When I see pictures of Simon Borg, I find myself wondering what if the DC Animated Universe had been Nick Park’s project, rather than Bruce Timm’s. Simon Borg does kinda look like the Telly-Savalas-inspired Lex Luthor. Had a baby. With Pokey. Gumby’s horse. And its brain was made of putty. Soft putty. That melted in the sun.

So evidently MLS hates women now, too. Bill Archer sums it up better than any of the sites I was considering linking to when BS was still down for maintenance. gay4soccer.com, for instance, which is possibly the only soccer site who send me updates other than “this team will play that team soon” or “that team just played this team and this was the score” or “I know you would rather remove your eyes with a melon baller than read another Brek Shea blog post, but you don’t own a melon baller mwa ha ha go read it now.”

Evidently it’s not the women who go to games, when their menfolk talk them into it, and don’t enjoy it too much, that turn Simon Borg off. It’s the women who get into it. Who actually enjoy it. Those women. Screaming, sweating, trembling, passionate frenzies, in which they try to dance the spider venom out before inevitably hitting the dust dead but panting still. I am still talking about the act of watching soccer here.

I mean, if you see a photograph of a guy who’s really into soccer, who loves soccer, who’s taken his shirt off and body-painted himself in his team’s colors, that’s awesome. If a woman who’s really into soccer gets her shirt off and body-paints herself in team colors that’s just awful. Right, Dan?

The—now redacted—comments followed a run of responses to thematically-similar emails from listeners, starting with guys complaining they can’t pull 18 hour match-watch marathons and spend weekends with their girlfriends, then listeners talking about soccer as a date night phenomenon, then female fans describing how over-the-top their obsession with soccer is, then the MLS PR Dept. (if such a thing does not yet exist, it soon shall) saying the podcast has been cut short because, well, some people might take offense at something someone said.

And I just can’t stop shaking my head. All this stupid, stupid bullshit the past few weeks. We aren’t that far removed from a time when an American soccer fan, in America, would be called “commie” or “faggot” just for liking soccer. (And isn’t hockey the big commie sport? I mean, no one in Russia likes soccer, yet, that’s why it was so important their 2018 host bid won, even though their 2018 host bid sucked.) We should be more inclusive than… you know, I can’t think of any sport whose fans should even come close to soccer fans on this front. WNBA fans maybe. Having been marginalized and ridiculed until… shit, it still happens, and at a grassroots level, not just by multi-sport journalists who feel threatened by the rise of soccer and project their anxieties over the future of their careers by criticizing soccer for spurious reasons so scattershot they’re obviously prioritizing contriving an exhaustive catalogue of excuses now now now over coherence and sincerity.

Also, we’re Americans. Unlike Italians, we know better than to throw bananas at people who are in the middle of a competition—be it a soccer match or a go kart race against a giant gorilla and a flying turtle. Shiitake ain’t the only funghi…

But with some exceptions—and those of you from said exceptional places know better than I where such locations lie—soccer was a sport supported, followed, played by a minority, outside of the organized practices and games “our” moms “forced” us into participating in. Last time I took an MLS virgin (we really should write Vs on their foreheads in red lipstick the way the Rocky Horror crowd does) there were two of them, and they spent much of the match referencing “orange slices”. It was a double header with the Blues, and they were far kinder to the soccer crowd than the rugby crowd, for whom they hold no healthy-snack-centered nostalgia.

Also, it was KC-Chicago and one of them wore red. Asshole.

But between the historical marginalization of the US soccer fan, and the newness of the sport (apparent) and its prominence (actual), we have the opportunity—and with that the obligation—to learn from the mistakes of the banana-tossing soccer leagues abroad, or the fan cultures for historically mainstream sports in the US, which eschew acceptance for the sillier, stupider “virtues” of heteronormative machismo, with its “my ass is just for poopin’” and “to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen” and whatever other trite, cliché sentiments ruin those fan cultures almost absolutely and distract from the beauty of whichever game, be it ever so homelier than our better, bosser, beautiful game.

