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Fox Sports
19-07-2025
- Sport
- Fox Sports
Was Argentina-France the Best World Cup Final Ever? Ranking The 5 Best
Editor's note: This story was published on Dec. 19, 2022. Was the 2022 FIFA World Cup final the best in the tournament's history? There were multiple game-tying goals, a hat-trick by one global superstar, and yes — the elusive title for the GOAT. But there have been plenty of other classics. We looked back at every men's final and picked the five greatest: 5. 1970: Brazil 4, Italy 1 in Mexico Although this match is the only one that wasn't really close in score, there was so much history rolled up in this that it has to be considered an all-time great. To wit: This marked the first time two former champions had met in a World Cup final. It was the last match of Pelé's World Cup career and made him the only player to this day to win three World Cup titles. Brazil coach Mario Zagallo became the first person to win the World Cup as a player and manager. Overall, this was a historic event and made Brazil the most successful national team with three titles, a distinction it still holds. 4. 1954: West Germany 3, Hungary 2 in Switzerland Known in German circles as "Wunder von Bern" (Miracle of Bern), this is one of the largest upsets in World Cup history as Hungary was a heavy favorite to claim the title. This match earned Germany the first World Cup title in its history and remains the only World Cup final where a team overcame a two-goal deficit to win the match (had France won on Sunday, it would have repeated this feat). Hungary struck twice early taking a 2-0 lead after just eight minutes, but West Germany outscored the Hungarians 3-0 the rest of the way with the final score coming in the 84th minute. A truly epic comeback for the ages. 3. 1966: England 4, West Germany 2 (a.e.t) in England Known for the "Phantom Goal" that gave England its first and only World Cup title. The final was played in its home country at the historic Wembley Stadium, and it started at a frenzied pace with both sides connecting on a goal within the first 20 minutes. After West Germany tied it in stoppage time to send it to extra time, it was all England. The Three Lions were able to drive home two more scores to take the crown. Those two goals were scored by Geoff Hurst, who became the first player with a hat-trick in the World Cup final. It was an all-around impressive performance played on a country's home turf and had history all over the place. 2. 1950: Uruguay 2, Brazil 1 in Brazil Better known as the "Maracanazo" for the shocking defeat – and one of the sport's greatest upsets – at the iconic stadium in Rio de Janeiro. This wasn't technically a World Cup final, but rather a de facto final determined by a final group stage. Because of that, Uruguay needed to beat Brazil and Brazil just needed to avoid defeat to claim the title. Uruguay trailed 1-0 in the second half, but scored goals in the 66th and 79th minutes while holding the Brazilians in check to claim the 2-1 victory and title. It was the second title for Uruguay. 1. 2022: Argentina 3, France 3 (a.e.t, Argentina wins 4-2 on PK) in Qatar Recency bias aside, this is without a doubt the greatest World Cup final in history. There were so many compelling storylines and even more added as the match was played: Would Messi get his first in what was potentially his last World Cup? Could France be the first repeat champion in 60 years? You could even throw in the fact the Golden Boot race was tied between Kylian Mbappé and Messi, two of the world's greatest stars taking part in this game. Argentina was in control 2-0 before Mbappé laced a penalty kick into the back of the net to halve the deficit for France. Mbappé scored just one minute later in the 81st minute to tie the match with the final heading for extra time. In extra time, Mbappé would connect on another penalty to tie the match and make him just the second player in World Cup final history with a hat trick (this followed a Messi goal that looked like a fairytale finish). After that penalty score, the title was settled in penalties – both stars converted their kicks, of course – with Argentina coming away with the crown. Messi winning his first World Cup in the likely final opportunity would have been enough to be among the best finals ever, but the drama, talent and back-and-forth intrigue made this the undisputed best. Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account , and follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily! recommended Item 1 of 1 Get more from the FIFA Men's World Cup Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
New York Post
