This is big. Take a deep breath, American soccer fans. A Yank has taken charge of an English Premier League team … a team in the world’s most popular sports league. Bob Bradley is the new coach of Swansea City, the Wales-based club that already is at risk of relegation, seven matches into the season. […]

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Americans sometimes are surprised that few other people in the world are interested in the NFL. They have heard of something called the Super Bowl, but they overwhelmingly do not follow the game nor know very much about it. It isn’t as puzzling as it was 20 years ago because the NFL launched the Europe-based […]

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Wow. Hard to remember the last time a guy screwed up the greatest opportunity in his professional life as quickly as did Sam Allardyce. A year ago, he was an unemployed English soccer coach of middling reputation whose claim to celebrity, as far as it went, was “never being relegated” — a reputation he burnished […]

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How big is the English Premier League? So big that a French telecom is paying the world’s most popular soccer league 100-million euros per season, for this season and the next two, to show all of the Premier League’ games. In France. Did we make that clear? In France, which has its own soccer league, […]

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The LA Galaxy has been around for 21 seasons now, but it struck me today that never in that time had the soccer club had to fight for attention in its hometown with a local National Football League team. The NFL abandoned the Los Angeles market after the 1994 season, when the Rams and Raiders […]

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Here is my take on the online fantasy sports sites: People who use them are gamblers, not sports fans. Real fans do not need the lure of winning money by defeating strangers in daily fantasy competitions sponsored by rapacious, apparently-not-quite-ethical companies.

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The LA Galaxy has concluded a silly but interesting promotion — the LA Galaxy Ridiculous Soccer Challenge. It involved four “games” pitting two Galaxy players against dozens of children on a training field at the club’s Carson home, the StubHub Center. The last matchup to be posted: Steven Gerrard and Robbie Keane against 30 eight-year-old […]

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Trying to remember when it seemed as if Landon Donovan making a comeback on the pitch … pretty much had to happen. It couldn’t have been any later than the first month or two of the 2015 Major League Soccer season. Landon playing more games seemed inevitable, didn’t it? Two powerful currents pushed him in […]

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Megan Rapinoe plays for the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and a few weeks ago she was front and center in the condemnation of teammate Hope Solo. Solo, the veteran goalkeeper, whose description of the Swedish performance in a shootout victory over the U.S. in the Rio 2016 quarterfinals as “cowardly”, was strongly criticized by […]

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Some might opt for England’s Premier League. Others would nominate the Uefa Champions League or perhaps the World Cup or European Championship. But a strong case can be made that the greatest soccer competition is the quadrennial World Cup qualifying for South America’s 10-nation confederation, generally known as Conmebol. And a writer is making that […]

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