The Third Carnival of American Soccer Blogs!

Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls! Alien races with ears, alien races without ears, and Zooty's friend Bingo the invisible fish! Come right this way for the third installment of the Carnival of American Soccer Blogs!

The topic of this month’s carnival, one month after a disastrous Yahoo Mastercard Budweiser Avaya Adidas Hyundai McDonalds Emirates Toshiba Philips Gillette Fujifilm Coca Cola FIFA World Cup™ is appropriately “The Way Forward.”

We have some great entries and differing opinions, so let’s get right down to it.

First, of the wondiferously splendid du Nord, Mig chimes in with an in-depth piece, hosted here at The Fool’s Prerogative.


Next up, we have Steve over at Soccer Orb giving us some Different Perspectives on the Way Forward.


Then Eric of Off the Wing gives two pieces; one on helmets and one on Gaining Respect through Club Friendlies.


Mike of On the Pitch tries to answer the question that we're all asking: "Now What?"


While Josh over at Throughball, our previous Carnival Host, gives us his Recipe for Success.


Michael gives us his way forward at His Soccer Blog.

Oscar of Record as I Am gives us a dialogue between Oscar and Alejandro

And the god-daddy of the Carnival, D of DCenters chimes in with America's Questions in response to Adam Spangler.


And of course, finally, my own two cents parts one and two.




I'll now start accepting bids for the next carnival. Send in your topics and proposals to here.





Update: I somehow missed posting this piece from Brian Garrison at An American's View. Check it out. NOW!

Mig's views on the future of US Soccer

Mig of du Nord wrote us this little piece for the Carnival today, and I agreed to host it, as it's not the usual duNord fare:

When MLS started they thought that the drive to the top of the American sports world would be relatively quick and decidedly massive. So they went ahead and booked American Football stadiums as their home venues and figured it would only be a matter of a couple years till they were full of raving lunatic fans.



Then things went and got all realistic (ie. ugly-empty), and after a few seasons - aw hell who am I kidding here, it's been 11 years for the sad empty canyons of Arrowhead, Foxboro, Giants, Mile High (for 9 more months), and RFK – some of the money-power people decided it was time to get something a little more economical to drive around in, a.k.a. their own stadiums.



In comparison MLS has recently been touting a brand new television broadcasting deal with ABC-ESPN that will pay the league some money etc, and in addition ABC-ESPN has bought the rights to show things like the UEFA Champions League and the World Cup.



So my question is: How many years will it take MLS-ABC-ESPN to realize that having announcers/producers act like they are working NFL-MLB-NBA-NHL games is completely the wrong way to go?



From reading the words being spewed by the television executives and on-air personalities lately, it seems that this realization could take a long time.



They don't seem to care at all what actual soccer fans want. In some cases they seem to actually despise us real soccer fans in America and see us as the enemy. And that attitude being directed at us game after game will be a lot harder to stomach in the long run then seeing empty seats. (You do know that ESPN's much beleaguered commentator Dave O'Brien is about to become the voice of MLS on ESPN2 don't you?)



This is not progress.



Why are the big money people who run soccer having to learn all these hard lessons one at a time? Isn't there a point where it all makes sense and several things can be updated at once? Why can't they just suck it up and make the very important leap to simple quality broadcasts right now? No, really. Why not?



Mark my words though, like other things in American soccer, they will come around. But it will take time. It will be with a regime change at the top of the organization that puts on the productions, and it will happen without acknowledgement that they were wrong.



Let's hope that by the time these changes are implemented that MLS will be well down the road to figuring out other very important aspects of their business plan like:

-Teams spending more money on talent. (I highly doubt that giving each team the chance to hire one massively over-paid just-over-the-hill Eurostar is gonna do the trick – Ronaldo, Zidane, Beckham etc. – use same argument for big stadiums and terrible TV production values.)

-Teams will actually have to advertise all season long about upcoming matches at their new stadiums, including non-league and playoffs games.

