Real Madrid and Portugal star Pepe has apparently found himself caught up in the holiday spirit as news of him buying a reported 9,000 kilos of food for 200 families surfaced last week. The food will go to families in the Las Rozas neighborhood of Madrid, and will go a long way in cheering up the holidays of a normally underprivileged area.
For those who don’t play soccer but have played FIFA, you know about all the little training exercises that clubs use to brush up on their skills. Well, Portuguese club Benfica have introduced a new state-of-the-art technological training room that blurs the lines between video games and reality.
Carlos Vela just won La Liga’s Player of the Month Award for the month of November . Under normal circumstances, the award would be all well and good, and we would have no problem celebrating the night away with Vela and his legion of admirers.
This is one of the more unfortunate things we have ever seen and, trust us, we have seen a lot. Of all the soft red cards we have seen, this might just take the cake. After being subbed on during a restart after a goal, the poor chap in blue picked the wrong player to swing his arms in the general vicinity of:
Imagine if Manchester United were one day told by the English Crown Court that they could no longer play in red, wear a devil on their crest or, indeed, refer to themselves as Manchester United: Quite a blow to Ed Woodward’s plans for global sports brand indomitability.
According to Forbes, Cristiano Ronaldo earned $80 million in 2014, and there is no reason to believe that Ronaldo’s earnings in 2015 should be any less. With a paycheck as big as that, you could probably have a lot of fun. So, that got us thinking, what could you afford if you earned $80 million a year?
It is well documented that the world's most popular soccer clubs compete for the next up-and-coming Messi or Ronaldo. See, for insance, this article about the 9-year-old AS Roma signed earlier this year. Youngsters who show promise and skill are top priorities for any club's youth system – and after you see some of the videos of these wonderkids play, you can understand why.
Heading into the weekend, we previewed the main plotlines we thought might unfold in La Liga (Spain), Seria A (Italy), and the Bundesliga (Germany). Now let’s see what actually happened:
Spain - La Liga:
About a week ago, Zlatan Ibrahimovic named his dream team, consisting of all the players he’s played with. He, of course, put himself on the list starting alongside Leo Messi, but the Swedish great may have forgotten one player.
David Luiz has now come out with his starting 11, and the Paris Saint Germain defender failed to put his teammate in his 11 as well. The two shared only three of the same players in their XIs: Lionel Messi, Thiago Silva and Maxwell.
At The18, we have covered many stories about soccer hooliganism and match abandoments around the world - from the biggest rivalries in soccer, to the worst instances of fans rioting on the pitch, to street brawls outside stadiums (some of them very strange indeed).