Alejandro Bedoya deserves a call up for the USMNT when they take on Guatemala in World Cup Qualifying. Bedoya has become something of a hero of late for French Ligue 1 side Nantes. After not scoring for Nantes for nine months, the United States international has now scored four in six games. Some of those goals have been extremely important.
Friday was the Mexico derby in Portugal, with the eyes, ears and various other sensory parts of the body tuned into Porto vs. Benfica, a match that pitted Mexico National Team teammates Hector Herrera, Miguel Layun and Jesus "Tecatito" Corona (Porto) against Raul Jimenez (Benfica).
Porto ended up with a late 2-1 victory, with the Hector Herrera 2016 return-to-form tour in full swing.
Trivia question: how many times has Lionel Messi won La Liga Player of the month? A hundred? Fifty? Seventy five?
Answer: one. And it was last month.
That's right, after 298 goals, making him La Liga's all-time leading scorer, Messi has finally been named Player of the Month in La Liga. The 28-year-old Argentine has won the FIFA Ballon d'Or four times, La Liga Player of the Year six times and the UEFA Best Player of the Year award twice.
And La Liga Player of the Month once.
As promised, my predictions for futbal were awful, 0-5…but I nailed the Super Bowl call, I will take it. Enough said about that, on to the top five matches you can’t miss this weekend:
Juventus vs. Napoli, Saturday 2:45 p.m. EST beIN Sports
Leicester City continue to play quality, no frills football and the individual effort of Riyad Mahrez helped the squad to a controlling victory over Manchester City. The creative brilliance of the Algerian winger was on display the entire match. Mahrez has embraced the center stage as the squad remain on course to an EPL title.
Barcelona fan site Grup14 uploaded three very interesting infographics depicting the managerial statistics of Barcelona’s three “most successful coaches” through their first 100 games. While you won’t get any argument here about whether or not Luis Enrique, Pep Guardiola, and Johan Cruyff are the best managers in Barca’s history, we’re going to ignore the “top 3” debate for now and focus on the top two: Enrique vs Guardiola.
It's hard being a soccer fan in the United States. You have to be content with watching your favorite teams on television while quietly scrounging up pennies for that pilgrimage to the promised land. In fact, 53,000 American 'soccer tourists' made the trek to Britain in 2014, and soccer tourism in general contributed 684 million pounds to the British economy that year.
Any stereotypes about women that you readers may harbor should have been thrown out years ago (seriously, it's 2016), but they should especially be thrown out in light of this video. On a similar note, any stereotypes you may harbor about the French — actually keep those, but forget they exist for like a minute.
A few takeaways:
"That's the most German thing I've ever seen."
This was my reaction to the following video of a Bayern Munich winter training in which Bayern attacking midfielder Thomas Muller shows everyone how few f*cks he gives about the cold.
Thomas Muller doesn't care if its cold https://t.co/1MbdOFDMbB
— 101 Great Goals (@101greatgoals) February 4, 2016
We've all seen it. A goalkeeper gets sent off and the substitute keeper comes on and immediately has to face a penalty. What a difficult task that must be, and it's exactly the situation Serie B side Bari faced in their game against Crotone. Except...they had no substitutions left and were faced with the prospect of putting one of their outfield players in goal. So up stepped striker Riccardo Maniero, who quickly threw a goalie jersey on with all the grace of a teenager who slept through their alarm. Guess how well that worked out.