Category: Soccer

Soccer 201: Positions and Logistics

Have you graduated from our Soccer 101 course? Have your diploma framed and on your wall? Great! Here’s your next challenge. Soccer 201: Positions and Logistics is a week-long email course that will bring you into the know in a number of ways. You’ll learn all about each of the positions soccer players can play — what each position’s responsibilities are and what characteristics are needed for each role. You’ll also become an expert on some of the most meaningful logistical details about soccer. Together, this information will fill in a lot of the gaps in the understanding needed to feel confident watching and talking soccer with the biggest of fans. Good luck!












  • How do substitutions work?
  • What are strikers?
  • What are midfielders?
  • What are defenders?
  • What are goalies?
  • What is stoppage time?
  • How do overtime and shootouts work?

What is a defender or fullback in soccer?

Are you big? A little slow? Do you have the desire to play soccer but not the dribbling skills? Able to kick the ball hard but not aim it that well? There’s a good chance that you play defense on your soccer team. Of course, world class defenders or fullbacks are neither slow nor bad at dribbling or shooting. Instead of playing defense because of their deficit in the skills department, the defenders you see playing soccer on television play defense because of what they have more of than anyone else: size, strength, and determination. Defenders use their size to out-jump opposing forwards when a ball is played in the air. They use their strength to muscle the opposition off the ball when they have possession of it. Like offensive linemen in football, defenders have the least margin for error and the most dramatic consequences for failing. (Some would argue the goalie has less but its understood that the goalie’s task is virtually impossible, whereas defenders are always supposed to succeed.) As such, the players who are attracted to playing defense and who succeed there are strong-willed and determined. No matter what it takes, their job is to stop the opposition from scoring and they’ll find a way to do it. Defenders may not run as much as midfielders during a normal game or sprint as quickly or as often as strikers, but they have to do it for a full 90 minutes. It’s very rare, except in cases of injury, for a team to spend one of its three substitutions on a defender. Some defenders find a way to get into the act on offense as well. Normally, this chance comes on set pieces, particularly corner kicks, when the ball is going to be in the air and a defender’s size is an advantage.

Central Defenders

The most common formation involves four defenders. Of these, two are considered central defenders, two outside defenders. Of the big, strong, determined defenders, central defenders are bigger, and stronger, and more determined than the rest. As central defenders, their responsibility lies in the area right in front of their goal — the most dangerous area for an opponent to have the ball. A great central defender will keep the ball from ever getting to that area by positioning herself to intercept any passes into that area. If a player tries to dribble the ball into that area, they should expect to be met by a firm and well placed pair of cleats. In modern soccer, the four defenders are usually deployed in a horizontal line across the field, so the two central defenders have overlapping but similar responsibilities. In older formations, they were often stacked vertically, one as a first line of defense, called the stopper, and one as a last resort, called a sweeper. Among the sweeper’s responsibility was to coordinate the other defenders and any other teammates necessary. Nowadays, that responsibility will be given to one or the other central defender. It’s not uncommon for that player also to be the captain of the team.

One strange vestigial aspect of soccer tactics is the habit of British soccer people to call a central defender, a “center half” or a “center half-back.” This is confusing because Americans use the term “half-back” synonymously with midfielder, so it not only doesn’t make sense to call a central defender a “center half” but it actively subverts something you think you know about positions. The reason for this is that in the very, very old days of British soccer, teams often played with only two defenders. As it became more necessary to have four full-time defenders, the two existing defenders shifted farther out, to the sides of the field and two central midfielders, called center half-backs, slid back to play defense. Though their role changed, these players held on to their positional name.

Outside Defenders

Outside defenders are a more varied bunch than central defenders. Whereas central defenders almost need to be tall, because the primary responsibility of an outside or wing defender is to prevent a player from crossing the ball into the penalty box, outside defenders can be a little shorter. While their central counterparts almost always stay back, even when their team has the ball, an outside defender may transition quickly to offense, sprinting up the side of the field. An outside defender’s closest teammate is often the midfielder in front of her, with whom she can play intricate give-and-goes to move the ball up the field. Since attacking is more prestigious than defending, even in a sport as low-scoring as soccer, the best known outside defenders in the world are offensive players. In the past twenty five years, Brazilian wing-backs have made a name for themselves internationally and on club teams throughout the world as talented offensive outside defenders. Based on the opponent and the composition their own team, a coach may choose to play with two offensive-minded outside defenders, two defensive-minded outside defenders, or even mix and match. Of course, none of these forays up the field excuse a defender from his defensive responsibilities. Even when caught way out of position, an outside defender has to have the speed and stamina to get back on defense before they are missed.

