Plus James Curtis Hepburn in the missionary position.

I’m 90% sure it’s satirizing pretentious American soccer fandom.

I don’t know anybody (including several Swiss) who actually thought Switzerland’s #6 ranking accurately represented their ability. FIFA world ranking system is broken and I’m glad they’re scrapping it.

Orson Welles didn’t know shit about Swiss history. Spoiler: lots of wars.

That was a perfect goal. Coutinho blasted it into the goal practically from another time zone, and it was as far to the right as it possibly could have been and still gone in. A tie isn’t the result they wanted but they should drink a toast to that one.

Is that number more or less obscene than the number of off-target shots Germany took?

Oh, yeah, no black people in Oakland or any place around there.

So what you’re telling me is, calling someone a herb is basically saying, “I can’t come up with my own insults and have to take them from ‘80s Burger King commercials?” That’s almost as good as “I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast!”

I’m not sure I even buy the premise of this. German players are still strong and athletic, and there’s always been a sense of fluidity in the German system. Beckenbauer, for instance. Mattäus. Brehme. They’ve always had versatile midfielders and even defenders that score goals when necessary; it’s never just been…

It’s a good trick for the authorities, right? If you catch wind of some new trick, you hold off on nailing anyone for it for a while so more people do it, and then sweep them all up in short order.

Don’t be hard on yourself. It sounded to me like it was going to be about mortality or something like that, and I think that was borne out.

The thing is, Ronaldo plays like a regular forward, and you get a couple of really phenomenal forwards every generation - your Beckhams and your Other Ronaldos and your Zlatans and your Neymars - who may be more or less efficient in terms of scoring but are tactically interchangeable. This means every reasonably good…

The joke the German announcers made (which was funny once, and then proceeded to be beaten long past death) is that the end result was Christiano Ronaldo 3 - 3 Spain.

Billy, are you contractually obligated by Nike to mention Nigeria’s uniforms in every time the team comes up? Every time the team comes up, you mention their kit. Anyway, if you are, you need to disclose this fact or mark the article as advertising. You don’t want to end up getting GMG sued again.

I don’t have as much of a hard-on for relegation as some people do, and the tendency to see it as a kind of panacea is short-sighted. In fact, relegation is probably in the timeline, which is why MLS is trying to crowd out NASL with their “own” level 2 and 3 leagues - until now relegation would have seen MLS losing…

Deadspin have skipped ze Germans, but mostly, that’s how the World Cup shakes out. You have a few standout teams that are expected to go deep, a bunch of also-rans that are happy just to have made it, and a big middle group for whom winning is an impossible dream but not getting out of the group stage is a shameful…

Does Chris Amman get decertified after this?

Nah, in the US it would be the opposite: US national team coach gets a job coaching in MLS, tries to resign, and they tell him to keep both jobs - and to just use his MLS roster for the national team as well, now renamed RSLNT.

The US has a habit of going on long tears of win streaks in pointless matches, and then underperforming expectations when the chips are down. One of those happened during the qualification phase of the tournament.

Hot Take: the arc of Japan’s progress in international soccer is what USMNT fanboys think/hope the US’s will be. Japan has the advantage of a weaker confederation, but their domestic league is at least as weak as MLS and the sport competes for attention with more popular alternatives. The big difference is that the…