Soccer Archives - Page 13 of 17

Why do soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much? Sometimes they go all the way back to their goalie. I know it makes me seem like a dumb American but I get so annoyed when soccer teams do this. Aren’t they trying to score? What’s up with that?

Thanks,
Shane

Dear Shane,

Yours is a common question. It does seem counter-productive to move the ball backwards so much in soccer. I admit, even having played soccer my whole live and having spent many more happy hours watching soccer, that at times, I share your annoyed feelings. There are good reasons why soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much and it’s worthwhile to explore them because they touch on some of the core principles of soccer.

The first reason why teams pass the ball backwards so much is because it helps them keep the ball longer and having the ball is much less tiring than chasing the ball. Fatigue is an important element of soccer. The game is one and a half times longer than football and hockey and almost twice as long as basketball. Soccer is also much more restrictive when it comes to substitutions than those other sports. In most competitive soccer, only three subs are allowed for the whole game. Being more fit than the other team is a big advantage and possessing the ball for a majority of the time is a big tactical advantage when it comes to fatigue. The team with the ball moves as it wishes, offering a chance for some to catch their breath while others make short, sprinting runs up field. The team without the ball is forced to chase, not just the ball, but person with the ball, and anyone else who is running around the field. As the team with the ball moves forward towards the goal they are trying to score on, they meet increasingly more resistance from a higher concentration of defenders. This increases the chances that they will lose the ball and have to transition to more tiring defensive behavior. If, on the other hand, they pass the ball backwards, they’re less likely to lose the ball and they can continue tiring the other team out. Advantage team with the ball, advantage passing backwards.

Of all the major sports, soccer is the hardest sport to score in. As I wrote in my post answering “Why do people like soccer?” there are four key factors in this:

First they take away the most dextrous limbs at your disposal, your arms. No using your hands or arms.
Then they put a ball on the field that, if you kick it hard enough, bends and dips in all sorts of fairly unpredictable ways.
Controlling this ball without using your hands means that your top speed with the ball is way slower than a defender can run without the ball.
Finally, they allow one player, the guy who is there with the sole purpose of preventing you from scoring, to use his hands.

All of these offensive disadvantages are magnified when operating in a space with a higher density of defenders. The precision a player needs to hold on to the ball, pass it to a teammate, or get a reasonable shot on goal increases seemingly exponentially when surrounded by two, three, or four defenders. Soccer players know this. They know that they have a much better chance of scoring if they can do it against a sparse collection of defenders. One way to do this is to allow the other team to have the ball and attack your side of the field. Then, try to steal it from them and quickly transition to offense before all their players can run back to defend. That’s a risky proposition! Passing the ball backwards is a safer, if slightly less effective way of achieving the same effect. By moving the ball back towards your own net, you tempt the opposition to follow you, stretching their position and decreasing their ability to completely surround and stymie your attackers.

You’ll often hear soccer announcers or fans talking about a team’s “shape.” In a sport that has a lot of unique words, at least for Americans, like “nil” for “zero”, “pitch” for “field”, or “golazo” for “holy shit, did you just see that unbelievable goal”, it would be easy to dismiss this linguistic peculiarity. It would be a mistake. The metaphor of shape is incredibly useful when watching soccer. It’s so difficult to translate the positions and actions of 22 players in constant motion into meaningful tactics. If you think about each team as having its own shape, with edges defined by the outermost players to the front, back, and sides of the field, then understanding what a team is trying to do becomes easier. I think of soccer as a game between two globs of semi-liquid, semi-solid gloop. When a team’s shape is compact, it’s very tough to cut through it and score. When a team’s shape gets stretched out, it’s much easier. When the team with the ball passes it backwards, they’re trying to stretch their opponents shape until it becomes thin enough to poke through with a few passes ending in a goal.

Hope this makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Stadium prints for sports fans

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden — international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

What is El Clasico?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is El Clasico? It seems like it’s a big deal!

Thanks,
Evan

Dear Evan,

You’re 100% right. El Clasico is a big deal. It’s an extremely big deal.

