So, four of us pilgrims set off on the Camino de Santiago this morning, marching 22 kilometers in about seven hours and 37,000 steps. In other news … the little Spanish town where we halted for the day went slightly crazy tonight as Real Madrid defeated Liverpool 3-1 in an eventful Uefa Champions League final. […]

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In the U.S., sports fans must be talking about the top-seeded University of Virginia losing tonight to a 16 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament. A No. 1 seed losing to a 16 had never happened, not in 135 previous encounters, until Virginia succumbed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMDC) by 20 points […]

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We cannot know what it is like, at the remove that is the TV in your living room. Radio can convey some of the noise but little of the energy. Even inside the stadium, the nervous tension does not always register up into the seats. To gauge the real impact of a big and painfully […]

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They probably should give a bit more thought than usual to avoiding trouble as they travel to Champions League group stage matches in Moscow in the coming days. One fine idea might be to hold off on consuming copious amounts of alcohol in the hours before kickoff. Why? Beside the calories? Because English club fans […]

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I get it. Some might consider it silly, ridiculous even, to be headed for a sports bar on a Wednesday night while visiting an exotic capital city. But keep in mind that 1) the sports bar is about 50 yards away from where we are staying; 2) the bar serves food as well as beer […]

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Many Americans seem to think the NFL’s Super Bowl is the world’s most-watched sports event. To be sure, 114 million television viewers, thereabouts, is a big crowd. But the Uefa (European) Champions League final easily wins the “most viewers” statistic with what has been around 380 million watchers, in recent years. Tonight’s final pits soccer […]

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Isn’t it grand when someone writes a piece taking a position you wholeheartedly endorse? Especially when you begin to wonder if you are the only one who feels that way? That is what happened today when a staffer at The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, published a commentary pointing out the “dark arts” (that is, […]

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This has been an oft-revisited topic over the past five or six years. Has Arsene Wenger, on the job since 1996, stayed on too long as coach of English Premier League side Arsenal? Increasingly, the answers have come back, from fans and pundits, “Yes. It is time for Wenger to go.” The criticism of his […]

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The United States plays in the soccer world’s cupcake federation. Concacaf, the North and Central American and Caribbean federation, is guaranteed three berths in the World Cup, and the Americans should earn one of those three berths Every Single Time. After Mexico, the only Concacaf side that can be anticipated to be reasonably competitive is […]

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Just the other day I was thinking about how remarkable it is that nation states that don’t like each other often manage to go on playing soccer matches. I was thinking in particular of the Asian Champions League, which this year has three groups that include clubs from both Saudi Arabia and Iran — which […]

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