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Our staff has had about a month to process the glory and agony of the Qatar 2022 World Cup. What started with a big dream ended with a U13 club soccer-esque daytime drama. Here’s our collective take on the USMNT’s good, bad and ugly. If you don’t speak Spanish, you have three years to learn…
A grudging and growing acceptance that maybe Leeds might have some good Americans… Yorkshire doesn’t take easily to change. But walking around the city center or down Elland Road on gameday there’s no avoiding the signs of a growing American influence. Leeds United fans wear Major League Baseball caps and US men’s national team jerseys.…
And not in a good way. 3:00am: Awakened “Ridiculous! Disgraceful!” A heavily accented voice shouts into his phone. “I’ve never felt so cheated in my life. I’ve already emailed FIFA. I’ve told them. I’ve let them know this is unacceptable. I want a full refund! $200 a night…for this?” Welcome to FIFA’s Quetaifan Island Fan Village. The voice…
Howler is happy to have Matthew Shaddock as its Foreign Correspondent for the duration of the tournament. Today’s dispatch, complete with photography, represents the first of several messages he’ll share from Qatar—where the atmosphere isn’t quite like World Cups past. It might look right on TV, but it doesn’t feel right in the streets. Qatari…
Where FIFA fails, Howler delivers. They didn’t give us a Group of Death, so we made one. A real Group of Death features four teams that could win the Cup. Our "Group of Death" features four metal songs to melt your face. Howler's "Group of Death" treats your ears better than FIFA treats soccer fans.
A reluctant but thorough preview of one of the strangest tournaments ever. Buckle up and get ready for this year’s edition of a tournament we’ve been raised to love. A (GROUP A) While it looks like a walk in the park for the Dutch, each side’s unique style could make every match a tough adjustment.…
Howler is proud to celebrate the release of Christine Sinclair’s Playing the Long Game, a memoir (written with Stephen Brunt) of her phenomenal and record-breaking career. Our excerpt is from Chapter 13, on her pursuit of Abby Wambach’s record of 184 international goals—it’s an engaging welcome into a striker’s mind and an intriguing insight into…
A writer and illustrator with deep roots in the game craft a story for soccer’s future stars. In 2017 Sam Cronin—not to be confused with her husband and former MLS All-Star Sam Cronin—wrote the initial manuscript for Leave a Little More, a children’s book with a nucleus of soccer and empowering the everyday decisions we…
Soccer’s a lot of things. But even when it looks like just another day in the park, it’s never just another day in the park. Tío Lobo says that anyone in the business of running fast should avoid cutting their toe nails. Cutting keratin, the protective protein that extends from one’s feet reduces, Lobo theorizes,…
This extraordinary remembrance of soccer pioneer Arthur Pember originally ran in slightly different form in Howler 10, Spring 2016.It’s longer than most web pieces, and we considered running it in two or three parts, but it deserves to live here in its remarkable entirety. ARTHUR PEMBER titillated Victorian New York with his muckraking journalism, but…
Tales of Inspiration, Service and Terror — from American Soccer’s Before Time Casey Bahr’s journey from the Naval Academy to the ’72 Olympics, from the Philadelphia Atoms to the Philadelphia Fever, with a stop-off to claim that the German American Football Association might have been better than the NASL…for a year or two anyway. Casey…
This past summer, I was running around Gdańsk, Poland desperately looking for a bar showing the Women’s Euro Cup match between Sweden and Portugal, all while thinking, in the words of the Talking Heads, “Well, how did I get here?” I used to be a traditional American sports fan. I would watch an ungodly amount…