The 2018-19 UEFA Champions League technical report was released today, and it’s got 51 pages of highly entertaining and valuable information that analyzes specific tactical and technical trends at the very top of the world’s game. The comprehensive overview of last season’s competition includes some fascinating insights.
Do you ever look at Wikipedia pages to see what age people accomplished things and think, “Hey, Charles Bukowski didn’t publish his first novel until 50, I’ve got plenty of time,” but then you see that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the age of 18 and you say, “It’s over, bury me out back.”
Is that a thing you do?
After a year-and-a-half together at the Camp Nou, it’s likely that Ousmane Dembélé and Philippe Coutinho have ended their time together as teammates on the pitch.
Good vertical jumps are touch and go in soccer — some footballers have it, some don’t. It’s not always a necessary skill when playing the game, but it sure is nice to have. However, there's one player who has it in abundance: Cristiano Ronaldo. The man has BOUNCE.
In fact, his 30-inch vertical might be even higher now since the stat was officially recorded in 2014, because we all know how much he loves to train. Below, we’ll look at his vertical compared to a few other athletes, past and present, from various sports.
• Cristiano Ronaldo: 30 inches
The 2019 MLS All-Star Game averaged only 182,000 viewers for its English-language coverage on FS1, the smallest audience for the game on any network over the last decade and the smallest English-language TV audience in the 24-year history of the event. That number is down 60% from 2018 (452K on ESPN) and 57% from 2017 (420K on FS1).
Atlético Madrid won the match 3-0 in front of a sell-out crowd of 25,527 at Exploria Stadium.
Atlanta United set all sorts of Major League Soccer attendance records in its second year in the league, from highest average attendance to biggest MLS Cup crowd. It was impressive to see more fans at the 2018 MLS Cup final in December than the Super Bowl at the same stadium two months later. But how does Atlanta stack up to the highest attended soccer matches in U.S. history?
Everyone knows that Christian Pulisic isn’t going to immediately step into Eden Hazard’s shoes at Chelsea and act as a carbon copy of the Belgian. Hazard, of course, is eight years older than Pulisic and currently much more decisive in the final third: Hazard hit 16 Premier League goals last campaign, the American tied his career best by reaching four in the Bundesliga.
On June 7, the eighth edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicked off in Paris, France. The USWNT entered the tournament as the defending champion and the world’s No. 1 ranked side, and the team can still rely on Carli Lloyd, who finished joint-top scorer in 2015 with six goals. However, when it comes to the most Women’s World Cup goals of all time, the 36-year-old remains just outside the top 10 with eight total goals.
As the Premier League season wound down, polls such as this indicated that neutrals preferred to see Liverpool win the title. Some pundits claimed that this tendency was owing to sympathy that Liverpool hadn't won the title in 29 years, or perhaps to an affinity for Liverpool’s playing style or their affable manager Jurgen Klopp.
There is another explanation that has received no attention whatsoever, namely that spectators judge Liverpool’s record to actually be superior to Manchester City’s.
It's been about a year since Zlatan Ibrahimovic debuted in MLS with two dramatic goals to help the LA Galaxy top new cross-town rivals LAFC. Despite the Galaxy's horrid defense, Zlatan kept the team in the playoff race for much of the campaign. He ended the season with 22 goals and 10 assists in just 27 matches. That was with avoiding turf and recovering from the injury he arrived in the U.S. with.