Meet the U.S. Women's Soccer Team: Megan Rapinoe

The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. To help prepare you to root for team and country, we’re going to run a short profile of every player on the 23-person roster. When female athletes take their turn in the spotlight, they often receive coverage that is slanted toward non-game aspects of their stories — marriage, children, sexual preference, perceived lack-of or bountiful sexiness, social media activity, etc. In the hope of balancing things out, just a tiny bit, these previews will strive to stay on the field, with only a little bit of non-gendered personal interest when possible.

Megan Rapinoe

Position: Midfielder

Number: 15

National team experience: 102 appearances, this will be her second World Cup, and she has 29 international goals.

What to expect from Megan Rapinoe: Every player on the U.S. national team is a great soccer player. Every player in the World Cup is probably better than anyone you or I have ever played with. But there’s something different about the few players who are truly world class. World class players just look different from everyone else. They have at least one skill that virtually no one else can match. Megan Rapinoe is a world playmaker. She has exceptional vision. Vision literally means the ability to see the field, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Rapinoe has exceptional vision in one way or another, but it also means the ability to understand where every player on the field is and to anticipate where they are going to be. This is truly where Rapinoe excels. She seems to know exactly where to put the ball. Her other exceptional skill, quite handily paired with vision, is her technical ability to pass the ball to just the spot she wants. In the flow of play, Rapinoe’s approach to playing midfielder is acquire the ball, survey the field, move the ball to the player in the position most dangerous to the opposing team. Rapinoe takes the majority of the more technical set pieces, including corner kicks. Her skill on the ball allows her to be a formidable goal-scorer, especially on shots from a distance, but it’s not her primary focus. Rapinoe missed the team’s last warm-up game with a thigh injury. How much we see her on the field during this World Cup depends a lot on her health. The more she can play, the better it will be for the U.S. team’s chances.

Video: This goal, the latest scored in World Cup history, gives me chills every time I see it. Its sheer improbability has a lot to do with the skill involved in Rapinoe’s cross.

Non-gendered personal interest item: During the 2012 Olympics, Rapinoe became the first soccer player of any gender to score a goal directly from a corner kick. Oddly enough, this type of goal has been known as an “Olympic goal” since 1924 despite having never been accomplished in the Olympics until 2012.

Links: Read Sam Borden’s fine profile of Rapinoe from a few years back in the New York Times. Check out Rapinoe’s US Soccer page, her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Why is there so little sports in coverage of women's sports?

The sports writer covering women’s sports has a problem. Write articles like people are used to reading about sports or about women? At Dear Sports Fan, we think the answer to that question should be to write articles about women’s sports the same way we would write about male sports. This isn’t to say that people should reduce female athletes to genderless passing, shooting, sweating sports-machines in order to be acceptable, but it does mean that articles which cover female athletes as women to such a degree that their athletic feats are reduced to an afterthought or forgotten entirely are bad. Sports writing that covers women’s sports but neglects the sports side of its subjects make the sports world as a whole less inclusive. One of Dear Sports Fan’s key goals is to make the sports world more inclusive. This is why we’ve been publishing gender-story-free player profiles of each of the members of the U.S. women’s national team in the lead up to the World Cup. It’s why I plunked down $12 to buy a copy of Equalizer Soccer’s 2015 World Cup preview. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with our sports-first approach. I was disappointed by a recent issue of ESPN the Magazine that had so much promise but failed to deliver.

The June 8 edition of ESPN the Magazine showed up in my mailbox with a big picture of three members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team on the cover. With the World Cup in Canada quickly approaching, it makes sense for a sports magazine to focus on women’s soccer. I am extremely excited for the tournament. Not only is it an ideal subject for Dear Sports Fan but I’m personally invested in the U.S. team. I’ve followed them since what has unfortunately turned out to be their hey-day in the 1990s and am rooting for this group to reclaim the World Cup title after 16 years without one. I am hungry for knowledge about the upcoming tournament. Who is going to start? Who are the biggest threats to the American team? Are there any new up-and-coming players who could break out during the tournament like James Rodriguez and DeAndre Yedlin did last summer in the Men’s World Cup? I want to know all of that stuff. So, imagine my disappointment when I read the first paragraph of the first article about women’s soccer in the magazine: The Authentication of Alex Morgan by Janet Reitman.