El Clasico is the name given to any game between Real Madrid Club de Futbol and Barcelona Futbol Club. It’s an explosive mix of regional and cultural rivalry and shockingly talented soccer players that gets ignited a few times a year. To give a sense of the proportions of the game, the March 2014 edition of El Clasico was viewed by an international television audience of 400 million. That’s more than twice the international audience for the Super Bowl, which, just a month before, drew a paltry 167 million viewers. The best players in El Clasico are predictably the best players in the world. According to The Guardian, “for the last 18 years, every winner of the Fifa World Player award, now merged with the Ballon d’Or, has played for Madrid or Barcelona at some stage of their career.” The whole thing, incredible players, gobs of money, tons of viewers around the world, is driven by an intense conflict within Spain that is viewed through a lens of Madrid against Barcelona and specifically, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona.

So, what is the rivalry all about? Barcelona is the center of Catalonian culture. The Catalan are an autonomous community within Spain. Catalan people can trace their culture’s history back to at least the 10th century. They speak a different language from the rest of Spain and close to half in the region would like to secede from Spain all together. When the fascist Francisco Franco came to power in 1939, squeezing the Catalonian culture out of existence was one of his priorities. He banned use of the Catalan language as well as any kind of cultural or political expression of Catalan culture. By no means were the people of Madrid all fascists or supporters of Franco but, Franco was a supporter of Madrid and of Real Madrid specifically. He even went so far as to meddle in which team got to sign the legendary Argentinian player Alfredo di Stefano. Madrid was the center of what Franco thought of as the standard Spanish language and culture, Castillian. Because of this association and history, Barcelona has always seen Madrid as the enemy, and visa-versa, if to a lesser extent. In World Soccer Talk’s article on El Clasico, they express the current situation like this:

Today, Real Madrid, in their all-white uniform, still represents a pure and united Spain. In contrast, FC Barcelona proudly bestows the Catalan flag (the only flag one sees in Catalonia) on their jerseys as a memorial of their continuous struggle for an independent state.

Sometimes, to really understand something like this, you’ve got to go full-on scholarly. Here’s a passage from Duke University’s excellent resource on El Clasico:

Rivalry, which is more than the sum of one team’s players versus another’s, serves to pit one codified regional social identity against another. If there are any tensions between the peoples represented, then the match becomes “ritual sublimation of war, eleven men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city or the nation.”[vii] And there are plenty of tensions between Barcelona and Madrid, none of which fail to be manifested in their epic rivalry. As Guilianotti explains “the football dyad at club level… [becomes] an exterior site in which ethno-nationalist tensions are symbolized and expressed.” Barcelona, synonymous with Catalonian nationalism, “displays a richer luster in confrontations with Real Madrid (the team of Castile and Franco).”[viii] Notions of Barcelona’s resistance to Castilian authority as well as General Franco are fundamental aspects of their abhorrence of Madrid:

“Twice Castile tried to subjugate the city (and the region), dismantling its institutions and outlawing its language, Catalan. The last attempt, by Franco, ended with his death in 1975.”[ix]

Tensions between the Spanish state, seated in Madrid, Castilian in language and origin, and the desires of many Catalonians for self-governance remain hotly debated political issues, a veritable powder-keg waiting to be ignited upon the soccer pitch.

This year’s game will be played on Saturday, October 25, at noon ET on beIN SPORTS. The headliners for Real Madrid are best player in the world candidate 1A, Cristiano Ronaldo, Columbian break-out star from the World Cup, James Rodriguez, and German Toni Kroos, who many said was the best player for the German team that won the World Cup. Barcelona will roll out a lineup featuring best player in the world candidate 1B, Lionel Messi, Brazilian wunderkind, Neymar, as well as Barcelona legends Xavi and Iniesta. Just to add a little spice to an already eye-popping mix, Uruguayan striker/cannibal Luis Suarez will be eligible to play in his first game since the World Cup biting incident. If you decide to watch, you’ll be joining almost half a billion of your fellow humans in doing so.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

