Every league has that one team that isn't really all that good but just seems to hang around for far longer than they should. They don't spend much, they don't play entertaining football, and they never really win any big games. Yet when the season ends, they are always mid-table.

In the 2010s, that team in England was Wigan Athletic, as Roberto Martínez's brand of "Guerilla Soccer" kept an underfunded Latics side in the Premier League for eight years.

FC Cologne coach Steffen Baumgart is one of the more demonstrative managers in the Bundesliga. Forced to watch Cologne’s big game against Freiburg from home while self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19, Baumgart brought his antics from the sidelines to his own living room on Saturday. Fortunately, he had a very good doggo to keep him calm.

Cologne beat Freiburg 1-0 on Saturday to move up to sixth place, within one point of Freiburg for Europa League contention and two points back of fourth-place Union Berlin, currently clutching to the final Champions League berth.

Nobody's cheering for the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The backers of Newcastle United are the world's richest owners — their wealth, with regards to the global football market, is limitless. 

There was a bizarre Ricardo Pepi quote making the rounds in Germany this week. Thankfully, the fine folks at FC Augsburg were kind enough to dispel it as fake. But we still have so, so many questions.

Watching Ricardo Pepi make his first Augsburg start on Sunday against Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga, I realized that either Pepi's performance was exactly the same as the debuts of Clint Dempsey with Fulham, Christian Pulisic with Borussia Dortmund and Tyler Adams with Leipzig or that I have a tendency to see exactly what I want to see when hugely talented Americans finally grace the field in Europe.

Ricardo Pepi’s transfer to Augsburg in the winter transfer window means 44 percent of teams in the Bundesliga have an American in the ranks. How many Americans play in the Bundesliga those who don’t feel like doing math might ask?

Here’s the list of eight American players expected to get minutes in Germany’s top flight in 2022.