By Chris Wright

Roll up, roll up. This way to see Juan Mata looking like a child extra from 'Field of Dreams', Frank Lampard weilding his wood in public with careless abandon and David Luiz's copper wire crimp-perm somehow condensed down into a baseball cap as Chelsea promo their pre-season tour of the States by trying their hand at a few American sports.

Newly crowned European champions Chelsea will return to the United States for their preseason tour this summer and to promote it, the club put together the above video of various players trying out American sports. And it's fantastic.

You've got David Luiz jamming his Sideshow Bob hair into a Yankees cap, Petr Cech trading his scrum cap for a Seattle Seahawks helmet and Branislav Ivanovic trying to murder a baseball to promote the four-match tour that will include the 2012 MLS All-Star game in Philadelphia.

As an American sports fan, my obsession with fútbol is only rivaled by my obsession with football. Here, another team I have supported for years — decades, actually — that sports blue and white, also recently said goodbye to a legend. When the...
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And by that read younger viewers, those most prized by advertisers since they represent the future. It's always interesting to put TV ratings for soccer in a broader context with other more established American sports. So why don't American newspaper editors and producers of sports television shows devote more attention

On March 29, 2009 the WPS kicked off its inaugural season with a nationally televised match-up at the Home Depot Center. Pitting the Los Angeles Sol against the Washington Freedom, the opening match featured Brazilian star Marta and U.S. National Team scorer Abby Wambach. At the time, this site was just over one month old and covering the birth of the league was a natural fit.

By Alan Duffy

"Poke me again on Facebook and I'll block you, Kenneth"

Poor old Kenny Dalglish. Not only does he have to deal with the trauma of unemployment in middle-age, but now he has been forced to endure the ultimate social media humiliation, after Liverpool overlord John W Henry decided to unfollow him on Twitter soon after giving him the elbow from Anfield.

1. Rafa Benitez Let's talk about facts: Rafa is still loved by the Liverpool faithful, is settled on Merseyside and is available. Little wonder that he's gone straight in as the bookies' favourite for the job. 2. Graeme Souness Woah, woah, woah, Rafa. If the Reds are going to continue this retro manager vibe then [.

Required reading for Sounder nation!

An excellent write up on how the Germans do it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees this as compelling a reason as any to pull for Bayern Munich this Saturday

You need to read this if you are any kind of American sports fan. I would imagine our "big league" franchise owners would rather this sort of information be suppressed from their "customers" ;-)

Thinking about what to write for tonight it occurred to me that 2012 has lacked some of the big business stories that have been an MLS trademark over the last few seasons. Obviously, the entry of Montreal into the league was a big business story as was the start of the NBC/MLS relationship. Over the next few weeks, two new soccer venues will open, one in Montreal and the other in Houston.

The big soccer story on Monday was not an American soccer story. Rather, it was the battle for Manchester and the Premier League lead when Manchester City hosted Manchester United as the EPL nears the end of the 2011/2012 campaign. Although the match took place in England, the significance of the game was evident in the United States, and that makes this proper fodder for a blog covering the business of American soccer.

Ray Hudson, do your wonders never cease? The Geordie commentator, who plies his eclectic linguistics on an American sports channel, is a fan of football first and a describer of football matches second. We expect he requires a bib in the gantry given his habit of salivating like a hyena at a barbecue during his [.

There were a couple of derbies on last week.

Liverpool played Everton in a battle for upper-mid-table supremacy. I'm sure it was on the box, and Liverpool won, but no one outside of Liverpool really cared. It cemented their grip on – what is it, seventh? They must have been delighted to have already qualified for Europe through the Carling Cup.

American sports TV producers think fans love to hear coaches talk about what's going right and what's going wrong. And while there's nothing objectionable about these types of interviews, they usually result in empty cliches and lack any real insight into a coach's or team's mindset.
In most sports these interviews take place as the football or basketball coach is heading into the locker room or return from it on either side of halftime, but since soccer's action is continuous and there's a need to air commercials and halftime highlights and plugs the sideline interview takes place in-game.

