I have been given the job of organizing coverage of the local professional soccer league, which is known at The National as the Pro League.
I am impressed by how many UAE nationals play in the league of 12 teams, considering the Emirati population is only around 1 million, which means perhaps 500,000 males and a […]

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Wow. That looked miserable. Actually, it looked scary.
Professional soccer,  and all that running and sprinting and just maximum exertion … in temperatures described by weather.com as “93, feels like 113.”
That was what we had going on here in Abu Dhabi tonight when Al Jazira played Al Nasr on Day 2 of the local soccer season, […]

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I was struck by this last year, and I am again:
Paris has to be the world’s biggest city that cares almost not at all about team sports.
For that matter, nearly the whole of France has escaped the maladie that is sports fandom. Which may actually be healthy, as well as unique. But it certainly is […]

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This is pretty good stuff, if I say so myself.
However, I didn’t link to the Europe part of this, a couple of days ago, and South America is coming up for Tuesday morning.
So let’s catch up with that.
Got any guesses at our top three venues for Europe and South America?
Let’s link you up.

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Part 3 of the series in The National about the best sports venues in the world. Broken out by continent.
In Monday’s editions: North America!
Interesting, how the voting went.
I will tell you who won: Augusta National. Even the Brits in the room know about “the course like no other” or whatever it is network TV gets […]

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For some reason, a guy celebrating a soccer goal doesn’t seem as offensive as when American football guys celebrate a touchdown. Trying to figure out why.
Because goals are so rare, in soccer? Because an individual scoring happens so infrequently (really good scorers average about one goal for every two matches) that they must prepare far […]

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I don’t know this. But I believe it.
Rumor floating around … that Manchester City, the new big spender of the English Premier League, is trying to add Landon Donovan to its roster. Considering that he scored three goals in the World Cup and had that nice 10 weeks with Everton last winter … Sure. City […]

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We decided, at The National, to do a story on the history of aging players who have signed, near the end of their careers, with Major League Soccer. The focus being on guys who were at least 30 when they got to MLS … 30 being the point when attacking players, in particular, tend to […]

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Watching a soccer match while you put out a newspaper is a bit tricky. Especially when the big-screen is over your right shoulder and around a pillar. But I saw more than enough of Spain-Holland to be hit by this thought at about the 75th minute:
If I had never seen a soccer game before, and […]

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Let’s see … Where were we … before ants and LeBron James took over our lives.
Germany had just bombed Argentina out of the quarter-finals, Uruguay won that bizarre handball match over Ghana, Brazil went out to the Netherlands, and Spain took down Paraguay.
Which were the two days when what had been shaping up as South […]

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