-And, hey, marketing just to families and kids is turning off all those 20, 30 & 40 something's that are the immediate future and have their own cash in their pockets to spend.



Etc etc etc….. (More on those another day perhaps.)



Let's all start by getting the pressure applied to broadcasting issues for right now, cuz I think it can have the biggest, and quickest impact. I implore you to make calls, and write letters & emails. Tell everyone you know to do the same. And don't just start & end with ABC-ESPN. Get after your local teams broadcast standards too. They can all be better. It is massively important to our sports future in America.



PS. If you claim to be a supporter of US Soccer at its highest level, but don't support your local club team (on whatever level you have in your town or region) with your hard earned dollars and beg your friends to do the same, then you aren't a supporter of any soccer in America. It all starts at the local level, and with the bottom line. Without them, we have nothing to build the real long lasting foundation on top of. Now go get 'em tiger.

Brian McBride Tribute

Scaryice beat me to making one, but nevertheless, here are my Tribute Videos to Brian McBride. Downloadable links coming soon.

YouTube link to #1 here

and #2 Here





And stay tuned for the third Carnival of American Soccer, coming late morning on Monday!

Still coming down off the high.

There was a lot of debate prior to the Yahoo Mastercard Budweiser Avaya Adidas Hyundai McDonalds Emirates Toshiba Philips Gillette Fujifilm Coca Cola FIFA World Cup™ as to whether it would be good or bad for the sport in this country. Would it gain MLS fans? Or would it be a distraction from MLS?

Well, it seems as though it was a mix of the two. Andrea Canales talked to some MLS first-timers as they went to a Galaxy game, so there’s at least anectodal evidence of the World Cup bringing new fans in to the game. And there’s no doubt that the coverage was a watershed event, much of it thanks to Zidane’s moment of madness.


However, there seems to have been a large, World Cup sized hole in my MLS season. From June 9 until now, I’ve taken practically no notice of it.

Part of this is because I live in Minnesota—there is no local MLS team here. I’ve continued to follow the Thunder, my local USL team, but MLS? Nope. There weren’t any matches on (my) TV and I wasn’t about to but Direct Kick and/or internet coverage when I didn’t even have the time to watch all the World Cup games.

On top of that, watching an MLS game so quickly after the World Cup lays bare the lack of passion and the lack of numbers in the stands. They simply fail to hold my attention in the way that World Cup matches did. The play isn’t as fast, skillful or immediate.

That’s hardly surprising. What league could compete with the World Cup? But it makes me question my faith as a fan of the sport. Am I a poor fan? I’m certainly a poor ambassador. Through the cup people around work would ask me various questions about it and I’d usually just get annoyed at having to answer them all the time. I didn’t want to talk to these people about the sport. I didn’t want to have to stop every few words to explain what I meant. Having to explain four to six times a day (often to the same person) what a national team is as opposed to a club team and that we couldn’t just trade for better players.

But I just can’t get myself excited about the MLS season right now. I watched all the games on TV before the World Cup, even some of those on Direct Kick, but since the cup, I’ve watched only the few games on ESPN mostly on fast-forward.

I expect that I will be more intrigued by the playoffs and that next year after the high of the World Cup has worn off a bit more, I’ll be back to fervently watching my MLS.

But what does it say about me, MLS and US Soccer that the world cup has done this to me?

The Third Carnival of American Soccer Blogs

Well, I've been selected to host the Carnival of American Soccer Blogs #3.

This, I can't help but think is akin to the Olympics being awarded to Lillehammer.

Anyways, I'll begin taking submissions for the Carnival immediately at TurkishZath@gmail.com.


So. The topic: The Way Forward. Where do we go from here? I've given my thoughts in the previous few posts, what are yours? Who is the right man for the job? Why? What does he need to do? How should Sunil Gulati go about making this decision?

Gulati has indicated that there will be decisions made within the next few weeks, that ought to provide plenty of fodder--I mean food for thought.

