As the 2020 American NFL season drew to a close with Tom Brady winning his record seventh Super Bowl, it was interesting to note another sporting first: the three women involved in the game — two coaches and one official.
With eight women currently coaching in the NFL, there’s still a long way to go when it comes to parity, but it does seem that women are finally breaking into elite men’s sports coaching in the U.S.
I was excited. For the first time ever, ABC was going to broadcast a Bundesliga match, and not even the absence of Gio Reyna could dampen the anticipation for the Bayern Munich-Borussia Dortmund rivalry. Well, maybe an outdoors show could.
As I turned my TV to ABC on Saturday morning, instead of my local Denver7 ABC network showing Der Klassiker, I was subjected to “Ocean Treks With Jeff Corwin.”
It’s rare that a Premier League game has gone by this season where the announcers, players, fans or even the referees themselves haven’t complained about an offside call. With VAR, offside calls are calculated with more precision than ever before, but lovers of the beautiful game still aren’t happy with the offside rule.
I’ve got a solution: get rid of the whole offside rule altogether.
Wait, wait, hear me out.
No sport does rivalries quite like soccer. In terms of proximity, history, passion and the genuine animosity these conditions create, the biggest derbies and grudge matches in world soccer make the Green Bay Packers vs. Chicago Bears look more like the World Stone Skimming Championship.
We live in a golden age of soccer documentaries. From the “Diego Maradona” documentary in 2019 to Amazon’s All or Nothing series and Netflix’s “Sunderland ‘Til I Die,” soccer fans have never had so many great inside looks at the players and clubs we’ve watched on the pitch for all our lives.
Every time it’s derby week in Europe, from Manchester to Madrid to Milan, American soccer fans listen to British commentators and ask themselves how to pronounce derby. Being one of the few American soccer websites that actively refuses to use British English, we at The18 decided it was time to once again explain basic soccer terms in American English.
Manchester United’s website has posted a few stories over the last month about players being fined. The stories have been repeated by just about ever soccer-related media outlet, and all of them leave out one key factor. We think we speak for all fans when we say we want to see some raw data on how much these Man United fines are actually costing the players.
The USWNT just completed an expected-but-still-impressive showing at the 2021 SheBelieves Cup, winning all three matches to claim the tournament title for a fourth time in six years. While the exhibition is a good barometer of some of the world’s top national teams, it’s also one of the best chances to evaluate talent ahead of a big summer competition. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics postponed to 2021, the question is: Who will make the USWNT Olympic roster this summer?
German soccer and the Bundesliga are ramping up their campaigns off the field in 2021. A week after announcing the “You Can Count On Us” movement to support future gay players, the league is now pushing to tackle the hatred players face online. The new Bundesliga Unite Against Hate message is simple: don’t be a dick online.