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Trump quips about signing executive order mandating soccer be called ‘football' in America: ‘I think we could do that'
President Trump joked about requiring the US to call soccer 'football' in line with the rest of the world during an interview at the FIFA Club World Cup final Sunday, where he touched on the state of America and his favorite sports stars. Trump attended the FIFA final at MetLife Stadium Sunday evening, where Chelsea FC trounced Paris Saint-Germain FC in what the president aptly described as 'a bit of an upset.' 4 President Trump joked about signing an executive order on soccer at the FIFA Club World Cup final Sunday. Getty Images Advertisement Despite the let-down match, Trump lit up when a reporter suggested penning a new executive order officially renaming soccer 'football' in the US. 'I think we could do that,' he told DAZN. 4 Trump attended the match alongside FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a good friend of his. FIFA via Getty Images Advertisement The commander in chief was invited to the tournament by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a longtime friend. He said he took great pleasure in watching soccer boom in the US with hopes it could soon match the country's other standings on the world stage. '[The US] is doing very well on the other stage, on the political stage, on the financial stage. I was just in Saudi Arabia, I was in Qatar, I was in the UAE. Here we have Qatar, you know, the big presence they have, but you have all of the leaders and then you look at NATO, all of the leaders said 'a year ago your country was dead, and now you have the hottest country in the world',' Trump told the outlet. 'There's a lot of truth to that, we were doing very badly as a country in an incompetent administration and now we have a hot country. It's really hot. And I think the soccer is going to be hot here too.' 4 Trump also handed out a series of trophies after the final match ended. POOL/AFP via Getty Images Advertisement Trump cheekily added that FIFA had to make a whole new Club World Cup trophy after Infantino left it in the Oval Office in March as a gift to the president that conveniently matches his signature gilded decor. Infantino has previously praised Trump for embracing FIFA and offering up the US to host both World Cups, with the main stage tournament's final coming to New Jersey's MetLife stadium in July 2026. 4 Trump said his favorite FIFA player was the late Brazilian legend Pelé. Getty Images Trump hopes that boosting athletics, particularly sports with international popularity like soccer, can provide greater points of connection between total strangers or entire countries typically at odds. Advertisement '[Sports] is about unity, a lot of getting together, a lot of love between countries. I guess this is probably the most international sport, so it can really bring the world together,' he told the outlet. Trump added that of FIFA's star-studded lineup, Brazilian football legend Pelé would be his personal 'GOAT,' even if the choice did age him, he said. He noted that he was fortunate enough to see Pelé in action when he was 'a young guy' and has revered the late champion ever since.
Hypebeast
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Your First Look at Michelob ULTRA's Pitchside Club Event in NYC
Michelob ULTRA's Pitchside Club in NYC is officially open—and if you haven't RSVP'd yet, now's your chance at theofficial event site. Friendly reminder: access is 21+ and free, but capacity is limited, so don't wait. Located in midtown Manhattan's SECOND (849 6th Ave.) event space, this six-day pop-up (July 8–13) is a premium soccer destination where fans can catch the remaining FIFA Club World Cup 2025™ matches. The Pitchside Club blends the energy of the tournament with a specially curated fan experience. Inside, you'll find vintage kits, cold pints, and electrifying match viewing—all under one roof, built for the game's most devoted enthusiasts. As you step inside, you'll get to make your way through a player tunnel flanked by rare artifacts from the FIFA Museum—like Pelé's 1962 Brazil tracksuit and a Cristiano Ronaldo game-worn Real Madrid jersey. Inside, wall-to-wall screens stream the matches, backed by booming 4D sound in the Lovesac Lounge. Meanwhile, fans can take on friends in foosball or test their skills against a virtual Messi in a 'G-O-A-T' challenge. For something new, try Subsoccer: a fast-paced table-based soccer game where you play seated, kicking under the table for the win. The Hypebeast Kit Bar is the event's prime offering where guests have a chance to score a free Michelob ULTRA jersey and personalize it live with exclusive patches, embroidery, and heat-press graphics. And don't miss Hypebeast Night on Thursday, July 10, where a limited-edition kit drops and stylists help fans build stylish looks. Classic Football Shirts NYC will also be on-site with a rare collection of vintage gear, while digital archives dig deep into jersey history. Elsewhere in the space, photo ops abound—from a trophy flex with the 'Superior Player of the Match' award to share-worthy moments throughout the club. A live broadcast studio hosts watch-along shows, a sports legends panel, and celebrity interviews, adding even more to the lineup. Lock in your RSVPhereand don't miss one of the week's most exciting matchday experiences.