Lists

The 2010s has been a decade. I can’t say it was great nor will I say it was bad. It was 10 years and as I write this it’s almost over. 

In 10 years, the soccer world saw Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo absolutely dominate the Ballon d’Or, winning all but one since 2008. Real Madrid won a bunch of big-eared trophies, Spain finally won a World Cup and few teams played more beautifully than Barcelona. Perhaps most shocking, England actually fielded a decent team at a World Cup, but Liverpool still hasn’t won a Premier League title. 

The biggest news of the Major League Soccer offseason so far has been the Chicago Fire’s new logo. For many, it was a bigger shock to the system than seeing Giovani dos Santos score goals for Club América.  

Named for the greatest story our city can tell - its own legend.

@grahamparkerfc https://t.co/zVr2cWbs0d

The 2019 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup came to a close on Sunday with Portugal lifting the trophy following a 6-4 victory over Italy in the final. The Azzurri’s Gabriele Gori finished as top scorer for the second-straight tournament with 16 goals in six games, but it was Japan’s Ozu Moreira who received the Golden Ball award as the World Cup’s best player. 

Most Major League Soccer teams have been busy negotiating contracts and striking deals across the league . . . but not D.C. United.

Instead, this MLS original has decided to assign every MLS team a type of candy, and well, it's pretty amusing.

Here are some of the best:

hi @FCDallas pic.twitter.com/1bNVkziPUt

Scoring a hat-trick in Europe’s premier club competition is no mean feat, especially so as an adolescent teenager between the ages of 13 and 19. The list of players to have accomplished the goalscoring achievement reads like a who’s who of the world’s greatest talent since the tournament’s adoption in 1992. 

In fact, only 19 players have multiple Champions League hat-tricks to their name, with both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo having accomplished the task a staggering eight times. Nobody else has recorded more than three.

This Sunday at 3:00 p.m. ET, the Seattle Sounders host Toronto FC at CenturyLink Field in the 24th edition of the MLS Cup. It’s the end of the trilogy as the Sounders and Reds do battle in Major League Soccer’s showpiece event for the third time in four years, and it’s being broadcast nationally on ABC and Univision.  

We’re just six days away from the 2019 MLS Cup Final between the Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC at CenturyLink Field, and although the entire capacity of the 68,740-seat stadium will be open, the match is already a sellout and the cheapest tickets you can find on the resell market are for $300 up in the 300-level. 

In case you haven’t seen all the obnoxious social media posts — like the one that probably brought you to this link — it’s Halloween. And while some of you have probably had your costume picked out since Nov. 1, 2018, most of you are probably still scrambling around to think of a costume for tonight or trying to think of reasons to stay inside, shut out all the lights and pretend you’re not home. So we’ve come up with some soccer-related last-minute Halloween costume ideas for you unimaginative, cheap and lazy folks out there (our prime audience, I’m sure).

Nutmegs — alongside cross-field rakers, back heels and an inordinate amount of step-overs — constitute one of the greatest forms of artistry in our beautiful game. The act of the nutmeg is equal parts illusion and imagination; it transcends the simple reality of moving the ball from Point A to Point B and replaces it with something sublime. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, a nutmeg tells us of beautiful, untrue things. (After all, a nutmeg is rarely ever a decisive moment.)

I honestly wasn’t aware until today, but the Swedish Allsvenskan is making a pretty convincing argument concerning the best league in Europe. First, it came to my attention that with only one match day remaining in the 2019 season, three clubs — Djurgården, Malmö and Hammarby — still have legitimate aspirations of winning the title.