What Is Ignorance?

The most pervasive stereotype against American soccer is that Americans don’t know anything about soccer. It’s a very hard stereotype to break, and an easy one to reinforce. Regularly reaching the knockout rounds of the World Cup does little to enhance the reputation. Winning the Women’s World Cup outright also does little, as many countries still don’t seriously compete in women’s soccer. But a slump by the men’s team under an increasingly embattled Jurgen Klinsmann and his increasingly erratic squad selections, which continued with a comprehensive 4-1 loss to Brazil on September 8, will show that it’s still easy to find comments in the Guardian writeup siding with Klinsmann, as he can hardly be blamed for Americans being inherently bad at soccer.

Despite being one of only seven countries to qualify for the last seven World Cups- alongside Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Spain- this remains America’s lot. South Korea doesn’t catch this kind of grief, even though the US has made four knockouts to South Korea’s two (even if one of those two was a 4th-place finish on home soil in 2002).

Perception matters. If you have a Brazilian passport, it’s quite easy to find work abroad, even if you personally aren’t very good. There’s a reason that the squad list for Thailand’s Buriram United, at least as of the latest Wikipedia update, shows an entirely homegrown team except for one South Korean, one Venezuelan… and four Brazilians. Or why Shandong Luneng Taishan of China, in addition to their homegrowns, was as of March running only one Argentinian… and four Brazilians. One player, Gilberto Macena, has played for both. Is Macena any good? Well, this is where he went after six years with Denmark’s AC Horsens- who did not spent that entire tenure in the top flight with him as their main striker- so you tell me.

Meanwhile, unless you’re a goalkeeper, an American passport can be quite damaging to job prospects, especially if you’re a coach. If your name’s not Bob Bradley, good luck finding a coaching job anywhere outside the US/MLS… and if you are Bob Bradley, have fun in Egypt and Norway as opposed to any of the established elite nations.

This is not a large list, folks. Even if it isn’t comprehensive, meaning it’s lacking the likes of Ziggy Korytoski, who as of 2013 was logging time in Guatemala, it’s pretty representative.

This, meanwhile, is a list of currently overseas players, and it IS intended to be comprehensive, tagging everyone from Aston Villa’s Brad Guzan, Everton’s Tim Howard and Bayern Munich’s Julian Green to the likes of Travis Cantrell, a midfielder for Finnish second-tier side Vasa IFK and defenseman Royal-Dominique Fennell, plying his trade for Germany’s Stuttgart Kickers in the third tier. Given that fact, it’s not very impressive. Here’s the equivalent list for less-accomplished Australia.

But how true is it exactly? Where does America’s knowledge of soccer really stand?

I’m going to take a rather unorthodox method of measuring: Jeopardy. Jeopardy is recognized as a pretty intellectual test of a cross-section of the smarter folks in America, and any question asked on any topic would, naturally, be calibrated to be a challenging- though not overwhelming- test of the knowledge of a random cross-section of the smarter folks in America. Random, here, is key, because that means the question writers are unable to anticipate in advance the knowledge base of the contestants. All they know is the contestants are all pretty smart in general.

And that means you can’t get into overly deep minutiae on any one topic. You can’t be asking a random person the third ingredient listed on a can of Mountain Dew. For someone to have any chance of knowing that, they’d need to be a soda hobbyist (and there are some out there), or a health expert. (The answer, by the way, is concentrated orange juice.)

What would Jeopardy ask about Mountain Dew instead? For that, we go to the resource we’ll be using for this exercise, the J! Archive, a complete directory of every clue, response, and other assorted info, including the order the clues were called for. A search for questions concerning Mountain Dew (as clue, correct response, or even incorrect response) shows one particular clue that’s been used three separate times over the years. The wording used in 2008, when it was Beverages for $800, was “An animated character called Willy the Hillbilly once sold this citrusy soda brand.” It has been answered correctly twice and incorrectly once.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take the archive of Jeopardy questions and see what comes up for soccer. Where, exactly, do the Jeopardy writers peg as the limit of an average intelligent American’s knowledge of the sport.

For it to actually mean anything, though, we need a control. In fact, let’s take two controls: a sport in which Americans are indisputably knowledgeable, and one in which Americans are indisputably not. For the first control, we’ll use baseball, and for the second, let’s use its Commonwealth counterpart cricket. For all three sports, baseball, cricket and soccer, let’s take note of the fact that a question in which the answer is the sport in question demonstrates less actual knowledge of the sport than one in which the question establishes that the sport is being asked about, and you’re asked to identify something within the sport. In Ken Jennings’ book Brainiac, about his 74-game win streak, he stated that Jeopardy writers love to toss in extraneous factoids about an otherwise pretty basic call-and-response, as doing so simply makes for better viewing. It is, after all, a TV show. If you’re asking ‘What’s the capital of Wisconsin?’ (Madison), that’s pretty boring. But if, like the show did in 2012, you ask ‘In 1901 the USA’s first reference library for state legislators was set up in this Wisconsin capital’, now it’s spiced up a bit. Not that we can’t get anything from it, but we’ll have to be a bit more careful and concentrate on factoids that keep popping up when they ask about it.

What we’re really wanting to see here are questions more along the lines of ‘Sheboygan, Wisconsin began its annual festival of this sausage in 1953’, as asked in 2009. (What is bratwurst?) You’re gifted the Wisconsin part, now do you actually know something about the place.

Let’s do cricket first. The sport America absolutely doesn’t know. The cricket clues are here. Ignoring all the stuff about the animal, you can see quite a lot of clues simply asking people to identify cricket. Cricket has been a category in and of itself twice. Once was in 1998, and it was the fifth of six categories tackled by the contestants that day. The other was in 2009, and it was saved for last, with time running out in the round with two clues still covered. Clearly, cricket is not an attractive category from a contestant perspective. The last of that second set that was asked, “Cricket’s World Cup is contested every 4 years; crikey! This country has now won 3 straight”, seems like almost absurdly basic info for a cricket fan, but the Jeopardy writers felt the need to toss a ‘crikey’ in there as a further hint… and still they got a ‘What is Britain?” in response before someone else came up with Australia. The other two clues had similar hints tossed in: never mind who Canada played in the first international match; who’s Canada’s neighbor. Never mind how many players are on a cricket team; it’s the same as a football team. How many is that? Among the more common things asked are if contestants can identify that the player that delivers the ball is called a bowler; if they can identify his goal as hitting the wickets behind the batsman, and if they can properly identify a cricket bat.

When, as a $2000 clue in 2013, contestants were asked the birth country of Cricket Hall of Fame inaugural class member Imran Khan– the options narrowed considerably by the fact that his name is Imran Khan- one incorrectly said India, and the other two failed to buzz in at all. (What is Pakistan?)

Baseball’s Yasiel Puig- then a rookie- rated $800 in the same category, and after one person said Venezuela, someone else correctly said Cuba. So right away you can see that more baseball knowledge is expected of Jeopardy contestants than cricket knowledge. All cricket questions combined- sport and animal and wrong answer concerning something else entirely- turn up 150 results in the database, and the only Final Jeopardy clue that actually dealt with the sport, as opposed to being listed because someone gave cricket as a wrong answer, dealt with the animal as well (“Name shared by a popular world sport & a member of the Gryllidae family”, which all three players got.) A search for baseball turns up 1,242, with 37 Final Jeopardy clues, nearly all of them actually about baseball in some way.

The most recent Final Jeopardy, asked on July 30- less than a month ago- was “This major league team’s official colors are Sedona red, Sonoran sand & black.” Clearly, they expect you to know a little something here. Even if you take the Sedona and Sonoran hints that the clue gives you, you’re still being asked what the Arizona-based MLB team is named (who are the Diamondbacks?) And all three players got it. Another Final Jeopardy from 2008 asked “For nearly 30 years, California’s Catalina Island was the spring training camp for this non-California Major League team.” Even if you ARE a baseball fan, that has a chance of stumping you anyway, and sure enough, all three players whiffed on it. So prior to revealing the answers, Alex Trebek supplied his own clue, “Some people will recall that the island had been purchased by a rich man of chewing gum fame, and if you could come up with that bit of information, it would have helped you, I’m sure.” Which if you’re a non-baseball fan still might not have been too helpful. The contestants came up with the Rangers, Mariners and Brooklyn Dodgers; they needed the Chicago Cubs.

Other assorted baseball clues requiring actual knowledge of baseball:
‘Point “A” To Point “B”, 2014, $400: “Go from the present to the original home of baseball’s Braves & you’ve gone from here to here” (What is Atlanta to Boston?, correct)’How Novel!, 2012, Daily Double (wager $8,600, a True Daily Double): “If this alleged report is true, that is the last of Roy Hobbs in organized baseball” (What is The Natural?, correct)
‘September’s Here Already’, 2010, $800: “I’m 2 weeks late with my 73rd birthday gift for this L.A. Olympics organizer & ex-baseball commissioner” (Who is Peter Ueberroth?, nobody got it, someone guessed Pete Rozelle)
‘On His Baseball Hall of Fame Plaque’, 2010, “Boston Red Sox A.L. 1939-1960… batted .406 in 1941” (Who is Ted Williams?, correct)

Jeopardy baseball questions have a high tendency to ask about the idiosyncrasies of specific MLB teams. Whose official magazine is called Vine Line (the Cubs). Whose stadium name was swapped from SkyDome to Rogers Centre (the Blue Jays). Who won the 1969 World Series (the Mets). You are not very often asked simply to identify baseball as a thing.

So these are our two extremes. Now, let’s tackle soccer.

Searching for cricket, sport and animal, resulted in 150 clues. Baseball turned up 1,242. Soccer– which isn’t sharing status with an animal- returns 290 results…. though in increasing frequency as the years go by. Only 19 of those clues came in the first 2,000 shows, ranging from 1983-1993. By that point, baseball had garnered 161 clues, one of them a Final Jeopardy (“For the 1st half of this century, it was the westernmost city represented in Major League Baseball”, what is St. Louis?, everyone answered right). The most recent 19 soccer clues, though, have come in about the last 350 shows, a dramatic increase in the pace.

Given the increase in pace, while 290 is certainly closer to cricket’s number than baseball’s, that number alone can’t be counted on to tell the whole story. The proof is in the clues.

If you’re looking to Final Jeopardy to provide any encouragement, well, the most I can say is that soccer’s been used. It hasn’t been involved in a long time, though; the last question to directly ask about it was in 1999 (“In August 1999, for the first time in its 75-year history, Wheaties began featuring players of this sport on its boxes”), and it got one hockey, one soccer, and one contestant who had already ended in negative numbers and didn’t even get to answer. (In case you’re wondering, it was an assortment of players from the US women’s team after they won the Women’s World Cup.)