US Women's Soccer begins its World Cup run

The US Women’s Soccer team begins its World Cup run tonight with a game against Trinidad & Tobago. The US Women’s Soccer team is everything the men’s team is not. In men’s soccer, the United States is David without the slingshot. In women’s soccer, we are Goliath without the acromegaly. The thing is… we haven’t won the World Cup since the famous 1999 game versus China. You know, the one in California where we won in a shoot out and Brandi Chastain celebrated by tearing her shirt off in triumph? Yeah, that one. Since then we’ve placed third twice and second once. It’s incomprehensible to fans and unacceptable to players. The US Women’s Soccer team is on a mission to win the 2015 World Cup in Canada and it all starts tonight with their first qualifying game against Trinidad & Tobago.

The game tonight will be televised live from Kansas City on Fox Sports 2. I can’t promise it will be an exciting game — according to the official preview, the US is 7-0 in games against Trinidad & Tobago and we’ve hit double digits in three of those seven games — but it will be an important game. For the players on our team, the arduous five games in twelve days schedule of the qualifying games will be more about simultaneously gelling and competing with each other for places on the team and in the starting line up. For fans, it’s a chance to get to know the team a year before the spotlight of the World Cup starts shining in earnest on them.

My favorite player on the team remains Abby Wambach. Wambach has scored more goals in her international career than any other soccer player ever, male or female. This remarkable fact often gets lost in conversation about soccer. Take Landon Donovan, for instance, who recently retired from the Men’s National Team and was widely referred to as the leading American goal scorer in history. As Valerie Alexander points out in her wonderful article on “the issue of establishing women’s achievements as “women’s” but allowing the male position to be the assumed baseline,” “every time [Donovan] sits there, silently allowing that phrase to be rattled off — “all-time leading U.S. goal scorer” — without pointing out that he is the all-time leading men’s goal scorer, it does take away from what Abby Wambach and Mia Hamm have achieved — total world domination.” Wambach is a great, great soccer player. She’s also fun to root for because she breaks through a lot of the conventions of the popular female athlete. Beautiful though she may be, she is not a sports pin-up sensation like fellow national team players Alex Morgan, Syndey Leroux, or even Hope Solo. Although she is happily married to a fellow women’s professional soccer player, her sexual preference is almost never mentioned in discussing her. What people talk about when they talk about Wambach is her ferocity, her unwavering drive, and her unparalleled athletic achievements. Abby Wambach is a bad-ass and I would want my kids, girls AND boys, to play soccer like her if they choose to play.

Wambach is 34 years old now and what seemed inevitable before — that the U.S. would win a World Cup and that she would be the starting striker of the team — is uncertain. Even more uncertain is her life after soccer. Michael Jordan, equally dominant and driven, has struggled to find a balance in his life without basketball. Kate Fagan recently spent some time with Wambach and profiled her in the twilight of her career brilliantly for ESPNW. It’s an inspiring and troubling article. The ode to the great athlete is there but the overarching theme is Wambach’s impending retirement and the fear, held jointly by Wambach and her friends, teammates, and wife about what happens after soccer. It’s a transition that all great professional athletes have to make but I’ve rarely heard it talked about so honestly and revealingly:

“I know that I was put on this planet to be an athlete,” she says. “But what else is there? What is my point in life? This might sound masochistic or narcissistic, I don’t know, but when I’m not playing the game, the validations I feel about life are always through the hardships. I relate more to sadness, in a lot of ways, when I’m not playing. You can imagine how many people tell me how great I am every day. So for me, it’s a balancing act, trying to be and feel like a normal human being. I have to, not exactly dim my light, but alter my expectations, so I can start to be happy in ways that are sustainable for the rest of my life.”

She takes a deep breath, then lets out the air. “I’ve never actually said that out loud.”

Whatever the world has in store for Wambach after retirement, she says “it will be a lot easier… if I go off into retirement with a World Cup title.” I will be rooting for her all the way. The first step on the trip to the World Cup title starts tonight. Be a part of it!

How does the Champions League work?

