Jersey Count- September

Some trends I noticed this month were that on Champions League gamedays, many students (like myself) wear jerseys for their Champions League teams. I saw the same guy two days in a row wearing two different Barcelona jerseys- Iniesta the first, Ibrahimovic the second. I have still yet to see anyone else on campus wearing a USMNT jersey.

Real Madrid 5
AC Milan 5
Arsenal 5 (Fabregas 1 (me))
Manchester United 4
Barcelona 4 (Messi 1, Iniesta 1, Ibrahimovic 1, Ronahdinho 1)
USA 3 (Bradley 1) (all me)
Chelsea 3
England 3 (Gerrard 1 (me), Beckham 1)
Holland 2
Italy 2 (Materazzi 1)
Republic of Ireland 2
Liverpool 2 (Torres 1, Gerrard 1)
Inter Milan 2
Tottenham 1
Boca Juniors 1
Celtic 1
Sweden 1
Everton 1
Germany 1

For reference, the cumulative jersey count will be kept on the sidebar.

a confession...

Dear soccer,

I know we haven't been seeing a lot of each other lately. I mean, I know you've been busy on international break, and I've had my schoolwork and a couple of Georgia Tech football games to keep me busy, but I think it's time we had a talk.

You see, soccer, I have a confession to make. I don't know how you're going to take this, but...I've been cheating on you. With tennis. It's sorta been going on for a while now, too. It started last summer, just for a little while...but then this summer, it came back and I just couldn't say no. Paris, London, New York...it was just so glamorous that I couldn't resist. And it wasn't just me. Over the summer, I had my sister, then when I left for college I had my roommate. And it was always on, for 12 hours at a time, and I just couldn't help myself. But I think it's over for now. At least for a while, you'll be my one and only love again, with the exception of my Yellow Jackets, until I get swept off my feet again to Australia. But I'll always come back to you, my one true love.

So soccer, I really hope you can forgive me. What we have is special, and we've had it for so long and been through so much together. I mean, sure, with tennis it always started out with love, but it almost never ended with it. With you, it'll always be love. And I know you've got a lot planned for us in the next few weeks, with Champions League and Europa League and then league play, then more Champions League...then another international break. I promise, soccer, I won't keep breaking our dates this time. I'll be there for you during international break, through thick and thin, for better or for worse, till death do us part. Please forgive me.

Love,
Rebecca

When soccer and nerdiness combine

So it's been a while since I've posted, school started back a couple weeks ago and I've been busy settling in to a new schedule. But things are starting to normalize and hopefully I'll be posting more, especially since I even less people to discuss soccer with now that I'm not living at home.

So as you're well aware, the Champions League draw was this past Thursday. What you may not be aware of is the number of possible groups that could have been formed. When I saw the four pots from which the groups are drawn from on Wednesday night, I became so curious that, after a quick Google search to make sure no one else had already done it, I decided to calculate it myself. I figured I had a decent knowledge of statistics and my engineering brain knew I could find a solution somehow, even if it took forever. But it was a Wednesday night, I was waiting for CONCACAF Champions League games to start, and this was far more interesting than the Physics 3 homework I had been working on before the idea struck me.

This task would have been a lot easier, of course, if teams from the same country were allowed to be in the same group. Then it would have been just 4(8!), or 161280. But of course UEFA has to make it more complicated than that. My calculation doesn't take into account teams being drawn already- that would have made it way too complicated. For my purposes, I assumed all 8 teams in each pot were available for group placement.

I started out listing all four pots on the white board, with team names as well as their country. I then put each team from pot 1 in their own group. Then I went through pot 2 and wrote down the number of possible teams each pot 1 team could play. I then went through pot 3 and summed up all the possibilities from say, Barca-Lyon, Barca-Inter, et al, then I did the same premise for pot 4 to get the final number. 3,196.

An hour and half's worth of work.

Looking back on it, the easiest way to have done this would have been to write up a big recursive function in MATLAB, since that's pretty much what I did by hand on the white board, but besides the fact that I'm not that great at coding from scratch, I also never installed MATLAB on my new laptop. And of course, I could have saved myself a lot of time by just skipping the steps for pots 1 and 2 and pots 1, 2, and 3, because the final step took both of those steps into account, but whatever. It was made easier by the fact that four of the groups started out with an English team, so the calculation for one of them was the same for all four. I used the same consideration for the two Spanish teams. So really in the end, I only had to make four calculations, but I'd say overall it was worth the work.

