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Byline: Tariq Panja and Rory Smith A soccer championship has doubled as a test of identity for millions of Germans with Turkish roots. For many, picking one team to support [...]

Byline: Rory Smith A 5-1 thrashing of Scotland in the opening game of Euro 2024 was a good omen for a host nation in search of one. The arc of [...]

A new documentary about gay players tells a story that is, in some ways, no longer a story. As a teenager, Collin Martin felt he had to make a choice. [...]

Byline: Rory Smith The system may be the center of the modern soccer universe, but stars like Kylian Mbappé exert a gravity of their own. Ultimately, a single wrong answer [...]

Byline: Rory Smith The patience of Alonso, the Bayer Leverkusen manager, says a lot about him, and just as much about a sport perpetually chasing the next big thing. Xabi [...]

Rapinoe, who helped define U.S. soccer for a decade, is retiring after this week’s N.W.S.L. final. Hayes, the Chelsea coach, will try to put her stamp on it next. Emma [...]

The best player in the Premier League is a defensive midfielder. Pep Guardiola would, in an unguarded moment, probably concede that he has a slight tendency toward hyperbole. With eyes [...]

A Loveless Marriage Nears the Bitter End This time, Kylian Mbappé means it. The https://x.com/FabrizioRomano/status/1758405855597433264?s=20 https://theathletic.com/live-blogs/kylian-mbappe-live-updates-transfer-real-madrid-psg/SGwTlJKfvqsi/zpAYD9uM4Vf3/ of his decision to leave Paris St.-Germain, his hometown team, might have carried with [...]

Is Soccer Ready to Retire Its Last Taboo? As a teenager, Collin Martin felt he had to make a choice. For as long as he could remember, his ambition had [...]

Byline: Rory Smith A team that had endured all that Spain has in the past 12 months should not be able to win a World Cup. And yet that is [...]

A Tortoise Amid the Hares LEVERKUSEN, Germany — Xabi Alonso has always done things at his own speed. As a player, it was his coolness, his control, his capacity to [...]

An End, and a Start Emma Hayes first met Megan Rapinoe before she was Megan Rapinoe. Or, rather, just as she was becoming Megan Rapinoe. She was not yet a [...]

Byline: Rory Smith, Tariq Panja and Ahmed Al Omran The cold calls and text messages started arriving on Jan Van Winckel's phone a couple of months ago, and they have [...]

Byline: Rory Smith Gerard Piqué has always been an ideas guy. He has, at various times, had ideas about industries as disconnected as isotonic sports drinks and international tennis tournaments. [...]

Lionel Messi and his Argentina teammates have reunited for the first time. Most are finding a day job feels different after you’ve won the World Cup. When Alexis Mac Allister [...]

Byline: Rory Smith Quinten and Jurrien Timber are on opposite sides of the Dutch championship race. At home, they may be closer, literally, than any two players in European soccer. [...]

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has become a star in nine months at Napoli. With his transcendent talent, things may only get better. NAPLES, Italy — European soccer’s breakout star looks briefly uneasy. [...]

Byline: Tariq Panja and Rory Smith The Premier League club's American owners have splashed roughly $750 million on new players since last year. Puzzled rivals can't see a strategy behind [...]

Byline: Rory Smith The Netherlands is Europe's most reliable talent factory. Unless you need a goalkeeper. Follow live coverage of France vs. Poland and to follow teams that have advanced [...]

Byline: Rory Smith AL KHOR, Qatar - This is how fine the margins can be: As the first bout between heavyweights of this World Cup ticked into injury time on [...]

Who Is Having Fun? Brice Samba was trying, as best he could, to share the crowning glory of his career with his wife. The goalkeeper’s road to stardom had been [...]

Byline: Rory Smith Ajax sold the bulk of its Champions League-ready squad over the summer and never looked back. It can't afford to. THE HAGUE, the Netherlands - As a [...]

Byline: Rory Smith Ukraine's players have not shied away from what earning a place in the World Cup would mean to their country. After beating Scotland, they're one win away. [...]

Byline: Rory Smith The outsize wealth of England's clubs increasingly allows their owners to play a direct role in deciding the champions of other leagues. That first meeting told Alex [...]

