The first round of MLS playoffs (aka MLS Conference Semi-finals)� always spurs heated discussion about its playoff format as well as the League's two conference structure.

Let's take an overview of various playoff format options and League structures� for Major League Soccer.� There should be three objectives to a playoff format and League Structure:

1) Crown a worthy champion

2) Entertain the fans

3) Maximize revenue for the teams and League

No matter what playoff format is used or what tweaks are made to improve it, a percentage of fans will criticize it and offer other imperfect solutions.

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Richard Farley from "Inside the Six" interviewed yours truly to bring you up to date with the latest news on the Team Owners Association (TOA).

"Inside the Six" is part of the World Soccer Reader network and Richard Farley is well versed in football from around the globe as well as the US.

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Richard Farley from "Inside the Six" interviewed yours truly to bring you up to date with the latest news on the Team Owners Association (TOA).

"Inside the Six" is part of the World Soccer Reader network and Richard Farley is well versed in football from around the globe as well as the US.

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This blog post takes a brief look at how Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) and its teams have used Twitter. We'll look at the early days of Twitter integration and how it's evolved as a sports marketing tool. Then, we'll discuss a couple ideas for utilizing Twitter's new List feature.

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This blog post takes a brief look at how Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) and its teams have used Twitter. We'll look at the early days of Twitter integration and how it's evolved as a sports marketing tool. Then, we'll discuss a couple ideas for utilizing Twitter's new List feature. Keep in mind this is a very short post on a topic I could describe for days.

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If you are a connoisseur of Twitter like me, then you've already stumbled upon the terms "twiggers" and "twitches" numerous times and you've undoubtedly already figured out what they really mean. So to pacify the Decency and Morals Subcommittee of World Cup Blog, I will be using those terms (well, actually only one of those terms) liberally during this post in order to avoid getting into twouble.

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The U.S. Women's National Soccer Team is now in Germany for a friendly against defending FIFA Women's World Cup and UEFA Women's Euro champion Germany on Oct. 29 at the Impuls Arena in Augsburg, Germany. � Kick off at 6 p.m. local (1 p.m. ET). Unfortunately, there is no television or internet streaming coverage of the [. Click to continue reading...

[video sent to us from See the Cup] Brazilian team Santos won the inaugural ladies Copa Liberatadores on Sunday, or to give the tournament its full and excellent sounding Spanish language title: Copa Libertadores de Fútbol Femenino. A healthy crowd of 14,000 were in attendance at the Estádio Urbano Caldeira to see Santos beat Paraguay's Universidad Autónoma [. Click to continue reading...

Chicago Red Stars defender Jill Oakes has written an interesting post about what it means to be a female athlete over at Pretty Tough (via Melissa):

So what DOES it mean to be girl? At one time, we were only cheerleaders, while boys were told not to play "like a girl." Nowadays, girls are tackling, competing, and enduring physical and emotional pain for success in their sport.

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After serving three years as President and CEO of WPS' Chicago Red Stars, one of the country's newest pro soccer� franchises, today I accepted the same position with the oldest professional soccer team in the United States, the National Indoor Soccer League's Milwaukee Wave.

I'd like to share my� thought process that went into the decision to take the new position and offer a look at the behind the scenes issues and dynamics that led to this decision, one made in the context of considering where to go next in American soccer.

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Great video by the WPS!� I only managed to interview one WPS player this year, Ella Masar and she was awesome, but next year I hope to do a lot more!

Loved the goal celebrations in this video and I love the fact that the girl's I coach have professional female role models to look up too!

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I hear you, Aaron, but missing out on the Olympics is pretty bad for American soccer, especially women's soccer.
The Olympics have historically been very kind to the USWNT. Remember, the Golden Generation got their big boost from the Richard Jewell Olympics in 1996, the worst in human memory. Click to continue reading...

And now it is time to check in once again on my new hometown football club, the Atlanta Beat. That's the Atlanta Beat of the recently formed league known as 'Women's Pro Soccer' (WPS). Yes, I support a women's team. Got a problem with that? I hope not.
The Beat are what is called an 'expansion' team, meaning that they are currently being created out of whole cloth to compete in the WPS's second season beginning in Spring of 2010. Click to continue reading...

It was a bad day to be Brazilian in WPS yesterday as teams around the league handed seven of their "Girls from Ipanema" their free-agency walking papers. The name on that list that perhaps raised the most eyebrows was Cristiane from the Red Stars, that team's leading goal scorer and the first and only player in WPS history to register a hat-trick. Click to continue reading...

Yay, the new season of the W-League is just two sleeps away and finally, the squads are here.
So who's in and out? Probably won't know exactly what will happen until the team's line-up but certainly some interesting last minute signings. Here are the interesting parts of the previews, game by game. Click to continue reading...

Mouthpiece Sports:

MOUTHPIECESPORTS is a safe place for athletes to speak directly to their fans without the interruption of editing or twisting their words. We bring you the athletes like you've never seen them before -- off the field, off the court, when they're just like you and me.

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What an amazing experience being part of the inaugural Women's Professional Soccer season has been! I'm a part of history. I'm a PRO athlete. But now it's the offseason, and so what next?

The difficulty as a player within this first-year league is that there is very little to count on once the season ends.

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In November, Alex Kotler of Football Partnerships is putting on a rockin' panel to discuss how social media is affecting the sport of football, and yours truly has been invited as a panelist. (I'm super honored/excited to be a part of this! Details below.)

So I'm calling on all my Social Media gurus out there to help me prep!

