MLS Weakly, 02 27 2021: Camp Opens, Cups Get Hideous & Getting Nervous about the Math

A statement on World Cup 2022

Let’s get the downer out of the way first. Both U.S. National Teams (that is Men and Women) announced their schedules for 2021 ($ site), and probably did a bunch of other shit I don’t really care about. (Related: does U.S. Soccer run the U.S. Open Cup; asking due to that tournament’s long, continuing strides toward irrelevance: I mean…who blessed this mess?) I rarely tune in for USWNT games, but that’s from lack of context, but it’s getting damned hard to get excited about USMNT games due to the sharp stench wafting over from Qatar.

Look, I understand that FIFA is crooked as 20 broken penises, but reports of 6,500 deaths associated with the construction of stadiums in a country that, frankly, should never have been awarded a World Cup pushes them several miles past vanilla corruption and into open criminality. I can’t, in good conscience watch an event built on top of so many dead, which will make 2022 the first World Cup I’ve ever skipped and the first I've missed any part of since 1982. If I commit to that (frailty being a thing), is there any point to watching World Cup qualifying when it starts later this year?

Despite everything above, I’ll likely tune in for friendlies, Nations Cup and this summer’s Gold Cup, and that entails some falling from the moral high ground because I assume FIFA gets a cut of all of that. I acknowledge the several rationalizations needed to make that leap - the way the body (qualifying tournaments) support the head (the World Cup Finals) chief among them - but I’d still love to see the Qatar tournament fall flat on its hideous face and sincerely hope it comes to pass. I’ll keep telling myself that failure of the marquee event would give FIFA the darkest possible black eye.

FIFA will always be corrupt, near as I can tell, so the only real moral choice is to stop watching international soccer altogether. I can’t see doing that. At any rate, I’m stepping away for a shower and 2,000 Hail Mary’s, and then I’ll move on the Major League Soccer.

And…we’re back. The 2021 MLS season has finally, officially started with a handful of teams reporting to camp. I’ll do the usual thing, i.e., talk about the two teams I follow (FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers) and then wrap up with some league-wide notes. And so, to start with the team that has…

FIFA, Their Cups, and My Raging Discontent

OK, maybe half of that ass.

The U.S. Men's loss to Jamaica, and the concomitant early exit from the Gold Cup, put me into a head-scratching funk, just like it did for a lot of American fans. That said, I think I caught a different bug. The short diagnosis goes like this: the loss to Jamaica, and everything about it, didn't piss me off nearly as much as the fact that the U.S. can still reach the Confederations Cup. The long version follows, which elaborates on how totally and ridiculously ass I find the larger situation.

While I forgot the mechanism – that is, the playoff for CONCACAF's Confederations' Cup spot between the 2013 and 2015 Gold Cup champ'eens – it sounded familiar once people started talking and tweeting about it as last night's semifinal slipped further and further out of reach for the U.S. And it's fair on paper: here, in CONCACAF, we just happen to play our regional tournament on a two-year cycle, as opposed to the more common four-year cycle, and, with the Confederations Cup happening once every four years, they had to come up with some way to decide on which team gets to fly the flag...

...at the Confederations' Cup...

...which is like a half-assed World Cup...

...held the year before the World Cup...

...to accomplish? Oh, goddammit!

This Site's Official Policy on FIFA....

...fuck those guys.

No real news here - just wallowing in schadenfreude - but absolutely thrilled to hear about the arrests in Switzerland. Slimy fucks have left a trail all over international soccer for far too long.