Not a good weekend for American soccer people or the league most of them play for. Landon Donovan’s comeback from retirement suddenly ended as he went off at halftime with a hamstring injury and his LA Galaxy went out of the Major League Soccer playoffs in a shootout. Bob Bradley, the first American to coach […]

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The LA Galaxy has been around for 21 seasons now, but it struck me today that never in that time had the soccer club had to fight for attention in its hometown with a local National Football League team. The NFL abandoned the Los Angeles market after the 1994 season, when the Rams and Raiders […]

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Trying to remember when it seemed as if Landon Donovan making a comeback on the pitch … pretty much had to happen. It couldn’t have been any later than the first month or two of the 2015 Major League Soccer season. Landon playing more games seemed inevitable, didn’t it? Two powerful currents pushed him in […]

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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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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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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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I have voted for the Futbol de Primera award — formerly the Honda Award — for most of two decades. The award, voted on by journalists, goes to the U.S. national team player judged to have been the best performer in a calendar year. Michael Bradley is the winner, for the first time, over Clint […]

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I pretty much gave up advocating the dismissal of coaches and managers a decade ago. Maybe more. I make an exception for Jurgen Klinsmann. This man is doing so much harm to U.S. soccer that every day he mismanages this team leaves them in a deeper hole from which they must eventually climb. The 4-1 […]

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On this side of the Atlantic, they have a tired, trite expression for perennially successful soccer teams. Those that dominate their league, pay the best salaries and seem to suck up the best players, as they become available. “Giants”, they inevitably are called. “Juventus, the Serie A giants … Bayern Munich, the German giants … […]

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A professional soccer team usually can accommodate no more than one big, strong, slow player in its lineup. And he nearly always is a striker known for being good in the air. He doesn’t have to win the ball. He doesn’t have to carry the ball. He doesn’t have to pass the ball. He doesn’t […]

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