Posts Tagged ESPN
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
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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.◊
THE GROWTH OF ^EUROPEAN^ SOCCER IN THE U.S.
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in AC Milan, Chelsea, La Liga, MLS, Premiership, Seattle Sounders FC on July 26th, 2009
And Why It’s Probably OK
Ah, summer soccer in America. When we can finally kick back, crack an ice cold Miller Lite, and take in some of that industrious Major League Soccer all of these scallywags have been talking about … oh you’ve got Stella? Wait, Barca’s playing? Maybe next year….
In a lot of ways, foreign club tours of America have exposed just how secondary MLS’s secondary status is – even in its home country – compared to foreign soccer. To accommodate big-market European teams, MLS clubs rearrange their schedules and literally roll out lush grass carpets at the feet of foreign royalty. Small tribes of MLS fans stomp their feet and thunder sticks in frustration while fans pack one American stadium after another to drool over the likes of Inter Milan, AC Milan, and Chelsea. While MLS attendance stagnates. While television ratings even drop.
Some MLS fans, like Kartik Krishnaiyer over at MLS Talk, get pretty pissed about all this. Here’s a chunk of a recent diatribe:
Fans of the beautiful game believe anything that happens to have an American flavor is somehow tainted, even though many of them have not given the American game a real opportunity. People claim to support the game but yet turn their backs on their own domestic leagues and national team without really ever really developing knowledge about them.
We hear “fans” bash CONCACAF and the quality of the opposing national teams when they have not taken the time to watch Panama, Honduras or Jamaica play. Their judgments are not independent but reflect a peer pressure from “educated” fans of the game and certain elements of the press as well as American based bloggers who ignore the domestic game.
I do not fault ESPN for showing these games. They have learned through the hard knocks of MLS’ absolutely pitiful TV ratings, as well as a decline in USMNT TV ratings over the past several years (until the Confederations Cup, of course) that European football sells in the US. But I do fault those “fans” that seem oblivious to the game in this country acting as if the next few weeks are the greatest in football for this country. Those “fans” are among what is holding the game back here in the United States.
I want to give Kartik and all like-thinking MLS fans a big hug. I feel their pain. I understand the frustration and even anger Krishnaiyer feels toward Europhile American fans who look down their toffee-smeared noses at American soccer. I understand wanting to shake the glassy-eyed twinkle out of the eyes of casual fans who don’t realize that they could watch MLS or USL teams outside their back door.
But I don’t really understand the way some hard-core MLS fans have framed a battle between true American soccer fans and pretenders. Can someone explain to me how more exposure to the game, especially such a high quality brand of soccer, is bad? Should we stop importing foreign beer because it’s better and undermines our domestic product? And should we blame those who want to pay to drink it.
Importing a refined foreign product should help American soccer fans, of which MLS fans represent only a small subset, continue to develop a realistic comparison to their domestic product. It should help erode the snobbery and ignorance of American fans, or at least it will as long as American soccer continues to close the gap that separates it from Europe (another touchy subject that I won’t get into right now). Fans will see Seattle play a fiery and even game with Chelsea for 90 minutes, despite losing 2-0. They will watch MLS games held as part of double-headers after Barcelona and Milan games. And some on the cuff will be converted when they realize, yeah, American soccer is bad, but you know what it’s not that bad goddammit, or at least not bad enough to ignore. They will think, it’s kind of like American beer – cheaper, grittier, and a lot less pretentious. Then again, you’re probably right Kartik. A lot of American fans need a slap in the face.
Is Soccer the New Poker?
This isn’t necessarily a new era for American soccer. But it does seem like a new era of marketing and exposure for soccer, mostly foreign soccer, in the U.S.. Although America has accommodated foreign clubs for centuries, we’re seeing foreign clubs exhibited and marketed like never before.
I grew up watching as much scrambled soccer as porn on television. Kids these days have it easy. Both porn and soccer are readily accessible. ESPN and Fox continue to increase their soccer coverage – mostly of the foreign game. They’re not dumb. Demand exists, and it exists because these leagues are the tits.
