you don’t you’r...
USMNT unveils new jerseys that even the players hate
You know it’s bad when even the players hate the jerseys they’re wearing...
Kylian Mbappé is PSG’s only hope
Let’s be fair, it isn’t much of a sacrifice or even a hard choice to make more money than a lot of countries’ GDP and live in Paris. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and something 95 percent of the world would opt for (with the other five percent either already living there, making millions somewhere bette...
And we all thought Barcelona was done big-game hunting
We didn’t really get as big of a window to laugh at Barcelona as we thought or hoped. Proving the life lesson that you need to celebrate anything worth celebrating at that time and that place or you’ll miss the opportunity. Barça is roaring in La Liga right now, all the way up to second after winnin...
They qualified, so shut up
As mentioned previously this week, the USMNT fan’s natural inclination these days is to turn cold and scornful. It’s understandable, as we all spent so much time watching a team and program that was an utter mess and just twirling around before falling like a child you made do the spin-around-the-ba...
I MF’d Barcelona
There’s no hiding, not after yesterday. Not after Barcelona, just months ago the biggest figure of fun in world soccer, waltzed into the Bernabeu, and kicked eight different kinds of shit out Madrid to the tune of 4-0. It could have been 8-0 or 10-0. It probably should have been 5-0 or 6-0. This was...
Kylian Mbappé passes the audition but PSG spectacularly fail another test
While the word “narrative” has become something of a cinder block sitting in the intestines of sports, sometimes you just can’t avoid how much it’s beating you over the head. Kylian Mbappé lining up against Real Madrid in the round of 16 in the Champions League was one of those times. Mbappé is stil...
Kylian Mbappé continues to bend Champions League to his will
Kylian Mbappé is only 23, but his plunge into the world soccer scene keeps growing. The French dynamo, playing for his home country’s most successful club over the last dozen years, Paris Saint-Germain, as well as being an integral member of France’s national team, keeps scoring critical goals. Two ...
Olivier Giroud continues to just do the work
It is hard to look at Olivier Giroud and think “grafter.” Because it’s not hard to look at Giroud at all. Ask Leslie Jones. It would be silly to suggest that people don’t make conclusions based on how a player looks. It’s hard to reconcile him as a pure, old-school center forward. Strong, holds up t...
Changing the World Cup to every two years could (but won’t) help soccer’s have-nots
Changing the World Cup to a biennial event is an awful idea. That’s not the most groundbreaking statement, but I wanted to put it bluntly because that’s the point I want you to remember from the rest of this. And if FIFA president Gianni Infantino is to be believed, and the move has a majority backi...
Top 10 sports moments of 2021
Happy New Years’ Eve everybody! I hope you’re getting ready to kiss 2021 goodbye and good riddance, but before we celebrate another revolution around the sun and kick off 2022, I want to take one last look at some cool moments from the past 365 days....
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....
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....
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’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...
Harry Kane decides to stay with Tottenham
It just might not be as violent as we thought. But maybe weirder. ...
So what does this say about Neymar?
When it comes to anything off the field in La Liga, and especially the two giants Barcelona and Real Madrid, if one of my eyebrows isn’t raised then it’s certainly in the starting blocks to be so. So when news last Thursday broke that Lionel Messi was leaving Barca due to their self-imposed, financi...
France couldn’t just turn it on and off forever
Yesterday, we dove into the very nature of Spain. How its championship pedigree is still around, but how the frustrating, and at times incomprehensible, frailties that surrounded that glorious era are in their DNA, too. And you’ll see all of them in the same match. They can’t help it. It’s who they ...
That’s what Paul Pogba is supposed to be
It’s always difficult analyzing or discussing Paul Pogba. I’ve found myself on both sides of it just in the past year or two. How good was he at Juventus? Isn’t it easier to play when Claudio Marchisio is doing some of your running and Andrea Pirlo is there to spread passes to you? Maybe, but eight ...
Euro 2021: Joachim Löw might wish he left before last call
We all know it’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door. But sometimes you pay even more when you ignore the door that was right there....