Fans

I know that Premier League match atmospheres have a lot going for them. The fans are extremely passionate; there seems to be a song for every single player and every single situation. But, they lack a certain kind of raw power found in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Leagues. 

The best example I can give is the way that they celebrate an amazing goal. The crowd doesn’t cheer so much as it collectively looses it’s s***; it’s the difference between yelling “YES!” and “OH MY F***ING GOD!”

Observe the phenomena in the Portuguese first division: 

If you are dangerously close to losing faith in humanity, stop reading this article and go watch this video, because it doesn’t get much worse than what went down during Steaua Bucharest & Petrolul Ploiesti.

The old saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, sometimes a minor tweak to an existing great thing can take it to the next level. EA Sport’s latest installment of the FIFA franchise has introduced a new mode to its uber-popular Ultimate Team mode – FIFA 16 Ultimate Team Draft Mode – that allows players an alternative to winning packs and prizes.

Have you ever seen footage of a flood? People talk about how there are massive, 100 ft walls of water that barrel across beaches and towns but that’s not really how it works. Water doesn’t just form a vertical wall; it seeps and flows, steadily, more rapidly than you think until all of the sudden a street is turned into a river 15 ft deep. It’s dangerous because people inland away from the initial landfall don’t react quickly. They want to see how the situation unfolds, and their curiosity kills them.  

Your flight to Heathrow is arranged. You have packed a primary umbrella, a backup umbrella and an emergency umbrella. You have your Oyster card ready to use on the Tube. Plans have been made to visit a proper chipper (fish and chip shop). I highly recommend Golden Union near Liberty of London. Fantastic! A trip to the British Museum is on the agenda. As are many visits to pubs.

At 16 years of age, Carlos Vela walked onto a soccer pitch in Peru with all the weight of Mexico on his shoulders. The Mexican National Team had finally made it the final of the U-17 World Cup. Not once in Mexico’s history had a Mexican national team made it to the finals of a world tournament. No pressure. No pressure at all for Carlitos, who would go on to lead the young Mexican national team to glory against Brazil, scoring their first of the match and leading Mexico to a 3-0 scoreline against the tournament favorites.

Entire lifetimes have been spent hashing out what qualities give people worth. Those qualities change as often as they are discovered; they can vary as widely as the names of the people they belong to.

In the world of sports, however, society teaches us what to value in a very specific kind of human, an athlete. It teaches us to value only one thing: whether or not an athlete wins. It seems like the ultimate meritocracy: if an athlete deserves to win then they will win, and we will applaud them for doing so. Sometimes it works just like that, but not always.

No doubt soccer is a growing game in the United States. Major League Soccer has invested all sorts of resources in building its league into something that can compete with other major professional sports and, more importantly, be respected in comparison to the other top soccer leagues in the world.