How many times has global soccer gone through this over the past 30 years? Three times? Four?

England, standing prepared to stage, on short notice, what appears to be a possibly amateurish — or scandal-tainted — World Cup.

Most recently, it was Russia 2018. This time it is Qatar 2022, the World Cup that has been controversial from Day 1, back in December of 2010 — when Sepp Blatter displayed the name “Qatar” as host for the 2022 World Cup.

Somehow, the tiny gas and oil exporter located on a sandspit of land thrusting into the Persian Gulf won the Fifa executive committee vote ahead of Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States — setting off what is now nearly a decade of doubts on the legitimacy of the voting process.

The Sunday Times, a leading English newspaper, last weekend ran an interesting piece on alleged “black ops” sanctioned by Qatari officials to be run against rivals Australia and the U.S. ahead of the 2022 World Cup vote.

Almost immediately, dreamers in England were suggesting Fifa had to revisit the investigation into a process that was almost certainly corrupt … and then give the 2022 World Cup to someone else.

Like, say, England.

What are the odds of that happening?

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World War II ended more than 70 years ago, and it is rare to find a new analysis of key events.

But a German journalist named Norman Ohler has managed it, in his 2016 book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich — which I have finally gotten around to reading.

Ohler generally prefers the blunderbuss mode of analysis — hoping to secure hits on multiple targets/topics with one shot.

His talking points all revolve around rampant drug use inside Nazi Germany — generally, among soldiers, and particularly, by the regime’s head, Adolf Hitler.

Some of it works. Some of it works really well — and that is the bit about the importance of spearhead units, in the Battle of France, in which nearly every soldier apparently was hopped up on a substance called Pervitin — a close relative of methamphetamine.

It was the wired soldiery of Germany’s best units, including most of the army’s tank units, that was able to pierce the French front near the fortress of Sedan and then race across northern France to the North Sea, cutting off France’s mobile units and the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium, essentially deciding — in a week — the outcome of the war in the west of Europe.

This is the one part of the war in which the main theme of the author, widespread German drug use, seems to have led to a particularly important outcome.

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Two things we have learned over the first half of the 2018 Major League Soccer season:

–Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most exciting player in the league.

–Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most underpaid player in the league.

Generic soccer fans probably knew about the first bit of information, and if they did not his three-goal match in a 4-3 victory over Orlando City last night reinforces his status “most exciting player.”

“Ibra” now has 15 goals in only 17 LA Galaxy matches, during which he has returned the club to its preferred status as the most prominent team in North America.

And the second note? According to numbers released in May by the MLS Players Association, Ibrahimovic is being paid “only” $1.5 million. Which places him fourth — not in the league, but on the Galaxy.

Giovani dos Santos is getting $6 million this season. His brother, Jonathan will be paid $2 million. And Romain Alessandrini is making $1.87 mil.

None of those guys offer even a half-ass imitation of what Zlatan brings to the game.

He knows he is too good for MLS but, showing extreme self-discipline, he has not yet said exactly that — though he comes close to it in this interview at the team’s training facility.

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The Dodgers publicity release landed in my inbox earlier this week, and I was flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. Gobsmacked.

Confused.

The title of the email:

“Matt Kemp Wins Los Angeles Dodgers Heart and Hustle Award”

(Emphasis added.)

My first thought was a silly one: Is there another Matt Kemp in baseball?

There was a Steve Kemp, a pretty good outfielder with Detroit in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but that guy never played with the Dodgers. Another Kemp is currently active, the tiny Houston infielder named Tony Kemp. But this clearly was not him.

No, it was the Matt Kemp whom Dodgers fans came to know from 2006 through 2014. The gifted guy who established a reputation for nice numbers on offense — but also for a wandering mind, poor decision-making and talent untested.

The one the Dodgers got rid of ahead of the 2015 season … just to have him gone.

And now he gets this citation from an organization called the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association … and what we have here is a full-blown redemption story.

And we love redemption stories!

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No, this is not spam. Though it looks a bit like it.