Chicago had their Our City, Our Diversity tifo, which (fuck you, Houston! fuck you with the cock of a gorilla with gangrene in the glans!) is a start, and Sporting Kansas City—which is better than your team, unless your team is Sporting Kansas City, in which case it’s still better than your team, c.f. Chance Myers’s Comunardo Niccolai homage—is timing a match to explicitly coincide with Pride Week, which—like an MLS Cup, an Open Cup, and the current standings—makes them better than the Chicago Fire. It’s a start. But only a start. This falls on everyone. The hot chick who’s way too into the game? She’s one of us. The ugly chick who’s way too into the game? She’s one of us. The woman, pretty or ugly or fat or thin, who sits the whole 90′? Fuck her, fuck her tennis clap, fuck her pinky-in-the-air approach to eating nachos and her audible “how much time is left?” whenever… whenever.

We want screamers. We want face painters. We want women who flip off the ref and call Beckham a cunt and a wanker and an abatino and—horror of horrors—a Galaxy player. We want women who swear when they step in dog shit, or explicitly will Simon Borg to eat said dog shit, and choke on it, and die.

We want women who care about the future of soccer in America. And if you care about the future of soccer in America, can you honestly claim to not want Simon Borg to eat dog shit, choke on it, and die?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

These niggas sure came out the closet section 8
hahaha no offense anyone haha

gay4soccer.com has fuller details, but basically some idiot Houston fan combined the idiocy of Colin Clark’s “fucking faggot” with the idiocy of MLS’s “you had me at strippers” in Houston’s very first game back following Colin Clark’s “fucking faggot” remark away at Seattle. Yes, that was a long time ago. Houston’s gone a long time since their last game. Well, since their last game that lasted 90 minutes.

We’ve all had to deal with closed-minded, judgmental morons at some point in our lives. My dry cleaner, for instance, gives me dirty looks when I call his attention to the bacon grease stains on my linen-wool-blend slacks. Okay, so I watched For the Bible Tells Me So a few days ago, and Tongues Untied is still on my “to watch” list, and this… weird, just weird FB post is looking more the latter than the former. But “niggas”? For random people on the far side of a stadium? Perhaps this would be better:

These good gents, who are possibly Hamites, have quite indubitably rendered public knowledge their non-hetero-normative sexual proclivities cum gender identity. I refer, of course, to a certain contingent within Section 8. What jolly, riotous sport I find in this! Please note, I intend neither to disparage the character of any individual present, nor to incite division within the community, through the frank and candid flavor of my remarks, but I must declare I find the situation frolicsome, jocose, and comedic. Comedic? Nay! Downright gay!

Now, it is Chicago. They have pro sports teams with names like Bears, Cubs and Bulls. “White Sox” might mean something in LGBT slang, too, for all I know. Maybe involving a certain Rolling Stone cover, and what some men my age, then young boys, did with said cover.

I’m tempted to go off on a tangent about Dynamo girls and over-emphatic declarations of hetero-normative masculinity—I mean, some of them have “tans” so orange they look topless in Dynamo orange when you squint—but I like pretty girls in skimpy outfits as much as the next guy (Blanka Vlašić? Smokin’. Alex Morgan? Not enough paint thinner in the world to clean that shit off. Sports Illuwuh?), and the guy after him, and the guy after him, and the guy after him, and the guy after him, and the guy after him, but—whoa! not the guy after him! Yeah, not that guy! He likes dudes the way I like girls! He watches Blanka Vlašić to see how high she can jump! And Alex Morgan to see how low she can stoop! (She does play for Seattle, right? I am picking on her for a reason here.)

I lost you back at “topless”, didn’t I?

But between fans chucking stuff at Becks and Cakes and… Keano? (I forget who all plays for the Gals) at MLS Cup 2011, and Clark’s nonsense at Seattle a few weeks back, Houston’s already looking shaky on issues of both fan conduct and hate speech. And I support a team whose “fans” chuck things at our own keeper’s head. No, Sporting Kansas City, not whoever-the-thing in Serie C1. I’m sad that happened there, too, though. Is “Double Secret Probation” a thing in MLS? Is Houston already on it, but they double secret don’t know it yet?

Yeah, probably not.

(The Xmas tree shape is really only appropriate for Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes, or Canada’s U23 team. Or perhaps green-frosted gingerbread. You know, various variations on the “cupcake”.)

Anyway…

If LA bunkers against SKC, they’re going to turn their 18 into a shooting gallery. Even if we’re shooting with our eyes closed, some shot, at some point, will go in. If the Galaxy midfield presses up, they run the risk of getting caught too far upfield, something they’ve (to hear their fans tell it) been having issues with all season long.

