Major League Soccer

They do need a creative midfield presence but damn it I've spent so much time making fun of him.

http://i28.tinypic.com/2dtxhcn.jpg

mls can aspire to be the best league outside of europe. long term it's not so far-fetched. mls has a bunch of factors working in its favor. what's better at this point? nothing in asia. brazil, argentina, and mexico are the only leagues i see as being better.
argentina is one wrong step away from their peso being worthless again. mexico, the security situation is a deep concern, even if quality of play and quality of pay are still better than mls. brazil i know nothing about but you have to think they sell their future stars fast.

there's no reason why mls can't step into what could become a void. the idea that

There's simply not enough money in the game

look at what's happened in colombia. the league is basically insolvent, checks are bouncing, and the players are bouncing from the league even faster. that's been to MLS's benefit. in the western hemisphere there's still a cachet to america/canada. players from el salvador or honduras whose families feel like europe is too far away, too unknown, will look to mls. your average nicuraguan parent of a future star, they don't know red star belgrade from cska, it all seems far away and foreign, but everyone has a cousin or family friend in LA or chicago. and if they stay long enough, hey, green card. have a kid here? s/he's american. MLS can be the main league for the caribbean and central america and canada and the US. that's a lot of talent. and mls can be attractive to pretty much any player. play in the right city and you have a social network of countrymen. no other league can offer that.

yes, the nearly-finished will still come to mls. and that's fine if it gets people to come out and see the game. i don't buy the 'quality of play sux so they won't come back' argument. i fell in love with soccer watching a team called Vegalta in sendai, japan. did i know how crappy the j-league supposedly is? no. i knew i could take the subway to a game, watch 20,000 japanese badly sing along to Country Roads, have a beer and cheer. A soccer-specific stadium in a city on a summer night practically sells itself, no matter how many red cards, no matter how sloppy the play.

i do think the washed-up former stars will get found out as the league gets better and better.

i'm gonna bet that we can all agree that MLS will be a feeder league for at least the medium term (15-20 years). but MLS has the chance to be the biggest and best shop window in the world, and there's nothing wrong with that. it's kind of awesome.

hear hear

the return of the NY Cosmos?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/sports/soccer/02cosmos.html

fyi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Di8QT98Zk&feature=related

fyi

sega's back

http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/7732/segaa.jpg

nobody watching usa/brazil?

ugh

really not impressed w/ Borny or Bedoya

feel like we started out pretty good, now it's just brazil having fun

as I was saying...

so many players just standing still there, watching

lol nike usa commercial

"I am a giant killer"

;_;

holy fuck lalas is such a loudmouth

jeez

brazil having fun

what do you know, offside

argh

charlie davies ca. summer 2009 would have blown right by that brazil d

whats the score?

0-2

mostly cause brazil doesn't seem to particularly care anymore

and because they keep hitting the posts

77,223

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mostly cause brazil doesn't seem to particularly care anymore

― iatee, Tuesday, August 10, 2010 9:43 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

most of these kids have fewer than 10 caps, i'm sure they all want to score

yeah it might be more the post thing

why is michael bradley playing forward

sooo...guzan was a bright spot?

he didn't actually let in any goals

I liked what I saw of goodson too

I liked what I saw of 18 y.o. Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsre2UcAOL0

lol at running out spector to showcase him or w/e just to see how he gets turned around

Guys I am not a starfucker but I met Freddie Ljungberg last night at the opening of a new soccer bar here in Chicago and I swooned a little bit.

Also our new gk is a total bro.

Book review

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41151HA6JCL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Soccer In A Football World
David Wangerin
amazon US UK Google books

This is a history of American soccer and it's really, really good. It traces the game from the earliest days, when it arrived at the same time as it did everywhere else, through all subsequent eras, some successful, others disastrous. It's a straight-up treatment, he's not pushing any particular viewpoint except for a love of the game, and he's amused and heartbroken in all the right places, but mostly just interested in letting you know what happened. It's pretty much all fascinating, and a few nice pictures too. I especially like the way crowd trouble keeps appearing throughout history, it makes me feel the US game was right in step with the rest of us all along.

It's just an excellent piece of writing. He has several different strands to trace - the professional game, national squad, grassroots soccer, big personalities, rival sports - and he balances their attention really well, keeping them all updated together so you get a single narrative without you being totally conscious of how he's doing it.

