soccer Archives - Page 15 of 19

News Clippings: The Business of Sports

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. Sports can be followed on many levels. For some fans, only the action that takes place during the games matters. For most fans, following sports means watching games, learning the personalities of players and coaches, and following the business of sports attentively. For most of this fall, the leading story in the business of sports has been the mishandling of domestic violence by the NFL. Bryan Curtis of Grantland argues that, although the focus of the storm, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, is still standing, the public uproar has had some positive impact. Despite the storm, the NFL is still eyeing potential expansion to London. Jenny Vrentas writes about how the NFL might work in London in The MMQB. Meanwhile, established international sport organizations are receiving their fair share of criticism as well. Dan Wetzel and Tom Ley wrote wonderfully about the International Olympic Committee, rivaled in its corruption and general crumminess by the international soccer organization FIFA.

The Goodell Blackout

By Bryan Curtis for Grantland

By blasting Goodell in print, sportswriters acted as pulling guards for the government officials in Washington, who are now torturing the league by threatening to revoke many of its long-standing perks.

Since 1975, a Federal Communications Commission rule has given the league an imprimatur to remove games that don’t sell out from local TV and cable. If it’s 15 below zero when the Packers take the field, the FCC’s chairman recently noted, then Packers fans have to buy all the tickets or find a TV in Chicago. That sounds like extortion.

For years, the NFL has also protected its federal tax-exempt status. The exemption dates back to 1966, and although it has been a perennial talking point for politicians of all stripes, it has also been considered inviolable. “Revoking the tax exemption isn’t in the cards,” the Washington Post argued on September 15. “The NFL doesn’t lose games on Capitol Hill.” Well, that was before Goodell’s lousy press conference and two more weeks of heavy shelling from the press.

Finally, pressure from sportswriters forced action inside the NFL, too. When Goodell was still staggered from the release of the second tape, the NFL suddenly got serious about revising its drug policy.

Why London and Can it Work?

By Jenny Vrentas in The MMQB

The International Series has been a testing ground for the logistics of basing a team abroad.

Teams scheduled to play in London begin planning for their trips in February. They take two reconnaissance visits overseas in the spring. In August they send a shipment of bulk supplies by boat to save money and space on the team plane. Included in the Raiders’ shipment: 10 cases of 8.5 x 11-inch computer paper for play sheets (standard paper is a different size in the U.K.), a couple hundred cases of Gatorade (teams are superstitious about flavors) and 600 outlet plug converters.

“As long as they get their paychecks,” Bills Hall-of-Famer Andre Reed assured the forum of local fans, “players would play in Alaska.”

Steve Smallwood, 49, of Eastbourne, on the Channel coast, sees the growth of American football in the U.K. as a good thing, the same way he views the growth of MLS in the U.S. “And,” he offers, “I’d rather watch American football than rugby.”

Why no one wants to host the 2022 Olympics

By Dan Wetzel for Yahoo Sports

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren’t allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

“The vote is not a signal against the sport, but against the non-transparency and the greed for profit of the IOC,” Ludwig Hartmann, a German politician said when his country said no.

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn’t pay the athletes. It doesn’t share revenue with host countries. It doesn’t pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn’t lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn’t pay taxes.

Top Female Soccer Players Sue FIFA Over Bullshit Artificial Turf

By Tom Leyfor Screamer

After weeks of pleading with FIFA to change its mind about playing the 2015 women’s World Cup on field turf instead of grass and being met with nothing but stubbornness, a handful of women’s soccer’s biggest stars have filed a lawsuit against FIFA to try and force the organization to put the upcoming games back on grass.

Turf sucks, everyone knows it, and there’s no way FIFA will force it upon the men’s game if it continues to cut up and piss off players around the world. But that won’t stop the organization from crapping all over the biggest tournament in the women’s game by forcing women to play on it. The only thing that sucks worse than turf is FIFA.