Jersey Count- August

So last year was my first year of college, and I noticed a ton of people wearing jerseys for various teams. Sometimes it would be the same people over and over again, I think, but it was still fascinating to me to see so many people wearing jerseys since the only people who wore them at my high school were me and this Italian-American kid who cycled through 3 or 4 different jerseys. It's even more exciting when I saw someone wearing a jersey from a team that wouldn't be considered a big club in the US (i.e. I saw a guy wearing a Marseille jersey going to lunch one day and got far more excited than I should have).

So two weeks ago, I started my second year, and in my first class I noticed a guy in the front row wearing a David Villa Valencia jersey. And that was when I had my brilliant idea.

I've been keeping a list of every jersey I see people wearing so I can see which teams are the most popular and/or just keep track of all the cool jerseys I see. I always have my I-touch with me so I just started a note on there and update it every time I see someone in a jersey. If I notice it has a name on the back, I write that down as well so I can see which players are more popular on their teams. I'm posting this here just a way for me to keep up with my count on a monthly basis, in case anyone else out there thinks this is as cool as I think it is.

Valencia 1 (David Villa 1)
Real Madrid 1
Chelsea 2
AC Milan 2 (Gatusso 1)
England 5 (Rooney 3)
Liverpool 3 (Torres 2, Gerrard 1)
USA 3 (Bradley 1) (all me)
Galatasaray
Netherlands 2 (Van der Vaart 1)
Marseille 1
Argentina 1 (Messi 1)
Brazil 1
Aston Villa 1 (Laursen 1)
Japan 1 (Nakamura 1)
Inter Milan 1
Barcelona 1
Arsenal 1 (Nasri 1)
Manchester United 1

Converting the Eurosnobs is the key for MLS success

Eurosnobs. Every American soccer fan has met them- they belittle you for calling it "soccer", laugh about what a joke MLS is (and obviously you're a joke as well for caring about it), and proudly support one of the "Big 4" in the EPL and one of the top European national teams such as Spain, Italy, or Germany...even though they're American as well. They wouldn't dare lower themselves to watch an MLS game, yet they would get up before 8AM on a weekend to watch their beloved Premier League team play. Their love for the game is evident- but only for the European game. If their love for "football" can be harnessed and directed towards MLS, the league will have the support it needs to succeed.

TV ratings for Premier League games are consistently much higher than those for MLS games. February's game between Liverpool and Chelsea on FSC averaged a 0.5 rating (294,000 viewers) while last weekend's game between the Kansas City Wizards and the LA Galaxy on widely-available ESPN2 (which included supposed ratings-booster David Beckham) only averaged a 0.3 rating (231,000 viewers), just a bit less the season-high rating set by the season opener between Seattle and New York (254,000 viewers). MLS is watched even less on FSC, averaging a 0.1 rating (44,000 viewers) through May of this season. Ratings for Euro 2008 averaged a 0.5 on ESPN2 and a 0.9 on ESPN, with the final on ABC earning a 3.1 rating. MLS Cup 2008, also on ABC, only earned a 0.7 rating.

And it's not just TV where European games attract higher crowds- July's World Football Challenge had attendances ranging from over 31,000 to over 81,000 across 6 venues (I was one of 53,000 in attendance in Atlanta). This is combined with sellouts of 67,000 and 27,000 in Seattle and LA, respectively, where the Sounders and Galaxy faced European opposition. Future friendlies this summer for Real Madrid and Barcelona have pretty much sold out. But so far this season, the MLS has only averaged over 15,000 a game, with average team attendances ranging from almost 9,500 in Dallas to over 30,000 in Seattle. People are coming out to watch these European teams (Chelsea's three games drew the three biggest crowds) as opposed to their own local teams, which is understandable, especially in Atlanta, where men's top-level soccer has been virtually non-existant (I'm not really a fan of AC Milan or Club America, but the chance to actually go to a live soccer game was too good not to take), but there shouldn't be this big of a difference between the two.