Things get a fair bit better in the rest of the set, though. In the early clues, you’re largely asking people to either identify soccer, identify Pele, or use soccer as a way to get to a clue about some other sport (e.g. “Soccer was forbidden in 14th century England for taking practice time away from this military skill”- what is archery?- which amazingly enough, fun fact, was asked in exactly the same wording in two 1987 shows five months apart, and correctly answered by the same contestant, once in regular play and then again in the ensuing Tournament of Champions; but I digress). There’s one notable exception- “British soccer fans who started disastrous Brussels Riot were supporters of this city’s team” (what is Liverpool?)- but the clue came in 1986, the year the Heysel Riot occurred, and it qualified as current events back then.

Expectations have risen in the ensuing years. You are rarely asked nowadays simply to identify soccer. Gone are the days when knowing that the goalkeeper can use his hands was sufficient to get by. It might be instructive to provide a sample of the evolution of soccer clues, which I’ll break up in 1,000-show chunks (the most recent show as of this writing being #7,132), leaving out the aforementioned Pele and goalkeeper topics. If the answer is anything besides “what is soccer?”, I’ll list it.

Shows 1-1000: “Sports event that set off a 1969 war between Honduras & El Salvador” (1984, Wars for $600, answered correctly); “Played in 1869, the 1st intercollegiate “football game” in the U.S. was actually this sport” (1987, Football for $200, nobody got it; one person said rugby); “The 1950 U.S. defeat of England has been called the greatest upset in the history of this sport” (1988, Sports for $400, nobody even guessed).

Shows 1001-2000: “While bullfighting is Spain’s most distinctive sport, this int’l sport is the most popular” (1989 Teen Tournament, Spain for $800, correct); “Argentina has won 2 of the last 3 World Cup titles in this sport, the country’s most popular” (1990, Argentina for $100, correct); “This sport derives its name from the word association, as in association football” (1993, Word Origins for $400, correct).

Now let’s introduce the 1994 World Cup… and watch the expectations rise.

Shows 2001-3000: “This London stadium has been the site of cup finals in soccer & of Live Aid”- what is Wembley Stadium? (1996, Stadiums and Arenas, $500, first person answered ‘what is Wimbledon?’, second person, who’s actually from London, answers correctly); “In keeping with the Buccaneer theme of its football team, this area’s MLS team is the Mutiny”- what is Tampa Bay? (1997, Major League Soccer for $300, correct); “This man who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup soccer title played for Italy’s Napoli from 1984 to 1991”- who is Diego Maradona? (1997, International Tournament held in Sweden; answered correctly by a contestant from Norway).

Starting here, the frequency of questions goes from a trickle to something far more substantial.

Shows 3001-4000: “If Disney starts a soccer team, they’ll probably name it for this 1995 film with Olivia d’Abo”- what is The Big Green? (1998, The “Big” Screen for $1,000, correct); “Abbreviated NASL, it peaked in the 1970s with stars like Franz Beckenbauer & Pele”- what is North American Soccer League? (1999, Sports History for $400, correct); “The band Simply Red took their name in part from their love of this northern English soccer team“- what is Manchester United? (2000 Tournament of Champions, Fandemonium for $500, nobody guessed). ‘What is soccer?’ questions are still getting asked, but at lower dollar values and they’re being knocked down much more frequently.

This is where the dollar values rose to their current values.

Shows 4001-5000: “This soccer player whose real first name is Mariel is one of 4 women to have scored over 100 goals in international play”- who is Mia Hamm? (2003 Teen Tournament, Female Athletes for $200, correct); “The WUSA, the USA’s women’s league in this sport, folded September 15, 2003” (2004 Teen Tournament, Sports for $1,600, correct); “Juventus, Arsenal, Ajax”- what are soccer teams? (2005, 3 Of A Kind for $2,000, correct)

Shows 5001-6000: “In 1981 soccer’s 1st Toyota Cup was held in this world capital between the champion clubs of Europe & South America”- what is Tokyo? (2006, Sports Stuff for $800, nobody guessed); “He may have stepped down in 2006 as captain of England’s national team, but nobody bends it like this soccer great”- who is David Beckham? (2006, Celebs for $800, correct); “Major League Soccer in the sun: The Milky Way or Andromeda” (2008, Pro Sports Teams In Other Words for $800, correct). There were a lot of David Beckham questions in this set.

Shows 6001-7000: “Including 1952’s “Magnificent Magyars”, it has won more men’s soccer medals than any other current country” (2013, Olympic Fact Sheet for $800, correct); “Also called a one-two, this play can start with a pass or a throw-in; then the player breaks past the defender into open space for a quick return pass”- what is a give-and-go? (2013 College Championship, Soccer, The Beautiful Game for $800, nobody guessed); “No longer just stadiums but teams are renamed: the Metrostars are now the New York Red Bulls in this sport” (2014, Naming Rights for $800, correct).

Shows 7001-current: “AKA “The Red Devils”, this team that averages 75,000 fans per game is the most popular English soccer team” (2015 Teachers Tournament, Roots for $1,000, correct); “Fittingly, the national soccer team of this African nation is known as the Elephants” (2015 Celebrity Jeopardy, Gilligan’s “I”sland for $1,600, correct); “This ritual is believed to have begun at the end of a 1931 soccer game when France beat England for the very first time” (2015, The Sporting Life for $1,000, nobody guessed).

While at the start Jeopardy merely contented itself with asking people to name soccer, over time it started asking specific things about soccer, and more often. ‘What is soccer?’ has always been an option for the writers, but it’s gone from being leaned on all the time, to being relegated to lower dollar values, and as of late, they’ve simply asked for that response less often altogether. And they, once in a while, have seen fit to ask a question that wouldn’t seem ridiculously, insultingly easy when asked of a European fan, though this has to be tempered by the fact that, when spotted, the contestants still reliably can be counted on to leave the clue alone. There’s still a reliance on a few megastars when asking about individuals, but it’s not just Pele anymore; David Beckham, Mia Hamm, Wayne Rooney and Christiano Ronaldo will now show up as well. MLS was seized upon within a few years of inception, but within the last couple years an odd clue about a foreign club has peeked its head in (even if it is just Manchester United). National team nicknames have started to show up as well.

What does America know about soccer? Well, we’re still not nationwide experts. But if Jeopardy is anything to go by, we’re not total idiots anymore either. We have a ways to go. But we’ve cracked the book open. We know some things.

We know enough to know we’re losing patience with Jurgen Klinsmann, for instance.

Gallant Refrains From Throwing Hamburgers; Goofus Not So Much

I think it’s time we had a talk about fan conduct.

My default stance regarding fan behavior in soccer is to, first and foremost, acknowledge that it is multitudes more passionate and vocal than in other sports. It’s kind of why we’re here: people wrap themselves up so deeply in the game that it spreads into other facets of society. I covered back in April some of the ways that fans might express displeasure with their team or their players, up to and including demanding the shirts off their backs, forming political parties, and forming new competing clubs.

At the same time, though, it’s important to recognize that, at the end of the day, we are playing games. Sports carry importance because of the Tinkerbell effect: they are important because and only because we say they are, and they carry exactly as much importance as we choose to give them. If nobody wanted to participate in sports, sports would not exist. The same goes for art, or money, or the rule of law. If humans were not around, these things would all vanish as concepts. But money and law perform vital functions in a society: money provides a standardized way of determining the worth of things and a standardized way of obtaining them; law provides structure and order in how we conduct ourselves. Sports cannot claim such lofty ideals: it is entertainment, pure and simple. It can also be exercise, a way to keep a body healthy, but there are a lot of ways to do that which don’t involve sports. As such, because sports are less vital in the abstract than some other subjects of the Tinkerbell effect, it’s important to keep perspective. To remember that we’re here to be entertained, and to have fun. A sporting event where everyone’s pleasant to each other makes for a sociable day out and a strengthening of the local community. A sporting event treated like a matter of life and death makes for a community torn asunder, sometimes violently so.

This appears to be something American fans, from the perspective of the rest of the world, have down pat (or at least a lot more pat than them), sometimes to their bewilderment, fully on display in Brazil last year. They realize they’re probably going to lose this upcoming game, right; why the hell are they chanting ‘I believe that we will win’? They’ve had worse outings at the World Cup than we have; why are they so relentlessly cheery all the time? If WE had a team like that, we’d be tearing our hair out! Are they just here to party and enjoy themselves? …you know what, we can live with that. They aren’t about to slug an opposing fan anytime soon; that’s not a bad thing.

Or, well, storm the pitch and chase away the other team, as happened in Bulgaria on Sunday when CSKA Sofia supporters ran off Israel’s second-tier FC Ironi Ashdod in response to an Ashdod tackle that received a red card, Ashdod’s third of the match. CSKA fans are probably on edge a bit, having recently watched the most decorated club in the country be forcibly relegated to the third tier due to financial difficulties alongside local rival Lokomotiv Sofia and relegated-anyway clubs Haskovo and Marek Dupitsna, but that is far from an excuse. If anything, it’s less of an excuse, because it’s not like they sunk alone. Bulgarian soccer is clearly in a bad way. In the 2012-13 season the Bulgarian top flight stood at 16 teams, and then each of the next three seasons it’s shed two spots; it currently is a 10-team league. You’re having problems, CSKA fans? So is everyone else. Don’t take it out on the Israelis.

This is why the wall is there, folks. We should not have to dwell on this basic fact. The only time anyone decent thinks it’s remotely acceptable to storm the field is after you’ve won a title or escaped relegation, and many think not even then. A stray red card? Stay in your seat. The players are supposed to be able to play. Yell, cheer, boo, chant, make the place uncomfortable for the opposition. That’s the whole idea of home-field advantage. But they do still get to actually play. They’re just folks trying to make a living. Not enemy soldiers to be driven back outside the city walls.

A judge in Germany agreed on Wednesday after witnessing another unacceptable behavior: tearing off an opposing fan’s team colors, as some fans of 1860 Munich did to a Bayern Munich supporter last year, stripping him of shirt, jacket and hat. The attackers figured that this was within the bounds. The judge begged to differ. After consulting with the victim, he “wanted to show that football is football and not a battlefield,” and the way he did that was to give the attackers a choice: either spend 15 months in jail, or go to the Bayern Munich team store and personally buy the victim replacement gear (and pay 500 euros in restitution). Said the judge, “I thought about what would be really painful to them, and doing something like this really bothers this type of people.” 1860 and Bayern being local derby rivals, and being the kind of people who would do that in the first place, the judge likely is not wrong. Even so, a walk of shame to the rival’s team store is still a damn sight better than over a year in the hoosegow, so off they went to the store to buy a hat, scarf and jersey for the victim.

