Opinion

FC Barcelona released new home kits for the 2021-2022 La Liga season and they're chaotically terrible. The new shirts appear as if the creators never agreed on a set design and continued the fight throughout the process.

With Barcelona being in severe debt, we should have assumed the new kits would be this bad. They feature verticle traditional blaugrana stripes and a new design inspired by the team crest. With tons of stripes and lots of colors, these kits fail to impress.

The build-up to every major international tournament is the same: who has the best striker? Or, this is why x midfielder is going to dominate or why this winger is the key to this country getting out of its group. 

But no one ever talks about the goalkeepers. In such a short tournament, where three matches decide a team's fate, the importance of the goalkeeper becomes magnified. 

So let's give the goalkeepers the spotlight for a little bit, because often they're the ones that end up deciding the tournament.

LCD Soundsystem’s song “tonite” begins with a lyric that could be applicable to every UEFA European Championship anthem ever written. “Everybody’s singing the same song,” James Murphy laments. “It goes ‘tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight.’ I never realized these artists thought so much about dying.”

The U.S. men's national team defeated Mexico in a highly contested match on Sunday to win the CONCACAF Nations League, marking the country’s first competitive victory over its rivals since September 10th, 2013.

The fruitless streak continued so long that I personally graduated middle school, high school and was just one year away from graduating college before the U.S. was victorious again. Christian Pulisic, the American captain who scored the go-ahead goal, was just 14 years old when the U.S. last claimed victory. 

Hartford Athletic put the beatdown on New York Red Bulls II in USL Championship play on Saturday night, winning 7-0 despite only holding a 1-0 advantage up until first half stoppage time.

The pick of the bunch was scored by 22-year-old American midfielder Conor McGlynn, who lobbed Anthony Marcucci from deep inside his own half to put Hartford up 5-0 in the 59th minute.

It’s rare that goals from the half-way line actually occur inside the goalscorer’s own half, and it’s even more wild that it was a first-time effort from McGlynn after Hartford had secured possession.

Imagine you get to ask the first American male to win the UEFA Champions League one singular question. What would you ask? Christian Pulisic is sitting there on the other end of the Zoom call staring into your soul awaiting your question. The pressure is on.

This was the situation I found myself in on Wednesday. Concacaf was kind enough to give me — an aspiring 22-year-old sports media graduate who just finished college last month — media accreditation to attend Nations League press conferences and the semifinal matches.

San Marino gets plenty of attention and scrutiny for being the worst national team in the world according to the FIFA men’s world rankings. I even wrote about San Marino the other day after the team scored its first goal in over a year.