“The shock value is notable. The Serie A champions not making it through the Champions League league phase. The current best in class and league leaders by 10 points going out to Bodo/Glimt. Two teams exiting in the play-off round this season. Three last season. Eliminations at the hands of Belgians and the Dutch in 2025, Norwegians and Turks in 2026. Discarded players like Ivan Perisic, Noa Lang, Victor Osimhen and Jens Petter Hauge coming back to haunt their old league. Headlines calling it a “disaster”. Talk show hosts making sensationalist claims about Bodo/Glimt’s payroll being the equivalent of Catania, Salernitana, Vicenza and Benevento’s in Italy’s third division. The sheer embarrassment of it. A country’s anxieties stoked ahead of the national team’s own play-off against Northern Ireland next month, when the risk of missing out on another World Cup, the third in a row, hangs heavy once again. …”
NY Times/The Athletic
Champions League knockouts: 16 teams remain, all-English ties loom in latter stages
“An entertaining Champions League play-off round is complete, with last year’s runners-up Inter comprehensively beaten by Norwegian side Bodo/Glimt in one of the tournament’s biggest shocks for several years. Juventus’ task — trailing 5-2 from their first leg against Galatasary — was even steeper. … Newcastle United ensured that six English teams will be in the last 16. Anthony Gordon scored four goals in one half in the first leg as they cruised past Qarabag of Azerbaijan, clocking up the furthest competitive away trip an English side has ever made in the process. …”
NY Times/The Athletic
“Atletico Madrid’s 7-4 aggregate Champions League play-off round victory over Club Brugge sees Diego Simeone’s new-look side roll on to face either Liverpool or Tottenham Hotspur in the last 16, and comes as veteran attacker Antoine Griezmann mulls a possible move to MLS. The build-up to Tuesday’s game 
“Tonight’s Champions League match between Real Madrid and Benfica sees Jose Mourinho return to the Bernabeu for the first time since his turbulent spell at the Spanish club from 2010 to 2013. He does so in dramatic circumstances. Last Tuesday’s knockout phase play-off first leg between the teams saw Mourinho sent off for protesting from the sidelines during a 1-0 defeat for his Portuguese side. After the game, he made headlines around the world with his comments about the alleged racist abuse of Madrid forward Vinicius Jr by Benfica winger Gianluca Prestianni. …”
Queretaro (in red) will be forced to play their league match on a later date 
“The year that Inter last won the Champions League, their historic treble season of 2009-10, Bodo/Glimt finished sixth in the Norwegian second division. We could be here for quite a while, listing ways to measure the gulf in the respective sizes and international reputations of these two clubs, but that seems as good as any. One of the most historic and storied football clubs to ever exist — 20-time Serie A champions and three-time European champions — were beaten on Tuesday, and beaten easily, by ‘a team from a small town up north’, as their head coach, Kjetil Knutsen, put it after the game. …”
“FC St. Pauli is considered one of the most left-wing football clubs in the world, with a long-standing commitment to 
“Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football. This was the round where Arsenal answered a few critics with another 4-1 victory against Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool boosted their Champions League prospects with a smash-and-grab win at Nottingham Forest, moving them level on points with Chelsea, who stuttered at home to Burnley. We will ask whether talk over Arsenal’s supposed fragile mentality is valid, question just how much trouble Spurs are in and ponder what on earth has happened to Crystal Palace. …”
One of the biggest cheers of the night from Benfica fans was the introduction of their young Black striker Arthur Cabral
“Liverpool had one Alexis Mac Allister goal disallowed in the 90th minute and one Alexis Mac Allister goal allowed in the 97th minute, earning Arne Slot’s side a late victory against Nottingham Forest at the City Ground. The first was ruled out for striking his elbow, and the second was given after a lengthy delay ruled that Ola Aina’s left boot had played Virgil van Dijk onside in the build-up to Mac Allister finding the back of the net with seconds left to play. The win papers over the cracks of a disappointing display from Liverpool against 
“One of the themes of Manchester City’s attack this season has been their ability to operate in a narrow or wide shape depending on the available players and the opponent’s setup. This flexibility was evident in City’s 2-1 victory away to Nottingham Forest in December, when the switch from a narrow 4-3-3 shape on the ball to a 3-1-3-3 in the second half stretched the opponent’s shape and created spaces between the lines. In either of those attacking shapes, the rotations and fluidity have helped City 
Estádio 11 de Novembro, Luanda, Angola.
