Yes, these are all points on the scatterplot, but the regression line remains. All of the clubs you’ve listed played competitive league football the years they went to the final. Last year Ajax finished just three points clear in the Eredivisie (which, if you keep scrolling on the app you’re pushing in the comments…

It’s almost like playing 38 matches against scrubs doesn’t prepare you to go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the world.

Lukaku’s going to Inter but otherwise spot on.

Buddy, if you think the third most populous country is bad at soccer, wait til I tell you about #1 and #2...

I watched the U-20 and thought the U.S. backline was universally excellent, FWIW. A lot of good American defenders are coming up through some very good academies right now.

I would argue that it makes good refs worse, as it changes the style in which they officiate, and in the long run that leads to careless and lazy calls. It’s a godsend only for the bad refs, who now can direct the blame for their performances elsewhere and eschew even more responsibility than they currently do.

I gotta say: I’ve been avoiding WWC Deadspin articles and just coming across Rapinoe’s interviews randomly from other sources, and it’s weird how much less angry they make me. She’s actually quite charming! Deadspin’s doing a better job of taking her quotes out of context and framing them in the most obnoxious and…

Absolutely not. Just look at the way that sentence scans. Appalling.

That’s the offense lol

Makes perfect sense to me. People who move to Arizona just to hang out in the casino all day make up 12% of the state’s economy. I’m gonna send him a coin bucket and half a pack of Marlboro 100s to congratulate him on his early retirement.

It’s no big deal, really. I don’t even see why they bothered to report it.

British broadcasters are the best in the world, now if we could only get the crowd to start singing....

If he’s skipped BAPE the next place you gotta check is Supreme, SMH.

A ring is a ring. And a franchise which rewards its players for their performance in the present is one which attracts and retains high-performing players in the future.

[me, the first 113 seconds of the video]: YES! YES!!! Finally, the unthinkable idea I’ve been advocating for years has gone mainstream and is on its way to becoming reality!!!

That’s one way to talk about a ring I suppose.

The IFAB has made an emergency “temporary dispensation” announcement: during any KFPM shootouts for the remainder of the World Cup, goalkeepers will not be given a mandated yellow card if they are charged with encroachment. The fear is that, at the rate we are seeing these calls, keepers who found themselves involved…

I was rooting for Spain and also thought the penalty was garbage, and even I knew sending it to VAR wasn’t going to do anything but waste time, which IMO is about as damning an indictment of the system as you can get.

Wait...you’re saying the people who work at desk jobs have a lower expectation for returning emails??

Think about the future. You hopped on the bandwagon long ago. You’ve lived and died with this team. Now years of waiting and following from afar is about to pay off — you finally get to make the trip and see your team in person.