The Football Weekend

Club football is back and so is Germany’s biggest game. It’s BAYERN MUNICH vs BORUSSIA DORTMUND in Der Klassiker.

The Bavarian hosts have returned to their formidable best with 11 wins from 11 matches across all competitions this season. Bayern have scored 25 goals in six Bundesliga matches, with Harry Kane, Luis Díaz, and Michael Olisé firing on all cylinders. They are once again among the favorites to win the Champions League.

It’s the second international break of the young club season, so we’re continuing our tour around the continents to see who’s doing what in World Cup qualifying. This week we head over to the Confederation of African Football to see who’s on their way to North America next summer, plus:

• How the expansion of the tournament to 48 teams rights a historical wrong with respect to how many tickets African nations get every four ye...

Monaco and Nice are not the biggest clubs in the South of France — that’s Marseille — but they maintain a testy feud that carries the cultural differences between the two towns. The Principality of Monaco is fiercely independent from France but plays in Ligue 1 alongside Nice, a gorgeous but (somewhat) less glitzy destination than the champagne-and-caviar precincts of the Monégasques.

AS Monaco has a rich footballing tradit...

It’s the Madrid derby this Saturday as Atlético host Real Madrid at the Metropolitano, and ahead of the big game we’re getting into some La Liga history. There’s a thrilling story of how two Racing Santander players defied Generalissimo Franco’s fascist regime, a look at the man largely in Santiago Bernabéu’s shadow who did so much to make Real Madrid what it is today, and the tale of how a flying Atléti winger became a Nazi spy.

It's the Merseyside derby this weekend, and we get into that feud a bit with this week's guest. After all, Stephen Warnock came up through the Liverpool academy and has been to Anfield and Goodison Park umpteen times (and to Everton's brand new Hill Dickson Stadium once). But that’s not the marquee match of the round. Neither is Man United-Chelsea.

The big one is ARSENAL vs MANCHESTER CITY at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday, and ...

The 2026 World Cup in North America is less than a year away, and while the club season has now kicked off in earnest, we'll have a number of international breaks before the big show. Each one is an opportunity to take stock of the various national teams across (nearly) every continent and see who’s on their way to the United States, Canada, and Mexico next summer.

We’ll take those opportunities with a series of shows in those w...

The violence, the sectarianism, the proxy war linked to The Troubles in Northern Ireland and what it means to be Scottish — all of it is tied up in the Old Firm, Celtic vs Rangers, Glasgow’s white-hot derby. A particularly ugly Scottish Cup final at Hampden Park even saw alcohol banned from Scottish football stadiums.

But what about the commercial side?

Because from the beginning, all concerned have recognized the financial o...

Here's a proper Big Match Preview, and it’s a big guest to help us do it. Andrew Mangan is the proprietor at Arseblog, the preeminent fan chronicle of Arsenal Football Club, and he joins us to look at the true doozy ahead this weekend. The Gunners will head north to Anfield on Sunday to face Liverpool in the first proper title clash of the Premier League season.

It comes on the back of a very active transfer window for both side...

Liverpool will travel to St. James’ Park to round out Matchweek Two in the Premier League, and in another time it might merely be a rematch of last season’s League Cup final, or just a meeting of two major institutions of English football who’ve never particularly liked each other.

But this one has a different kind of electrical charge, because the defending champion Reds are trying to pry Newcastle’s star striker, Alexande...

When Robbie Earle left Port Vale for Wimbledon in 1991, he knew he was joining a cast of characters. John Fashanu, Vinnie Jones, Jason Euelle, Andy Clarke, Efan Ekoku and many more major personalities came together to make the ‘90s Dons one of the more charismatic sides in Premier League history.

They welcomed Earle to the crew as only they could: By stripping him naked during a team run through a public park and leaving hi...

“Anfield is not the same anymore,” commentary legend Clive Tyldesley wrote on Substack in March, because “our relationship with our football heroes has changed…It’s now up to them to give us something to get excited about.”

But when I asked Liverpool fan and prodigious observer of the game Laurence McKenna whether he agreed with that diagnosis, he offered a different one: It’s not the tourist f...

During Copa América last summer, Alexis Guerreros of The Cooligans podcast and Morning Footy on CBS Sports Golazo came by the Weekend to preview the Round of 16, and the standup comedian made a sharp point about Lionel Messi’s “elasticity” and his stunning physical resilience after all the kicks and hard tackles he’s taken in a long and storied career.

That’s just one reason that the little Argentin...

At the end of the 2023/24 season, Jon Champion joined the show just before calling the FA Cup final for ESPN. He’s also a Premier League commentator for NBC, and he’s been to all kinds of grounds across England and beyond over his decades in the game.

So what are his favorite stadiums?

Champion has a natural predilection for old places with all their layers, one laid atop another until there’s a tasty cake of ...

On the eve of Copa América last summer, former U.S. Men’s National Team midfielder Stu Holden came by the show to preview a competition that he would soon crisscross the country covering for FOX Sports.

The tournament did not go well for the USA, and then-head coach Gregg Berhalter lost his job on the back of it. But it was also a great opportunity to take stock of the young Americans plying their trade for some of Eur...

World Cup 2010 in South Africa, Group C. The United States Men’s National Team is headed for an early exit, unable to secure the points needed to escape a group shared with England, Slovenia, and Algeria. The clock is ticking down on an abysmal game of football in which the Americans did little to demonstrate they belonged in the knockout rounds. The incessant drone of vuvuzelas is like a hive of angry bees chasing the world’s pree...

Carl Anka’s Premier League time machine...

The Athletic staff writer covers Manchester United and joined the podcast ahead of the derby with Man City in April, but we also surveyed the wider landscape of England’s top flight. Carl is one of today’s great tactical minds, and he explored how Nottingham Forest thrived last season, whether their blistering counterattacking style was a philosophical rebuttal of Pep Gua...

Born in Ormskirk, England, 20 minutes north of Liverpool, it was always Stephen Warnock’s dream to pull on the red shirt at Anfield. He joined the Liverpool Football Club academy and worked his way up the ranks until he broke into the first team. Having stood on the Kop singing, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” he walked out on the pitch singing it with a tear in his eye. He lived the dream of every football fan and made 40 app...

Welcome to The Football Weekend Classics series, where we’ll be sharing some of the best moments from the podcast all summer long. First up: Kasey Keller’s Millwall stories.

The goalkeeper from Olympia, Washington played for the U.S. Men’s National Team at four World Cups, but he was also one of the first Americans to really cut it in Europe. His first move after college in 1992 was to head out to South London to play in The...

The Champions League final is upon us, the thrilling crescendo of the club football season. With no major tournament on the horizon this summer — and no, the Club World Cup does not count — this is the last big match for a while. There’s an announcement along those lines towards the end of this week’s show, but more importantly, we’ve got Rob Green on.

The former England national team goalkeeper will call this game for CBS and P...