soccer Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

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...

FIFA wants to promote women’s soccer — as long as there’s money in it
“FIFA is a non-profit organization” is one of the biggest oxymorons in the world. You don’t get a good portion of the organization indicted for corruption if the body is mainly focused on merely the health of the sport and building it from the bottom up. Gianni Infantino’s latest episode of throwing...

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...

Jerry Reinsdorf, why don’t you stop talkin’ for a while?
We can’t be far from sports teams and organizations banning any of their management team from speaking at any kind of conference or forum. It’s what started the whole Gregg Berhalter fiasco, even if he thought it was a private, closed event. Jerry Reinsdorf pulled the same trick yesterday, and with ...

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 ...

Playoff hockey is stupid anyway
The NHL Playoffs gets its jollies from defying logic or explanation, and reveling in its unpredictability. That doesn’t mean it’s always a free-for-all, as hockey and its fans would have you believe. But it delves into the chaos and silliness more often than its brethren, that’s for sure....

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...

The Women’s World Cup is already a battle of attrition
The World Cup is always a measure of health and a team’s ability to deal with it. It comes at the end of a long season — unless you’ve fisted it into a desert, totalitarian country that makes you have it in the middle of the season — and players have logged the most possible miles before they play i...

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...

Whether genuine, stunt, larf, documentary fodder, or indulgence, Wrexham delivered to those who matter
As I said in an initial review, Welcome To Wrexham, the show isn’t really for me and my ilk (nor should most anything be, really, we’re a broody bunch). It wasn’t meant for the diehard soccer fan, who already is at least somewhat familiar with promotion, and relegation, the football pyramid in Engla...

Death, taxes, and James Harden disappearing during the playoffs
James Harden’s sunsetting in the playoffs is a reliable annual trend. Similar to Punxsutawney Phil emerging as a sign spring has sprung, but with darker clouds in the forecast. For what feels like a decade, Harden has disappeared into his shell once the best-of-seven portion of the schedule begins. ...

Chinese Basketball Association’s extreme punishment for tanking is what the NBA needs
If the NBA wants to look into discouraging teams from strategic tanking, they should borrow from the Chinese Basketball Association’s playbook. In the basketball exchange program, the rest of the world learned the game from watching the NBA, American hoopers integrated the Euro step into their skill...

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...

The Mavericks give away the game
Well now it’s pretty obvious what NBA teams really think of the play-in tournament. The Dallas Mavericks spent the weekend doing everything they could to drop right out of the 10th seed and into the draft lottery, which they successfully did. Mavericks fans are probably most excited about the season...

Hasn't Lionel Messi made enough money?
Lionel Messi’s time playing for Paris Saint-Germain has long appeared to be reaching its conclusion this summer, as signing another contract with the French giants never made sense. While a return to boyhood club Barcelona or Major League Soccer looked to be in his future, spurning both of those cho...

No Jill Biden, Iowa and LSU don’t need to talk it out
One would have hoped the dumbass and unnecessary (and racist!) chatter coming out of the women’s championship game would have died an easy death on the next day’s news cycle. But seeing as how the men’s version was two packs of ass and the First Lady got involved, that was too much to wish for, appa...

Girls can talk trash, too
Depending on whatever echo chamber you’ve decided to inhabit on social media, the final of the Women’s college basketball tournament might sound very different than it does to someone else. I’m sure for all the genuine college basketball fans out there, and especially LSU fans, all there is is an ap...

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...

Who the fuck are St. Louis City SC and who the fuck do they think they are?
The pattern of a first-year MLS club is pretty well set by now. Team gets announced, we all joke about the league being a Ponzi scheme (still might be!), they begin play in a stadium that looks fun as hell in front of raucous crowds, and then kind of eat it for most of the season. Maybe they pick it...

LeBron James found the 'LeBron James of feet' to okay his return
lebronWe’ll refrain from the Rex Ryan jokes. LeBron James returned yesterday to the Lakers…for some reason, to aid the Lakers’ chase to get dog-walked in the first round, at best. James had been told by two doctors that he should have surgery on his foot, only to find a doctor who would tell him wha...