If they play four at the back, one center defender does nothing all game but making sure CJ Sapong does nothing all game. If they succeed in neutralizing Sapong, during the run of play at least, then they shut down a lot of our attack on the left, since the left will send crosses in to Sapong, but no one on the right seems to want to play over to our left forward, no matter how open he is, unless of course Kamara has decided to switch sides with Convey for a 3-5 minute stretch just so he can blow. your. mind.

The other center defender (I’m assuming they have two, despite the fact that, with Omar Gonzalez out, they have zero) is going to need to stay positioned to shut down Kamara/Myer’s angle at goal, for when they (and they will) beat whoever the Galaxy puts on the left, but also remain positioned to shut down Zusi’s angle at goal, if he comes charging up the middle with Galaxy D-mids 5 feet behind him—which will happen, a few times at least, when Kamara/Myers has beaten the leftback so badly he has time to turn all the way around and send that ball right to where Zusi wants it.

Obviously when LA’s midfielders get back, things are simpler for them.

Offensively, for LA, SKC not only saw its midfield caught too far upfield—we saw our midfield and our wingbacks caught too far upfield. The fact that Chivas makes Leonardo Da Vinci, Stanley Kubrick and Kevin Shields look like guys who have no problem finishing surely spared us some blushes—and saved us some points. If LA does bunker, simply waiting for SKC’s midfielders to push too wide, possibly to cover forward runs by Myers and Sinovic, and catching Cesar in a less-than-ideal position (God forfend!) they should be able to (if they have the ball; if Espinoza takes a shot we’ll have plenty of time to get back while Saunders takes his goal kick) thread a low through ball to Keane (or some other Galaxy forward who hasn’t been carrying the team all by himself for the past few weeks) and let him take a 30-40 yard run at goal past his choice of Collin or Besler, before support can get back.

Surely Robbie Keane’s got the confidence to try to blaze past Aurélien Collin with the ball at his feet. I mean, he has talent to spare, right?

(I have no idea how autocorrect got “talent” from “teeht”—surely opt-out autocorrect functions are a first amendment violation, no?)

And now, the question more relevant to likely outcomes, how can SKC beat LA? I’m gonna phone this one in and say “score more goals than they concede”. Never heard that before, huh?

After that Pérez can get onto a twelve step program: take twelve steps, without falling down. Then, as a reward, he can watch his favorite Michael Douglas movie, which is (you guessed it!) Basic Instinct.

You thought I was gonna say Falling Down? Or The Game? Pérez has no respect for The Game. Oo! They have Incesticide on karaoke! Let’s sing track 1!

Besides, only a f********** wouldn’t like Basic Instinct.

Wait, is the profanity blocker gonna star out film critic?

Which segues into me doing my NSFWiest favorite thing in the world: chewing out a low-rent cunt. In this case: 1) metaphorically 2) Colin Clark.

My God, he is a cunt. I’ll refrain from making the obvious callback to focus on Colin Clark. The cunt. Who is a cunt. Yeah, that cunt.

My legal advisor is shaking his head and pantomiming severing his carotid. I assume he’s suggesting I arrange the gruesome murder of—Dudley Moore? Him? Oh, he’ll sue? That cunt?

Whatever.

So Colin Clark called a ball kid a “faggot”. If that gets starred out like “film critic,” and you still haven’t seen the video, it kinda sounds like “faggorz”. The ball kid, basically, didn’t put the ball right where the Dynamo player wanted it—as if Colin Clark has never been guilty of failing to put the ball right where a Dynamo player wanted it—so Clark turned his head back and called him a “faggot”.

He was in a hurry, see, so he took the time to turn around and call the kid a “faggot”.

7 minutes into a 0-0 game.

Clark’s empty-cranial-cavity-where-a-brain-should-be fart follows Lee Nguyen’s fagggggggg tweet, which begs two questions: 1) what the hell is wrong with Lee Nguyen 2) What the hell is wrong with the G on Lee Nguyen’s keyboard.

Ngggggggguyen apologized, promptly and thrice-over, and Clark is following suit:

He also sent a tweet to Gay4Soccer, a U.S. website covering the issue of homophobia in the sport and working to assemble a list of “allies” in the cause.

“I’m very sorry for my actions tonight, and I would love for you to consider me a #soccerally moving forward,” Clark wrote.

i.e., please, gay people, please tell people I don’t hate gay people, so people, gay or otherwise, won’t hate me.