Hardly a day goes by that I do not get an email from a random person/machine offering to “fix” my website.

Having worked in newspapers for most of four decades, even now my first reaction is to think of “errors” in a journalism sense.

“Wait, what? Did someone notice a couple of hedbusts on this blog? Too many typos in text? ‘Who’ and ‘whom’ embarrassingly swapped?”

What it is, of course, is people attempting to make money off some sap (that would be me) who has an under-the-radar site — like, say, this one.

From the perspective of the “helpers” … maybe, just maybe, I am silly enough to send them money to tinker with something on the blog that will drive thousands of people to the site.

Turns out, I’m not that silly, and the shifty people out there in the spam-i-verse are barking up the wrong tree.

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No need to be an international NBA fan to guess the answer to that one. The top-two selling jerseys, at the least.

That would be LeBron James, No. 1, as he should be, and Stephen Curry, three-time NBA champion.

The NBA recently posted lists on the top 10 jerseys sold in Europe, during the 2017-18 season, via the e-commerce outlet NBAStore.eu

The league also has sorted jerseys by team, ranking the top five among the 30 NBA franchises.

How many of the 10 players and five teams can you name? What are Euro fans buying?

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The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18.

As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage:

–The final score of the baseball All-Star game.

–A result from an NBA summer league game.

–And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists.

And that was it. Those were your North American/global sports highlights, the hottest news out there. Making things worse? Nothing significant was scheduled for the whole of Wednesday, July 18.

Which left me sad and bored. And rediscovering, again, that the low ebb for the generic sports fan is not the week leading up to Christmas … it is the third week of July.

It was a day of realizing that several major events had recently finished, but it also could have served as a wake-up call for some big things about to amuse us.

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Hmm. Not sure it was supposed to work out like this.

Well, then again, maybe it was, once unrestricted free agent Paul George re-signed with Oklahoma City.

If the Lakers were intent on providing LeBron James with a superstar-level wing man for his debut season in Los Angeles, and they were trying, it was going to have to be a free agent.

Otherwise, it was going to cost them some of their rising stars and maybe a draft pick or two.

Rising stars? Talking Brandon Ingram. Lonzo Ball. Kyle Kuzma. Josh Hart. Some multiple of those four would have disappeared, in a world where the Lakers had to make a trade for, say, Kawhi Leonard.

Leonard was traded to the Toronto Raptors yesterday, with San Antonio getting DeMar DeRozan and a first-round draft pick.

And that cuts short the notion that the Lakers can climb right back into contention for a championship … even with LeBron on the team.

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No one will ever accuse France of not sufficiently celebrating its second World Cup championship.

Quicker than you can say “Kylian Mbappe”, every piece of national-team apparel seemed to have that second star on it.

For those not familiar with the “star” system in international football, a team is entitled to wear on the jersey, above the badge, a star for each World Cup championship it has won.

Brazil has five stars. It looks like a constellation. Germany and Italy have four each.

France now has two, and as of the final whistle in Moscow yesterday, you can buy a team shirt with dual stars on it, just above the national chicken. (OK, a cockerell.) You probably can assume it costs more than the one-star version of same.

France kicked out the jams today, going to great lengths to celebrate the 4-2 victory over Croatia.

Consider: When the day began, the team was in Moscow. When it ended, it was in Paris. Along with hundreds of thousands of ecstatic fans.

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Russia 2018 is over. It was France 4, Croatia 2 in the championship match, and the final whistle had barely been blown before some pundits were suggesting it was the best World Cup final in the history of the event.

Granted, six goals is a good place to start. That is as many goals as were produced by eight teams over the previous four finals. But just because our soccer standards had been debased by a scoring drought doesn’t mean we swoon at 4-2.

Quantity does not always overpower quality, and saying this match was the best out of what now has been 21 finals … not ready to go there.

Which means it is about time for a list.

My Five Best World Cup Finals!

We will do this in reverse order, starting with the fifth-best and ending with the best.

Here we go!

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