I doubt many people in the Gulf region know that the Women’s World Cup is going on. Women’s soccer is not big here. Sometimes, it’s not played at all. (Hello, Saudi.) The UAE and Bahrain, to name two, recently ramped up their support of women’s soccer, but it will be a while before any team […]

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A colleague let me know about this piece in The Guardian, the English newspaper: An oral history of USA at Italia ’90: the World Cup that changed US soccer. This felt very personal, from the first few paragraphs. I know/knew those guys. I was at Port of Spain, Trinidad, for the Shot Heard Round the […]

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It was another day of creeping Fifa revelations. (This is how Watergate felt.) The most significant being the New York Times quoting a federal official who said the $10 million shifted from South Africa to Concacaf’s Jack Warner had gone through the hands of Jerome Valcke — president Sepp Blatter‘s No. 1 henchman. The investigation […]

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Again. Europe and the English-speaking world again worked themselves up into a froth of indignity and righteous wrath over the cesspool that is “Fifa business” … … and again the broad swaths of the world where such things don’t matter a bit reelected their man. The reform candidate — or the guy who was not […]

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When this day began it seemed inevitable Sepp Blatter would be reelected to a fifth term as Fifa president tomorrow — despite the arrests of several top Fifa officials yesterday and the amping up of the usual level of scandal surrounding global soccer. And, as I wrote for The National, that certainty began to fray, […]

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Bhutan is a small, rarely visited country on the eastern end of the Himalayas. North of India, south of Tibet, middle of nowhere. And it probably is neither unkind nor unfair to suggest that a couple of weeks ago, Bhutan was best known, globally, for being the country ranked 209th — and last — in […]

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The UAE won the right to stage the 2019 Asian Cup on Monday … a tournament not well known in the rest of the world but a very big deal in Asia. Almost as big a deal to Asia as the African Cup of Nations is to Africa. Way bigger than North America’s generally limp […]

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The list of sports events I would like to cover once before I die … is no longer a long one. I have been very lucky. Not to say I haven’t missed some big events. But most of them I am not all that interested in seeing, as a journalist. The British Open. The U.S. […]

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First, the irony. World soccer governing body Fifa won’t tell you how its two-dozen executive committee members voted after they hand out the World Cup … But Fifa gives us chapter and verse on how the voting goes for the Ballon d’Or, the player-of-the-year award. Which Cristiano Ronaldo won tonight, as he should have, for […]

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This may have been the highest-profile sports event in the history of the UAE. No, really. Perhaps the most famous soccer team in the world, Real Madrid, led by one of the two most famous players in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, against an Italian club, AC Milan, that has won more European championshps (seven) than […]

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