Nguyen at least offered to do whatever he could to help out with whatever he could. Clark, he wants his name added to a list, so he can point it out to people who want to add it to some other, far worse list. Like the-list-of-people-whose-names-Dan-Savage-is-going-make-mean-new-things.

He is going to apologize to the ball kid, though. #Rule34cmonyoutube

So Colin Clark’s tail is now tucked firmly enough between his legs to keep him from sticking his head up his ass for at least a little while. A week. Maybe two. Maybe.

But the reaction to this has (perhaps inevitably) drawn comparisons to Suarez-Evra, and Terry-Ferdinand, and they are significantly different.

You don’t call someone who isn’t black a “nigger” for doing something lame or stupid or clumsy. You wouldn’t say: “You nigger, Jim, you ain’t read Mark Twain” to a white kid named Jim. Who hasn’t read Mark Twain. Or whatever.

But people call gentiles “Jews” for shortchanging them, or for appearing to be “cheap” in some other fashion. You know, something like: “The boss tries to RobertKraft us every chance he gets.” But substituting “Jew” for “RobertKraft.” Is that anti-Semitic? If you substitute “gyp” for “RobertKraft” is that Antiziganistic?

Um… yeah. Yes. It damn well is.

And that’s a place where the it’s-like-the-n-word-for-black-people analogy breaks down. Criticizing people who are not a member of a set for bad behavior by using terms, derogatory or otherwise, that identify a member of that set, constantly reinforces the message that Jews are cheap, or Romani are thieves, or homosexuals are lame stupid wimps. It doesn’t matter if it’s one gentile calling another gentile a “Jew” to criticize him, it doesn’t matter if no actual Jewish people are present at the time, and it doesn’t matter if both gentiles involved deny being anti-Semites. Simply swapping bigoted banter like that keeps the hurtful stereotype in circulation. It’s the same with “faggot” or “homo”. If the ball kid Colin Clark called a “faggot” actually is gay, that’s terrible. If the ball kid Colin Clark called a “faggot” isn’t gay, then the subtext of Clark’s “poorly chosen words” is this:

Because of something you did wrong, I hold you in such low regard, that you’re as bad as someone who is homosexual.

And that’s a terrible message to send.

So MLS announcers are a bunch of Homers. (For MLS fans in the UK, that means something different here. Like “fag” does, over there.) All except my team’s home announcer, Callum Williams, who is never biased and gets every call right and is smarter than you and could beat up your dad. We all know this, we all accept this, yet we all make posts about it in MLS General and MLS News as if no one has heard it before. Also, most of us agree that MLS announcers are a bunch of homers.

(Sometimes I have to remind myself that Jake Yadritch is a real person, and not just Cal Williams’s imaginary friend he sometimes addresses by name in the middle of saying something else, like “Hey, Verne!” or “Dear, God!”)

So Columbus Crew home announcers claim that refs will job Montreal because Montreal already have a reputation for being thugs. They’d only played two league matches prior to visiting Crew Stadium on Saturday, but that well-earned reputation dates back to the moment they announced the hiring of Jessie Marsch as head coach. Dear, God! What a thug! (“What a thug, Jake Yadritch!” works just as well, no?) I can see it now:

Jesse Marsch: There’s a player named Karate? We have to get him!
A Person Who’s Normal: Actually, it’s Corradi, not Karate.
Jesse Marsch: I must have him! Karate….. CHOP!

I got the feeling Montreal were being jobbed by the ref early in the first half. It’s just a feeling, I’m not going to make rational arguments to support it, so it carries less weight than a supported-by-argument claim to the contrary would (see what I did there?). I also felt Houston got jobbed by the ref early in the first half at Seattle. I’m not going to gripe about that, though, as I take delight in any and all misfortune to come Houston’s way.

But I do want to complain about Columbus. Without examining specific comments and inviting the horseshit storm of “anything can mean anything out of context”—I did my Reader Response reading back at school (Who de Man? Paul de Man!)—a brief look at the following, taken from the Crew’s website, should be enough to establish at least a potential conflict of interest:

Team Staff
Head Coach: Robert Warzycha.