I especially like the sheer number of different aspects of soccer in the US, not all of which I was aware of - power struggles at national levels, college soccer, the ethnic game, women's football, kids' football, etc etc etc. See also 156's excellent post above. These are (nearly) all strengths imo and it's kind of tragic how you haven't managed to create a sporting culture that blends them all, mostly because there's never been a single, undisputed, competent administrative body. I had never appreciated, especially, that even up until the 50s everything except the supremacy of baseball was up for grabs - even gridiron wasn't much more popular until TV changed the rules totally. Y'know, why couldn't there have been a single structure where New Jersey clubs of scots origin and top college sides competed with tycoon-owned clubs and the best St Louis had to offer, and all the other entities that have been big at one time or another? Instead of all that fannying about trying to create something for television or people who don't really like the game at all.

MLS seems to have mostly sorted that now, and the book ends hopefully - a lot of faith is placed in the bricks-and-mortar development that's taken place recently, and that kind of modest achievement seems the right way to go. But the catch is the lack of any spontaneous soccer culture, and that seems to me to be a huge drawback - if you ever get your inner-city kids spending their youth kicking a ball rather than bouncing it, you will be unstoppable.

I can't really think of any faults to the book at all. I'd've maybe liked a bit more anecdotal stuff about the early players, and the 1930 squad in particular, because that's my thing, but nobody's going to be able to write that now and I can't complain. There is a fair amount anyway, and he keeps it up to the present day - lots of good stuff about the post 1990 stars I'm more familiar with.

Basically, if you like football and you like reading, and you like a bit of history, you'll like this.

if you ever get your inner-city kids spending their youth kicking a ball rather than bouncing it, you will be unstoppable

I posted yesterday in the off-season thread about a change in NCAA (college athletics governing body) rules concerning players signing contracts and receiving compensation from professional clubs but not waiving their eligibility to get a scholarship, play in the college ranks and get a free education. One of the dozens of reasons more kids don't seem to keep playing the game is this sort of catch-22 of pay-to-play coaching, college, and other sports. Aside from the really big stars, American NBA players hone their skills in the college game for the most part, but there's a hell of a lot of them who don't get a pro contract and still have their degrees to fall back on. Same thing with football/gridiron/handegg. So, to a kid that grows up playing basketball or football AND soccer (and there are a lot of them), the path that leads to a free education and the possibility of huge riches is the path they take.

With soccer, the best coaching is not in the college ranks, and the college game has crazy rules about things like substitution, the season is very short, and many players that come out of it are already getting "too old" at 22 or so to compete seriously in the pro game. Many of the top college players fall apart completely, even in MLS. Being able to be affiliated with a pro club from an early age, to get coaching and experience in a pro environment beyond just training, and still having the ability to go to school on a scholarship if things don't work out is going to be a boon to the kids who are 15-16 years old right now, and those who will come after them.

apologies if that doesn't make sense, the US soccer landscape esp with regards to college is incredibly hard to unpack

imo klinsi gets it here (starts at about 2:00 if you don't want to listen to lalas talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y-fZpD_BrE

The book reckons that you'd never come across kids kicking a ball in the street or elsewhere without it being an adult·supervised activity, though xp. That seems to limit the pool of talent drastically. The Soccernomics book I read a couple of weeks ago pointed out that the really top players mostly come from the poorest backgrounds in the richest countries - your Ronaldos, Rooneys and Drogbas - because they're the ones who have nothing else for entertainment, yet are in a position to get scooped up into a fantastic infrastructure once they prove themselves.

Yeah, Klinsmann's excellent - that's such an intelligent, strategic view. It's so funny to hear McManaman follow straight up with "that's right, but you also need a goalscorer to get you twenty, thirty goals a season"

thx for the review IK, i'll be sure to pick it up

Whoa, San Jose Earthquakes sign Geovanni of Hull City fame.

wow. he looked decent w/jozy at times last year

updated player salaries released:

http://www.mlsplayers.org/files/august_12_2010_salary_information__alphabetical.pdf

kind of amazing to me that Marquez is on higher wages than Henry, if only slightly

Haha, that's exactly where I went first! Also amusing that Henry's bonus seems designed purely to leapfrog back over Marquez. It's pretty awesome that that doc exists.

Yeah, the players' union is pretty dedicated to showing exactly how badly most of them are getting paid.

it was only a couple of years ago the league min for developmental players was like $12K

Red Bulls are starting to get scary good.