This must be tough for Major League Soccer clubs and their fans. The steady drumbeat of failure and defeat in the Concacaf Champions League. Tonight, it was the LA Galaxy crushed 4-0 by Santos Laguna (after a scoreless first leg in Carson) and DC United going down 3-1 on aggregate to Queretaro after the latter […]

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For 2.5 years I sat across from an Englishman who detested Ashley Cole, who at the time was a left back with Chelsea. My coworker inevitably would get around to paraphrasing the quotes from Cole’s biography, My Defence, in which the player said he was “trembling with anger” in the summer of 2006 when his […]

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On this side of the Atlantic, they have a tired, trite expression for perennially successful soccer teams. Those that dominate their league, pay the best salaries and seem to suck up the best players, as they become available. “Giants”, they inevitably are called. “Juventus, the Serie A giants … Bayern Munich, the German giants … […]

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I work in a room with dozens of Britons, and their interest in Major League Soccer extends about one team deep: The LA Galaxy. For two reasons:

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I got an email the other day from the L.A. Galaxy media department. “Postgame notes: L.A. Galaxy 2, Chicago Fire 0 – March 6, 2015” The Galaxy season opener, and a victory for the defending Major League Soccer champions. And it was then that I realized …

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Omar Abdulrahman is the best soccer player in the UAE. He might be the best soccer player in the Middle East. He is good enough that whenever foreigners see him play, they inevitably ask: “When are you going to Europe?” Now and then, Omar has seemed vaguely interested in that concept. He trained for a […]

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This is a big pat on the back, a career “attaboy”, for Landon Donovan, newly retired soccer player who spent nearly all of his career in Major League Soccer. The league’s Most Valuable Player award will henceforth be known as the Landon Donovan MVP Award, it was announced by the MLS today. (Follow the link […]

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One of my favorite readers alerted me to this one: A look at Landon Donovan’s last Men’s National Team game, the one against Ecuador. Wayne Drehs wrote the piece for ESPN The Magazine, and it was posted to the espn.com site today — but I would have missed it entirely, having spent most of the […]

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This game snuck up on us, a little. In that this could have been the final game of Landon Donovan‘s soccer career, and I’m not sure many of us really had recognized that, aside from the Los Angeles Times. It was not his last match, thanks in large part to the three goals and an […]

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I predicted this a couple of months ago. How Landon Donovan’s farewell match with the U.S. national team, now less than a week away, would be one of the most awkward moments in the history of U.S. soccer. The ramping up of what is going to be days and days of U.S. media and fans […]

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