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kottke.org posts about soccer

European soccer disappears from American TV

Perplexed and irritated that I couldn’t find any Barcelona FC matches on TV for the past few weeks, I finally did some research and it turns out that’s because Qatar-based Al Jazeera bought up the TV rights to several European leagues but doesn’t actually have a channel to show the games to most American viewers.

Lionel Messi’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s league matches will disappear from the television sets of many American soccer fans, starting this weekend.

That’s because the U.S. television rights to Spain’s La Liga have switched from GolTV to the new beIN Sport USA network, launched this week by the Al-Jazeera Sport Media Network and available in only about 8 million homes to viewers of DirecTV and DISH Network.

And it’s not just Spain’s soccer that is affected.

Italy’s Serie A, France’s Ligue 1, England’s second-tier League Championship and England’s League Cup also have moved to high-spending beIN Sport, which is taking over all of them from News Corp.’s Fox Soccer.

“The ratings are going to be so low that they will be almost unmeasurable,” said Marc Ganis of the Chicago-based Sports Corp. Ltd., consulting firm. “Considering the push that European soccer is making in the United States, taking additional money and losing exposure becomes fools’ gold. They need to have a long-term strategy, not short-term.”

What. In. The. Actual. Fuck!?


Howler, a new magazine about soccer

This looks promising β€” Howler, a quarterly magazine for North American soccer fans started by some experienced big mag editors, designers, and writers. They’re looking for $50,000 to get it started on Kickstarter.

Howler is a new magazine about soccer. It’s a big, glossy publication that will come out four times a year with distinctive, original writing about American and international soccer, as well as some of the most striking art and design you’ll find in any publication being made today. (We know that’s a bold claim, but we really believe it’s true.) We’ve been working on Howler for months, and issue one is nearly ready to be printed, shipped, and in your hands by late summer.

I ordered a year’s subscription. (via @thessaly)


Lionel Messi documentary

A recent 45-minute documentary on Lionel Messi, which starts with his discovery in Argentina and runs through the end of last season.

It’s funny seeing Messi playing as a kid…the style is essentially the same, but in an even smaller package. (via @dens)


All of Lionel Messi’s 234 goals

Lionel Messi has scored 234 goals in his short career (he’s only 24), making him the top goal scorer in all competitions for FC Barcelona. Here are all of them.

What strikes me about this video, aside from the crappy quality, is that the type of goals Messi scores are not generally what you see from other top scorers. Think of the booming balls of Ronaldo for instance, which may break the sound barrier on their way into the back of the net. Many of Messi’s goals often don’t look like much. They’re chips and slow rollers and even the fast ones aren’t that fast. But what’s apparent in watching goal after goal of his is that what Messi lacks in pace, he more than makes up with quickness, placement, and timing. It’s a bit mesmerising…I can only imagine how it feels as an opposing keeper to watch the same thing happening right in front of you. (via devour)

ps. I also enjoyed reading this piece by Simon Kuper on Barcelona’s Secret to Soccer Success.

Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.


Lionel Messi never dives

Ever since the World Cup in 2010, I’ve been watching a fair amount of soccer. Mostly La Liga, Premier League, and Champions League but a smattering of other games here and there. As my affection for the game has grown, I’ve mostly made my peace with diving. Diving in soccer is the practice of immediately falling to the ground when a foul has been committed against you (or even if one hasn’t) in order to get the referee’s attention. To Americans who have grown up watching American football and basketball, it is also one of the most ridiculous sights in sports…these manly professional athletes rolling around on the ground with fake injuries and then limping around the pitch for a few seconds before resuming their runs at 100% capacity. I still dislike the players who go down too often, lay it on too thick, or dive from phantom fouls, but much of the time there’s only one referee and two assistants for that huge field and you’re gonna get held and tackled badly so how else are you going to get that call? You dive.

Except for Lionel Messi. It’s not that he never dives (he does) but he stays on his feet more often than not while facing perhaps the most intense pressure in the game. Here’s a compilation video of Messi not going down:

In recent years, efforts have been made on various fronts to apply the lessons of Moneyball to soccer. I don’t think diving is one of the statistics measured because if it were, it might happen a lot less. Poor tackles and holding usually occur when the player/team with the ball has the advantage. By diving instead of staying on your feet, you usually give away that advantage (unless you’re in the box, have Ronaldo on your team taking free kicks, or can somehow hoodwink the ref into giving the other guy a yellow) and that doesn’t make any sense to me. If you look at Messi in that video, his desire to stay upright allows him to keep the pressure on the defense in many of those situations, creating scoring opportunities and even points that would otherwise end up as free kicks. It seems to me that Messi’s reluctance to dive is not some lofty character trait of his; it’s one of the things that makes him such a great player: he never gives up the advantage when he has it.


