Cristiano Ronaldo is not above the law of soccer. Neither is his club, Real Madrid. Any player who shoves a referee deserves whatever ban he is given — in this case, five matches. The game has a serious problem with players, coaches and fans heaping verbal abuse on officials, especially the referee. And sometimes the […]

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The NBA has fans outside of North America, but not tons of them. So the stunning similarity of what soccer’s Neymar has done and what the NBA’s Kyrie Irving wants to do may have gone largely unnoticed in the vast realm of global sports. In short, it is this: Each is is a star, each […]

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No, it’s not just your imagination. Many of the 1.6 million residents of Barcelona can be a bit abrupt. A bit impatient. A bit aggrieved. Those conditions can be the product of decades and decades under the thumb (in their telling) of the Spanish capital, Madrid. More recently, it has been about the inundation, over […]

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I first traveled to Barcelona in the summer of 1992 to help cover the Summer Olympics for Gannett News Service. I was very impressed with the place. It had charm. It had class. It organized a very fine Olympics. It seemed like a city people would want to see, if they knew about it. And […]

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Isn’t it grand when someone writes a piece taking a position you wholeheartedly endorse? Especially when you begin to wonder if you are the only one who feels that way? That is what happened today when a staffer at The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, published a commentary pointing out the “dark arts” (that is, […]

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I had been in Paris barely 10 minutes today when I had my pocket picked. Arrived from the south of the country on the fast train into Gare de Lyon, made my way downstairs to the Metro’s 1 line, got into a jammed car just as the doors were about to close … and then […]

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Estacio Sants is the main train station in Barcelona. In case you have lost track of where you have stepped off the train from, say, France … the famous local football team has a merchandise store you can hardly miss as you exit the station — one of (by my count) nine such stores in […]

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Rio 2016 is the first Summer Olympics I will not attend since Moscow 1980. Yes, it was a good run. I made it to eight consecutive Summer Games. Beginning with Los Angeles 1984 and continuing with Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The first four with […]

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It was three years ago that I saw Ricardo Quaresma at what must have been his low ebb. This would have been in Abu Dhabi, in the stands at Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium, where I watching the final of the President’s Cup — which pitted Al Ahli and Al Shabab on a stultifying May evening. […]

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After six years on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, I can safely identify two additions to Sports Competitions I Follow. The English Premier League … which is a subdivision of the ultra elite European Champions League. This is where the world’s most famous sports teams come to play because, really, we must concede […]

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