La Liga has reacted to 26 instances of racist abuse towards Vinicius Junior
“Welcome to the latest edition of Inside Barcelona, our weekly series to follow throughout La Liga’s 2025-26 season. Every week, we will bring you key information and analysis on the biggest talking points, cutting through the noisy world of all things Barca with reporting you can trust. The information contained in this article reflects multiple conversations with various sources at the Spanish champions, all of whom wanted to speak anonymously to protect relationships. …”
“Xabi Alonso’s response to a question about his preferred playing style in his first press conference as Real Madrid head coach last May was instructive. … Alvaro Arbeloa’s response to the same question seven-and-a-half months later, after being promoted to the first-team job from coaching in the club’s academy in the wake of Alonso’s January 12 sacking, was much simpler. …”
“… Anatoliy Trubin has had a bit more time to process what happened in the 98th minute of Benfica’s final Champions League group game against Real Madrid. But it still doesn’t feel entirely real. To recap: because of injuries and a couple of VAR reviews in the first half, the game was still going six or seven minutes after every other fixture on the last, chaotic day of the group stage had finished. That meant Benfica knew what they had to do to make it into the playoffs for the knockout stages. Well, in theory they did. …”
“New Year, new managers. Chelsea kicked things off when they sacked Enzo Maresca on New Year’s Day, before Manchester United parted company with Ruben Amorim four days later. Now, after a pair of February firings this week, there have been four Premier League sackings already in 2026, the most ever seen across the first two months of a calendar year. Tottenham Hotspur reignited the sacking spree when they dismissed Thomas Frank on Wednesday, while Nottingham Forest relieved Sean Dyche of his duties less than 24 hours later, releasing a statement in the early hours of Thursday following their 0-0 draw at home to last-place-by-a-mile Wolverhampton Wanderers the previous evening. …”
Sandro Tonali of Newcastle complains to referee Chris Kavanagh during Saturday’s FA Cup game against Aston Villa
Fabian Hurzeler pictured during Brighton’s FA Cup tie at Anfield on Saturday
Tottenham Hotspur’s sporting director Johan Lange (left) and CEO Vinai Venkatesham, the men who will appoint a long-term successor to Thomas Frank
“After beating Barnsley in the FA Cup last month, Arne Slot admitted that his approach to analysing opponents might need a rethink. ‘We’ve played 30 games this season and I’d say 28 of my pre-match meetings, I could just throw in the bin,’ he said in a press conference, highlighting the extent to which he feels teams have altered their approach when lining up against Liverpool. For context — and this is important — Slot was not suggesting that opponents should roll over and play into Liverpool’s hands. Against Barnsley, for example, he acknowledged that he also would have adopted defensive tactics in their position. …”
“All FA Cup draws are equal, but some are more equal than others. It is an age-old maxim for managers to rebuff suggestions that they have been handed a favourable tie in football’s oldest competition. Jose Mourinho provided a classic of the genre when his Premier League employers Tottenham were given a third-round tie away to Middlesbrough of the second-tier Championship in the 2019-20 competition. …”
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the controversial government agency known as ICE, will play a ‘key part’ in the 2026 World Cup’s ‘overall security apparatus,’ its 
“Liverpool came through a bruising encounter away to Sunderland, with battles across the pitch and a serious-looking injury to Wataru Endo. Virgil van Dijk’s goal just after the hour was enough to seal three points at the Stadium of Light and inflict the hosts’ first home defeat of the season after a first half in which Liverpool missed several chances, before Endo had to be carried off a few minutes later to add to their right-back concerns. …”
“A couple of weeks ago, two football stories which seemed unrelated were, in reality, very much connected. The first story was 
“Sean Dyche was right when he observed that Evangelos Marinakis was unlikely to sack him on the back of one poor performance by his Nottingham Forest side at Leeds United. But there is a reason Forest’s match tonight (Wednesday) against fellow relegation candidates Wolverhampton Wanderers feels as though it will carry an additional weight for their head coach. It is not just one game that has left Dyche’s position in the spotlight less than four months into his tenure as Forest’s third head coach of this season, but the cumulative effect of several recent displays. …”
Dominik Szoboszlai departs down the tunnel after his late red card against Manchester City
Jorgen Strand Larsen, James Ward-Prowse and Tony Pulis