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I know there was an AFT yesterday. And here's another while I try to think of a good Top 5 List topic...#1 - ESPN has tabbed 11 guys to watch at the FIFA Under-20 World Cup. If you hadn't guessed by now, the American inclusion is a bit of a surprise: keeper Brian Perk.I was planning a similar article tomorrow at S365, but have now seen several of these around. Click to continue reading...

MLS fans looking in the direction of WPS this week might find themselves surprised at the impending free agency period. Players who have been waived by teams are free to sign with any other team for the upcoming season, and many players are playing abroad in the off season.
Among the reasons for this is that apparently WPS is not a strict single-entity league. Click to continue reading...

Before I get started, yes that really is a living albino alligator. Lisa Cole of the Boston Breakers is in San Francisco this weekend watching games, so last night we took a jaunt to the California Academy of Sciences to take in a little NiteLife. This place is AWESOME. Basically, the Academy is a museum/planetarium/aquarium in Golden Gate Park.

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Crunching some numbers and shaking them until they give up some useless information about the 148 players who played in Women's Professional Soccer this season:

• Five players - Kristine Lilly (Boston Breakers), Aya Miyama (Los Angeles Sol), Caroline Jonsson (Chicago Red Stars), Becky Sauerbrunn and Homare Sawa (Washington Freedom) all played every minute of every game.

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I think you will find that many bloggers across the US don't write a lot about women's soccer because they don't know a lot about it. That's not the case at Inside The Six,� a podcast from World Soccer Reader.

Richard Farley stays on top of the women's game and on this last edition of Inside The Six, Farley welcomes Jeff Kassouf and Ryan Wood.

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I think you will find that many bloggers across the US don't write a lot about women's soccer because they don't know a lot about it. That's not the case at Inside The Six,� a podcast from World Soccer Reader.

Richard Farley stays on top of the women's game and on this last edition of Inside The Six, Farley welcomes Jeff Kassouf and Ryan Wood.

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Melissa over at The Offside's WPS blog summarizes my last bit of ideological twaddle for those of you who don't want to slog through it all. Better yet she's dubbed me "the fake one." Sweet. Now I can hang out with the Professor and not feel lame. Dan Loney, you nicknameless bastard, I can see you turning green with envy. Click to continue reading...

Although I am enjoying the breast beating and hair-shirt wearing that the Bath City community is engaged in at the moment, my status as a native Atlantan has given me some cheerier football news to report to you today.
Just over an hour ago Women's Pro Soccer (WPS) has announced the results of their first ever expansion draft, and as a result the first six members of the new Atlanta Beat roster have been revealed. Click to continue reading...

Wendy Parker decides to take a crack at the WPS issues we've all been talking about:

But demanding that a fledging league like WPS shoulder the burden of advancing such things like an anti-rape movement is absurd. WPS has had enough difficulty launching during a recession, experiencing lower-than-expected attendance figures and attracting corporate donors.

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The day the Women's United Soccer Association died, I called Tom Stone, the ever-quotable head coach of the Atlanta Beat, who was grappling with the fresh reality that he was out of a job.

This was just days after his team finished second in the WUSA in 2003 and shortly before the Women's World Cup, which had been moved to the United States from China because of the SARS outbreak.

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(Editors Note: We profiled Jill Oakes shortly before the start of the WPS season. A high school and college soccer standout, Jill just wrapped her first season as a pro and will be a regular contributor to Pretty Tough as she, and the league, gear up for a second season).

As I reflect on the roller-coaster ride I like to call the inaugural WPS season, my own personal journey reads with the same dramatic exclamations of a thrilling 1920's newspaper headline.

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As some of you know, Peter Wilt has been on a guest blogging run at Pitch Invasion, my favorite site to leech from. At the end of last week, Wilt submitted his report card on the first WPS season. Those of you who've already read it can probably guess what I'm going to focus on. Overall, there's a lot of encouraging stuff in his report, although it's clear the league is not yet profitable for the owners. Click to continue reading...

The Women's Professional Soccer League has not generated much interest from the casual sports fan, let alone the average soccer fan. Soccer America's Mike Woitalla examines what problems lie within trying to develop a women's professional soccer league.
The first season of the Women's Professional Soccer league produced smaller crowds and bigger financial losses than anticipated. Click to continue reading...

I really enjoyed Chicago Red Stars' CEO Peter Wilt's post on Pitch Invasion the other day. Titled Grading WPS in Year One, he takes a hard look at 8 aspects of the just-finished inaugural season of Women's Professional Soccer. These include attendance, fan experience, marketing and operations, and quality of play. Click to continue reading...

Other WPS All-Star blog posts on Soccer Science:
WPS All-Star Weekend Begins
WPS All-Star Weekend II: WPS Awards Ceremony through Kick-Off

We've just finished editing the videos from the WPS Awards Celebration and thought it would be nice to post links to all of them here so you can see the acceptance speeches.

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Editor's Note: Chicago Red Stars President and CEO Peter Wilt returns for his third weekly column on Pitch Invasion, pulling no punches as he grades the first season of the league his own team plays in.

Sunday's Women's Professional Soccer All-Star victory over Swedish powerhouse Umea ended WPS' first season and that makes this a good time to reflect on the inaugural year and analyze WPS' progress.

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Sunday
Long Beach State 0 UCLA 4
Sydney Leroux scored twice for the No. 7 Bruins, which also got goals from Lauren Cheney and Liz Zadro at George Allen Field.

USC 1 St. John's 2
No. 12 USC has started the season 0-2, a 54th minute penalty from Megan Ohai failing to stop the Trojans' first loss at home since 2006, snapping a 19-game streak at McAlister Field.

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