Has this percolated back to North America? This Messi versus Ronaldo thing? It is nearly inescapable, here in the Old World. Who is the better player? Who is more valuable? Whom do you prefer? Lionel Messi? Or Cristiano Ronaldo? It’s almost as if two-thirds of the planet organizes itself into two camps. The Messis and […]

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Let’s start with full disclosure: I have not been in the same room with Landon Donovan since 2009. Rarely even in the same hemisphere with him. In touch, in contact from time to time, but not in the same place. My perceptions of him are based on lots of conversations from around 1999 to 2009. […]

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I am amused yet oddly proprietary about the World Cup and this Group of Death meme. Has to be one. At every World Cup. A Group of Death. It’s the law. And it’s silly. Cliche, vaguely morbid, overstates the importance of soccer, but it’s what we do. (And according to the link, above, the first […]

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The World Cup intrigue begins earlier than ever. In this case, the pot distribution revealed today, ahead of the draw on Friday, was a source of some controversy. Well, it was in England, anyway. What it shows for fans of the U.S. national team is that the Yanks are likely to be in a tough […]

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A weird thing about being in Thailand — which is physically closer to the U.S. than is the UAE, and by several thousand miles — is an even bigger sense of disconnect from American sports. It’s the time zones. By 10 a.m. UAE time, just about every sports event “last night” in the U.S. is […]

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This is a big deal for Dubai and the UAE — winning a vote to stage the 2020 World Expo. No event of this magnitude has been awarded to the city or the country. So that would explain the thousands of people in the streets of Dubai, celebrating.

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Hoped you liked the 2010 World Cup … Because the 2014 version is overwhelmingly the same teams you saw in 2010. Here is the complete list of teams who are going to Brazil who did not play at South Africa:

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I have been thinking about this for some time now. A sort of nightmare soccer scenario. The UAE national team over the past year has played as well as it has at any time in the country’s history. Which may count for nothing on the World Cup stage — a potentially crushing disappointment I wrote […]

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It lasted 23 days, but it seemed longer. Twenty-four teams, originally, from New Zealand to Canada, from Argentina to Sweden. They played 52 games in 23 days, and many of us here in the UAE got quite used to having these kids around, and watching them on Al Jazeera, the Qatar cable station that carried […]

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I have noted this during every World Cup since 1990, at least. The first I covered … so of course I would have noticed it. But now, even watching via television, I discover the same emotions. I am oddly bereft when the group stage of a World Cup ends, producing a day or two of […]

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