FIFA finally stepped in (not like Concacaf was going to) and punished Mexico for the continuous homophobic chants from fans on Friday. On top of a $65,000 fine, Mexico will be forced to play its first two home games of World Cup qualifying without fans. Officially, the punishment is due to the chants heard during Olympic qualifying.
Looking at North Macedonia's obscure warmups heading into its match against Ukraine, there is no surprise it later lost. As fun as it looked, with the players racing up the pitch and passing the ball between each other using upturned cones, it didn't seem like the appropriate warmup for the Euro 2020 Group C match on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku announced that his team planned to kick the ball out of play in the 10th minute of the game against Denmark to pay tribute to Christian Eriksen. The Eriksen tenth minute moment on Thursday was as beautiful as you could imagine.
FC Barcelona released new home kits for the 2021-2022 La Liga season and they're chaotically terrible. The new shirts appear as if the creators never agreed on a set design and continued the fight throughout the process.
With Barcelona being in severe debt, we should have assumed the new kits would be this bad. They feature verticle traditional blaugrana stripes and a new design inspired by the team crest. With tons of stripes and lots of colors, these kits fail to impress.
Was it the 67,000 in attendance? The Coca-Cola bottles from the night before? Cristiano Ronaldo had an extremely uncharacteristic miss in Portugal’s 3-0 opening group game victory. This Ronaldo miss vs. Hungary will likely be forgotten after his second half heroics.
He looked a little like Timo Werner with this miss in the first half.
After Christian Eriksen collapsed onto the pitch during the EURO 2020 Group B game between Finland and Denmark, both countries' fans and players came together to display perfect sportsmanship. As panic ensued throughout the stadium and no one knew what was happening, the moment quickly became bigger than football.
Italy, nominally, was the away team for its Euro 2020 opener on Friday. Though the match was played in Stadio Olimpico in Rome, Turkey was designated the home team. In reality, it was a home game for Azzurri, and one to celebrate as major international soccer returned after a year’s delay because of the Covid-19 pandemic.