|
Northern Ireland20810 Posts
On March 22 2024 06:37 Oukka wrote:Football is a stupid game and euros aren't even that important and wales isn't even a real country. In fairness and I do personally enjoy having our rivalries but it has long struck me as strange that the UK is represented in this manner.
|
Norway28267 Posts
At least Iceland won! :-)
|
51146 Posts
|
On March 22 2024 00:09 FlaShFTW wrote:Show nested quote +On March 21 2024 14:10 Sermokala wrote: I think MLS has a lot more depth to its teams and is a lot more interesting league with how parity works and the quality of stadiums, which I would put top of the world. Most leagues in the world are extremely top heavy but MLS hasn't seen a team repeat in more than a decade. In its almost 30 year history repeats have happened 3 times and no threepeats. Season pass also being best for the consumer in anywhere in the world isn't a hard argument to make, a single subscription for all games no blackouts and great streaming quality.
I was slightly meming in response to the post about messi vs ronaldo. It echos the saudi league vs mls quite well. Team for team I would slot it in the top 10 8-10 yeah, I think its better than the championship and bunda2 but I don't know how to definitively prove that. The MLS teams don't have depth, let alone even starting caliber players, for their defenders. They buy washed up has beens from the top 5, then the rest of their players just aren't good enough. I'd probably rate the Championship over them tbh and don't think an MLS team would ever make it to promotion if slotted in. I think this is massively changing. the u22 slots has opened a lot more youth to come into the league. Yes teams still buy has beens for their DP slots but they haven't had that big of an impact on winning teams. You see very clearly the difference between the players that are there for the paycheck and the ones who are motivated to make their final years count. MLS is a very physical league and I think they would fare very well in the championship.
Yeah I don't think an MLS team beats one of the yoyo club but I definitely think you would see a luton town situation with a few of the supporters shield winners. One of the biggest points for MLS being a top 10 league is its parity though, the league is balanced and you don't see the same team winning all the time. Teams rise and fall and every season feels different from eachother.
Peak concacaf tonight btw. 96th minute OG the only thing that saves USA from humiliation. ref refuseing to call shit and heroic bunkering against far more talented opposition.
|
Northern Ireland20810 Posts
I have no idea why but this genuinely annoyed me
|
All teams beijg on the same level doesnt mean you are a top10 league...
|
There's definitely something to be said for having low disparity in a league, so every game is exciting. However, having it be exciting because all teams are clown fiestas and you never know who will blunder more is not the same as having it be exciting because you will see top quality football every day. Also, it's missing a key ingredient for being an actually exciting league: relegation. The Eastern vs Western conference bit and the playoffs are all a pretty good system to generate hype, but the bottom teams still feel no real pressure to perform.
Also, it's a bit disingenuous to say there have been no repeats of MLS champions when both the eastern and western conference have repeats. The supporters shield doesn't seem like a meaningful designation, because the competition is completely different. It'd be like comparing the winner of the Eredivisie and the Belgian Pro League (two leagues that I'd say are roughly at a similar level atm), and whoever scored more points overall gets an extra trophy, without even playing against each other! The MLS Cup is the interesting aspect of the league, but being single elimination it's even more volatile than the Champions League... and the Champions League has few YoY repeats, mostly because of its format (which just seems to really favor Madrid for some reason).
|
The US sports system has some good points for it but no relegation makes it forever be a clown league imo. You can literally lose on purpose to get better young players for your team, best still is, these young talents are not allowed to say no. Its modern slavery that combines poor coaching and unsportsmanlike thinking. NFL is a joke as well because of this PLUS blackmailing cities to fund a new stadium or going to another city is a valid option.
|
Northern Ireland20810 Posts
I see some of the benefits, but those benefits aren’t an inherent component of the other, more negative aspect of how US sport is structured.
Competitive parity and financial stability are the big ones, but you could conceivably have those in European football with binding financial controls.
