It was jarring from the moment it was cued up for television viewers: Alan Pardew … coach Alan Pardew … dancing on the sideline moments after his Crystal Palace team took a 1-0 lead in the FA Cup final, the world’s longest-running competition in team sports. The goal came late … ish … in the […]

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Yesterday, we linked to a podcast reexamining what happened to the U.S. national team at the 1998 World Cup … and if we boiled it down one of the primary factors for the U.S. face-plant at France ’98 was the bad behavior of John Harkes, the team’s captain. So, it was a bit of a […]

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It would seem a bit late, as well as irrelevant, to conduct a post mortem of the U.S. failure to win a point from the 1998 World Cup. But Alexi Lalas, one of the best-known players on that U.S. team, and Steve Sampson, the U.S. coach, spend 40-plus fascinating minutes on The Mutant Gene Podcast […]

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Ah, Quique Sanchez Flores. Here we are on Day 2 of My Favorite Soccer Coaches Roundup, which includes a certain Spanish player and coach who grew up wanting to be a sports writer. But more about that in a bit. I have been a fan of Quique Sanchez Flores from the moment he was named […]

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Bob Bradley is my favorite former U.S. Soccer national team coach. He is a square-jawed, straight-shooter kind of guy who radiates quiet passion for his work but is a model of steely decorum — and gets results. Whether it is leading the American team to the final 16 of the World Cup (South Africa 2010) […]

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Kids tend to believe their sports coaches know everything. Even if the coach is just someone’s mom or dad. Kids particularly believe in their coaches at the high-school level. Most of them, anyway. The coaches are adults. They have perhaps played, at the college level, the sport they are coaching. High school kids are 15, […]

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Really, I can’t blame France’s Secretary of State for Francophony. French is slipping in global status. What used to be lingua franca throughout Europe is anything but, in 2016. Most of us know it. French linguists certainly do. And most of that slippage is moving towards English, and England and France were arch-rivals for hundreds […]

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During six years following the sports scene in the United Arab Emirates, I often returned to one question: Why does Dubai not have a big stadium? Dubai has hundreds of big buildings, including the world’s tallest. Dubai loves big buildings. Much of its reputation is based on big buildings, and that skyline of skyscrapers. But […]

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Leicester City FC can secure an astonishing Premier League championship this weekend, with a victory at Manchester United. And if not then, by winning one of its final two matches. English media have been doing celebratory Leicester stories (like this one and this one and this one), and even the New York Times has discovered […]

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Well, this is the sort of nightmare scenario for NFL teams who inevitably say: “We did our homework.” Not talking about the Los Angeles Rams here. They needed a quarterback and they took Jared Goff of Cal with the first pick in the draft — the safer (and perhaps duller) choice between Goff and the […]

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