Do you like soccer?

You do know you are on a football discussion thread?

 

Deleted - replied to wrong poster.

 

Glad to hear it. But in retrospect - you kindly provided a not-entirely convincing answer to my question; I thanked you for it, and implied that I loathe team sports, but then you carry on by asserting 'If you love football . . . ' and launched a prolonged explanation into the rules, regs. and rationale as if you couldn't help it. That kind of obsession scares me to be honest, and what's why I was a bit intemperate, and for that I apologise.

 

Sporadically watching international football matches, yeah.
Curious also, what else will transpire in the "corruption arena" as regards the FIFA-scandal.

 

All that needs to be said is that Mighty Leicester are five points clear at the top of the English Premiership with nine games to go.

Leicester, the World is praying for you.

 

Liverpool's victory last night in the first ever European clash between Liverpool and Manchester United, is a microcosm of where the two clubs are at the moment. Man United are now three seasons into the post Alex Ferguson decline, and they could possibly not qualify for any European competition this season, if their form continues as it is.

Liverpool on the other hand have acquired one of the most sought after and progressive managers in the game. In a sense Liverpool FC don't deserve Jurgen Klopp due to their pedigree, or lack of, over the last 25 years. I am guessing that Klopp saw what Brendan Rogers got out of many of these players, when he played blistering attack football and came within a whisker of winning the league two years ago. That and the rich history and tradition at the heart of Liverpool FC.

Of course this could be yet another false dawn for Liverpool. Us Liverpool fans are sadly all too used to them. What both of these clubs do in the summer will be telling? Klopp, who is a master in the transfer arena will be judged on his signings. United will/should get rid of Louis Van Gaal. The problem is that it is looking ever more likely that Jose Mourinho will be the next United manager. While I respect Mourinho as one, if not, the greatest manager of the modern game, I believe he will destroy Man United. If their fans, who are calling for him to be appointed, think that he will be any less defensive minded than Louis VG, then they are plainly deluding themselves. Mourinho also has a habit of splitting the dressing room, which he has done with disastrous effect at both Real Madrid and Chelsea.

Either way, these are two huge clubs who are currently playing at a very mediocre level. This summer's transfer window may be make or break for both of them in the short to medium term. Thankfully for Liverpool supporters like me, there is a lot more that needs fixing down at Old Trafford.

 

U.S. Soccer stars file federal complaint for wage discrimination—and their case looks strong


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...ge-discrimination-and-their-case-looks-strong


The women of U.S. Soccer are taking their equality fight to a whole new level, officially filing a federal discrimination claim against the U.S. Soccer organization for wage discrimination:

In the filing, the five players contend that the women’s team is the driving economic force for U.S. Soccer, the governing body for the sport in America, even as its players are paid far less than their counterparts on the men’s national team, said their lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler.

The players involved in the complaint are among the most prominent and decorated female athletes in the world: the co-captains Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn, forward Alex Morgan, midfielder Megan Rapinoe and goalkeeper Hope Solo.

Their complaint appears to be totally valid.

Goalkeeper Hope Solo makes the case in a statement released by the women who filed the complaint:

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Solo said. “We are the best in the world, have three World Cup championships, four Olympic championships, and the U.S.M.N.T. get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships.”

The players and their attorney are confident in their case:

Jeffrey Kessler, the New York-based attorney for the players, said the women's national team members are paid 40 percent of what the U.S. men's national team players make.

"This is one of the strongest cases of gender discrimination I have ever seen," Kessler told USA TODAY Sports. "We have a situation here where the women's have outperformed the men on the field and in every other way yet earn fraction of what the men are paid. This is pretty open and shut case."








Interesting matter. Perhaps the Special Olympics athletes should consider the same lawsuit.

 

It should be a slam dunk, and rightfully so. How many extra kids are playing soccer in the US because of their World Cup winning heroes?

 

I have watched some soccer
It does not seem so well suited to tv
And, the appeal for me drops off considerably when i do not care about the teams or outcome
Which is usually the case

Am a little surprised that the rigorous morality of the EU
seems to tolerate corruption in soccer with such equanimity

 

It's very well suited to TV - one of the reasons it became so popular around the world. It's just not well suited to TV that expects to have a commercial break every few minutes.

 

All i can say is that mostly what you see is a wide view that makes it difficult to appreciate the pLayers skill
AND low scoring... Which is less exciting than football or basketball
But that is just my opinion

 

Shouldn't be like that if it's good coverage - wider angles are important, because it's a game of strategic positioning and movement as well as skill, but modern TV coverage of top level games usually have an almost endless array of close ups, angles and replays. Quite a lot of the skill is about the 'pass and move' kind of thing, though, and you need to be able to see that.