You create too big a gap between your small, top league and the rest of the pyramid. Which kind of necessitates needing some parallel system to harness talent, especially in such a large nation. Which ends up mostly being the college system, and this puts the US at a big disadvantage IMO.
Of course there are exceptions, and it’s improved in recent years but you’re still having players going truly professional in their 20s, where elsewhere talented players are attached to pro clubs of some level from very early ages, and go pro much earlier, even if it’s lower in the pyramid.
I’m curious what you American fans on here think, from my experience most football fans are Europhiles who follow football over here, plus a big cohort of Latinos of various places of descent who are also pretty football crazy, but not a community I interact with much!
In my experience much of the fan base actually likes the traditional league pyramid, it’s what’s in place in the football they watch around the globe.
Pretty much forever in the States it feels that it’s been structured around the more general American sports fan sensibility, not the actual taste of existing football fans, if you get my point. I don’t know if the observation is accurate, but it’s my experience in Americans I’ve talked to. They like the fan culture (minus the ‘Ultras’) of European and South American football, they like the cultural divergence and how clubs have long unbroken links with cities, or political leanings and what have you. Barcelona is a great team, but it’s also a shining gem of Catalan pride, or Liverpool thrums with the English but decidedly separate Scouse identity. Or Argentina’s eternal rivals in River and Boca are the clubs of the upper crust and the working class despite being situated pretty close in the same city.
I could be talking total bullshit but hence why I’m asking, it’s a subject that interests me!
By want of a crude parallel I’m reminded of when Kespa moved to SC2 and basically just replicated the BW structure. Sure it had worked in BW very well, but SC2 had had a very differently focused scene up to then, a different audience and was much more international, as well as being much more player-focused rather than team focused.
In the same sense it feels the US football structure is kind of as it is because that’s historically how their big sports are structured, rather than being what that fan base actually enjoys about that specific sport, so too I think did the Kespa era kind of impose a structure based on a similar maxim, but not necessarily one that dovetailed with a chunk of the SC2 fan base. Especially the people who became fans with SC2 and hadn’t been following since BW
|
Ligue 1 Uber Eats will become Ligue 1 McDonald's
LFP have struck a deal for the fast-food company to replace Uber Eats as their new title sponsor for the league for the next three seasons.
“This partnership marks the coming together of two major institutions that are deeply rooted in the daily lives and collective imagination of the French people,” the release adds. Athletic article
|
Norway28267 Posts
lol saying that mcdonalds is deeply rooted in the daily lives and collective imagination of the french people.. I think some french might find that slightly offensive.
|
United States9665 Posts
On March 22 2024 19:35 WombaT wrote: I see some of the benefits, but those benefits aren’t an inherent component of the other, more negative aspect of how US sport is structured.
Competitive parity and financial stability are the big ones, but you could conceivably have those in European football with binding financial controls.
You create too big a gap between your small, top league and the rest of the pyramid. Which kind of necessitates needing some parallel system to harness talent, especially in such a large nation. Which ends up mostly being the college system, and this puts the US at a big disadvantage IMO.
Of course there are exceptions, and it’s improved in recent years but you’re still having players going truly professional in their 20s, where elsewhere talented players are attached to pro clubs of some level from very early ages, and go pro much earlier, even if it’s lower in the pyramid.
I’m curious what you American fans on here think, from my experience most football fans are Europhiles who follow football over here, plus a big cohort of Latinos of various places of descent who are also pretty football crazy, but not a community I interact with much!
In my experience much of the fan base actually likes the traditional league pyramid, it’s what’s in place in the football they watch around the globe.
Pretty much forever in the States it feels that it’s been structured around the more general American sports fan sensibility, not the actual taste of existing football fans, if you get my point. I don’t know if the observation is accurate, but it’s my experience in Americans I’ve talked to. They like the fan culture (minus the ‘Ultras’) of European and South American football, they like the cultural divergence and how clubs have long unbroken links with cities, or political leanings and what have you. Barcelona is a great team, but it’s also a shining gem of Catalan pride, or Liverpool thrums with the English but decidedly separate Scouse identity. Or Argentina’s eternal rivals in River and Boca are the clubs of the upper crust and the working class despite being situated pretty close in the same city.
