US Soccer Catch-All

kazooka wrote:

Allowing Precourt to burn down one of the original franchises because he doesn't think the city is sexy enough is a stake through the heart of that image.

They already set a precedent by letting the ClashQuakes move to Houston and granting a new franchise in San Jose. This time they're apparently doing the opposite - keeping the team in the same place, but allowing the owner to skip all the expansion competition and move Austin to the top of the list.

If I'm Detroit, Sacramento, or St. Louis, I'm pretty angry right now.

Dc United on the cusp of making playoffs after being worst team in MLS so that's exciting.

bigred wrote:

Dc United on the cusp of making playoffs after being worst team in MLS so that's exciting.

That sucks.

Hrdina wrote:
kazooka wrote:

Allowing Precourt to burn down one of the original franchises because he doesn't think the city is sexy enough is a stake through the heart of that image.

They already set a precedent by letting the ClashQuakes move to Houston and granting a new franchise in San Jose. This time they're apparently doing the opposite - keeping the team in the same place, but allowing the owner to skip all the expansion competition and move Austin to the top of the list.

If I'm Detroit, Sacramento, or St. Louis, I'm pretty angry right now.

Houston/San Jose was a different era and a different situation. Anything prior to 2008 or so, when the league's survival was still pretty tenuous, shouldn't be taken too much as precedent. But even then, they moved real quickly to replace the Quakes and made sure that Houston wasn't going to pull some weird Utah Jazz/LA Lakers situation.

Detroit doesn't have anything to worry about, atm. If they place a competitive bid, it won't matter how many teams are already in. They're too big of a market to ignore. Sacramento, though, yeah, they've probably got a decent axe to grind here. St. Louis really hasn't been serious about a team since 2011 or so.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

The women play again October 14 in the first knockout game. 7ET on FS1.

The men play Peru October 16 at 7:30ET on ESPN2.

GAME DAY! USWNT vs Jamaica!

And I'm seeing that it starts at 8pm ET, so maybe the previous time was for pre-game?

kazooka wrote:

St. Louis really hasn't been serious about a team since 2011 or so.

Course I say that and then:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/...

kazooka wrote:
kazooka wrote:

St. Louis really hasn't been serious about a team since 2011 or so.

Course I say that and then:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/...

Yeah, I already knew that St. Louis had become serious when I included them in my list.

The USA is officially going to World Cup 2019! The USWNT beat Jamaica 6-0.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

The USA is officially going to World Cup 2019! The USWNT beat Jamaica 6-0.

What? Already? Didn't they just start qualifying play?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

The USA is officially going to World Cup 2019! The USWNT beat Jamaica 6-0.

What? Already? Didn't they just start qualifying play?

Yeah, but it's not like the men, in CONCACAF for the women, qualifying is done via a tournament. The winners, runners-up and third-place all get in.

Now, considering that so far, the USA and Canada have scored a combined 48 goals and surrendered exactly one (EAT IT CANADA), both of them probably should've just been allowed to qualify the moment they walked onto the field wearing the correct clothing and equipment.

Ah, I didn't know that, thanks.

So Wednesday's USA-Canada final—although not critical for qualifying—could be a competitive match, I take it.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

So Wednesday's USA-Canada final—although not critical for qualifying—will be the first genuinely competitive match either team has played, I take it.

Fixed.

Poor Canada, to be rivals with the GOATs.

I didn't watch the latest USWNT game, but I watched half of one about a month ago, and the US looked really sharp.

I also remember watching them play last year in a friendly or something like that, and they didn't look that good.

Is this just a case of them getting their act together in the past 12 months, with all the new players they've brought in?

Is there a team that can challenge them in the World Cup?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I also remember watching them play last year in a friendly or something like that, and they didn't look that good.

Is this just a case of them getting their act together in the past 12 months, with all the new players they've brought in?

Remember that "didn't look that good" means something different for the USWNT. They're 18-3-0 since October 2017, so whatever you saw was probably a more experimental side interesting in blooding new players, rather than a competitive "let's get qualified" kind of game.

Is there a team that can challenge them in the World Cup?

Several. England, Germany, Japan, China, Brazil, France, all of those are teams capable of beating the USWNT (maybe Australia and Sweden too).

The playing field is much more level across the globe now than it was, say, 15-20 years ago. There are several teams that could win, although the USWNT are still presumptive favorites. But they won't walk it like they walked CONCACAF qualification.

Basically, the US and Canada are way, way, way ahead of everyone else in CONCACAF on putting the time, money and development into having decent women's national sides, so it'd be a surprise if the USWNT didn't put 6 past Jamaica.

Blooding is a weird word.

I think it might have been that 3-1 South Korea match in October of last year that I watched. They won, but it wasn't impressive stuff. Compare that to now and they've leveled up.

I'm excited for June. My daughter and I are talking about trying to get to France to watch a match.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I think it might have been that 3-1 South Korea match in October of last year that I watched. They won, but it wasn't impressive stuff. Compare that to now and they've leveled up.