Dear Sports Fan,

You mentioned in today’s Cue Cards that the European soccer tournament, the Champions league started yesterday. How does the Champions League work? Is it a playoffs or more like the World Cup?

Thanks,
Paul,

— — —

Dear Paul,

The Champions League is the most exciting and prestigious tournament of professional or club teams in Europe and therefore, unless you’re an extremely passionate MLS or South American soccer fan, the world. The Champions League format is more like the World Cup than like a playoffs format that we’re used to in the United States. There is a qualifying stage, a group stage, and then a knockout stage. There are some differences between the Champions League and the World Cup though.

The underlying issue which makes the tournament so complicated, is that the organizers are caught between two goals.

To include all of the domestic league champions in the Champions League
To find the overall best team in the continent.

The first is a hard-and-fast rule: every domestic champion must take part in some way in the Champions League. To achieve the second goal, the tournament has two strategies. First, it allows teams that came in second, third, or even fourth place in stronger leagues to participate in the tournament. The stronger the league, the more Champions League invitations it gets. Second, it stacks the deck so that champions of weaker leagues have to play more games to qualify for the Group Stage of 32 teams than teams from the strongest leagues. The rankings it uses to do this are called the UEFA coefficient in what I can only assume is an attempt to make your brains spill out of your eyes.

Home and Away Games

Throughout the entire Champions League, with only one exception, regardless of whether the tournament is in the qualifying stage, the group stage, or the knock-out stage, teams always play each other twice: once at each team’s home stadium. Three points are rewarded for a win, one for a tie, and zero for a loss. If the tournament calls for deciding just between the two teams playing (in the qualification and knock-out stages) and the two teams have the same number of points after the two games, a system of tie-breakers comes into play. The tie breaking is thankfully not that complicated. Whichever team has scored the most goals in the two games wins. If both teams have scored the same number of goals in the two games against one another, then the team that scored more goals in the game when they played away from their home stadium, qualifies. If that’s not going to work, then the second game of the home and away is extended into overtime. If no goals are scored in overtime, there’s a penalty kick shootout.

The Champions League Qualification Stage

Qualification has four stages: the first qualifying round, the second qualifying round, the third qualifying round, and the play-off round. In each of the four qualifying rounds, the winners from the previous round compete and new teams are added into the mix. For example, the surviving three teams from the six that played in the first qualifying round are joined by 31 teams who have not yet played a game. The play-off round is just like the other qualifying rounds, it’s just called something special because the winners of that round gain admission to the Group Stage of 32 teams. Of the fifty-five teams that take part in the qualifying stage, only ten will make the Group Stage.

The Group Stage

The group stage is when, for casual observers, the tournament really starts. It’s plays out very similarly to the way the World Cup group stage works. The teams are divided into eight groups of four that play each other to determine which sixteen teams (two from each group) make it into the next round. The only real difference is that the home and away game format is used here, so each team plays six games in this stage instead of only three.

The Knockout Round

Again, very similar to the World Cup, the knockout round winnows the field from sixteen teams to eight to four and finally to two. These matches are played like all the preceding matches in the tournament as part of a home and away. The only exception to this is the Champions League final that is played as a single elimination game in a neutral location. Or at least, a pre-ordained location. This year’s final will be held in Berlin on June 6, 2015.

What does it all mean?

It means there’s a lot of great soccer ahead of us! The Group Stage is just beginning, and will continue from September to December. After a civilized winter break, the Knockout round begins in February and dramatically lollygags until the final in June. The deliberative pace of the Champions League reflects the fact that its participating teams are simultaneously involved in their own domestic leagues and tournaments. It’s also reflected in the home and away format and reflective of the slower pace of soccer as a game. This contemplative aspect of soccer is one of the many reasons I love the sport.

