As is customary, FC Barcelona walked out to "El Cant del Barça" during Wednesday's Copa del Rey semifinal first leg against Real Madrid. But due to the significance of the occasion — what with it being an El Clásico semifinal — the accompanying music was turned off and the anthem was sung a cappella.
Wednesday night's announced attendance was 92,008, so the result was staggering.
If you want to know what Kobe Bryant is up to today, there’s a fair chance that he’s spending it watching El Clásico. Growing up in Italy, Bryant was a massive soccer fan and credits the game with helping shape him on the basketball court.
Up in Minnesota, the polar vortex came, dropped temperatures to minus-28 degrees and went. Up next was some overnight freezing rain that left everything caked in ice on Monday morning. Some people took the opportunity to play ice hockey in the streets, some went about attempting to fix the situation — I'm talking about that hero the salt truck driver.
But just as we can ask who watches the watchmen, who salts for the saltmen?
If you’re like the rest of America, you’ve probably got the Puppy Bowl on right now. It’s the 15th edition of the game on Animal Planet, and it’s shaping up to be a real doozy.
CLARA THE PUP HAS LEGS FOR MINUTES!#PuppyBowlXV #PuppyBowl pic.twitter.com/ZDmNVLcIBo
Pulling off a nutmeg is exhilarating. Executing back-to-back megs is the stuff of legend. Three straight is unheard of. Four? That’s too outlandish for Hollywood. M. Night Shyamalan would slap you for even thinking something so preposterous.
But over in the Israeli Premier League, it’s just been done. The mad lad that probably deserves arresting is Maccabi Netanya’s Fatos Bećiraj. The 30-year-old Montenegrin striker redefined holdup play with this five-second display of savagery.
Bayern Munich sure loves Texas.
Last year, the German club partnered with FC Dallas to create a player-development program. Bayern has brought a number of Americans over on loan from the MLS club, even signing 18-year-old Chris Richards earlier this month.
It’s been irregular, but we’ve been treated to some pretty revealing interviews with Lionel Messi of late.
The haters can hate, but Major League Soccer can put on a show. And this 2018 MLS skills video the league put out ahead of the 2019 season has it all.
It starts with an elastico. It’s got Cruyff turns, Zidane roulettes, sombreros and nutmegs. So many nutmegs.
Do yourself a favor and spend the 4:33 it takes to watch this video and try not to get too excited about the upcoming 2019 season, which will feature plenty more of Zlatan.
In a sequence of events that involved one man taking a ball to the face, another shanking the hell out of an overhead kick and a third connecting sweetly with a chilena of his own, we witnessed football’s most spectacular sight three times inside five seconds in the video above.
It’s not often you encounter a team with this kind of chutzpah. Usually, someone would opt for an approach other than the most notoriously advanced skill in the game, but these boys showed that anything other than a bicycle kick is simply a waste of time.