premier Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Roberto Firmino will play his last game for Liverpool as my heart aches
The shelf life for soccer players might just be the shortest around. Baseball would like to get there, but in the world of football it still basically works that once you hit 30, they start counting down the clock on you. So on one hand, it seems Roberto Firmino has been playing for Liverpool foreve...
Here comes Newcastle… maybe
As Manchester City have bulldozed their way through the second half of the season that gives off the feeling that they’re simply strolling to a Treble, if bulldozing, and strolling can be the same thing, there’s been a question of what anyone can do to stop them in the years to come. Sadly, for ever...
What’s next for Arsenal?
When you’ve spent 248 days on top of the Premier League (somewhat aided by the World Cup break, of course), getting not just passed but utterly dusted in the last month or so of the season can feel pretty deflating. That’s where Arsenal find themselves, and certainly conceding the title by getting o...
Black magic is no match for perfection
It’s impossible to be neutral on Manchester City. If you support a club that has to compete with them in England or in Europe, it’s likely they are a symbol of all that’s wrong with the modern game, given their state ownership, and bottomless financial resources. If you don’t belong to one of those ...
Brentford’s Ivan Toney breached FA rules 262 times for betting
Breaking the rules once is bad. “But why stop there,” you could imagine Ivan Toney saying, probably, because he breached FA rules 262 times when it came to sports betting. This resulted in the Brentford striker being suspended from all team activities for the next eight months — less than one day pe...
Ilkay Gündoğan joins the chorus line and cinches another title for Manchester City
A lot of the joy of sports comes from watching men and women do things we can’t possibly do, or would never have been able to do. We live to be amazed, and sometimes can’t even conceive of how a particular play is made. The logistics just don’t add up, with where the ball was landing or the speed it...
Here’s a shovel, Mauricio Pochettino
If you’re a manager who loves to tell players to do one out of a club, especially as an example to the rest of the squad how things are going to work under your leadership, then boy is Chelsea the place for you. And as Mauricio Pochettino, now the new manager at Stamford Bridge, is known to wield on...
Dan Snyder’s perpetual sale of the Washington Commanders is <i>Hard Knocks</i> meets <i>Succession</i>
The saga of Dan Snyder’s selling the Washington Commanders has had more twists and turns than Waystar Royco in HBO’s Succession. It shouldn’t take this long to move one from one corrupt billionaire to another and yet, every few weeks, there’s another twist that’s giving these storylines new legs. Wh...
Real Madrid and Manchester City trapped each other, or so they’d have you believe
When you’ve been as dominant in the Champions League as Real Madrid have for the past decade, or as dominant in the Premier League as Manchester City have, you can convince everyone that whatever you do is part of the plan, part of a higher genius we can’t quite understand. It must be, otherwise, ho...
The Gang Enters The Soccer Tournament
This is a fever dream for soccer, or a fever nightmare depending on what team you root for. The Soccer Tournament, or TST for short, was announced this week as a 32-team showcase taking place in early June in North Carolina. Based on The Basketball Tournament, it’s a winner-take-all, 7-on-7, $1 mill...
There are cheaper ways to tell us you’re friends with Ryan Reynolds
Everybody’s favorite spinoff to We Bought a Zoo — Famous Person Buys an EPL Team — just got a new character as retired NFL star J.J. Watt and his wife, NWSL player Kealia Watt, announced they’re the proud minority owners of Burnley FC. The Bears are set to return to the Premier League after finishin...
America’s darling Wrexham A.F.C. would get creamed in Major League Soccer
There truly hasn’t been a team to carve out their own slice of Americana in quite the way Wrexham A.F.C. has. Three years ago, if you’d heard of Wrexham and you didn’t live in the United Kingdom or have any family lineage in Wales, I’ll brand you a liar. The former-fifth-division side in the UK just...
Weston McKennie is not having a good time
Soccer moves fast, and it moves faster in the January transfer window. All the things Weston McKennie had to consider when a move to Leeds United from Juventus was probably thrown at him in a matter of days, if not hours. Questions of role, money, future, and the allure of moving to a country where ...
Pep Guardiola is about to complete his masterpiece
My brother had a college friend who had an overarching theory of Led Zeppelin. This isn’t much of a surprise, as I assume college students for some 40 years all had their own theory of Led Zeppelin. I remember telling a friend that I had to have a serious talk with him, made it sound really grave, t...
US Soccer might have actually made a good decision
There is always a suspicion that US Soccer has fucked up. They’re too insular, too greedy, too cheap, and too weird to ever get out of their own way. Even when it looks like they’re taking a step forward, they’ll find a way to sabotage it. The Berhalter-Reyna mess is perhaps the perfect example of j...
The Gang Possibly Gets a Promotion
As season one of FX’s Welcome to Wrexham concluded, we saw the Welsh football club narrowly miss out on a promotion to the top four tiers of England’s professional football pyramid. And for those living under a rock, Wrexham is a small United Kingdom team that got that spotlight because they’re owne...
Just two breaks are all it takes
With all apologies to Dua Lipa, it takes more than one kiss (I feel like if I met Dua Lipa I’d have an overwhelming urge to apologize for a lot of things, BUT THAT’S NOT WHY YOU CALLED). ...
Who does Jesse Marsch think he is?
On one level, it is understandable that Jesse Marsch wants to be careful in picking his next job. He has one Premier League firing to his name, and should he add another in quick succession it would probably close the door on him working in the biggest league in the world forever. Managers are no di...
Aaron Ramsdale’s fingertips may have saved the Premier League title for Arsenal
There isn’t another league that can produce the utter chaos, at least as consistently, as the Premier League can with yesterday’s 2-2 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield. It starts with the end-to-end action, two teams waylaying into each other for various periods of the game. Which is the...
Is it time to start talking about Aston Villa?
The Premier League, at least this season, has become stratified in a way it never has before. There seem to be only two categories. You’re either fighting against relegation or you’re in the race for the Champions League. It’s a little more nuanced than that under the hood, though not by much. From ...