NewsOne Featured Video Black women are rising up the ranks in the realm of sports and making history in the process. According to the Washington Post, Danita Johnson has been appointed to serve as the president of business operations for the soccer team D.C. United; making her the first Black president in MLS’ 28-year history. […]
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Weston McKennie was not, it is fair to say, particularly known for his goal scoring during his time with Schalke, but he has developed something of a taste for it with Juventus. He scored, spectacularly, at Camp Nou against Barcelona late in 2020, and his 2021 started with a celebration in another of European soccer’s […]
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By his own admission, Almir Numic is quite enjoying the media circus. Over the last couple of months, television crews have beaten an increasingly frequent path to Neukölln, the district of Berlin that is home to Tasmania, the soccer team he runs. Sky Sports was there early in December. Germany’s Sport1 has been down twice. […]
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On the face of it, the Premier League’s decision was an easy and an obvious one. Manchester City and Manchester United had finished last season late, thanks to their commitments in the summer’s European competitions. To ensure that both teams would have a similar break between campaigns as all of their rivals, the Premier League […]
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In a year in which Covid-19 caused more than 1.7 million deaths worldwide, sports competitions took place amid much debate over their necessity and the wisdom of their proceeding during a global health crisis. Did any good come from them? As these personal stories from the New York Times staff and contributors attest, in small […]
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Now, of course, all those ideas have been adopted at clubs of far greater scale, of far richer history. Where Midtjylland has gone, Europe has generally followed. Danish academies train every day. The vast majority of teams across Europe are committing vast resources to building teams of analysts and statisticians and physicists. Thomas Gronnemark, the […]
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Lionel Messi opted to stay with Barcelona this year after very publicly flirting with a move away from the Nou Camp. Ultimately, clubs like Manchester City and PSG were unable to secure his services, although this does not mean Messi’s future is with Barcelona, because he could still leave at the end of this campaign. […]
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Playing soccer against Lionel Messi has never seemed particularly fun, especially if you’re one of the goalkeepers who will invariably get beaten by the best player to ever set foot on the pitch. This week, Messi passed the latest mile marker in his decorated career when he scored his 644th goal for Barcelona. That goal, […]
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He had been doing that for almost a year when the pandemic struck. Suddenly, he found himself dragged back to a life he thought he had left behind. “We were lucky to be able to finish the season,” he said. “But nobody knew how many players would get the virus, and we had really strict […]
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Firing a coach, meanwhile, is expensive. At the elite level, that can mean several million dollars to pay out the contracts of an incumbent and his staff, and the commitment of millions more to appoint a suite of replacements. Fiorentina, for example, fired Giuseppe Iachini at the start of November, replacing him with Cesare Prandelli. […]
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At the beginning of March, Roger Balsdon was all set. For months, he and his wife, Gloria, had been planning the journey from their home in Plymouth, along England’s south coast, to Southampton, where they would board a cruise ship for a trip to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. It took only the blink of […]
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MANCHESTER, England — The fourth goal, the one that signaled a victory turning into a rout, was the one that meant the most. Manchester United’s coaching staff poured from the bench. On the sideline, several of the handful of stewards standing guard over Old Trafford’s empty stands celebrated wildly. And on the field, the players […]
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In a way, in a year of such uncertainty, there is something comforting about seeing an old standard raised: Mourinho has spent much of 2020 actually being quite likable on Instagram, but it is reassuring to know that, deep down, he has not changed. He is still the recidivist fire-starter he always was. But that […]
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Soccer leagues and tournaments around the world will be allowed to experiment with concussion substitutes starting in January, the body that oversees the sport’s rules announced Wednesday. The change is the most tangible action to be taken by soccer leaders amid growing concerns about the effects of head injuries at all levels of the game. […]
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LONDON — The content itself does not, when you type the words, sound especially fascinating. A 15-second video of a man buffing his shoes. A photograph of that moment he checked his phone in the snow, or that time he sat on a bus, or the day he ate some popcorn. In truth, the execution […]
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The celebration was the catharsis Columbus Crew fans had dreamed of since 2017, when the team’s former owner had threatened to move their team to Texas. It was the party they had pined for since 2018, when their campaign to stop him had yielded new owners and new hope. It was the dream that sustained […]
