As we grow older, we find less and less time to play the sport we grew up loving so dearly. No longer do we play soccer five to seven days a week as we did in our youth. Hell, finding time to play once a month is hard enough.
But still we reminisce about the days of yore, when weeknights were filled with going to practice or playing pick-up games at the park and weekends were loaded with games and tournaments.
Parody in European football is a rarity. Typically, in domestic leagues there are several clubs that dominate the table and even fewer that are traditionally crowned champions. As of right now, Europe’s top five leagues consist of 98 teams. In the past decade those leagues have crowned 15 different champions. No one league has had more than four unique champions.
However, Turkish Super Lig club Sivasspor is on a historic run for its first-ever league title.
Women’s soccer is a massive sport these days, drawing more than 1.1 billion viewers to the 2019 Women’s World Cup. Leagues across the planet are growing steadily and women’s footballers are becoming household names throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The body of Eric Birighitti, a 21-year-old soccer player, was found Tuesday, sharks having attacked the corpse after the footballer drowned following a Jan. 2 incident.
Birighitti, an Australian who played college soccer in the U.S., slipped on some rocks on Jan. 2 and was swept out into the ocean. Despite having a life preserver thrown to him, Birighitti could not be saved, according to reports.
Wildfires are raging so hot in Australia right now they dwarf those seen recently in California and Brazil. Brighton & Hove Albion goalkeeper Mathew Ryan wants to help, even as politicians in Australia and around the world ignore the obvious effects of climate change.
There’s a handful of footballers on the planet that immediately demand your attention — when they speak, it’s time to stop what you’re doing and listen. Cesc Fàbregas is one of those players.
Nathaël Julan, a 23-year-old striker for Guingamp, was killed in a car crash on Friday.
The French club confirmed the death, issuing the following statement:
“En Avant Guingamp is in mourning. The club had the immense pain of learning this afternoon, the accidental death of its player Nathael Julan. On this tragic day, all the members of the club join together to send their sad condolences to Nathael’s family.”
Britain may have royal weddings, but in America we’ve got something far better: the Krashlyn wedding.
The anticipated marriage between USWNT stars Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris was held with soccer royalty in attendance on Saturday in Miami, Florida.
Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Abby Wambach, Heather O’Reilly, Marta, Becky Sauerbrunn, Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, Christen Press and more were on hand as two of their teammates tied the knot.
We’re nearing the end of the decade and we here at The18 have watched a whole lot of soccer over the last 10 years. So to commemorate the end of the era, we’ve compiled a best XI of our favorite soccer players — and our least favorite soccer players.
While other outlets are doing Best XIs for the decade, we wanted to go a different route. Anyone can say Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were the two best male players of the decade; who really cares about that? What’s more interesting, to us, is who people choose to like and dislike.
Mahia Macías is a 7-year-old girl from Montevideo, Uruguay, who just wants to play football, but where she comes from, there aren’t nearly as many teams for girls. However, since she’s still young enough to play on the boys side, she’s become the first girl to play in the youth league of Club Nacional de Football, Uruguay’s most successful team apart from Peñarol.
Home