Rookie mistake, Newcastle in relegation form at home is the classic Spurs trap game. I’m frankly relieved they only lost by one.

Regardless, that’s just a rough time slot for your marquee matchup.

I didn’t watch the game at all for the same reason, but on the other hand it gets kinda hot in Los Angeles in August and I wouldn’t want to be playing or watching a soccer game in an outdoor stadium before like 7PM PT anyway, so I guess tradeoffs (that said, it was probably more relevant that the Dodgers were playing…

Honestly the main reason I love the name despite the riff is because the fans came up with it and then the league/broadcasters just followed along.

Isn’t that...exactly what they did? They named the team “Club Internacional de Futbol Miami” and it predictably got shortened to Inter Miami like with any of the fifteen other professional soccer teams in the world that are called “Inter <somewhere” for that exact same reason.

(also Nacional really isn’t any more unique…

There’s no reason why MLS can’t find its own identity, as has every other country.

Better get the refs to take off those headsets and communicate with their linesmen about offside calls entirely via yelling, then. 

VAR fundamentally shifts the ontological frame from the human to the technological.

But as soon as studios gained the ability to show replays to the viewers the status quo changed. You cannot run a system where fans watching from home know more about what’s happening than the officials on the field.

The problem is that “was that contact between players a foul” is a judgment calll by the ref, so VAR defers to the ref if he saw the contact and just decided differently, while “did the ball contact the arm” (ie: the new handball rule) or “is that player in an offside position” are yes-or-no questions so they’re way…

Ironically enough, the ball-to-hand-to-hip Llorente goal that actually won that CL game would have been disallowed under today’s rule. Swings and roundabout I guess?

Short version: it frequently ends up like this.

Yes, but there are basically ten other teams on the entire planet that can realistically impact “who Manchester City can add from year to year”, maybe three of which even play in their league. I don’t think it’s the same question.

Unlike hockey or NFL football (which do, I guess, see the talent dilution problem), soccer…

The offside rule could be rewritten to say “if a player is X distance in front of the last defender” or “if a player’s entire body is ahead of the last defender”(or have a static offside line like hockey if you’re getting really radical). At least with offside, it’s not at all the same as the NFL’s debate. For…

Exactly! So why not actually change the rules to reflect that, instead of relying on the discretion of referees on what degrees of offside or handball or whatever are “worth calling”, and then complaining when calls by different refs are inconsistent? 

So many of the takes about this comment miss the gigantic crashing irony that:

a) Zlatan’s team isn’t winning the league and is fifteen points behind the team that is, with eleven games to go (normally a basically impossible gap to catch up, and since nobody cares about the CONCACAF Champions League or the Open Cup,…

On paper, Americans should be WAY more interested in a women’s soccer program that has won half of all World Cups than a men’s program that’s not even consistently *qualifying* for them

I guess the argument is that if the teams weren’t trying to make money off these preseason friendlies then they would be held in smaller (so less profitable) but better (for player safety) venues than NFL stadiums with turf surfaces that eat knees for breakfast?

And sure, they probably would be. But it takes eight…

I dunno, it's rather easy to imagine “that jackass Pérez” doing precisely that.

Both, really. Real Madrid vastly overpaid for him when they signed him, both in terms of salary and the 100 million euro transfer fee to Tottenham, and he then proceeded to spend the subsequent six years either injured or underwhelming (except for a few standout moments, usually in cup finals).

Of course, it’s very…