I've recently defended the MLS against a barrage of insults from two sports-crazy friends who said, among other things, that "people want excitement and entertainment and that's the EPL not MLS" and that there isn't "a big consistent enough fan base in America" for the sport to succeed. I'm not sure if he's ever watched an MLS game, but I certainly find them exciting- I didn't really care as much until I picked a team to support, but I still watched games whenever I could catch them and always enjoyed it. The past three MLS Cup finals have been very exciting, in my opinion. As for the big, consistent fan base, it's there for soccer, just not for the MLS. The Eurosnobs are holding the league back- if even half of them decided that it was okay to like the MLS and actually showed up to a game or watched it on TV, the league's popularity would skyrocket. But they're most likely not going to convert. They'll watch one MLS game on TV, and if it's not up to their standards, they're going to write the league off and not watch again. And unfortunately, there's not a whole lot the league can do to attract them. Setting up the friendlies against big clubs is a great move for the league as well as the clubs, though I'd like to see a wider range of MLS teams' international friendlies on TV. Designated Players for the most part haven't really worked out the way the league hoped they would- they've brought in fans, but the degree to which they've improved their team varies, with the most impressive being Guille at Columbus, and he didn't even start out as a DP!

Hopefully, the day will come when MLS fans outnumber the Eurosnobs. And that will be a glorious day for soccer.

Cable TV drops the ball

Next month, the USMNT will be headed to Mexico City for a very important World Cup qualifier against Mexico. I'm going to make a bold statement here and say that it's the most important qualifier for us. Mexico have already tried to knock us down a notch by scheduling the match at 4 PM EST, during the hottest, most humid part of the day. The US has never won at the Azteca EVER and with the squad we have now and the form we were in for the last three Confederation's Cup games, winning in Mexico is DEFINITELY a possibility.

HOWEVER, most of us won't be able to see it on television. Why, you ask? Basically, ESPN won't be carrying the ridiculously important US-Mexico World Cup qualifier next month. They decided it was too expensive to buy the English language rights from Telemundo, a Spanish-language channel that is part of the NBC Universal network. And that's understandable, since they apparently really jacked up the price because they knew it'd be in demand. But that leaves no English-language broadcast. NBC Universal had the bright idea to use their ties with Telemundo to broadcast it in English...on mun2. I had actually never heard of this channel until yesterday when I read about this. Apparently it is a bilingual channel aimed at the Hispanic 18-34 demographic. And it's only available to 30.4 million homes in the US, which isn't a lot of people. So hardly anyone is going to be able to watch this match. However, most people in the US get the USA network, which is part of NBC Universal. Do you know what they are showing during the time that the game would air? Reruns of House and NCIS, which, although they are good shows, are not crucial to watch and could either be aired on a different day or a different time or something. But of course they aren't, because this is America, and the mainstream media hates soccer.

Wanna help out? First off, you can sign this petition. It's unofficial, but when I signed it there were almost 500 signatures and this thing started yesterday, so if you sign this and send it to people, tweet it to everyone, put a link on facebook, whatever you want to do, you'd be helping out.

Another way would be to go to Matchfit USA's article which gives more details about the situation and has more things you can do to help. One of these ways is emailing NBC Universal network officials- they have a template email that you can just copy, paste, edit, and send to the NBC people whose email addresses they also give.

If you were to do all of this, it would maybe take 5 minutes out of your day. I think you can sacrifice that in the name of American soccer.

Pre-Panama musings

So it doesn't appear that any of the seven extras will be called in for the USMNT's Gold Cup quarterfinal against Panama this Saturday, since I'm assuming the MNT blog would have told us when they posted the updated roster. This leaves us with even less options than we had against Haiti, since Charlie Davies, Steve Cherundolo, and Michael Parkhurst will be back with their clubs by then for preseason. Granted, Parkhurst was suspended anyways for yellow card accumulation, but it leaves us stretched in the back and up front.

As for who I'd like to see...

-----------Perkins-----------
Pearce-Conrad(C)-Marshall-Evans
-----------Beckerman---------
Rogers-------Arnaud--------Holden
----Ching/Cooper---Quaranta----

Luis Robles' performance against Haiti showed that Troy Perkins in goal is an automatic pick. The back 4 pretty much picks itself at this point- Brad Evans did well enough against Haiti and Grenada to keep the right back spot. Robbie Rogers, Kyle Beckerman, and Stuart Holden are all locks in the midfield, and I think Davy Arnaud could do well in a central role. He looked better than Logan Pause and Sam Cronin, so he gets my vote. And up top, there aren't really that many choices. Knowing Bob Bradley, Brian Ching will get the start, but either him or Kenny Cooper partnering Santino Quaranta up top is fine with me. I'm a huge Kenny Cooper fan, but he didn't do enough against Haiti to pull him ahead of Ching.

If we make it through to the semifinals, Bob Bradley has to call up some of the extra 7. The roster just isn't deep enough for him not to.