For this reason, EPL teams will probably become household names before domestic teams do. It’s already happening. Teenagers bounce out of bed to watch Chelsea games. College kids pass out with a Fabregas through ball sliding its way into their dreams. MLS fans need to accept this no matter how much it hurts. More European soccer won’t necessarily help MLS attendance or TV ratings. It might even hurt our domestic game’s ratings. Like, I won’t be the only one watching Tottenham vs. Portsmouth on Saturdays instead of Dallas vs. D.C. United. But this is how the game will grow here in the long term, with impressionable youngsters emulating swarthy icons with slippery last names. These icons might be a little more flamboyant with prettier hair than the ones we’re used to, but they’ll have to do in the absence of any truly magnetizing magicians in the U.S. Sorry Beckham.
While we wait for them, our domestic game will grow, slowly. And we will send our best players to Europe. And we will bring European players here to go to seed. And we will watch MLS during halftime of replays of Premier League games. And we will grow toward a foreign sun. Meanwhile, the home roots of the game continue to squirm beneath us, live and hungry and waiting to recognize their turn.◊
A KID’S LETTER TO ALEXI LALAS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Alexi Lalas, US Soccer, Youth Soccer on July 7th, 2009
Dear Alexi,
You seem like a pretty cool guy, for a ginger and a hippie. Actually, that’s why I like you – cause you’re a ginger but you make fun of yourself for being a ginger. You’re like, ‘yeah I’m a goofy ginger, What? I’m still pretty cool and funny could probably kick your ass, so if you can’t look past my gingerness then like screw you dude.’ And that’s a lot like what if feels like to play and love soccer in America. A lot of people in this country think it’s stupid and boring, but so what. A lot of other people love it. One day I want to play for the U.S. national team. Maybe you could give me some advice, because you know what it takes. You ARE American soccer, at least that’s what my dad says. I was watching the Confederations Cup the other day on TV and I didn’t know who you were and my dad came in told me you’re an American soccer legend, who like helped put us on the world map. So then I looked you up on YouTube and stuff and it’s totally true. You were bad ass, like a hockey player on the soccer field. A rock star. And then I found out that you actually are a rock star too! Sort of. Except you sound like a homeless man’s Nickelback, but with words that make more sense and are a little less wussy. Anyways, I think you’re pretty cool. (I don’t even blame you for all that Beckham stuff that everyone’s talking about, which kind of seems like a lot of other big guys in suits might be telling you what to do and then you have to take the blame for it). I got your back on that one. But what I don’t got your back about is you coming out on ESPN saying that we need to get bigger and stronger players on the U.S. team. Maybe you were just saying that to agree with the radio host or to get more Americans totally pumped about soccer in a way that they can relate to. Or maybe ESPN made you say it like the Galaxy made you say certain things. Or maybe you were kidding. I mean, I know you can be a kidder sometimes. But you didn’t really sound like you were kidding. You said something about how in America “we have cultivated this group of players that are technically very good, but don’t have that much size. And that’s where we need to bridge the gap.” (By the way, you have a pretty slick vocabulary. Maybe you could teach your friend Harkes a few things). You make it all sound really believable when you talk the way you do, like you should teach jock speech classes or something if your office jobs don’t work out. Anyways, have you seen the U.S. team lately? Have you seen Gooch? Bradley? Altidore? DeMerrit? Wynne? Casey? Dempsey? You really think size is the problem? To me, soccer is more about everything else athletic: coordination, balance, quickness, fitness, agility, and mostly skill. You know, all the good stuff. And a lot of times being big doesn’t help that much.
That’s what makes it so great. Of course size can help in some places on the field, like in front of the goal. But have you seen where most of the game is played, and have you seen like most of the best players in the world, ever? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of them aren’t that tall. I know you’re pretty big, and so were a lot of your teammates back in the day. And you played in Italy and blah blah blah. But that doesn’t mean you can take a shit on my dreams, you stupid clumsy ginger brute. It’s when you do say stuff like this that I wonder if you really deserve to be Mr. American soccer. Like why don’t you manage a hockey team or something with the rest of your clan.
