soccer Page 23 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Does Riqui Puig signal a new kind of MLS?
One of the most fascinating things about MLS, as goofy as it can be, is watching it evolve into a different type of league every few years....
For one day, Yann Sommer channeled the spirit of Ron Tugnutt (wait Ron Tugnutt isn’t dead, right?)
Most soccer analysts, especially those who really get in up to the elbow in the analytics, say that the sport is pretty random. Most games are only decided by a single moment (or rarely more than a handful), and those moments can bounce any which way no matter what the trends of a match or a season ...
Reminder: WNBA players are still going abroad to earn a living
It seems pertinent on Women’s Equality Day to mention that there are still WNBA players going overseas to earn more money than they would by playing stateside....
C.B. Bucknor drags everyone down with him
It was yet another banner day for C.B. Bucknor behind the plate, as we watched in real time while he lost sense of the strike zone and perhaps indeed any sense of direction at all. The plane which the ball must pass through to be called a strike is imaginary, of course, and tough to judge from a pos...
Don’t do it, Christian
The transfer window is closing soon, and that would normally mean a pretty furious avalanche of rumors, requests, bids, and stories. Deadline day has become the sport’s free agency day in the NHL or NBA (or even election night), with masses of reporters spread out across the European continent breat...
Chelsea and Tottenham is why we watch
After yesterday’s fracas (it was certainly more than a game,) the temptation is to call Chelsea-Spurs the best rivalry going in the Premier League. Liverpool-City might have more quality, and the best quality in Europe arguably, but everything is pretty civil and they’re too respectful of each other...
Brenden Aaronson is going to be just fine
Amongst the excitement of any US player heading overseas, there’s always a tremor of trepidation (I’m usually anti-alliteration but here we are). This angst is sure said player will fail, and will cast a pall over any future Yank moving to that team or even that league. We’re probably past that, giv...
The crypto crash makes its way to sports
It didn’t take much of a connection with the stars to figure out that the whole crypto thing was a bubble that was going to burst. You tend to know when rich assholes are pushing bullshit on those with not much money so the former can take what little the latter have left that something’s afoot. Con...
How far can Brighton go?
The question almost every soccer fan gets from non-soccer fans, which is healthy, is, “So which team should I support?” You never mind hearing it, because it means your friend/acquaintance/bookie wants to become a fan, but it’s also an impossible question to answer. Your football club usually finds ...
It came home
It took scoring one of the more beautiful goals in any final, giving up one just about as good, and then winning it with one at the opposite end of the artful spectrum, as scrappy as you can get. It took wading through just about every narrative that England’s women’s national team had to carry into...
WTF! A backheeled nutmeg winner at Women's Euro 2022
It is not very English to win semifinals at major tournaments. Glorious defeat is kind of their thing, and has been for decades....
Darwin Núñez’s courting of Liverpool holdouts is underway
It must be a slow period for sports in the U.K. as well. There’s not a dart league or a cricket game (match?) going on either? It could be the record-breaking heat that’s made fans more irritable than normal. Whatever it is, overreacting to a player’s preseason debut during a couple of friendlies is...
Carl Nassib came out to help a movement push forward
When Ryan O’Callaghan decided to come out as openly gay, for him it was supposed to be the end of the world. He thought that he would lose everything. His family, his friends, his career, it would all be over with so his plan in 2011 was to kill himself after the conclusion of his NFL career. ...
We fixed the college conferences... you're welcome
The irony of all the bellyaching about constant player movement and the free market from the NCAA and its institutions is that they aren’t even loyal to their conference partners. Those same athletic programs get a buck dangled in front of them and dive into a national conference transfer portal of ...
USWNT qualifies for World Cup, but we still don’t have all our answers
It’s hardly a surprise, but the USWNT walloped Jamaica 5-0 in the CONCACAF Women’s Championship to qualify for the 2023 World Cup, where they carry the heavy but illustrious burden of being two-time defending champs....
Demaryius Thomas’ CTE case a stark reminder that all football players, regardless of position, are at risk
No one is shielded from CTE exposure once they first put on the pads and a football helmet....
Todd Boehly knows Chelsea aren’t the Dodgers, right?
Chelsea fans knew it would be a bit of a comedown from the ownership of Roman Abramovich — though from dubious-at-best roots he did turn Chelsea from basically an also-ran to a world power beyond all of their dreams — to whoever came next. American ownership of Premier League teams has always been v...
The Yanks are marching into Elland Road
Normally, when you’re a manager and you save a team from certain relegation, you’d be given a key to the city and have a welcome mat anywhere (and let me tell you from experience, having that in Leeds can lead to a lot of rough mornings). Jesse Marsch isn’t that guy, even though he did save Leeds fr...
Which players have played on the most teams in each sport?
Adjusting to the environment around you is key to success in any sport. Even with NBA rosters having the smallest maximum roster size of the big four North American leagues with 15 players, there are personnel changes all the time. Imagine having to deal with that in new cities with new teammates an...
USMNT Under-20 men’s team brawls with Costa Rican team
The United States men’s national under-20 soccer team’s initial celebration for qualifying to the 2023 FIFA U-20 World Cup lasted all of five seconds. They got into a fight with Costa Rica. The American’s CONCACAF U-20 Championship quater-final was heated throughout, with plenty of those mass confro...