So we are at a cross roads with Freddy adu. I am sick of it. Sorry mods. Please read before erased.

I've posted this before: YA is a limited-function forum. It has to do with international club careers of people who are or have at least a real chance of being US citizens. It does not have to do with the national team careers of those players. The Freddy thread in YA was talking about two things: his potential role/past play on the national team and his problems/potential as a player. Whatever news there was coming out of Blackpool was completely inundated by the same people saying the same things they've said over and over for years. That's fine. It's a perfectly legitimate topic for conversation...someplace else. We moved that conversation to a place that is better suited to house it. When new news for Freddy comes up that substantiates his status as a YA, then he'll get another thread going. We're not going to restart the same thread shortly after it's been moved someplace else.

Nobody (but you, that is) said anything about derision being the cause for this recent decision. In fact, despite your claims about extreme prejudice, we are very quick to delete derisive comments in those threads. The problem is that Freddy threads are for some reason consistently locked into a terminal death spiral around whether his positive attributes outweigh his negative ones, whether he brings anything of value to the US team, and to what extent does Freddy bear the responsibility for his marginal status in US soccer. If his performance on any international club is brought up, it is in support of these endlessly worked and reworked arguments. That is USA Men material. It's not YA material.

 

But we do close threads for people who cycle out of YA/international club status. That's always been the policy. Sometimes we don't have to, because the threads drift off the front page of their own accord. Other times we do, just because the (former) YA in question draws enough attention to keep the thread afloat. We also consider other issues in the course of making these decisions, such as whether there's anywhere else the topics under discussion can go.

The thing is, though, there aren't many players who have Adu's history. He's been in and out of clubs like a Vegas lounge lizard on a bender over the last few years. You couple that with the fact that Adu threads tend to be kept afloat by a dedicated group of posters who have areas of Adu-ological turf to defend and yeah, we've had to close more Adu threads in YA than is normal.

Why do we bother closing the threads? Because the forum loses the ability to perform its narrowly defined function if it's not watched (most commonly, it threatens to become just another USMNT forum, with people debating JK's or BB's or whoever's preferences for one guy over another). We have readily admitted that the YA boundaries are arbitrary, but then so are the boundaries describing most, if not all, of the sub-forums on this site. And they're the boundaries established at its inception.

All that said, we are perfectly happy to consider opening a Freddy at Blackpool news only thread.