National Teams

The UEFA Nations League is objectively a cool idea — turn meaningless friendlies into interesting competitions, replace boring lopsided matches with enticingly even matchups, create another tournament for players and fans to enjoy. But Wednesday’s draw didn’t exactly get the pulses racing for next fall’s Nations League schedule outside of a handful of UEFA’s 55 countries.

League A, Group 1 is awesome: Germany, France and the Netherlands. Group A4 is pretty good too: Spain, England and Croatia. But the other 14 groups fail to really move the needle. 

There are two rules for hiring someone for a position as a public figure that everyone should follow in 2018. Rule No. 1: make sure that person is qualified for the position. Rule No. 2: read their dang tweets.

The England FA evidently did not follow either of these rules before they announced Phil Neville as the new manager of the England Women's National Team.

When outgoing U.S.

On Sunday night, sporting power couple Zach and Julie Ertz were both in action — Zach with the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship game and Julie with the USWNT in a friendly against Denmark. With the NFL game kicking off at 6:40 p.m. ET and the women’s match beginning at 7:30, the two went about their business without knowing what was transpiring across the country.

Mexico’s pre-World Cup exhibitions will include at least three matches in the country El Tri helped keep out of the World Cup, highlighted by the Mexico vs Iceland friendly in Santa Clara, California, in March. Coach Juan Carlos Osorio will test his team against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland and Croatia this spring, with all three to be played in the United States.

Bosnia and Herzegovina will play Mexico on Jan. 31, three days after playing the United States. The USA match is in Carson, California, while the Mexico match will be in San Antonio.

The fallout to the Jonathan Gonzalez switch from the U.S. to Mexico has been immense. We’ve covered it here and here. Simply put: The U.S. appears to be failing in its pursuit of identifying and recruiting Mexican-Americans to compete for the national team. But the possibility of a Timothy Tillman switch is proof U.S.

The fallout from Jonathan Gonzalez’s switch from the United States national team to Mexico has been expectedly fierce, especially so when coupled with the current state of U.S. Soccer. Here was a California native who’d progressed through the U.S. youth system, including run-outs at the U-17, U-18 and U-20 levels, who joined Mexican club side C.F. Monterrey in 2014 “bleeding red, white and blue.”

USMNT and Borussia Dortmund star Christian Pulisic recently sat down for an exclusive interview with ESPN FC from Dortmund’s winter training camp in southern Spain, taking time to answer questions from Raphael Honigstein ranging from the USA’s World Cup failure to how he deals with the burden of expectation as a 19-year-o

Less than a year after being hired by the Canadian Soccer Association, Ecuadorian manager Octavio Zambrano has been replaced by the hugely successful coach of the Canadian women’s team, 42-year-old Englishman John Herdman. Former Herdman assistant Kenneth Heiner-Møller will now take charge of the side ranked fifth in the world with the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup just 17 months away.

Aged 31, Mexico international Andres Guardado recently told FIFA.com that he now prides himself more on bringing “balance to the team” rather than being the “box-to-box player” of old, so the Real Betis midfielder is probably less than pleased with the club’s defensive record this season — they’ve allowed 34 goals in 18 matches, third-worst in La Liga.