A sort of silly string of posts stretches through this blog, going back to 2009, in which I ponder the great question of our time: “Which English Premier League soccer team should I support?” This is a weighty and defining decision in large parts of the world, increasingly including (of late) the United States, which […]

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It rained in London yesterday. Not just a little. A lot. Steady, pelting rain nearly the whole of the afternoon. And especially during the Crystal Palace-at-Watford match, staged in a London suburb. The players were soaked. The officials were soaked. The fans, those of them who stayed in seats not covered by the partial roof […]

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Chelsea opened Premier League play last weekend, and I could not have been the only viewer puzzled by the presence of a grizzled old … bum? … sitting among the Blues’ coaches. It looked like the guy had not shaved in a while, and he had the sort of buzz haircut he might have done […]

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What are we? The proverbial “red-headed stepchildren”? We just went 26 days without an elite soccer game being played anywhere in the world. It was on July 15 that France defeated Croatia 4-2 to win the 2018 World Cup. And then planet soccer went cold turkey. None of the big European leagues in action. No […]

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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 […]

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I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

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England and its relationship to its soccer team has mostly been unhealthy since, say, 1966 — when England won its first and only World Cup championship. During the 30 years that I covered international soccer, 1986 to 2015, I saw England and its team muddle through the same scenario every four years. It was an […]

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I now am a fan of England, at Russia 2018. And not just because the rest of my preferred teams have been eliminated. As noted a few weeks ago, I was around a lot of English soccer, in six-plus years in Abu Dhabi, and if you are a fan of the Premier League, as I […]

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I find it nearly impossible to be a neutral observer in any competition. Give me five minutes in a game involving teams I don’t know … and I will have a favorite. It could be about geography or playing style or history, but I will have made a choice. A girlfriend from a long, long […]

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I have never liked the Manchester City club of the English Premier League. This is not a lifelong thing. No, this is about events and behavior and performances observed during my great Premier League awakening, while working in Abu Dhabi at the start of this decade. That is when I decided that for better or […]

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