This drawing together of emotions cuts across the differences that fuel sometimes bitter rivalries in soccer's so-called "family".
They came for bitters and for soccer.
It is another thing for a crazed tennis fan and Steffi Graf enthusiast to stab Monica Seles as she sat on a chair between games during a match in Hamburg, Germany, or, as happened several years ago in Guatemala City, hometown loyalists, after their team suffered a bitter loss in a soccer match, descending on the winning team with machetes and hacking five people to death.
Corner kick: How is it that the N.H.L., a league in which the officials stand by patiently while players punch each other in the face, can handle the handshake line after bitter multigame playoff series, but soccer players cannot?
At the very same time, China was being knocked off by Norway, 2-1, which means that the United States and Norway, the two most bitter foes in women's soccer, have advanced to opposite semifinals.
All too many observers treat these unhappy aspects of soccer as the bitter that goes with the sweet: the price to pay for grand entertainment.
The 163-year-old SSV Ulm club is in many ways a microcosm of the bitter-sweet world of German soccer, a blighted, little reported universe of shattered hopes, financial woes, low-level corruption and rarely realized dreams.
LONDON — A bitter generation gap in women's soccer burst into full view on Saturday when Hope Solo took to Twitter to berate Brandi Chastain.
Mediapro and Prisa are locked in a bitter dispute over rights to broadcast Spanish soccer, and each has accused the other of receiving special treatment from allies in the ruling Socialist Party.
In soccer, perhaps no division is as bitter as the one between fans of the two Rome teams, A.S. Roma and Lazio.
