Fans

They say women are the taste makers of every generation. If that is true then maybe this video has something to do with why so many people took a metaphorical dump on Gareth Bale in the 2014/15 season. 

For anyone who follows Real Madrid, you’ll know that Bale was the greatest thing since sliced bread at Tottenham the year before he moved to Real Madrid, and for his first year at Madrid, that continued: he scored the game winning goal in the 2014 Champions League Final, and did this to Barcelona: 

Dear Liverpool fans,

Not to go all Britney Spears Youtube guy on you, but y'all need to leave Mario Balotelli alone. 

It is my belief that one of the major difficulties Americans have with soccer is that they don’t understand how the different leagues and tournaments work.

Generally, Americans understand that the best soccer leagues are in Europe and can grasp the promotion/relegation system the leagues use, where the best teams from a league get promoted to a better league and the worst get relegated to a lesser one.

Brace yourselves. This story is not for the squeamish. 

There was a shark attack at an English soccer game between Barnet and Grimsby town. We are not making this up.

Apparently, a Grimsby town supporter named Kenneth Meech assaulted a steward at Barnet's home grounds with an inflatable shark, like the things that small children ride around on in swimming pools.

There are trophies to be won all over the place in soccer, but no prominent belts. Until now.

A group of supporters of three MLS teams, Sporting Kansas City, FC Dallas and the Colorado Rapids, have created the Midwestia Belt, to be awarded to the best-performing team in head-to-head matchups between the three.

The season-within-the-season is formally known as the Midwestia Championship. It's modeled after the Cascadia Championship, a competition among the Vancouver Whitecaps, Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers.

Over the weekend L.A. Galaxy newcomer Steven Gerrard did something that should set him on the path to becoming as much of a Galaxy legend as he was at Liverpool: he bought the fans beer.

You can never be too sure about how you will affect someone’s life. Our actions, words, and emotions can do so many different things across the 6 degrees that separate every single human being in the world. It is almost impossible to track how this affected that, there.

Finally, they’re in the game. EA Sports announced earlier this month that for the first time ever, the members of women’s national teams will be featured in the next iteration of the wildly-popular FIFA video game franchise. Although mostly the news was met with praise and positivity, because this is the internet, of course there were trolls that had to cast a negative light on this development.

I wonder how many thousands of groundskeepers and security people around the world groaned when they saw this video. Pitch invaders are probably the most annoying part of their jobs, and here is Cristiano Ronaldo, a star among stars, rewarding two of them. It’s just about as close to a rousing endorsement as he could give.