Signed,
Bruised American youth
ps. I still like you, but check yourself, especially if you’re going to be a voice for American soccer that kids like me look up to.
pps. I don’t have a Napoleanic complex or anything. I’m small, but the doc says its just a phase.◊
FSC vs. ESPN MAILBAG
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Champions League, Media on April 7th, 2009
Fox recently beat out ESPN for the rights to broadcast next year’s Champions League fixtures. Footsmoke has been getting a lot of mail about the implications of this potentially lucrative swoop. I answer some of the responses below.
USAWC2030 writes: What was ESPN thinking? After last year’s European Championships, I thought this network was making a push for global soccer domination. I’d like to know what Fox paid for this swoop, as it clearly marks one of the best long-term investments for any broadcast network. Besides the World Cup, the Champions League is the most popular and lucrative tournament in soccer, and it gets bigger every year, both worldwide and in America. Last year’s final, between Manchester United and Chelsea, reached over 1,000,000 American viewers for the first time. I worry, however, that ESPN’s soccer coverage will start to lag in the wake of this loss. What will this mean for the millions of ESPN viewers that will now get less world-class soccer as part of their basic cable package? What if a potential Pele is among those not able to watch these games, and he chooses baseball instead, because this is the sport he and his friends watch when they come home from school and this is the sport they start to play in the backyard. See what you’ve done ESPN!
FS: Good points. And I thought I was too concerned about soccer development in this country, but maybe this is something to consider. Also, I doubt ESPN will just fade away. There’s more bounty to be had in the soccer world…
Americansoccerfanfuckyeah writes: How about Bretos and those other Canadian bitches get out the way and we bring in the big dogs, like Madden, but for soccer. Unscripted. Raw. Real. Wait … We don’t have any of those. Shit. Well maybe we could hold our own American Idol Soccer Commentator contest. Get a young-blooded smack-talker in there who calls it like he sees it without all that fancy talk and pitter-patter. Call a PK a PK, a pansy a pansy. Lets put those divers in their goddamn place, right! And lets spend some freakin money! You know Fox will bring it with the HD. I don’t know what everyone’s scared of. They’ll have picture so sharp you’ll see Steven Gerrard’s forehead, Crouch’s actual skeletal structure. They’ll have fields so mic’ed-up that we’ll hear Rooney swearing after missed shots, Ronaldo’s tears dropping on the ground, the linesman’s ass clenching after he knows he made the wrong call. Goals so explosive that they’ll make touchdowns seem like tiddlywinks. Replays from every angle physically possible: goal-side, grass-side, boot-side, even heart-side – from inside the fucking heart!
FS: Awesome. I think.
Trevor66er writes: Fox’s coverage of the international soccer already makes me shudder. The crude American/Canadian commentators lack the sensitivity, intelligence, and craft required to call a proper game, not that the misguided mumblings of Tommy Smyth on ESPN are much better, but at least Tommy has a sense of drama and justice, even if his sense of both ultimately dooms us all by the blatant ways he speaks about them, which displeases the soccer gods, causing tragic reversals of fate (Thanks again, Tommy, for your call around the 89th minute of the United game today). Thankfully, to clear up this danger Fox is considering deferring to the International English feeds, which have a little more discretion regarding jinxes. Also thankfully, Fox doesn’t have the same problem with their website coverage. Bobby McMann’s delicious tidbits of information satiate my deepest football appetites. And Jamie Trecker! I just discovered this delightful chum, who really has his probing finger pressing deep into the zombie-like pulse of American soccer, which I love to trash whenever possible by pointing out the vast differences in play between MLS teams and European clubs to my piddling and ignorant work colleagues. Are you sure you’re American Jamie?
FS: How did you even find this blog? I didn’t know Brits believed in jinxes.
futbolvida writes: Fox, where will I go for all my La Liga teams? You know there’s futbol outside of English teams? Thanks for clearing my face up though. Proactive es La Bomba Atomica! I get all the chicas now and I know the number by heart when I need more! Also, what’s the deal with all the red en the studio? It hurts my eyes.
FS: I think you meant to write Fox. Try foxsoccer.com.
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