Opinion

Watching March Madness over the weekend has made me realize that the world of sports is incredibly cruel. Talent is often not enough to defeat an opponent, and sometimes outplaying the other team isn't even good enough to earn a victory. 

In the Premier League, the teams on the receiving end of this bad luck are usually found in the lower reaches of the league table. Generally speaking, the relegation zone contains three of the worst teams in the league, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the three clubs that deserve to be relegated. 

There are three Premier League teams still competing in the Champions League at the quarterfinal stage: Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool. Looking at the matchups, at least two of those three clubs are clear favorites to advance to the semifinals. Liverpool has the most difficult tie against the historical kings of the competition, Real Madrid.

The road to Istanbul is set!

When listening to people discuss the merits of the U.S. U-23 side on a player-by-player basis, it’s interesting to take note of this particular ilk of big-brained soccer ‘splainer as nothing more than a snake oil salesman well-versed in misleading radar plots.

What I can tell you for sure is that they don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of 19-year-old João "Johnny" Lucas de Souza Cardoso, they don’t spend much time watching Internacional in the Brasileiro and their sage words of advice for Jason Kreis are worth even less than their 8K Twitter followers.

A recent Netflix documentary about the legendary Brazilian soccer player Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé, tells a compelling story of the athlete’s rise to fame from 1950 to 1974. The 99-minute documentary, which includes interviews with the 80-year-old Pelé, shows Pelé’s spectacular life against the backdrop of Brazil’s politics. But the film fails to address deeper questions of race and class.

Sometimes I wish that, through some glaring administrative error, I had been accidentally registered for the Ajax youth academy, even if it was just for one day. Then, in semi-good conscience, I could exploit that fact to have my own Wikipedia page, Transfermarkt profile and agent, allowing me to bounce around the world on one-year contracts — obviously being found out as total trash time after time — living my best life. 

A couple months before USMNT manager Jurgen Klinsmann announced his final 23-man roster for the 2014 World Cup, I was at a wedding in California, at the bar with a member of the LA Galaxy technical staff. The conversation turned to Landon Donovan, who’d reestablished himself in the national team after being dropped at the start of the Hex.