“Lahm hardly has a foul called against him,” Dr. Steffan Giessner said in a telephone interview. “He plays tough. People pick up on small players and say they are really tough guys.” But Giessner, 35, and Dr. Niels van Quaquebeke, 32, two German scientists and researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, assert in a paper entitled “Height-Related Bias in Foul Calls,” published on the Web on Tuesday (and in the February edition of the subscription-only Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology) that soccer’s tall people usually got the short end of the stick in ambiguous situations when a referee calls a foul. Their research indicates that taller people are more likely to be perceived by referees (and fans) as foul perpetrators and their smaller opponents as the victims.

I’ve been coaxed out of soccer-blogging retirement by Aaron, who wanted me to contribute something to what he called “National Rip On Kartik Week.“ Of course, by “coaxed,” I really mean, “he wouldn’t stop nagging me until I agreed.” The problem is that I really don’t have a huge history with Kartik the way so many of you do. I’m temporarily removing the redirect on Booked For Dissent for the sake of this argument (I’ll try to remember to put it back on Monday), but I only took him apart twice, both times in November 2007 (the dates on BFD are wrong due to a WordPress glitch). When I realized it was the same person, I stopped reading him, and any time a friend would reference him, I would simply say, “Why do you still read that idiot?” Well, except for the time a friend once tweeted that, if dipsh$# were cheese, Kartik would be Wisconsin. I was too busy laughing. I’ve since stolen that. But even though I’ve largely moved away from the soccer community, I still follow it enough to know that he has since been given a degree of credibility, or at least acceptance that he has a fairly large audience, and therefore can’t be ignored no matter how wrong and/or unethical he is. Apropos of nothing, where is Chris Bergin these days? * Yes, there is a need to have someone willing to dissect Kartik’s half-baked ideas and lunacy. Thankfully, in my absence, Aaron has done it with a quality and vengeance that makes me kvell with Semitic pride. The beauty of new media is that it’s inherently democratic in that everybody has an equal voice. In a sport that’s still struggling to create an acknowledged hierarchy of experts (I present the FSC crew as Exhibit A), you just have to care about the sport and know how to market yourself effectively enough to become one. And now he has parlayed those skills into a paying gig. Bravo, Kartik. On Wisconsin. * I put that in there because it’s something Loney would say. ** ** That’s why I’m temporarily stealing this gag from Loney *** *** Hi, Dan!

this one

this one

But if today's announcement is set in stone, it leaves one to wonder if by omitting Chicago, the bid has been weakened. Granted, the U.S. is a country awash with cities and stadiums more than capable of hosting World Cup matches, and it's hard to imagine the exclusion of a single city putting the bid in jeopardy. But what kind of message does it send to FIFA that one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country -- one no doubt still smarting from its failed bid to land the 2016 Olympics -- couldn't muster the requisite enthusiasm to crack the presumed final list? It's certainly not a development that committee chairman Sunil Gulati will be trumpeting when he submits the official document to FIFA on or before May 14.