Pelada

I watched a documentary last week that I would highly recommend to any soccer fan or player, but anyone else as well.  It started with the story of Luke and Gwendolyn, two former college soccer players who never made it in the professional leagues.  Having resigned themselves to the fact that they would never make it to “big time,” they tried to move on in life.  They found, however, that the game still drew them in.  They worked other jobs: Gwendolyn as a writer, Luke working on billboards, but they still found time to play.  Realizing that they were not alone in this predicament, they decided to do some investigation.

Named after the Brazilian word for “pick-up”, Pelada is the story of the other side of soccer.  Far away from the lands of multi-million dollar contracts, media spotlight, and world-wide competitions, soccer represents something entirely different. A healthy percentage of the world’s population plays “pick-up” regularly, loosely organized neighborhood games that are never recorded and have few spectators.  Luke and Gwendolyn decided to travel the world, going mostly to the overlooked and underdeveloped countries, to capture the heart of these games.  

Read Full Post »

Link of the Week

http://www.hammerandrails.com/2010/10/18/1759006/ignore-us-now-at-your-peril-the-revised-plan-for-the-national-title

I’m feeling lazy this week, so I’m just going to post an article about Purdue basketball’s revised plan for success following the loss of Robbie.  I don’t know about everyone else, but this gets me excited, it’s kind of nice to be underdogs and fighters once again.   I’m still glad I camped out for basketball tickets.  And while I’m completely ripping stuff off from Hammer and Rails, I’ll close with this, from another post of theirs.

“We’re still Boilermakers – You know what that means, right? We’re still going to fight like mad bastards in every game. So we have to tie our shoes a little tighter and buckle down more on defense. We’re going to get some leadership and if we have to drag teams down into the hell of slugging it out defensively with us, so be it. Remember when the 2007 team did the same thing to Florida in the NCAA Tournament? That Florida team is one of the best college basketball has seen in the last 20 years, and a team with half the talent we currently have dragged them down into a war. We will make every night a 40 minute war and teams will remember they have played us.”

Read Full Post »

Can You Hear Me FIFA?

So, in case you didn’t already know this, I am a huge soccer fan.  This means that, for about one month every four years, not much in my life matters.  Because, for this month at least, the events of my life pale in comparison to the glory that is the World Cup.  I will wake up early to watch games; I will catch replays of the ones I miss on espn3.com; I will cheer ecstatically for every positive move from my team, U.S.A, and I will experience the inevitable sorrow of their trademark early dismissal from the tournament.  But I will not stop there.  I will loyally watch every game from the round of 16 up until the final; because for me, the Cup does not end when America’s chances end: it’s usually only just beginning.

But I’m not a typical American. The typical American is skeptical, at best, of soccer.  They may not hate it, but they vastly prefer fast-paced, action packed sports like football or basketball, or sports steeped into American tradition, like baseball, golf, or racing.  A Harris poll conducted almost annually since 1985 confirms this.  When American participants were asked to choose one sport as their favorite, only 2% chose soccer as their favorite, which put it in 9th place.  Unfortunately I can’t compare apples to apples on this, but for rough comparison, 46% of adults in the UK follow football(soccer), and 10% participate in it…

The point I’m trying to make here, is that FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, is largely missing out completely on the U.S. market.  97% of FIFA’s income comes from event related revenue.  Among other things, this covers licensing, marketing, and, primarily, broadcasting income.   What is their one chance to gain ground, and therefore increased marketing, licensing, and broadcasting revenue in the U.S. market? The World Cup.  This is the only time in four years that America watches soccer.  And a large percentage of Americans watch only matches in which the U.S. is involved.  So, based on a typical U.S. performance, that gives FIFA: 4 games.  Four games to capture our nation’s attention.  Four games to prove to the great god of sports, espn, that their investment was worth it.  So you’d think that, in those four games, FIFA would want to make sure that Americans were seeing soccer at it’s finest.  You’d think that FIFA would want these games to go flawlessly.  Right?  Right?

Well they didn’t.

Read Full Post »

Some Crazy French Guy

So, for the first post with any actual content, I decided to go pretty easy on you guys, and just put up some awesome videos (and overload you with links). If you haven’t heard of him already, let me introduce you to Remi Gaillard. His motto is, “It is by doing whatever that you become whoever,” which basically means that he does whatever ridiculous, insane, illegal thing he wants to do for the sake of comedy.  The idea, I suppose, is that you should not be limited by what is generally accepted, and that you should have fun with life.  Which is, I think, a fairly decent premise.  He does sometimes ruin businesses, steal from mcdonalds, and interfere with police, which I don’t really approve of, but he also does some awesome and ingenious things.  He’s also pretty amazing at both being a soccer player and impersonating one.  And finally, this last video simulates the ending of a cycling race for normal Sunday riders… You could say it’s about cycling, but I think it’s more about just making people’s day.  I hope it does the same for you.

Read Full Post »