trem_two posted:

https://twitter.com/ArsenalMoh8/status/764459589198815232

quote:

There was the endlessly mobile, hummingly energetic, supernaturally ubiquitous N’Golo Kanté, so adhesively on top of opposing players that his teammates nicknamed him “The Rash.” There were the tipsy, brilliantined skills of Riyad Mahrez, a slender goal grabber generally moving at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Watching Mahrez, often in gloves, flaneur his way through a crowded penalty box with the ball obediently at his feet was one of the season’s great joys. And then there was Jamie Vardy, the speeding yang to Mahrez’s oozing yin, austere and high shouldered, pure athletic purpose burning almost vacantly behind his eyes, bursting into space and stonking the ball into the back of the net with a kind of extravagant directness. Can Leicester City hang on to the title? Can it fend off the young and muscular Spurs, the brawling West Ham, the revitalized Liverpool, the brittle, neurasthenic, intermittently dazzling, almost erotically frustrating Arsenal?

Godzilla07 posted:

These also exist for Spurs, City, and Chelsea but this is enough

Godzilla07 posted:

Brendan Rodgers posted:

I am officially no longer a gooner. I'm parting ways with my beloved Arsenal. I am focusing all of my support on the mighty Crewe from now on. We may be poo poo but they're my home team. Arsenal are also poo poo but are a dirty southern club. Thanks for the memories, but it's time to move on. You won't see much on here anymore but I may just pop up out of no where now and again to rattle some oval office when I'm bored.

triple sulk posted:

“I really like Arsenal. But you, do you like Arsenal? Or just Arsenal with Trophies?”

That was said by one of our legends, Dennis Bergkamp. I'm not calling any one here not a real fan; we all express our passions differently. Myself, I want us to win everything possible and every year always put an absolutely stupid amount of money on us winning everything. I want us to win everything, all the time, but Arsenal is my team so I will forgive all. Doesn't mean I'm not salty, or not frustrated, but that's part of it.

We're not Madrid or Barca, or any of the other superclubs; we're not always going to get the best. The struggle is real and it makes the love a little bit sweeter. But what gets me is the idea that we're in complete meltdown because of a bad result when six starters are out and that loss signifies the season is fluffed. What are you all going on about?

Austerity blows. I get it. We all want to spend ludicrous money and eat caviar sipping champagne on a yacht. But reality is that even with a billionaire owner, we are still beholden to the reality of the markets and are still growing. That's not a bad thing. We will still remain competitive at the highest levels and the window still isn't closing for another 15 days. To think our spending is over and that the relevant people aren't busting their rear end behind the scenes is absurd.

There's also 37 games left to play: 111 points still up for grabs, of which we are guaranteed roughly 75, if not more. We came in second last year, while pushing deep in the FA Cup, so there's no reason to expect things will be radically different once our full squad returns to action in a month or so.

The main reason I'm even compelled to write this is because it seems like everyone was holding their breath for Wenger and the team to gently caress up. If not against Liverpool, then Leicester. If Not Leicester, then Watford, and so on, and so on. That's not the behavior I expect, and it's downright shameful when people seem to be celebrating a loss just to say "I told you so!" It's childish and churlish, and leaves a bad taste.

So, I'll quote the great man again “I really like Arsenal. But you, do you like Arsenal? Or just Arsenal with Trophies?”

Because I'll follow this team down to the Sunday leagues, and celebrate with them when they inevitably hit the highs we all know they will hit. Just chill out and let them do their thing.

Victoria Concordia Crescit

And that motto has never been more appropriate.

Brendan Rodgers posted:

I agree with every word of this post, especially the latin words that I don't understand.

quote:

Im not a huge soccer person

but maybe something similar to the way lacrosse does it? Have players designated to certain areas of the field so the offensive zones have more open space, so a "pack the box" strategy isn’t as effective. Im not advocating this but it might be a solution.

quote:

I’m also in his boat, having nearly no soccer expertise. But that would be something to open things up. And to continue with that thought, when schools tried to slow it down (like Johns Hopkins), they originally implemented a stall rule where the offensive/attacking team had to keep possession in the box or it would be an automatic turnover. They also have a clearing rule for when the defensive team gains possession, they have to get the ball over the midline in a certain period of time or it is an automatic turnover. Its pretty effective at forcing the action instead of spending the whole game throwing the ball around on the other side of the field.

