Monthly Archives: July 2008

All the scores from Thursday’s UEFA Cup first-round qualifying action. You will want to know, for example, that it was a bad night for Marsaxlokk of Malta as they crashed 4-0 to Croatian side Slaven Koprinica.

James Walker-Roberts takes a look at the four groups of 16 teams and tips the first round winners. Perfidiously, he doesn’t back the U.S. to advance.

Nike has spotted a new market — Brazil’s Olympic team will play Vietnam on its way to Beijing.

With little or no action on European soccer fields right now, and with transfer talk at unprecedented levels of exhaustion, a short piece in the London-based Daily Telegraph illustrates another favored method of British journalists for filling space on a slow news day. Take any given incident from the previous 24-hour news cycle, and second-guess […]

As D.C. United and other MLS teams seek public money to help finance new stadium ventures, Mark Yost looks at the real figures behind a sports venue financed largely by the taxpayer’s cash. While there’s no denying that the neighborhood around the Washington Nationals’ new baseball stadium in southeast D.C. has undergone a renaissance in […]

There was an announced crowd for Thursday’s MLS game between the Columbus Crew and the Kansas City Wizards of 16,117. But how many people were actually there? Shawn Mitchell examines the discrepancy between the Crew’s announced crowds, the number of people actually showing up for the games (that is, tickets scanned on the night), and […]

Abby Wambach’s broken leg is a “huge blow” to the chances of the U.S. women’s Olympic team winning gold in Beijing, writes Andrea Canales, especially for a roster already robbed of experienced players such as defender Cat Whitehill and midfielder Leslie Osborne. But while many of the players that Coach Pia Sundhage takes to the […]

Hamburg striker Preston Zimmerman, who was promoted to Hamburg’s first-team roster at Christmas but didn’t appear in the Bundesliga in the second half of the season, is on a week’s tryout with Belgian first division club Westerlo.

D.C.’s injury worries increase as its Argentines face possible hernia operations.

Results and reports from the remaining first leg games of the UEFA Champions League opening qualifying round. Look away if you’re a fan of the Faeroe Islands’ champion, NSI Runavik.

The prestigious Premier League opponents of our Major League Soccer superstars are traveling to the United States for the All-Star game in appropriate style — by economy class. Or, as Britain’s favorite tabloid phrases it: “West Ham stars are fuming at their tour from hell after a travel firm went bust.” According to the (notoriously […]

Emerson, a Brazil-born Qatar international, has just been banned by FIFA after it turned out that he represented Brazil at the 1999 South American U-20 tournament. Despite all the confusion surrounding the player’s passport and his real identity, Gavin Hamilton writes that “the Qatar FA made a huge mistake, punishable in FIFA statutes by a […]

Many of D.C. United’s players declared themselves “disappointed” after Tuesday’s SuperLiga defeat at home to Atlante. However, writes Pat Walsh, “it was the kind of disappointment one feels walking up to a bus stop, seeing the bus pull away, and thinking, Oh, well, there will be another along in a few minutes.” That other bus […]