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
New York Cosmos revived as USL expansion club in New Jersey
For most of the past decade, the New York Cosmos have almost solely existed in the American soccer landscape's past tense. The impact of Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer playing in the nation's largest market still resonates half a century later, with Inter Miami's signing of Lionel Messi arguably being the modern-day remake of a 1970s classic. Proponents of the nation's lower-division terrain also speak of the Cosmos — arguably the most successful second-division team of the modern era, dominating the NASL from 2013 to 2017 — with a sort of begrudging respect, a lucrative Goliath that forcibly cast every opponent as that match's David. Advertisement What's been lacking since the NASL's own revival ended in 2017 is a fresh batch of memories to keep the Cosmos from being more of a brand than a soccer team. The Cosmos have played just four competitive games in that span, all during the lockdown autumn of 2020. While the team name and logo have undeniable cachet, their value was greater among nostalgic collectors than neutrals searching for an active point of entrance into following the sport. On Thursday, however, the ownership group bringing a USL club to New Jersey is reviving the Cosmos' on-field legacy. Officially, this marks the return of the New York Cosmos, which will debut in third-division USL League One in 2026. The group bought the intellectual property as well as primary ownership of the club from Rocco Commisso, with the Fiorentina owner (who acquired the Cosmos in 2017, two years before purchasing the Serie A side) holding 'a small ownership stake.' There's significant continuity to the 2010s iteration beyond the name. Among the co-owners is Erik Stover, who joined the club in NASL in 2012. In his previous role with the New York Red Bulls, he played a crucial role in both signing Thierry Henry and the building of Red Bull Arena (now Sports Illustrated Stadium), winning MLS executive of the year in 2010. With the Cosmos, Stover kept the club at or near the top of the NASL for each of its five seasons, working with Giovanni Savarese on the sporting side to bring in aging icons (like Raúl and Marcos Senna) as well as a strong domestic core. But first, to link two previous points: these New York Cosmos will play their games in New Jersey. As such, the team will revisit one of its crest variations that was donned by Pelé and Beckenbauer at the height of the club's buzziest heyday. 'The Cosmos have told a very winding story over the decades,' Stover told The Athletic on Wednesday, 'including in that, at its very peak in 1977, when the Cosmos came to Giants Stadium, they took New York out of the crest and it became just 'Cosmos.' So that's the logo that most people recognize with the heyday of the Cosmos: 1977, '78, Pelé and Beckenbauer, packed stadiums. That's really part of our history; we're sort of reliving it again. Advertisement 'It's funny: I was talking to (former Cosmo and U.S. international) Werner Roth last night. For the first time ever, the Cosmos will have their own stadium that they call home — both men's and women's. For the first time, we're not nomadic. We're not wondering where we're playing next year.' The Cosmos will play at Hinchliffe Stadium, a 7,800-seat arena located in Paterson, N.J. The venue itself is in the midst of a revival. Hinchliffe Stadium originally opened in 1932 and hosted the Negro Leagues' New York Black Yankees and the American Soccer League's New Jersey Eagles in the late 1980s before shuttering in 1996 after many neglectful years without maintenance and upkeep. In 2023, it reopened to become the home of the New Jersey Jackals, an independent league baseball team. As for the aesthetics, while the above crest explainer retcons aspects of the club's identity, especially in rationalizing its original color palette, it's a mark that will instantly have a place in the wardrobes and on the walls of diehard fans of soccer around the