A  football field at the Luzhniki Olympic Sports Complex on the outskirts of Moscow recently hosted the world’s longest football game, which lasted a total of 26 hours.

To celebrate All-Russian Football Day last Saturday, two teams of 7 players each gathered at the Luzhniki Olympic Sports Complex to break the record for the longest football match ever. The game started at noon on Saturday and ended after 26 hours, at 2 in the afternoon on Sunday. The previous record had been set in 2014 when two teams played the beautiful game for 24 hours straight. This time around, the Red Team defeated the White Team with a score of 416 goals to 409.

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A Hungarian kids ‘football team won the Under 14 National Championship after surmounting an impressive 40-goal difference with a 43-1 victory in their very last match of the season.

With just one match left to play, Kerekegyháza SE and Miklós GYFE were tied at 43 points, but the latter had a comfortable 40-goal advantage, which virtually guaranteed its first-ever U14 football title. But there is a reason why ‘virtually’ isn’t synonymous with ‘definitely’. In their last match, Kerekegyháza SE scored an epic 43-1 victory over Palmonostora, the last team in the rankings, while Miklós GYFE only managed a 1-0 victory in their last match. Miklós GYFE was getting ready to celebrate their title after the comfortable win when they got the unbelievable news that they had actually finished second, behind Kerekegyháza. The 43-1 victory is now being investigated by the Hungarian Football Federation.

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A football referee has been suspended for life for allegedly celebrating with a club he helped win by eliminating 3 players from the opposing side and granting 15 minutes of extra time, enough for the winners to score a necessary goal.

Earlier this month, Dutch football clubs St. George and SV De Valken met in a final match of the country’s fourth division to decide which of the two teams would be promoted to the third division. It may not seem like very high stakes, but they take football very seriously in the Netherlands and passions ride high, so this particular match was very important to both clubs. It was supposed to be a close game between the two most dominant team in the division, but the match played out very differently than expected because of the one person responsible of fair play, the referee. Jan Smit stands accused of not only rigging the game in one team’s favor, but also celebrating with its members after the win.

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Over twenty Argentinian farmers and massive fans of football legend Lionel Messi, grew a giant portrait of the popular player in their corn fields, as a tribute.

Lionel Messi has millions of fans all around the world, but nowhere is he more beloved than in his home country of Argentina, where most people see him as nothing less than a god of football. Messi recently led the Argentinian national team to win the 2022 World Cup, which made him even more popular than before, but his true fans were sure this was going to be his year even before the tournament started. For example, shortly before last year’s World Cup kicked off, more than 20 Argentinian farmers used a farming engineer’s planting algorithm to create giant portraits of Messi in their corn fields.

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The internet is struggling to come to terms with the fact that Jeremiah Johnson, a running back from Fort Worth, Texas is only 12 years old despite his mature appearance.

Jeremiah Johnson started making news headlines around the country last week, after photos of him holding the trophy for ’12U Division 1 Most Valuable Player’ went viral on social media. Johnson’s team, the Dallas Dragons Elite Academy (DEA), had just won the 2022 Youth National Championships in Miami, and he was crowned MVP. But while his photos got thousands of likes and congratulatory comments, what most people seemed to be focused on was Jeremiah’s age. They just couldn’t believe that he was only 12 years old, and to be fair, the boy did look incredibly mature for his age.

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An Argentinian football fan was recently arrested after allegedly hijacking a bus full of people to make sure he gets home in time to watch his country’s game against Croatia at the World Cup.

Argentina is one of the few countries on this planet where football is as close to a religion as you can possibly imagine. People live and breathe the beautiful game and stars like  Diego Armando Maradona are worshipped, so when Argentina played Croatia in the semifinals of the 2022 Football World Cup in Qatar the whole country was buzzing. Missing the game was an unimaginable travesty, so when one man found himself on a bus at rush hour, just minutes before the start of the historic football match, he basically felt forced to take desperate measures.

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A 26-year-old man wound up with facial paralysis after wasting several nights watching the World Cup football games for an entire week.

The World Cup is always an exciting time for football fans all over the world, but keeping up with the action is a huge challenge, especially during the group stages, and even more so when the host country is in a very different time zone. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t die-hard fans out there who will sacrifice sleep for nights in a row to make sure they don’t lose a single game. Unfortunately, that can take a terrible toll on one’s body, as a 26-year-old man in China recently learned at his own expense.

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The Isles of Scilly Football League is the world’s smallest official football league, consisting of only two teams that play each other seventeen times a season.

