DON’T WRITE OFF THE U-17 NATIONAL TEAM YET
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Style, US Soccer on November 9th, 2009
This Might Be Obvious, But Seriously
Buy cheap lasix
purchase lasix
where to get soma
buy propecia online
order propecia no script
obtain propecia
buy generic viagra cheap
where to get cialis
where to get clomid
purchase cialis
buy zoloft online
viagra cash on delivery
buy tramadol online
where to get clomid
Buy cheap clomid
buy cheap viagra
obtain soma
buy tramadol no script
online soma no script
where to get levitra
purchase xenical
where to get vpxl prescription
obtain vpxl
get xenical without a prescription
Buy cheap cialis
Propecia fast shipping
soma discount
purchase zoloft
buy clomid
purchase vpxl
propecia express delivery
cheap price propecia
buy maximum acai
where to get prozac prescription
cheap price vpxl
buy levitra no script
order acomplia
Buy cheap xenical
purchase tramadol
cheap viagra
Much hype surrounded the talented U.S. U-17 national team during the Fifa World Cup in Nigeria. Ultimately, the team fell flat, losing in the round of 16 to a classier Italy side. And so the mumblings have started, gnawing into America’s rotten system of developing professional players. “Is the Academy system the best way to develop players?” “Is this crop of players grossly overrated?” “How can we continue to suck so bad?”
Before we start pouring gas on our 2022 chances, I just want to say, you know, back the hell off. The Americans disappointed big time, it’s true. Judging from the team’s qualifying results and all that I had read leading up to the tournament, I expected a buzz saw of an American attack to tear through the defenses of weak soccer nations like Malawai and UAE. This never happened. The U.S. squeaked by both countries with 1-0 wins and a goalkeeping error that would have been less embarrassing had the goalkeeper simply crapped his shorts.
Don't fire this man. Despite a poor showing in the World Cup, Wilmer Cabrera's young team showed glimpses of its attacking potential.
But even over the course of four sub-par performances, many in scorching African heat, Wilmer Cabrera’s young team showed qualities that I’ve never before seen in American white and blue. Primarily, they showed collective confidence on the ball, even in the defensive third. And although they failed to break down defenses, many players showed a heartening hunger to take defenders on, instead of simply winging blind American-brand (TM) crosses into the box. The goals never came, which is a shame. But you get the sense that on another day, or couple of days, they would have. Cabrera has his boys playing a forward-looking, positive and promising brand of soccer.
A number of players showed more than technical competence. 15-year-old Luis Gil was often brilliant. The spark of most American attacks, he sprayed deft passes all over the field and maneuvered out of clogged spaces with ease. And his midfield partnership with the pint-sized Marlon Duran often looked more refined than anything the senior U.S. national team has produced recently. Duran covered the backline with smart and vicious challenges. And he often kept attacks surging with linking passes.
Luis Gil, getting looks from Arsenal and others, apparently.
On defense, outside backs Tyler Pollack and Zachary Herold both looked more solid than most highly-rated college backs. Herold got roasted a few times by slick Italian attackers like Giacomo Baretta, Marco Fossati and Federico Carraro. But he was nails in the air and showed awesome recovery speed. Pollack might have been the most consistent American player all tournament. He stifled talented Italian and Spanish attackers while choosing opportune times to push forward. And I’m guessing that he turned the ball over fewer times than any other player on the American team. His composure consistently got the U.S. out of trouble in the defensive end and led to promising attacks.
Some other players struggled. But maybe us critics can forgive them a little considering some of them haven’t even started shaving yet. Jack McInerney never revealed the form that many of us expected of him as America’s most hyped attacking threat. Despite the two goals he scored, McInerney disappeared for large chunks of games, seemingly letting his turnovers and mistakes compound on top of one another.
Alex Shinsky, who announcers often confused with McInerney, also turned in a number of up and down performances. But he was more up than down. He dominated spells of games, including an entire half against Spain, carving up defenses with slick dribbling and relentless pace. His whining attitude looks the most harmful part of his game, as he often threw up his hands to teammates and wore a Ronaldo-like pout for not getting the ball exactly where he wanted it, when he wanted it.
