Last Christmas, two young sisters and Borussia Dortmund fans received jerseys with the names of Ousmane Dembélé and Emre Mor on the back. A solid present if there ever was one. However, much to the dismay of Olivia (8), Emily (11) and Dortmund supporters everywhere, both of these exciting players left the club this summer with Dembélé making a move to Barcelona and Mor finding a new home at Celta Vigo.
There was no soccer this week at BBVA Compass Stadium, home to the Dynamo of MLS and Dash of NWSL. There were more important things to worry about in the United State’s fourth-largest city, inundated with up to four feet of water from Hurricane Harvey.
Instead of hosting Sporting KC on Saturday and the North Carolina Courage on Sunday, BBVA became a collection site for Harvey relief donations, an orange beacon to the ravaged city.
Here’s your football fact of the day: the England Blind team is a force to be reckoned with. The IBSA Blind Football European Championships kicked off last week in Berlin and the English side has made it known that they are the team to beat after 6-0 and 7-0 whoopings of Romania and France, respectively.
They’re just as much about quality as they are about quantity as Daniel English proved, however. Against Les Blues on Monday, the England player went on this brilliant solo run to score in just the first minute of the game.
Barcelona hosted Chapecoense at Camp Nou in the Joan Gamper Cup in a celebration of the Brazilian club, which was devastated by plane crash in November that killed 71 of the 77 passengers, including most of the squad and staff. An emotional first kick from survivors Jakson Follmann and Neto had some holding back tears but when the match began, there was no holding back Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and the Catalans in a 5-0 victory for Barcelona on Monday.
July 8th marks a tragic date that Ajax will not soon forget. It was on this day that 20-year-old Abdelhak “Appie” Nouri collapsed during a friendly against Werder Bremen due to cardiac arrhythmia. Tragically, the young footballer suffered severe and permanent brain damage as a result. As of July 25th, Appie is no longer in an induced coma and is able to breathe on his own again.
On the pitch, Appie was named the 2016-17 Eerste Player of the Year as a member of Jong Ajax (the second team), and he was expected to make an impact this year in the Eredivisie with the first team.
The greatest footballer you’ve never heard of was an absolute beast on the pitch, scoring more than 900 goals in the first half of the 20th century. The towering chain-smoker once broke a man’s arm with a penalty kick and was unafraid of defying social norms.
Lily Parr of is a legend of the game forgotten to time and ignored by many after England banned women’s football in 1921.