No sources noted, no complainant identified, and most of the stories seem to come out of outlets financially supported by RM or their backers. Anything is possible in football, but let’s just say more should be on offer before we feel too bad for Real Madrid.

There’s rarely a strict cutoff for this sort of thing. If you’re on the edges, it’s sort of “whichever feels right”. I am only a year older than my wife, and we were both born in the late 70s, but I had a brother 7 years older than me and she was her parents’ first. Based on the TikToks she sends me, she identifies as a millennial. I am much more in tune with the Gen X zeitgeist.

Jesus Christ, how many bodies did this guy bury? Dude, you were out of touch and gross and basically committed “minor” sexual assault on live TV, yet due to an ongoing culture of permitting men to do what they want, all that was going to happen was you had to negotiate a settlement and resign. That is a sweetheart deal.

Going with the nuclear option instead is an interesting tack.

The story said he’d been dealing with a lengthy illness. It would be hard to know who made the decision and what she thought about it. I can imagine everything from a straight up cynical blackout from the RFEF, to her having discussed it with him before the tournament, and anything in between.

Seems to come down to whether your skills and appeal eroding during a year of barebones training are outweighed by the lesser but similar risk of playing in Saudi, combined also with uprooting your life for a year and assuming a higher risk of injury.

Eh, good for him. The market supports guaranteed contracts for top players, so this is a known business risk for the clubs. Same as with Bale. Their skills have a shelf-life, and the clubs are ruthless, so I generally understand when players use the leverage they have.

I’m a Dallas fan and have been for, jeez, almost 20 years now. I’ve seen stars who come over and think this league is an ass-kissing tour and don’t put in the effort, and they get obliterated by the low-technique high-motor Americans that still make up half the rosters. I’ve seen stars who give it their best, but their bodies are done; they often look good for a bit but break down almost instantly. I’ve seen others whose games rely on getting world-class service or having world-class strikers on the other end; sometimes they adjust, and sometimes they just scream into the void that is Frisco on a 100-degree night.

So far, Messi just does Messi things and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope to outscore him. Little walkin’-around motherfucker has the perfect game to pick apart MLS defenders for years to come. He doesn’t rely on pace anymore (to the extent he ever did), has the technique and awareness to stay away from the enforcers, and can create his own chances or exploit the space when his presence pulls defenders out of shape.

Messi is the goat, but he doesn’t have Barca or PSG around him tonight. FC Dallas leading 2-1 at the half. LFG Dallas!

Edit: DOH! He was, however, playing against a middling MLS team, LOL. DTID.

On the one hand, I’m American and dominance in the women’s game is my birthright (or would be if I weren’t way older than the Women’s World Cup and Olympic tournaments), so it’s frustrating to see the team struggling to mesh as we ease into the next generation.

On the other, it’s good to see competition increasing and other countries investing in their setups. A lot of this is down to opponents improving rather than the Americans cratering. It’s good for the game and makes for better storylines.

I can see where you’re coming from, but I disagree. I think it’s a solution in search of a problem. American sport has developed just fine without it, and for MLS in particular there is no massive surplus of clubs and investors itching to to take a crack at that sweet MLS AppleTV money. Many of the issues you point out, like drafts (almost irrelevant in MLS these days, btw) and playoffs are the particularly American solutions to maintaining interest throughout a season, and honestly they work better than you’re implying for the intended audience. There are issues, true, and the specific structure of playoffs and relative incentives can be part of that, but the American leagues are no more “boring” than the EPL is a needlessly cruel exercise in hopelessness, where your budget is your fate, and the only excitement comes from dodging the existential terror of a relegation. I don’t actually believe that about either paradigm, but you’ve got a 120 years of cultural inertia in both markets, and it’s unfair to the people who do enjoy American sports to say they’ve got it all wrong.

Pro/Rel is the expectation in Europe, and it has a lot going for it, but it there are pros and cons, and there is no groundswell of clubs and investors across the US itching to build 20k seaters just to see the fans immediately abandon them in droves when they’re relegated. MLS is successful, but operating as the fifth most popular team sport and in the shadow of the NFL leaves it more brittle than other leagues at its level.

Minor League baseball is also a rather limited example. As a spectator sport, it’s largely a relic of the pre-TV era, and even then once the Dodgers formalized the “farm club” system in the 40s, it was a subsidized exercise in player development, passive entertainment, and brand extension. It’s even more true these days, with a significant contraction of teams and a reorganization to put the higher level minor league clubs closer to their parent clubs, sometimes just a half-hour drive up the highway. It’s basically practice but they keep score and sell tickets. No one is passionate about minor league baseball for its own sake.

