It wasn’t a great weekend for Texas sports. Aside from the horrible stuff that went down at the NRA 500, the generally serene-ish FC Dallas Stadium got violent when a player from … uh, FC Dallas scored a game-winning goal. Yeah, I don’t know.

George John scored the game-winner on a header, and before he could even get out of the net and celebrate, a fan tossed some garbage onto the field and sliced him in the back of the head.

John, 26, headed home the game’s only goal in the 87th minute, but he barely had time to celebrate. The bottle hit him as he took his first steps out of the Galaxy goal, and he fell straight to the ground.

“I knew something hit me,” John said. “I wasn’t quite sure what happened, if I ran into the post or what, but then I looked down and saw a beer bottle and I was like that had to of hit me. I felt [my head] and there was a ridge and then I was like ‘Yes, something hit me for sure.’ Luckily I didn’t need stitches and I was able to stay in and finish out the game.” (via NESN)

If you watch the video (included after the jump), it looks like a water bottle hits him in the chest and he flops, lying around holding his head while the time runs out. And then as the video progresses you see him get up with blood all over the back of his head. So … no.

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I’m not going to call them “grenades” anymore because people on the Internet know way too much about the semantics of what is and isn’t a grenade (“grenades have shrapnel!”), but this is the third story in two months we’ve written about soccer fans indiscriminately tossing explosives at soccer players, and I’ve got to ask … why is this a thing? Seriously, why are you trying to bomb the soccer guys?

The first story happened in Iran, where a player almost lost a hand disposing of what he thought was tossed garbage. A month later, a player gets injured during a Cypriot soccer match and fans throw firecrackers at him to “teach him a lesson” about not taunting them. Now, a first-division soccer match in Argentina gets suspended because somebody threw a bomb at a goalkeeper and nearly exploded his eardrums.

Again, why is this a thing? I guess “insanity” is a viable excuse, or maybe a surplus of bombs and nobody around but soccer players to murder, but can’t we find a way to riot about soccer without bombs and walls of flame? Jesus Christ, soccer, come on.

[h/t to Larry Brown Sports]

It’s getting harder and harder to shock you with violent soccer stories. Soccer players are always either wiping their blood on each other or starting kung fu gang brawls or being blown up by grenades, so if you see a screengrab of a soccer stadium on fire, chances are you’ll scroll right by it without a second thought. Of COURSE soccer fans set fire to a stadium.

It all happened (in Russia!) on Sunday after Zenit St. Petersburg’s win over FK Volga. The visiting Zenit fans, happy about what they’d just zeen, celebrated by torching their own seats, then throwing wood into the fire while dudes with fire hoses tried to put it out. The best part? The incident occurred at the hilariously Russian-sounding “Lokomotiv Stadium”.

Fire services in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod were forced to put out a blaze after fans set fire to seats at Lokomotiv Stadium.

The incident occurred in the aftermath of the match between home side FK Volga and reigning league champions Zenit St Petersburg, which ended 2-1 to the visitors.

Following the conclusion of the game, Zenit fans seated in the away section set several seats alight, with police reporting that some 430 seats in that part of the stadium were broken or destroyed. (via ITV.com)

If you’re already pumping your fists and going FIRE, FIRE, FIREEEEE, here’s the clip. Warning: extremely Russian.

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Francesco Totti is the captain of Serie A football club Roma, and he’s a pretty popular guy. Don’t believe me? Watch this video of a weird lady showing up at a train station to meet him, and accomplishing it by just wandering around and yelling TOTTI, TOTTI, TOTTI, TOTTI, TOTTI at everyone she sees. For 2 1/2 minutes. TOTTI!

There’s an off chance that the lady, described pretty accurately by a YouTube commenter as “a cross between Sailor Moon and Groucho Marx,” is just a Borat character played by an Italian woman who found a Japanese school girl uniform at a Halloween store. She’s got a camera crew with her, and with the language/soccer barrier happening she could be anything. She could be Pele in a wig, how the f**k am I supposed to know? But much like how I’m continuing to share exceptional high school football clips despite 70% of them being undercover AT&T commercials, I hope that there is still room for legitimately weird, random people to show up at train stations and mark the hell out for soccer guys.

For more on this story, please consult Totti’s face:

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In the grand tradition of somebody throwing a grenade at soccer players comes this clip from Sunday’s match between Anorthosis and Omonia Nicosia, wherein a player gets injured and somebody in the crowd throws firecrackers at him. No, you read that right: he wasn’t injured when someone threw firecrackers at him, he was already injured and on the ground with a bunch of people huddling over him, then the firecrackers were thrown. I know, right?

One of the most interesting things about running a blog is observing how difficult it is to get people on the Internet to believe anything. If you post a picture of Scarlett Johansson naked on a bed and she says it’s her, people call it fake and start dissecting it by angles to prove it. If she says it isn’t her, they use those same angles to find matching lightswitches and wallpaper prints to verify that she was AT THAT SAME HOTEL ONCE so it HAD to be her. If you post a video of someone throwing a grenade onto a soccer field, people say it was enhanced with CGI (no, really) and explain how grenades have shrapnel, so while this may have been an explosive it wasn’t a grenade, because blah blah something something Dwight Schrute. This video already has its detractors, with people saying the smoke and explosion were scripted, and the players are just diving and playing it up. You know, because a Cypriot football match needs a SOMEONE TRIED TO EXPLODE US narrative.

That said, explanations as to why someone would toss explosives at an injured player are already popping up in the comments section, so I’ll let a couple of psychotic, asshole soccer fans explain it themselves:

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So, uh, this happened.

During a local club match in Isfahan, Iran some spectators threw a hand grenade on field, a player found it and thought it was some other object and threw it on sidelines just in time, if he had done this a few seconds later his hand would have been blasted.The game was called off and police have started investigating this case.

In case you somehow did not fixate on that blockquote for 20 minutes, SOMEBODY THREW A GRENADE ON THE FIELD DURING A SOCCER GAME. And sure, maybe I’m just a sheltered American guy who doesn’t know the hardships of the world or whatever and stuff like this happens every day, but stuff like this doesn’t happen every day because holy shit a dude threw a grenade onto the field during a soccer game.

Video of a guy seriously throwing a goddamn grenade onto the field during a soccer game is after the jump.

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