Oh yeah, and goalkeeper Earl Edwards looked like a beast. Also encouraging for the national team’s future is that more players from this crop of U-17 national team players are making designs to play abroad. A few have already signed European contracts, preventing them from playing in Nigeria. Joseph Gyau and Charlie Renken signed Academy deals with Hoffenheim in Germany. And Sebastian Lletget moved this past summer to the famed West Ham Academy. And even after many disappointing individual performances in Nigeria, more moves will come.
So don’t give up just yet America. Our development system needs work. And this U-17 team, one of the most talented in years, grossly underperformed. But the team’s performance was still one to praise, however quietly, more for the way it tried to play than for any results.◊
DEBATING DIFFERENT TYPES OF FANDOM
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Style, US Soccer, fandom on September 15th, 2009
Throughout my life I’ve been both types of fan, loyalist and leach, depending on the sport. There is logic and even romance in each. But as I age I’m attracted more and more to the latter, to the Chuck Klosterman sort of sports fandom that resembles musical taste – polygamous and fickle. I think this is common for a lot of modern sports fans, the mass consumers of entertainment that we are. But such anti-affiliation, although aesthetically pleasing and easy, undercuts some of the most fundamental aspects of fandom no matter how much it tries to objectify a sport.
The trend toward changeable fandom parallels social trends. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski don’t say this explicitly, but seem to imply it in an extract from their new book, Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained. They show, using numbers that seem a little dubious, how loyalist fans (whom they call Hornby-types in reference to Nick Hornby’s classic Fever Pitch) are actually a rare breed in modern British society despite stubborn myths to the contrary. They suggest that modern mobility of place and class cause changing devotions. They also suggest that such mobility causes the myth of the Hornby-type to persist. Rootlessness prompts a reactive nostalgia, a desire for an authenticity and identity that isn’t there.

Like the authors say, “fandom is not a static condition but a process.” Changing affiliation can come as a natural part of our development. As impressionable youths we latch onto a team with all our starry-eyed might. We crave idols and identity and acceptance and a professional team overflows with these things. That, or our dads make sure that a certain baseball team came as part of our genetic code. So we are loyal, at least for a while. But as we grow, more mobile and more discerning about our tastes, we feel freer to change affiliations. We realize that rootless fandom is easier and a lot less painful than unconditional devotion. Our fandom depends on taste, on the style we relate to or the players we like. Or it depends on convenience, where we are and when. It depends on us, not on the randomized geography of birthplace or our father’s heavy-handed indoctrination via the bed sheets he bought for us on our fourth birthday. This is how I watch most soccer, free and easy. And I’ve always believed it has given me objectivity, more sensitivity to the nature of the game because I’m not biased to the trivialities of one team . It’s not necessarily about the result. I route for good soccer and the teams that play it.
I’ve tried to adopt many foreign teams over the years, not just for their aesthetics. As a kid I liked Nottingham Forest because it sounded like some sort of fantastical place where goals grew along with the moss and trees. Since 2004, I’ve routed for Manchester City, after I told a Manchunian friend that I would adopt City if he adopted my then hapless Boston Red Sox. I tried to convince myself of my City fandom. I always liked Claudio Reyna, I reasoned. I liked the way City were a second-fiddle team in a soccer mad city with a first rate fan base. I liked that they had history. I felt like I owed it to City after the Red Sox won the World Series. I still say I like them, mostly to piss off fans of the other Big Four teams, and to keep appeasing the Sports Gods. But it never felt authentic.
No matter which club I try to adopt, foreign or American, something is missing. What attachment do I have to a club thousands of miles away? How much do I really know about their history, their pain? It’s in these questions that the loyalists have us beat, even if their attachment traces back to time they spent watching a certain team with an otherwise negligent dad – especially if it traces back to this. There are old world values in unconditional loyalty. You love a team like you love a father or wife, in sickness and in health, alcoholism or betrayal. Sometimes you don’t even know why you love them. You just do. They chose you.