Hope you enjoy soccer too, thanks for writing,
Ezra Fischer

Why Major League Soccer is like a New York co-op

Jermaine Jones was assigned to sign with the New England Revolution

Recently Major League Soccer, the top professional soccer league in the United States did something which raised eye-brows and exposed one of its oddest elements, its organizational structure. If you remember anyone from the United States Men’s World Cup team from earlier in the summer, it’s probably goalie Tim Howard. But if you remember anyone else it might be Jermaine Jones the dreadlocked maelstrom of a midfielder who was probably the best non-goalie on the team for the duration of the tournament. Jones is one of our many German-American players. He grew up in the United States but moved to Germany as an adolescent and began his professional career there as a fourteen year old (which is not rare for German players). He’s spent his entire career in Germany and Turkey but became interested in playing and perhaps finishing his career in the United States. And that’s where the weirdness began.

Major League Soccer has a “single entity-structure” in which, according to Wikipedia, “teams and player contracts are centrally owned by the league.” Most other leagues in the United States are connected, but much more loosely, like a neighborhood association connects property owners throughout the country. Instead of operating independently on the important things and in unison when necessary, Major League Soccer operates independently until the decisions become important. This type of structure is familiar to me only from living in a co-op apartment building where I am a “tenant-owner” the same way that Robert Kraft (who owns-owns the New England Patriots football team) is an investor-operator. Through this peculiar organization, the signing of Jones became an assigning.

The MLS team most interested in Jones was the Chicago Fire and had been pursuing him for months. According to MLS rules, most players are able to negotiate and sign with teams of their choosing if they are free agents. Players who fit this description, as a “U.S. National Team player who signs with MLS after playing abroad” however, have to go through an “allocation order” where teams that did worse in the previous year have first dibs until they sign a player that fits that description. Then they drop to the bottom of the list. Okay, that’s a little arbitrary, but I can see what they’re going for there. But what is this? There’s an asterisk?

*Designated Players of a certain threshold – as determined by the League – are not subject to allocation ranking.

That, my friends, is an elastic clause if I’ve ever seen one. So, in some cases, the league can just bypass the rules and do whatever it likes. In this case, MLS decided to have Jones skip the allocation process and they decided to choose between the two teams interested in him with a coin-flip! The two teams were the Chicago Fire and the New England Revolution (it boggles the mind to believe that these were the only two teams who wanted him, but…) and the Revolution won the coin flip.

Not only does this feel anti-competitive and arbitrary, but as Barry Petchesky argues in his Deadspin.com article about the assignment, it’s “shockingly anti-labor. If MLS wants to be the league of choice for the world’s best players, it’d better start allowing those players to choose their situations.” I couldn’t agree more. The worst thing a sports league can do is create the appearance of favoring one team over another or one player over another from an organizational standpoint. The NBA lives and flourishes with a little bit of this sentiment thanks to conspiracy theorists who think the draft lotteries are fixed or the refs are instructed to favor big-market teams. Too much of it can only lead to bad things, like the UFC’s recent issue with President Dana White’s removal of a judge mid-fight. The perception of true competition is essential for the enjoyment of sports.

A Soccer Fan's Dream Come True

What happens when the manager of West Ham’s soccer team calls a heckling fan’s bluff and invites him onto the field?

From NPR’s Snap Judgement podcast comes the true story of one soccer fan’s dream come true. Steve Davies was your prototypical English soccer fan. As we know from the New York Times’ excellent study of when people form lasting fan-team relationships, many of us, especially boys, become fans of a team that wins a championship when they are between 8 and 12 years old. When the British soccer team, West Ham, won the championship in 1975 it began a “massive love affair” for Davies. He attends as many games as he can and has a “West Ham ’till I die” tattoo on his arm.

West Ham Fans — Find out what happens when the West Ham manager calls a fan out onto the field

One day, when Davies was 22, he and some friends went to a West Ham pre-season game. Even though it was only a pre-season game, Davies and his friends had high hopes and high standards for their team. Davies in particular didn’t think the team’s striker (forward most attacker) was trying hard enough, and like die-hard fans everywhere, was vocal and colorful in telling him so. The venting and exhorting went on into the second half but the striker did not. He got injured and was substituted out. At this point, something truly remarkable happened. The team’s manager, Harry Redknapp, turned towards the stands and asked the most belligerent fan there if he thought he could really do better than the striker.

