Losing season

What makes you keep going to games when your team keeps getting blasted? RSL and Chivas (to a lesser extent) drew fine crowds last year despite being DREADFUL.

The Thunder last year had a bad season. It was sad that Buzz’s final season as coach was one of very few where the Thunder didn’t get to the playoffs. Maybe it was a season too far for the great man, or maybe it was two—perhaps Buzz should’ve retired when the core of his original team did. But I’m getting off track.

We the fans continue to support our teams when they lose. Why? Loyalty is a large part of it, to be sure but what else causes us to be so masochistic? Some people measure how much of a fan they are by their determination to go to all the games even when their team loses by a large margin every match, but how is that productive? In the leagues in the US are set up all that tells the owners is that you’re willing to pay for a shitty product. Hardly the best way to get your team to be better.

But it’s a catch-22 as if no one goes to the games because the team is horrible the owners can just up and move the franchise somewhere else (seems to me there is a movie plot in here somewhere….)

My (only) regular reader, Lukacs pointed out that there’s quite a dichotomy to being a fan and a lot of toeing of the line that we have to walk.

I’m going to think about this one for a while and get back to you because for me especially it’s a question which is important at the moment.

You’ll eat drink it and you’ll like it!

So I just watched Super Size Me last week. I know I’m behind the times; it’s sad when you watch a movie that came out years ago; no one wants to talk about it any more. Oh well. There’s quite a mentality I think among the restaurant business that says if they market something, no matter how crappy it is (McDonalds’ hamburgers for instance) people will eat it—and like it.

Now this is true to a degree, but where it’s truer is soccer fans. The things that soccer fans put up with in this country is amazing. As Marc Connolly noted last week, we take what we can get. And we’re happy for it. We pay exorbitant amounts of money to get obscure Spanish-language satellite channels, keep odd hours and request three hour lunch breaks to watch games. It’s kinda like being in a cult.

I didn’t even have cable until 2001. I eagerly awaited games on ABC and had my dad (who got cable at work) record games for me and played the waiting-without-finding-out-the-score game for my own tape-delays.

That’s why when people say that since ESPN’s deal for MLS is bad or because the announcers are bad, US soccer fans should boycott ESPN to “teach them a lesson” I just don’t get what they’re thinking. What lesson is this teaching ESPN? That we’re willing to cut off our nose to spite our face? Cutting out the audience for soccer on ESPN isn’t going to cause ESPN to do better work; it’s going to cause them to cut their soccer coverage. They already lose money on all of it except the World Cup, and only keep it because US Soccer is smart enough to bundle them together.

No, we’ll take what we can get, and be happy for it. Tape delay our friendly from 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM? We’ll stay up for it. Give us Dave O’Brien and Marcelo Balboa? We’ll watch them. We’ll grumble about it, but entirely unsuccessfully. It’s like an alcoholic complaining about the cost of liquor.

We’ll take what we can get, but damn will we whine about it.

That’s why we’d put up with a league of Red Bull NY, DC United Airlines and Real Player Salt Lake. I just hope we don’t have to.

Selling out

Maybe it’s the commie in my coming out. Maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know what it is, but Red Bull New York simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth (much like the product Red Bull itself.)

Don’t get me wrong, this is no knee-jerk reaction. I’ve thought long and hard about it. The money coming into the league is good, no doubt about it. Another large company with a stake in the league is good, no doubt about it. Funding for the SSS is good, no doubt about it.

However.

I don’t think it’s hard to see that a matchup between Red Bull New York and Pepsi San Jose isn’t going to sound like a major league sport. It’s going to sound like company sides facing off in extramurals.

One of the things that I’ve come to accept, even if I dislike it is the naming of stadia after sponsors. I like the old names. Metrodome. Astrodome. Old Trafford. Anfield. Highbury. What’ve we got now? Emirates Stadium, Monster Park, Xcel Center. No history; no pride; simply a way to advertise. It’s something that I can live with.

In Europe, having a sponsor on the front of your shirt is commonplace. MLS hasn’t done that. For a while, they had some shirt sponors on the back, but I don’t believe that they’ve even had much of that recently. The reason is largely because of the team names being plastered on the front. I don’t really have an issue with that, but with Red Bull New York, this brings an interesting question. Will other companies suddenly realize that they can get their logo on the front of the shirt if they buy the whole team outright? Will this spark a number of these types of deals?

And if it does will these companies be more or less likely to pull their money when it becomes apparent that they’re not going to start making a ton of money really quickly. Despite what Giorgio Chinaglia says, simply spending a wad of cash on getting a few top-quality players isn’t going to bring back the “glory-days” of the NASL.

