Soccer, Major League Soccer | featured news

How the Cup Was Won In an important match such as a Cup Final, a foot soldier often scores a decisive goal rather than one of the accepted stars. The reason is pretty straight forward – teams want to make sure that the opposition’s best players don’t beat them.

The star midfielder, whose record five-year, $32.5-million contract with the Major League Soccer club expired Dec. 31, will announce Thursday that he has reached agreement on a new contract for the 2012 season, which begins in March. Details of the contract were not immediately available but it is expected to call for a summer sabbatical from MLS play, allowing Beckham to play for the English team in the London Olympics.

A team made up of some of soccer's biggest names — David Beckham, Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane — finds redemption by winning the MLS Cup. Who says Los Angeles can't win a pro football championship? It just did, Sunday night in a poncho-filled bandbox in Carson, so chilly the players' breaths appeared in puffs, so soggy their socks were caked in mud. Folks in this country call it soccer, but, goodness, this was football, powerful and passionate, players fighting through the Home Depot Center muck while thousands serenaded them with streamers and songs, throaty voices rising above the tempest and eventually landing somewhere deep in the Galaxy.