Other News

After winning his first major international trophy, Lionel Messi posted a picture with a wide smile holding the Copa América trophy and it quickly became the most-liked photo of an athlete on Instagram ever.

While it isn’t shocking to see so many people come to support one of the greatest footballers ever in his first international trophy at the age of 34, it intrigued me in wondering what other athletes can garner this amount of attention and love on social media. 

Here we take a look through the most-liked social media posts made by athletes from all around the world. 

While FC Spartak Moscow might not be the best on the pitch or even near it, but its social media team is undefeated. The club's TikTok account has garnered over 33 million total likes throughout their posts, nearly three times the number of citizens in the home city of Moscow. They are by far the best soccer TikTok account and their videos are a must-see for any soccer fan.

Have you ever turned on men's soccer at the Olympics and wondered, "who the heck are these guys?" The two sides on the field usually consist of a few players you might have heard of before, along with a bunch of nobodies. Unlike other international tournaments like the World Cup or Copa América, only certain players are eligible to play because of a Olmypic soccer age limit — which FIFA put in place to delineate the Olympic tournament from the World Cup. 

The NCAA has adopted a new interim policy that provides college athletes with the opportunity to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL). Including all the top three divisions of all NCAA sports nationwide, almost 460,000 athletes now have the liberty to be compensated for their worth and what they bring to their school. Before the new policy came into effect, the NCAA owned the public rights of every athlete as a part of their scholarship agreement. 

When you look at the Chile national team, one player might appear out of place. Ben Brereton is not your usual Chilean; he doesn’t even speak Spanish, the primary language spoken by the rest of the team. The English-Chilean forward had played with England's U19 and U20 national teams for almost five years before switching to Chile's squad this year for the Copa América.

Looking at North Macedonia's obscure warmups heading into its match against Ukraine, there is no surprise it later lost. As fun as it looked, with the players racing up the pitch and passing the ball between each other using upturned cones, it didn't seem like the appropriate warmup for the Euro 2020 Group C match on Thursday. 

FC Barcelona released new home kits for the 2021-2022 La Liga season and they're chaotically terrible. The new shirts appear as if the creators never agreed on a set design and continued the fight throughout the process.

With Barcelona being in severe debt, we should have assumed the new kits would be this bad. They feature verticle traditional blaugrana stripes and a new design inspired by the team crest. With tons of stripes and lots of colors, these kits fail to impress.

As the world heals from the pandemic, pick-up matches are on their way back as well. Pick-up matches exemplify all the best parts of soccer: intense rivalries, healthy competition and the opportunity to sharpen your skills.

It was a foggy Saturday morning soccer match and I was defending the goal spectating the action going on the field. I had stopped a few shots earlier in the match and my confidence was quickly rising. Thoughts raced through my head, realizing that I was about to officially record my first clean sheet of the season. Then as clear as day the ball was passed to me, and as I went to stop it with my foot it slowly but surely skipped right below my outstretched foot and into the awaiting net behind me.