Assistant Coaches: Ricardo Iribarren, Mike Lapper, Vojislav “Scoop” Stanisic, Duncan Oughton

CSCS Strength and Conditioning Coach: Brook Hamilton

Director of Team Operations: Tucker Walther

Equipment Manager: Rusty Wummel

Support Staff
Public Address Announcer: Todd Bell

Television Play-By-Play: Dwight Burgess (Voice of The Crew), Duncan Oughton

Radio Play-By-Play: Neil Sika

Color Commentary: John Bluem

Press Box Staff: Steve Haller, Joe Merth, Dan Nelson

As a Sporting fan, my initial reaction was, of course, “HSG”. But Clark Hunt’s lending SKC the replica trophy Lamar Hunt commissioned following our 2000 MLS Cup victory (yes, we have to give it back soon; no, Kei Kamara will not drop and break it), so instead of saying something profound and erudite about HSG’s cost outlay, like SMH LOL@u crew 2 troo dat! *hugs* hi5s pie!, I’m just going to point out that one of the Crew’s announcers is also listed as one of the Crew’s first team coaches.

And Portland fans are mocking Seattle announcers for wearing Sounders scarves in the booth. SMH LOL@timbs hi5s hugs! TBH LOL pie!

Columbus’s other announcer, the Voice of Sauron, Dwight Burgess, said something during the Montreal match that illustrates my main reason for feeling that homernouncers ought to be considered harmful. No, not “You’re my treasure. You’re my little kiwi fruit.” No. He explained the offside rule, for viewers who “aren’t as familiar with soccer”, going as far as to contrast it with hockey’s offside rule.

If you have viewers who don’t know the offside rule, then you have viewers who don’t know what constitutes a foul, a card or a penalty. When homernouncers go so far to as claim that a deserved penalty was undeserved, or vice-versa, or an undeserved ejection was deserved, or vice-versa, and so on, based not on what happened on the field or the angle from which they’re viewing it, but on which of the teams benefits from the call going the way the homernouncers want it to, then we’re setting the progress-of-the-sport back, at least a little bit, which is harmful. Or a little harmful. Or mostly harmless. Or so long, and thanks for all the fish.

I’m not saying Burgess or Oughton did that on Saturday. But announcers calling MLS games have done it before and will do it again. And having to explain (e.g.) the offside rule for a Chiefs fan, or a five year old, or your octogenarian great-grandmother, and then explain on top of that that the announcers are idiots/liars/bacon-wrapped-orphan-eaters (you should all catch that reference) consumes valuable time that could otherwise be spent drinking beer or screaming “Your head’s fatter than your wife, ref!” or “Why? Why must you turn this into a field of lies?” when the ref makes a perfectly correct, obviously impartial decision (or not, like when it goes against my team) that doesn’t benefit my team as much as Everettian-MWI suggests an alternate call might have.

Also… boogers!

Some other thoughts on NE@KC: Espinoza wanted a goal so bad he couldn’t see straight, which accounts for his aim on some of those shots he whiffed. Convey isn’t as good on the left as Kamara is on the right; also, Convey was reportedly sighted at a BBQ joint in KC just throwing ribs away, instead of turning them into beautiful naked women of loose morals who speak Parseltongue and hawk fruit. Seth Sinovic might be the only human being in the world—one of the two, if you use the term “human being” loosely enough to encompass Robert Kraft therein—incapable of feeling any pity at all for the New England Revolution. And as much as I think American celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day are rooted in cultural misperceptions stemming from pondular disputes as to how one ought to interpret phrases such as “A guy lets the whole world know he’s Irish when he walks into a bar and makes sure everyone within 25 feet of him gets totally bombed” or “After his sixth car bomb, he could barely walk” or “The blight of the English imperialist tyrant will be driven from the land if you fine ladies show us your titties” or “Now jump up and down a little, yeah, like that”, that was one helluva goal celebration.

I believe an imaginary conversation I just had in my head with an imaginary college girl wearing a green t-shirt and no bra ended with me getting slapped full across the face. So she beat you to it, non-imaginary Irish brother in law!