Even if you remain in your seat, things on your side of the wall should stay on your side of the wall (unless it’s part of a tifo and specifically meant to be pitched forward, like a streamer or confetti). Food, for example. That goes in your belly. That does not go on the field. One recent violation of this came in Argentina on Sunday, where goalkeeper Juan Olave of Belgrano had a hamburger tossed in his direction by fans of opposition Racing Club. Normally this would come with vigorous protests on the part of the players involved, maybe even a walk off the field in protest. Olave, meanwhile, decided there was no sense wasting a hamburger that only had a little bit of dirt on it and proceeded to take a bite, before returning to keeping a clean sheet in what would end as a scoreless draw.

And when you chant, don’t be racist about it, as CSKA Moscow fans were towards Caucasus Mountain-based Anzhi Makhachkala last Saturday in merely the latest in a long line of racist behavior in Russian parks. Moscow fans were hit with a partial stadium closure in response. The Russians, along with other racist fans the world over, can also be distressingly easily found violating the ‘no food thrown on the field’ rule every time a banana is hurled at a black player, as evidenced with a simple Google search of ‘soccer fan banana’ or its ‘football’ equivalent.

I’m sure you are likely thinking of other examples, but here’s the thing: other than the bananas, this is all just news from the previous week. America’s got a good fan-conduct reputation partially because American soccer tends to have higher standards for conduct. Nobody’s going to tolerate so much as an empty drink cup being thrown on the field in the likes of Chicago or Portland, and if push comes to shove, as it did after, for instance, the 2012 MLS Cup when Houston Dynamo fans rained streamers and beer cans down on Landon Donovan after the LA Galaxy won 3-1, or the following season when MLS launched a leaguewide offensive against the chant ‘you suck, asshole’, MLS is going to think less about the supporter groups and more about the random mom, dad and two kids coming to one soccer game a year. Those families generate a large percentage of the revenue, and if they get too scared to attend a game because the people around them are jerks, pretty soon nobody’s going to have a team to root for at all.

It seems to have been a difficult week. The English Premier League season begins today. Let’s make it a well-behaved season, okay?

On Location: Club Atlas 2-1 Newcastle United

Last summer, the state of Wisconsin held the biggest soccer event in the state since 1990, when the men’s national team rolled into Milwaukee County Stadium to play East Germany in the aftermath of the World Cup. The 1990 match, the first and only time the national team has ever been in the state, was, to put it bluntly, a disaster. The match was set for July 28, but as late in  the process as May, a woeful lack of advertising and seriously underwhelming ticket sales led to speculation that the friendly would be moved to Boston. Somehow, the fixture was rescued, but an originally-expected 25,000 fans manifested at the gate as an official attendance of 12,574. The East Germans barely made it in themselves; what was supposed to be a direct flight from Berlin to Milwaukee wound up turning into an overnight layover in New York and a diverted connection in St. Louis.

The United States lost 2-1 that day to an East German squad that would go on to play only one more match, a 2-0 victory over Belgium, before reunification with the west. Adding to the frustrations that day was the fact that defenseman Jimmy Banks, a local player that was supposed to serve as the marquee attraction on the day, ended up instead serving a one-game suspension due to picking up two yellow cards at the World Cup. He didn’t find out until the day before the game.

24 years passed. An indoor outfit, the Milwaukee Wave, would serve as the only professional soccer-adjacent outpost in the state for the next quarter-century. It’s where Banks came from when he was picked for the World Cup, and it’s where he would go back to to finish his career in the days prior to MLS. He would never play for any other club; since 1999, he’s managed at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Then Chivas Guadalajara and Swansea City arrived last summer. It may only have been a functionally meaningless preseason friendly that they were in town to play, but for the state’s soccer-starved population, it was a blessed acknowledgement that they existed too. 31,237 arrived to make sure they made themselves louder than anything the Brewers had heard in a long time. The crowd as a whole was heavily pro-Chivas, but if you didn’t have apparel of either of the two teams, nobody cared. In fact, the sheer variety of teams represented, international, pro, amateur, local high schools, even defunct (in the case of one fan wearing an LA Aztecs shirt), simply added to the color of the occasion. Root for whoever you want. Just get out here and root so they’ll bring us more games. The match ended in a 1-1 draw, but more importantly, plans were quickly put into place to hold another game this year. Success. A second game was held this past Tuesday.

The formula for selecting the teams was fairly simple: as anyone who remembers the Chivas USA saga already knows, Chivas has a policy of using only Mexican-born players, a policy that ran afoul of discrimination laws in the US, but in their home country makes them heroes, and as such, is guaranteed to draw out any city’s Mexican community in force. It helps that they’re also a traditional power in Liga MX, though they haven’t won a title since the 2006 Apertura and lately have in fact had to start trying to fend off relegation. Swansea City, meanwhile, is an English Premier League club. Any old EPL club will do, really; the bigger ones are busy playing in NFL stadiums, so just get whoever you can. The 12th-place finisher from the previous season will do fine.

As that turned out to work so well, the formula didn’t change for this year: a mainstay of Liga MX vs. any old EPL side that can be bothered. This time, the Liga MX representative was Chivas’ local rival Atlas. Atlas doesn’t have the trophy case Chivas does- their only title came in 1951- but coming in third in last season’s aggregate table isn’t a bad substitute for that. The EPL representative: Newcastle United, who last season only secured safety on the last day when Hull City, needing a win and help, drew Manchester United 1-1 while Newcastle beat West Ham United 2-0. Their final position was 15th.

While in the US, Newcastle also scheduled games against Sacramento Republic and Portland Timbers 2 before returning to England to serve as the opposition for the testimonial match of longtime Sheffield United defenseman Chris Morgan.

As a one-off match designed to get people out to Miller Park, of course, little attention could be expected to be paid to how this game would actually play out. And there was almost zero chat about that as far as I noticed. It was a smaller crowd- 21,256, perhaps depressed by a combination of Atlas being less of a name than Chivas, as well as the fact that the match was scheduled directly against the MLB All-Star Game- but it was still quite sizable by the standards of what Atlas and Newcastle figured would happen, and that crowd had an agenda utterly unrelated to the match itself: get professional soccer into Milwaukee on a long-term basis. The Wave is not sufficient. It never was.

There are actually two separate groups looking to make this happen. One, out in force at the game, is the Milwaukee Barons. The Barons are a supporter group in search of a team, which before you say anything is pretty much how the Philadelphia Union got started. The theory: get together, show yourselves as a group that will show up for games, take season-ticket pledges to show how much money a club would stand to make, and hope the leagues listen.

The second group, interestingly enough, is just such a team: the Milwaukee Torrent, currently in construction, scheduled to hold open tryouts in October to fill their initial roster, and slated to begin play next year in the American Soccer League, which began play only last year as a northeastern regional league. The Torrent is supposed to be part of the ASL’s expansion into the rest of the country. The problem is, the ASL currently doesn’t really have a stated ‘tier’ in the American league system, and didn’t even have a berth in the US Open Cup yet (we’ll see about next year). So while you’d think the Barons would simply latch onto the Torrent and be off to the races, the Barons are holding out for a team starting out in higher prominence, in USL or NASL.

The Torrent did not have a presence at Atlas/Newcastle, at least as far as I observed. However, taking a census of every side I did see (jersey or other official paraphernalia), I counted 74 different clubs- 18 of them in-state- representing ten different countries. 22 national sides were also spotted: Mexico, the United States, Portugal, Germany, England, Croatia, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, France, Poland, Costa Rica, Ukraine, Colombia, Italy, the Philippines, Ghana, the Netherlands, and Finland.

Among the clubs, there were five MLS clubs seen (New York Red Bulls, Chicago, Orlando, Seattle and Portland). Liga MX showed 11: Monarcos Morelia, Chivas, Atlas, Cruz Azul, Leon, Tigres, Club America, Pumas, Puebla, Monterrey and Pachuca. The EPL showed 12: Newcastle United, Aston Villa (not even having to count myself), Liverpool, Crystal Palace, Manchester City, Chelsea, Swansea City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, West Ham, and Leicester City.

The media declared the night another success. The teams… well, they had no problem with the turnout, anyway, at least if Newcastle coach Steve McClaren’s comments were any indication.

The game was another matter. Atlas and Newcastle, in a way, are photographic negatives of each other. Atlas is a moderately successful-yet-hungry club in a moderately successful-yet-hungry league. Mexico annually finds one of its clubs representing CONCACAF in the Club World Cup, but is still searching for that first appearance in the final. Atlas is in the higher echelons of Liga MX, but falls just short of getting to play continentally, and any chance it can get to show itself to the world, even a preseason friendly in Wisconsin, is not a chance to be wasted. Meanwhile, England has long thought highly of itself as the home and pinnacle of the sport, even as that thinking has repeatedly translated into hubris that has cost them dearly in the clutch. The EPL has long thought itself the best league in the world, even when the Champions League era (1992/93 and beyond) has only given them four champions to La Liga’s eight and Serie A’s five (and the Bundesliga’s three), and the same timeframe in the UEFA Cup/Europa League has only given them two winners, a number equal with Russia and Portugal. And Newcastle United, barely skirting relegation last season, is not at all concerned with winning their league, but would be content merely to remain in it. Which means all energies are concentrated on preparing for the Premier League.

It leads to two completely different approaches to a preseason friendly. And it manifested immediately as one man ran rampant. Atlas forward Gonzalo Bergessio, freshly signed from Sampdoria, within the first minute crashed into Newcastle defenseman Mike Williamson, and was brought down in the box by defenseman Jamaal Lascelles, leading to a converted penalty in the 10th minute. He struck again in the 17th, and nearly completed the hat trick in the 22nd but hit the post. For most of the rest of the half, Newcastle looked like a team that had actually been relegated instead of a team that had averted it, offering little response to Atlas’ continued pace control. The crowd, though the teams might have thought it exciting, seemed to me to be rather quiet, almost casually conversational. For the record, my seat was in the sixth row behind home plate, which in Miller Park’s soccer configuration meant I was staring at a corner flag, so it’s not like I was away from the action or anything.

Not that there wasn’t any response. As had been the case last year with Chivas’ fans, anytime the Newcastle goalkeeper (Tim Krul was starting) would line up for a goal kick, the crowd would yell ‘PUTO!’ as boot met ball. This is a trope common to the Mexican game, transferred to the national team’s matches. ‘Puto’ translates to ‘fag’, and in recent years Mexican soccer has come under fire for continuing to permit it. The fans, for their part, say they don’t mean it as a gay slur, and merely intend it as a synonym for cowardice, as Americans might call someone ‘chicken’, and further state that it, and the female equivalent puta, are widely used in other aspects of life. Or more to the point, they intend it to distract the goalkeeper and nothing more.