The only soccer team I’ve ever supported unconditionally has been the U.S. national team. It has been painful. Occasionally glorious, but mostly painful, even when we squeak out wins against Trinidad and Tobago. But I feel invested in my fandom, in my infinitesimal stake in the team. I know the team’s history, its faults and its potential for success. But most importantly, I know what it feels like to truly route for them, to be crushed and then hopeful, over and over. Such devotion, as foolish or false as it can be, ties us to our surroundings – to our neighbors, to the communities and countries where we live. Loyal fandom helps us pare down the swirling and infinite chaos of the world, even the soccer world, to something we can hold onto and make sense of, to one game at a time, to wins and losses. We can see and feel the game in a way that means something to us, or at least means more than its entertainment value.

I think this is what separates sports from art or other entertainment fields. Although fans obviously want to be entertained, sports rely on a different value system than say music. Competition, or the idea of winning and losing, lies at the heart of any sport’s worth. Although winning can serve as one function of entertainment, it also serves as a value system that functions separately from, often in opposition to, a game’s style or capacity to entertain – however much us unaffiliated wish it didn’t. As much as fans follow sports be entertained, we also watch to feel the ecstasy and despair and hatred that wins and losses cause. We can’t feel the drama of the sport fully unless we attach some sort of loyalty to our fandom. The more loyalty, the greater the payoff or the let down. Without loyalty we lose the fundamental aspect of investment (economic and emotional and physical) in the teams we follow. We get stadiums muted by shrugging critics with pursed lips, polite and ultimately feckless. We get lower highs and higher lows.
I’m as responsible for this as anyone. But I hope I’m not representative of of too big of a trend. Otherwise we’re turning into a society of squabbling philosophers who don’t know what it means to be xenophobic toward “other” people for no reason. And where’s the fun in that?◊
Thanks to fredorrarci for compiling the quality pieces that spurred this belated post.
ON FREDDY ADU’S REVISED POTENTIAL
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Freddy Adu, Style, US Soccer, World Cup on September 2nd, 2009
Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast.
Or just over played your part.
Nothin shakin on shakedown street. Used to be the heart of town.
Dont tell me this town aint got no heart. You just gotta poke around.

Freddy Adu was once pure potentiality. He was the savior of American soccer. He was the American Pele that would deliver the U.S. from the dark ages of soccer mediocrity. At 14, he signed a million dollar contract and played his first professional game. It’s safe to say he had a little too much hype too soon. Barely pubescent, he struggled in MLS, against men twice as strong and twice his age. He has fallen in and out of favor with the national team. He has bounced around Europe in search of the right club with which to ply his overblown trade. Some people speak of him as if he’s already gone, so paralyzed by hype’s glaring lights that he still looks like that underdeveloped 14 year old playing against properly developed men.
The hype has been rightfully toned down. But I still wonder how anyone can dismiss Adu, a barely-20-year-old still looking to latch onto the right club to get significant playing time and experience. Although he has struggled at the full international level and at high level European clubs, he has achieved consistently when playing against peers. Adu excelled at the 2003 U-17 and 2007 U-20 World Cups. In his three games at the 2008 Olympics, Adu scored four goals. Even with the U.S. National Team, Adu has shown glimpses of the sort of creative attacking abilities that the U.S. has never truly had. He has flare. He has touch. He has that electrifying element of unpredictability that American players historically lack. He draws us in under his spell until we’re ready to believe again. Then he turns back on himself one too many times, a child playing on a freeway, and he loses the ball to an onrushing defender. We all shake our heads. We get that sinking feeling that maybe he’s too flighty and too soft, that he can’t last against the big boys.

Despite all of Adu’s perceived failures, which were inevitable given his unrealistic expectations, it’s easy to forget his successes and how much potential he still has. A recent loan from Benfica to fellow Portuguese club Belenenses will give him another chance to dig in, to develop physically and mentally, to harden the tactical elements of his game, to work his way into the national team. Despite all the harsh criticism and dismissals Adu receives, many fans still invest their hopes in him. I’m one of them. We hope Belenenses is a good fit. We hope Adu will get playing time. We hope Adu will see significant time on the national team if he shows more consistency. We hope he can still change American soccer by becoming a fraction of that magnetizing player that he once promised. Somehow these hopes feel so much more natural and fair than the media-fueled hyperbole that warped our impressions of Adu from the start, which dislodged him from any realistic context and measurement of development.
