US Soccer has appointed Natasha Patel to lead analysis across its men’s, women’s and youth teams.

Patel, the highly-regarded assistant academy director at Championship club Southampton, will begin her role at the start of June ahead of a busy summer with the USMNT competing on home soil at Copa America, and the USWNT heading to Paris for July’s Olympic games. She previously worked as Southampton’s head of performance analysis and carried out the same role at New York Red Bulls in MLS.

Patel will be reunited with US Soccer sporting director Matt Crocker, who was also previously at the English club as director of football between 2020 and 2023.

She joins with the federation set to host the 2026 World Cup in the U.S. and also preparing to open its first National Training Center the same year.

In an interview with the Training Ground Podcast in March, she said: “Any club, any organisation that I want to go into longer-term has to be aligned with my values and future ambitions.

“You give so much time and energy, I think you really want to be fully involved — and I’m all-in in everything I do.

“Hopefully that takes me to meeting more people and new experiences. You only get one life and I want to make sure I enjoy it and maximise it – with myself, but also my friends…

The battle between Manchester City and Chelsea at the top of the Women’s Super League (WSL) might be the main storyline, but it is not the only exciting title race at the moment. With just two full matchdays to go, there are four points between the top four teams in the Women’s Championship.

Only the winner will be promoted to the WSL and all four are set to play each other on the final day of the season on April 28.

Sunderland, Crystal Palace, Southampton and Charlton Athletic all have deeply varying histories within the women’s game. They are evidence of the range of teams vying to compete at the top level of English women’s football, despite fears that the WSL looks increasingly set to mirror the Premier League.

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Sunderland (20 games, 40 points)

Sunderland are top, a point clear of second-placed Crystal Palace, who have a game in hand. Top-flight women’s football has eluded the north east of England over the past couple of years, despite Sunderland’s illustrious history of developing a glut of England stars, including Lucy Bronze, Beth Mead and Jill Scott.

They have struggled in the past to meet the FA’s licensing requirements for participation in the WSL and

From the age of six, Willy Caballero realised he liked to be the player giving out the instructions to those around him. It was one of the reasons why he became a goalkeeper.

He had joined a local team in Santa Elena, his home city in northern Argentina, and had initially been an outfield player but when his team-mates decided they did not want to play in goal, Caballero went between the posts. After that, they began to win.

“I started to enjoy giving out orders, commenting on the defenders and correcting people,” Caballero said in a 2013 interview with Nuevo Futbol, a Spanish-language sports website. “ It stuck, so at the age of six I became a keeper.”

On Monday night, the now 42-year-old Caballero will be the man on the touchline, passing out the instructions and encouragement to Leicester City’s players as they take on fellow promotion hopefuls Ipswich Town in the Championship.

With Enzo Maresca serving a one-game suspension up in the King Power Stadium stands for picking up three yellow cards this season, it falls on assistant manager Caballero to step forward into the technical area.

Caballero’s early experiences have provided grounding and perspective and strengthened his leadership skills. He settled down with wife Lucia and started a family aged 21 before moved…

In January 1970, the Football Association’s (FA) ban on women’s football — imposed in December 1921 on the premise that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged” — came to an end, with the FA committee agreeing that “ladies’ football should no longer be… classed as unaffiliated football”.

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When the FA decided to ban women’s football for 50 years

The Women’s Football Association (WFA), set up in 1969, ran the incipient women’s game, with the Women’s FA Cup becoming the showpiece calendar event as a national league was not founded until 1991.

The WFA continued to be in charge until 1992, when the FA took over the running of women’s football. However, little is known about the period, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, when women’s football was self-governing.

The names of trailblazer Lily Parr, who was widely considered the greatest striker of her generation, and the Dick, Kerr Ladies, who attracted crowds of over 50,000 fans in 1920, have become familiar to women’s football fans over the years.

But the story of Southampton’s Pat Chapman, the 1978 FA Cup final record goalscorer,…

Marianne Spacey-Cale is widely considered one of the greatest women’s footballers of all time.

She played 91 times for England, was part of the squad who went to their first FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1995 in Sweden, and played for Arsenal between 1993 and 2002, winning five league titles and seven FA Cups.

Now she is the manager of Southampton Women, who sit third in the Women’s Super League (WSL) table, having joined the club in 2018 and overseen their climb from the fifth tier of women’s football.

Tonight her team will take on her former club Arsenal at St Mary’s Stadium in the league cup, the first time the two teams have met, in a game for which over 12,500 tickets have already been sold.

She is a player who has appeared on some of the biggest domestic and international stages, but now she must motivate a team that includes players not born at the height of her playing career.

“Yes, I’ve been in big games, but this is a different group of people, a different era and generation,” she says. “How can I use my experience? Part and parcel of playing football is that there is pressure.”

