The Ballon d’Or is the most prestigious individual award in football, the closest thing the sport has to a most valuable player trophy. Every year it crowns the best player in the world, and the list of names who have lifted it reads like a history of the game itself. But how long has it … Read more
The penalty shootout is one of the most nerve-wracking spectacles in all of sports. After 120 minutes of soccer with no winner, the entire match comes down to a series of one-on-one duels between a kicker and a goalkeeper from 12 yards out. For new fans, though, the exact rules can be a blur of … Read more
If you’ve ever watched a big soccer match end level after 90 minutes, you’ve seen the game roll on into extra time. For new fans — especially in the U.S., where we tend to call it “overtime” — the rules can be genuinely confusing. Does the first goal win it? How long does it actually … Read more
If you’re new to soccer, one of the first things that trips you up is the clock. In most American sports — football, basketball, hockey — the clock counts down and the game ends when it hits zero. Soccer does the opposite: the clock starts at zero and counts up, and it never stops. So … Read more
The World Cup has always been the biggest stage in football. What it pays, though, is a different story depending on when you showed up. When Italy won in 1982, the prize for lifting the trophy was $2.2 million split among a squad of players and staff. Good money in 1982, but pocket change by … Read more
Watch a match from the upper deck and the players look tiny, lost in a sea of green that seems to stretch forever. That impression is not an illusion. A football pitch is genuinely enormous, big enough that fans reach for farmland comparisons to make sense of it, which is exactly why so many people … Read more
The World Cup Golden Boot goes to the top scorer of each tournament, and the most recent winner is France’s Kylian Mbappé, who netted 8 goals at Qatar 2022 — edging Lionel Messi’s 7 as Argentina took the title. The all-time single-tournament record still belongs to France’s Just Fontaine, whose 13 goals in 1958 have … Read more
Lionel Messi holds the all-time record for most men’s World Cup appearances with 26 matches, set across five tournaments from 2006 to 2022. He’s followed by Germany’s Lothar Matthäus (25), Miroslav Klose (24), Italy’s Paolo Maldini (23), and Cristiano Ronaldo (22). On the national side, Brazil leads everything: the only country to play in all … Read more
The biggest World Cup stadium in history is the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, which held a verified attendance of 199,854 fans for the 1950 World Cup Final between Brazil and Uruguay — the largest crowd ever recorded at a soccer match. That record will never be broken under modern FIFA safety regulations, which mandate … Read more
Soccer balls come in five official sizes (1 through 5), with size 5 being the FIFA regulation ball for all professional, college, and adult matches. The right size depends on the player’s age: size 3 for ages 8 and under (23-24″ circumference), size 4 for ages 8-12 (25-26″), and size 5 for ages 12 and … Read more