That was the result this week of an Asian Football Confederation third-round qualifying match for the 2018 World Cup. Mahmoud Al Mawas scored in the 54th minute to give Syria the one-goal victory before 37,000 at Shaanxi Province Stadium in China. The match is unlikely to have a bearing on which four or five Asian […]

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Gianni Infantino, who grew up one Swiss town away from his infamous predecessor as Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, seems to be equally prone to silly or unworkable ideas. (We can only hope he does not prove as venal.) Infantino campaigned for the presidency earlier this year on a platform that called for the World Cup […]

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Only one sport really matters among the citizens of the United Arab Emirates. And, actually, it is a subset of one sport. The men’s national soccer team. Not necessarily the domestic soccer league those guys play in; Emirati fans are far more interested in club soccer in other countries, particularly in England and Spain. No, […]

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This seems almost too good to be true. The front-runner to get the job as coach of the English national team is none other than … Jurgen Klinsmann! This is great news … for the U.S., where he currently is employed. England, you’re on your own. But we should be talking up Jurgen at this […]

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The Wales soccer team is more Welsh than I imagined it would be. I decided to have a look, after watching the rousing 3-1 victory over Belgium tonight that puts Wales in the semifinals of the European Championships being played here in France. Seems like a team good enough to beat Belgium’s all-star side might […]

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France is host of the ongoing European Championship. We live in France. We have never been to a Euro tournament match. A few matches are being held in Marseille, the closest game site to where we live, in the Languedoc. One of those Marseille matches is Saturday and involves Iceland and Hungary, two long shots […]

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U.S. soccer fans have been wondering, for years now, whom the next great American-born attacking soccer player would be … someone to carry the torch Landon Donovan bore for more than a decade. The Next Man may finally be here, and he more properly is a boy rather than a man. That would be, of […]

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One of those “things I came across while looking for something else” moments. The Guardian, my preferred site for news and soccer from a British publication, has posted a long story about diving — and when it became “football’s worst crime”. And along in there the 1990 World Cup came up, a tournament played in […]

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Of great interest to me, anyway. And this may be one of the more bizarre pairings among global soccer fans. Two of the three world countries with “United” in its name, and neither is the United Kingdom. –The United Arab Emirates, home to Saudi Arabia. –The United States, home to Guatemala. Both are tomorrow. The […]

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This must be tough for Major League Soccer clubs and their fans. The steady drumbeat of failure and defeat in the Concacaf Champions League. Tonight, it was the LA Galaxy crushed 4-0 by Santos Laguna (after a scoreless first leg in Carson) and DC United going down 3-1 on aggregate to Queretaro after the latter […]

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