Robbie Keane, who is also non-imaginary and Irish but who is not my brother in law, had a good game. Generally, this early in the season, if a team from the West (like LA) plays a team from the East (like DC), I’m supposed to pull for the team in the West to beat the team in the East (and East-East contests to end in ties) so that my team (in the East) can pull ahead in the standings (in the East). And then later drop a house on the West, like our (old) name implies. But in this case that would mean pulling for LA. Which would be awful. I’d be sitting at home, watching the game, and LA would score, and I’d cheer, and then some xenobiologists would walk into my living room and say “Robert Kraft was unavailable, might we document your non-human morphology” and I’d just glare at them while sipping from the imaginary Guinness the imaginary girl in the green tee most likely spat in. They would, of course, be wearing white coats. But what’s the alternative? Pull for DC? *shudder* A meteor strike? Christopher Nolan might be editing The Dark Knight Rises in LA, and if nerds come to hate asteroids then the world as we know it really will end in 2012. A pitch invasion in which no one is injured but for which both teams are docked points is probably the ideal result of a match like this, but it was held in LA; if fans in LA were going to mount a pitch invasion, they’d go out to the parking lot, get in their cars, then drive onto the pitch.

Why can’t they both lose?

Maybe teams should get 3 points for a win, and 0 points for a loss, and –3 points for a tie. And female players should dress like Power Girl and Psylocke and Emma Frost (I love asteroids!). And goal line technology should be implemented at AYSO games. And MLS should have promotion and relegation and winter schedule and single table. And Qatar should host the World Cup. In a giant air-conditioned yurt. And I should root for LA when they play a team in the East.

Unless it’s TFC, cuz that shit’s just funny. Har!

The true sandwich boards of soccer, for my money, are in the Chinese Super League. When last I bought season tickets for Shenzhen Ruby (shirt and scarf included) I paid 100RMB—which is like dinner for two at Burger King, so it’s not really all that much money. Shenzhen Ruby currently plays in the Chinese second division (the “China League One”) after Philippe Troussier—the “white witch doctor” you most likely remember having coached Japan at the 2002 World Cup—oversaw their meteoric rise to the relegation zone. Two quick addenda: 1) If you hire a guy described as a “witch doctor” as your manager, you can’t be surprised when your team play like zombies. 2) Meteors, by definition, never “rise”.

Since it was established in 1994, Shenzhen F.C. has been rebranded more times than the ass of an epileptic cow. They were actually named after a travel agency for awhile. They were owned by the Ping’An Group from 1997 to 2002, sometimes named Ping’An, sometimes Ping’An Insurance, and sometimes half named after Ping’An and half named after Kejian (of Everton shirts fame).

They were briefly “owned” by Kingway Beer, uncontestedly the local beer of Shenzhen (despite being incorporated in Bermuda, they are mostly owned by an HK-based holding of the Guangdong provincial government, and have a brewery in Shenzhen’s Bao’An District), who are currently facing bankruptcy less than a year after the Heineken/Asia Pacific Breweries joint venture divested. “Kingway Beer”, I’ll note, is the English name of 金威啤酒. 百威啤酒 is the Chinese name under which Budweiser (St. Louis, not Budweis) is sold. So basically Shenzhen F.C. spent a year as a sandwich board for the lawnmower lager equivalent of Stars & Bucks Cafe. Except, of course, that Arabs make coffee you’d actually drink.

All this is prelude to my incredulity at John Duerden of ESPN/Soccernet’s rose-tinted appraisal of Guangzhou Evergrande and Chinese soccer in general:

Guangzhou are the standard bearers for the new-look Chinese football scene at home and overseas. The team, from the city formerly known as Canton, started the spending spree in the country and are showing little signs of stopping. They have already gone from the second division to the Chinese title in successive seasons. Now, with a squad jam-packed full of domestic internationals and highly-paid foreign stars (Dario Conca from Argentina is reportedly among the top five top earners in the world), they have eyes on the Asian Champions League that starts this week. (emphasis mine)

Yes, Shenzhen soccer fans despise and envy Guangzhou’s soccer largese. Unlike Shenzhen Ruby, Guangzhou Evergrande gets increasing amounts of money from their government depending on how high up the table they finish, and Guangzhou’s owners, real estate behemoth Evergrande Real Estate (perhaps better known as Hengda Real Estate), give the club enough of their own money that… well, “lighting cigars with 100RMB bills” doesn’t work, because 100RMB is like dinner for two at Burger King, and that’s the highest denomination they have. Enough to make the government monies look like pocket lint, at any rate.