Seems to be a bit of a 'cultural difference' over that - the US seems to love constant scoring, while others don't need that to appreciate the skill and ebb and flow of the game, and find the play and the 'chances' pretty much as exciting, if you see what I mean. Some of the best games I've seen have only had one or two goals.

 

I am not sure there is much logic in comparing sports purely on the rate of point scoring in the game. On this side of the pond, I from time-to-time watch and attend soccer, rugby, Gaelic football, and hurling (that fine game with the players with the sticks!). Of all these sports, only soccer is low scoring. Yet almost no one ever comments on the rate of scoring being an issue between these sports. My Welsh friend can confirm this as also being the case in the UK where they also have cricket.

North American sports aren’t all that different in comparison. Like British and Irish sports, there is a mix of the major N American team sports which are high scoring: basketball, baseball; and relatively low scoring i.e. ice hockey and American football. For me, American football’s scoring rate is similar to soccer with the only difference being that touchdowns are awarded with points, as opposed to one for a goal in soccer. Personally, I prefer grid iron over the other N American games. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t there a modern phenomenon in baseball of people turning up just for the Wi-Fi in the ground. And in baseball I read somewhere that people, most likely not the core fans, often turn up late in the game to avoid the back-and-forth of points scoring until the game is decided at the end of the match. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to go to a competitive baseball match and I used to play a bit of basketball in my youth.

Bottom line, all major sports have boring uncompetitive games and if you randomly tune into a game that has little or no significance, or is simply a bad game, one can’t really get a full understanding of the sport. Yes, many soccer games can be relatively boring. But when you get a good one it is enthralling for the entire ninety minutes. This for me, is no different for any of the major N American sports.

 

Hillsborough - some measure of closure for the victims of this police crime against those innocent people:


http://www.theguardian.com/football...-deadly-mistakes-and-lies-that-lasted-decades



It was a year into these inquests, and 26 years since David Duckenfield, as a South Yorkshire police chief superintendent, took command of the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, that he finally, devastatingly, admitted his serious failures directly caused the deaths of 96 people there.

Duckenfield had arrived at the converted courtroom in Warrington with traces of his former authority, but over seven airless, agonisingly tense days in the witness box last March, he was steadily worn down, surrendering slowly into a crumpled heap. From his concession that he had inadequate experience to oversee the safety of 54,000 people, to finally accepting responsibility for the deaths, Duckenfield’s admissions were shockingly complete.
David Duckenfield arrives to give evidence at the Hillsborough inquest in March 2015.


He also admitted at the inquests that even as the event was descending into horror and death, he had infamously lied, telling Graham Kelly, then secretary of the Football Association, that Liverpool fans were to blame, for gaining unauthorised entry through a large exit gate. Duckenfield had in fact himself ordered the gate to be opened, to relieve a crush in the bottleneck approach to the Leppings Lane turnstiles.

The chief constable, Peter Wright, had to state that evening that police had authorised the opening of the gate, but as these inquests, at two years the longest jury case in British history, heard in voluminous detail, Duckenfield’s lie endured. It set the template for the South Yorkshire police stance: to deny any mistakes, and instead to virulently project blame on to the people who had paid to attend a football match and been plunged into hell.


The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force. Responsible for an English county at the jeans-and-trainers end of the 1980s, the force had brutally policed the miners’ strike, and was described by some of its own former officers as “regimented”, with morning parade and saluting of officers, ruled by “an iron fist” institutionally unable to admit mistakes.
Hillsborough inquests jury rules 96 victims were unlawfully killed
Read more

The dominance of Wright, a decorated career police officer who died in 2011, loomed over the catastrophe. He was depicted as a frighteningly authoritarian figure who treated the force “like his own personal territory” and whose orders nobody – tragically – dared debate.

The families of those killed in the “pens” of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, who have had to fight 27 years for justice and accountability, recalled the appalling way the South Yorkshire police treated them, even when breaking the news of loved ones’ deaths. Relatives and survivors recalled indifference, even hostility, in the unfolding horror – although the families’ lawyers thanked individual officers who did their valiant best to help victims. Then there was the unspeakably heartless identification process in the football club gymnasium, after which CID officers immediately grilled families about how much they and their dead loved ones had had to drink.

The families, and many survivors, spoke up in the witness box at these inquests to reclaim the good names of the people, mostly young, who went to Hillsborough that sunny April day, to watch Kenny Dalglish’s brilliant Liverpool team.