Adu’s career has been a series of revised expectations. Maybe Adu’s abilities can dovetail with what are now more down-to-earth expectations. Maybe this will propel him forward. Maybe he has finally reached a place that lies sufficiently under the radar for him to play within himself.
Well, well, well – you can never tell.◊
AN ADULT’S LETTER TO ALEXI LALAS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Alexi Lalas, Brazil, Confederations Cup, Maradona, US Soccer on August 27th, 2009
By Diego Maradona
Alexi,
What’s up you leather-faced buffoon? Last time I saw you I was probably putting the ball through your legs. Or blowing lines off your wife’s potatoes after your country banned me in ‘94. You’re lucky I didn’t get you on the field. Just kidding. Have we met before? I don’t remember. But an American kid with big dreams keeps emailing me to tell me you’re spewing garbage about American soccer on ESPN and something about a pod shell. He says you’re treating small soccer players worse than women. So I guess you want a war.
Or, I would want a war if you didn’t make me laugh all the time. Seriously, you’re a funny man on TV, which I respect. But men should not be funny all the time. That is for clowns. And clowns are mostly sad. So I just need to clear one thing up before I get started. Are you serious when you say that “size does matter in soccer and it’s mattering more and more”? Are you serious in saying that America needs bigger players to win? Are you really fucking serious and not just trying to entertain people and make me laugh? If you are not, like I hope, then you can stop reading now and we’ll pretend I never wrote this. But if you are, then it’s on man to man. (Hold on, while I get another drink).
I would look up at you like I look up at a tree, Alexi. It’s true. But I have balls as big as oceans that would sweep you away like dead wood. That is what matters in soccer, and life – not physical size. Strength is different than size. So let’s get that straight. Look at all the best players in the world of all time from any country. First off, myself. I probably come up your gut. Pele would come up to your chest. George Best was up to your neck. And Cruyff to your chin. Got it? Ok.
Now you say that players today are getting bigger and bigger. Maybe this is true. Today you have players like Kaka and Gerrard. You had Zidane. Fine. But they’re not good because of their size. They’re good because they’re good, maybe even despite their size. They’re good because they have the heart and mind and blood for the game. See, this is what I like so much about soccer. It’s such a human sport, unlike a lot of those you play in your country. You can’t tell who is a star by their appearance. You don’t need some kind of freakish body type to be good. You need to have it inside of you. We don’t have a name for it, but you dicks probably call it skill. And the skill matters most on the ground, where the game is played. If you don’t believe this, then I pity you.
Next you say Brazil is a big scary team, and that’s who America should be more like. I admit, Brazil is bigger than it has been before. But what are you smoking Alexi? Brazil isn’t that big. They’re still a bunch of sissies, like you’ll see on September 5th. You make me use numbers, and I fucking hate numbers. But my secretary sent me this:
Brazil’s roster for the Confederations Cup had an average height of (in your language) 5’11’’ and an average weight of 166 pounds. The USA’s roster, without your precious goalkeepers, had the same average height and weighed seven more pounds. You fatties! So you can stop talking about this like it’s the reason you lost. The biggest teams are all the ones from North Africa. And France is pretty big too. I don’t have to look this up. I just know. And these teams are Ok.
Have you seen my team Alexi? Have you seen Mascherano? El Jefecito. Tevez? El Apache. Have you seen my son-in-law? Have you seen fucking Messi, the one who you call “a dying breed”. Have you seen this little fucker! A dying breed? Me? Messi? We haven’t even started yet! I hope we get you country-club bitches in the World Cup.
I know you’re trying to sell soccer in America because that’s your job. But stop saying foolish things so I can focus on more important things than kicking your ass. Who’s the best player on your own national team Alexi? That’s what I thought.
Yours,
- Diego ◊
Translated by Cyrus Philbrick
WPS END OF SEASON WRAP-UP
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in WPS, Women's Soccer on August 26th, 2009
* This is the last time I’ll write on WPS for a while, I swear. Unless SI hires me to do “The Marta Experiment” or something.