To which I say, ‘pollo’, the actual Spanish word for chicken, is the same amount of syllables and makes for a very easy linguistic substitute for ‘puto’. And we’ve used ‘gay’ as a perjorative in the US too, but we’re in the process of phasing it out as such. But anyway.

Slowly, Newcastle began to find their voice, as forward Papiss Cisse pulled one back in first-half stoppage time. And after the half, Atlas had opted to defend their three points that didn’t really exist because it was a one-off friendly. Cisse appeared to score the equalizer in the 53rd off a headed corner, with the ball falling a foot or so behind the line before it was defended. But referee Kevin Terry Jr., normally a 4th official in MLS, failed to notice and called no goal. Given the low stature of the match and the fact that it was a converted baseball stadium, goal line technology was not available, and the score remained 2-1. There, it would remain, as Newcastle’s attack was far more scattershot than Atlas’, and while they were threatening late, they weren’t truly threatening.

The crowd, towards the end, had begin to sound like a proper soccer crowd… but the action on the field wasn’t what was doing it. After numerous failed attempts from the Atlas side to start a wave, the Newcastle fans succeeded in the mid-60’s. The roar of the crowd as they rose out of their seats to keep the wave going was louder than anything else on the night.

The true review of the match came towards the end, in the 85th minute. As per a promotional offer, the first 10,000 fans were to receive a double-sided scarf with one team on each side. Presumably, everyone would then hold up their preferred side during the game. but by the time the gates opened, the scarves were absent, held up due to the day’s patchy weather. Upon entry, the first 10,000 fans instead got rain checks for the scarves. In the 85th minute, an announcement went over the PA that the scarves had arrived and were available to the fans with rain checks on the main concourse behind the first-base line.

The review of the game is thus: is the match you’re watching interesting enough to where you’re willing to wait five whole minutes to go get a free scarf?

No. In fact, hell no. Immediately, large chunks of the crowd got up out of their seats and made for the concourse. There was no chance they’d make it back to their seats in time to see any more of the game, but it mattered not. They were free. And so was the scarf.

In theory, Atlas and Newcastle provided an intriguing juxtaposition, but on grass, it didn’t play out like that. Early in the game, Atlas was hungry to prove themselves, while Newcastle was unconcerned with much beyond Premier League preparation. As time progressed, Newcastle became desperate for a result- perhaps too desperate- but by then, Atlas had their result and now merely wanted to maintain it. One side attacked, and then the other, but never both at the same time.

But that’s a thing you only really realize once the whistle blows. Everyone ultimately got what they were looking for out of the game: the fans got a game, the Brewers got some extra revenue, the city of Milwaukee got some international name recognition, Atlas got a win, Newcastle got… well, okay, maybe Newcastle didn’t find what they were looking for, and would like to actually lose something they have, namely Mike Williamson. A substantial crowd showed up again and the reaction they did give was more than enough for the teams involved, meaning there will almost certainly be a third match next summer, and if the proliferation of Leon jerseys I witnessed at Miller Park was any indication, I’d put my money on them being placed in a starring role.

Who definitely won’t be in a starring role is the Milwaukee Wave. The Wave were one of the 74 clubs I witnessed being represented, but I only saw one man representing them. I saw him twice, both at the same place prior to entering the stadium: on a footbridge passing over I-94. On one side of the footbridge is Miller Park, and the main parking lot, chiefly containing the Atlas supporters. On the other was a pregame tailgate in a secondary lot hosted by the Milwaukee Barons, chiefly containing the Newcastle supporters. The man in the Wave uniform was alone on the footbridge, seemingly noticed by few.

And a microcosm of the goal of all involved: shove indoor soccer into the wilderness once and for all. It is no longer needed. It was never needed in the first place.

Bracketville: Stay As Long As You Can

We’ve hit the business end of the Women’s World Cup, and as with any quadrennial sporting event, the teams still around are taking stock of their place in history. The United States defeated Germany 2-0 on Tuesday in a matchup featuring four of the six previous champions that many labeled the ‘true’ championship; either side going on to win it all would make that nation the first to three titles. The actual reigning champions, Japan, are still defending the belt, having defeated an England team that is the first of either gender to reach a semifinal since 1990, a result that is getting England at large to stand up and drop their long-held apathy towards the women’s game, just in time to get heartbroken in ways that know no gender. The Japanese hope to become only the second team to mount a successful defense.

Those who have crashed out, meanwhile, are taking stock of how they did, what went wrong, and what it bodes for the future. Canada, which itself has topped out at a fourth-place finish in 2003 and made the knockouts this year for only the second time, is blaming its lack of playoff experience for its 2-1 defeat at the hands of England in the quarterfinals. England will be consoling itself over the last-second own goal by defensewoman Laura Bassett that sent them out for a long time to come. The tournament’s various debutantes- and there were eight of them (Cameroon, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand)- are understandably looking at their rookie status and gauging whether they should just be happy to get what they got or whether they should have expected more. Usually, it’s the former. None of them made it into the quarterfinals. Cameroon, the highest-finishing of the group (11th), is over the moon with their outing, having beaten two of the other rookies (6-0 over Switzerland, 2-1 over Ecuador), to go alongside a 2-1 loss to the Japanese and their 1-0 elimination against China in the round of 16. Ecuador finished dead last, scoring one goal and conceding 17, but the consensus going in was that they were out of their league going in anyway and that being in the World Cup was the victory.

French midfielder Camille Abily, meanwhile, blames the bracket. Remember that places in the World Cup- as well as a lot of major tournaments requiring preset host cities- the fixture grid is made out in advance, with the host cities knowing far in the future what games and dates they will host, and the teams that will contest those games figured out via the draw. In the men’s World Cup, the host nation is manually placed into the fixture grid and the rest of the field is drawn into their places. In the women’s World Cup, at least this year, all six of the seeded teams were manually placed into groups, with a clear eye on where those teams were going to go in the knockout bracket presuming they won their groups, which all six of them did.

As expected, seeded France won their group. The result was that, as they were to work their way to the final in Vancouver, their round-of-16 game, quarterfinal and semifinal were all scheduled for French-speaking Montreal. Canada was also given three knockouts in the same city, that being Vancouver (their semifinal would have been in Edmonton). That shook out nicely for France. What didn’t shake out nicely was the teams in those brackets: France, Germany and the United States- pegged as the three strongest teams in the field- all being on the same side of the bracket, with Canada being handed a half where the weaker set of Brazil, Japan and England were the strongest of the class, and the strongest of those, Brazil and Japan, being held off until Canada’s semifinal. In essence, a bracket designed to advance Canada as far as possible. France went down to Germany, drawing 1-1 and then losing 5-4 in a quarterfinal penalty shootout.

I won’t go so far as to say Abily doesn’t have a beef here. Shenanigans were most definitely had with the fixture grid. And it’s not like that’s the only beef the women have had this Cup; the artificial turf is causing every single problem the players railed against and were utterly ignored despite. The Japan/Australia quarterfinal in Edmonton was reported by FOX reporter Kyndra de St. Aubin as having a turf temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

However, I think there’s only so much that can be placed upon bracket construction as a cause for failing to win a title. If you’re a team that isn’t projected to go far, sure, it can have an effect on how long you do go. But the entire idea of a bracket is to get a large field whittled down to one champion by pitting them against each other, with the presumptive result being that one of the strongest sides will be the last one standing, and even if it’s not the strongest, they went through a gauntlet to get there.

The general hope is that your relative strength as a competitor should correlate roughly with the path you have to travel in the bracket to reach the title. In most national cup competitions, this is very strictly enforced through the usage of multiple rounds of byes, forcing weaker teams to play several matches just to reach the rounds where the stronger teams enter the bracket. In the 2014-15 FA Cup, the 368 teams entering in the opening ‘Extra Preliminary Round’ would have to get through that, the Preliminary Round, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Qualifying Rounds, and the 1st and 2nd Rounds Proper before reaching the 3rd Round Proper, where Premier League teams entered the fray. Out of the 736 clubs who competed, the Premier League and second-tier Championship do not get involved until 672 of those clubs have already been eliminated.

But once they are in, the draw is completely blind. It is entirely possible for the strongest two teams in the field to meet as soon as they join the fray. North American playoff systems go as far in the opposite direction as they feel they can, seeding each and every team that makes the field. The straightest example is the NBA playoffs, where the top eight teams in each conference’s regular season are simply seeded 1-8, bracketed accordingly, and turned loose on each other. The most famous example, though, is in NCAA basketball. 68 teams in the men’s edition and 64 in the women’s are each seeded 1-16, with the provision that teams from the same conference are kept apart for at least the first couple rounds, and much, much, oh so very much is made about where they fall in the bracket, or whether they get into the bracket at all.

There are teams that get in who are far weaker than teams that don’t. Teams who, at the conclusion of the regular season, nobody would call a national champion. But all place faith in the bracket to sort it all out. Whatever sins and merits your season may have included are all boiled down into a seed number and a path on the bracket. All those sins will, without question, be forgiven, and all will consider you a legitimate national champion, just so long as you run this gauntlet of six (or seven) games without a single loss and make sure that you’re the last team standing. By the time you get there, you will assuredly have faced and beaten enough quality opposition that any doubts about you have been thoroughly erased.

Not that it hasn’t gone completely in the opposite direction. The logical extreme to what Abily has brought up came in the late 1960’s NHL. It was the end of the Original Six era, more or less enforced by a number of outside factors, as the NHL was itself perfectly happy continuing to only have six teams and in fact fought to keep from having to expand beyond that. Rival leagues were popping up in unserved markets, and US television networks made it clear in 1965 that the league, which had not had a TV deal in the US since 1960, would not get one back without expansion, with at least one network stating that they were looking just as much into airing the rival WHL instead. And the WHL was also looking to perhaps merge with the AHL. CBS, who finally gave the progressively-more-panicked NHL the contract, further dictated that they would want two expansion teams to be located in California. The result was teams in Oakland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, doubling the reluctant league’s size.

But they were six expansion teams. Everybody knew they’d get slaughtered as soon as they stepped onto the ice with the Original Six. As a measure of easing them into the league, the Original Six would make up one division, the Eastern Division, and the expansion teams would, geography be damned, make up the Western Division. The playoffs would be carried out as such, guaranteeing that an expansion team would make the Stanley Cup Finals. The regular season in 1968 bore this out, as five of the six Eastern teams- all but the Detroit Red Wings- had a better record than the Western-leading Philadelphia Flyers. Nobody in the West finished with a winning record. Nonetheless, the St. Louis Blues emerged as Western champions and lined up against the Montreal Canadiens in the final.

