Women's Soccer

In UEFA Women’s World Cup qualifying there are a lot of routs. Half of the 10 matches played Tuesday involved scorelines of 3-0 or worse (most were worse, much worse), including Germany’s 11-0 thrashing of Faroe Islands. Scotland’s match against Albania was no different but for one feature: none of those other lopsided affairs had a goal this pretty.

In the end, Netherlands and FC Barcelona attacker Lieke Martens was the deserved recipient of 2017’s The Best FIFA Women’s Player award (an accolade presumably named by a toddler or Sepp Blatter). But the three-woman shortlist for the prize continues to flip the bird at anyone who wishes to try and make sense of it all.

FIFA actually got something right on Monday when it awarded Cristiano Ronaldo The Best FIFA Men’s Player of 2017 at the FIFA award show. Lieke Martens was named The Best Women’s Player while Olivier Giroud claimed the Puskas Award for the best goal. 

Ronaldo won the honor as best men’s player for the second year in a row and was also named to the FIFA FIFPro World XI alongside four of his Real Madrid teammates. 

Iceland became the smallest nation to ever qualify for the Men’s World Cup earlier this month. The Iceland women’s national team is trying to follow suit. Iceland stunned Germany, the top-ranked team in Europe, 3-2 in UEFA qualifying for the 2019 World Cup on Friday in Wiesbaden, the first World Cup qualifying loss for the two-time world champions since 1998.

Lindsey Horan struck in the 50th minute to propel the Portland Thorns to their second NWSL championship, a 1-0 victory over the North Carolina Courage in the NWSL final on Saturday in Orlando, Florida. 

A crowd of 8,124 watched the final at Orlando City Stadium.

Portland won the inaugural NWSL championship in 2013 and lost in the semifinals to North Carolina last year after winning the NWSL Shield. On Saturday, the Thorns edged the Courage, who themselves won the NWSL Shield this year as the league’s best regular-season team. 

According to a report from Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, Norway’s men’s national team has agreed to a pay cut with the money then going to the women’s side, resulting in equal pay from the Norwegian soccer federation beginning in 2018.