American citizens pay more attention when Lady Gaga burps on television than when New Jersey’s Sky Blue FC wins the WPS championship. So I’m not alone in my doubts about WPS’s staying power. Media, even local media surrounding many WPS teams, largely ignored the league all year. The Los Angeles Sol and Sky Blue FC played the final at the Home Depot Center in front of a little over 7,000 fans, less than half the number that attended the league’s opening game at the same venue. According to the New York Times, “no teams came close to turning a profit.” All of this doesn’t bode well for the league’s philosophy of “slow growth.”
I root for the league in the same way I root for under-appreciated bluegrass bands or rappers. Obscured from the public eye, the league depends mostly on its grassroots community appeal: on ticket sales, camp revenue, and community events. The league treads a thin line between professionalism and amateurism. On the field, it’s professional; it’s the best women’s soccer I’ve ever seen. Off the field, however, the players are amateurs in the sense that playing soccer is not all that they do. Many have other jobs, at least in coaching. Some are considering other career paths. Some are moms. Players will stay after games to sign every autograph of every grinning fan. This is all unusual in professional sports.
Like minor league baseball, WPS is probably full of Hollywood-caliber stories that media ignores. Christie Rampone’s story is one of the few that got any serious ink this year. After a replacement coach quit, Rampone took over as player-coach of Sky Blue FC. This was right after she had surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst. Rampone helped lead her team, last place after eight games, to the championship over the most dominant team in the league throughout the season, the Los Angeles Sol. And she just turned down a call-up to the national team because is three-months pregnant. Forget the pregnancy part, this sort of story wouldn’t happen in many other leagues, including MLS. It’s a heart-warming example of the sort of thrift and dedication that drives the league.

It got me thinking: If WPS can’t compete as purely a soccer product in the sports arena, then maybe it can compete or even win in the one arena that it does have the advantage: humanity, or emotion. I’m not trying to patronize the league. As a league unspoiled by the screens necessarily erected by big-money professional sports – the media coverage and endorsement deals that suffocate players’ true personalities and interactions with fans – WPS has the unique opportunity to let fans in on the drama, the ups and downs of life as a professional athlete.
Actually, it might be more of a necessity. The league realizes that access serves as one of its best selling points. It encourages open communication between players and fans, even allowing players to Tweet during games. But how much can the league peel back the curtain without sacrificing its own professional integrity? Before marketing ploys look pitiful and desperate instead of engaging? I’m not sure. It’s a thin line. But I know the league should test that line’s tension in the coming year if it wants to start grabbing new fans and make any money.
As Rampone said: “Hopefully we can get the word out about the league. We need to spend a little more time in the community and start selling the league a little better on the players’ side. I think we did a great job on the field, but now it’s just a little more mindful in getting the work done off the field.”
Is it too early for bake sales? How about a reality TV series? I’m serious about both.◊

HOW MUCH WILL HDTV AFFECT SOCCER IN AMERICA?
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in ESPN, Media, Premiership on August 20th, 2009
Bill Simmons, one of the most beloved messiahs of American sportswriting, is getting into soccer. I wish him the best, although I have a feeling he has no idea how big of a plunge he is about to take. His new attraction to the sport should make for an interesting experiment with fans of mainstream American sports. How many will he convert? How many will he betray? Also, choose your words carefully, Bill, because the already-converted American soccer fans are a tenacious bunch, like some territorial species of barnacle clinging to the charging hull of the American sports scene. We stick together, and a lot of us are corrosive bastards
Anyways, I’m intrigued by one of the reasons Simmons has repeated as responsible for his warming to the sport: HDTV. Really? Is it possible that HDTV will aid the breakthrough of the sport into the mainstream? That better definition flatters soccer more than other sports? HDTV makes anything better as far as I can tell, kind of like pot but without the neuroticism. I’m pretty sure I could watch crab races or tiddlywinks and be riveted. The subtle movements of joints, the colors, the grotesque detail. Antennae! Knuckles! ESPN looks poised to cash in on its HDTV capabilities. The Chelsea-Hull City game received a modest .2 rating, or over 150,000 viewers, on Saturday morning as a last minute addition to the TV schedule and without any advertising.