2012 sees a modified version of Guangzhou Evergrande’s 2011 5-1-3 performance incentive system—500k per league win, 100k per league tie, –300k per league loss—coupled with even larger win bonuses for Champions League results (1.4 million RMB for the 5-1 pasting they handed Jeonbuk) have yielded 2.4 million RMB in player bonuses for the first three matches. Under the 5-1-3 policy they lost 300,000RMB per league loss, a practice still in place in the current 3-0-3 system (for CSL) and 6-3-0 system (for ACL), but you can see why the rest of us envy them. Add to that also that Shenzhen fans have no idea how Ruby owner/chairman Wan Hongwei earned his fortune… but bear in mind that we also have no idea how Troussier earns his, so maybe we’re just generally clueless… like hockey fans.

(One popular theory is private equity investments. He’s pledged US$1 million over 4 years to UNESCO, so he’s not the new New York Cosmos or anything, but it’s not as concrete as, well, concrete, one of the products Dalian Aerbin’s owners manufacture.)

But oddly ignored in both the passage quoted above and the article as a whole is the (much publicized) fact that Guangzhou was sent down to the China League One (China’s D-2) as punishment for their role in a (again, much publicized) match-fixing scandal that saw one-time CFA deputy chief Yang Yimin, that-Chinese-guy-you-saw-refereeing-at-the-World-Cup Lu Jun, and at least 19 others sent to prison. I’m taking that count from the first google hit to not include video, but this story was everywhere. It is, as the kids sometimes say, “a thing”.

That Juventus went from playing in Serie B to a third place finish in Serie A in consecutive seasons is hardly indicative of new ambitions. In the case of Juventus, it’s actually indicative of genuine struggles, as is their failure to win a scudetto since.

Guangzhou’s real rise to the first division occurred when they won the second division in 2007, several years before Evergrande bought the team. Evergrande assumed ownership a week after the punitive relegation was announced—punishment for a match fixed in 2006, while still a second division club. The real cause for optimism is not simply the rampant spending, with no hope of the club itself ever making a profit, but the assumption of control by an untainted ownership group.

Guangzhou won the league in 2011, are 1-0 thus far in 2012 league play with that 5-1 AFC Champions League victory over Jeonbuk last Wednesday to dispel any remaining doubts about their on-the-field ability. But for Duerden to so glaringly ignore the role that Chinese soccer’s biggest club played in Chinese soccer’s biggest scandal of, at the very least, the Super League era, raises both questions and suspicions. Perhaps he felt we all knew the story? But if the core of his op-ed is that Chinese club football is turning a corner and striding confidently out into a bright new day, then the darkness and dankness of past years offers stark contrast to the optimistic radiance of the new chapter Guangzhou is writing for the CSL. It provides, as the kids sometimes say, “a foil”.

I suspect Duerden is, as Roger Ebert sometimes says, a “quote whore”.

Several years ago, the old Jia-A League, founded at roughly the same time as MLS and Japan’s J-League, was is in imminent danger of joining the NASL, the W-USA and (let’s be real) the WPS on the trash heap of history. With the establishment of the Chinese Super League came new guidelines to ensure owners’ long-term financial viability, reminiscent of US Soccer’s recent NASLv2 guidelines (though thornier and less enforceable; how do you enforce division-graded financial requirements while employing English-style promotion and relegation? for starters), as well as youth development initiatives that could likewise be compared to American/Canadian youth development standards put in place by MLS (with the occasional prodding from the Players’ Union). Talk of imminent collapse evaporated. So too did the success of the Chinese national team. The Chinese men made their only Word Cup finals appearance in 2002 (helped in part, no doubt, by the host byes granted Japan and South Korea, as well as remaining AFC powerhouses Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia all being drawn in the other of the two final qualifying groups) and were runner-up to Japan in the 2003 AFC Asian Cup (with riots in Beijing following that loss). The CSL played its inaugural season in 2004.

China has already been eliminated for Brazil 2014. Being able to beat Korea might be a big deal. It might not be. But not being able to beat Jordan is definitely a big deal. Jordanian soccer fans routinely complain that their national soccer team hasn’t won a World Cup since 1966.

Give it a minute.

Yeah.