Cue Cards 9-30-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, September 29

Down and out in Kansas City — The Kansas City Chiefs beat the New England Patriots 41-14 last night and the game didn’t even seem that close. The Chiefs dominated the Patriots in just about every way possible. They were better at running the ball. They were better at throwing the ball. They were able to keep the Patriots from running the ball successfully and, when the Patriots tried to pass, the ball seemed just as likely to end up in an opponents hands as one of their own. It was a complete beat-down.
Line: I know the Patriots always seem to turn it around, but this year their team seems really bad.
Two little bits of soccer — Other than the football game, the sports world was pretty quiet yesterday. You know it’s quiet when the other biggest score of the day is Stoke City 1, Newcastle United 0. Both these teams are relatively weak teams in the top British soccer league, the English Premiere league. According to this ESPN article, Newcastle United’s manager might get fired because of the result. Also their nickname is the Magpies! The other interesting soccer news is that Chivas USA is being sold and as part of the deal will skip the next two seasons! It’s an unorthodox move. Chivas had been one of Major League Soccer’s most interesting franchises because it was owned by the owner of a Mexican soccer team and operated almost as a minor league team. Apparently that has not been successful and the new owners insisted on the team taking a break from competition while they rebrand and potentially relocate the team.
Line: Soccer seems so wacky compared to other sports. Who names a team the Magpies? Who buys a team but insists that it stop playing?

Saarland and national teams without a country

From EPSN comes a fascinating story by Uli Hesse who writes about little known rules of international soccer:

It serves as a reminder that what we call national football teams do not all represent a nation. They don’t even represent a country. They are merely teams that represent an association.

That is why many countries have some sort of hidden football history, full of teams that few people know about even though they once were official sides playing official games.

Read the whole article: Saarland — the forgotten international team within Germany.

Cue Cards 9-19-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Thursday, September 18

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer team rolls — Our women’s soccer team is to international soccer what our men’s national basketball team is to basketball. Dominant. Perhaps they aren’t quite as overwhelmingly dominant as the men’s basketball team but you wouldn’t know that from the easy 4-0 victory over Mexico last night. This followed an 8-0 win over the same team in their previous game. According to Liviu Bird of Sports Illustrated, these two games against Mexico are actually likely to be more challenging than any teams the team will face in official qualifying games for the 2015 World Cup.
Line: If only we could develop male soccer players in this country as well as we do women, we’d have been able to give goalie Tim Howard some support in the men’s World Cup in Brazil.
The Atlanta Falcons swoop the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — Last night’s NFL game was compelling like a fender bender is. The Falcons scored the first 56 points of the game. 56!! The Bucs? Well, they fumbled and bumbled and slipped and fell. It was ugly.
Line: I know they’re professionals and all but how can you not feel sympathy for a group of guys who just had their absolute worst day on the job watched by millions of people?
Auburn survives Kansas State — There was a rare high-profile college football game on Thursday last night. The Auburn Tigers have national championship aspirations and the way college football is set up, teams basically can’t lose more than one game all season if they want a chance at the championship. It’s far better to be undefeated. The Kansas State Wildcats showed a lot of talent and heart by putting a real scare into the Tigers late in the game.
Line: The good thing about college football is that the regular season is so important, the games feel like playoff games.

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

Cue Cards 9-18-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Wednesday, September 17

