Someone will get hurt. Actually, lots of someones already have. OK, then. Someone else will get hurt. Seriously hurt. This weekend or next. Or both. Soccer’s goal celebrations. Out of control. Mindless, actually. Exuberance perhaps is to be expected, following something as rare (in many soccer games) as a goal. However, in their enthusiasm to […]

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Landon Donovan apparently is considering continuing on in Major League Soccer. This, after a couple of months of interesting-but-not-scintillating play with the LA Galaxy at the end of the 2016 season. That he could keep up at all is impressive, in his nine games back, during the autumn. He is 34, will be 35 in […]

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I am impressed by how often the cameramen, and directors, of sports broadcasts manage to get images of athletes spitting … into our living rooms via television. Baseball’s World Series manages to get bearded players spewing streams of brown “tobacco juice”. If a viewer is lucky, guys in the dugout might limit their expectorations to […]

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Well, that was ugly. And perhaps unfortunately timed. Bob Bradley, the first American to coach a team in one of Europe’s biggest five leagues, was fired by Swansea City today — only his 85th day on the job of the English Premier League club. He was a dead man walking since Swansea’s 4-1 home loss […]

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Ask American sports fans what he or she can tell you about the New York Cosmos … and I’m guessing 90 percent of them will say, “Zip. Nada”. Maybe 1 percent will say, “Cosmos? Did you mean Galaxy?” The Cosmos were the American soccer team that the rest of the world sorta cared about. Without […]

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I feel confident in saying I am as big a soccer fan as anyone in my age cohort who was born and raised in the United States. Came to the game late, got involved as a self-taught AYSO coach, volunteered to cover the U.S. national team, saw Paul Caligiuri’s Shot Heard Round the World, went […]

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His given name was Luiz Carlos Saroli, but he was known by the informal Caio Junior, going back to his playing days in Portugal and his native Brazil. And that is how we referred to him in the pages of The National while he coached in the UAE. He died in a plane crash tonight, […]

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I realized this weekend I have moved into a form of Premier League partisanship that revolves around a single question: What is best for Bob Bradley? Bradley is the coach of Swansea City, a club already mired in a fight to avoid the disaster of relegation. Bradley is the American coach of Swansea City, and […]

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Jurgen Klinsmann was fired today and it looks as if the U.S. Soccer Federation is taking our advice on another matter, too: Bruce Arena as the new/old U.S. national team coach. That would be Bruce Arena, he of five MLS Cup championships, three with the LA Galaxy, and a quarterfinals run at the 2002 World […]

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It’s time. Jurgen Klinsmann must go. He now is inflicting real damage on the U.S. national soccer team. The U.S. Soccer Federation really has only One Job that fans insist it complete: Qualification for the Fifa World Cup. A limp and lifeless U.S. team was crushed 4-0 in Costa Rica tonight. The U.S. has lost […]

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