LaGrandeOrange

Yeah- I feel the same, the amount of CPL talent moving to MLS/abroad is fairly impressive for such a short time and with such little infrastructure beforehand. I am a very rare person who follows the league without a club to support (the Alex Bunbury group has talked about coming into town for years, any day now...) and I find it to be a fairly admirable quality all things considered. I hope I'll be able to continue to watch, but I also probably won't put in extra effort since I don't have a club to support. It'd be very bad for something to happen to the league before 2026, I can't imagine FIFA would be too thrilled for a World Cup host to not have a domestic league.

Pretty fun template, I am wary of the halo on the hat though- I'd try it a little higher up like it was in the real life 61-65 version. I may just be old/boring but I wear a lot of caps and I don't like when they're too busy (like the Expos tricolore), they don't seem to look good on actual people.

I'd really like to think that! As zubazpirate points out- there's some fairly strong entities within the league, I have no doubt Forge and the Cavs could land on their feet regardless of what happens, but even without this uncertainty there's at least two (York and Valour) clubs who are on shaky ground.

I am unfamiliar with most about LDS, but is there a reason why the mormon population would not want to watch the team just because they didn't grow up with playing the game? Isn't Nevada one of the other handfuls of places with a significant population? The Grizzlies ECHL team seems to be at around the average attendance of the AHL, I've always been under the impression that saturation level/team success/marketing is what draws attendance for basically every team in the non-NFL leagues and we've seen with the Golden Knights/Kraken that the NHL is very happy to give expansion teams a good chance at early success (unlike the 90's/00's expansions).

I'm not sure who will produce the broadcasts, but it seems like a PWHL model (YouTube + occasional national) is probably the best course of action, but the PWHL has the benefit of national names and the CPL's marquee names are...the clubs in Hamilton and Calgary, ostensibly? It's so frustrating because it just takes so much work to build the domestic game in any country where it's not a huge part of the culture (I follow the A-Leagues to some degree too and Australia/NZ is having some issues) and people are impatient (naturally) AND have the benefit of still following CFM/TFC/Whitecaps in MLS, a league that (while a pyramid scheme) has somewhat successfully grown.

You should try to align the makers mark on the chest and the crest. That's pretty much universal in real kits unless the makers mark is below the collar.

Very cool! The Angels are the best one, I see no reason they shouldn't adapt it.

That's good news- Hummel tends to do good work.

You have a lot of really cool custom (I assume) typefaces for your wordmarks- the Warriors and Towers especially. Do you create whole typefaces or just do the characters for the wordmark?

Hi, I think it's as simple as, "Los Angeles" translates to "the Angels" and they are red largely because the Dodgers are blue. I believe the original Angels in the PCL were red and blue (and the Angels wore mostly blue in the 00's) .