Now hockey fans will tell you, and you’ve likely already guessed, that Montreal promptly pound the stuffing out of St. Louis 4 games to 0. And then the same result happened in 1969, and then it was Boston’s turn to sweep St. Louis in 1970, and then new expansion teams in Buffalo and Vancouver caused things to start mixing a bit. But had St. Louis beaten Montreal or Boston in any of those finals, despite having an obviously far easier path to the title, would their title have been diminished? No. They would have lifted the same Stanley Cup as anyone else. They would have had to knock off an Original Six team to get there, after all. A strong one. THAT team certainly wouldn’t have been able to complain.

That’s the beauty of a bracket. You can, ultimately, structure it just about any way you choose. Give teams as easy or as difficult a path as you want. The paths won’t stay easy forever. Sooner or later, that weaker team is going to have to answer the bell against the elites. The bracket will, inevitably, force them together.

Perhaps it wasn’t the best result for France and Germany to meet in a quarterfinal instead of a semifinal or a final. But they met. And in the end, in any bracket, you simply have to beat who’s put in front of you.

So Where Do We Stand?

When your sport is being paid attention to by people who don’t watch sports, something major is going on. Something has occurred that, in all likelihood, is reaching a fair distance beyond the confines of the field. It doesn’t get much more major than a decades-long scandal of global scope that reaches up to the very highest levels of an organization that has shown proven ability to bring governments to heel the world over.

The FIFA scandal has delivered, on a daily basis, headline after headline placing the game and the world at large in horrific intersection, sometimes making it distressingly unclear which is having a bigger influence on the other. So far, as multiple nations conduct their own investigations into FIFA’s various doings, we’ve seen things such as this:

*14 people, all from North and South America, were indicted by the United States, with the arrest of seven of them by Swiss authorities in Zurich on May 27, the action that set everything else in motion. Six of them have been issued red notices by Interpol, essentially international wanted posters.

*CONMEBOL headquarters in Luque, Paraguay, a suburb of the capital Asuncion, is under investigation as to how, exactly, the Paraguayan legislature granted it the status of an embassy, literally placing soccer officials above Paraguayan law when conducting business on the grounds. The theory is that someone slipped it into an unknown piece of legislation somewhere and nobody but CONMEBOL noticed. The legislature is currently working to strip the headquarters of its embassy status, which it’s had since 1997; president Horacio Cartes has pledged to sign it if and when it reaches his desk. Two former presidents of CONMEBOL are among those indicted, Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay (1986-2013), who has been placed under house arrest by local authorities; and Eugenio Figueredo of Uruguay (2013-14), who was arrested in Zurich.

*Germany was found by German paper Die Zeit to have entered into an arms deal with Saudi Arabia in order to secure their vote for hosting the 2006 World Cup over South Africa.

*FIFA Executive Committee member Ismail Bhamjee of Botswana was captured on tape by reporters posing as lobbyists stating that Morocco, not South Africa, won the vote to host the 2010 World Cup, but that behind closed doors, the count was altered to favor the South Africans. Bhamjee may have been lying. It’s not quite sure. Bribes were the order of the day in securing votes; Jack Warner accepted bribes from both countries and voted for South Africa because their bribe was bigger.

*After Ireland lost in controversial fashion to France in a final-round qualifier to participate in the 2010 World Cup, with France scoring off a handball by Thierry Henry, FIFA arranged a $10 million bribe to Ireland’s national federation to make the problem go away.

*Reporters in the Cayman Islands have fled to Florida after reporting on the actions of indicted executive Jeffrey Webb after premier Alden McLaughlin called their reporting “reckless” and saying that the reporting “must be interpreted as a treasonous attack on the Cayman Islands and on all the people of Cayman.”

Do not for a second think the worst is over. We have only begun to unpack the myriad horrors that those in charge of the world’s most popular sport can inflict upon that world, in addition to slavery in Qatar, demolished homes in nearly any neighborhood in the world picked as the site of a new stadium needed for a World Cup, and virtually anything done at the whim of a dictator whose team has gotten enough of a winning streak going. This will continue for some time, and to make any kind of proclamation about where the sport of soccer will stand after all is said and done is rushed at best. We don’t know where we’ll stand at the end. We don’t know where we stand now, really. Who will head FIFA at the end of the day? We don’t know. What will that person do once in charge? We don’t know. What will be their ability to do what they want to do? We don’t know. Will we have true change for the better? We don’t know.

It’s not a satisfying answer, sure. But it’s the answer we have.

The best we can do is make some informed guesses. Soccer as a sport isn’t going away. We can be sure of that. What’s going on is off the field, not on it. Teams can still find and play each other and the results of those games are still held up as fundamentally valid. If the problems had brought the results of games into disrepute, then we’d be into existential territory, the place boxing and cycling found themselves. But while match-fixing is itself a problem in the sport, it’s not the problem on our hands here. You’ll still have your favorite club, they’ll still play your rivals. Even if we get to the point that FIFA dies and some other organization takes its place, all the clubs, or constituent nations at least, will have to do is swap affiliations and continue on with their day.

Who will lead FIFA? Well, Sepp Blatter isn’t entirely out yet. He still has the seat. So at the risk of sounding obvious, until Sepp is out, Sepp is in. But assuming we do have an election, I have a feeling it will, once again, settle into a two-candidate race. On one side, I have fairly good reason to believe that Prince Ali bin Al-Hussein of Jordan, Blatter’s just-defeated opponent, will stand again. On the other, I would peg his opponent as Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, president of CAF since 1988 and the man who Blatter defeated in 2002. A candidate who appears to be too closely aligned to Blatter will be placed under immediate intense scrutiny, and if you’re a European name, such as Michael Platini, that’s a problem. But Blatter’s base has been Africa and Asia, whose leaderships fiercely maintain that Blatter has recognized that the poorer nations of the soccer world, at least, exist. (Whether he’s actually helped anyone in those nations except those leaders… that’s another matter.)

It’s my personal wild speculation that Africa, worried that what the rest of the world would see as a ‘reform’ candidate would in their mind be one that shoves Africa into a corner to rot, may opt to go for direct control, ensuring their seat at the table for the foreseeable future, and the obvious candidate if they go that route is Hayatou. This, of course, is only if Hayatou avoids the hammer himself. He’s certainly lobbed his fair share of accusations at the investigators, and the investigators certainly have reason to lob right back.

The big question on the minds of most is what will happen with Russia and Qatar. What happens there will partially depend on who takes the helm, but I feel pretty safe in saying that the 2018 World Cup will remain in Russia for one simple reason: it’s already too late. In December, I noted how the length of time from a World Cup final to the ensuing qualifiers shrinks by the campaign. We are already on the road to Moscow, and 15 countries have already gone off into the ditch. Nepal, Pakistan, Mongolia, Macau, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, and Jeffrey Webb’s Cayman Islands have been defeated. Indonesia has been kicked out for government interference; Zimbabwe has been kicked out for failing to pay fired coach Jose Claudinel a severance fee.

The host gets an automatic bid, and as such, does not participate in qualifiers. Stripping Russia of the hosting gig would create something of a logistical nightmare. We’ve only budgeted for one automatic bid, and the new host would have to have it. Can you slot Russia into qualifying (or do you boot them out, which doesn’t really seem fair to the team itself)? Can you slot them in even if you reallocate to a non-European host? What happens to the new host’s continent’s qualifying scenario? To swap them out cleanly would have to be done before the global main qualifying draw on July 25 in St. Petersburg. We know Blatter will be in charge when that draw takes place, and thus, Russia will be the host on the day of the draw. After that draw, a host swap becomes calamitous to pull off. By the time any new host took their seat, we’d be so far along in qualifying that nobody will be able to figure out how to rip through enough remaining red tape to make it work in time. They’ll hem, haw, campaign, rip clothes, gnash teeth, threaten to boycott, but there will be a World Cup in Russia in 2018.

Qatar is another matter entirely. Qatar has been the poster child of everything that’s led to our current scenario. Russia, people could on some level forgive, because at least Russia has a competent national team and something of a soccer pedigree. Qatar has nothing. The fight to replace Blatter could very quickly turn into the fight for Qatar as well, as any reform leader would almost certainly go after Qatar as a central part of the reform.

But not even that’s entirely certain.

We don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know. The only way to really know what will happen is to hang on for the ride.

A Day With The Emerald City Supporters

You haven’t seen me around the last two weeks or so. There’s a reason for that: namely, I was on a roadtrip to the Pacific Northwest, and I didn’t have time on the road to research and write anything for here at any point. I had about enough online time to alert friends and family as to where I’d shacked up on any given night, check in on them in turn, and that was more or less it.

The recent arrests and indictments of FIFA officials by the FBI and Swiss police got sprung on me the same night I arrived home. Normally I’d be all over this, and if you follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook, you’ll see that’s exactly the case. I’ll likely start diving into the matter here at the Minnow Tank in time. But right now, I have slightly different business, as I want to share a story from the road.

Namely, my day with the Emerald City Supporters (ECS), the local ultras of the Seattle Sounders, spent alongside a member who also happened to be a fellow forumer on another online board of mine, going (in person) by the name Bender, that I was meeting up with and who helped fill me in on the situation. For those of you who’ve never been inside a supporters section, here’s a taste of what it’s like.

My last full day before starting for home was devoted to the Sounders’ May 23 match against Sporting Kansas City. The story of this game is tied to the Sounders’ match the previous week, visiting the Vancouver Whitecaps. I’m not able to find a clip of the incident, but I do recall seeing it in the highlights of the match beforehand in hotel rooms earlier in my trip. So I know it happened. What had happened was that MLS had wanted to put a camera on the ECS bus to Vancouver. ECS told them no. When they got to the game, ECS found not one, but three league cameras trained on them without their consent. The incident was that one supporter, at some point, flipped the bird, and that got on camera and wound up in the highlights packages. The fan received a stadium ban and was ordered to take a code-of-conduct course.

I met up with Bender at one of the ECS’s customary meeting places, a bar called Temple Billards. It wasn’t very full- it looked okay for some random day in a random burg in Wisconsin like I might see at home, but as a pregame soccer bar meetup point, it was considered barren. This was by design. The core supporters were being asked to meet up at another bar a couple streets away called Fuel for a meeting regarding the events in Vancouver. A little after Bender and I arrived there, another member of ECS, who I never got the name of, was handed a microphone and she gave the rundown for any latecomers (such as us). As it happened, things weren’t going to be left at that.

