The World Cup’s Best Young Player award has the best hit rate of any trophy in soccer: its winners list reads like a preview of the next decade, Thomas Müller before the Müller era, Paul Pogba before the nine-figure transfer, Kylian Mbappé the summer he arrived as a teenager and left as a world champion. … Read more
No nation has a relationship with the penalty shootout like England’s. Ten shootouts at major tournaments, seven defeats, a thirty-year stretch in which “penalties” became shorthand for national sporting trauma, and then, in the modern era, something like a cure. With England facing Norway in Saturday’s World Cup quarterfinal, and the memory of every knockout … Read more
Lionel Messi is 39 years old, has scored eight goals at this World Cup, owns the all-time tournament scoring record, and every match Argentina plays now doubles as a global farewell watch: is this actually his last World Cup? The short answer is that everything, his age, his own words, his contract, the calendar, says … Read more
Saturday’s Norway-England quarterfinal is many things, but at its center it’s the purest striker duel this World Cup can stage: Erling Haaland vs. Harry Kane, two of the three most complete No. 9s alive, meeting in a knockout match for the first time in their careers. One is 26, a goal-scoring cyborg authoring the greatest … Read more
Scoring in a World Cup final is the rarest currency in soccer: 22 finals, roughly one every four years, and most of the greatest players ever never managed a single goal in one. Which is what makes the top of this list so absurd — two men have scored a hat-trick in a final, fifty-six … Read more
Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé have met four times as opponents, and those four matches include a World Cup knockout classic, a Champions League hat-trick at the Camp Nou, and the greatest final ever played. In between, they spent two seasons as teammates in Paris, winning titles together while the soccer world wondered how the … Read more
Novak Djokovic and Jannik Sinner walk onto Centre Court today for a Wimbledon semifinal that doubles as the defining rivalry of tennis’s transition era: the 39-year-old chasing a record 25th Grand Slam title against the 24-year-old defending champion who owns something almost no one in history has owned, a winning head-to-head record against Novak Djokovic. … Read more
The Golden Boot goes to the World Cup’s top scorer, but the Golden Ball goes to its best player, the tournament MVP, voted by media, and its history is a strange, wonderful list where legends sit next to heartbreak. Messi has won it twice, both times defined by finals against France; Zidane and Forlán won … Read more
Kylian Mbappé is playing this World Cup on the most cleverly structured contract in European football: a five-year Real Madrid deal (through June 2029) whose reported €31.25 million base salary is only the visible layer, sitting atop a signing bonus reported between €100-150 million amortized across the contract, performance incentives, and the negotiation’s real masterstroke, … Read more
Kylian Mbappé has scored 20 goals in 20 World Cup matches, a goal-per-game pace no player in the tournament’s 96-year history has sustained, and he is 27 years old and exactly one goal behind the all-time record after breaking the deadlock against Morocco in Thursday’s quarterfinal, minutes after Yassine Bounou had saved his penalty. The … Read more