NBC’s Premier League coverage: It’s hard to say whether NBC’s Premier League coverage has 
earned such widespread adulation because of Rebecca Lowe’s slick transitions between games and Robbie Earle’s clever studio analysis, or merely because the network decided not to recruit Warren Barton. I honestly don’t know, but I’m pretty certain that NBC won over a lot of doubters simply by not hiring the superhumanly stupid former defender.
The Ted Lasso video helped, too.
Brazil is hosting the Confederations Cup, an eight-team tournament that serves as a kind of warm-up for the World
Cup, which kicks off in about a year. Brazil is also hosting a series of increasingly controversial demonstrations: in the last week, Brazilians have taken to the streets to protest everything from high bus fares to government corruption to the construction of football stadiums.
These protests represent a rare phenomenon: the news story that gets as much coverage in the New York Times (bastion of high-quality journalism) as on ESPN Soccernet (The Worldwide Leader in Misplaced Commas) and the BBC Sports website (employer of Alan Shearer). Football has always influenced world politics – read Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy – but, truth be told, the Times’ hard news and ESPN’s football analysis almost never overlap. This is an unusual situation, and it’s generated some interesting contrasts.
In For The Hat Trick 