Opinion

Football’s refusal to enter the 21st Century – and seeming willingness remain in the dark ages – continues to baffle viewers of the beautiful game. The shameful Diego Costa versus Gabriel incident at Stamford Bridge resurfaced tensions on the role video technology in football can play, a topic that divides supporters like few others. People love football because of its simplicity, but time and again the television viewer is more informed than the man employed to make on-field assessments. How can this be the case?

Sunderland and the North East in general have some of the most passionate fans in the country, week upon week both Sunderland and Newcastle produce great home support and fill out their stadiums. When you consider that they both have capacities of near 50,000 that is an incredible following. But certainly within the last few years they have struggled to generate any foothold in the Premier League.

The Seattle Reign and FC Kansas City are about to face off in the final of the National Women’s Soccer League playoffs tonight at 9:30 PM EST on Fox Sports 1. If you didn’t know that, you are not only not alone, but you have come to the right place. 

Cristiano Ronaldo transfer speculation is rife again even though the transfer window only closed at the start of September and Real Madrid won’t release the world’s No. 1 footballer until next summer (at the earliest).

As befits a player of his caliber, Ronaldo is being most closely linked with two mega-rich clubs: his former team, Manchester United, and Paris Saint-Germain.

It will come as no surprise to even the greenest of soccer fans that, while money can’t buy you love, it can certainly buy you a solid full-back or a game-changing winger with quicksilver in his heels and an eye for goal. And a lot of money (£5.13bn or $7.91bn to be precise), spread across the Premier League’s 20 clubs, can buy a lot of quality players – and, in turn, a bigger and better Premier League TV deal – or so conventional logic would have us believe.

Going into week 6 of the 2015 NCAA Men’s Division 1 soccer season there was one thing clearer than all the rest: parity, even among the best teams in the nation, is at an all time high.

It is incredibly hard for an individual player to have an affect on a soccer match. The game is comprised of 22 players that at any one time could be making more of an impact than any one player. There could be a defensive battle on the left side of the field that renders the right winger a spectator. The left-back in a defense could be such a defensive liability that the opposing attack choses to go nowhere else but through him, leaving the corresponding right back to do little more than mark space in solitude.

After its 2-0 victory over Newcastle United on Monday, East London’s West Ham United sits in an impressive fifth place in the table after five matches, ahead of such prominent clubs as Everton, Tottenham, Liverpool, and Chelsea. The results have to be reassuring for fans of West Ham, as the club is facing perhaps the most important season in its history. So just what is at stake for the Hammers this season?

Why a 21-year-old from France just might be the most American player on the planet.

This article was written at a time when Paul Pogba and Juventus were struggling. Those struggles got worse before they got better, but Juve have now won 15 straight Serie A games, find themselves in first place, and Pogba is playing with all of the confidence and leadership one could hope for. This article sheds some light on how Pogba got out of an unencouraging start to the season with some help from his manager, Massimiliano Allegri.