MLS

[StrandedX02]

The Philadelphia Union of course.

The Union in the first half on Saturday were a pretty good match for Carver's NUFC in terms of general cluelessness. I loved watching Nogueira last season...putting him in a 2-man midfield and hoofing it over his head is absolutely criminal.

[Kaizero]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

It is a confusing grammatical pattern. This is just how it is and you will have to accept it.

 

 

which way?

 

I've been googling the correct use, and it seems you do not add "the" in front of MLS.

[Superior Acuña]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

 

This was mentioned on the Guardian podcast last week. Massive effort to change in my head since I think refer to every other league with 'the' apart from 'la' liga. I've been saying 'the NFL' too, is that wrong like too?

[Kaizero]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

 

This was mentioned on the Guardian podcast last week. Massive effort to change in my head since I think refer to every other league with 'the' apart from 'la' liga. I've been saying 'the NFL' too, is that wrong like too?

 

No, that's not wrong.

[Deuce]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

 

This was mentioned on the Guardian podcast last week. Massive effort to change in my head since I think refer to every other league with 'the' apart from 'la' liga. I've been saying 'the NFL' too, is that wrong like too?

 

Nah, it's "the" NFL, NBA, and NHL.

 

It just doesn't make sense to say "the Major League Soccer," which comes out as "the Soccer." As opposed to "the National Football League" (the League) or "the National Basketball Association" (the Association). It's really incredibly pedantic, but drives me nuts.

[Kaizero]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

 

This was mentioned on the Guardian podcast last week. Massive effort to change in my head since I think refer to every other league with 'the' apart from 'la' liga. I've been saying 'the NFL' too, is that wrong like too?

 

Nah, it's "the" NFL, NBA, and NHL.

 

It just doesn't make sense to say "the Major League Soccer," which comes out as "the Soccer." As opposed to "the National Football League" (the League) or "the National Basketball Association" (the Association). It's really incredibly pedantic, but drives me nuts.

 

It's not pedantic, it's proper use of "the".

[Kanj]

I have to say I couldn't give a single fuck if someone said the MLS or didn't use the for NFL. Splitting hairs mayyne.

[loki679]

Well said the Kanji.

[Mike]

I remember when Flip was talking this exact same shit about the Bucs. Then he watched them play.

[Kanj]

He's completely on-one if he still thinks Okugo was bad on Sunday

[SEMTEX]

 

Sports Illustrated thinks Flip's opinions are whack

 

http://i.imgur.com/h8hBw6l.png

 

I'm still convinced Okugo was the guy, but Kanji may be right after all. One of the two CMs couldn't do anything right though.

 

cmon dude, between me, everyone who watched the game not named you and SI. You still not convinced? You think Cabella is tall too?

 

I'm surprised to even see to Orlando City players in there I mean seriously, is that the level? I though Orlando were still trying to gel. If that is XI of the Week material I'm f***ed. f*** sakes Kanji what have I gotten myself into? Already scheduled to watch the next game on tv.

 

I didn't see the game, but my blind answer is a resounding yes.

 

There are very few teams in the MLS capable of successfully passing the ball more than 3 times without giving it away. There is a lot of effort but very little team quality, just a few good players who every so often make something magic happen (where have I heard that before...). Although I imagine NYCFC & Orlando have an excuse given it was their first game.

 

Which team plays the best football in the MLS?

 

 

Seattle, Portland, SKC, LA. It fluctuates. New England played some decent football last season.

 

Also, we need to end this "the MLS." It's just "MLS." Just as we don't say "the MLB." It's a pet hate and perhaps a YANK thing, but that's just how it is.

 

This was mentioned on the Guardian podcast last week. Massive effort to change in my head since I think refer to every other league with 'the' apart from 'la' liga. I've been saying 'the NFL' too, is that wrong like too?

 

Nah, it's "the" NFL, NBA, and NHL.

 

It just doesn't make sense to say "the Major League Soccer," which comes out as "the Soccer." As opposed to "the National Football League" (the League) or "the National Basketball Association" (the Association). It's really incredibly pedantic, but drives me nuts.

 

It's not pedantic, it's proper use of "the".

 

The issue is that "MLS" is a shit name for a league, so they can get fucked and deal with the improper grammar. Name your league with "league" on the end and we have no issue.

[Flip]

I remember when Flip was talking this exact same s*** about the Bucs. Then he watched them play.

 

Bucs was never Orlando though This team has at least Kaka. I was watching Josh Freeman ffs.

[Mike]

And when Kaka leaves?

[Kanj]

"I never liked Orlando" - Flip 2018

[Flip]

"I never liked Orlando" - Flip 2018

 

Showing too little faith in me man, you know I love the City, been there 10+ times. Support the Orlando Magic like crazy. That Okugo shit put us on the wrong foot, let's start over. Okugo is the shit. Him and Brek Shea are my two favourite players.