Please do keep this forward looking. Don't dwell on what coulda/shoulda/woulda happened in Germany. It's not going to help; it's only going to get negative. I'm really much more interested in the very bright future of US Soccer. And yes, it is still very bright.

Where do we go from here? I agree with Sunil Gulati. We go south. To South Africa.

So what route do you see us taking?



Submissions by Wednesday, July 26, for the Carnival to take place on Monday, July 31.

(Begrudging) Congratulations to Italy.

Hats off to Italy. World Champions.


I was bitterly disappointed in the world cup final in 1998. I didn't want France to win. I didn't like Zidane. I didn't like Barthez, I didn't like Desailly or LeBouf or Petit.

I didn't like the idea of the host nation which I didn't feel was the best in the world riding a wave of home support to an undeserved championship. (They of course proved me wrong in Euro 2000.)

How things changed in eight years time. I'm marrying a German girl in just about 115 days, four hours and twenty minutes from the time of writing this (but who's counting?) so I was pulling for the Germans and California Klinsi up until they were knocked out by Italy (who definitely deserved that game, truth be told.)

However come the final, and I was rooting for France. I still didn't like Zidane, although I finally had to admit how great a player he was. I still, in all honesty didn't much like France (though I rooted for them over Portugal too.) But I liked Italy less. Why? I just don't like the way in which they play. The diving, the historionics, the whining to the ref, the constant defensive play.

It's not that I dislike Italy. There are some wonderful Italian players that I've loved to watch. Baggio, Vialli, Gianini, Zola, Maldini, Baresi, Ravanelli, even Del Piero in his day. The Italy of those men was a joy to watch. But the current Italy--I hated it.

I hated that they pressured until they got the equalizer and then didn't play for the rest of the 100 minutes of time.

And I hate that it was Marco Materazzi who was the hero of the day. I have disliked this player since when he was a hack for Everton, and a hack for Inter Milan. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

I can make arguments all I like about defensive play and not really being the best team in the world, but they won. I could say that after a (very) tough group stage, they had among the easiest routes to the final imaginable. But you can only beat what takes the field in front of you. I could say that they're match-fixers, but it's kind of hard to fix a World Cup win. They won, and congratulations to them.

But I stand by my feelings on watching the Italians play. It's dull, it's uninspiring and it's ugly. But it's effective. If the US played like that I'd probably love it (if it brought a World Cup Trophy.) So as I said, hats off to Italy.



One final thought: Fabio Cannavaro was the Man of the Tournament. Zidane had a great game against Brazil, and won because of his name and his retirement. He was nothing special in most of the games.
Cannavaro was magnificent and took his team all the way though to the championship and deserved the Golden Ball without a doubt.

Continuing on from the last post…


Well now that Germany is out, the speculation around California Klinsi is growing louder. Is he the solution to the question posed in my last post regarding the intricacies of the US system? He’s got a foreign point of view and has worked a side to the semi-finals of the world cup and yet he’s familiar with the US system. Could there be a better choice?

You’d better believe it, bucko.

While I wouldn’t be surprised or even terribly disappointed with Klinsmann as a choice as coach, he’s not the name I want to see.

Klinsmann took a team which had a decent mixture of age and youth and a hell of a lot of talent and got them further than people expected. Did they look like world-beaters? No; they looked lucky to get by Argentina and unimpressive in most of their matches, apart from the round of 16 match versus Sweden. This is not an accomplishment to be sneezed at; he did quite well, but I am not convinced that his coaching is going to bring anything new to the table for the US team.

Klinsmann has taken a lot of what he does directly from the tactics and methods of Bruce Arena and the USA. Arena already has the fitness coaches and such that so revolutionized the German training field for this world cup. He can’t bring that in to the USA setup and expect to get more success than we currently have.

Is he more tactically astute than Arena has been? I’m not sure. I would argue that if one were to give Arena a team with Klose, Schweinsteiger, Ballack, Podolski etc, he’d have done as well as Klinsmann did too.

