Things are getting awfully serious now: the kits are revealed, the roster is close to locked and Sports Illustrated has dropped its Women's World Cup preview issue with Alex Morgan, Rose Lavelle, Sophia Smith and Trinity Rodman gracing the cover.
Pelé is now a word to describe 'someone out of the ordinary' as the three-time World Cup winner's name was included as a new adjective in the Portuguese edition of the Michaelis dictionary.
Earlier this month, the Pelé Foundation and Sportv launched the "Pelé in the dictionary" campaign to pay tribute and recognize his legacy in other fields besides sport.
Having reached more than 100,000 signatures, the name of the former player, who died in December, is now an entry in the dictionary.
The lives of most professional footballers — outside of vacation — are never quite as exciting as we'd like to believe. Their schedules are a ceaseless clockwork of training, recovery, matches and rest, so they spend the majority of their days on the couch in the living room recuperating.
This is doubly so when footballers are injured and deprived of their one meaningful outlet, so they become hellbent on returning to action by spending every waking hour either in the physio room or planted in front of the television.
While Megan Rapinoe continues her fight for equal pay for the USWNT, she’s also been hard at work on side hustles to capitalize on her own self-earned fame outside of soccer. From hosting the ESPYs to interviewing presidential candidates, the former Best FIFA Women’s Player has kept busy during the pandemic, despite not having taken the field since March.
It’s storybook time with East Bengal FC.
Supporters for East Bengal, which competes in India’s I-League, unveiled a unique, record-setting tifo before its home match with Real Kashmir on Wednesday at the Kalyani Stadium. The tifo featured a book of sorts, with six pages venerating the club’s accomplishments.
Founded 99 years ago, East Bengal has no shortage of history. The East Bengal tifo on Wednesday leaned into that.
Batman and Spider-Man have Neymar Jr.’s back.
Well, they are his back.
Neymar Jr. highlighted his love for comic books this week with two new large tattoos on his upper back. On his right shoulder is Batman, the Caped Crusader. On his left, the amazing Spider-Man.
If there was ever any doubt that Neymar Jr. is a comic-book nerd, we present to you the Brazilian star’s new back:
Back in 2017, The Football Crest Index was first published — a glorious coffee table book that served to document and preserve the history behind the crests of all 49 clubs to have appeared in the English Premier League. The beautiful aesthetic of the publication was achieved by employing 49 different designers, each of whom supported the club they worked on to produce the artwork which accompanied the chronicle.
Everyone wants to be a superhero. For Neymar Jr., his dream became a reality — but it wasn’t simple.
Neymar Jr. transformed into a comic book superhero in September with the launch of Neymar Jr. Comics, a collaboration with the comics studio Fan The Flame. Now, Neymar Jr. Comics is showing us how its artists, writers and producers created “Inked,” the first series of Neymar Jr.’s comic series.
Cristiano Ronaldo is a man of the world. A renaissance man. A gentleman and a scholar. Such a man would be welcome in any book club, including ours. That's why we would like to extend a formal invitation for Cristiano Ronaldo to join our book club here at The18.
Cristiano, please join our book club. We are very interesting folks and are sure you would enjoy yourself. You seem like you'd be a good fit. Think it over.
Soccer’s standing as the world’s game has opened it to a wealth of different viewpoints and cultural backgrounds, and the literature of the sport truly reflects this diversity. Whether the focus is on the game’s most interesting characters, the tactics, the supporters or the memorable events, soccer is a topic that has yielded some of the finest writing of any sport. Here is a selection of 18 of the best books concerning the beautiful game.