The overwhelming evidence, shown in BBC colour footage of the horrific scene, contrary to the lurid, defamatory tales spun afterwards by the police, was of Liverpool supporters heroically helping. The “fans” – a label too often applied to depict a dehumanised mob – included doctors, nurses and police officers, alongside scores of people with no medical training who, once they had escaped themselves, fought instinctively to save lives.
South Yorkshire police: who did what at Hillsborough
Read more

The 96 people who died or were fatally injured in “pens” three and four, standing right behind the goal, so by definition Liverpool’s hard core of support, were honoured by their families in achingly tender personal statements read out in court. They came from all walks of life: working-class, middle-class, wealthy, hard-up, from Liverpool, the Midlands, London and around the country. They included a heartbreakingly large number of young people – 37 were teenagers – because to watch an FA Cup semi-final then cost only £6. They were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, one wife – Christine Jones, 27 – and partners. Twenty-five were fathers; one, 38-year-old Inger Shah, was a single mother with two teenagers: altogether, 58 children lost a parent .

The horror the victims suffered and the generally abject response of the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service (SYMAS) were exposed in greater detail than ever before, in months of film and photographic evidence, from cameras that had been at Hillsborough to cover a football match. Survivors of the lethal crush bore tearful witness to the vice-like squeeze, the cracking of ribs, arms and legs, faces losing colour, the vomiting and emptying of bowels and bladders, relatives and friends dying next to them, the still barely believable piles of dead bodies at the front of the “pens”.

One doctor said the crush, which caused death by compression asphyxia as people could not expand their chests to breathe in, was “like a constrictor snake”. Survivors recalled their own helpless entrapment, the agonising suffocation, the eye-popping panic, the terrible screams for help, the delayed reaction of South Yorkshire police officers on the other side of the metal perimeter fence.


The makeshift courtroom, assembled within the ground floor of a plate glass office block on a Warrington business park, often felt blankly incongruous for stories of such human extremes.

Yet the remnants of the police effort to blame the supporters were on show even here, despite the families’ long, exhausting battle against it, and the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, having stated when he quashed the first inquest that the narrative was false.

Duckenfield’s own barrister, John Beggs QC, an advocate instructed by police forces nationwide, pressed the case most forcefully that supporters had misbehaved, persistently introducing as context into his questioning notorious previous episodes of football hooliganism, his manner often repellent to the families attending.

But Beggs was not alone. The present-day South Yorkshire police force itself and the Police Federation also argued that Liverpool supporters outside the Leppings Lane end could be found to have contributed to the disaster because “a significant minority” were alleged to have been drunk and “non-compliant” with police orders to move back. Yet survivors gave evidence of chaos at the Leppings Lane approach, no atmosphere of drunkenness or misbehaviour, and no meaningful police activity to make orderly queueing possible in that nasty space.

Many officers who made such allegations against supporters in their original 1989 accounts, which the force notoriously vetted and altered, maintained that stance under scathing challenge by the families’ barristers. For periods, these inquests felt like an inversion of a criminal prosecution, in which police officers were repeatedly accused of lying, covering up and perverting the course of justice, while sticking insistently to their stories.
The confrontation between riot police and miners at Orgreave in 1984
The confrontation between riot police and miners at Orgreave in 1984. Photograph: Photofusion/Rex

Even as the terrible failures of Hillsborough were being laid bare at the inquests, the South Yorkshire police culture of the 1980s, and its other infamous scandal, Orgreave, were being further exposed. In July, the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to formally investigate the force for its alleged assaults on striking miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, and alleged perjury and perverting the course of justice in prosecutions of 95 miners which collapsed a year later.

However, the IPCC’s review found “support for the allegation” that three senior South Yorkshire officers had “made up an untrue account exaggerating the degree of violence” from miners, to justify the police’s own actions that day. It revealed that senior officers and the force’s own solicitor privately recognised there had been some excessive police violence, and perjury in the 1985 trial, but never acknowledged it publicly, and settled 39 miners’ civil claims, paying £425,000 without admitting liability. The IPCC said the evidence “raises ... doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police]”.





more ........





The stupid and criminal cops deserve the gallows for their crimes against those innocents.

 

I don't know. Probably none. You really think boys or girls are going to see some woman on tv playing soccer and decide that soccer is for them, these kids are going to run out and get the city to form a league and build soccer fields and have coaches and tournaments? Dream on.

 

"We have a situation here where the women's have outperformed the men on the field and in every other way yet earn fraction of what the men are paid"

The women have not outperformed the men, the women have outperformed other women. Have you seen these women play? Its not up to the men's level. And none of them are up to the international men. When US teams can hold their own against a la Liga team I'll admit the US can play soccer.

