2019 CONCACAF Champions League Thread

I think you'd be surprised what 21 year-old women in Kansas City that work in marketing know.

 

I'm sure I will be blown away with her knowledge of Klopp's gegenpress.

 

That's moving the goalposts a bit. Hell, I don't know jack shit about Klopp's gegenpress and I work in the soccer industry.

 

I'm not surprised at all that someone in the American soccer industry would be clueless about one of the world's most influential soccer tactics.

Perhaps you should spend less time defending the honor of hypothetical female soccer fans in Kansas City and spend more time reading up on the game.

 

Maybe you should re-calibrate your expectations closer to an average soccer fan when using this analogy. Your claim is like saying anybody who doesn't know what RPO (the new NFL buzz word) isn't a real fan when everyone knows the current option fad, they just don't necessarily know what to call it. Gegenpress is just the buzz word for aggressive pressing on a possession change.

 

What is it about the champion's league thread that brings the assholes out, year after year after year?

 

Klopp's wife sure was...........

 

If my job was to follow the NFL, I would know the buzz terms. And so too should a supposed soccer industry professional know these terms especially if he’s going to argue about me with what the average person knows about soccer. Instead he spends countless hours virtue signaling on the internet.

 

Dude get over yourself. I don't give a shit about Jurgen Klopp. It has absolutely zero to do with my life, what I do for a living, or the soccer I actually consume and enjoy. I'm sure you know jack all about Anson Dorrance's implementation of the 3-4-3, or Paul Riley's tactical innovations that are literally shaking the ground of high level professional and international soccer over the last three years - but I'm not going to suggest you're a moron or that all "serious soccer fans" should know. They're just not in the soccer that you consume or deal with.

And if you're going to argue with me what an average person knows about soccer, you should probably have some experience with average people.

If Jurgen Klopp's strategies are important for me to know, I'll figure it out when the time comes. Until then, I deal with the part of the soccer world I live and work in. If you want to follow the EPL or whereever Klopp is currently coaching, good for you. I hope you enjoy it.

 

The ground is literally shaking right now. I can feel it. These male coaches who couldn't make it in men's soccer are literally shaking the world with advanced tactics in women soccer teams (except when said teams are losing to the local MLS academy's U15 team.)

 

Are you suggesting that new tactics can only be developed by first-team men's team managers?

 

Not quite. Just expressing some skepticism here. There's no need to exaggerate the achievements of women's soccer coaches within the U.S. or elsewhere. And there's no need to conflate "women's soccer" with "high-level soccer," or at least until those women's teams can regularly beat amateur boys.

 

It’s good to see sexism is alive and well on BigSoccer.

 

You conflate two things (though not really) tactics and physical ability. I watched a U14/U15 or so boys team destroy the women's U20 team 8-1 or something like that. The tactically the women were better in every way. However the boys were so much quicker it didn't matter In most cases, it is the less gifted teams that come up with the tactical innovations. So your basis of argument really doesn't apply.

That said, while your argument doesn't apply, your underlying statement does as the women's game is far behind the men's side. In general (not all girls coaches are bad and certainly not all boys coaches are good), the girls are much more likely to get get the dregs for coaches. The other reality that many do not want to admit is in general girls are not as invested in soccer as the boys. If you go to a park and see a player practicing on their own, juggling or kicking a ball against the wall, in the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time that player will be male. So at the end of the day, the technical proficiency of top female players is nowhere near the male counterparts nor is the play as complex and as fast.

 

Facts are sexist, I guess. Carry on.

 

Probably should've stopped right there...

 

Why? For people interested in learning rather than regurgitating dogma, I'd recommend David Epstein's book "The sports Gene." It is an interesting and easy to read book with plenty of footnotes for those that like to dig into the scientific basis for what is discussed.

 

Yep great read

 

Acknowledging that women cannot reach the high level of soccer that men can achieve is now sexist. Lol at the anti facts virtue signaling going on in this thread.

 

If you had said that you might have a point (unlikely), but you didn't. You said women's soccer could never be high-level soccer. Not "could never reach the levels of men's soccer" just that you couldn't conflate women's soccer and high-level soccer.

 

Women's soccer can be played at a high level, be quite athletic, have clever strategy and significant skill. It is a worthy sport, and it can be absolutely worth the viewers time. But very few women can approach the athleticism of the average professional player. That is reality. And if you are going to label anyone who acknowledges this reality as a "sexist", then that word has been as devalued, as made empty of objective meaning, as others who have suffered that fate [such as "fascist" and "racist"]. It is as absurd as calling those who point out that the college game is not up to par with MLS, and that there is a significant difference in average talent and level of play, "classists".

 

You'll notice I didn't call him sexist. I just pointed out that he didn't say what he claimed to say.

Now I find what he said very borderline. To your point there is truth to the fact that the women can't play at the level of the men. But that doesn't inherently mean women's soccer can't be high-level in any number of ways. Soccer isn't all about physical attributes and there's nothing that prevents a female soccer player from having the same high-level mental attributes to succeed as a man does. There's also no reason that women's soccer couldn't advance the game in other ways such as training regimens, fitness, and such.

Given that he has, twice, suggested that women's soccer could not develop or otherwise advance the game in anyway it does come close to stereotyping on the basis of sex, which is literally one of the definitions of sexism.