The origins of soccer

All kinds of evidence has been uncovered that organized soccer was being played in Scotland as early as the 15th century.

He discovered a manuscript of accounts from King James IV of Scotland that showed he paid two shillings for a bag of ‘fut ballis’ on 11 April, 1497. More evidence came with we came across several diary accounts of football being played in places like Stirling Castle, Edzell Castle and Carlisle Castle. The games were played on pitches smaller than the current regular football field, and featured between 10 and 20 men on each side.

Maybe we can get that guy who wrote the epic Reddit thread about how a 2000-man Marine unit might fare against the circa-23 B.C. Roman Empire (and got a movie deal for it) to write a scenario in which Messi, Ronaldo, Rooney, Iniesta, et al travel back to Scotland in the 1500s to take on the King and his footballers. (via @tomfossy)


Messi, the genius of football

The NY Times ran a big feature on FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi this weekend. At only 23 years old, Messi is already being touted by some as the best player ever.


FC Barcelona vs Real Madrid

In the next two and a half weeks, Spain’s two best soccer teams β€” FC Barcelona and Real Madrid β€” play each other four times. There was today’s regular season La Liga game, April 20’s Copa del Rey final, and then two semifinal games in the Champions League, the European championship. As Mike Madden said on Twitter:

Barça-Madrid 4 times in 18 days. Would be like if Michigan and Ohio State played every week for a month, and everyone in U.S. was an alum.


Floating soccer pitch

Much of the village on the Thai island of Koh Panyee is actually floating; the island is too rocky to build much of anything on land. So when a group of kids wanted to start a soccer club, they built themselves a floating soccer pitch…which led to some interesting advantages once they started playing against other teams.

(via @dunstan)


Ronaldo retires

Ronaldo LuΓ­s NazΓ‘rio de Lima, more commonly known as Ronaldo, retired from soccer today as one of the most decorated players ever: he won two Ballon d’Ors, three FIFA player of the year awards, was on two World Cup-winning Brazilian teams, and scored the most goals in World Cup history. The video is a bit fuzzy, but here are ten of Ronaldo’s greatest goals:

That backheel in #8 is just otherworldly, as is the spin move in #5. See also Ronaldo’s skills.


Messi named best player of 2010

Lionel Messi won the inaugural men’s 2010 FIFA Ballon d’Or today, given to the best soccer player in 2010. The award was created for 2010 by merging France Football’s Ballon d’Or and the FIFA World Player of the Year award, both of which Messi won last year as well.

FIFA also named the World XI team, the best eleven players in the world by position (kinda like the NFL’s All-Pro team). Amazingly, six of the eleven are from a single team, Spain’s FC Barcelona. (All three of the finalists for the Ballon d’Or were from Barcelona as well.)

I’ve been watching Barcelona this year and I’m not sure professional American sports has seen anything like what this team is1. On paper, they’re the best team on the planet by a wide margin (and that includes the World Cup-winning Spanish team, where several players β€” but not, notably, Messi β€” overlap) and in practice they’re almost as good. Many of the players coming off the bench could start on just about any other team in Europe. But they still have to play the games and having six of the best eleven players on the planet doesn’t guarantee wins, especially in a strongly team-oriented sport like soccer. Still lots of fun to watch them play, though.

[1] Maybe the Yankees in the 30s or 40s. Or the Celtics in the 60s. But neither of those teams had the three best players in the world on their rosters. ↩


Amazingly bad soccer

In the 90th minute of a quarterfinal match between Qatar and Uzbekistan in the 2010 Asian Games, you’ll see the worst ever play by a goalie and then it gets even worse.


Goalkeeper faster than speeding locomotive

Watch how quickly this goalie gets back to defend his own goal.

He’s moving so comically fast compared to the other players on the pitch that it reminds me of the not-so-special effect of Clark Kent racing the train in Superman. (via unlikely words)


The physics of free kicks

Why are long free kicks suprisingly effective in soccer matches? Science explains!

For a well-struck soccer ball, the researchers estimate, one might expect a gentle arc followed by a sharp hook at about 50 meters β€” in rough agreement with the distance of Roberto Carlos’s free kick. In other words, if a soccer player has the strength to drive a ball halfway down the field with plenty of velocity and spin, he or she can expect to benefit from an unexpected curve late in the ball’s trajectory.

