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Soccer
The Greatest National Team Managers of All Time
International management is a strange job. You get the players a few weeks a year, you cannot buy a solution in January, and you are judged almost entirely on six or seven matches played in a foreign summer every other year. Club managers build. International managers assemble, persuade, and then…
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Soccer
England v Spain Preview: A Euro 2024 Final Rematch at Wembley
Two years and a bit after Berlin, the same two teams line up again. England against Spain at Wembley on Saturday evening is the opening fixture of Nations League Group A3, and it is also a rerun of the Euro 2024 final, the night Spain won 2-1 and England spent…
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Soccer
International Break Preview: Klopp, Xavi and Zidane all start their new eras
Club football will be going quiet for sixteen days, which sounds like a punishment but this is actually the most interesting international break in years. FIFA has merged the old September and October breaks into a single block running from 21 September to 6 October, so national teams play up…
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Champions League
What’s going on at Manchester United?
Five Premier League games into the season, Manchester United have five points, twelfth place and a goal difference of exactly zero. On a table it looks unremarkable. If you support the club, it feels like a dagger. The strange part is that this was supposed to be the calm year.…
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La Liga
Atlético Madrid v Real Madrid: Derby Preview, Team News and Predicted Line-ups
There is a particular kind of tension to a Madrid derby played in September, before anyone knows what either team really is. Nobody has been found out yet. Nothing has been decided. And yet the Metropolitano on Sunday afternoon will feel like a match in May, partly because both sides…
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La Liga
The greatest free-kick takers of all-time, ranked
The wall shuffles into place. The goalkeeper barks, waves an arm, then steps sideways and hopes. Behind the ball, one man is doing arithmetic nobody else in the stadium can follow: distance, wind, wall height, the two inches of daylight between a defender’s shoulder and the near post. Free-kick taking…