Alex Morgan breezes into a Kansas City restaurant called Cafe Gratitude one early spring day looking perfect. Morgan is one of those people who can pull off appearing well-groomed even when drenched with sweat, and today she is casually, yet impeccably, attired in a long gray skirt, a black-and-white short-sleeved shrug and a white tank top, all of which she threw on after realizing she was half an hour late. She apologizes; she was trying to curl her hair. “I don’t know where my blow dryer is,” she says. There was also a minor crisis with her skirt, which apparently at some point was a crumpled mess. “I put it in the dryer for five minutes because we don’t have an iron yet.”

Okay, what? Alex Morgan is one of the key players on the U.S. team and, going into the World Cup, one of the biggest mysteries. She’s a star striker, who has been identified by many as the obvious goal-scoring successor to living legend Abby Wambach. Unfortunately, her last two years have been riddled with injuries and she’s missed most of the team’s recent games with a knee injury. A fully healthy Morgan would be a big part of the U.S. team but her health is questionable. She’s also more easily replaced than other stars on the team. Sydney Leroux provides a reasonable facsimile of Morgan and Amy Rodriguez or Christen Press could also step into her position. There’s so much good sports coverage to be had here but instead we get an introduction that focuses solely on Morgan’s appearance while also suggesting that she is ditzy in a stereotypically female way.

I move on to the second (and only other) article in the magazine about women’s soccer. This is an article about Hope Solo, the team’s long-time starting goalie. By Allison Glock, its headline is “Pride. Regret. Hope.” The article begins with a description of Solo’s home in Kirkland, Washington. We get a description of Solo’s “tasteful living room,” learning that it is “tidy, inviting” with its “plush beige couches” and “throw blankets [that] are draped over armrests.” Okay… We get a description of Solo, who is:

Tinier than you imagine. Lean, compact. The planes in her angular face catch what little light Seattle has to offer, her hair a Breck-girl wonder, her teeth white as the queen’s gloves.

When we hear from Solo herself, her first two quotes are about her husband, Jerramy Stevens. The first is, “He’s the neat freak.” The second, “I can’t even leave anything on the stairs.” Within four paragraphs, we have a description of Solo’s appearance, with reference to classic 1950s era shampoo ads, a description of her house which sounds like it comes out of an interior design article, and Solo herself speaking only about her husband. This article doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test so far!

All right, before we get carried away too far in our indignation about gender equality, there are some ameliorating circumstances and I am by no means out to hammer the two authors.

First, this is a magazine; a paper magazine. So, its articles have to be written and prepped far in advance. It can’t compete with websites in terms of newsworthiness, so it doesn’t try. Profiles are therefore a reasonable approach to take and the magazine frequently runs profiles of male athletes that also focus on their personal lives to some extent.

The second issue is the choice of subjects. The focus on Hope Solo’s family life is a legitimate, hard news focus because of a legal history that involves domestic abuses charges among other things. Of all the U.S. women’s soccer players, Alex Morgan has the most consciously constructed image. Her image is so carefully constructed that it’s hard to imagine writing about her without examining it. Solo and Morgan are both celebrities as well as athletes. Reitman recognizes this in her article when she writes:

If Hope Solo, with her complex personal life and frequent outbursts, is perceived as the Dark Queen in women’s soccer, then Alex Morgan is Snow White.

This is a hysterically accurate representation of how Morgan and Solo are viewed. So then, why choose those two? There are 21 other players on the team. Abby Wambach is the greatest goal scorer in international soccer history, men’s or women’s. Julie Johnston is a young player who is expected to play a major role on the team. Christie Rampone will be playing in her fifth World Cup. Why not profile athletes who are less set in the cultural understanding?

Admittedly, women’s sports is an active battleground in the gender-equality culture war, and its athletes consciously or unconsciously make and are seen as making statements about gender all the time. Ignoring the issue of gender completely (as I’ve chosen to do in my profiles) is sticking your head in the sand a little. As the articles go on, both authors make very clever and insightful comments about the diverging pressure women athletes are under to be feminine and win. Here is Reitman on Morgan:

Morgan has her own list of contradictions that don’t make her any less authentic: waving the flag for tween body image but contemplating breast implants; wanting her sport to be taken seriously while consciously leveraging her looks to attract male viewers…

In her article on Solo, Glock uses a quote from Solo’s teammate Carli Lloyd to describe the plight of being a world-class female athlete.