At the same time, is this really so widespread that its going to be an issue in soccer? The Princeton basketball strategy comes to mind, where a team may be able to beat the occasional powerhouse, but normally does not experience lasting success against superior teams. The Devils first came to mind to me, as the trap became a way for teams to succeed and it began to spread through the league. If soccer thinks this is going to be more like the trap versus the Princeton offense, then change the rules. If not, keep it as is and let the game work itself out.

quote:

They're nothing like the Greece teams that terrorized men's soccer for a decade.

Ewar Woowar posted:

http://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2016/8/16/12506464/sweden-brazil-rio-2016-olympics-womens-soccer-pia-sundhage-tactics

Some lovely stuff here. The comment section in particular is a trove of awfulness.

quote:

Everyone who is not Swedish will be rooting for them to lose in the final.

Tongues posted:

I might be in the minority here, but this is a far better move for football's growth, and will rival the American sports leagues in terms of revenue generated. The better mvoe in the long term is to create a super league away from national leagues

Investors will more likely back the teams now. They wouldnt risk the likes of Man U getting knocked out early of the champs league, or not even be it. Thats a huge risk for investors. This also allows teams to invest and build more carefully, and have rebuilding years and focus on youth players. Teams like Man U are too under pressure to get into the champions league every year (and in some cases, be relegated, like Dortmund nearly were a few years ago) so they cant build teams and prepare for the future, they have to panic spend, killing the market value for players.

This also allows the national leagues to be feeder leagues to this super league. We can then impose a salary cap, and have a draft every year, which keeps the top teams in this super league fairly well balanced. creating a much more exciting competition than the current champs league.

The good thing that about American sports is they have parity or some hope for parity and you get to see the best players play each other all year not just in special competitions. If you are winning now, the leagues are set up so that pendulum will soon start swinging in the other way (unless you have extremely talented coaching staff/scouts like the Spurs of the NBA). Same with losing. Salary caps and drafts means that in theory teams should be evenly matched and bad teams can't get too bad or they get to grab the next greats. It's also nice to see the best players playing each-other every game instead of beating up on little teams most of the year. The talent is spread through 5 leagues in soccer. If there were a permanent top league there would be some benefits to the competition.

Rather than oppose the America model, we should embrace it, which is why their leagues are financially so successful. The likes of Leicester are great fun, but kill the investment value in the champs league.

opus111 posted:

almost as good as that goon from ages ago who was obsessed with AMERICAN SPORTS PRESENTATION.

opus111 posted:

almost as good as that goon from ages ago who was obsessed with AMERICAN SPORTS PRESENTATION.

peanut- posted:

It must be a troll, it's too well crafted to touch every button guaranteed to enrage Reddit.

opus111 posted:

almost as good as that goon from ages ago who was obsessed with AMERICAN SPORTS PRESENTATION.

opus111 posted:

almost as good as that goon from ages ago who was obsessed with AMERICAN SPORTS PRESENTATION.

peanut- posted:

It must be a troll, it's too well crafted to touch every button guaranteed to enrage Reddit.

Ewar Woowar posted:

I don't remember this? Link? Explanation?

quote:

I'm kinda an odd duck-- watched EPL/World Cup with my college roommate, forgot about the sport for a few years, went to a Champions League match last season, and decided that overall, the live fan experience for soccer was exactly what I wanted. I'm pretty much all-in on La Liga/Champions League. I figured it would take me a few years to watch it at an elite level, so here I am approaching year two. While I can't often see my main squeeze leagues live (gently caress friendlies tours in the US), I can attend and watch some MLS here and there. I've attended those matches and those fans don't quite have the gravitas of 87,000 singing fans, but they care a lot. And the passes aren't crisp, and attackers are sprinting at dribbling defenders just on the reasonable chance that the defender fucks up. It's sloppy at times. The general play is improving, the facilities are improving, and all-in-all the infrastructure for everything involving American soccer is improving. And to be honest, the fans are pretty friendly. Even Timbers/Sounders where Dempsey scored a hat trick to tie the game at 4-4, people were kinda just happy to see a close match. Soccer is keeping me, and many other fans, in the game and sending us out into ambassadors. And when the game grows in the US, it's good for everybody.