“Manchester United’s interim manager has long been on the premises, if not in the building. In recent years Michael Carrick was a regular visitor at the club’s Carrington training ground, sitting unassumingly in his car for hours, waiting for his son Jacey, now 15, to finish training with United’s junior sides. Those staff who are still around — and many are not — from when Carrick left United in December 2021 after his previous interim spell in charge would say hello, but the man himself usually kept a low profile. …”
“The many spirits pouring out of Central and South America will continue to fill New Yorkers’ cocktail glasses this fall. Following the lead of recently opened bars like Tijuana Picnic on the Lower East Side and Leyanda in Brooklyn, new places like the Daisy on the Upper East Side and Lorenzo’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, will pour not only the familiar tequila and mezcal, but also sotol, cachaça, pisco and aguardiente. …”
“And just like that, Leicester City found themselves embroiled in a battle against relegation to the third tier. Confirmation filtered through on Thursday evening that the Championship club were subject to a six-point deduction, handed down by an independent commission, for breach of the English Football League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR). The sanction leaves a side who are currently without a manager, following the sacking of Marti Cifuentes last month, outside the second division’s bottom three on goal difference alone. …”
“… Joseph Oughourlian, owner of Racing Club de Lens, was responding to a question from The Athletic about what it would mean for Lens — a city in northern France with a population of just 35,000 — to pip Paris Saint-Germain to the Ligue 1 title. With 20 matches played in Ligue 1, and 14 remaining, Lens trail the European champions by just two points, having been leading at Christmas for the winter break. They will have a keen eye on PSG’s next match, at home to Marseille in Le Classique on Sunday night. For Lens to even be in the title mix at this stage is a remarkable achievement. …”
“Of the many ways that Pep Guardiola is not a typical football manager, the strength with which he holds his political convictions is especially striking. On Tuesday, a seemingly routine pre-match press conference, ahead of his Manchester City side’s League Cup semi-final against Newcastle United, turned into a global talking point. ‘Right now we kill each other for what? For what?’ he implored a room full of journalists, ostensibly there to get answers to questions about refereeing decisions and City’s inability to play well after half-time. …”
“The 2026 tournament is the 10th since it was expanded in 2017, from 38 to 47 teams. And it wasn’t just an expansion of teams in the tournament, it was also an expansion of the tournament’s length. 10 years ago, the Libetadores’ schedule was expanded from a 6 month-time-frame to a whopping and roster-depleting 11 month-long tournament (to the detriment of smaller clubs). Since then, no team from a country other than Brazil or Argentina has won the title. Brazilian teams have won it 8 times since the tournament-expansion, and an Argentinian team has won it once since then. 
“The 2026 
“Pep Guardiola was defiant in his press conference after Manchester City threw away a two-goal lead to draw with Spurs, but he did admit his side have ‘difficulties for many things’. They are the kind of things that mean City’s latest dropped points cannot be explained by the unusual Tottenham curse, which has seen them win just four of their 12 matches against the Londoners since the start of the 2021-22 season. If there is an underlying reason for that poor head-to-head record then it may be that Spurs, seemingly no matter how much they may be struggling, relish the opportunity to hit teams on the break, and have been able to turn over City when they have been trying to find some momentum themselves. …”
Manchester United owners Avram Glazer, Jim Ratcliffe, Joel Glazer and Malcolm Glazer on a devil’s fork held by a protestor in May 2025
Dominic Solanke scores his spectacular second goal as Spurs fight back from two down to draw with Manchester City
Jagiellonia Bialystok fans at a Conference League game. Their club is one of three from Poland to have made the knockout phase this season.
“… Striker Omar Bogle, who plays for Crewe Alexandra in League Two, is recalling to The Athletic the frightening moment last year when he became addicted to sleeping pills and painkillers. He initially started taking the pills after suffering a back fracture during pre-season in the summer of 2024. Bogle described the back fracture as the worst pain he’d ever felt. In agony and struggling to sleep, he turned to sleeping pills and, similarly to the painkillers he was taking, at the beginning, he found them helpful. …”
Coventry players celebrate during their Championship win over Leicester this month
Scissors Kick 