Lloyd has “felt pressure to be a certain kind of girl.” She too chafes at the double standard for women in sports, finding the impetus exhausting, if not impossible, to be sweet and approachable, to sand down every edge, to exist in a state of constant gratitude. “We live in a world where hair color and taking bikini selfies is more vital than stats,” sighs Lloyd, noting, “You can get shafted if you don’t play.”

The sad truth is that Lloyd is right. She has gotten shafted. She doesn’t construct a gendered image of herself as carefully as Morgan does or as Solo once tried to do, so she doesn’t get profiled in ESPN the Magazine. The editors of the magazine chose to focus on Solo and Morgan for a set of reasons. Their conventional attractiveness, enormous social media following, and status as known quantities in the culture were all part of that choice and all defensible to some extent. That’s kind of the problem with these types of social issues. A series of tiny defensible choices lead to the production of articles that focus almost exclusively on women’s athletes as women, not as athletes. That’s a shame.

I don’t mean to pick on ESPN. Some of their work has been excellent. ESPNW, its female focused branch provides consistently good coverage of the team.  The Louisa Thomas profile of Sydney Leroux on Grantland was excellent and even better is the series of articles about leading players from other country’s teams by Allison McCann. Five Thirty Eight, another ESPN property, is doing a statistical model of the World Cup just like they did for March Madness and other sporting events, male and female. In fact, this model was the only piece in the magazine aside from these two profiles to focus on the World Cup and it gives the U.S. a slight edge over Germany as the favorites to win it all.

I hope the team does win the World Cup, and if they do, I hope it nudges us a tiny bit closer to a world where we cover athletes the same way, regardless of gender. The U.S. women’s national soccer team plays its last warm-up game before the World Cup today against Korea at 4:30 p.m. ET. The game will be televised live on ESPN. If you’re looking for less gendered coverage of the team and the World Cup, (aside from this site, of course) I suggest purchasing a copy of Equalizer Soccer’s 2015 World Cup preview. Led by editors Jeff Kassouf and Ann Odong, this beautifully written and produced preview is chock full of coverage that’s sports focused.

Meet the U.S. Women's Soccer Team: Christie Rampone

The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. To help prepare you to root for team and country, we’re going to run a short profile of every player on the 23-person roster. When female athletes take their turn in the spotlight, they often receive coverage that is slanted toward non-game aspects of their stories — marriage, children, sexual preference, perceived lack-of or bountiful sexiness, social media activity, etc. In the hope of balancing things out, just a tiny bit, these previews will strive to stay on the field, with only a little bit of non-gendered personal interest when possible.

Christie Rampone

Position: Defender

Number: 3

National team experience: 305 appearances, this will be her fifth World Cup, and she has four international goals.

What to expect from Christie Rampone: After almost a decade and a half of being the heart and soul of the U.S. Women’s National Team, Rampone will finally be passing the torch and taking a firm seat on the bench. Even as recently as the start of this year, the smart money was on Rampone starting for the team at her normal central defensive position. Then a back injury in January forced her out of the lineup and gave Julie Johnston a shot. Johnston has played so well that it’s impossible to imagine Rampone fighting her way past her and into the starting lineup in this year’s World Cup. That doesn’t mean Rampone isn’t still important to the team. She is the sole remaining link to the 1999 World Cup Championship team and therefore the only person on the team with the experience of having won the Cup. I can’t write about the internal dynamics of the team, but from what I can tell from listening to interviews and reading about the team, it seems like Rampone’s leadership is much appreciated by the younger players. None of this is intended to suggest that Rampone is an honorary member of the team — she’s not. Now that her back injury has healed, she’s still fully capable of playing 90 minutes of hard-nosed, lightning quick defense. If there were an injury to a defender, fans should feel completely secure in seeing Rampone slotted back onto the defensive line.

Video: Four goals in 305 appearances for the U.S. team basically tells you all you need to know about Rampone’s style. She’s one of the fastest players out there and despite being only 5’6″, she’s a physical, no-nonsense defender.

Non-gendered personal interest item: Rampone has reached the point in her career when most of the personal interest stories written about her are about her age. Juliet Macur wrote the best article in that milieu for the New York Times. In it, she points out the technological novelty of Rampone having been originally invited to play on the national team by fax and uses Rampone as an example of the insidious shift in our culture away from raising children to be multi-sport athletes who play sports primarily for fun.