 

And when Kaka leaves?

 

Owners Brazilian He's representing.

[Deuce]

"I never liked Orlando" - Flip 2018

 

[Mike]

Flip has no loyalty. Been learning German since the 7-1.

[Flip]

Flip has no loyalty. Been learning German since the 7-1.

 

FFS

 

In my defense I was learning it before You found me on duolingo or something

[Mike]

:lol: I swear I didn't know!

[Kaizero]

Is Flip... a leaner, more sexy, Froggy?

[Kanj]

"I never liked Orlando" - Flip 2018

 

Showing too little faith in me man, you know I love the City, been there 10+ times. Support the Orlando Magic like crazy. That Okugo s*** put us on the wrong foot, let's start over. Okugo is the s***. Him and Brek Shea are my two favourite players.

 

And when Kaka leaves?

 

Owners Brazilian He's representing.

 

f***ing love Flip, man just had a wild mood swing back in the right direction. We cool, homie, we always cool. I'm iffy on Brek; but I want to like him and will support him as he's now part of the setup. Okugo, Molino, Kaka are my trio though. Need a new striker bad. Rivas has a polarizing feel to me, I'm going to hate him and love him.

 

Deuce:

Love being a fan of THE MLS.

 

 

 

Deuce my man as well, just gotta now annoy him for no reason with this.

 

 

[ujpest doza]

What get's on my wick is the American way of referring to Teams in the singular rather than plural.

 

EG Newcastle IS winning 1-0 instead of the correct Newcastle ARE winning 1-0

 

really annoying.

 

[Kanj]

That's how Pardew speaks.

[Deuce]

What get's on my wick is the American way of referring to Teams in the singular rather than plural.

 

EG Newcastle IS winning 1-0 instead of the correct Newcastle ARE winning 1-0

 

really annoying.

 

 

Well, that happens because "Newcastle" is singular. Though I use both.

[Deuce]

On Friday, Major League Soccer's new season kicked off. It felt like a seismic campaign for what we still think of -- back in the old world -- as a newcomer to world football. Not just because the league is now 20 years young, but because it was welcoming two new teams, New York City and Orlando City, and a host of new stars, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, David Villa and Kaka among them. Even across the Atlantic, there was a sense that something was happening in the United States, that football was finally conquering what has long been seen as its final frontier.

 

It seemed, then, a fitting time for a British newspaper to dispatch a reporter to New York and take the temperature of the game in the city and in the country as a whole, to ask not just how New York City FC were put together but whether they were welcome in one of the world's most intense sporting landscapes and whether MLS can ever fulfil its ambition to be one of the best leagues in the world.

 

What I found was, to some extent, what I was expecting. By accident rather than by design, I have spent much of the last two World Cups traipsing around after the U.S. national team. I saw all of their games in South Africa and all but one in Brazil. What struck me (especially last summer) was the fans; they sent more than any other country, bar the hosts, and their fervour was eye-catching.

 

That was enough to convince me that the old question -- when will America learn to love football? -- was now redundant. Twenty-two million watched Jurgen Klinsmann's team play Portugal in Brazil. That is twice as many people as there are in Portugal.

 

The U.S. has, at the last count, around 70 million inhabitants who are interested in the sport. That may not be a majority but that should not be the barometer of whether a country likes football or not; if it was, Britain would not count -- only 20.6 million watched the World Cup final here, less than a third of the UK's 64.1 million population. If you're not watching the World Cup final, you probably don't count as a football fan.

 

To travel to New York and find countless bars showing Premier League games, then, or to see Real Madrid and Barcelona shirts as I walked around Tribeca and Williamsburg was not a surprise. I knew America had fallen for the game.

 

I also knew that European football in particular was what was popular. I knew a welter of websites (like this one, for example) and magazines have sprung up in recent years to cater for that taste. I knew that just as basketball fans in Europe will watch the NBA, soccer fans in the States had identified the highest form of the game and had chosen to follow it. I knew that sport was a globalised marketplace, and that it can be difficult for local products to thrive.

 

But then there were the things I did not know. The best thing about sports journalism is that, often, it is not really about sport at all: the game becomes a prism through which you can see other processes at work. So it is with the story of football in the U.S., which is not really a story about football but one of culture, of technology and society.

 

MLS was launched in 1995, right at the dawn of the digital age. This meant that, as Jeff Agoos (an MLS executive and a former U.S. national team player) told me, it was born at a time when the US was rapidly becoming "part of the global conversation." That made it easy for fans to follow European or Latin American football, and it offered the nascent league a double-edged sword: far more interest in the sport they were trying to push, but also far more competition for their attention. That led, in turn, to what as an outsider seems the most fascinating sociological aspect of football in the States.