As the home of football, England has always been crazy about the team sport, and the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago of more than 140 islands off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, is no exception. Like many other regions of England, the isles have their own football league, but what sets them apart is the size of the league – it consists of just two teams, the Garrison Gunners and the Woolpack Wanderers, that play each other every weekend during a season, as well as in two yearly cups and the traditional ‘Old Men versus the Youngsters’ game played on Boxing Day.

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Roberto Gabriel Trigo, are tired football player from Paraguay, is probably the only man alive who can say that he shot down a small plane with a football.

The legend of the football kick that brought down a plane has been doing the rounds through the locker rooms of Paraguayan football clubs for six decades. Some say it happened during an official game, others that it was during a practice, but they all credit the same man – Roberto Gabriel Trigo. He was 17 years old at the time and playing as a right back for the now-defunct General Genes football club of Asuncion. Annoyed by a small plane flying low over the local football field, Trigo allegedly kicked the ball outwards, hitting the aircraft’s engine and causing it to crash in an open field, just 200 meters away.

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As the name suggests, alpine football is a variation of the world’s most popular competitive sport that is played on steep mountain slopes in order to make it more difficult.

Most competitive sports usually take place on level playing fields, but in the case of alpine football, one of the main conditions is that the pitch must be steep. It sounds downright impossible, but a group of football fans in the Austrian Alps claims that it’s the ultimate way to play their favorite sport. They came up with the idea for extreme alpine football during the 2014 World Cup, while watching a boring game and brainstorming for ways to spice it up a bit.

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Carlos Henrique Raposo, aka Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian former football player known primarily for having a decade-long career without actually playing a single game.

As children, most people grow up dreaming of one day becoming sports champions, despite an obvious lack of athletic abilities. Most of us realize this to be nothing more than an impossible dream and move on, but a few still manage to find ways of making their goal a reality, by any means necessary. This is the story of Carlos Henrique Raposo, a Brazilian athlete who “wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football”. Believe it or not, he managed to be just, playing for top-ranked Brazilian and international clubs for over a decade. ‘Playing’ may not be the right word, though, as he never actually played an official game in his entire 12-year-long career.

Carlos Kaiser – nicknamed earned due to his alleged resemblance to German football legend Franz Beckenbauer – always knew that he had the physique of a professional football player, but not the necessary talent and skills to make the roster of top football clubs, so he relied on a variety of tricks to build himself up as this great player that every team was after.

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Jasen Bracy became completely blind at the age of 7, but he didn’t let that setback come between him and his dream of playing football, and he is now a quarterback for the Modesto Raiders.

Jasen, who lives in Modesto, California, was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a type of cancer that causes tumors in the retina, when he was only 1-year-old. Despite undergoing several treatments to treat his condition, there was no saving his eyesight, and by age 7, Jasen was completely blind. Today, the only thing he can distinguish is whether it is daytime or nighttime. But despite growing up blind, Jasen never hesitated in following his dreams, no matter how ambitious they may have seemed. And it was this ambitious attitude that won him the role of quarterback on a local football team.

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A Chinese entrepreneur recently bought a second division football club just so he and his overweight son could play in official matches.

It’s never too late to fulfill your dreams, and having lost of money helps a lot, as He Shihua, a 35-year-old entrepreneur with a passion for football, can tell you. His biggest regret in life has always been not being able to participate in official competitions as a player, but luckily he realized he could do just that by buying his own football club and pressuring the coach to include him in the team. Now, both Shihua and his 126-kilogram-heavy son are part of the team, even though their skills on the pitch aren’t exactly up to par.

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A Scottish football club may regret its decision to replace human cameramen for an AI-operated camera system, after it hilariously kept mistaking a linesman’s bald head for the ball, thus denying viewers of the action on the pitch.

Last month Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, commonly known as Caley Thistle or Caley Jags, which competes in the Scottish Championship, the second echelon of the Scottish Professional Football League, proudly announced that it had installed the AI-powered Pixellot camera system at its Caledonian Stadium. The system was designed to replace human cameramen with artificial intelligence-controlled cameras designed to follow the ball on the football field. Only the plan to automate live broadcasts of its home games went awry last week, when Pixellot managed to annoy viewers by constantly mistaking a linesman’s bald head for the ball during a game with Ayr United.

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A friendly New Year’s Eve soccer match between teams representing two rival cartels in a Mexican prison turned into a bloodbath after a controversial tackle escalated into a gun fight.

For over a decade, Cieneguillas, a medium-security prison in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, has been home to hundreds of dangerous criminals representing no less than six of Mexico’s main drug cartels. In an attempt to relieve the pressure of the rivalries between these criminal organizations, the prison leadership authorized a soccer game between teams representing Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, on New Year’s Eve, but what was meant to be a friendly celebration abruptly turned into a deadly shootout, and not the penalty kind…

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