Links: Check out Rampone’s US Soccer page and follow her on Twitter.

What is going on with FIFA? Why is the U.S. arresting people?

Yesterday, the U.S. government arrested more than a dozen people involved with the organization of international soccer competitions. Many of them were in Switzerland for an annual meeting of their organization others were scattered around the world or already in U.S. custody. This is a big story and has been covered extensively by mainstream and alternative media alike. Even with all that coverage, you may still have some basic questions unanswered. If these are them, great! If not, feel free to comment below or email dearsportsfan@gmail.com.

What is FIFA?

FIFA is the primary organization that facilitates international soccer. Its name is a French abbreviation for Fédération Internationale de Football Association or the International Federation of Association Football in English. By maintaining relationships with regional organizations of a similar sort and directly with national soccer associations, FIFA facilitates all games between national soccer teams in both men’s and women’s soccer. This includes putting on the most important and financially viable international tournaments, the Men’s and Women’s World Cup. In many ways, FIFA resembles a country more than a company. It has a president and a congress, not a CEO and a board of directors, it has an anthem, and despite being a non-profit corporation, its 2013 revenue of $1.3 billion would place it 15th in a list of nations by gross domestic product, right between Mexico and Spain. Its current president, Sepp Blatter, has been in office since 1998.

What the heck is CONCACAF?

CONCACAF is one of six regional associations that FIFA maintains a relationship with. It is an absurdly constructed acronym for the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football. Within that region, CONCACAF does many of the things that FIFA does globally, including the running of big, financially viable international tournaments. FIFA uses CONCACAF and the other five major regional soccer associations as divisions for World Cup Qualification. CONCACAF is officially a non-profit and registered in the Bahamas.

Okay, so what exactly are the people who got indicted accused of doing?

The three key charges are “wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.” The key word there is racketeering, which is a term we normal associate with organized crime or the mafia. The association is a correct one in this case. Everything gets a lot easier if you think of FIFA as the Corleones, the Sopranos, or a giant, international conglomeration of Stringer Bells. The technical definition of racketeering is quite elegant. Racketeering is the act of collecting money to provide a solution to a problem that would not exist unless you were collecting money for it. A simple example is a protection scheme where a criminal named Bob offers to not break your leg for $50. It’s illegal because protecting your leg from being intentionally broken by Bob is not a problem you needed to solve until Bob started collecting money for not breaking your leg. In this case, the primary service that people within FIFA were collecting money for was for considering bids of countries to host soccer games or tournaments and of media companies or middleman companies called sports marketing companies to cover tournaments. Wire fraud can be widely interpreted as meaning “using a computer to do something else illegal.” So, if you’ve got racketeering and you’re not targeting someone in the stone age, you’ve got wire fraud. The definition of money laundering has expanded past the intentional exchange of illegally acquired money for legally acquired money to mean more generally using legitimate financial institutions like banks or credit cards for illegal acts. This makes money laundering another obvious add-on if you’ve got a racket.

Why is that illegal? Isn’t making money from people who want to host and cover their sporting events exactly what an international sports organization should be doing?

Well, yes, FIFA and CONCACAF exist to organize international soccer games and tournaments and there’s nothing wrong them charging for the right to host or carry those tournaments. The reason this qualifies as a racket is because FIFA officials were there for the purpose of voting on bids by countries and companies who wanted to be involved with soccer during events like the World Cup. No additional payment and certainly no personal payments should have been necessary. Bribing officials to consider your bid became a necessary solution only when those same officials invented a problem (if you don’t bribe me, I won’t vote for you.) A solution to a problem that the person providing the solution invented? That’s a racket!

Why does any of this stuff matters? Who cares?

