Highlights

Christmas came early for Paris Saint-Germain. So what do you get the club that has money to buy everything? You gift them goals, of course. With über-expensive signings Neymar and Kylian Mbappe not starting, Strasbourg gave PSG two early goals in a 4-2 victory for the Parisians in a League Cup match on Wednesday. 

PSG really does not need anyone’s charity. The club that spent half a billion dollars on Neymar, not to mention another absurdly high fee for Mbappe, is doing just fine, thank you.

For 50 glorious minutes, Ali Khaseif was a magnificent wall, stopping anything and everything thrown his way. The world’s greatest goal scorer on the world’s most expensive team had shot after shot parried away. Then, the goalie got hurt, had to come off and Real Madrid immediately took advantage on the way to a 2-1 win over Al Jazira in the Club World Cup on Wednesday. 

With everything on the line, Aviles Hurtado channeled his inner Simone Zaza, hitting an absolutely appalling penalty kick to cost Monterrey the Liga MX Apertura championship, allowing UANL to pull off an impressive comeback to win 3-2 on aggregate on Sunday.

The Rayados took an early lead in the second leg on Sunday before two quick-fire goals helped the Tigres win the 2017 Apertura title after losing the preceding Clausura clash with Chivas in May. 

After more than 100 minutes of impressive defensive play, Indiana’s defense finally made a mistake and Stanford pounced for a 1-0 victory in the NCAA Men's College Cup final on Sunday at a chilly Talen Energy Stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania. 

The Cardinal won their third straight NCAA championship and Stanford became the first school to win the men’s and women’s NCAA College Cup in the same year after the Cardinal women won last week against UCLA. 

For all the attacking talent on display in the Manchester Derby, defensive blunders decided the outcome between Manchester United and Manchester City at Old Trafford on Sunday. And when the snow settled, City defeated United 2-1 to set the English Premier League record for consecutive wins at 14.

We here at The18 do not like goal GIFs. OK, maybe we like some of them. But mostly, we don’t like them. We, like you, have been burned too many times on Twitter, expecting to see a great replay of a goal only to get a stupid GIF merely telling us what we already knew, that soandso scored for suchandsuch team.

It was one of those matches where you wondered if the manager would get away with resting some of his big stars on the bench. It was one of those matches where you always felt the team in the lead would regret not adding a second or third. It was one of those matches where you weren’t shocked at all to see the road underdog score an equalizer to steal a point. 

A meeting between third and fifth in La Liga turned into a rout inside the first half with Real Madrid racing to a 5-0 lead on Sevilla inside the match’s opening 42 minutes. Nacho got the first, Cristiano Ronaldo added a brace on the day his fifth Ballon d’Or trophy was presented to the Bernabeu crowd, Toni Kroos struck the fourth and 19-year-old Achraf Hakimi scored his first La Liga goal for the club.