WTF

Being a national team coach in a landscape where you rarely get to see your players must be difficult, and Costa Rica manager Gustavo Matosas has said to hell with it after less than one year in charge.

Matosas, the head coach, said that he gets bored with the amount of downtime he has compared to the amount of time he actually has to train and work with his players. He felt “unproductive” with so much down time, even though he spends loads of it studying film so that he is prepared to get the most out of the little time he has with his players.

The long, grueling road of Asian qualifying for the 2022 World Cup began back in June with the first round and continued today with the start of the second round of proceedings. A massive fixture went down this morning in Central Jakarta, pitting fierce rivals Indonesia against neighbors Malaysia.

Racism in Italian football is rampant. Incidents in the last year have highlighted how little Serie A and the Italian FA are doing to curb racist chants toward black players. Now, Curva Nord, an Inter Milan ultras group, is defending the right of Cagliari fans to racially abuse Inter players.

This is the world in which we live.

Humanity should not expect progress to be expeditious or even linear. But when racist chants are commonplace in Italian soccer stadiums, the world takes notice.

The Jamaica women’s national team has announced that it will refuse to play until it receives the compensation that the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) owes them.

Jamaica's women's national soccer team made the #FIFAWWC for the first time ever in 2019.

They apparently were never paid for their effort, and now they're refusing to play or train. https://t.co/BHkfZO09Pt

Can you get called for a dive if you make a match-saving pass as you go down?

According to referee Kevin Friend, yes, you can.

Aston Villa was denied a 96th-minute equalizer in a 1-0 defeat to Crystal Palace on Saturday as Friend disallowed a Henri Lansbury goal for a perceived Jack Grealish dive, despite the fact Grealish assisted the goal.

Huh?

For the second time in three days, a Ligue 1 match was halted over homophobic messages from the stands. A PSG-Metz banner forced the stoppage of play in the first half of the match, 48 hours after the Nice-Marseille match was delayed.

Ligue 1 has new rules against homophobia in stadiums for the 2019-20 season, and those rules have been violated twice this week. 

You probably didn’t know who the Orlando Pride coach was when you clicked on this article. Given his recent comments and his club’s appalling performance this season, you probably won’t need to know his name much longer.