world. Despite the stops, starts and various iterations, the Cosmos remain a singularly recognizable brand in American soccer. Their one-time heights have now become part of the sport's oral tradition, when the game's original 'GOAT' came stateside to face other luminaries including Johan Cruyff, George Best, Gerd Müller and Gordon Banks. Stover won't be working on the club's rebuild alone; in vintage Cosmos fashion, he's recruited a storied ex-international to play a central role. Earlier this week, the group announced that it added retired striker Giuseppe Rossi as the club's vice chairman and head of soccer. A former Italy international, Rossi was born in Teaneck, less than 14 miles from Hinchliffe Stadium. Rossi will be directly involved in daily decision-making, with his playing career helping inform what he still views as one of the biggest areas where soccer in the U.S. trails many other nations: the critical steps in player development during their teenage years. Advertisement 'Today, I feel like it's parents more than anything telling these kids that they have to decide something at 13, 14, 15 years old,' Rossi told Goal this week. 'It's ridiculous, absurd. They do that so they can have a status. Who gives a crap? Who cares where they're playing national team soccer at 13, 14, 15 years old? It doesn't mean anything. It's just a status for parents so they can talk about their kids and say this and that. It's not developing players. It's putting extra pressure and it's taking away from what the true focus should be: developing and having the right coaches to develop.' Albeit speaking with less outright antagonism, it's a general sentiment that's in line with Stover's view. His time with both the NASL's Cosmos and the Red Bulls has given him ample experience in how players can advance in their careers at the MLS level as well as in the lower leagues. 'I think anybody that works in soccer in the United States will tell you that we're not very good at developing players from their mid-teens to their early 20s,' Stover said. 'And it's been a problem. It's largely because we don't have enough professional environments for kids to continue their career. 'Even if you can get a scholarship to a pay-to-play system, or even if you're playing with the Red Bulls, you might not be able to get there, You don't have a car, there's not fast transit. The practical challenges of just training are very real.' While many USL clubs have gradually incorporated academy structures into their structure, the overwhelming majority of high-end player development is entrusted to the most established MLS setups. In 2025, MLS launched its 30th active club in San Diego — a large number of teams for a first-division league, but one that can only provide a fraction of the requisite opportunities needed to keep up with the number of youth soccer players in the country. Most non-MLS programs charge fees to participate (the 'pay-to-play system' referenced by Stover), a significant barrier to entry for many. There's significant geographic scarcity, too. Seattle Sounders midfielder Obed Vargas, a breakout talent in recent years, had to relocate from Alaska as a teenager to chase his professional dreams. U.S. international and Crystal Palace defender Chris Richards left Birmingham, Ala., to join FC Dallas' academy before the USL set up a club in the area. Even the more populated hotbeds like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York/New Jersey are left with very few opportunities for burgeoning pipelines of rising talent. 'The example I like to give is that in New Jersey, there are nine and a half million people,' Stover said. 'There's one professional club in the entire state. Red Bull does it very well, but they're the only one. In Portugal, there are 10 million people, and there are lots of clubs across so many levels and layers of the hierarchy. The net that they're casting is much, much wider than ours.' Advertisement It's a strong commitment to development that could help this iteration of the Cosmos be less reliant on the stars it recruits and better equipped to endure on its own merit. While the Cosmos will still nominally identify with 'New York,' just like the Red Bulls, it's another avenue available for promising young New Jerseyans who may follow in Rossi's footsteps. The Cosmos will also arrive in the USL — which was a direct rival to the NASL in the 2010s — at a time when the league system itself is undergoing an ambitious reinvention. In March, the USL's boards of governors (comprising all owners in the Championship and League One) voted to adopt a promotion and relegation model. Owners see it as a way to go beyond the current local, community-driven iteration and