I could be talking total bullshit but hence why I’m asking, it’s a subject that interests me!
By want of a crude parallel I’m reminded of when Kespa moved to SC2 and basically just replicated the BW structure. Sure it had worked in BW very well, but SC2 had had a very differently focused scene up to then, a different audience and was much more international, as well as being much more player-focused rather than team focused.
In the same sense it feels the US football structure is kind of as it is because that’s historically how their big sports are structured, rather than being what that fan base actually enjoys about that specific sport, so too I think did the Kespa era kind of impose a structure based on a similar maxim, but not necessarily one that dovetailed with a chunk of the SC2 fan base. Especially the people who became fans with SC2 and hadn’t been following since BW I would say that as a Yank, I love the whole ultras and chanting aspect of football, which is what really drew me into the sport. In America, chants and "team pride" is boring. Plus I came from being an NBA fan with it's obscene 82 game schedule per team, it was too much for me to actually follow actively and I would find myself only caring about the first 3 games of the season then losing interest quickly, only for interest to pick up again when playoffs started (if my team was in playoffs).
Football (and F1) are very viewer friendly products. No ads, just 2 hours straight of whatever event you're watching (minus half time for football). There are only events on the weekends (and weekdays if you follow a European competing club), and they're so spread out that it makes it easy to care for every game and prevents burnout.
With regards to the development system, I agree that our talent funnel is not great. Yes, it's either college, or imports from foreign regions (like the influx of European basketball players recently). But the latter is built on the basis that America has the best league in the world and the highest salary for players, making it the most attractive destination for high profile and skilled players. There is no other professional league better than the NBA or MLB for those respective sports. Thus, feeding the league with new, high quality talent, is quite easy for them. But the MLS is a lackluster league, and it still tries the same strategy: take foreign players and bring them into the league to supplement your own talent. But America's talent is also weaker (as football is not the main sport here). If you removed all foreign talent from the NBA or MLB, those leagues would still be high quality leagues which can provide a compelling product.
I do wish MLS was also a relegation based system, but we simply don't have enough players interested to make this into a strong pyramid. At best, it would likely be just a few divisions, which maybe is fine for a starting block and building from there, but I think there needs to be an actual football revolution in America for our country to take the sport more seriously. We have too many sports that we care about: basketball, American football, baseball, hockey, golf. Americans pretty much only watch the World Cup if America is playing, and otherwise pretend the sport doesn't exist otherwise (pretty much how I felt until I started more closely following).
|
Colombia won vs Spain B ! Xd
|
On March 23 2024 00:34 FlaShFTW wrote:Show nested quote +On March 22 2024 19:35 WombaT wrote: I see some of the benefits, but those benefits aren’t an inherent component of the other, more negative aspect of how US sport is structured.
Competitive parity and financial stability are the big ones, but you could conceivably have those in European football with binding financial controls.
You create too big a gap between your small, top league and the rest of the pyramid. Which kind of necessitates needing some parallel system to harness talent, especially in such a large nation. Which ends up mostly being the college system, and this puts the US at a big disadvantage IMO.
Of course there are exceptions, and it’s improved in recent years but you’re still having players going truly professional in their 20s, where elsewhere talented players are attached to pro clubs of some level from very early ages, and go pro much earlier, even if it’s lower in the pyramid.
I’m curious what you American fans on here think, from my experience most football fans are Europhiles who follow football over here, plus a big cohort of Latinos of various places of descent who are also pretty football crazy, but not a community I interact with much!
In my experience much of the fan base actually likes the traditional league pyramid, it’s what’s in place in the football they watch around the globe.