She explains her…

Burnley are progressing in talks to sign Basel forward Zeki Amdouni and in advanced talks to sign Nathan Redmond on a free transfer.

Amdouni, 22, spent last season on loan at the Swiss club, where he scored 22 goals and provided five assists in 52 appearances before the club triggered an option to make the move permanent in May 2023.

Burnley have already strengthened their forward options this summer after triggering their option to make Michael Obafemi’s loan move from Swansea City permanent but he will miss the start of the season after undergoing surgery on his hamstring.

Like Obafemi, Amadouni would be another young forward who brings international pedigree to Vincent Kompany’s attack. The versatile forward has scored five goals in five games for the Switzerland national team, including three goals in two games last month against Andorra and Romania.

• Transfer blog — live updates
• Premier League done deals

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Redmond, 29, is without a club after his contract at former club Besiktas expired earlier his month. The former Southampton winger scored six goals and provided six assists in 28 appearances for the Turkish club last season. The club’s interest in the winger…

When Cristiano Ronaldo made his return to Manchester United in 2021 he faced a conundrum: having sold the £4million ($5.2m) mansion he previously owned in the north west, where would he, wife Georgina Rodriguez and their children live?

They eventually settled on a £3million property in Cheshire, notable not only for its swimming pool, cinema and garage big enough for four cars, but for its owner: former United striker, Andrew Cole.

A decade earlier, Ronaldo had been the one doing the letting. After swapping Manchester for Madrid in 2009, his five-bedroom house in the exclusive Cheshire village of Alderley Edge (one of three areas, alongside Prestbury and Wilmslow, which make up Cheshire’s “Golden Triangle,” where many of the area’s finest properties can be found), complete with indoor swimming pool, steam room, jacuzzi, gym and wine area was rented out to then-Manchester City winger Adam Johnson.

It’s not just players. After replacing Brendan Rodgers as Liverpool manager in 2015, Jurgen Klopp ended up renting his predecessor’s house in Formby. And when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer returned to Manchester as caretaker (and then permanent) manager in 2018, he was unable to move back into his former Cheshire home because of a tenant in place by the name of Virgil van…

Southampton academy director Matt Hale will leave at the end of the season.

Hale is currently responsible for players who enter the club between the ages of eight and 23.

His exit — confirmed to staff in an email — will follow a number of figures that have or who will depart the club.

Assistant academy director Edd Vahid left at the start of the season to join the Premier League, while head of academy recruitment Dan Rice is joining Everton.

Managing director Toby Steele has already resigned and is working a notice period.

Steele has been key to the day-to-day running of Southampton. Mike Fenn, who has been with the club for 20 years, is expected to step up as new chief financial officer.

Director of football Matt Crocker will also leave this summer to take up the sporting director post with the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Crocker has spent three seasons at Southampton, overseeing the men’s, women’s and youth teams, and helping to develop a club methodology that was dubbed the ‘SFC Playbook’.

Joe Shields left for Chelsea at the start of the year, having only been in his head of recruitment role for three months.

Southampton are currently bottom of the Premier League — four points from safety.

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Southampton mailbag: Sport Republic strategy, Selles’ future, relegation…

The uncertainty and chaos around Southampton has led to more questions now than throughout their decade in the Premier League.

There are the potential ramifications of relegation, who goes and who stays in the summer and the inevitable inquest into what has gone wrong this season.

We haven’t done a mailbag for a while, so thought we would give you, our subscribers, the opportunity to ask whatever you want.

We want your questions — they can be about the first team, women’s side, ownership or about how many bags of sweets Jacob Tanswell nicks from the St Mary’s press lounge.

Don’t be shy, there’s a lot to discuss — and we will publish the answers in the coming days.

It is Monday lunchtime as The Athletic arrives at a Staplewood seeing its first glimpse of summer 2023.

The sun is breaking through over Southampton’s training ground but its pitches are empty. The women’s team have a day off and for the under-14s, who would usually be here on day release, it’s the Easter holidays.

All focus is therefore on the boys’ under-18s – the age group coaches at the club strongly believe is Southampton’s best since the class of 2012, when James Ward-Prowse, Harrison Reed, Calum Chambers and Luke Shaw were all offered senior contracts.

The squad have finished their morning education and are scheduled to start training at 2.30pm, where they will be plotting to do what the Southampton first team could not manage: beat West Ham United at their place.

“You could be the best footballer going but if you’re not behaving in education, then we’ll know about that in our MDT (multi-disciplinary meetings),” says Jonny Woodhouse, Southampton’s head of academy operations. “We have those weekly, all the way from under-nines to the B team.”

The Athletic has been invited to go behind the scenes with the under-18s as they prepare for Thursday’s FA Youth Cup semi-final — Southampton’s first since 2006.

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Dom Ballard is the first player The…