History will show that Tottenham defender Toby Alderweireld’s 90th minute own goal was responsible for gifting Liverpool a 2-1 win during a tight race for their first league title since 1989-90. History can be a strange and misleading thing. In this case what Alderweireld is responsible for is standing there baffled…

You can not read the book on goalkeeping because the book does not exist, and that is for the better. A book might be helpful for outlining fundamentals and common techniques, but it might also be an anchor drowning effectiveness in a pool of orthodoxy, a dagger sacrificing creative problem-solving on the altar of…

Zack Steffen, an American soccer player who currently plies his trade on U.S. soil, is set to join the English Premier League’s reigning champions. The Columbus Crew have announced that the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year will be moved to Manchester City Football Club next summer for an undisclosed transfer fee. That fee…

If parody is still possible, the opening montage is beyond parody. You’ve got your orchestral strings. An American flag. The ubiquitous name slapped on the back of a helicopter: TRUMP. Then Dana White in his traditional uniform, jeans and a black shirt with an extra button undone, lavishing praise. “Donald Trump is a…

Penalty kicks are bad. They’re dramatic and can be a fascinating experience out of context, but we don’t get to experience them out of context. We have to deal with penalties as a clumsy method of deterring fouls in the box and as a makeshift solution to tied games dragging on forever. The fact that they’re preferable…

CARY, N.C. — How are we not talking about this team all the time? Sustained dominance is easy to take for granted, sure. And as far as it has come in recent decades soccer still isn’t close to leading the sports conversation in the USA. These are answers, and they aren’t wrong, but they mostly evade the question. How…

It’s not really surprising that an eccentric position played by only one-tenth of a sport’s population and operating under a completely different rule set is relatively overlooked and misunderstood. That’s not always a major problem. After all, a goalkeeper’s job boils down to “Keep the ball out of the net,” and their…

Goalkeepers have no business existing in soccer. Maintaining an entire class of players whose job is to snuff the joy out of a game is absurd, and strapping on gloves to play a sport that prohibits the use of the hands is blasphemy. In defiance of not just strikers, but more or less everyone, the keeper believes there…

SANDUSKY, Ohio — There is more than one enormous rubber duck. I did not know this when I decided to travel to Sandusky to see one, but I can’t unlearn it now. Though there was once a bigger duck in Saint-Nazaire, France, the monstrosity anchored in Sandusky comes with a registered trademark: it is the “World’s Largest…

When the fight was over, in the short lull before the selling of the next fight began, Daniel Cormier was alone in the center of the canvas with his eyes closed. His arms were raised, holding his own head, and he was beaming. Bruce Buffer was bellowing his name. A beat later during an interview, grinning and…

Eight years ago, Games Done Quick started as a handful of sleep-deprived speedrunners unexpectedly crammed into owner Mike Uyama’s mom’s basement. Networking issues had forced them to abandon their planned location at MAGFest’s hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, so they improvised. Back then, the organizers’ chief concern…

StarCraft is reportedly dead, though for a corpse the exact time and cause of death are proving difficult to pin down. It’s possible that the StarCraft: Brood War match-fixing scandal of 2010 killed the pioneering real time strategy game a few months before the sequel was even released, but by then it may have already…

All the old knocks still apply. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is a corrupt, exploitative brand in a corrupt, exploitative sport. It functions in large part to enrich the egos and bank accounts of people lacking for neither, and it does so belligerently. At the moment it’s a business that may or may not be for sale

Fedor Emelianenko will be 39 years old when he returns to Japan to fight on New Year’s Eve. His comeback will be promoted by an organization so new that it only announced its name—Rizin Fighting Federation—after announcing the fight. His most recently rumored opponent is a relatively unknown, used-to-be-decent…

There is an Ultimate Fighting Championship card scheduled for this Saturday, like many—probably too many—other recent Saturdays. What makes this one special is that it will be capped off by a main event of the highest caliber, with a dominant champion facing a threatening, wildly athletic challenger in a rematch of a…

The Nevada State Athletic Commission is a bumbling, soulless government agency, and so a strange agent for the delivery of the message that our gods have forsaken us. They never have been particularly diligent messengers in any event, but for whatever reason—bureaucracy, incompetence, something more nefarious—they…

On Thursday, UFC 177 was positioned to be a terrible pay-per-view event, just really bad by any objective standard. At the risk of being accused of doing what promoter Dana White calls "the most disgusting fucking despicable thing," I would have discouraged fans from purchasing it, if asked. It was thin from top to…

Sometime shortly after Robbie Lawler started hitting Matt Brown unreasonably hard in San Jose, Calif. Saturday night, a low rumble shook my apartment. It felt and sounded strangely like—and turned out actually to be—fireworks. This was silly, entirely too literal, but given that the fight featured Lawler, a man far…

I love body shots. There is a horrible, wonderful noise generated when a professional athlete hits another professional athlete in the torso, a thudding slap of skeleton and meat. It sounds like a Foley artist's garish exaggeration of what you think a body shot should sound like. I love this sound.

If you follow mixed martial arts long enough, even at a casual level, and if you are capable of feeling shame or outrage, the sport will eventually embarrass you. For those of us who follow the sport intently, especially those of us who deeply love it, this is a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence. Awful,…