The Édgar Méndez red card that took place in the 34th minute between Alavés and Levante will be a strong contender for the oddest sending off of the season.
Méndez was shown his first yellow card in the 24th minute. Then, ten minutes later, he was bizarrely booked a second time and given a red card after retrieving a ball that went out of bounds and passing it onto the field.
Russia's national football team said on Sunday it would not be calling up its captain Artem Dzyuba for upcoming international matches this month to shield him from negative publicity.
Its statement followed the leak of an private video online on Saturday, which TASS news agency said showed a man similar to the 32-year-old Dzyuba, who is also the striker for Zenit St. Petersburg. There was no suggestion of any controversial behavior in the video and it was not clear how it had leaked.
Reports out of England this week suggest the Premier League will do away with selling $20 pay-per-view matches. Hopefully NBC follows suit, but don’t hold your breath based on what it’s doing to the biggest match of the year this weekend.
Conceding immediately after kickoff is a FIFA video game tradition unlike any other. For some unholy reason, opponents will slice through your team like a hot knife through butter after a kickoff. Every so often this event of a fast kickoff goal takes place in the real world.
No kickoff goal will be faster than that poor Spanish goalkeeper scoring a late goal and then immediately getting lobbed from kickoff. We have found a close second though.
Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez has had a season to forget with the Los Angeles Galaxy. The man who was expected to fill the massive boots that Zlatan Ibrahimovic left behind has tossed said boots to the side and put on some flip-flops with socks still on instead.
Describing Chicharito’s performances this season as underwhelming is a massive understatement. Mexico’s all-time leading goal scorer had a major flop of a season. He only made 11 appearances and scored his second goal on Wednesday night in the Galaxy’s second-to-last game of the season against the Seattle Sounders.
With Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Luke Shaw playing the roles of marauding fullbacks, Axel Tuanzebe the false center back, Bruno Fernandes the floating No. 10, Donny van de Beek the floating No. 8 and Juan Mata and Nemanja Matić the taxidermied zebras, Manchester United produced the sort of display that makes you wonder why Mauricio Pochettino is still out of a job on Wednesday.
I’ve become addicted to FIFA 21 Pro Clubs. I think a part of it is that I miss playing the actual game so damn much that Pro Clubs has given me the endorphins I crave by way of reassuming my CDM position, clattering loose touches, linking defense to attack and experiencing the thrill of teamwork making the dream work.
It’s fun, alongside four strangers turned comrades on the field of battle, to embarrass five other strangers to the point of rage quitting.
In all honesty, we’ve only just begun to see the torrential number of ways in which COVID-19 can disrupt football in a purely sporting sense.
Major League Soccer’s regular season has been severely disrupted by the pandemic with a logjam of postponed matches that can no longer be completed before the start of the playoffs, forcing qualification to be determined on a points-per-game basis rather than the final standings.
Don’t let Gareth Bale scoring Tottenham’s game-winning goal against Brighton on Sunday distract you from Harry Kane and Son Heung-min’s abysmal flopping performance. In the span of ten seconds, the world was treated to two pathetic Kane and Son flops.
One of the rarest moments in football is when, with one team trailing late, the goalkeeper rushes forward to join the attack and actually pulls off the miracle equalizer. It's rare, but it happens (our favorite example being this bicycle kick).