But really, this is just an excuse to show you Roberto Carlos’ amazing free kick against France in 1997:

Pure awesometown. But it might not be even be better than this one:


Usain Bolt wants to play soccer

Professionally. From the tail-end of a recent interview with the sprinter:

Ultimately, he says, he’d love to make a go of playing football professionally. He’s being deadly serious. One of the perks of being Usain Bolt is that sporting stars love to meet him, so whenever he’s travelling and there’s time, he tries to train with a top football team. Last year it was Manchester United, a few days ago it was Bayern Munich. He’s still carrying a copy of the French sporting newspaper L’Equipe, which features a spread on his football skills and praise from Bayern manager Louis van Gaal. He shows me a photo of himself with his arm wrapped round the dwarfed 6ft German forward Miroslav Klose. “If I keep myself in shape, I can definitely play football at a high level,” he says.

“With his physical skills, I reckon he could play in the Premier League,” Simms says.

Professional American football would be even more of a no brainer…Randy Moss with Darrell Green speed++.


Blind soccer

What blind soccer players lack in sight, they more than make up for in footwork.

Some lovely skill there. From a Wired article on the sport:

In blind soccer, there are five on each side, a goalie and four outfield players. The goalie can be sighted or visually impaired and must stay in his designated goalie box. His teammates, meanwhile, wear eye shields so as to take away any competitive advantage from those players that may have limited vision over those who have no sight whatsoever. There are no throw-ins, as there is a wall surrounding the shrunken (at least, by typical soccer standards) playing field, and each team has someone calling out instructions from behind one of the goals. The players can call each other either by name or by shouting “Yeah!” And when you’re approaching to engage another player to steal the ball, you must shout “Voy!” β€” Spanish for I’m here! That means that you’ve got to discern the voice of your teammates β€” since everyone on the pitch is yelling “Yeah!” β€” and have a sense of where you are with the ball (which contains ball bearings, to help with tactility on the foot) in relation to the goal.


Best penalty kick ever

I’ve been meaning to post these since the beginning of the week. Here’s Ezequiel Calvente’s penalty kick for Spain from a U19 game against Italy. He runs up to kick with his right foot, but just before making the kick, Calvente pushes the ball into the other side of the goal with his left foot. Fantastic.

And a bonus amazing sports play. Spiderman in center field.

(Thanks, Dave and Jonah)


North Korean team punished for World Cup losses

For losing all of their World Cup games, including a 7-0 defeat at the hands of Portugal, the North Korean soccer team was subjected to six hours of public shaming.

The broadcast of live games had been banned to avoid national embarrassment, but after the spirited 2-1 defeat to Brazil, state television made the Portugal game its first live sports broadcast ever. Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats.

What’s annoying, beyond the obvious totalitarian issues, is that they played really well against Brazil, the top-ranked team in the world at the time.


Where did “soccer” come from?

It’s not an Americanism:

“Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers-a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA-the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S.


There is Bergkamp

Congratulations to the Dutch for reaching the World Cup final. To celebrate, here’s a great Dutch moment from a past World Cup…Dennis Bergkamp’s epic goal vs. Argentina in the 1998 WC. Turn the speakers up…the sound is everything.

Congrats also to Spain, but I couldn’t find a Spanish WC highlight as entertaining to match.


The genius of Messi

An ode to Lionel Messi, the best footballer in the world.

Messi simply does things β€” little things and big things β€” that other players here cannot do. He gets a ball in traffic, is surrounded by two or three defenders, and he somehow keeps the ball close even as they jostle him and kick at the ball. He takes long and hard passes up around his eyes and somehow makes the ball drop softly to his feet, like Keanu Reeves making the bullets fall in “The Matrix.” He cuts in and out of traffic β€” Barry Sanders only with a soccer ball moving with him β€” sprints through openings that seem only theoretical, races around and between defenders who really are running even if it only looks like they are standing still. He really does seem to make the ball disappear and reappear, like it’s a Vegas act.

I’ve watched just enough soccer to realize that despite having scored no goals and having, by FIFA’s reckoning, only a single assist, Messi is having a great World Cup. He attracts so much attention on the pitch β€” two or three defenders swarmed him on every touch in the Mexico game β€” that he should get an assist on nearly every play for opening up the rest of the field for his team. It’s one of those things that the new soccer fan (as many Americans are) doesn’t catch onto right away. (thx, djacobs)


Goal of the Century: Maradona vs Messi

Split-screen view comparing Diego Maradona’s 1986 Goal of the Century with a very similar goal by current Argentinian star Lionel Messi.