I would guess you're referring to the 2017 She Believes Cup, where the USWNT came in a respectable but no hardware fourth place...

...out of four teams!

Oh, and the USMNT is about to kick against Peru. Go USA!

Just a reminder...

USWNT Team kicks off against Canada for the CONCACAF Championships in 30 minutes (8pm Eastern, Fox Sports 1 for TV).

Go USA!

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Oh, and the USMNT is about to kick against Peru. Go USA!

1-1! Not bad, still a bit "eh" though. The USMNT is 3-3-3 in 2018. I'll argue that the results, based on who they've been playing is positive-ish.

And the USWNT wins!

(And Jamaica is headed to France as well, for the first time ever!)

Way to go USA!

Prederick wrote:

And the USWNT wins!

(And Jamaica is headed to France as well, for the first time ever!)

After an unfortunate start, Canada bottled the US up nicely for pretty much the whole game. If Canada can learn to attack better, they’ve got something.

And yeah, Jamaica wins in a PK shootout!

Well, look what happened today:

IMAGE(https://newyork-mp7static.mlsdigital.net/styles/image_landscape/s3/images/RBN1018039_181026_supporters_shield_CHAMPS_DL.png?bx61rABI1rRmNAZ0FsH5A8K1Ytik0LpH&itok=5UE4qX_T&c=c1a1d0e6f51664e4c3a12b708c799c76)

IMAGE(https://league-mp7static.mlsdigital.net/styles/image_landscape/s3/images/2018-Primary-SupportersShield-RBNY-1280x553-v2.jpg?rSzWc98ZMG9D5Gm2ayxj8C8QP2st9gQN&itok=4zmggYss&c=f314d8203b8996cc9e2553852d52d09b)

RBNY beat Orlando 1:0 and Atlanta lost 1:4 to Toronto, so RBNY wins the Shield by 2 points. We also set marks for the most wins (22) and points (71) in a single season.

Thank you to TFC for playing with pride in a game that was meaningless to them.

Of course, the actual Shield was up in Toronto because the league (reasonably) assumed Atlanta would win.

I am quite pleased for RBNY, as they're one of my two local teams, but this will be their 3rd Supporter's Shield since 2018, with grand total of zero MLS Cup Final appearances so.... maybe better this time?

I also have mixed feelings about treating that trophy with any kind of real honor. It's the President's Trophy, which is neat but very obviously not the point.

Hey, in most of the world the Supporters' Shield is THE thing!

LOL, yes, well, in most of the world, the season would end and RBNY would be champions.

Not that I have a huge problem with the playoffs though. I'd prefer the MLS without, but I can understand why they have the playoffs, as moving to the Belgian or Scottish model would probably turn off a lot of fans.

But at the end of the day, at least in soccer, I feel like the team that's the best over X number of games in the regular season should generally be the Champion. Playoffs are fun, but especially in soccer, you can end up with someone who was mediocre at best during the season winning the whole damn thing (see Seattle's win in 2016).

Prederick wrote:

I am quite pleased for RBNY, as they're one of my two local teams, but this will be their 3rd Supporter's Shield since 2018, with grand total of zero MLS Cup Final appearances so.... maybe better this time?

Well, RBNY did appear in the Final once, but not in a year that they won the Shield.

Prederick wrote:

I also have mixed feelings about treating that trophy with any kind of real honor. It's the President's Trophy, which is neat but very obviously not the point.

Maybe not the point, but that's simply because MLS decided by definition that their "Champion" would be the winner of MLS Cup. I think the President's Trophy is a slightly different story, though, given the unique history and mystique behind the Stanley Cup.

IIRC, the whole idea of the Supporters' Shield came out of discussions on the NAS (North American Soccer) email list, and I'm sure other places. That alone makes it mean more than the President's Trophy, as it's not just some other award made up by the league itself. The fans (in particular, the early fans who helped the league get started) wanted a regular season champion to be recognized, and made it happen.

Some people were pushing to have it called a Scudetto, but thankfully that wasn't adopted. It certainly doesn't carry the weight that a league championship does in Europe, but that's OK.

Prederick wrote:

But at the end of the day, at least in soccer, I feel like the team that's the best over X number of games in the regular season should generally be the Champion. Playoffs are fun, but especially in soccer, you can end up with someone who was mediocre at best during the season winning the whole damn thing (see Seattle's win in 2016).

Back to the only RB finals appearance (2008), we almost had that happen. RBNY finished fifth in the Eastern Conference, but ended up with the fourth seed in the West because of the wild card rule they employed at the time. We lost to Cowlumbus in the Final.

In 2009, RSL did the same thing, and won MLS Cup as the Eastern Conference Champions, after finishing fifth in the West.

Let's not even talk about 2010...

I'd argue 2009 was worse, as RSL literally had more losses than wins. And in 2016, Seattle was 14-6-14, with a astonishing goal differential of +1.

To be fair, the best teams generally have a pretty good record of being in the MLS Cup final or thereabouts in the MLS, but yeah, if you can't accrue most wins than losses, I would argue, in any sport, you should not be allowed to compete for a championship.