soccer Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
And now, a national moment of silence: The Twins' playoff-win drought is over
Our long national nightmare is over. The Minnesota Twins won a playoff game....
MLS is playing pretty fast and loose with Lionel Messi’s injury
The problem with hinging an entire league’s reputation and financial fortune on one man is what do you do when that man isn’t around? If you’re MLS, you kind of shut your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and pretend it’s not a problem. ...
VAR performs its coup de moron
Whether VAR is still in its teething stages, and this is season five so it’s really debatable whether or not it should still be having growing problems, it will never be able to escape its fatal flaw. And that is it is still administered by humans. So it’s still going to be susceptible to human erro...
Apparently, it’s Inter Miami fans who are going to foot the bill for Lionel Messi
What, you thought Apple was going to pay for Lionel Messi’s deal? The other MLS owners? C’mon now, you know how this works. ...
Barcelona might prove every fan’s conspiracy theory to be true
You’ve heard that guy at the other end of the bar. It’s impossible to miss, given the volume, and sincerity with which that particular message is always delivered. It’s always along the lines of, “These refs are in the bag!” Here in Chicago, it’s pronounced more like, “Dese jagbag refs are in da baa...
Our national nightmare is over, the San Diego Padres won a game in extra innings
What gets to the heart of baseball, and to the heart of a baseball season, is that 162 games is supposed to be enough for any anomaly or bit of screwiness a long enough timeline to flatten out. Anyone can get hot, but no one can get unreasonably hot for 162 games and six months. Every team is going ...
The Chicago Bears are forever hopeless until new ownership arrives
I’ll never be free of this....
The umpires strike back
There is no longer season than the MLB one, and it’s understandable that just about everyone is at the end of their rope and not ready to deal with any sort of guff from any sort of swine. ...
Talk about Coach Prime all you want, just leave the college football conversation to the actual experts
The seas are parting, the sky is clearing, and the writers and actors are striking at just the right time for college football’s lord and savior to start his ascent....
Here is what we kind of learned from the USMNT’s week
As we and many others stress, international friendlies are weird. Especially when everyone has to fly over from Europe for two games that don’t count for anything while trying to not get hurt. And for the USMNT, there weren’t really too many players trying to carve out a role, or a bigger role, with...
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are still the heroes in <i>Welcome to Wrexham</i>, even when they’re the villains
The problem with Wrexham becoming such a story within the soccer world, thanks to the efforts of Ryan Reynolds, and Rob McElhenney making them so, is that the suspense is kind of removed from Season 2 of Welcome To Wrexham. We know how this one ends. Wrexham win the National League, and get promoted...
Natural grass wouldn’t have prevented Aaron Rodgers’ injury
It’s always interesting to see how leagues and players’ unions react to injuries. Zaza Pachulia stepped under Kawhi Leonard’s foot, and now NBA defenders can’t impede a shooter’s landing zone. Buster Posey getting blasted by Scott Cousins led to MLB banning plays at the plate. On Monday, Aaron Rodge...
USA’s FIBA World Cup loss to Germany proves something needs to change before the 2024 Olympics
The Americans will leave this year’s FIBA World Cup without a title....
Oh right, Gregg Berhalter returns to USMNT this weekend
Mostly, the international break is just a water break for fans. Qualification for various tournaments doesn’t really matter until the end, or to a handful of countries on the bubble, if it matters at all. That’s doubly true for the USMNT, who don’t have anything to play for and anyone to play right ...
Lionel Messi coming to MLS has had the effect you’d think
One of the bonuses for both MLS and Apple TV having an exclusive streaming deal is that they’re not forced to tell us how it’s going. Or they can decide what they want to say. Without usual ratings to gauge how the revolutionary deal is fairing, we’re usually left guessing. There were whispers that ...
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...
Julie Ertz, the USWNT’s most irreplaceable player, retires
I’m a sucker for a midfielder. Especially one like Julie Ertz. It’s not that I played there or anything. It’s just something about a player who sees all the angles on both sides of the ball before being anywhere near it that gets me, I think. Xabi Alonso is my favorite Liverpool player of all time. ...
The Angels wave the white flag, and Gregg Berhalter doesn’t know how a phone works
It obviously hasn’t worked out for the Anaheim Angels. While their determination to try and make themselves worthy of Shohei Ohtani’s long-term commitment, or at this point even a short-term one after the season, was admirable and certainly unique to MLB these days, their immediate nosedive after ac...
There is a reason Lionel Messi is tearing apart MLS
It might be hard for most to believe, but Lionel Messi played in his first MLS game Saturday night. I know, I know, you’ve been seeing the highlights and stats before now, but his first steps into the North American game have come in the Leagues Cup, a tournament invented by MLS and Liga MX this yea...
Christian Pulisic is having fun
If you’ve found yourself lost on soccer Twitter the past week, and it is a haven for the truly wayward as we’ve all had our brains addled by too many pre-dawn wakeups and day beers, you’ve probably seen a lot of “Pulisic is so back!” tweets and hashtags. Whether Pulisic is actually “back” is another...