Here’s the rub. As a soccer fan, none of this affects me. I don’t particularly care where tournaments are held or what media company gets to promote and cover them. I care about the soccer and the soccer players and the wonderful game. The fact that this story is showing up in sports pages and on sports blogs like this one is a distraction from the actual issues though. This isn’t a crime against sports, it’s a crime against people. When corrupt officials make the bid process for a World Cup into a bribery contest, only the most corrupt governments rise to the murky top. Corrupt countries are often despotic countries with very little regard for their own citizens or people in general. Hosting a World Cup is a giant, multi-year infrastructure project. The prime example of this has been and continues to be the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. The Washington Post estimates that a total of 1,200 workers, many of them South Asian migrant workers who are essentially trapped on the job, have died in Qatar since FIFA gave that country the World Cup. To writer Christopher Ingraham’s credit, he points out that this figure includes the death of all construction workers in the country, but even if that inflates it by a factor of 10, it would still be two times higher than the next highest death toll from a major sporting event, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. In case you think this is simply a bad country doing bad things which they would do even without FIFA’s encouragement, note that FIFA requires countries who want to host the World Cup to actually change their constitutions and laws during the tournament. In 2010, South Africa, (a country you think would know better), was forced to suspend the constitutional right to protest and constrain some laws regarding freedom of the press in order to host the World Cup.

Got it. Can we get back to deflated balls now?

Yes. Yes we can. Although, just in case you want more on FIFA, here are some great links:

Meet the U.S. Women's Soccer Team: Christen Press

The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. To help prepare you to root for team and country, we’re going to run a short profile of every player on the 23-person roster. When female athletes take their turn in the spotlight, they often receive coverage that is slanted toward non-game aspects of their stories — marriage, children, sexual preference, perceived lack-of or bountiful sexiness, social media activity, etc. In the hope of balancing things out, just a tiny bit, these previews will strive to stay on the field, with only a little bit of non-gendered personal interest when possible.

Christen Press

Position: Midfielder

Number: 23

National team experience: 44 appearances, this will be her first World Cup, and she has 20 international goals.

What to expect from Christen Press: Christen Press should be the breakout star of the World Cup for the U.S. team. Press is one of the most skilled and explosive players in the world. Everywhere she’s played, she’s scored goals in droves. In four years at Stanford, she scored 71 goals. Her senior year, she averaged a goal per game (lots of teams would be happy with that average) and won the coveted Hermann prize as the best college player in the country. Her goal scoring has translated to the professional level. In 2013, she became the first American to ever lead the elite Swedish league, the Damallsvenskan, in goal scoring. Stuck behind a logjam of brilliant strikers on the U.S. National team, including two of her peers, Alex Morgan and Sydney Leroux, Press was slow to get a chance to play at the senior international level. Her performance, when she has had a chance to play, have been consistently good. In her 44 appearances, she’s averaged .78 goals per 90 minutes. That’s impressive. In 2015, coach Jill Ellis has had Press playing primarily from an outside midfield position. This is a change for Press, who had played primarily as a striker before, but she seems to be embracing it. The position fits with her talents well. Watch for Press to get free in the midfield, collect the ball, and then use her speed and ball control to run at the defense. She’ll either find a seam to run through or collapse defenders onto her until she frees a teammate for a pass.

Video: It’s possible Press caught the French defense napping a little but it’s also possible that she’s just better and faster than all of them.

Non-gendered personal interest item: Press is a writer as well as a soccer player. She’s had articles published in the Chicago Daily News and the Player’s Tribune but my favorite was a first person account of her final two games with the Swedish club team Tyresö which she published on her blog. It’s rare for an athlete to write so openly and reflectively about their career as it’s happening. Here are a couple brief excerpts:

As much as the first goal against rattled us, it was nothing compared to the second. In just 10 minutes, we lost our lead and all of our confidence. I looked at the faces of my teammates. We had so much experience on the field, but faces seemed stricken with panic. So many our fittest players began to cramp halfway through that half. It was chaos.

I’ve tried really hard the last few years to be less attached to winning. I would like to fight as hard as I possibly can in each and every game, and win or lose, leave it at that and move forward. I know in my heart that that is the mindset I need to be a successful and happy athlete. But still, I knew that this game had taken a piece of me.

You can read the whole piece here.

Links: For more about Press, read Jeff Carlisle’s interview with her in ESPNW. Check out Press’ website, her US Soccer page and follow her on Twitter.

What's the easiest way to learn soccer? Soccer 101

If aliens were to descend to the surface of the earth today and demand, not to see our leader, but to see our most popular sport, delegates of the human species would undoubtedly bring them to a soccer game. Soccer is the most popular sport on the World and it’s not even very close. As a beginner fan, the sport can seem hard to understand or even boring but it’s not that hard to break through the wall to begin to enjoy soccer. Once you do, you’ll join literally billions of other people in the thrills of playing, watching, and understanding soccer.