The ECS traditionally holds a pregame ‘March to the Match’ starting at Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, more or less kitty-corner from Fuel and a couple blocks from CenturyLink Field. Fearing that this, too, was to be co-opted by MLS, and noting that the fans are independent supporters and not advertising branches for the league, the core supporters were going to do things a little differently: they were going to start the march right there at Fuel (where they’d originally started the march from in the days before this whole MLS thing came along), parade behind a construction zone across the street from Occidental Park (where cameras wouldn’t see them), merge with the rest of the supporters after the park, and reassert control. Solidarity was also expressed for the fan from the Vancouver game, not so much for his right to flip the bird whenever he wants, but because he’s one of them and the imperative is to stick together.

A fuller rundown from ECS about what was said can be found here.

Thus duly fired up, the march began, beginning the nightlong drumbeat of songs and chants inherent with any self-respecting supporter group. For first-timers like myself, song cards are made available so you know what’s being sung and can join in, as is your duty if you’re going to be part of the crowd. I’m an Aston Villa supporter first and foremost, but as the Sounders aren’t playing Villa anytime soon, I had no qualms about doing just that. Gimme the song card…

…er, ‘Seattle’ by Perry Como? I don’t know that one. Perry Como is not my lyrical wheelhouse. I could, however, suss out the rest, at least after a repetition or so. (As I quickly discovered, and was informed, not all the songs are actually on the card. The ones that aren’t are either very simple, or contain bad words, or are verses of songs on the card that contain bad words.) Everything that was on the card, as well as some things that weren’t, are also available to view here, on the ECS website.

The song/chant selection is done by what amounts to an ultras cheerleader universally referred to as the capo. They’re not used everywhere, but here they are used. This is pretty much always going to be a guy; this game was no exception. Make of that what you will. The capo’s job during a match is to stand in front of the supporters section with his back to the game- though in some cases, Seattle included, there’s a Jumbotron behind the section so the capo can still see what’s going on in the game. For the most part, what’s going on in the game isn’t really important, as the capo leads the supporters and gets them as loud and boisterous as possible regardless of how the game is going. He’ll be on some sort of elevated platform so everyone can see him- in some cases having to straddle a retaining fence in order to do so- and at least in our case, he had a microphone so as to be better heard. The capo decides what gets chanted (starting it off and monitoring to see when the energy needs to be picked back up), when it gets chanted (with the occasional quick break to save everyone’s lungs and throats), and how long it gets chanted; in ECS’s case at least, there’s a signal for when to stop: one fist up means wrap it up after the next rep of the current chant, two fists crossed means stop everything right now. A few lieutenants were off to the sides, in the midst of the crowd, to help the capo carry out his orders.

This extends to the march, which the capo, naturally, leads. As the march was led behind the construction zone, green smoke canisters were set off as part of the spectacle. I happened to walk right over the first one deployed while it was still emitting smoke… and tried to chant.

PROTIP: Never do that. You just get a mouthful of smoke, which makes it rather hard to chant anyway. It pretty much wrecked me for most of the march (I’m okay). When I wound up walking over the others- I was positioned in the middle of the street- I just hiked the front of my shirt up to my mouth and waited it out. A couple times over the course of the night, I’d be coughing it out and a neighboring supporter would ask if I was okay. Turns out walking over a smoke canister is considered a perfectly reasonable explanation. Once I got into the stadium, my first task was to get a drink, but there weren’t any sodas I drink for sale, and the best thing on hand other than water was a Starbucks hot chocolate. (PROTIP: That was a poor decision. Get the water.)

This is all serious business in the soccer world. In ‘Soccernomics’ by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, it was determined that home field advantage in soccer is worth two-thirds of a goal. With the low scoring rate in soccer, two-thirds of a goal per game is a massive edge. The ultras are more than pulling their weight; their team is literally much less capable of doing it without them. As such, their job is down to a science. Organization, speaking with one voice, is far superior to the disorganized cheering common in the old-guard North American sports. Deciding for themselves how to cheer makes for a more enthusiastic and attentive fanbase than waiting for the scoreboard operator to exhort the crowd to ‘make some noise’ or ‘charge’. Signs are well and good, but they’re far better when A) everyone’s given prior consent to having their view blocked by them- we’re all familiar with that complaint at a game- and B) the fans organize in advance what displays get shown. A couple scattered signs saying ‘Go X’ or creating acronyms out of the broadcasting network’s name are less impressive than one gigantic pregame display that the entire section participates in, or at least, a ton of signs and banners all over the place isn’t half bad either.

In essence, you want an environment that makes it look like the supporters section is half-crazed and frightening for the opposition to be in the presence of, without actually being, you know, dangerous or anything. (Though some ultra groups will gleefully cross that line.)

This was the view immediately behind me during the march. Does that look like a group you want to mess with? No? Then they’ve done their job.

Before starting the march, one such example of this was demonstrated. As a further show of defiance against MLS authority, the members of ECS were asked what they were going to do when the cameras fell on them. A slew of middle fingers were raised (not mine, though). The message: if you ban one of us, be ready to ban all of us. However, once in the stadium, the capo clarified the situation slightly. You see, at a game in the 2013 season against the Portland Timbers, the camera happened to fall on a fan who was busy flipping off their ultras, the Timbers Army. Unfortunately for all involved, this happened during the national anthem. Hilarity ensued. This was doubly important to know on this particular game, as the Sporting KC match happened to fall on Memorial Day weekend. So while the middle fingers were going to come out, the capo instructed the ECS to holster them during the color guard display, moment of silence and national anthem, just to make sure there’s no tragic misunderstandings this time. I didn’t see any, so, mission accomplished.

He also provided a rundown of what was likely to happen in the game itself: recent matches against Kansas City had seen little scoring up until second-half stoppage time, and then everything went down at once. No game between the two has ever resulted in a margin of victory of more than one goal. He told ECS to expect no different. When anything particularly notable did happen in the game, a scoring chance, a hard tackle, and ECS began reacting to it like normal fans, the capo immediately jumped to reassert control, continuing the current chant himself and getting the group back to business. When one supporter produced a video camera (my point-and-click camera was apparently fine or at least went unnoticed), the capo gazed at the fan and went “…Not today.” (And shortly afterwards, “I’m sorry. Send him to me afterwards; I’ll buy him a beer.”)

There were really only a few instances where ECS was not being managed by the capo: as the group was going through the turnstiles (although this didn’t go without a verse of ‘Let Us In’ sung over and over to the tune of Stars and Stripes Forever), and during some of halftime. When the scoreboard operator told all the fans just before the game to get their scarves up- a pregame tradition- the capo begged to differ. This was a day of defiance. If CenturyLink Field as a whole is being told by The Man to get their scarves up, ECS was going to keep theirs down. And they did.

Not that there weren’t moments of cooperation, but ECS demanded the lead. The capo would, at a few points, instruct ECS to chant “Seaaaaaaattllllleeee!,” and wait for the rest of the stadium to obligingly chant “Souuunnnnnderrrrrrs!” At one point, the capo seemed amused by this arrangement.

Even the downtimes were carefully managed: at several points in the game, as opposed to a song or chant, the capo, still mindful of the theme of ECS solidarity running through the night, instructed everyone in the supporters section to turn around and say hi to their neighbor (seats are general admission). Really mean it, too. This is a community, after all. Seriously. Strike up a conversation with whoever’s next to you. Go on. Do it. This is how I found out the guy in the seat in front of me also happened to be in from Wisconsin, although he’d actually moved to the area and wasn’t visiting like I was.

Towards the end of the game, the capo made a call to the supporters to take a little pity on the other meetup bars that had been largely cleared out so that everyone could meet at Fuel, Temple Billiards included. Head to them after the game and make up for the lost business from earlier. (I have no idea whether this was done, because my task after the game was to get back to the parking garage and my hotel and prepare to start for home first thing in the morning. But I’m confident it was.) And then… oh yeah. The game’s in a scoreless draw and we’re nearing second-half stoppage time. Come on, ECS! You only have to keep it up for three more minutes! Empty those lungs out! Come on! Come on!

The Sounders didn’t come on. Neither did Kansas City. Seattle really should have taken the win- they had 65% possession on the match- but only one shot out of their ten was on target (Sporting was 3-for-9). No goals, one point apiece. It was actually a distressing result for Seattle, as they’d won seven of their other nine meetups against Kansas City, losing only in their inaugural meeting in 2009.

Most of the supporters stuck around to sing the Sounders into the locker room, and to chant the name of goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who was named Man of the Match. I, however, had to prepare for three days and over 2,000 miles of driving home, and left not long after the final whistle.

If you ever find yourself amongst your club’s ultras, hopefully this provides a taste of what to expect when you’re there. Every club’s local ultras have their own traditions, customs and mentalities. But there’s a fair bit that broadly holds true. Many of the same songs and chants are passed from club to club, the lyrics altered slightly to suit local situations- the ECS song card, for instance, contained the ‘No one likes us, we don’t care‘ chant originally made famous by Millwall, and Seattle is far from alone in co-opting it. Many of the same props are used by most clubs- scarves, flags, banners, smoke to name a few- and it’s typically a matter of which implements are used by a particular club and how often. And although not every game is spent sending some sort of message, like this one was, the sense of community is absolutely everywhere.

It wouldn’t be a supporters group, after all, if it wasn’t a group.

Go ahead. Say hi to your neighbor.

Bilbao In Boise

With the end of the fall-to-spring leagues fast approaching and promotion/relegation scenarios quickly leaving the realm of the estimates and entering the realm of what specific games need to end in scoreline X to achieve result Y, it will soon be time once again for the more prominent of those clubs to hit the road on the annual preseason friendly world tour. We glossed over that last month in the context of a leaguewide geographic spread. But there’s more to the preseason friendly than simply the clubs making the tour. It’s also about the places hosting the games.

A lot of these games will be pretty straightforward home/away situations. But they don’t have to be. Because the game’s just a friendly and doesn’t count for anything, you can hold it wherever you please. As this is the case, cities will fight to bring the biggest clubs they can to their backyards. Major cities with big stadiums in lucrative markets, even if they have teams of their own, will try to land the megaclubs of the world. This is basically the purpose of the International Champions Cup, which last year featured 13 different stadiums across the United States and Canada- only one of which is an MLS stadium- hosting eight European teams, all of which are notable for not being from MLS. Five of the host cities- Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Miami and Ann Arbor- were not MLS markets (at the time). This summer, the cup will be hosted by Australia and China as well as the United States.