gain a greater national and international following. The narrative potential will only get richer as neutrals can monitor the Cosmos' hopes to rise the ranks to join a newly proposed and first-division sanctioned league to operate above the Championship. Throughout the 2010s, and especially under Commisso, the Cosmos' became synonymous with the NASL's opposition to the MLS model, a single-entity structure which is a closed system with no other pathway into the league but nine-figure expansion fees. The years following the NASL's final season in 2017 saw the NASL and U.S. Soccer clash in painfully slow-moving litigation. In February, the antitrust lawsuit was dismissed by a jury. Still, Stover feels the legal push did help the USL set up its more ambitious trajectory. 'My personal opinion is that the USL Super League would not be first division if it wasn't for all the lawsuits against U.S. Soccer, and how U.S. Soccer was operating back then,' Stover said. (The USL Super League is a first-division sanctioned women's league that debuted last summer and provided the women's landscape with a second professional league at the highest level, joining the NWSL.) 'I think it's also paved the way for promotion and relegation,' he continued. 'When you're operating a club, it is so wonderful to have hope as part of your club's identity, and we haven't really had that in the past. Now, what it's going to look like and how it unfolds, I don't know. But we know it's coming, and so a whole bunch of things have come together to make this a really unique moment in time for us.' There's still a lot of work left to do, both for the Cosmos' impending relaunch as well as the USL's aims to kick off pro-rel. The former pursuit will happen far quicker, with USL League One historically kicking its seasons off in March. Advertisement So while the name and identity are familiar and the history is indelible, the months to come are all about refining the modern iteration's DNA with a clearer focus on being as valuable for Northern New Jersey as it is for merchandise collectors. 'We've been hyper focused on really defining who we are,' Stover said. 'The Cosmos' legacy is clear. The cosmopolitan nature of the club has been clear. But for us, it's how do we apply it in a way that really works here in North Jersey, and then taking those concepts and putting them into practical use. Those ideas have informed every decision we've made with staffing. So many of the people we've hired, if not all, are from New Jersey. Several are from Paterson, grew up in the neighborhoods here, and our entire goal needs to be about building a community around the club. 'It's really great to look around the room and see a very diverse set of people in so many different ways, but that everybody's unified on building this club back up in a way that is community-driven.'
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Teenage sensation Gilberto Mora breaks record in Gold Cup final
Mexico retained their CONCACAF Gold Cup crown on Sunday night with a dramatic 2-1 win over the United States in Houston. While goals from Raúl Jiménez and Edson Álvarez secured a second consecutive title for El Tri, it was 16-year-old midfielder Gilberto Mora who truly stole the spotlight. Advertisement The teenager not only started the final but also etched his name into the history books by becoming the youngest player ever to win a senior international tournament. At just 16 years and 265 days old, Mora's achievement surpasses that of Lamine Yamal, who only last summer helped Spain win Euro 2024 at the age of 17 years and 1 day. Before Yamal, the record had been held for decades by the legendary Pelé, who won the 1958 World Cup at 17 years and 249 days. Mora has now surpassed them both. The Club Tijuana prodigy first featured in the quarter-final against Saudi Arabia, before earning starts in both the semi-final and final. He registered an assist for Jiménez's winner against Honduras in the last four, and went on to play 75 composed minutes in the final against the U.S., showing a maturity well beyond his years. FIFA has now officially recognised Mora as the youngest player ever to feature in and win the final of a senior-level international competition. Advertisement His performances have not only cemented his place in Mexican football history but also attracted growing interest from major European clubs. However, any move abroad appears to be on hold for now, with his immediate future likely remaining in Liga MX. Just under a year ago, Yamal's triumph with Spain seemed destined to stand for some time. But Mora's rapid rise has rewritten the record books again, confirming the arrival of yet another teenage talent on the world stage.
