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Now that the 2008 MLS Draftapalooza has passed into history, and each team's fans happily swap learned, detailed observations about the relative merits of a bunch of young players they'd never heard of before last Friday, some reflections, observations and questions come to mind:

First, the Combine: from all accounts, the quality of play, which was never particularly high to begin with, has steadily deteriorated to a level generally associated with city parks, midriff bulge and Sunday afternoons.

Now we all know that the event mostly serves as an opportunity for all the...

When you're a degenerate, corrupt thief scrambling to stay on the top of the heap, you can end up with some unsavory freinds.

Jack Warner is a case in point.

He has a freind named Patrick John. John used to be Prime Minister of Dominica which, in case you're not a fan of cartographic minutia, is a tiny island in the Caribbean which - not coincidentally - is a member of FIFA despite a recent census that showed only 500 soccer players on the whole island.

(Dominica having an equal vote in CONCACAF as Mexico, Jamaica and Canada may seem absurd to you, but at...

I didn't even have to see the headlines or see the posts in Big Soccer. I can guess the subjects.

Everybody wants Hugo gone.

How could Mexico not even qualify for the knockouts in an Olympic tournament in the minnow infested CONCACAF?

Nothing less than Hugo Sanchez's immediate resignation is the only thing that can possibly begin to dull the pain of such a humiliating exit.

Does that sum it up?

Is Hugo the only one to blame? Hardly. This latest in a long series of setbacks for Mexican footie has its genesis in the...

For some reason, it seems like there is so much more to say about this game. And yet, it would appear to the naked eye as such a non-descript feature in the week 33 lineup. Napoli-Atalanta. Bah. Not really all that much to attract the casual observer. Not when you have Inter-Fiorentina, Juve-Milan, Udinese-Roma, and other interesting matches to chew on. But for some reason, I lived this one most thoroughly from start to finish. It felt like this experience were being recorded for posterity somehow. Almost like a band going on tour, and choosing to record this particular night for the upcoming...

... and does it even really matter?? Sure - for one, it will give the Puerto Rico Islanders a run for their money and their CONCACAF Champions League spot.

The new 8-team league will commence on Saturday, June 28th . Apparently, the league was announced on May 14th and they will have at a "trial run" - with a 56-game tournament - each team will play each other to determine the first season's champion before they start in 2009 the "apertura" and "clausura" system.

This seems to be nothing...

In my role as a blogger on a soccer website, I have striven to keep the great moral and social issues of our times strictly separate from the day-to-day diversion offered by sport.

But sometimes, it is impossible for people of good conscience to turn away from the crises and conflicts of the day.

So in that spirit, I'm going to diverge from my usual chattering about soccer and instead devote this column to an examination of a subject that most of us thought was part of history:

Slavery in the modern world.

To illustrate this human tragedy, I've...

Unlike pretty much every other sport in America, soccer is not one that lends itself to a lot of statistical analysis. In other countries, player statistics are limited to games played and goals scored or, if you are a goalkeeper, games played and “clean sheets.” There are also “match ratings,” a completely subjective evaluation of a player’s performance in games. Otherwise, there is not much else to base a fantasy league on.

Of course, since we are Americans, we have done our best to foist statistics upon the Beautiful Game. This may be an attempt to make the game more palatable...

This morning when Timmy arrived at his job,
He was met by a furious torch-waving mob.
"You stuck us with Sampson! You gave us Alexi!
You hired that guy who thought football was sexy!
We're still in last place! The Galaxy stink!
Resign from your post! Yes, that's what we think!"
Tim raised his hands and said, "What can I do?
I'm mad as well, just as angry as you.
I went to the team and said, start playing better!
But the coach handed me a go-sex-yourself letter.
I did bring us Beckham, I did bring us Landon.
This lack...

By all accounts, Jimmy Mohlala was that rarest of creatures, an honest man.

As Speaker of the Mbombela local municipality, and a former executive within the South African Football Association and member of the World Cup organizing committee, he built a reputation as someone who was outside the influence of the rampant political corruption which is the norm in most of South Africa and the ruling ANC, of which he was a member.

Unfortunately, standing up for the little guy and crusading for the truth only goes so far when you run up against the combined power of big money...

A few weeks back, in this very space, I allowed as to how it seemed to me that having a big foreign club like Barcelona become a member of MLS carried with it more problems than it was worth.

Virtually alone in the sea of "...and having Barcelona in MLS will of course give the league a tremendous boost" happy talk from every soccer writer in the country (not one of whom ever bothered to explain exactly what it was that having someone's farm club in our purportedly "Major" league did besides stamp "MINOR LEAGUE" across our collective forehead; everyone seemed to feel that these wonderful...