Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard was appointed as the new boss at Scottish Premiership side Rangers on Friday. It represents Gerrard’s first taste of life as a manager for a club. Before he made the jump to the big boy leagues, Stevie G was an academy coach at Liverpool, where he guided their under-19 side to a quarterfinal place in the UEFA Youth League this season.
Neymar is reportedly back in Paris today, and while he’s not expected to return to action immediately, there’s still hope he can play in PSG’s final league game, away at Caen. Neymar has been out injured since the end of February after fracturing his fifth metatarsal and flying back to Brazil to have it surgically repaired and treated.
Four years is a good amount of time for a person to change.
So I decided to take a look at players who have played in a lot of World Cups and see their evolution every time they played in the world’s greatest competition. I picked welll known players in football (and DaMarcus Beasley for the USMNT fans) and what I learned was this:
In one of the biggest controversies in U.S. soccer history, Jurgen Klinsmann infamously left out USMNT stalwart Landon Donovan from his 23-man squad for the 2014 World Cup. Donovan, who was 32 years old at the time, would have been looking at participating in his fourth World Cup, but sadly it was not to be.
When Bastian Schweinsteiger first burst onto the world scene at the 2006 World Cup, the precocious 21-year-old was a winger with a bag of tricks. By 2014, when he helped Germany hoist the World Cup trophy, he was a veteran defensive midfielder, a calm and composed presence.
But Bastian Schweinsteiger in 2018 with the Chicago Fire has taken on an entirely new role: sweeper.
Fire coach Veljko Paunovic has moved the aging but gifted player from the heart of his team to the heart of his defense, lining the German up at the middle of a three-man defense in a 3-5-2.