Yes, American fans can be classic Sportscenter-watching dolts and that's kinda ok. Sometimes you need nothing more than loud people irrationally driving conversation, and there are dumb fans in every sport. Gotta reach critical mass somehow. Yeah, Americans have a weird relationship with this team between cheering for a legit underdog and then confronting people who want to talk poo poo about MLS/USMNT beyond just stating dispassionate facts, unfortunate realities of the league as it is today. Mostly NFL fans teeing off domestically, hyper-competitive internet people digitally. And yup, the overall product isn't as good as the stuff across the pond and we don't want to deal with those unpleasant facts so sometimes we lash out, just as the people who feel the need to attack MLS often do it due to some perceived slight against them from the simple existence of the MLS.

America can be good, GREAT for soccer. What America can offer is their total, world-class media presentation and fan brains ready for irrational indoctrination into the sport. All it needs is the right seed and the handful of right players. The team/league/UEFA/FoxSports1 digital products are all second-class to NA apps like TheScore or even the Turner-media run league pages for the NBA. Or, you know, YOU-loving-TUBE strategy. San Francisco made, our web products are word class.

If you don't like soccer stats being owned as proprietary data by Opta, you should see the reverse with the NBA: http://stats.nba.com/ The league even builds APIs for websites to use! Oh, and we're great at bringing in hard math and processes to create advanced statistics that can open the game up for analysis which hopefully leads to a more fluid, position-free, exciting game that can raise the quality of discourse in soccer talks. The discussion of advanced stats and their value is always a tough battle at first, but most sports are well through that fight in various degrees with NBA the clear leader in that the league fully embraces data and paid for every team to install tracking cams in every arena. Last year the greatest breakthrough in all attempts to gain a sports edge was... playing important guys fewer minutes over the season and playoffs so they were less tired than their opponents. So, uh... there are still little edges to discover too hahaha

Let's combine the two! Through our giant media companies, we have websites like 538 that map out players mathematically to show that no, really, Messi is the no-exaggeration once-in-a-generation player and Ronaldo is behind him, but in some ways he's very very behind. They give proof! Sure, some sites like Statsbomb.com are trying to do it in the EU, but we have multi-million dollar media companies getting into the game here! Fans are more educated, better informed, internalize better processes for evaluating the game and they teach that to their kids!

Also, eyeballs. Marketing dollars, so many marketing dollars in a world where basically the only TV ad time worth a drat is related to sports and we spend stupid amounts of money on sports, either as consumers or brand partners. The NFL has a target of yearly revenue at 25 billion dollars in 2027. That sport is so dangerous to play that it may not even exist in 20 years! The NBA teams made 5 billion dollars this past year. Even the paltry NHL had 3.5b in revenue. So, yeah, Americans spend and spend recklessly on pro sports. Also, the departments in Nike, Adidas, etc know how to integrate their branded gear into our identities to being emotionally committed to a product. We're not so cool with wearing the sponsors on the chest (besides the Nascar folks), but there will always be national team shirts we can buy, I guess and eventually we'll just cave to the corporatization of our jerseys and buy them because we're easily manipulated beasts. More money coming into the league, more money teams can spend to train and compete!

Finally, what America does is get the kids. You can get the kids. Soccer won't just be a week spent once a year where kids play soccer poorly. Every kid has a sense of what's going on and the gym teacher feels compelled to teach the kids how to play the sport right. Maybe some more youth leagues open up, but what that really does is give each player a sense of the game where they can be a viewer and create some stakes for themselves easily when they watch.

Anyway, soccer/futbol worldwide becomes far more successful when the American teams will inevitably find success in the world tournaments. America hitting the knockout stage is real cool and there's plenty of things to look forward to in the next 2-4 years.

quote:

This won't be about people wanting to see some magical US team be good. It's about what we can reproduce on a worldwide scale that we've already done with our existing sports teams and athletes. That is, once we hit that inevitable jump into the legit contenders for a World Cup and our domestic leagues are of higher quality.

We build the "culture of famous" better than anybody and the sponsors around those superstars make them global phenomenons. Could soccer use a few more global phenomenons that instantly have reach in the #1 economy in the world, then beyond? And like I said, our web engineering and development gives us the best presentation, UX/UI for fans. Everything I've used in researching EPL, LL, S1 feel like websites from 2002.