Maybe soccer does stand to gain more from this godly invention. It’s a game of subtleties. Stats tell you next to nothing. To appreciate the game you need to watch and watch closely. Only then will you be able to decide if a Drogba chip more delicate than a Phil Mickelson pitching wedge was intended as a shot or a cross. You’ll see if that grimacing player really got whacked on the ankle or if he’s just another player to add to your Pansy Hit List. I’ve always watched soccer games more like movies than sports. The game’s fluidity invites, even demands, attention. It’s a drama that unfolds in a coherent narrative, not piecemeal. This is why I’ve always liked watching soccer alone better than with friends – at least, if I actually want to watch a game. Maybe serious fans of any sport can relate. Sometimes you just want to be alone with your team or your idols. But soccer affects me this way regardless of who’s playing, regardless of who I’m with. It sucks me into its vortex. My eyes glaze over and I tune out my surroundings. My favorite people to watch games with all understand this. I don’t necessarily even call them my friends. I have “soccer friends” like one might have “drug friends”. And during a good game we’ll all slip into a gone-to-the-world daze like a group of junkies who just scored some grade A smack. We’ll talk when we regain consciousness at half-time.
As the late Stephen Wells often pointed out, American sports are built for distraction and excess, like some twisted metaphors for the country’s sensibility as a whole. On TV, their constant breaks – time outs, quarters, innings, two-minute warnings – exist as ideal vehicles for commercials. Live, they provide gaps that need cream-puff fillers – fired objects, giveaways, shaking tits and furry butts. This is something foreign friends always notice when they attend any American sporting event. “They spend so much time not playing the game,” a Hungarian friend once said at a basketball game. “I get it. You just come to baseball games to eat,” a kiwi said. I don’t mean all this to diss American sports. Actually, I guess I do, but I still like them, just for very different reasons than I like soccer. They are different forms of narrative. In most American sports, for example, excitement usually builds in segments, ratcheted up between commercial breaks like cliff-hangers on prime time television. I like that about them. You can get ragingly drunk and still know exactly what’s going on. Pay attention now! the TV or the jumbotron tells me. This is why they’re so sociable. I like going to baseball games so because they provide a chance to talk. At any given game, you’ll have over two hours of bull-shitting time. At any half decent soccer game, I’ll pee in my beer cup before I venture to the bathroom to miss ten minutes of a half.
The first weekend of the Premier League reminded me of all this – mostly in the way I remembered how much I liked watching uninterrupted soccer. Good soccer. I watched the Liverpool-Tottenham match at my dingy local Irish pub, where I sometimes brave the smell of piss-and-vinegar-soaked-wood on Sunday mornings to have breakfast and crank the volume of the flatscreen in the backroom. I was so consumed by the game that I didn’t want to look down to size up a bite of my egg-piled English muffin. I could manage only the coordination necessary to take intermittent sips of stale coffee. This is just right, I thought. Sharp angles and deft turns stitched my heart to my mind. My coffee tasted better than it should have. An ocean of green swelled and contracted with the quiet heaves of my chest.
And I’m pretty sure that this game, on Fox Soccer Channel, wasn’t even in HD (as Fox has yet to roll out their HD option). If it was, I might have cried. OK, that’s an exaggeration. But, in such a harmonious moment, I might have at least sworn off American football.◊
HOLY CRAP, HAS ANYONE ELSE NOTICED WHAT MANCHESTER CITY IS DOING?
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Chelsea, Economics, Manchester City, Premiership, capitalism on August 18th, 2009
Manchester City is like a black hole that has opened up in the fabric of the Premier League. Sucking mass, masses of expensive players and media attention, it leaves many fans unsure about how to approach the club’s awakening and limitless powers. Some laugh. Some wince. Most shake their heads, confused and afraid, especially those millions of fans of any of the now comparatively-less-rich Big Four, which constitute most of the Premier League fans here in America and elsewhere outside England. This is understandable. Manchester City’s profligate spending has driven up transfer prices, undermined other teams’ prized resources, and presented a serious threat to the Big Four’s establishment and their lock on Champions League places.

