SSN is a digest of the day's soccer/football/futbol articles with a focus on the top European leagues and the United States National Team. Below, you’ll find links to articles and video, as well as additional features and commentary. We locate the top news of the day so you can stay updated with ease.
As the Gold Cup quarterfinals begin Saturday, here are five notes for the rest of the tournament, including Soccer Power Index predictions.
With the almost incessant scandals that emerge from the world of football it's refreshing to find that some players can behave themselves. Take Didier Drogba for instance - the Chelsea star married his long-term partner this weekend in a private ceremony minus the opulence commonly associated with the world of millionaire footballers.
For years, Palestinian soccer was disorganized, underfunded and hindered so much by Israeli travel restrictions that games were often forfeited because players couldn’t arrive for kickoff. But the sport is growing, with new stadiums rising across the West Bank, the local soccer federation hosting international competitions, and the Palestinians set to host their first-ever World Cup qualifying match next month.
On July 3 the Palestinian team will welcome Afghanistan in an early-round World Cup qualifier.
Players say boosting the game is about more than sports: It’s a mission to build an independent nation.
Once the tipping point is reached departures become inevitable and the slide becomes harder to arrest than ever; what starts as an emergency solution risks becoming a permanent situation, the enshrinement of inequality and the inability to compete. Handled well, the effects can be palliated but, barring a sudden shift, the trend is unavoidable. Spanish soccer has reached that tipping point.
While Mexico has drawn an average of 62,708 fans to its games, the U.S. has only managed 25,350 per match. El Tri has a slight advantage because it played all three of its games at larger football stadiums while the U.S. played one at a Major League Soccer stadium. But the numbers wouldn’t have increased much for the Americans no matter where they played.
Eating horse meat, buying Celine Dion albums, considering Sharon Stone to be a great actress: they do things differently in France and sometimes not just to be contrary. Take the sponsorship of sport, for example.Off The Ball never rests in its mission to scratch around the underbelly of professional football to find the most bizarre, humorous and inexplicable stories.
This week, the German U20 women pose for Playboy ahead of the World Cup, Lionel Messi escapes a 'sex and alcohol' party in Argentina, 'partying' Ruud Gullit given the boot in Russia, Chile strip team-mate Roberto Cereceda naked in front of the watching media and Ronaldinho shows he's still got it with an amazing bit of skill.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Almost a year on, Manchester United today appeared to admit that some things may be too good to be true. In a curt, innocuous statement on their official website, the Premier League champions confirmed that Bebe, the Portuguese winger Sir Alex Ferguson signed for £7.4 million from Vitoria Guimaraes last summer, would spend the coming campaign on loan at the Turkish side Besiktas. There was nothing surprising about the statement, nothing to distinguish it from the raft of similar declarations that will be made this summer. There was a brief description – perhaps a defence – of his year at Old Trafford. “Now his development will continue at Beskitas,” it read. Business as usual. There has never been anything usual, though, about Bebe’s story.
To ascribe his signing to a brief moment of folly from Ferguson, usually so calculated, is anathema, and it would be foolish to subscribe to the conspiracy theories which cast the deal in a rather darker light. But there is no question that, from the moment last August that Bebe completed his journey from homeless shelter in the dusty, downtrodden outskirts of Lisbon to Old Trafford, to a £12,000-a-week salary to the minute he agreed to join Besiktas – who can make the deal permanent for £2 million – this has been one of the most curious transfers of recent years.
The success of this season's final between Barcelona and Manchester United, combined with the fact it is the year of the Football Association's 150th anniversary, have persuaded Uefa to consider returning to the venue in London.
If so it will be the first time a stadium has hosted the European Cup final twice in three years – though Wembley previously hosted the final twice in four, in 1968 and 1971.
Longtime captain Michael Ballack's Germany career is over, the German football federation said Thursday, ending months of speculation about his future. The 34-year-old midfielder has 98 caps but has not played for Germany in more than a year and missed seven months with an ankle injury, including last year's World Cup in South Africa, where Germany finished third.
Ballack, who had 42 goals in a Germany career that began in April 1999, never won a major title with the national team. He was Germany's captain in 55 games.
There was no immediate reaction from the former Chelsea midfielder, and no quotes from the player in the federation's statement.
In spite of what may have transpired over the past century or so, Italians do not love authority figures. We pay them some sort of superficial respect, especially if they pretend to have all the solutions, but we then turn around and think up every possible way of circumventing the rules they set and mock the very authority we fake our loyalty to.
It's been another momentous year for African footballers, with players from the continent involved in title-winning sides in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. Others have won a domestic cup, although the biggest trophy on offer ended up in the hands of Mali's Seydou Keita after his Barcelona side destroyed Manchester United at Wembley on Saturday.
Jozy Altidore scored in the ninth minute off an assist from Michael Bradley, and the U.S. hung on to beat Guadeloupe 1-0 on Tuesday night and reach the tournament quarterfinals after a loss earlier in the group stage to Panama.
Grant Wahl: Head-Shaking Win
Grant Wahl: Post-Game Thoughts
Martin Rogers: Bradley could be on shaky ground
"The best supported club in Italy, and one of the most followed in the world, must return to the top sooner rather than later in order to retain its status as the most revered institution in Calcio. The Agnelli family are clearly in a position to be able to do something about the Old Lady’s fall from grace, but if they are unwilling to give the Bianconeri the attention they deserve, then it is time for them to sell to somebody who is."
