News: What it would mean to play in the winter, weather-wise

As a fan in England though I almost fell off my chair when I read the opening.
It was 17 degrees in Sandy on Thursday evening shortly before 5.
Not exactly ideal weather for watching a soccer match at Rio Tinto Stadium.
I would of been surprised if I had read that about cricket match where warm weather is preferred because people are sat and the game can last all day or at least several hours depending on the format.
There is certainly a very different idea of the sort of conditions where a soccer game is worth attending compared to Europe in some places yet attendance is generally good. Consider how high it would be if it were not unimaginable to watch a game in below 20c or above 25c, a windspeed over 15mph or horror of horrors it were raining?
Yeah I'm teasing, I know there are some hardcore fans within MLS but that article gives new meaning to the term "Fair weather fan".

Ahah! Yes you should point that out. I actually knew that you used Fahrenheit but for some reason it didn't register .
I really should of thought that was too crazy that 17c was considered poor spectator weather. .
Actually I also thought Salt lake had quite a reasonable winter climate for some reason but hey if you're gonna be wrong do it in style.

Now that I have learned my error, yeah -8c isn't ideal soccer weather.

Thanks for the correction and not being a dick about it.

Yes, and there are other weird weather anomalies going on around here. Take, for example, Kansas City where I live. We have this propensity for ice storms. Not snow, the cute fluffy stuff you can push off a field. I'm talking freezing rain that coats everything in a solid inch or so of pure ice. We had one such storm around 2000 or 2001 that shut down the city so bad I didn't have school for two weeks. Yes, that is an outstanding example, but we usually get one or two ice storms of varying trouble every year. Maybe those happen in England too.

Sorry for the out of issue comment, but if we use common english you can use common celsius. Fahrenheit seriusly? come on.

Are you trying to convince me to use math at 9:30 on a Friday evening?

A local newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, should not use the temperature scale understood by its readers, the people of Salt Lake City?

And itʻs not just KC that has that problem. Here in the Puget Sound area, we had a snow and ice storm last year that dumped 24" of snow in one day followed by a half inch of ice the next. The following day saw high winds. If you dared to venture outside you would have heard tree branches snapping like twigs at a pace of one a minute or so. Our schools shut down for two weeks.

Portland is also known for its ice storms.

And these are two cities MLS fans suggest have mild climates suitable for soccer when other American cities are not!

In Portland we mostly get rain that is just slightly above freezing. People think that it rains all the time in Portland, but really it is a seasonal occurrence: it rains almost every day during the winter, there is a moderate amount of rain in the spring and fall, and very little rain during the summer. There are about 1-2 freezing rain storms and 2-3 snow storms per year. As other people have said, the freezing rain is much more inconvenient than the snow. With everything encased in ice, even just walking a short distance can be very challenging. Since Portland is heavily forested, the storms also cause a lot falling branches that block roads and destroy power lines.

I don't know why anyone would want to play in the cold rain during the winter here if they could play in the summer when the weather is nice instead.

Pussies

Nothing like the scale you get it, probably because we are such a small land mass and don't generate our own cold pool - we have to constantly tap into colder air from the North to remain cold unless we are under high pressure which of course means no rain. We do get freezing rain occassionally though.
We get quite a mixed bag really but generally our winters are mild even though we are quite far North due to the Gulf stream. We can have freeze ups for a couple of weeks at a time though and there may well be one on the way for us come mid month.

This shoudn't come as a surprise to anyone, but here is what Saputo and Olympic Stadium looked like over new years:


http://instagram.com/p/T_iO0fPSrz/

This is after we got 45.3cm (18inches) of snow in 18 hours on the 27th. Temperature was -27C(-16F) two nights ago, and 0C(+32F) last night

Bekauz tha Yurupps do it!!!!! AHHHHH!!!

Hey, look at this.

Not only does it get cold here in SLC, but we live in something called the Great Basin. Basically, we get at least a month's worth of polluted and freezing inversion. High pressure sets in and cold air trapped gets trapped under warm air in the bottom of this geographic "bowl" along with pollution. It's quite nice at 8000+ feet (2450m) at the ski resorts, even 15F (8.3C) warmer (usually the reverse), but not so much at 4600 feet (1400m).

Running at full speed in temps as low as 10F (-12C) is hard enough on the lungs. I always feel like my throat and lungs have been scraped raw and bleeding. Add to that unhealthy air, which is roughly equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Answer, MOVE THE CONTINENTS OR THE EARTH'S ROTATIONAL AXIS.

It seems it would end up being mostly a semantic difference. Make the summer break a little longer and winter break a little shorter (more feasible when more Southern teams are added), and call the late summer the beginning of the season and late spring the end of the season. But that begs the "why bother" question. If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it just to make Septic Bladder happy.

The only two real problems I see right now with our current calendar set up is that a) the CCL does not fit kindly with our setup. Our teams come off the offseason and have to face some of their toughest competition ever. Also b) major international tournaments, such as the World Cup, can and will take away many of our players for a month. Not being raided by international fixtures and having less of a disadvantage in the Champions League are the only two reasons. Really, nothing to do with Europe or Sepp Blatter. More to do with Mexico than anything.

Who gives a ******** what Mexico does with their league and teams? I mean, I'm happy for them but it has nothing to do with MLS.

This is basically what they do in Denmark: the midseason break is much longer than the offseason. To me it makes no sense at all; they might as well call it a summer season.

I just want a much shorter offseason and no kickoff's scheduled before 7pm in Texas.

What summer break did MLS have last year?

Seems to me the general trend in MLS is towards a shorter and shorter off-season. It's not just more teams means a longer season, it's that the league is taking more and more breaks within the season. So we're already beginning and ending the season amid winter weather. That's only going to increase until the season ends in early December and begins again sometime in February. So we're talking long term about taking maybe 8-10 weeks off in the heart of winter. Right now we take about 12 weeks off. It's not a big difference.

The windchill is -13 in Montreal right now. Only -1 windchill in Toronto.

Basically, I'd like to see Sepp watch a game outside in Canada in the winter. Until that day, we can stick with the common sense, no?

Shorter offseason? Dec 1st to Mar. 2nd is 90 days

For comparison the gap for the EPL (using the start and end dates for the current season as an example) is 91 days (May 19th to Aug 18th approx).

La Liga is 80 days but they do take a short winter break IIRC.

Liga MX's split between seasons was 84 days last year (though I don't know if that included their playoffs).

Players need a couple of months to rest and then get back into shape. I'm not sure how much shorter you can realistically make it than they have this offseason.