Pretty much forever in the States it feels that it’s been structured around the more general American sports fan sensibility, not the actual taste of existing football fans, if you get my point. I don’t know if the observation is accurate, but it’s my experience in Americans I’ve talked to. They like the fan culture (minus the ‘Ultras’) of European and South American football, they like the cultural divergence and how clubs have long unbroken links with cities, or political leanings and what have you. Barcelona is a great team, but it’s also a shining gem of Catalan pride, or Liverpool thrums with the English but decidedly separate Scouse identity. Or Argentina’s eternal rivals in River and Boca are the clubs of the upper crust and the working class despite being situated pretty close in the same city.
I could be talking total bullshit but hence why I’m asking, it’s a subject that interests me!
By want of a crude parallel I’m reminded of when Kespa moved to SC2 and basically just replicated the BW structure. Sure it had worked in BW very well, but SC2 had had a very differently focused scene up to then, a different audience and was much more international, as well as being much more player-focused rather than team focused.
In the same sense it feels the US football structure is kind of as it is because that’s historically how their big sports are structured, rather than being what that fan base actually enjoys about that specific sport, so too I think did the Kespa era kind of impose a structure based on a similar maxim, but not necessarily one that dovetailed with a chunk of the SC2 fan base. Especially the people who became fans with SC2 and hadn’t been following since BW I would say that as a Yank, I love the whole ultras and chanting aspect of football, which is what really drew me into the sport. In America, chants and "team pride" is boring. Plus I came from being an NBA fan with it's obscene 82 game schedule per team, it was too much for me to actually follow actively and I would find myself only caring about the first 3 games of the season then losing interest quickly, only for interest to pick up again when playoffs started (if my team was in playoffs). Football (and F1) are very viewer friendly products. No ads, just 2 hours straight of whatever event you're watching (minus half time for football). There are only events on the weekends (and weekdays if you follow a European competing club), and they're so spread out that it makes it easy to care for every game and prevents burnout. With regards to the development system, I agree that our talent funnel is not great. Yes, it's either college, or imports from foreign regions (like the influx of European basketball players recently). But the latter is built on the basis that America has the best league in the world and the highest salary for players, making it the most attractive destination for high profile and skilled players. There is no other professional league better than the NBA or MLB for those respective sports. Thus, feeding the league with new, high quality talent, is quite easy for them. But the MLS is a lackluster league, and it still tries the same strategy: take foreign players and bring them into the league to supplement your own talent. But America's talent is also weaker (as football is not the main sport here). If you removed all foreign talent from the NBA or MLB, those leagues would still be high quality leagues which can provide a compelling product. I do wish MLS was also a relegation based system, but we simply don't have enough players interested to make this into a strong pyramid. At best, it would likely be just a few divisions, which maybe is fine for a starting block and building from there, but I think there needs to be an actual football revolution in America for our country to take the sport more seriously. We have too many sports that we care about: basketball, American football, baseball, hockey, golf. Americans pretty much only watch the World Cup if America is playing, and otherwise pretend the sport doesn't exist otherwise (pretty much how I felt until I started more closely following). Most European countries have two or three professional divisions at most. Not perfect but it works. I don't think our system as a whole is that much better though. Almost every country has 2-3 clubs that dominate the league and only a couple clubs dominate the CL. The system is built to keep the current top dogs on top and it has only gotten worse over the years. The only way to become one of the top dogs is what Chelsea and City did but that's not allowed anymore.
|
Germany dominated France!
|
I am positively confused.
|
Wirtz could be what Götze should have been. He is a gem.
Also Nagelsmann learned a lot from his Bayern time imo. Such pragmatic call-up and line-up
|
Germany is a beast now, who would have known that not taking washed out of form players and instead drafting great talents that perform so great right now would build up to be a really dominating team?
|
I presume the only reason that Upamecano started over Saliba and Konate is that it's a friendly. Zaire-Emery over Camavinga also seems odd.
|
On March 24 2024 10:11 gTank wrote: Germany is a beast now, who would have known that not taking washed out of form players and instead drafting great talents that perform so great right now would build up to be a really dominating team?
Yes, i love Dortmund but keep their players away please
|
|
|
|