After the tragedy of losing to Tottenham in last season’s Champions League semifinals was compounded by a heartbreaking exit during this year’s group stage, Ajax’s European odyssey has appropriately descended into comedy after being parachuted into the Europa League Round of 32.
Speed kills regardless of the sport. During Tuesday’s Champions League match, Dortmund’s new wonder-boy Erling Håland showcased his blistering speed during a box-to-box sprint. How fast is Erling Håland compared to Tyreek Hill from the NFL?
Håland has some scary speed, that much we learned from this insane burst from the Norwegian teen on Tuesday.
It is the one item a game can’t be played without: a ball. Unless you're named Michy Batshuayi that is. Jokes aside the latest installment of Champions League knockout football is upon us and with that comes the new Champions League ball.
Adidas is calling it the Istanbul20, and this ball trumps all past designs.
Ajax recently agreed to sell winger Hakim Ziyech to Chelsea for $43.4 million, with the 26-year-old moving to Stamford Bridge in the summer. While this number doesn’t even break the top 50 most expensive transfers of all time, it would be a blockbuster deal in most other leagues around the world. This list consists of the 18 most expensive incoming transfers across different leagues.
While the men’s Champions League Round of 16 begins this week, the women’s competition doesn’t return until the end of March with the staging of the quarterfinals. The question — on the back of four straight titles — is can anyone disrupt Lyon’s recent hegemony of the competition?
One potential answer is Wolfsburg.
The club won back-to-back European titles in 2013 and 2014, but in the five tournaments since, they’ve been bounced by Lyon four times (twice in the final, twice in the quarters). This season, the two clubs won’t possibly meet until the final.
John Oliver, a proud Liverpudlian, is now a U.S. citizen. The comedian and former The Daily Show correspondent is about to start his seventh season of his hit HBO show “Last Week Tonight.” But all he really wants to talk about is his love for Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool FC.
Every week, footballers do incredible things, and we then say exaggerated things like, “I’ve never seen anything like that before!" Let's face it: It’s fun to talk about soccer and even more fun to exaggerate about soccer. But then there are the records, the things that really have never happened before, and those are just as fun. Here are the 18 world records in soccer you need to know about. (Note: Unless indicated otherwise, these happened in competitive games.)
There’s obviously no official record for the fastest shot in soccer. It’d be convenient if a man with a radar gun had been sanctioned to sit at every match played since the beginning of time, but that was an oversight on FIFA’s end.
It’s obviously far too early to say that Kylian Mbappé vs. Erling Haaland is the next generation’s version of Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi — and you can absolutely make fun of me for even bringing it up — but these two kids are not normal.
The 21-year-old Mbappé has already proven that he has no level. With a World Cup winner’s medal to his name and a Champions League strike rate of 19 goals in 30 appearances (to go along with 11 assists), there’s no doubt that Mbappé’s Ligue 1 domination would translate across all European leagues. He’s a phenomenon.
For keen followers of the world’s game, Feb. 5 is something of a holiday. A startling number of legendary players were born on that day, from Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez to Gheorghe Hagi and the inimitable Neymar.
But this year, Feb. 5 will come with a bit less fanfare, a bit less pomp and revelry.
This year, Neymar won’t be having an exorbitantly extravagant party to celebrate his 28th birthday.