Wales captain Gareth Bale said he is on a "good path" towards full fitness ahead of the World Cup in Qatar, despite not completing a full game since joining Los Angeles FC in June.

Bale signed for the Major League Soccer club after leaving Real Madrid, where he struggled with injury in his last few seasons. He has made only two starts in his 11 appearances for LAFC, scoring twice.

It's almost impossible to believe, but we're currently just 671 days from the start of soccer at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, and the IOC is revealing key dates for how to get tickets for Paris Olympics.

It's going to be a massive competition for U.S. Soccer as the USWNT looks to return to the top of the podium after earning bronze in Tokyo, while the USMNT U-23s are back at the Olympics for the first time since 2008.

The USMNT begins its two-game September window Friday morning with a friendly against fellow World Cup participant Japan at Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf, Germany. 

It'll be a fascinating matchup with the Samurai Blue fielding the likes of Schalke's Maya Yoshida, Monaco's Takumi Minamino, Arsenal's Takehiro Tomiyasu and Real Sociedad's Takefusa Kubo, while the U.S. is looking for some reassurances from its banner carriers (the goalkeeper position, Christian Pulisic). 

This week serves as the final international break before clubs must release players to their national teams just one week before the World Cup begins, so the latest squad selections should be huge indicators of the final 26-man rosters for the competing nations.

However, a look at the current teams indicates that this won't be a traditional World Cup of blockbuster snubs, but rather an exploration of player pools in an attritional battle against lingering muscle strains.

The lives of most professional footballers — outside of vacation — are never quite as exciting as we'd like to believe. Their schedules are a ceaseless clockwork of training, recovery, matches and rest, so they spend the majority of their days on the couch in the living room recuperating.

This is doubly so when footballers are injured and deprived of their one meaningful outlet, so they become hellbent on returning to action by spending every waking hour either in the physio room or planted in front of the television.

Seven match weeks into the Bundesliga season, Union Berlin is top of the table — two points clear of Borussia Dortmund and five of Bayern Munich — with a 26-year-old American leading the charge.

On Sunday, he scored again — his third (to go with two assists) in six appearances — in Union's 2-0 victory over Wolfsburg. This one was a perfectly timed near post run to get in front of his marker and glance a header inside the opposite post. 

This, my friends, is good forward play.