Oh wow, I did not realise this thread was here, this is my world!!! The quick play games fit my current lifestyle a little better, although once my kids are a little older I can see myself getting into a longer play hockey or soccer game. To further speed it up, I often develop excel sheets that can do much of it. Not a huge football fan, but Fast Drive Football (which Discrim mentioned earlier) is so fun and has great customisation- the fictional league creation/maintenance is so smooth and feels realistic, especially when you get into some of the user created charts, you have a nice little self-contained fictional universe. Stone Mountain Press has three fun games (well, there's more but I've only played three) of note- Gridzone which is ostensibly a 7-on-7 football game, he's starting towards putting together NFL seasons but it is also designed for fictional league play, also with methods of going through the offseason. The game has no special teams, scoring is based on how far up the field a team progresses, based on skills of individual players and charts. Dice United is a beautiful soccer quick-play simulation, you get the experience of watching highlights on Match of the Day or the MLS Wrap-Up show, and there's lots of seasons (and a guide explaining how to rate any season you can find on FBRef). Stone Cold Hockey uses a very similar engine but uses it for hockey, and it's also a wonderful game with a lot of seasons that plays through pretty fast but still gives you the feel of watching highlights. Both games have a book for fictional team creation/season progress. Shoot-Out Hockey is a really good quick play game without much chart referencing, which is a nice feature- you can play with dice or fast action cards. It doesn't "backfill" the stats like many replay games, when you take a shot you know it's (X) player taking it, which is fun for a quick play game. The Beautiful Game is a very famous soccer simulation in this world where you can play any season ever with some quick math, this is a very fun game that sometimes feels a little more random than Dice United, but to me its' best feature is, similar to Shoot-Out is it doesn't feel like you're "backfilling" results, which is to say that when you flip a card for an attack you get some flavour text to set up and then roll dice to resolve, whereas in the Dice United/Stone Cold engine it's more like "Team A is on the attack, will they score or not?" Rugby World and World of Rugby League take the two rugby codes and put them into the Beautiful Game engine. I'm a big League guy, and WoRL scratches that itch. Finally I'll shout out Precision Sports Games who also have a fun Rugby League game, along with Aussie Rules and Rugby Union games. These are all the ones I play, although Dice United and Fast Drive Football are the big two for me right now. I'd add that I started out in MLB Showdown as well, and as a result (and of course my baseball team being killed off in 2004) I feel like I've had trouble ever getting into any other baseball game. Showdown Bot is a cool site though that makes cards from any player in Baseball Reference! NFL and NBA Showdown were really wonky games- NFL's barcode reader was broken year one, which killed any momentum the game could have built, and while they fixed it by year two, the damage was done. Wizards of the Coast also made a soccer game Football Champions which I tried SO HARD to get into, and I have so many cards (if I was willing to ship them to Italy, I could apparently make some good money), but just never quite worked for me as a game. I literally busted it out last week for my once every year or so attempt to like this game and it just doesn't work for me. Feels too stunted.

Lucho is really pretty incredible, happy to see him win it. Eastern Conference final really should be pretty exciting. Wilfried Nancy is a pretty great coach, sure wish my team could get a coach like him...

I maybe said this already, but the pinwheel Expos (and Orioles, and others) caps are fun on the players but look stupid on regular people, so the Expos look of my childhood (this one) is my favourite:

That's fairly commonplace in European hockey- in Switzerland the leading scorer on each team wears a flaming helmet and special sweater:

The somewhat cynical reasoning is that MLS is a bit of a pyramid scheme because it mostly makes money through expansion fees and the best justification they can get for charging those fees involves having a ton of matches, since it's mostly a gate-based league (and most MLS teams do draw very well). It operates in that way like every other North American sport, except unlike those leagues it has to contend with a higher body that can interrupt its' schedule (FIFA International breaks), and MLS has no real control over it, but the breaks are known far enough in advance that they could just...work around them.

I'm certainly feeling a little MLS fatigue- I think the earlier finish forced by the World Cup last year was favourable. It's a delicate balance of factors (and obviously it's weighted very heavily towards making the owners happy) but the long playoffs in other sports are aided by there being action daily or almost daily- with the big gaps and erratic scheduling it's a little tricky, especially since as time has moved on I've felt less connected to teams other than my own.

I've been a casual Als fan all my life and there have only been a few players to really break through and become stars (Calvillo, Boulay, Cahoon) but clearly Dequoy is the next one. The CFL's Tokébakicitte icon.

I assume you've completed these and are just posting them now, but would you be interested in keeping it going with the French Elite 1 or some of the top national teams? Most of the national teams have lacking aesthetics compared to their relatives in other top sports.

Pour ceux qui parlent français:

Hell yeah, was a great match- I have to admit I'm a total bandwagoner when it comes to the Als (as opposed to the Habs or Impact [refuse to use the new name]) but I'll probably head out to Percival Molson once or twice next year. This was a fun playoff run!

Aw man, I watch a lot of CPL and spaced on the green element to Cavalry. I'll throw another club out though, they were in Ligue 1 when I was a kid but I think have dropped down to the National, CS Sedan:

Pretty excited, it's been a minute since the Als have won. I can't claim to have followed the season too closely but the playoffs have been exciting and this Als defence is excellent- I don't know the Bombers well enough to know how bad they're going to beat us.

Is Everett an acceptable location? My Boston-area geography is so-so....is there T access?

Absolutely perfect, the biggest upgrade in this series so far I think.

This was exactly my question...who is this serving? And if the goal is to go to home markets...is that an admission the touring method is failing? Even though it's sort of the central premise?