There is very little history of Americans supporting lower level pro sports in anything like the same way they do the “big leagues.” The bizarro world of college (gridiron) football and basketball are exceptions, but even they are effectively U23 and are viewed as something culturally distinct from the NFL or NBA.

There are things that soccer leagues in England and elsewhere in Europe do better than the US leagues, and you point out how it can work well, but in many cases what they do is not really better or worse, just different, and promotion and relegation would be a poor fit for the realities of running a league in the US. Similarly, the Super League is a terrible idea for Europe. Horses for courses.

Incoming rant: Pro/Rel is a very interesting way to run a sports league. It provides a lot of drama and high stakes for teams at the bottom of the table. It gives fans of lower league teams hope that they too can join the ranks of the elite, simply by earning it. For Americans, the sheer novelty of it can be intoxicating.

It would also cut American soccer off at the knees and would be terrible for the game in the US.

When you look at TV revenues, competition for eyeballs, and general awareness from generic “sports” fans or even soccer fans, it becomes pretty clear that the level of investment that MLS owners make is only sustainable because those investments are protected. For good or ill, MLS is where it is because of a top-down approach, not a grass roots one. Interest in markets has been carefully curated and nurtured, and the number of true die-hards who would stay with their club after a relegation is almost certainly tiny. This is not England where soccer is the dominant club sport by such a large degree that even cricket and rugby are basically afterthoughts, and every team in a halfway reasonable market is a sleeping giant just waiting to galvanize community pride with a “little bit” of investment. In a soccer-mad country, with a hundred clubs full of history and local ties and community engagement, maybe the churn is worthwhile, but in the US you’d just be killing clubs that are relatively healthy with ones that are deeply undercapitalized and unattractive to players anywhere near the level MLS clubs buy now, to say nothing of the media partners.

Pro/rel has its own issues even in Europe, and especially outside England. It tends to erode or preclude other parity enforcing measures as the deeper pockets want to ensure they’re never at any particular risk of relegation. It can result in a mid-table liminal space that’s every bit as monotonous as the bottom American teams’ annual struggles and replaces the very realistic possibility of joy at an unexpected run with mere relief at survival for another year. It also still destroys rosters and erodes support, and particularly outside England it can consign a club to obscurity. Meanwhile, it hasn’t stopped the intrusion of money into the game in Europe, and the only REAL way to thrive is to throw money at a promotion effort; there are no more remote factory clubs unearthing a squad of hidden gems and storming up the pyramid.

I’m under no illusions that the American model is truly the result of pure competitive spirit from the owners. American sport is a cartel, moderated by ego and mid-term thinking, not a commune. That said, European sport presents the rather grim (to an American anyway) choice of picking a “big” club to follow or giving up on any realistic hope of cheering for sporting glory. At least in the American system, the oligarchs have decided that a rising tide lifts all boats and that the fans will expect a set of rules that give any well-managed team a chance to compete for the biggest prize. We force MLS to adopt pro/rel, and we’ll get a level of investment that accounts for it. That level is unlikely to be anywhere close to current state of the league, which is top 20ish in butts-in-seats, salaries, etc., across 30 teams.

TL;DR: The market for domestic club soccer is what it is in the US, and if you start throwing away huge swaths of it because NYCFC has a down year, you can’t replace it by promoting Charleston, romantic as as it may sound, and the owners know that.

Not sure I follow. I made that comment when the two teams were pointlessly posturing over who would retreat to the proper distance first so the penalty shoot-out could begin.

In case you’re not a football/soccer fan, the games themselves are part of the Gold Cup, the continental championship for North and Central America, including the Caribbean.

Do it. Soccer needs a governing body, but that need not be FIFA. One country/one vote sounds idealistic, but it’s been twisted beyond any semblance of reason.

UEFA and CONMEBOL leaving would cut FIFA off at the knees. US, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and any other number of halfway desirable and less-corrupt FAs would also happily jump ship to play against Europe and South America. The rest would reorganize to apply ASAP. Set up a weighted voting system that, yes, accommodates commercialism and favors “larger” countries, but can also resist raw bribery and take the long view and not kill the golden goose. Money has invaded the game and did so a long time ago. You can’t get it out. Pretending otherwise leaves gaps in the system that are worse than any well-managed ball-sport league in the world.

LOL, a dick measuring contest.

Energy level finally better after the US subs.

US playing with fire. Bad turnover, iffy almost-backpass.

Pretty sure it’s a federal offense for a West Point cadet to play for Canada, LOL.

A little murderball to end the half there from the Canadians. Looking forward to a US power play.

Jesus, US lucky to get away with that, but if you want VAR to get a handball, gotta risk VAR revealing your own fouls in the box.

In the last 15 at least, US looks better but running out of ideas in the final third. Some dangerous counters from Canada though.

Just tuned in. How is the game itself going, apart from the ref?