Michel Platini, president of the European football federation, has called for the World Cup to be expanded from 32 to 40 teams. First reaction? More of a good thing can’t be bad. Second reaction? Too much of a good thing can, in fact, be bad. Why 40 teams? Why now? Why would it be a […]

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I love, love, love Japan’s team at the Fifa Under 17 World Cup, being held at the moment in the UAE. The Japanese are quite good. A 1-0 victory over Russia, the European champion; a 3-1 victory over Venezuela. Their place in the final 16 is assured. But I like them for far more than […]

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The tipoff should have been watching the Under 17 World Cup. Well, actually, I did watch it, for several days. I just didn’t make the obvious mental connection. Those kids were sweating bullets. Ergo …

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The UAE is the host country of the Fifa Under 17 World Cup, the biggest soccer tournament ever staged in this country. As host, the country gets a team in the tournament, and the Emirati teens had done well in their long, very long (and certainly expensive) preparations for the tournament. Which included camps at […]

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It has been an interesting story, Bob Bradley’s two years in Egypt. The former U.S. national team coach, dismissed in the summer of 2011, found a place coaching Egypt, but during a time of historic upheaval there. For most of the subsequent two years, Bradley did well to keep Egypt competitive after revolution and the […]

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* With new video link! The final 15 minutes of North America’s six-team qualifying process, for Brazil 2014, was madness. And it ended with a crazy result: Mexico remaining alive for the World Cup thanks, pretty much entirely, to US Soccer … and with a Mexican television announcer shouting: “God bless America” in English. Mexico […]

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Most of us hear “World Cup” and think of the big event. The senior men, 32 teams. The one every four years that pretty much everyone pays attention to, even Yanks. But Fifa runs several varieties of World Cup, the others being for women or for age-group players, and what once was known as the […]

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A huge day in 2014 World Cup qualifying. Four years ago, I would have been up all night watching games to update the Countdown to South Africa blog. (Perhaps the best World Cup blog seen by … almost no one!) In this case, I woke early enough, in Abu Dhabi, to see the late games […]

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I wrote a comment piece for The National today, looking at the United States soccer team, now assured of playing in a seventh consecutive World Cup. On the eastern side of the Atlantic, we must assume the majority of our readers know little or nothing of American soccer. They would refer to it as “football”, […]

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1. The United States is headed for the World Cup for the seventh consecutive time. It’s a lock. Bom dia, Brasil 2014! But it gets better.

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