 

In Europe, liking football is an aspect of mainstream masculine culture. To be different -- to convey the idea that you eschew what is expected of you, that you are uniquely discerning in your interests -- it is necessary to express your disdain for football. Liking football is at odds with the fads and fashions of the posing hipster and the sneering chatterati.

 

The opposite is true in the States. There was long a feeling that soccer was somehow un-American -- witness Ann Coulter's attack on the sport being a sign of "moral decay" as World Cup fever took hold last summer -- which led, in turn, to it being imbued with a sort of counter-culture cool. Football, in New York and I would guess in the States as a whole, is young and urban and aspirational. It is Europhile and outward-looking. It is worldly, completely opposed to the world of soccer moms and minivans to which it was supposed to appeal 20 years ago.

 

Discovery, though, does not end with the gathering of facts and opinions and details. It continues right through the process of publication. I went to New York to find things out and relay them to an audience in Britain. That, in itself, can be revelatory. This is where it comes in handy to remember the journey, because the reaction of an Old World audience to the story of football in the new was intriguing, too.

 

It has long been a source of irritation in Europe that the U.S. did not care much for football. Convincing America to like football, like convincing America to like British music or films, was for a long time seen as a matter of national pride.

 

Yet there's something odd about it: now that America does like football, and in huge numbers, there is no sense of joy. There is only a slightly embittered feeling that they don't do it properly (they have playoffs and salary caps, the fools!) and a fairly widespread desire to suggest that it is all fake, plastic and doomed to fail.

 

MLS has been dismissed (by some, not all) as a retirement home, a never-going-to-be league where has-beens play out their days with wannabes. The standard is low, we say, and attendances are not great. It will never be a rival to any of the leagues in Europe. We are sure of that. Its various setbacks are reported with a degree of glee: the Lampard farrago, David Beckham's problems in Miami, the recent threat of a player strike, the fact that Bradley Wright-Phillips could be considered one of the biggest stars. All of these ideas feed into the idea that MLS is fighting a losing battle and America will never quite get the best of Europe, or Africa, or even Asia.

 

All of this jars with me. Not just because there are a lot of good people with a lot of good ideas working on growing the sport. Not just because it is redolent of a certain amount of good old-fashioned European anti-Americanism. And not just because it is my one avowed belief about football that anyone who likes the sport should want it to do as well as possible anywhere, rather than concentrating power with their team or in their country.

 

It jars, largely, because people forget the journeys they have been on themselves. There was a time not that long ago when the major European clubs sneered at the Premier League. They thought it was a retirement home. They found its tactical naivety astounding. The very best players laughed at the very idea of going there in the prime of their careers. It was a lucrative retirement home. It was seen, in short, roughly as MLS is seen now. But it changed, and it changed fast.

 

That is not to say MLS is about to overtake the Premier League. There are issues: the salary cap and single-entity model, as the league remind you, give it a competitive balance that none of the European leagues can match. Pretty much anyone can believe they might win the title this season; only a handful of clubs can say that in Europe.

 

Yet the very same structures serve to limit MLS's growth: with just three designated players and a limited salary cap, it is hard to build a truly competitive squad. With most of any transfer fee kept by the league, there is no incentive to develop youth players. With so much revenue shared, it is hard to see either how investors make their money back or why they would try to make their clubs anything other than as good as everyone else. The system fails to encourage excellence.

 

Just as importantly, MLS cannot offer Champions League football, and it does not offer the tradition or the history that European leagues do. To players hoping to test their mettle against the best in the world, hoping to fulfil childhood dreams, Real Madrid remains the aim, not Real Salt Lake.

 

There is a but. MLS has advantages that go some way to counteracting all of that. Players can go to the U.S. knowing they will be paid regularly; that is not true in a host of European leagues. There are a huge number of players locked out of the Champions League who may well see New York or Los Angeles or Chicago as a rather nicer place to earn their keep than Sunderland or Rennes or Mainz. There is also the added benefit, if they stay long enough, of U.S. citizenship. To many players from across the world, that could prove to be a powerful lure.

 

MLS and commissioner Don Garber have a stated aim of being one of the best leagues in the world by 2022. It is not there yet. There is a lot of work to be done, and difficult choices to be made. It is, though, on its journey. This is the difficult bit: the traffic jam, the holding pattern, the endless train ride.

 

It is a journey other leagues have been on, too. They made it to their destination and forgot all about how long it took them to get there. That is why they dismiss the credentials of their new rival. Sometimes, though, it is best not to forget. It is best to remember.

 

http://www.espnfc.com/major-league-soccer/19/blog/post/2342342/major-league-soccer-has-made-progress-after-20-years-but-still-work-to-do-writes-rory-smith