I follow two national soccer teams. The U.S., of course, but also the UAE, after working six years in Abu Dhabi. Both teams have key matches in 2018 World Cup qualifying tomorrow. The Yanks play at Costa Rico, trying to avoid a second defeat to open Concacaf qualifying, following the 2-1 home loss to Mexico. […]

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In Europe, the belief that soccer is more interesting to watch than American football is widespread. Approaching unanimous. If that preference is questioned, what often comes up is this: “American football has too many breaks in play. Soccer is continuous action.” The NFL RedZone package, however, turns that complaint on its head. It is the […]

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Qualifying for the soccer World Cup, any of them, should be easy for the U.S. national team. Jurgen Klinsmann, however, is about to make it difficult. The Yanks lost 2-1 tonight to Mexico in Columbus, Ohio, the first match in the Concacaf “Hexagonal” and the first defeat to Mexico on U.S. soil in five World […]

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Not a good weekend for American soccer people or the league most of them play for. Landon Donovan’s comeback from retirement suddenly ended as he went off at halftime with a hamstring injury and his LA Galaxy went out of the Major League Soccer playoffs in a shootout. Bob Bradley, the first American to coach […]

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The Los Angeles Rams lost again today, 13-10 to the Carolina Panthers. That is four consecutive defeats for the lowest-scoring team in the NFL, at 16.2 points per game, a team that fell to 3-5 and looks doomed to post a losing record for the 10th consecutive season. A team already becoming irrelevant in Los […]

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Paris has just about everything … but when it comes to the, OK, less-than-highbrow concept of the sports bar … well, they don’t do it often and often don’t to it well. All these years later, we finally seem to have found a competent sports bar that is a sports bar in a way that […]

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Aside, perhaps, from the return of oil to $100 a barrel, the United Arab Emirates would like nothing more than to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. The UAE played in the 1990 World Cup, a remarkable achievement at the time, given the country had not existed 20 years earlier. But they have not been […]

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That was the result this week of an Asian Football Confederation third-round qualifying match for the 2018 World Cup. Mahmoud Al Mawas scored in the 54th minute to give Syria the one-goal victory before 37,000 at Shaanxi Province Stadium in China. The match is unlikely to have a bearing on which four or five Asian […]

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I did not plan on making the Chicago Cubs a topic for two days running, but today it struck me anew that I really would prefer they not win a World Series for the first time since 1908 … Because I love, love, love long championship droughts, and when it comes to North American sports, […]

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Gianni Infantino, who grew up one Swiss town away from his infamous predecessor as Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, seems to be equally prone to silly or unworkable ideas. (We can only hope he does not prove as venal.) Infantino campaigned for the presidency earlier this year on a platform that called for the World Cup […]

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