HONG KONG - With crucial goals in each of Japan's three group games, Takefusa Kubo is delivering on his potential, as the Olympic Games hosts step up their chase for a place on the podium for the first time in over half a century.

Just as he had done in group phase wins over South Africa and Mexico, the 20-year-old opened the scoring for Japan in Wednesday's 4-0 victory over France to set up a quarterfinal meeting with New Zealand on Saturday.

Takefusa Kubo Goal Vs. France 

Lionel Messi is finally coming to U.S. audiences on a weekly basis without the need for an obscure channel no one can pronounce, let alone find on TV. And now fuboTV wants to help fans watch his every match with an exclusive offer: giving subscribers the money it’ll cost to watch every LaLiga match not on fuboTV.

When Manchester United met Barcelona in the 2009 Champions League final, United manager Sir Alex Ferguson famously quipped that Barça “get you on that carousel and make you dizzy with their passing.”

This poor child knows exactly what Ferguson was talking about.

Lionel (34), Thiago (8) and Matteo (5) are all students of the rondo at Barcelona, and they demonstrated their La Masia learnings in unison during this video that Señor Messi posted on Instagram.

Come August, there are always a few clubs that capture the imagination with their audacious summer spending before inevitably collapsing by October. Usually this is Everton. 

The return of a club legend, the signing of a highly touted prodigy or a loan move for a big-name player whose career has stalled (or preferably all three in one window) are the usual fixings for getting way too hyped before the start of a new campaign.  

Back in early May, ESPN announced that it had acquired English and Spanish-language rights for LaLiga on an eight-year deal, meaning that Spain’s top division was moving from the notoriously lacking beIN SPORTS to having every match available live on the ESPN+ streaming service.

On Tuesday night at Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield Stadium, Real Madrid and Barcelona Legends — at various stages of clearly enjoying their retirement — squared off in an El Clásico that featured players like Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Deco, Roberto Carlos and Luís Figo.

The 41-year-old Ronaldinho was the star of the show as he’s continued the impressive form he showed while in a Paraguayan prison.

BUENOS AIRES — Hernán Mastrángelo, a 100-year-old grandfather in Argentina, has gone viral after it emerged that for years he had been taking handwritten notes of almost every goal scored by local hero and Barcelona star Lionel Messi.

Mastrángelo, a chocolate maker by profession, made it his hobby to keep track of each of Messi's goals, an achievement his grandson Julián has announced on social media, catching people's imagination including the striker himself.