Byline: Rory Smith France is still the favorite and but a handful of other teams have impressed. Now, in the knockout stage, is when the tournament gets interesting. With a [...]

Byline: Rory Smith LONDON - There are a lot of things that everybody knows about Harry Kane. First and foremost, there is the fact that he is the captain of [...]

Byline: Rory Smith Only a handful of soccer players attain what might be best described as mainstream cultural relevance. That kind of fame now comes with responsibility. There are almost [...]

Byline: Rory Smith For the recently retired goalkeeper, a role as Chelsea's technical director is appealing because of how different it is from playing. LONDON - Petr Cech does not [...]

The fall of a Premier League champion shows just how precarious a soccer career can be, and the damage that can be inflicted by one bad choice. Enjoying this newsletter [...]

Byline: Rory Smith The soccer star returned to his hometown last summer, and to Italy's Serie A. The city had changed. But so had he. BRESCIA, Italy - No matter [...]

The soccer star returned to his hometown last summer, and to Italy's Serie A. The city had changed. But so had he. BRESCIA, Italy -- No matter where his career [...]

Faced with a series of incidents in which black players were racially abused, Italian soccer officials unveiled initiatives to fight the problem. One was immediately labeled racist itself. Four months [...]

Chelsea midfielder N'Golo Kanté is soccer's ultimate artisan: a player who does the running and the fetching and the retrieving so others can score the goals. That diligence has its [...]

PARIS -- The construction of Christiane Endler's masterpiece started days ago. Hours of work had gone into an action that would pass in the blink of an eye: all the [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Last summer, seven of Ajax's brightest stars were summoned to a room at the Dutch club's training facility. Edwin van der Sar, the goalkeeper-turned-chief-executive, and Marc Overmars, once [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH MANCHESTER, England -- The problem with Manchester City, as Arsène Wenger saw it, was not simply that it possessed an apparently bottomless well of wealth. It was [...]

Byline: ELIAN PELTIER and RORY SMITH PARIS -- A few days before Paris St.-Germain traveled to Liverpool in September to begin its latest quest to win the Champions League, Dani [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH MOSCOW -- In the weeks before the World Cup, a flurry of phone calls went around the recruitment departments of some of Europe's major clubs. Strictly speaking, [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH BURNLEY, England -- Jack Cork wears his status lightly. The Burnley midfielder has been aware of it since his brother pointed it out a few weeks ago, [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH LIVERPOOL, England -- Josep Maria Bartomeu, the president of Barcelona, preferred to focus on what he had gained, rather than what he had lost. A month or [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH SOUTHAMPTON, England -- Stuart Taylor cherishes those few moments before the game starts. Almost two decades since his professional debut, the sense of occasion still strikes him [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH MILAN -- A.C. Milan's museum sits on the ground floor of the club's gleaming administrative headquarters, Casa Milan, in a smart district to the north of the [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH Germany's players were still embracing on the field, some minutes away from lifting the Confederations Cup trophy, when the congratulatory messages started to pour in. They came [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH TURIN, Italy -- It was late one Saturday night when Nevio Scala, the manager of Parma, made his way to Gianluigi Buffon's hotel room. He wanted to [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH LONDON -- There were fireworks before and fireworks afterward, fizzing and crackling and disappearing into the sky. Before the F.A. Cup final, just as the players for [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH The moment belonged to Kai Havertz. With just a minute or so remaining at Bayer Leverkusen's BayArena on Sunday afternoon, Havertz, a teenage midfielder, and the home [...]

Byline: RORY SMITH MANCHESTER, England -- Neale McDermott's record as a soccer talent spotter is better than most. Long before Dele Alli was Dele Alli, when he was just a [...]

The article focuses on Emma Hayes' early encounter with Megan Rapinoe in 2008 when Hayes, as head coach of the Chicago Red Stars, recruited Rapinoe to join the Women's Professional Soccer league, highlighting Rapinoe's burgeoning talent and their journey together in women's soccer.

Byline: Rory Smith David Beckham's possible return to the Premier League moved a step closer yesterday when Queens Park Rangers manager Neil Warnock appeared to endorse owner Tony Fernandes's desire [...]

Byline: Jason Burt and Rory Smith Owen Hargreaves's remarkable move to Manchester City will not just offer the former Manchester United midfielder the chance to revive his Premier League and [...]