Less lucrative markets, and those who have no team at all, will generally just be happy to get whoever they can to show up. But they may still have a specific someone in mind, a club that would specifically appeal to the locals. In the case of the friendly I attended last year in Milwaukee between Swansea City and Chivas Guadalajara, the big draw was Chivas. Milwaukee, like much of America’s soccer market sizable Mexican community, and even though it was technically a neutral-site game, it was clear Chivas was the de facto home team against a Swansea side picked pretty much just to have someone from the English Premier League in attendance. Chivas has long held to the policy of only fielding home-grown (e.g. Mexican) players, a policy known as cantera. They’ve done this to the point where one of Chivas USA’s many woes leading to its dissolution at the end of the 2014 campaign included the club running headlong into American discrimination laws once it became clear that the club was favoring Latinos. As a result, where Chivas USA floundered, Chivas Guadalajara has established itself as a Mexican icon. If you want a club that will bring the region’s Mexican community out in force, inviting Chivas is just about the best move you could make.

A club with an equivalent policy, the Spanish Basque Country’s Athletic Bilbao, will be making the trek to Boise, Idaho on July 29 to face Club Tijuana. It will be Bilbao’s first preseason trip outside Europe since July 17, 2012, when they lost 3-1 to Morocco’s Raja Casablanca. Club Tijuana was a second-choice invite; Boise’s original plan was to try to get a regional MLS team- the Portland Timbers, Seattle Sounders or Real Salt Lake- but with MLS’s labor issues leading into the season, they sought the Mexican substitute.

But whoever they got, they were always going to be the ‘other’ team on the pitch. Bilbao, specifically Bilbao, was who Boise really wanted. Every five years, Boise holds the Jaialdi International Festival, a weeklong celebration of Basque culture, which straddles the border of Spain and France. Only a Basque club would do, and they don’t get any more Basque than Bilbao. Fellow Basque club Real Sociedad had once maintained the same policy as Bilbao, but abandoned it in 1989- to much consternation from the supporters- with the signing of Irish forward John Aldridge from Liverpool. Sociedad supporters have since come to an acceptance with an ‘impure’ squad; the Basque talent pool is only so large, and with Bilbao increasingly gaining control of it and Sociedad having slipped from runner-up in 1987-88 to 11th place in 1988-89, Sociedad felt they had to take drastic action to remain in contact. (Aldridge, his family proving unable to make the transition to living in Spain, returned to England after two seasons.)

The question surely being asked by anyone who doesn’t live in Idaho, of course, is “what exactly is a Basque community doing in Idaho?” More to the point, what is the largest concentration of Basques in the United States doing in Idaho? The first question to answer, really, is why would there be a Basque diaspora period. The first answer centers around the First Carlist War, a battle over Spanish succession in the 1830’s. Up to this point, the Basque region had been independent, part of the complicated system of small and ever-shifting nation-states that have dotted Europe throughout its history. The First Carlist War, though, put an end to that. It took place mainly in the Basque country (as well as Catalonia) and resulted in the Basque side losing not only the war, but also their independence, with the province of Navarre being absorbed into Spain, with whom they had been feuding off and on for centuries beforehand. This caused some of the Basque people to flee for greener pastures. ‘Pastures’, here, is meant literally, as those who left sought out environments as similar to those they left as possible. Usually, this meant heading for the Americas, and chiefly, this meant South America. Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay boast sizable proportions of Basques. The United States, not quite so much. As of 2009, there are only an estimated 58,000 Basques in the United States. The vast majority of them live in the west.

Which leads to the second question: why the west, and why Boise? Well, why did everyone else head west? Gold, of course. When Basques arriving in America showed up on Ellis Island, it was typically merely to pass right on through to hunt for gold and silver out west; many arrived in response to the Sutter’s Mill discovery and made directly for California, even luring away some of the Argentinian Basques. However, opportunities for Basques to take part in the mining were limited, as racist and anti-foreigner sentiments made it hard for anyone who wasn’t a white American to make a living that way. Luckily, the Basques had an alternative: sheep farming. Much of the immigrant population had come from a sheepherding background in which control of the family farm was passed on to the eldest son; the daughters and younger sons were simply out of luck, and some decided to start their own farms elsewhere. Plan B- raise and butcher sheep, and sell the meat to the miners- was only natural, and turned out to work a lot better than actually doing the mining, and allowed some of them to send for their families who remained in Europe.

Idaho in particular not only happened to have a particularly large sheep population in need of some extra people to herd them, there were silver discoveries at DeLamar in 1889 and Silver City in 1890; the latter is about 70 miles southwest of Boise and DeLamar is six miles from Silver City. It was not a hard sell for the Basques. After the gold and silver rushes petered out, so did the Basque migration, save for gradually moving off the farms as the years went by, many citing the crushing loneliness as the deciding factor as they headed for town. Presently, only a handful of sheepherders remain.

Boise presently contains the only Basque mayor in the country, David Bieter, who has served since 2004. They’re no token presence, numbering about 16,000 strong in the city.

Albertsons Stadium, which will be hosting Athletic Bilbao and Club Tijuana, holds 37,000. Plenty of room for all of them, and 21,000 of their closest friends.

A New Article, Way Better Than That Last One

Liverpool has unveiled their new home jersey for the 2015-16 season. But by looking at it, you can hardly tell. They have a new supplier, New Balance, but functionally, the jersey looks basically the same as all their others: solid red, with white trim. The main shirt sponsor, Standard Chartered (a bank based in London), is unchanged from last season, so there’s not even that. There was a whole entire unveiling ceremony for it.

People would be surprised if there wasn’t.

Every sport has its off-field checkpoints that help serve to get fans excited for the season to come. Free agency, scouting combines and rookie drafts abound. Soccer has its offseason transfer windows, but combines and drafts are largely out of the question due to the nature of the labor market. With most leagues in constant flux regarding club personnel, most of the time any offseason union of clubs is purely theoretical. They won’t really be seen together in one place aside from broadcast studio collections of logos. Clubs typically make their own fun, and so preseason hype has to be on a club-by-club basis. And what’s the easiest thing to roll out every season, aside from new players? A new uniform. Sometimes clubs do a total revamp, sometimes it’s only the most minor alterations- changing the placement of some of the trim, perhaps. An increasingly popular option is to include some element with special meaning to the club or the area that, nonetheless, will prove effectively invisible when viewed during an actual game.

For instance, Zenit St. Petersburg opted for a phrase, ‘Our Name, Zenit’, embedded into the inside of the back of the collar, which can’t be seen during a game unless you can peer through a man’s neck. The Portland Timbers have decided this season to include an emblem in the lower corner of the shirt- where it’s unlikely to be seen from any distance- reading ‘5/40’, signifying the number of seasons the Timbers have been in MLS, and alive overall, respectively; in addition, where Zenit puts its phrase, the Timbers wrote “Let it rain, let it pour, let the Portland Timbers score,” an homage to a chant from their supporters, the Timbers Army. The New England Revolution included a tiny version of the flag that represented the New England colonies in the American Revolution. A number of clubs have taken to including the names or photos of supporters on certain incarnations of their jersey. You’ll never pick it up on a broadcast, but it’s certainly meaningful.

It’s certainly not ineffective. The uniform has meaning to fans. It has more meaning than any of the players do. The uniform, though it may depict the name of a particular player, represents not just that one player, but all the players that have put it on over the years. It represents all that has been done by and to players while wearing it. The colors of the uniform may have meaning from the very start- all teams in the city of Pittsburgh, for instance, wear the colors of the city flag, black and gold (and I mean all teams; all the way down to roller derby and rugby league)- but even if they were chosen arbitrarily, they gain meaning as the ghosts of seasons past, perhaps championships past, begin to accumulate within them, to the point where an attempt to change them can result in furious backlash, as Cardiff City owner Vincent Tan learned in 2012 when he changed the colors from blue to red. Many fans simply refused to wear the red jerseys and continued to turn up wearing blue. (This past January, he surrendered and changed it back to blue.) Richard Beech of the Mirror, fawning over an AS Roma jersey rollout, presents a typical perspective on this kind of thing.

In North America, typically jersey news is saved for substantial reworkings, often involving a change in the team colors that forces a change in everything else, jersey included. But then, it can afford to be. North American leagues go to great lengths to ensure each and every team is financially stable and healthy. Outside that, league protections for the also-rans are far less comprehensive, and far more fragile due to the threats of relegation. Jersey sales, thus, are a valuable revenue stream. A stream that must be kept constantly stoked. A club can’t wait for an attractive new signing to sell laundry. It has to happen every year, no matter what, even if the team looks substantially worse than last year and includes nobody new worth writing home about.

The solution: alter the jersey. Make the old one obsolete. If people want to come out to the park clad in what the team is wearing right now, give them no choice but to buy the hot new thing in order to stay current. (And who wouldn’t buy a team’s jersey knowing that their own name or face was on it somewhere?) Even if you want to show up in the same basic jersey that you’ve worn for years, you still change some piddly minor element that doesn’t really affect anything. MLS has mandated something more substantial as of 2013, instituting ‘Jersey Week’ in which all clubs in the league are expected to introduce at least one actually new-looking jersey every season.

This is not to say North America doesn’t have a similar phenomenon. It just typically doesn’t revolve around the jersey itself. A North American fan typically has no problem wearing last season’s jersey; in fact, retro jerseys do brisk business, and teams frequently take the field on a ‘Turn Back The Clock Day’ of some sort, wearing what they, or some other previous local team, had worn in a particular year. The North American equivalent revolves around the names on the jersey. Beloved retired players are one thing, but who wants to be caught wearing the jersey of a player who recently left and is now playing for someone else? Better find another player’s jersey to wear.

What’s going on here is called perceived obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is more well-known, but that’s not the same thing. Planned obsolescence is when a product is made in such a way that it will break after a certain period, forcing the consumer to buy a replacement. Perceived obsolescence is about convincing a consumer to discard a product that, functionally, is still perfectly good. Those old jerseys could, if desired, still be worn for years and years, maybe even decades, to come. The car industry heavily relies on this: if people all kept their cars until they naturally stopped working, they wouldn’t sell enough to remain in business. They have to get people to buy new cars long before the old ones break down, and so they change the seats, change the hood, change the rear bumper, whatever other cosmetic elements will get people to go buy a new car, quickly. Buy a new TV. Buy the new iPad.

Buy the new club jersey.

Look. Look at the shiny new pinstripes. If you can notice them, because they’re the same color as the rest of the jersey.

Overseas Preseason Friendlies: A Primer

What I’ve decided to do here today is a rough-and-dirty analysis of non-domestic countries visited by clubs in six selected leagues in their most recent preseason. As one might already know, a club going overseas to do a preseason tour is not merely doing it to get the team ready for the season. There is no shortage of local clubs who would love nothing more than to go out and play the dream match against a big-time, major league club that they can go tell their grandkids about afterwards. You can warm up your club against them just fine. By going overseas to do it, a club is looking usually to build their brand in that country. They’re looking to take a fresh stack of replica jerseys along with them to sell to the locals and, if they’re lucky, get them to be fans of the team who will then go spend more money on team merchandise later on.