Another division has a winner in baseball — The Los Angeles Angels won their division, the American League West last night. When baseball teams win divisions, they sometimes celebrate in wacky, ritualistic ways that involve spraying champagne all over the place. The Angels did that last night but not too many people saw it in person because their definitively winning the division relied on the outcome of a rival team’s game and that game didn’t end until an hour after their game. So, the team waited in the locker room, watched their rival’s game on tv, and then, when it ended the way they needed it to, they “roared up the tunnel and onto their home field, goggles in place and champagne bottles in hand.”
Line: Did you know that this will be Mike Trout’s (excellent young player with a great name on the Angels) first time in the playoffs?
European Champions League soccer — The Champions League is the most prestigious club soccer tournament in Europe. It matches the best teams from all the domestic leagues, the English Premiere league, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A, the German Bundesliga, and so on. Even for a sports fan like myself who doesn’t follow European soccer closely, it’s exciting just for the novelty and the romance of seeing teams that normally only play opponents from within their country compete internationally. There were eight games yesterday. The biggest one was probably between English powerhouse Manchester City and perennial German Champions Bayern Munich. Munich won, 1-0. For sheer international mystique, it’s hard to beat Amsterdam’s Ajax playing Paris Saint-Germain or AS Roma vs. CSKA Moscow. The game with the best story was absolutely the 0-0 tie between the Spanish team Athletic Bilbao and Ukrainian Shakhtar Donetsk. There was a great New York Times story about Shakhtar Donetsk this past week. Donetsk, home town to the team, has been in an active war zone for the past six months, so the team has had to relocate to Kiev, where they are followed by a small but passionate group of fans. New York Times reporter James Montague caught one of these fans leaving a game. In place of a line for this, just relay this awesome story:

“This was the best day of the season!” said one fan, a 21-year-old finance student named Vladyslav, who declined to give his last name. He beamed as he left the stadium. “I don’t know how I’ll get home,” he said. “Maybe I’ll hitch a ride on a tank.”

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.

Cue Cards 8-26-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, August 25

Traditional Hegemony Trickling Back in Baseball? One of the unique and refreshing things about this season in Major League Baseball is that most of the traditional powers have been struggling and some teams that have been very bad for decades have been doing well. The two extreme examples have been the New York Yankees who are the winningest team ever but have not been good this year and the Kansas City Royals who have been one of the sorriest teams for the past thirty years but are doing great this season. Yesterday the two played each other and the Yankees won 8-1. This was their fifth win in a row and makes me wonder/worry if there’s enough time left in the incredibly long baseball season for things to turn back around.
The U.S. Open Begins — Big tennis tournaments usually start pretty quietly. There’s enough predictability in tennis and the tournaments are big enough that the first few rounds are usually pretty easy for the big names who get to play much less well known names. The most common story (until there is an upset) will be how some well-known player almost lost or, when that’s not possible, how the well-known player had to try harder than expected. In day one, Andy Murray had to try harder than expected against Robin Haase and Venus Williams had to try harder than expected against Kimiko Date-Krumm and an annoying bumble bee.
Rematch of British Titans — Last year’s English Premier League Champions, Manchester City, and Runners-Up, Liverpool, played yesterday afternoon. This might explains some funny furtive departures from the office in mid-afternoon and then more funny returns smelling slightly like ale. The defending champions trounced Liverpool 3-1 and from watching part of this game, I can tell you that it wasn’t even that close. Manchester City dominated almost as much as Germany did Brazil way back a few months ago. The English Premier League is fun to watch but mostly makes me miss the World Cup.

Cue Cards: 8-25-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, August 24

Sam Bradford’s Knee — St. Louis Rams Quarterback Sam Bradford tore his ACL and will miss the entire upcoming National Football League season. Bradford was the last quarterback drafted under the previous collective bargaining agreement when rookies made way more money than they do now, so, as upsetting as it is to lose your team’s starting quarterback before the season even starts for Rams fans, at least this means the team will definitely move on to a more affordable quarterback option next year.
Angels beat the Athletics — It’s rare that the two best teams in any sport are in the same division. In baseball right now, the two teams with the best records are not only in the same division but in the same state. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they’re actually called these days) beat the Oakland Athletics last night 9-4 to move into first place. Of all the major league sports, baseball has the fewest playoff teams, so this jockeying for position really does matter.
Sunderland ties Manchester United — The most famous team in the world, Manchester United, has a new manager this year, the way-out-there Dutch Louis Van Gaal. In two games so far this season, they still haven’t won with him at the helm. Yesterday they drew with the decidedly mediocre Sunderland. Let’s all just wait quietly for the Van Gaalian eruption to happen.

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.