That fan was Steve Davies and the rest was history. You’ve got to hear this one:

Snap Judgement is a wonderful collection of stories collected by host Glynn Washington. I enjoy it quite a bit and I suspect you would too. Check it out on npr.org and snapjudgement.org or subscribe on your favorite podcasting machine.

DSF Podcast Episode 1: Dennis Shaw Talks Soccer

In this, our first Dear Sports Fan podcast ever, I’m joined by old friend Dennis Shaw. We talk about the World Cup and the professional soccer league in the U.S., the MLS.

How to Watch the World Cup Championship Game

A month and a day after the World Cup began, we’re down to two teams, Germany and Argentina. It’s been the most exciting World Cup I can remember and I hope they produce a championship game today worthy of the tournament. I put together a few notes about the game for those of you who have been following the tournament and for people who are planning to tune in today for the first time.

If you’ve been following the tournament:

The game starts at 3:00 pm on ABC. WARNING WARNING WARNING — this is an hour earlier than the games have been starting. Adjust your routine accordingly lest you miss the first half. Why they changed the time, I have no idea, but it’s probably JUST TO TRICK US.

The game is being billed as “the best team against the best player” with Germany being the team and Argentina’s Messi being the best player. This is a clever analysis because it manages to insult literally every player on both teams except Lionel Messi. “Hi, German player,” it says, “you are not as good as Messi.” “Hi, Argentinian player,” it says, “you are an afterthought being supported solely by Messi’s brilliance.” Another way of expressing this would be to say that both teams are great, but that if you were to rank the individual players by skill, Messi would be the clear first on the list. After him would be five or six Germans before you finally saw another Argentinian. Soccer is one of the most collective games, so I won’t be surprised if the team with more better players beats the team with the best player.

Am I the only one who always feels a little let down before a championship game? Maybe it’s because the teams I have been rooting for (the United States and the Netherlands) are eliminated. Or maybe it’s because the World Cup, which I love so much, will be over in just a few hours. Or maybe it’s just because by the time you get to a final game there are only two potential winners which is so much less fun than four, eight, sixteen, or thirty two potential winners.

If you’re just tuning in now:

Today’s game is the sixty fourth and last game in the World Cup. The World Cup starts with thirty two teams who play a round robin in groups of four to determine who makes it through to the knockout round of sixteen teams. Those sixteen teams play a single elimination tournament, like March Madness but smaller and arguably more mad, until only two remain. Those two teams, Argentina and Germany, will play today to determine a World Cup Champion that gets to rein over the soccer playing world for the next four years. In 2010, almost a billion people watched the Championship game which dwarfs the 111 million who watched the Super Bowl this year.

You may be wondering why people like soccer. The reasons vary, of course, but I think it’s because it is really hard to score, and because of that you often get a tremendous buildup of tension as a viewer before an enormous eruption of joy when your team does score, and because it has the most teamwork and free-flowing movement of any game.

That’s all very good, but why is soccer so liberal and why do the players dive so much? The connection between liberal politics and soccer is mostly confined to the United States. In other countries, like Argentina and Germany, for instance, soccer spans the full political spectrum. In many countries, soccer is a political forum, but various professional teams will often be lodestones for different political parties. As for the diving, there are two main factors that play into it. First, there’s only one ref on the field to watch 22 players. Compared to three refs for 10 players in NBA basketball or seven for 22 in NFL football, the soccer ref has a nearly impossible task. Because it’s so much harder for a ref to see everything, players are more likely to be able to trick them by pretending to be fouled. Fouls also play a bigger role in the outcome of a soccer game than most other sports because soccer is so low scoring. If you can win a penalty kick by pretending to be fouled in the penalty box, or convince the ref to give an opposing player a red card, that may very well be the difference between winning and losing. Diving in soccer is more effective and more important than in other sports.

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Whether you’re a die-hard soccer fan, someone who has been casually enjoying the month-long World Cup, or someone who is planning on watching the game today just to feel united with 1/7th of the world’s population, I hope you enjoy the game!