We’ll see, but I’ll be watching very carefully to see how Red Bull New York handles its relationship with the Metrostars faithful. In Austria, they’ve banned people from wearing the old jerseys as they’ve tried to brand the club as entirely new. Supposedly, that’s what they’re doing here. Are they going to kick people out for wearing red and black stripes? I can only imagine that this will be ejecting they’re most loyal fan base—the one that Eric Wynalda harangued them for ignoring two years ago. That would not be good for the league no matter how you look at it. But maybe they’ll do it better here since they’ll no doubt be aware of the difference in demographics in New York vs. Salzburg.

Well, forward the future, towards a league of company sides.

Oscars and injuries

Well I won the Oscar Pool; I got 19 of the 23 selections correct. Despite seeing only three of the movies that were nominated for anything. I saw Good Night and Good Luck, Star Wars Episode III, and Wallace and Grommit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

But that’s fuck all to do with soccer; I’m just braggin’. Hey, it beats me whining about the cat at the Oscar Party I attended (a story which resulted in hypothermia.)

What is it that makes a player injury prone?
Is there some Karma involved?
Is there some inverse relationship between skill and durability?
Is there some law that states that a great player can only be available to a team for 30% of the time?
Or is that just a law that applies to my teams?

The players that spring to my mind when you say the term ‘injury prone’ are:

Tab Ramos
Claudio Reyna
John O’Brien
Kieron Dyer
Craig Bellamy
Michael Owen
Jonathan Woodgate
Elena Marcelino
Eddie Pope

There’s a range of players and of reasons there. Bellamy and Owen are blazingly fast, so it’s hardly surprising that they tweak a hamstring from time to time. Kieran Dyer is a little shit who doesn’t put in the time off the pitch to get back in shape; he’s content to simply pick up his (massive) wages for nothing.

Jonathan Woodgate is simply an idiot who injures himself through reckless behavior (not entirely, but he sure seems to be cursed.)

Elena Marcelino? Never heard of him? Newcastle bought him for Five Million Pounds in the late 90s. He was a Spanish international defender who promptly spent four years on the injured list due to – get this – a FINGER injury!

On to the US: It’s always those guys who we can barely do without. Ramos, Reyna, O’Brien.

John O’Brien must have visited the same voodoo doctor as Jonathan Woodgate. These guys could get hurt brushing their teeth.

Eddie Pope is one of those guys who’s constantly injured but seems to come back quickly. He goes down with a devastating ligament injury only to bounce back mere months later. At least he used to.

Compare these guys to the kind of player who is never out of the team. Cobi Jones, Alan Shearer, Roy Keane, Marcelo Balboa.

All of these guys have had long injury layoffs, but they’ve always been the exceptions. Roy Keane had the broken leg but then was barely out of the team. Cobi Jones was never hurt until a couple of years ago. Balboa had the ACL surgery but was an iron man before and after.

Is there something about these types of players? I notice that Jones, Shearer, Keane and Balboa were all captains of their squads—is there a mental toughness element? I’m sure there is, but surely there’s more to it.

Whatever it is, I can only hope that Johnny O from Playo Del Ray California is fit for Germany this summer.

It's like waiting for a bus....

You wait and wait and wait… and then two come.

Actually, this morning *three* came. But I digress.

It’s 2006, a World Cup year. Those are the great years for soccer. Not only do you get the actual cup, featuring 30 days of fabulous football feasting (I’d say soccer, but it’d kill the alliteration) but you also get the run up to the cup. So many friendlies to get ready! The build up to the cup is almost as good as the cup itself.

Last night’s friendly against Poland was the fifth of the year and it’s barely March! The games might not have the weight of a World Cup Qualifier, but there are still a lot more of them; not waiting two months to have two games in a week, we’re spreading them out and getting ready for the cup.

And then the cup itself comes! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I do have trouble watching a game when I know the final score. Not if it’s the USA (especially if we played well and/or won) but I can’t really be bothered to watch other matches when I know the score. Keeping up at the World Cup is a full time job…. And I’ve already got one of those. It’s just not possible to watch all 8 round of 16 games as they occur without hearing the score of most of them before you get a chance to see them. It’s a minor annoyance, though, one just has to prioritize which games you want to see. Especially if you’ve got a TiVo.

The withdrawal that I feel after the cup is the real danger though, and it taints my enjoyment of the event, because I know that afterwards the US will have a good long layoff and will probably be back without Bruce Arena. That and my current expectation that we’re going to go three and out. But that’s my pessimism coming through.

As for the Poland game itself, I’ll leave that topic for now, come back to it after I’ve watched the game for the second time—the first was largely interrupted at a bar where I showed up late and missed the beginning of the second half as well.

I do want to take a time out to say HELLO! to our 1000th visitor, hailing from the fine city of Swinefleet in Lincolnshire, England. Come back soon, dude.