 

They used the wrong term - by ''out performed'' they meant ranked higher in the final standings. That is correct, just a poor choice of wording.

 

The professional league is already there. The players are already there. The attendaces at pro games are shooting up. And more women are playing soccer now than almost any other sport in the US.

A few facts about US soccer:
1. Fox earned $40 million in ad revenue for the Women’s World Cup 2015 series

2. More Americans watched the Women's World Cup final than the NBA Final or Stanley Cup

3. Soccer now only trails basketball in popularity among 12- to -17-year-olds

4. More kids are playing soccer in the U.S. than ever before

5. As the MLS expansion continues, teams are drawing bigger crowds eclipsing average attendances in many of the major European leauges

 

Good for American youth, but I doubt the rise in soccer is due to American professional womens soccer. How many of those youth can even name one of the women on that world cup team? I can't name any, I have only seen one because she was in the news for a DUI.

If the women can make an argument for higher salary based on attendance and revenue, then great, that's how it should be. But some vague claim that they should be paid more because they "inspire" and are "role models" is BS and a sign they have fallen into the PC quackery.

 

To be fair, I am a 39 year-old male, living in Ireland, and I know the names of a couple of the US women's team. It is hardly a coincidence that the huge rise in numbers of girls and women playing soccer in the US has occurred at the very time when US women began dominating women's soccer.

It is a well known effect in many sports, that when a national team wins a major international championship e.g. the World Cup, the numbers of people taking part in the sport rises. Perhaps it is more evident in somewhere like Europe where there are many more countries. This is not 'PC quackery', as you say. It is a statistically verifiable fact.

I'll give you an Irish example from my youth. When Ireland's Stephen Roche won the so called cycling triple crown of cycling: the Tour de France, the Giro de Italia, and the World Championships, all in the same year. A feat only ever accomplished by the great Eddie Merckx. The uptake of cycling in Ireland went through the roof. My own brother even donned the lycra and joined a local team. Ireland was never a hugely competitive cycling country beforehand.

[Disclaimer: while Roache was never caught for doping, he did regularly attend the infamous Dr Ferrari. Blood doper to the stars, including Lance Armstrong]

 

If the women can make an argument for higher salaries based on league revenue, then they should go for it. Claiming they should get higher salaries because they are "an inspiration to girls" is PC quackery.

 

Hats off to these guys. The Leicester City players, tonight. 5000-1 outsiders at the start of this year's Premiership season in England. Tonight they wrote themselves into World footballing history by winning the English league title. Fairy tales don't get much more unbelievable than this.

With ten games to go at the end of last season, they were bottom of the table and staring into the abyss of relegation. They won seven out ten of those games to pull off one of the most impressive relegation escapes in recent times. Avoiding relegation and staying in the top division in English football is worth a minimum of £50m.

Leicester then started this season with a starting 11 players worth £32m. To put that into perspective, the champions from last season, Chelsea, started the season with a team on the pitch worth £232m full of superstars. In a game that has so many problems with the vast amounts of money at the top end, this really is an astonishing achievement.

But forget the money. These guys won the league in style, with a team of relative unknowns. It is not everyday day that a football story makes the front page of the major international papers around the world, including the like of the NY Times and the Washington Post. As I said, hats off.

 

Their claim for more money is based around the fact that they bring in more revenue than the men's US team. Yet the men get paid more. If on top of that they can show that they are attracting more players to the game, which in turn will obviously grow the sport, then this is also a factor. A lesser factor, yet a factor none the less.

 

The women want to be paid today, which means their salary has to be paid from current revenue. Unless the women want to defer their salary until their impact on attendance at soccer games is felt (and measured) then their future impact is not relevant.

 

Their claim is solely in relation to the men's and women's US soccer teams. It is the primary goal of almost all international soccer federations to grow the number of young people entering the game. You are focusing on a minor part of their argument. A point that is a core focus of most sports worldwide.

26.7 million Americans watched last year's World Cup final, a record number to watch a soccer game, any soccer game, in the US. To put that figure in perspective, it exceeds the number that watched the 2015 NBA Finals championship game featuring LeBron James. More than 760 million people watched the Women’s World Cup worldwide, joined by another 86 million who viewed online. I don't need to tell you that that is some amount of advertising revenue.

They generate more revenue than the men's US team, It really is as simple as that. The numbers of young players that have started to play the game since they have become double World and Olympic champions is plain to see. But it is the revenue argument that will win the day for them. Here's hoping.