The Chinese real estate bubble is more or less everyone in China’s favorite topic of conversation, as long as they’re kind of sober and don’t have line-of-sight on girls in bikinis selling cigarettes or monkeys smoking cigarettes they bought from girls in bikinis. “Needless to say that there is a huge bubble in Chinese real estate… it is almost ludicrous to say that there is no bubble” –thus spoke Zarathustra. How financially dependant the government is upon the existence of an incredibly—I mean the word literally, one simply cannot credit it—successful property development/real estate sector is beyond both my ability to analyze and the scope of this blog. Certainly much revenue comes from taxation, profitable SOEs like China Tobacco and interest collected from loans to deadbeat nations like the United States. But selling public land to wealthy developers for increasingly incredible (again, used literally) prices makes up a good chunk of government revenue. The lack of property tax, down payments of (up until a few years ago) 20% (now 30%) on 75 year mortgages with little-to-nothing in the way of rent control… incredible-used-literally. “Too big to fail” takes on a whole new resonance. But with, by my half-assed count, 10 of the 16 (by others’ more competent counts, 14 of 16) current CSL teams owned by companies either wholly or significantly invested in construction or property development or real estate there is some nervous… I almost said “twittering”, but that verb’s been hijacked by social media technologies. Griping? Gossiping? Murmuring makes it sounds seditious, or conspiratorial, and it’s really just something to do with fellow footie fans when your team’s season sucks. So “commiserating”, I’ll go with that.

Shanghai Shenhua is mostly owned by Zhu Jun, i.e. The9, the video game company that until 2009 had exclusive Chinese rights to World of Warcraft, and still have the rights to FIFA Online 2 and a slew of other titles that are so much more fun than
好好学习，天天向上！ or talking to girls. Jiangsu Sainty are, I believe, more concerned with exporting manufactured goods. Beijing Guo’An is owned by state-owned financial investment company CITIC. But in a preponderance of instances, the long term outlook of CSL teams is tied to the long term outlook of the famously problematic, infamously gamed Chinese real estate market. With far too many people paying far too much to either share cold-water efficiencies and/or commute long distances at slower speeds than even non-Kenyans can run, and too many shiny new condos sitting empty, titles held by wealthy real estate speculators who don’t pay property tax, something has to give well before China makes it to another World Cup—unless they qualify by hosting, as Qatar has.

Expecting clubs to run at Abramovichesque deficits can’t be a long term solution to China’s club-level woes. Ticketing isn’t much of a revenue generator (I was an STH for 100RMB), no one pays for parking in China (they see sidewalks through Italian eyes, and often see bus stops as sidewalks) and their TV viewership makes that of MLS matches look like the Apollo 11 landing. Concessions aren’t much of a revenue stream, either; China isn’t a nation of beer drinkers, and south China isn’t really a nation of drinkers, period. Hell, even the hard-drinking Mongolians up north get more baijiu and arak on their shirts than in their mouths. If they had girls in micro-shorts with pony kegs on their backs selling beer in all their stadiums… they’d be Japanese baseball, not Chinese soccer.

The “Eurosnob” factor is much stronger in China, as well, though when most teams change names more often than the Colorado Rapids change primary home colors, it’s hard to blame fans for being drawn to clubs that not only participate in elite competitions, but actually value their tradition.

Matches are often viewed as fixed affairs even before kick-off, including the (to me) perplexing school of conspiracy thought that claims a player on loan from Club A to Club B will play to lose when Club B (whose shirt he’s wearing) plays Club A (with whom he’s ultimately technically signed). In the States we assume he’s going to want to make his original club sorry they loaned him out. I mean, if your boss made you hire a moving van twice in one year, you’d wanna feed him his teeth through his Jumbotron, right?

And then, between the failures of the Chinese national team and the rise of Chinese basketball stars like Yao Ming and “Chinese” basketball stars like Jeremy Lin, participation wanes. Also, half-court works for basketball, and Chinese, being non-Kenyans, don’t like to run. Hence the snail-paced commutes.

Blackburn overspent and won an EPL title in ’95, only to be relegated four years later. Fiorentina in 2002 is every non-San Jose fan’s worst nightmare. Investing money to win games or to grow the brand is hells-yeah-awesome in the short run, but without strong fan support both independent of on-the-field performance and of genuine financial benefit to the club, the CSL will at best become a top-heavy, SPL-type league of no real use to the national team, or at worst an NASL redux with Guangzhou as the Cosmos and everyone else as everyone else.

EDIT: numbers on the 5-1-3 system and 3-0-3 system are in millions, not hundred thousands, as should be apparent from the links.