Opinion

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. 

Serie A returned after a short winter break and everything seemed to go according to plan. Napoli won. Juventus won. Benevento lost. Pretty much par for the course.

Abdoulaye Doucouré is one cheeky fella. The Watford midfielder took advantage of some poor refereeing and some poor decision-making from the English FA to help earn his team a point with a 2-2 draw. You see, the 90th-minute Doucoure goal vs Southampton was scored with the Frenchman’s hand. 

Yes, it’s still illegal to use your hands if you’re not the goalie. And no, England hasn’t joined the rest of the civilized world by adopting VAR. So yeah, the goal stood, and Southampton is rightly livid. 

On the second day of 2018, West Brom’s Jake Livermore rushed into the stands to confront a West Ham fan during an English Premier League match. On Wednesday, the English FA decided not to punish the midfielder. This stunning lack of a Jake Livermore punishment is wholly unacceptable.

The NASL, which once boasted such stars as Pelé and, well, Pelé should be enough for you to keep reading this sentence, cannot seem to sort itself out. The league is a mess right now and not even its move to the international calendar should convince you otherwise — in fact, the move is merely propaganda to make you think everything is just fine.

The NASL announced Monday it would move to an August-to-June calendar, one employed by most of Europe and many of the top leagues around the world. 

The institution that is Arsene Wenger was handed a three-match touchline ban and a $54,250 fine for a confrontation with referee Mike Dean after Arsenal’s 1-1 draw with West Brom on Sunday. The Wenger ban is nothing new for the Frenchman, who served a four-match touchline ban for a similar behavior last year. And Wenger didn’t even deny these accusations, fully admitting to what he said and standing by his criticism. 

Pep Guardiola has it all backwards when it comes to the festive schedule. In a postmatch interview after his side beat Watford 3-1, Manchester City’s manager discussed the busy fixture list and how the English FA doesn’t care about its players. That’s not what we’re taking issue with; we totally agree with that. What we think Guardiola, perhaps the best coach of this generation, is wrong about is why people watch football.

“We’re going to kill them,” Guardiola said of playing two matches in three days. “Here in England they don’t protect their players.”

The 2017 MLS Cup Final will be rightly remembered as the crowning achievement on a historic, record-setting season for Toronto FC, but for the second year running, Seattle Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei came agonizingly close to writing the script himself — almost literally single-handedly.