Landon Donovan might want to hold off from popping the champagne on his coronation as America’s international goal-scoring king. It turns out FIFA doesn’t think last year’s friendly against Denmark was against top competition, so they’re not counting the PK goal he scored.That means he’s now one score away from the record 34 international goals held by Eric Wynalda.

FIFA, soccer’s governing body, has not recognized the Americans’ 3-1 victory over Denmark on Jan. 20 last year as a full “A” international. Donovan converted a penalty kick in the 44th minute of the game.

When initially contacted by The Associated Press in August, FIFA responded: “The Danish FA confirmed in January that this match was not played by their official ‘A’ team. Therefore we did not register it.”

So since we’re a sports blog, we have to comply with the bylaws of the genre and do at least one “sports/pop culture” comparison every six months or we lose our blogging license. So we’d like to thank the Danish Football Association with opening up the opportunity to ask this question: Now that they’re casting the A-Team movie, which USA soccer stars would you have play the main characters. Here’s our go:

• Col. John “Hannibal” Smith: Brian McBride. He’s just the type of guy with the experience to pull this plan together. What plan? Making it out of the World Cup’s first round.
• Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck: Duh, Carlos Bocanegra. The ladies love Carlos, and he’s so international playing in England.
• Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock: He was trained as an actor, so we’re going to go with Landon here. Also, whenever we watched the A-Team, we were always annoyed when he showed up, so there’s that too.
• Sgt. Bosco “B.A.” Baracus: Clint Dempsy. The third Fulham guy here. If just, you know someone (above) would play overseas again, we could get this thing off the ground.

What say you?

Controversy over Donovan’s goal record [Fox Sports]
Image [GQ]