I have little doubt that Juergen Klinsmann would be a successful coach for the US National Team. He’d do very well. I predict that he would win the Gold Cup, qualify with ease for the 2010 World Cup and probably keep the US in the top 15 in the New and Improved Coca-Cola FIFA World Rankings™. However, the real test is the World Cup itself. On that stage, he will be found as lacking as was Arena in 2006.

And (and this is the important part) at triple the price, if reports are to be believed.

The US simply doesn’t have enough competitive matches to give the coach, whoever that may be the opportunity to improve the team enough. I ended the last entry with a quote from Steve Sampson. I will now use another piece of advice that he gave his successor:

“I would play only 20 percent of friendly internationals within the CONCACAF region.”

A fine goal, but it’s very difficult to make it a reality. Steve Sampson’s side ended up playing friendlies against Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Bolivia; outside of CONCACAF, but not really much higher quality opposition. The ‘elite’ teams like England, Germany, Italy et al. do not play many friendlies because they’ve got enough competition with qualifiers for the European Championships and World Cups that they don’t need extra exhibitions except to blood some new talent. In this region, that’s just not in step with reality.

People calling for the US to participate in the Copa America are short-sighted are on the right track, but are short-sighted. There are very good reasons that the US has not participated in the Copa America since 1995. The most obvious is MLS. The Copa America takes place right in the middle of the MLS season. Even today, the loss of marquee players for a month or two could be damaging to the growth of the league. In the earlier years, it would have likely been even more dangerous.

What sort of team can the US realistically take to the 2008 Copa America? The European players will be off, but the MLS teams are not going to want to give up their players again. There will be World Cup Qualifiers, and possibly the Olympics to contend with as well, so there’s a lot of food for thought.

One solution is to bring back the US Cup. In the early days, this was a decent competition. It was designed as a trainer for World Cup 1994 and in the first two incarnations included teams like Ireland, Portugal, Italy, England, Germany and Brazil. After the World Cup, it still had decent teams like Nigeria, Colombia and Mexico. However by the end of its run in 2000, it was just another set of friendlies with teams like Guatemala, or a 2nd string Mexico. It’s hard to get teams to take such tournaments seriously, but if we can get the right mix of teams, it can be done. The Tournoi which France hosted in 1997 as a primer for their World Cup is a perfect example. France had the advantage of being within skipping distance from the majority of the big teams, but we really can make it work by inviting a South American team and one from Europe and then one from Africa or Asia. If the European’s can’t be bothered to attend, fuck ‘em. We can do without them. A Europe-less pool could be USA, Argentina, Australia, Cameroon. Or even USA, Ecuador, Japan, Ghana. These sorts of things would still be worthwhile, even without an England, Germany, France or Spain involved.

The hole in this proposal is playing games on foreign soil. The US simply doesn’t do this enough. The Copa America will help, but realistically the US needs to win the Gold Cup in order to qualify for the Confederations Cup, and do all that it can in order to get itself invited to competitions like the one that I’m sure South Africa will run in order to do a dry run before 2010.

Falling back again on good ol’ Steve:

“It's very important that we establish a broad base of talent. We only have 30 or so players who can compete at an international level. We need 60, 70, 80 players at a minimum who have quality international experience.”

Maybe we have more than 30 today, but we’re still a long, long way off of the 60-80 that Sampson wanted, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get there. Once again, I come back to the point of tenure.

A long term approach is still needed in this program. Sunil Gulati headed up the Project 2010 committee, so he must know that there’s a long way to go before the goals of ‘2010’ can be a reality. I remember reading an article about the US and Nigeria contesting the 2014 World Cup final, but even 2014 seems a tad early for me. By 2022, I think the US can realistically expect to be semi-finalists and contenders. If we can host some time around then again, so much the more so. However in the meantime, we need someone who is going to continue to build the program, brick by brick. If that’s Klinsmann, so be it, but I think that there are better options for the price he would command.