Watching the video of the Timbers Army sing the National Anthem again and how much attention that gets in mainstream sports media made me think about what an opportunity MLS has to wedge into the American sports mainstream. People flinch at the ...
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TweetAmerican soccer enthusiasts, owe their interest, at least in part, to David Beckham, an internationally famous British soccer player. His persona, on and off the field, is one reason soccer has taken root in the American sports psyche. Even people who know nothing about soccer know about "Bend it like Beckham.

I guess that depends on how you view a two leg aggregate series. Are these two separate matches, counted like a 3-5-7 game series in American sports? If it's that, do you care if a team competes and doesn't advance? Or do you see this as a 180-minute match played in two separate stadiums, so essentially it's halftime?

After being involved in football and other sports for more years than I care to remember, I realize there's something drastically wrong with the way the press has turned sports reporting into nothing more than an ongoing soap opera. This is especially true in football with the recent rumours regarding Germany's Lucas Podolski and Arsenals' Flying Dutchman Robin Van Persie.

The wait if finally almost over and as Merritt Paulson put it "How can the shortest off-season in American sports seem so long?" Sure felt that way especially after the doldrums of December. Games start in earnest this Saturday and carry over all the way to Monday Night Football when 20,000 of our closest friends will be releasing all that pent up energy from the off-season.

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Here's a thing I've decided to do, despite the fact that MFUSA is no longer a viable soccer blog; re-blog things I've written in the distant past. Sometimes they'll be MFUSA pieces from the 3+ years of the site's existence, and sometimes they'll be things I wrote for other outlets. In this case, I'm posting a column I wrote for the defunct (and no longer extant, so there's not even a link) MLS Daily on the Sounders debut in March of 2009.

Every season the Sports Business Journal provides an excellent in-depth look at the upcoming Major League Soccer season. A link to the excellent grouping of stories is here. The lead story is about the new relationship between NBC and MLS.

In August MLS and NBC announced a three year television rights agreement that will put Major League Soccer on the Peacock and its affiliated sports channel from 2012-2014.

If I didn't know any better (and we all know I don't), we could say MLS is a major broadcast network American sports entity now.Breaking sports news video. MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL highlights and more.- Greg "Give Deuce his rightful goal!!" Seltzer

The FA Cup trophy
A near constant in myconversations with casual soccer fans and non-fans alike is the confusion cupcompetitions cause when trying to understand international soccer. Tomost American sports fans, a cup competition is an alien concept. Most sports(baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey) in America compete againstteams in their league for the league title and that's it.

John Harkes, lifting the first MLS "Cup"Seventeen years ago seems like a long time. In soccer history, though, it is just a drop in the bucket. For Major League Soccer seventeen years means everything.
In 1996 our domestic league was in its infancy. A Washington D.C. club with a European-sounding "United" slapped on the end faced off against the "Galaxy" (an American sports team name if you've ever heard one) of Los Angeles on a soggy football field in Boston, Massachusetts.

Could there ever be a better story than Josh Hamilton taking care of this boy?
The truth is Hamilton needs the boy more than the boy needs Hamilton.
As a father figure, Hamilton has something bigger than himself to look after and more meaning in his life.

Mention the word contraction in American sports circles and many fans will shudder. It was this word that was mentioned in the mid-90s by Major League Baseball in hopes of dissolving teams in markets that made little money. However, MLB ...
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Yes, you read that right. Southern California's own Landon Donovan, a Redlands native, is ranked three places higher than global superstar and part-time underwear model David Beckham on the just released Bloomberg Businessweek Power 100 list of the most powerful professional athletes in American sports.

The Name on the Front of the Jersey

"In most American sports, fans have learned to block out the countless corporate partnerships inked by their favorite teams. Only the most deranged of fans knows the identity of the Official Ambulance Provider of the New Orleans Saints, or choose a cell phone carrier based on who bought naming rights to their team's arena.