The idea here is, what does that look like across an entire league? It’ll change from year to year, of course. Clubs that focus on touring North America one year might tour Asia the next, and they can’t go everywhere in one preseason, but at the same time, other clubs in the league might not leave the country at all. So this is just a snapshot. Not only where is the footprint being made right now, but how big of a footprint, and how much of the league is contributing to that footprint. Perhaps everyone is traveling. Perhaps only a few are.

The six I’ve selected are three of the biggies in Europe- England, Spain and Germany- and three not-quite-so-biggies outside of Europe altogether- Brazil, the United States and Australia. Someone with more time on their hands than I do could expand it out and get more leagues involved, a larger sample size, but I figure this is a nice starting point. We’ll get a little more into the details of each league after we lay out the country spread.

Forgive the lack of links this time around. You would never make sense of what’s supposed to be pointing to what anyway. Unsurprisingly, preseason friendlies don’t get all that much ink, and it’s a real pain to hunt down a record of venue amongst all the betting sites that are interested in nothing beyond ‘home, away or neutral’. The place would be covered in blue. You’d think there was an ad bot on your computer. I did my best.

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE (2014-15)
United States: Arsenal, Aston Villa, Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Swansea City, Tottenham Hotspur, West Bromwich Albion
Germany: Chelsea, Everton, Hull City, Newcastle United, Queens Park Rangers, Stoke City, West Ham United
Netherlands: Aston Villa, Chelsea, Southampton
Austria: Chelsea, Crystal Palace
Thailand: Everton, Leicester City
New Zealand: Newcastle United, West Ham United
Slovenia: Chelsea
Turkey: Chelsea
Hungary: Chelsea
Denmark: Liverpool
Scotland: Manchester City
Ireland: Queens Park Rangers
Belgium: Southampton
Portugal: Sunderland
Canada: Tottenham Hotspur
Finland: Tottenham Hotspur

England, of course, makes a habit of annual globetrotting, with the major clubs treating it partly as vacations for the players to whatever exotic locale it is that year. In the last ten preseasons, Manchester United alone has traveled to Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. It just happened to be a glut of American tours this time around, with a lot of potential fans with a lot of disposable income hungry for a quality product.

GERMAN BUNDESLIGA (2014-15)
Austria: Hertha Berlin, FC Koln, SC Paderborn, Schalke 04, VfB Stuttgart, Werder Bremen
England: Bayer Leverkusen, Borussia Dortmund, 1. FSV Mainz, Schalke 04, Werder Bremen, VfL Wolfsburg
Switzerland: Borussia Dortmund, 1899 Hoffenheim, VfL Wolfsburg
Poland: Borussia Dortmund, Werder Bremen
China: Hamburger SV, Werder Bremen
South Korea: Bayer Leverkusen
United States: Bayern Munich
Qatar: Bayern Munich
Saudi Arabia: Bayern Munich
Italy: Eintracht Frankfurt
Spain: SC Freiburg
Slovenia: Hannover 96
Turkey: Hertha Berlin

The Bundesliga, outside of the marquee names, isn’t quite as enamored with big roadtrips as England is. Bayern Munich and their chief competitors have brands to sell, but most of the league heads for the Alps to do their warmups. Also note: there’s a lot of German/English crossover. Both can find the stiff resistance you like to have in a late-preseason game by looking to the other, as their respective national teams will attest.

LA LIGA (2014-15)
Germany: Athletic Bilbao, Atletico Madrid, Getafe, Granada, Malaga, Sevilla, Valencia
England: Celta Vigo, Real Sociedad, Valencia, Villarreal
France: Athletic Bilbao, FC Barcelona, Sevilla
Switzerland: Athletic Bilbao, FC Barcelona
United States: Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid
Turkey: Atletico Madrid, Sevilla
Portugal: Celta Vigo, Deportivo de La Coruna
Netherlands: Levante, Real Sociedad
Thailand: UD Almeria
Austria: Athletic Bilbao
Greece: Athletic Bilbao
Mexico: Atletico Madrid
Finland: FC Barcelona
Algeria: Celta Vigo
Colombia: Deportivo de La Coruna
Morocco: RCD Espanyol
Australia: Malaga
Italy: Rayo Vallecano
Poland: Real Madrid
United Arab Emirates: Real Madrid

While the convenience of remaining on the continent is a strong lure, La Liga scattered to the four winds in its most recent preseason, with at least one club trekking to every inhabited continent. The bottom of the table, though, never left Spain.

Now to the less marquee leagues, and watch how dramatically these lists shrink.

CAMPEONATO BRASILEIRO SERIE A (2015)
United States: Corinthians, Fluminense
Spain: Atletico Paranaense
Germany: Internacional

In Brazil, friendlies are a luxury only the more notable clubs have the energy, or finances, to consider doing. In addition to the league and cup competitions, as well as any continental obligations, there’s also a state-level competition that eats up tons of otherwise spare time. As far as larger clubs are concerned, if you want friendlies, that’s what beating up on your weaker in-state brethren are for. While other nations can easily see their clubs rack up six or seven preseason games, two or three looks to be the limit here.

MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER (2015)
England: Chicago Fire, New York City FC
Mexico: Montreal Impact
Sweden: LA Galaxy
Ireland: LA Galaxy

MLS, following its trend of taking after other North American leagues, tends to keep to itself, with the clubs mostly playing each other, and lower-level American clubs, in a handful of centralized spots throughout the southern United States. As with Major League Baseball, they chiefly home in on Florida and Arizona, though going to Texas or Nevada or South Carolina isn’t unheard of.

A-LEAGUE (2014-15)
England: Melbourne City
United Arab Emirates: Western Sydney Wanderers

The A-League acts much like MLS, but there’s more of a focus on traveling the country to regions without A-League teams- which are not hard to find, given the close concentration of most teams on the east and southeast coasts- and playing local lower-level sides. The Wellington Phoenix, the only New Zealand team, does likewise on its side of the Tasman Sea.

A Cunning Plan

Now beginning its 20th season (though not without some amount of labor strife), with 20 teams in the league, two more in the queue and more on the way, overseas broadcast deals starting to materialize, and an increasingly large flow of globally-known talent making its way to American and Canadian shores, it’s pretty safe to say that MLS is more or less around for keeps as America’s top soccer league. Any long-term failure of the league is going to be due to pilot error that will need to be more and more egregious by the year.

Which is to say, the decades-long contest to be America’s top soccer league is finally, decisively over.

But don’t tell that to FutbolUSA. FUSA is a league formed on the theory that American soccer is under-representing Hispanics, noting that there were only three of them on the 2014 World Cup squad: Omar Gonzalez, Alejandro Bedoya, and Nick Rimando. (Since then, the team has also fielded Luis Gil, Miguel Ibarra, Greg Garza, Michael Orozco, Alfredo Morales and Rubio Rubin.) But at the same time, FUSA is adamant that what they are doing is “not Hispanic outreach, inclusion, or integration.” This is said with a graph right next to that statement showing the percentage of Americans that have been or are projected to be Hispanic in the coming years, and a structure designed to maximize opportunities for Hispanics without actually enforcing it, so the truth of that statement is debatable at best.

FUSA aims to begin play later this year with two divisions of 16 teams each, with promotion/relegation introduced after the third season. Each division is to consist of four divisions of four teams each, the winners of which then enter into a playoff. They’ve already determined the city distribution of this: San Francisco/Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno/Visalia; Los Angeles/Long Beach, Anaheim/Santa Ana, San Bernardino/Riverside, San Diego; Phoenix/Glendale, Tuscon, El Paso/Las Cruces, Albuquerque; and Dallas/Fort Worth, San Antonio/Austin, Houston/Galveston, McAllen/Brownsville. Further expansion will then spread to the rest of the country.

FUSA has yet to actually find an owner to facilitate this. But when they do, they “will be individually owned and operated by team owners that possess a combination of financial resources, prior business success, a commitment to the Hispanic community, and a passion for both soccer and winning.” But they’re totally not doing Hispanic outreach.

Already, this looks like a league with ambitions way outpacing its abilities. Announcing a 32-team league before you’ve even found owner #1 seems the work of folly. A successful league will usually start with a group of people deciding that they will start the league by forming teams of their own, and then the rest boils down to finding anyone else who might want to join in. Owner buy-in has to be the origin story.

But even with that, that is nothing compared to these statements:

• FUSA is not a feeder league or a minor league of any existing US soccer leagues.


• FUSA is a challenge to the current US soccer status quo.


• FUSA will become USA’s premier professional soccer league within five years.

In essence, FUSA does not wish to live alongside MLS. It instead seeks to supplant it; replace it. And it intends to do this by specifically targeting a minority- a sizable minority, but a minority nonetheless- with a regional league. This is utter madness.

And not just because MLS is around. FUSA also has to deal with Liga MX. When people born in Mexico and points south migrate to the United States, there’s nothing that makes them adopt an American club as their primary. They may, and likely have, come to the country with a pre-existing affection for a Mexican club, one that persists as they watch that club on Univision or Telemundo or ESPN Deportes. In the two California counties bordering Mexico, Liga MX side Club Tijuana is actually the favorite club overall, beating out the LA Galaxy despite being over a decade younger, being formed only in 2007. As far as San Diego is concerned, Tijuana’s close enough for them.

One suspects they won’t be throwing that aside. A start-up club, sure. A start-up league? That needs to show some promise.

FUSA’s official Twitter account has a grand total of four tweets, the first on February 10. Two of them decry Hispanic presence in American soccer, the third announces the league, and the fourth is, “5 IFTTT recipes to share Instagram pics like a boss #erdm #feedly http://buff.ly/1DWzjx6“.

That’s not very much promise. Nor is the fact that I cannot, offhand, locate a bio of league president Michael Mauriello. There are a number of Michael Mauriellos on a Google search, but it’s not clear which one is the one we need to be seeing. Which is another worrying thing.

If I had to predict a lifespan for this league, it would not be one in which FUSA ever overtakes MLS. Or achieves any kind of parity with MLS. The immediate infusions of cash it would need to do that are held by people who, right now, would much rather be spending their time just trying to get into MLS and taking established routes to get there. I’m not sure that FUSA will even find enough owners to field a league of the size it seeks. When it does get going, I doubt it will be going for long. Maybe two years, with any clubs that get off to an actually sustainable start- and there won’t be many- proceeding to try and latch on with an already-established league so that at least they can survive.