National Teams

The FIFA Disciplinary Committee has handed Lionel Messi a suspension of four games for his altercation with an assistant referee following Argentina’s 1-0 victory over Chile on Thursday. The ban goes into effect immediately, ruling Messi out of Argentina’s match against Bolivia in La Paz later today.

If everything continues the way it is, the 2018 World Cup will be a 48-team tournament instead of the 32-team format we have now.

Now, how exactly will this expanded world cup tournament work?

Obviously the addition of all of these teams will have to result in reformatting the World Cup process, so the group stage will have 16 groups of three teams each, with the top team moving on from each group. From there on out, the knockout stage will be the same.

The Icelandic baby boom is here, y'all. Thanks, we presume, to the effectiveness of the long throw and the inadequacy of the England National Team, a hospital in Iceland reportedly gave out a record number of epidurals to pregnant women during the weekend of March 25 and 26.

This weekend marked nine months after Iceland's historic victory over the Three Lions, and now we know how the people of Iceland celebrated.

I bet there were strategically-timed viking claps.

Back on October 13, 2013, Panama were on the verge of their first-ever World Cup finals. Needing Costa Rica to defeat Mexico in San Jose was the first part of the equation, but the more daunting task was the one facing them — they’d have to defeat the United States in Panama City.

With the United States having already qualified as Hexagonal winners, a largely second-string American team gave Panama the conviction that history could be made on the day. Panama took an early lead through Gabriel Torres, only to be pegged back by American defender Michael Orozco.

The two most successful international matches in Andorra's recent history were a 0-0 draw with Finland in 2005 and a 0-0 draw with the Faroe Islands Saturday. In between, they lost 58 games in a row.

Andorra's population is roughly 80,000, and the stadium in which the Faroe Islands match was played, the Esatdi Nacional, holds just over 3,000.

Here are some highlights from the Faroe Islands match. I don't know why I'm showing them to you, or why you would want to watch them, but here they are.

There are a few positions which you can get away with playing a 17-year-old in a high-level soccer game: winger, for instance, or even fullback. Center back, however, is a different story. Center back relies almost entirely on guile and experience. This is why players tend to move back there as they age and cannot run like a midfielder anymore.

Cristiano Ronaldo hit his 69th and 70th international goals for Portugal on Saturday to join an elite club of players to have reached such a milestone. At 32, you wouldn’t put it past Ronaldo to some day eclipse Ferenc Puskas’ European record total of 84 international goals.

Both of his goals were extremely well taken against Hungary, but it was the historic 70th that both celebrated his unique skill and outlined his vast contribution to the sport of football. 

Russia 2018 is coming closer after each passing day, and there are a few large countries who absolutely cannot afford to slip if they hope to qualify.

Portugal

The decisive victory against Hungary notwithstanding, Portugal haven't been able to show the form that won them Euro 2016.

The Netherlands

Russia played the Ivory Coast in a friendly Friday, but there was nothing friendly about what Wilfried Zaha did to the 2018 World Cup hosts.

Oh my, @wilfriedzaha.  pic.twitter.com/XRENbfxnv0

— Planet Fútbol (@si_soccer) March 24, 2017