Photo by ISIphotos.com

With every passing year, the format for the MLS All-Star Game seems to continue to be a point of contention among fans and media, but even with that, the 2012 version won't be providing any drastic changes.

While officially awarding this year's game to Philadelphia, the league announced that it will maintain its unique MLS vs.

Former Boston Breakers (WPS) General Manager, Andy Crossley, runs a great site called Fun While It Lasted where I love to go to see the great history and information he digs up about minor league franchises that have come and gone in the American sports landscape. I especially enjoy anytime he posts something regarding soccer teams that once played in the D.

It should come as no surprise but it's being reported that Liverpool will tour the USA this summer and play a match at Fenway Park which is the home of the Boston Red Socks.

New owners are looking to tap into the huge base of American sports fans which would be great for club support and reaching potential sponsors.

Serena Williams goes for another Grand Slam starting this week.
She looks primed and ready.
Check out her practice video.
One of the greatest modern American athletes is gunning for a 14th Major tennis tournament.
She has been everything possible in American sports.

Arlo White now has his boots in the booth for NBC Sports Networks, and his successor behind the microphone for Seattle Sounders FC has been revealed.

I'm sure Ross Fletcher will do a bang-up job, and I'm truly intrigued to observe how Kasey Keller makes the transition from player to TV analyst, especially considering he's in the starting blocks at one of Major League Soccer's more important and higher profile regional broadcast positions.

Spend too much time examining the MLS scheduling format and the philosophies therein, and one will inevitably fall down a logical rabbit hole - though, to be fair, this doesn't differ significantly from other "major-league" North American sports.

MLS version 3.0, or 2.1, or whatever we are up to, has become all about "local rivalries", or so it seems.

It is virtually impossible to forecast the next misdemeanour, potential or otherwise, to emerge from Port Vale's boardroom, without descending into the realms of bad-taste fantasy (one of the major protagonists revealing themselves to be a woman trapped in a man's body, for example).

Presumably believing Christmas to be "a week to bury bad news," Vale chairman Peter Miller informed everyone, including all fellow board members apparently, that he'd re-mortgaged the club's Vale Park ground to facilitate a £277,000 loan covering "short-term" cashflow problems, caused by the collapse of the much-vaunted "investment deal" with American sports turf firm Blue Sky International (BS).

Angelina-Jen: A Derby for the Ages I'm staunchly opposed to the Americanization of football. I don't want overtime, shootouts, substitutions on the fly, bigger goals or shorter fields. I don't want instant replay, playoffs or field turf.
There's a lot of don'ts and won'ts in there. There are also exceptions to every rule.

Kermit the Frog didn't give us the entire truth. While it might not be easy being green it seems even a touch more difficult being Forever Orange. Houston might be one of the more unlovable clubs in the league stretching back to 2006 with their origins birthed to the detriment of the city of San Jose and its an original MLS franchise.

HRH Kofi Sarkodie is at it again, wrapping up the European adventures of both himself and teammate Will Bruin with the Generation adidas team in the Netherlands.

And here you thought with that title that I was going to write about Landon Donovan heading back to Everton. Well, for Ginge's sake, I hope Donovan kicks ass across the Mersey.

For fans of American Sports, even at the college level, there is usually only one prize.

The players and teams in the major leagues may win their division and their conference but it means nothing if they don't win the ultimate prize and lift the Championship trophy. In England the phrase 'We can concentrate on the league' is a very familiar one and can be used in one of two ways.

Once again FOX is promoting its English Premier League coverage as part of its Sunday sports package. The network is offering a high profile match-up (Arsenal/Manchester United) on the FOX mother ship as part of the lead-up to the network's live broadcast of the NFC Championship. As we have reported, the network has seen great ratings from its re-broadcasts of the EPL and the live telecasts promises to generate an even larger audience.

As the (Acting) President of the Alliance Council, I've heard plenty of skepticism about the Alliance, whether it truly represents "Democracy in Sports" or not, and whether or not it is - or can be - a true voice for fans and a way for them to take some control in the operation of the Sounders.
I share some skepticism.