The cities of Atlanta and Charlotte are separated by less than 250 miles. It’s a straight shot down Interstate 85. The buildup to this newfound Southern derby saw both the social media teams of Atlanta United and Charlotte FC taking jabs at each other.

Bragging rights were at stake, but Atlanta United held firm that they were the true kings of the South. Golden paper crowns were handed out as fans entered Atlanta United’s state-of-the-art Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday afternoon. The home supporters wore them proudly, but after Charlotte’s 3-2 win, which was Atlanta’s fifth consecutive loss at home, a procession of men, women and children exited the stadium feeling more like court jesters than Southern royalty. 

The next day, head coach Gonzalo Pineda was relieved of his duties. Another loss at home had sunk Atlanta United toward a new low.

Once a fortress for the club and an intimidating ground for visiting MLS teams, Atlanta United’s home stadium has lost its luster as Atlanta United has become a middle-of-the road team. Six years after winning an MLS Cup and revolutionizing the league, Atlanta United is now accustomed to hitting rock bottom. Once the shining example of MLS’ aggressive expansion model, the club has become synonymous with underachieving. 

To fire…

The Champions League final is the biggest club game on the calendar and the climax of the football season.

On June 1, Real Madrid, the 14-time winners of Europe’s elite club competition, will play German club Borussia Dortmund at Wembley Stadium in London. According to UEFA, the game will be shown in more than 200 territories and will reach 450million people worldwide, with an estimated global average viewership of around 145m.

The most ardent of football supporters, be it in the United States or the United Kingdom, will devour any match if it is on TV, whether that is the Premier League, Ligue 1, Major League Soccer (MLS) or the Women’s Super League (WSL).

Fortunately for fans, most games are now available on TV — but just how much do those in the U.S. and the UK pay to tune in?

As part of TNT Sports’ deal with UEFA, the broadcaster has to make the Champions League final free to view in the UK, giving supporters a small reprieve from the monthly costs associated with watching football on TV.

Regular fixtures, however, are seldom made available for free, and following your team on TV, or another league, is not cheap.

For the figures in this article, the platform’s baseline cost is not factored in. For example, the cost of basic cable in the U.S. is not included in the…

U.S. men’s national team winger Tim Weah has joined Brooklyn FC’s ownership group. In August, the club’s women’s team will begin playing in the USL Super League, the new first-division women’s soccer league, and the men’s team will move to the second-division USL Championship in 2025.

Weah, 24, was born in Brooklyn and grew up about an hour away in Rosedale, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of Queens. As of 2022, his family still had a home in Springfield Gardens, about 40 minutes from where Brooklyn FC will play its home games next season at Maimonides Park in Coney Island.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to join Brooklyn Football Club’s ownership team and strengthen our connection to the people of New York, the borough I was born in, and the city I love,” Weah said in a statement. “BKFC is a grassroots-oriented club, focused on providing not only top-level professional football but new pathways and opportunities for women and men off the pitch as well.”

GO DEEPER

Inside the Queens neighborhood Tim Weah calls home

Weah has been a key member of the U.S. team over the last four years. He played in nine World Cup qualifiers, starting eight, and scored the opening goal of the 2022 World Cup tournament.

Weah just completed his first season with…

When Jesse Marsch was announced as the new head coach of the Canadian men’s national soccer team on Monday, the press release contained a fact that raised eyebrows. March’s official formal title would not be simply “head coach of the Canadian men’s national team,” or even “Manager of the Canadian men’s national team.”

Rather, he will be on the books as the “MLS Canada Men’s National Team Head Coach.”

Why is MLS named specifically in the job title of a national team head coach? The answer is multifaceted and has more people up in arms than you might think. 

Why did Canada Soccer include MLS in the job title? 

In its hiring announcement, the Canadian federation notes that Marsch’s hire was made possible due to “major philanthropic contributions” from the country’s three MLS clubs – CF Montreal, Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps. It also says that similar naming conventions for official jobs are common in other areas, specifically citing that the head coach of the country’s women’s golf team is in fact known as the Stollery Family Women’s National Team Head Coach. 

It is also common for colleges, universities and hospitals to name positions after certain donors. However, it is all but unheard of in soccer. It is difficult to imagine, for…

This year’s Copa América will be closely watched, but the ensuing Olympic Games in Paris will have just as much to say about the broader state of the U.S. men’s player pool. Unlike the women’s side of the Olympic tournament, the men’s competition relies on players under the age of 23, though every team is allowed to bring up to three over-age players in the 18-man squad.  

If the team that U.S. Olympic coach Marko Mitrović selects comes close to matching the program-best 4th place finish in 2000, it would be a potential indicator that the U.S. can now consistently produce top-end talent. If the U.S. is embarrassed in Group A, though, some will fear that 2026 will be the program’s high point for quite some time.

After the draw in March, Mitrović touted a “big pool of players that we are following” for potential inclusion. He stressed that he wants to bring “the best 18 players” he can, and didn’t show his hand yet about areas where he feels he can sacrifice depth given the squad limitations of an Olympic tournament.

GO DEEPER

USMNT to play France in Olympic tourney opener

With that in mind, here’s a crib sheet of Olympic-eligible players to track in the coming months. This list focuses on MLS players, and with good reason: A full half of the most recent…

Tori Penso and Rebecca Welch are among the 21 referees who have been chosen to officiate football matches at this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris.