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The Columbus Crew is not supposed to be here right now. Not “here,” as in Major League Soccer’s championship game, M.L.S. Cup, against the Seattle Sounders on Saturday night — though for some fans that feels unlikely enough. But here, in Ohio, they said. The team’s home. Their home. Their path to Saturday’s final begins […]
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It was a moment worth savoring, even for those without a direct connection to any of the clubs involved. Much of the criticism of the Champions League group phase is warranted. It does, largely, simply confirm what we already know: a prolonged and dispiriting trudge to a conclusion that is essentially predetermined by the game’s […]
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Forget skill, training or even luck. If you’re a female soccer player in China, sometimes victory or defeat comes down to the color of your hair, as one university team recently found out the hard way. The women’s teams at Fuzhou University and Jimei University were supposed to face off at an intercollegiate tournament last […]
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Though Germany’s relationship with Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig, the teams with which Rangnick is most intimately associated, remains uneasy, nobody holds his lack of playing career against him anymore. “If you look at the Bundesliga, the vast majority of coaches did not play at the very highest level,” he said. Despite his vindication, though, he […]
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Israeli liberals skeptical about the country’s normalization deals nonetheless found reason to cheer the conspicuous twist of the new alliance. “The sale of Beitar to the Arabs is the clearest sign that God exists,” Noa Landau, the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, wrote on Twitter. Many Arab commentators jeered, however. Saied Hasnen, a sports radio host, […]
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Perhaps, though, there is one exception. Soccer’s past nine months have been marked, indelibly, by absence: first, for two months, of the sport as a whole, and then, for far longer, of the sport as it ought to be, not just a game but a spectacle, a conduit for contact and community and family and […]
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Arsenal will recover, of course. It will return, though it is likely to be a long and arduous journey. In the meantime, it stands as a warning to the rest of the elite that their place at the top table has not been granted in perpetuity: It is yours only so long as you make […]
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Diego Maradona’s wake knew no borders. Fans held a vigil in his name in Naples. His image lit up the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The New Zealand rugby team laid a jersey in his honor on a field in Newcastle, Australia. His face adorned the front pages of newspapers across the world. In Buenos Aires, […]
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For a while the boy — now 23, and whose identity is being withheld to protect his privacy — kept the messages to himself. He knew he was fortunate, selected among a group of two dozen boys who were given coveted places living and training at France’s national training center at Clairefontaine, arguably the world’s […]
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One of the first things we learn in soccer is to pass the ball. If you don’t, you lose it. But on that day, Maradona did the stuff of movies. He defied the odds. He charged on as an army of English players closed in on him. I was in the living room right in […]
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When Lisa Bloor heard that her daughter Abby’s elite-level soccer club was being shut down in England’s latest coronavirus lockdown she faced a tough problem: how to explain that boys at the same level were allowed to keep playing. “How do I tell my daughter it’s because she’s a girl?” Ms. Bloor asked. “It’s disheartening. […]
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The authorities searched the home and offices of Diego Maradona’s personal doctor on Sunday as part of an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the soccer star’s death last week. Prosecutors requested a search warrant for the doctor, Leopoldo Luque, after collecting evidence and interviewing Mr. Maradona’s relatives, according to a statement by the prosecutor’s office […]
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It was nothing more, really, than a ruffle of the hair and a kiss on the cheek. There was no pomp or circumstance that day in 1994, no words of wisdom whispered in the ear or sweeping gesture made for the crowd. Diego Maradona left the field, and Ariel Ortega replaced him on it. But […]
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Photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos (Getty Images) The U.S. women’s national soccer team (USWNT) showed their support for racial justice by donning Black Lives Matter jackets and kneeling on the field ahead of their 2-0 winning game against the Netherlands on Friday. Advertisement “Today, we wear Black Lives Matter to affirm human decency,” the team said in […]
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Two of the best big men in the NBA will join the FIFA universe. Milwaukee Bucks standout Giannis Antetokounmpo and Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid, both of whom are known for their love of the beautiful game, will make their way into FIFA 21‘s VOLTA Football game mode in the coming weeks. Both Antetokounmpo and […]
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