Additionally, when you refer to the "everyone around the world who doesn't already watch the most popular game in the world," that's us. Americans. The NFL and MLB each seperately bring in twice the revenue to EPL. NHL Hockey brings in more revenue than Bundesliga and the only people who watch hockey are general sports frontrunners, closeted racists, guys who still like grunge music, and midwestern beardo hipsters. We spend stupid amounts of money on meaningless poo poo while our children lack education and the general economic, social infrastructure to be successful adults. And the meaningless poo poo we love to spend it on most is sports. So, yes, soccer gaining the American audience would be a huge boon to the game itself.

You can play the best game in the world. Americans, in their worst, best know how to package a product and sell it.

Tongues posted:

Is there a word for a hatred erection? I feel like there'd be a German world for it



That post gives me a raging dickfragenshouhoogenhargen I tell us what

quote:

You're thinking it as binary. It isn't. There are just levels beyond what they currently have. They are global phenomenons. In general, the US produces way more of them because ultimately what we export is culture (bad and good), media. I assume Messi, Ronaldo will come to the US someday and when they do, they will reach a new level of status. Then they truly will have the world wrapped up. In Beckham's declining years in LA and spending much of it either on loan or hurt, he made over $200 million in endorsements across his contract. That's better than the endorsement money Ronaldo is earning now. Having American exposure matters. It doesn't define a person, make them nothings to somethings by default. But it's definitely a huge value add.

Everything's great in soccer, but there are a lot of things that soccer growth in America would bring with it that could do a lot of good for the sport in general.

quote:

quote:

Bogan Krkic posted:
I'm curious as to what paying people more will do to actually improve the game itself.

Reduce incentives to match-fix with players
Allow for superior training, injury care, studies, breakthroughs in human body performance
Encourage young athletes and interested parties to take up soccer and hone their skills, increasing the talent pool where kids were previously trying other sports
Soccer receives preferential treatment against other sports, giving it the best practice facilities, stadiums, start times, television times
Allows media to justify spending money on developing content just for soccer and improving the fan-at-home viewing experience
Fund philanthropic causes that the players hold dear
More interest in the strategy, tactics, and statistics of soccer leads to a new crop of coaches who bring new ideas, exciting play to soccer

quote:

I was referring to match fixing here. It's probably reasonable to assume that at the levels some MLS players get paid, match fixing is a possibility.

As for the best care, there's always going to be new breakthroughs, equipment, and surgeries. That's generally speaking to "what could you spend extra money on?"

We are exceptional at packaging up things to be consumed in media. That's our thing. We're A+ #1 at it. I've watched many broadcasts, fumbled with UI/UX features on different websites, and I've wondered why all this poo poo is so old and dated. The world media mostly loving sucks at covering football, both from the lack of advanced stats to actually explain things and general packaging of it.

We're not the best at producing soccer talent. Probably not even close. But, it would be cool to have more good players out there and more players who could be good to even give soccer a thought instead of just immediately getting taken by some shady AAU coach or abusive high school football coach. It would be great if taken seriously as a career path for kids in the US at the scale of the other popular US sports.

Americans aren't going to revolutionize the sport. But, we do really like advanced stats and from what I gather from the advanced stats community, it's still really hard to get the average soccer fan to put faith in these, let alone even analyze them. So, it's basically early 1990s baseball-era for soccer whereas the average baseball fan now is pretty familiar with WARP, tv broadcasts keep pitch counts.

quote:

There is no accounting for good taste, so to speak. In the way that general people would think, America's greatest, most influential export is its media product. Sometimes that's Transformers 4, which makes a billion dollars while being a steaming pile of poo poo. But, if a few hundred million people decide to pay money to see it, it's also wildly successful and packaged in a way that people love it.

quote:

I mean advanced stats have only led to large, measurable advanced in strategy across every sport that has applied them but I guess soccer has some English exceptionalsm that would make it immune to such a phenomenon

quote:

Yeah, that's kinda the problem. Like you with thinking in any abstract sense. If you don't put a smart person in charge of the analytics department, you're probably not going to get much out of the analytics department. Garbage in, garbage out. Like most of the posts in this thread.