Opinion

Les Herbiers, a club whose wage bill is almost certainly less than what Neymar spends annually producing bad music videos, will take the field against PSG on Tuesday in the Coupe de France final.

Some other things you should know about Les Herbiers: they play in the French third division, the Championnat National, which is the highest they've risen in their 99-year history. They sit 13th in the table as of this writing. They are not yet safe from relegation to the fourth division. They did not play against a first-division side on their way to the final.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really believe Alexi Lalas when he appeared on my television set and told me that Fox was "the home for all things El Tri this summer." My sneaking suspicion was confirmed a couple weeks ago when it was announced that the Fox commentating team of Jorge Perez-Navarro and Mariano Trujillo, the guys who’ll almost certainly be calling the Mexico games, wouldn’t even be sent to Russia. They’ll be calling games from a darkened room in Los Angeles. 

Yes, Cristiano Ronaldo’s bicycle kick against Juventus was very nice. And of course, that title-clinching hat-trick that Lionel Messi registered against Deportivo was very nice as well. But does that mean, with regards to Sunday’s El Clasico, that we should only focus on the 10-time Ballon d’Or winners?

Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard was appointed as the new boss at Scottish Premiership side Rangers on Friday. It represents Gerrard’s first taste of life as a manager for a club. Before he made the jump to the big boy leagues, Stevie G was an academy coach at Liverpool, where he guided their under-19 side to a quarterfinal place in the UEFA Youth League this season. 

Liverpool booked their ticket to the 2018 Champions League Final against Real Madrid on Wednesday with a 7-6 aggregate win over Roma. Now that the semifinals are over, all the attention now shifts to the final in Kiev, and rightly so. But have Liverpool already won the match before it’s even started? Here’s why that might be the case.

If you’re a sucker for tradition in soccer, then this concept will sound quite controversial to you. But as is the case in a number of other leagues across the globe, they have playoffs to decide who is crowned the champion of their respective leagues.

Yes, the vast majority of the main leagues in Europe do not follow this format. A team that manages to outlast everyone over the course of the season deserves to be the king of the league, right?

The Mexico vs Germany World Cup game will no doubt attract a great deal of attention worldwide. The defending world champions will make their debut against El Tri, and both teams will do everything in their power to make a statement showing that they mean business.