At this moment, only one story commands the attention of European sports fans. And that would be the misguided attempt by a dozen of the continent’s best-known clubs to break away from the European Champions League and form their own elite competition — which they plan to call the Super League. Twelve clubs have announced […]

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I have lived outside the United States for most of the past 12 years and I can vouch for this: Over that much time your sports interests mutate. Perhaps significantly. Some sports pretty much disappear from your mind. Thinking all high school sports; just can’t keep track of any of them, so I lost track […]

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For a month, maybe two, it looked like one of the most competitive Premier League battles in recent history. In the early going, to scan the upper half of the league table was to find several names few would have expected. West Ham, Everton, Tottenham and Leicester City all had their turn at the top […]

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At the highest levels — say, in the English Premier League — soccer is played on immaculately groomed fields of vibrant green. The reality is that you should not study the grass too closely unless you are a connoisseur of the dark art of spitting. Throughout the history of the game, players have been spewing […]

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Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on. Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

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The biggest story in world football since the most recent Champions League final (May, 2019) … was Liverpool’s dominance of European soccer. Before their game at Watford last night, Liverpool not only was being called “the best club football team in the world”, and they had some staggering numbers to back up that assessment. Unbeaten […]

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Anyone with the patience to follow this blog knows that every now and then … OK, maybe once a month … I go on a rant about how feckless is Arsenal FC, the London club I chose, a decade ago, to offer my support (mostly in the form of psychic energy), in all their competitions. […]

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It was madness. A moment of weakness. Impressed by Manchester City’s stampede through the Premier League. League, League Cup, FA Cup. So, on May 12, I had a shout-out, on this blog, for the club and its players, and the owner back in Abu Dhabi. Big mistake, in retrospect, especially with the publication of a […]

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In 2008, when Manchester City Football Club was sold to a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, it hardly warranted intense foreign interest, let alone surprise. Man City was a middling-to-lower-middling club in the English Premier League, and foreigners already were buying up English soccer teams. Two of the biggest brands in English soccer, […]

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I have some history with Jonathan Wilson, going back to when I was in Abu Dhabi working for The National, the emirate’s English-language newspaper. Wilson was one of our European soccer correspondents, contributing a couple of pieces per week. He often took on topics focusing on what he perceived to be significant trends in the […]

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