Typographic World Cup tshirts

I love these World Cup soccer shirts…here’s the Brazilian one:

Brazil soccer shirt

Another one for the list.


High-brow World Cup blog

The New Republic has started up their World Cup blog again.

This spring, we recruited Aleksandar Hemon to write a monthly column about soccer and encouraged him to write without pandering to a broad audience. And that’s the same spirit that we’ve embraced for this enterprise. Our cast of bloggers is filled with many eminent novelists and journalists (and a Deputy Mayor of New York City). They will write about the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of this tournament, I’m sure. But they will also write about tactics and players and coaches. They have a green light to be as wonky as they want.


Write the future

If this doesn’t make you feel a little tingly, you’re probably going to want to go on vacation from June 11 - July 11.


J.P. Morgan chooses England to win World Cup

If I was a fan of England, this wouldn’t make me feel too confident. J.P. Morgan’s quant team used FIFA Ranking, historical results, and something called “J.P. Morgan Team Strength Indicator” to predict the winner of the 2010 World Cup. Their results:

Ultimately our Model indicates Brazil as being the strongest team taking part in the tournament. However, due to the fixture schedule our Model predicts the following final outcome: 3rd: Netherlands, 2nd: Spain, World Cup Winners: England. Alternatively, we point out that the 3 favourite teams (from market prices recorded on 30 April of 3.9-to-1 for Spain, 5-to-1 for Brazil and 5.4-to-1 for England) represent a 52.5% probability of winning the World Cup.

If you’re more of a UBS (wo)man, they have it as (1) Brazil, (2) Germany, (3) Italy.


World Cup! World Cup! World Cup!

World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup!

Starts one month from yesterday. Can. Not. Wait. And it seems as though the TV coverage might be decent in the US as well:

Yesterday ESPN also confirmed that:

1. All 64 matches will be broadcast live.
2. In high definition.
3. On either ESPN, ESPN2 or ABC.

Of those 64 matches, 52 will be simulcast online at ESPN360.com. Which means many many Americans with be able to either secretly or not so secretly watch games at work 100% legally and in high quality (although the service is only available via certain internet providers).

Some of the games will also be broadcast in 3D, which…I don’t even know what to say about that.


How a soccer ball is made

And not just any soccer ball…the official match ball for the 2010 World Cup.


Fans buy soccer team

After a team sale was organized over the web, about 31,000 people have an ownership stake in a UK soccer team called Ebbsfleet United.

MyFootballClub has about 31,000 members/owners from all over the world (including the author of this article), all of whom pay an annual subscription of about $60 to be a member of the nonprofit trust that owns “the Fleet.” The club is run on the principle of one person, one vote for every decision, major or minor. Ebbsfleet recently made headlines in the British press when members voted to sell John Akinde, a talented young striker, for about $250,000, the first vote of its kind.


Own goal to win game?

In what was probably the weirdest soccer match finish ever, Barbados tied their match against Grenada with an own goal to send the match into overtime where they won by the 2 goals needed to qualify for the finals in the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup.

Needing to beat Grenada by two clear goals to qualify for the finals in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados had established a 2-0 lead midway through the second half and were seemingly well in control of the game. However, an own goal by a Bajan defender made the score 2-1 and brought a new ruling into play, which led to farce. Under the new rule, devised by the competition committee to ensure a result, a match decided by sudden death in extra time was deemed to be the equivalent of a 2-0 victory. With three minutes remaining, the score still 2-1 and Grenada about to qualify for the finals, Barbados realised that their only chance lay in taking the match to sudden death. They stopped attacking their opponents’ goal and turned on their own. In the 87th minute, two Barbadian defenders, Sealy and Stoute, exchanged passes before Sealy hammered the ball past his own goalkeeper for the equaliser.

The Grenada players, momentarily stunned by the goal, realised too late what was happening and immediately started to attack their own goal as well to stop sudden death. Sealy, though, had anticipated the response and stood beside the Grenada goalkeeper as the Bajans defended their opponents’ goal. Grenada were unable to score at either end, the match ended 2-2 after 90 minutes and, after four minutes of extra time, Thorne scored the winner for Barbados amid scenes of celebration and laughter in the National Stadium in Bridgetown.

Here’s a video with highlights of the end of the game. (via gulfstream)