Whether the pull to learn comes from an upcoming World Cup, a soccer loving parent, child, colleague, partner, or friend, or even just a self-generated hankering, Soccer 101 course is for you! Sign up for our six-part email course, and within a week, you’ll be walking and talking soccer like a knowledgeable novice soccer fan.












Note to current subscribers — to sign up for this course, click on the Update Subscription Preferences link on the bottom of any Dear Sports Fan email.

Here’s what Soccer 101 will cover:

  • Why do people like soccer?
  • How do the basics of soccer work?
  • How does the World Cup work?
  • How do fouls in soccer work?
  • Why do soccer players dive so much?
  • Why do soccer teams spend so much time passing the ball backwards?

Meet the U.S. Women's Soccer Team: Heather O'Reilly

The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. To help prepare you to root for team and country, we’re going to run a short profile of every player on the 23-person roster. When female athletes take their turn in the spotlight, they often receive coverage that is slanted toward non-game aspects of their stories — marriage, children, sexual preference, perceived lack-of or bountiful sexiness, social media activity, etc. In the hope of balancing things out, just a tiny bit, these previews will strive to stay on the field, with only a little bit of non-gendered personal interest when possible.

Heather O’Reilly

Position: Midfielder

Number: 9

National team experience: 218 appearances, this will be her third World Cup, and she has 41 international goals.

What to expect from Heather O’Reilly: Goal scoring sometimes seems like a knack more than a skill. Or at least, having the knack for it is at least as important as having the skills. Heather O’Reilly has both. She’s confident with the ball, ready to take on player head to head, beat them with a deceptive dribble and blow by them with speed that even in her 13th year on the U.S. national team is still present. She’s got a good shot but it’s not her primary weapon. She’s the kind of scorer who always seems to be in place to catch a fortuitous bounce or a little pass back from a striker and put it into the net. With the extraordinary logjam of talent up front, O’Reilly has moved backwards to midfield where she sees periodic action as a substitute. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see her get into around half the games during this year’s World Cup, especially when the United States has the lead and her veteran presence will help close out a victory with no mistakes.

Video: When watching this highlight package, try to count the number of times O’Reilly scores just by being where the ball is going to go before it gets there.

Non-gendered personal interest item: In 2002, when O’Reilly was called up to the U.S. team for the first time, she was a 17-year-old high schooler. Unthinkable now, (there is only one college player on the current team) it was an extraordinary experience for O’Reilly. Read Graham Hayes’ profile of O’Reilly in ESPNW for more about her long career on the USWNT. Also, this is a direct quote from O’Reilly’s Wikipedia page: “In January 2013, she gave a speech to the students at South Lawrence East 5th Grade Academy. Afterwards, she proceeded to beat the entire student body in a footrace.” Ha!!

Links: Check out O’Reilly’s website, her US Soccer page and follow her on Twitter.

Help set the curriculum for our soccer courses

Dear Dear Sports Fan Fan,

In the next week and a half, before the Women’s World Cup begins, I’m going to be releasing several email correspondence courses designed to help the beginner, intermediate, or expert soccer fan get more out of watching and following soccer. I’d love your input on what should be included. Here is my first draft of the contents. Let me know what I need to add, take away, or shift around! You can leave comments at the bottom of this page or send me email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com

Soccer 101

  • Why do people like soccer?
  • How do the basics of soccer work?
  • How does the World Cup work?
  • How do fouls in soccer work?
  • Why do soccer players dive so much?
  • Why do soccer teams spend so much time passing the ball backwards?

Soccer 201: Positions and Logistics

  • What are goalies and what do they do in soccer?
  • What are defenders?
  • What are midfielders?
  • What are strikers?
  • How do substitutions work?
  • What is stoppage time?
  • How does overtime work?

Soccer 202: Culture

  • Why do soccer fans whistle?
  • Why is soccer so liberal?
  • Why do players blame the ball?
  • Playing good vs. playing well

Soccer 203: Crime and Punishment

  • What is a penalty kick?
  • What is a shoot-out?
  • What are red and yellow cards?
  • What is advantage?
  • How does the offside rule work?
  • What is a set piece?
  • What kind of set pieces are there?

Soccer 204: Events/Leagues

  • How does European club soccer work?
  • How does the Champions League work?
  • Why is Major League Soccer like a New York City co-op?
  • What is El Clasico?

Soccer 301

  • How does the away goals tie-breaker work?
  • What is a nutmeg?
  • What are some common soccer formations?

Thanks for your help,
Ezra