However grotesque City’s expenditures seem, I say come with them! Pour on the gravy and turn up the heat! Or something like that. Modern soccer welcomes lavish spending to create a better and more attractive product. And City is relishing the chance to revolutionize a club overnight. Whatever their history, teams that spend more succeed more, with very few exceptions. This gets truer and grosser every year. Although soccer is a team sport, it is also as pure a “players’ sport” as exists. Put the best players on the field, you win. At least, I’ve always thought so.
City is gleefully testing this “theory”, as Chelsea did a few years ago, before a few years of success ingratiated that club into the Established Order. Unlike Chelsea, however, City’s is playing with capital as liquid as oil – a very real Arabian cave of treasure that isn’t tied up in business ventures or stocks. And City’s owners are making a messier and more offensive storm than Chelsea ever did. They even had the gall to try to buy-out the Blues’ loyal captain, John Terry. They offered apparently blank checks to Kaka and Ronaldo amongst others. And I don’t blame the Al-Nahyan royal family or the club for doing so. The owners are taking full advantage of the league’s (or more generally European soccer’s) lax and negligent financial policing.
City’s unchecked injection of play money should continue a few of the league’s trends. It should continue to increase the quality of the league at its highest stratosphere, amassing talent that will ensure high-level competition and entertainment that will pay off via its worldwide popularity and increasing value. At the same time, however, it should continue to bloat the already warped financial structure of the league, further separating rich and successful clubs from the bottom feeders, the poorer clubs whose best resources get pillaged and ransacked to feed towering predators.
While it’s easy to ignore the dangers of such a naturally competitive marketplace, as long as angelic billionaires or conglomerates of millionaires continue to foot the bill for their creations, the league has seen increasing concern with teams’ financial instability. Because so many clubs need to operate at losses to succeed or even compete, not living within their means but requiring what Arsene Wenger calls “financial doping”, their financial footing appears increasingly suspect. What happens when the “doping-agent” dries up, or when the club can’t find another sugar daddy to buy, to continue to push the absurd cycle? These have become very real concerns for a few clubs while others remain naive in thinking that insolvency can’t happen to them.
So how long can this last? I don’t know, and that’s for brighter economic minds than mine to figure out. I’m just hoping that City’s absurd spending, which clearly functions as the most effective and easy path to success, will prompt more debates about the league’s financial stability vs. its competitive stability. And hopefully financial reform will follow. It promises to be a complex and painful process, but it is a necessary one if we truly want more than the same richest few teams to have a shot at winning anything.

In the meantime, I’m not the only one curious about how messy City’s twisted project will get on the field. Some are already predicting a debacle, laughing at City’s illogical and unsystematic acquisitions. I’m not. I’m impressed that City snatched the caliber of players it did – a few world-class misfits and a few stalwart players who pledged their loyalties elsewhere until … wait, so I could like buy a Bentley and a Burnley? I’m also rooting for the backwards way City built a team, from front to back. This flouts most conservative conventional soccer wisdom, which relies on the tired cliché that defense wins championships. Of course, City’s coach Mark Hughes has admitted that he still wants another world-class central defender like Everton’s Jolian Lescott, and he still might get one. But right now he’s got such a surplus of attacking talent that he’s loaning startlet strikers like Jo and Daniel Sturridge to his competitors, Everton and Chelsea. How the hell is he going to make room for Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Tevez, Roque Santa Cruz, Robinho, and Craig Bellamy? Not to mention Martin Petrov and Sean Wright Phillips and Steven Ireland, arguably City’s best player for the last two seasons.
Such a top-heavy team needs streamlining to wield itself effectively against the organized defenses of the top four. But even if applied with childish whimsy, such a swirling mass of talent and goal scoring credentials should damage the best teams in the league. If applied with enough precision and restraint, then City has the firepower to crack the top four. But I’m just as curious to see if the arms race that Manchester City has amplified will prompt the sport’s governing bodies to make a more earnest effort to streamline financial structures and policies. Somehow I think this is less likely. So lets all appreciate the chance we have to watch money burn in all its sparkling and time-searing glory … ◊


![[Bloglines]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[LinkedIn]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[Squidoo]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/squidoo.png)
![[Technorati]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Email]](http://www.footsmoke.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)








Recent Comments