I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

[Read more →]

I never played soccer as a child. Never saw a match. Didn’t own a soccer ball. Never knew anyone who followed the game. The extent of my pre-adult exposure to soccer probably was occasional videotape on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; presumably World Cup highlights; lots of Pele. By the early 1980s, I was the […]

[Read more →]

England and its relationship to its soccer team has mostly been unhealthy since, say, 1966 — when England won its first and only World Cup championship. During the 30 years that I covered international soccer, 1986 to 2015, I saw England and its team muddle through the same scenario every four years. It was an […]

[Read more →]

What a curious match Brazil versus Belgium turned out to be. It was a sort of soccer experiment: “What would happen if 11 crazy-fast Munchkins with elite technical skills … met up with 11 mostly big and beefy guys with decent technique but marginal speed and quickness?” The soccer scientists perhaps could have chosen a […]

[Read more →]

Belgium is a pretty anonymous country, considering where it is located — bordered by France, Germany and The Netherlands, and just across the water from England. That’s a pretty busy neighborhood, with four countries tourists love to visit. And then there is Belgium. I probably am not unique in this: I have spent a fair […]

[Read more →]

I now am a fan of England, at Russia 2018. And not just because the rest of my preferred teams have been eliminated. As noted a few weeks ago, I was around a lot of English soccer, in six-plus years in Abu Dhabi, and if you are a fan of the Premier League, as I […]

[Read more →]

During the Watergate scandal of the mid-1970s, the Washington Post source known as Deep Throat told a reporter that he needed to “follow the money” to unravel the story. When it came time for LeBron James to choose where he would play for the 2018-19 NBA season, and beyond we could have homed in on […]

[Read more →]