So, after beginning his career in a strange little federal district, Freddy Adu continues it in a strange little principality. From DC to Salt Lake to Lisbon to Monaco: one of the more unusual soccer career paths, even today. I'm a little puzzled as to why Adu's Benfica performance gets such bland reviews; 21 appearances, five goals and an established role as a super-sub seem like worthy accomplishments for a 19-year-old playing in Europe for the first time.

Ah, late July. The Euros are over. The Olympics haven't started. Europe is embroiled in goofy transfer crises. Liverpool is busy stacking its reserve team with Swiss defenders and French teenagers. All the big clubs are off playing Guangzhou or someone. West Ham is playing the MLS All-Stars while the Inter-City Firm takes the measure of the Columbus casuals.

Prepare thyselves: West Ham fans engaged in aggro with...Columbus Crew fans? The Columbus Crew? Man, some weird shit is going on in the pulsating heart of Ohio's football nation: first the club's cosmic-order-defying run at the top of the table earlier this season, then the "racist chanting" scandal (you're not a real club until you've had one), now this.

This has nothing to do with football, but anyway. Buzz. Buzz Bissinger. Those who frequent the intellectual red light district known as the Blogosphere will know Buzz, the Certified Author who went bananas on Bob Costa's HBO chat show, getting all up in the grill of Deadspin's Will Leitch, accusing Leitch and his fellow bloggers of dragging the English language into the dirt, destroying the elevated tone of American sporting discourse (?

First came AFC Wimbledon. Then, FC United of Manchester. Now, not to be left behind, Liverpool supporters are launching their own grassroots "alternative" club into England's netherworldly non-league pyramid. Judging by the preliminary reports, AFC Liverpool will, fittingly enough, be sort of like the Beatles to FC United's Stones: roughly similar historical circumstances, less angry response.

Somehow, I missed the fact that the United States failed to qualify for the Beach Soccer World Cup. I didn't even get a chance to join the howling mob that undoubtedly stoned the team at the airport on its return from the unsuccessful campaign. Still, it's never too late for a moment of national reflection.

Not that I feel very sympathetic to a multimillionaire who can't "adjust" to working in a foreign country without the help of a specialized minder, but this Simon Kuper column on the struggles of relocating footballers contains a couple gems. First, his description of the core of English football culture ("drinking 20 pints of beer in a night") is one for the ages.

I'm preparing (oh so slowly) a massive post on a massive book: David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round, a tome that Ray Hudson would describe as "MAGISTERIAL!" In the meantime, have a look at this interesting look at Kurdistan's halting efforts to pull together a national side, a story that would fit right in with Goldblatt's enormous reckoning of the intersection of the global game and global politics.

"Everyone is replaceable in this game. Everyone's a commodity."
—inspiring words from Portland Timbers manager Gavin Wilkinson.

Sweet news from the nether reaches of the North American game (motto: "Taking What We Can Get Since Approximately Forever"): after the US Open Cup quarterfinals ended in a flurry of penalty kicks and red cards, two First Division teams landed in the semis. With Charleston and Seattle paired off in the next round, the scrappy little league that subsists in MLS' slender shadow is guaranteed a spot in the Final, and thus a possible berth in next year's continental Champions League.

Looks like the Colorado Rapids have overhauled their squad in a fairly dramatic fashion.

I know economics is supposed to be all rational and whatnot, but the just-compiled league table of top-earning footballers calls the dismal science into question. Or, at least, points to a paradox: a striking number of the top boys are totally past their prime as players. I'm not saying D. Becks or old Henry don't still offer some value on the field, because they obviously do.

Now that the Euros are over and we have a spare 15 minutes before the Big Leagues start up again, it's time for American soccer fans to do what they do best: obsess over competitions that no one else in the world (and the country? forget about it) has ever heard of. To wit, the US Open Cup, our national knock-out tournament, which continues a perpetually beleaguered and occasionally glorious history that dates back to 1914.

And they said Pepe Reina played no role.

All hail a great new football onomatopoeia: "tiki-taka," apparently a Spanish nonsense phrase to describe how Spain plays, with lots of fast, crackling short passes. To me, that was the most impressive aspect of the new Euro champions, and I hope it's an inspiration to club and youth coaches and third-rate Portland-based futsal teams everywhere.

News of the VIVA World Cup, a competition for wanna-be nations, micronations, notional states and parallel-reality empires, leads me to wonder: Where is the Republic of Cascadia? My word, if Sealand can get a team together, why can't we?

I'm not one to leap to the defense of ESPN on too many occasions, but Jack Bell's excoriation of the network, occasioned by its use of British announcers during its Euro '08 telecasts, seems a little off-base too me, if I may use a baseball metaphor. This position strikes me as a logical outgrowth of Bell's larger objections to Anglophilia in the American game—the veneration of British coaches, teams and playing styles at the expense of other (specifically, Latin) influences.