Penso, 38, became the first woman to referee a regular season Major League Soccer match in 20 years back in 2020.

The American official also took charge of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in Australia.

Welch, 40, became the Premier League’s first female referee when she took charge of Fulham’s 2-0 defeat to Burnley on December 23. She has been refereeing since 2010 and became the first woman to officiate a match in the men’s Championship — the English second tier — at the start of 2023.

Welch told The Athletic in 2021: “My gender has never held me back in refereeing. There’s never been a point where I’ve come away from a game feeling that they have treated me a certain way because I’m female. They might treat me a certain way because I’m a referee and they don’t agree with a decision but I’ve not come under that scrutiny.

“I know other people who have. Ninety-eight per cent of people won’t bat an eyelid when a woman turns up to referee their game, but there’s another two per cent who will. In years to come, there won’t be that exposure around it. That sounds negative, but it’s really not. It…

American soccer has dealt with two high-profile instances of extreme weather disrupting professional games in the last week. In both cases, despite conditions making it impossible to play at anything close to normal, the games went on.

The most recent of the two happened on Wednesday, when steady and heavy rains flooded the field at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego, Caif. before the U.S. women’s national team’s Gold Cup semifinal match against Canada. Conditions meant the ball could not travel on the ground farther than a couple of feet in most parts of the field, which played a direct role in the United States’ opening goal.

JAEDYN SHAW RIDING THE STORMMMM pic.twitter.com/0gq2tkR2sa

— Attacking Third (@AttackingThird) March 7, 2024

“It was honestly insane,” Shaw said. “We had such a good warmup … the ball was moving really fast, and we were excited to just play and have a really intense game, and then we came back out and we were like, ‘What’s happening?’”

Asked if the game should have been played, USWNT interim head coach Twila Kilgore said, “Probably not.”

The previous Saturday, an MLS match between Real Salt Lake and Los Angeles FC was similarly affected, but by a different form of precipitation. That game, which was held at America First…

The Portland Timbers have terminated their corporate sponsorship with DaBella Exteriors, a home improvement services company specializing in roofing and siding, that was the club’s new front-of-shirt sponsor.

The announcement came Wednesday on the heels of a report by The Oregonian detailing that the chief executive of DaBella, Donnie McMillan Jr.,is facing a lawsuit that could uncover complaints that he sexually harassed at least three female employees.

The lawsuit against DaBella, a company founded in the Portland area, and McMillan Jr., was made public on Feb. 23. The Timbers learned of the suit on Feb. 27 and decided to terminate the sponsorship, effective immediately.

“The Timbers and a third-party firm conducted a thorough pre-deal vetting process, and the club did not learn of the filing until Feb. 27,” the team said in a statement. “This decision was rooted in the responsibility we have to our fans, supporters, partners and employees to transparently reflect and uphold the values and expectations of our community.”

pic.twitter.com/RABxbBx9kd

— Portland Timbers (@TimbersFC) February 28, 2024

The termination of the partnership will come at a multi-million dollar cost for the Timbers, who have a significant inventory of 2024 jerseys with the DaBella logo on the…

Major League Soccer will kick off this season with stand-in referees when Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami hosts Real Salt Lake on Wednesday.

The MLS Players Association (MLSPA), the labor union that represents MLS players, said the lockout of the league’s match officials was a “backward step,” adding in a statement on Tuesday that “the use of replacement referees will not only negatively impact the quality and results of our matches, it may also jeopardize the health and safety of players.”

The move comes after PSRA, the union that represents professional referees across MLS, the second- and third-tier United Soccer Leagues and the National Women’s Soccer League, and PRO, the MLS-funded body that manages professional officiating in the United States and Canada, failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in January.

The Athletic explains what’s going on…

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So, who is going to referee the opening MLS games?

On February 17, The Athletic reported PRO had commitments from 66 replacement officials. Of those, 26 can be assigned as a referee or fourth official, and 29 can be assistant referees.

Cristian Campo Hernandez will be the center referee for Inter Miami vs. Real Salt Lake. The Spaniard officiated matches in the second-division USL Championship last year…

Over the course of his 17 years as the most powerful figure in world football, Sepp Blatter was memorably characterised by the venerable British sportswriter Brian Glanville as someone who had 50 new ideas every day, “51 of them bad”.

There was the one where the then FIFA president said the key to attracting more interest in women’s football was for the players to wear “tighter shorts” to “create a more female aesthetic”; the one where he proposed games be split into four quarters; the one where he suggested the goal be made 50cm (19in) wider and 25cm taller; the one where he urged any player racially abused on the pitch to settle the matter by shaking hands with his abuser at the final whistle; the one where, with his regime finally crumbling in 2015, he declared he was the man to “clean up” FIFA.

But Blatter had his moments. He was highly influential in the introduction of the back-pass rule in 1992. He led FIFA’s clampdown on both time-wasting and the dreaded “tackle” from behind. Before he became an eccentric power-crazed FIFA president, he was a skilled administrator with a fervent passion for trying to modernise and improve the game.

One Blatter idea that fell by the wayside was something called “6+5”.

It was as controversial as it was intriguing….