Tjäna, vet du inte att det alltid handlar om Sverige? Nej, ja skoja bara - det var en grab som började snacka om Allsvenkan också...
http://www.xs4all.nl/~kassiesa/bert/uefa/data/method3/ccoef2004.html These are official UEFA league rankings for the 2,003-04 season based upon the leagues records in UEFA Cups. To summarize : #1 is Spain (14.312 average); #2 France (13.500), #3 England (11.250); #4 Portugal (10.250); #5 Italy (8.775)... Norway's 9th, Belgium's 11th, Germany's Bundesliga 15th (their teams sucked last year in Euro play), Denmark's 18th, Greece's 20th, Sweden's 32nd. 51 leagues are ranked.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~kassiesa/bert/uefa/data/method3/crank2004.html if you however average out the results over 5 years: it comes out as from 1 to 10: Spain, England, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Greece, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Turkey. Belgium is 12th, Norway's 15th, Sweden's 24th.
No they didn´t. Brazil won the semifinal 1-0. And it was total domination as Brazil had most of the chances and dominated. The swedes cleared some of the line. The third place match endend 4-0 for Sweden over Bulgaria.
My observations here in England is that MLS is about the same level as the Championship...English 2nd division below the Premiership.
Is the Crew better than Rosenborg NO. Is the Crew better than Anderlecht NO. Could the Crew and Wizards compete in the Champions League NO.Could the Crew get a draw against Arsenal NO. The MLS is a good league but, it still needs time to grow. The MLS dosent have Relegation or Promotion thats another reason why some of the European leagues are better.
On a related note, here's where you can find out how common your name (or any name, for that matter) is in Norway: http://www.ssb.no/navn_en/
Rommul, this is a great point. It doens't mean that MLS would automatically churn out elite clubs if wealth and quality players were pooled in fewer clubs, but it does make it hard to compare two clubs, one European and the other American, that face totally different economic circumstances. The same could be said of differences between levels of competition. MLS teams are guaranteed of playing in MLS next year. Most European clubs face the prospect of relegation or promotion. Would MLS teams play better if there were more risk and reward riding the line?; if every game the Revs played was like the last game of the season against the Fire? Probably.
Don't confuse MLS/US NATS with Olympic Basketball my dear friend. I would argue that athleticism in the MLS and US Soccer has been below par internationally until recent years. Every new American generation contains superior athletes, but the 'hustle' team play has been a part of our culture for years. It is becuase in the past that we weren't as athletically talented. In conclusion, the US plays like the Danes/Swedes as a team and are overachievers. Still the Nordic's countries have players we simply don't currently have. That being said, these guys play abroad, and the domestic leagues in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway aren't superior to MLS in any way.
As a Swede this thread has been interesting to read, though I didn't read all five pages. Some general comments: 1 Sweden got 9 milion inhabitants , Norway I think 4,5. US 250 milion. So the comparations are quite strange. 2 In Sweden our first league has 14 teams, some of the teams in the bottom of the serie are from citys with a total population of less than 75 000. Therefore some of the teams aren't that good, they don't have the money to counterbid on the better players. 3 We do NOT, have soccer academys in Scandinavia . We are not trying to produce eliteplayers. At least not while the players are still kids. The reason why we produce so many (if you compare to the size of this nation) good soccer- and hockey-players, swimmers etc, is because kids in general don't want to sit still. We have PA lessons in school all the way up to college, even though it getting less and less hours. What I'm trying to say is that comparing the footballplayers in USA and Scandinavia is useless, since USA is allmost as big as EU. It's rather the structure of the entire society in USA and Norway/Sweden/Denmark that should be compared. And by the way, election day tomorow If the US population had been healthy, than Sweden wouldn't have won a single medal in the olympics and other events. So for more medals in the future... choose Kerry
US's got almost 300. Ya, 'cos they'll freeze their Swerige behinds to park benches... brrrrrrr.... BB, in the US, soccer isn't a popular <major league> sport. How highly do you think luge and biathlon rank?
Are the Revs and the Fire better than Sogndal? I'm about 99% certain they are. Most of the talent in any European league is concentrated in the top 3 or 4 clubs; Rosenborg is probably about as good player-for-player as a Rest Of The League XI. MLS, by comparison, spreads the talent around, which means the difference between first and last isn't very big.
Have no idea about the quality of MLS but you’re right that there's a big difference in quality between the top clubs and the bottom clubs in all leagues in Europe. Norway, Scotland, Holland and Belgium are extreme, with the same winners every year. Do you have a regular system in US like we have here in Europe, with 1:st, 2:nd, 3:rd division etc, or is it closed like the NHL and NFL?
...and this is totally "IIRC", but I just saw something yesterday that showed the all-Norwegian league XI (in a 4-4-2 formation, maybe?) for 2004, and Rosenborg for the first time in a really long time didn't have a single person listed on there. This would tend to refute your argument, although not necessarily the argument that Rosenborg could be a hell of a lot better team-wise than anyone else.
www.uslsoccer.com that's most of the rest of pro/semi-pro soccer it's not a matter of how popular soccer is as much as that the quality players get "developed". That's only started to happen the last 5-10 years.
For what? On the national team level, very little separates the US and Sweden, though Sweden's top players like Freddie Ljundberg and Zlatan Ibrahimovic are playing with the G-14 clubs and would rank higher than any US players at this moment. But, on the other hand, the US can field a lot more team speed. On the club level, the MLS is a salary-cap league, which precludes one dominating club. And this "average" MLS is about as good as roughly $2M can buy.
Without pro/rel, the 2nd and 3rd tier teams would have the option of blowing the team up, getting together a crew of youngsters, and hoping to ride them to the title before their salary demands necessitated them going to the big clubs. Think of the Cleveland Indians of the early 90s, or the Twins and A's now. With pro/rel, those teams would have to focus on surviving THIS YEAR, and not on building to win a championship 4 years down the road. I posted this on a thread that a Scot was posting on, and he said that was basically what was happening in Scotland, since for a couple of years, either the best team in the 2nd division didn't meet the SPL stadium standard, or one team was so horrible the other 11 teams were safe. He said that the midlevel teams in the SPL had, in fact, improved somewhat.
MLS is a closed, single-entity league, mainly because the single-entity system is seen as necessary for the financial survival of the league. All player contracts are owned by the league, not the clubs, though in practice the clubs are allowed to sign players at their own discretion as long as they stay within the league's salary restrictions and foreign player limits. (The simplest way to explain it, in European terms, is that the club says it wants a player and is willing to pay a certain salary, and the league will try to sign the player.) Promotion and relegation between divisions is probably unlikely to happen until soccer is much more popular in this country. The lower divisions have always been in poor health: there are many examples of clubs voluntarily dropping to lower divisions due to financial difficulties, and even a couple cases of clubs folding immediately after winning an A-League or D3 championship, and most A-League clubs' facilities would be an embarrassment in MLS.
Thanks for the information, it's good in one way, because that stops the sallarys from rising too much. Like it did in the best leagues in Europe during the 90:s, but it feels like this lead to a situation where clubs swap players within the MLS a lot. That happens of course here too, but not that much. Most of the players are brought from lower divisions and other countries.