Digby

It's not even just the penny-pinching! We have seen cheap teams find their ways to success, even Bloom's own Rays (a philosophy that shouldn't exist in a very wealthy market at the home of the $14 Bud Light, but I digress). It's the overpaying for Trevor Story and an unproven Japan league player while letting these other guys walk, it's giving up on 2022 at the deadline but not even doing a proper teardown, it's having zero prospects to show for any of this nonsense. They've both picked a bad philosophy and also executed it poorly. However, Fenway Park is in high demand as a concert venue and, I guess, hockey rink. So that's nice. Some of the reporting from inside the FO lately also suggests Bloom focus-groups every decision to death with his (no doubt numerous) staffers and hesitates to make big decisions in either direction.

Considering how play-it-safe most MLS kit decisions are, I appreciate the Sounders' off-and-on willingness to take more risks, even when the results are ugly. As distasteful as I found it to pretend Jimi Hendrix has anything to do with your soccer team, that last away kit really grew on me and I liked the easter egg of how it was basically a color inversion of their usual green/blue.

FH says Seattle is going to have a red away kit, which seems odd. Can’t really imagine that looking very Sounders, unless they’re going to yank the Kraken’s color scheme and beat them to a red base jersey. Also please enjoy this gem of a sentence from FH.

Continental Nations Leagues are just fine. I'm excited about this World Cup for having an intercontinental matchup as the final and it should always be that way. Infantino can never stop thinking about getting as much short-term profit as possible before he and his cronies die. That said, maybe we shouldn't have been so hasty to dump Confederations Cup.

Even before they entered the league I had fingers crossed for a light blue and yellow vertical-stripes jersey. Would be unique in the league and maybe even globally. The lightning bolts are fine, whatever, but the real shame would be dumping that color scheme. As an aside, do we know why Sons of Ben et al adopted the light blue? The Philly flag reads more as a medium/royal blue to me.

MLS holding jersey releases until just before the new season has been a thing since even well before the current supply chain angst. I think it’s only expansion teams who get stuff before the previous Christmas. I don’t really get it either!

I'm just glad we won't have to see the terrible white shirts in another major tournament. Using gold feels like a risky flex. I've actually thought about the WNT getting gold trim before for one of these extra Cup shirts but always imagined it would be on a navy/red shirt... gold on white seems potentially a legibility nightmare but might work nicely with navy trim.

Yeah, that's true. There was a brief period though where it looked like Portugal were going to become an impressively freewheeling side with no Ronaldo (and thus their best, but still outside, chance at making it to a WC final) but that didn't last longer than five minutes against Morocco.

I'm so bummed we won't get a Messi vs Ronaldo final, though. Would've been some gooood narrative.

No MLS on ESPN will take some getting used to. Doubly bad since we're all in the midst of "FOX is awful at soccer coverage" season on an entirely new scale. I'd really love to know the data (or theories) going into all the new MLS TV plans starting next season, because it's all very different. It feels like a bad omen, in a "remember when the NHL didn't exist for a dozen years when it wasn't on ESPN" kind of way, but I guess if there's already not much to lose on the ratings front...

Those two are tied, the human brain can't possibly remember them both at the same time. Actually the Orlando one might be more forgettable because I literally did forget about it until finding it again by accident during an unrelated thread here, a couple years ago.

Being pissed is fine and good, refusing to train is not. Everyone wants this team to play with heart and fire and all that, so here we are. Seems like the internal culture lived up to its reputation if the coach and players did their jobs in holding him accountable and the on-pitch performance didn't suffer because of it. Some agent leaking the sordid details isn't great, but good luck finding any team where that isn't happening. This was interesting from Yedlin: Okay, but even as a 10, now we're dealing with breaking up the MMA trio which made the midfield emerge as a real strong point for the team. Either way his G+A per 90 numbers have been strong but he's not wildly outpacing his competition for minutes here.

I tend to think the Athletic doesn't run with any old B.S. and they have two of their senior soccer guys on this scoop (and I'm sticking with that story, not whatever a C-list podcaster is tweeting about). Gio's gotta have a more specific response than just yelling "fake news" about this. Let's be clear here, Berhalter didn't "leak to the media", he told a story (without naming names) at what was supposed to be an off-the-record event. It was pretty naive and too candid, but that's not the same as a Mourinho-style bus-throwing or some personal vendetta against Reyna. (I love Wynalda throwing a fit about Berhalter "lying to the media" about Gio's status, as if playing coy and avoiding drama mid-tournament isn't a totally reasonable thing for a coach.) And that doesn't change the fact that even if Berhalter was wrong to be talking about this despite the attached caveats -- and I do wonder if he only talked about this knowing the Athletic story was imminent -- that doesn't mean his decision to bench the pouty kid until he sorts himself out was also wrong. I like the guy and obviously he's got a tremendous ceiling, but he's been inconsistent, injury-prone, and has maturity issues on a team that's made a big show of its internal culture being great. And so far in his USMNT career he's scored at the same rate as Joe-Max Moore. Not saying he's a fraud, but I'm also not saying he's light years ahead of the other wingers in the pool at this point. He certainly has not yet had the consistent production to earn Dempsey-level benefit of doubt. And Dempsey probably should not have punched a window anyway. Not getting the role you hoped doesn't excuse being lazy and petulant, this is a team of adults and you need to be a teammate in this situation, not an ego.

It was naive of Berhalter to speak of a situation like this at an "off the record" event expecting it to stay as such, but based on the Athletic's reporting, this was going to come out soon anyway. By my read he did well managing this in the moment if it didn't leak during the USA's games and got Reyna back into the fold by the last game, much like how McKennie surfing Tinder during a Covid-times qualifier was dealt with and ultimately blew over. Good! No big deal, situation managed. But a reminder to the rest of us armchair coaches that we're making judgements on just seeing a small slice of the overall situation.

Athletic's got the gossip that Gio Reyna was being a petulant child at World Cup camp. Explains some things, though the more radical factions of the anti-Berhalter crowd are going to have some reckoning to do. https://theathletic.com/3991695/2022/12/11/gio-reyna-usmnt-gregg-berhalter/

Reason I liked the later update was because of that side-stripe treatment (though yeah, the later-later kelly green jersey did it even better) and the updated number font. As other have mentioned, the angular look felt like a nod to the mountains and the music-note lineages at the same time. The initial fauxback rebrand, with the full stripes and basic block, felt too simple to me, and updating the color scheme but not changing the rest of it felt too odd to me, like it didn't hit its stride until the later modern touches. On another note, funny to me how all the various Jazz design eras get brought up in these conversations...except for these. Most forgettable unis in NBA history.

he does seem like the kind of guy who would work himself past the point of good health, especially given the circumstances. But also, wouldn’t that be a convenient fact for a state-sponsored secret poisoning.

Last year's crop of mashup City jerseys maybe offered some hints there. I thought the ones that were both 90s-heavy, and decent, were maybe the Nets and Wolves. The Raptors have had a very long, slow uniform evolution as well that traces back to the 90s post-dino-graphic look, but is maybe too far removed at this point to be a good example.

I thought the ideal Jazz set was the one they just departed from (preferably though the Adidas-late-era green for the alternate). Purplish-indigo, darker and richer shades of golden yellow and green felt like a classy and modern take on what the Jazz have been before. This was one of the smartest modernizations in the league IMHO, showed how you don't need to nuke your brand every six years but also don't have to be a Celtics-level traditionalist, either, which is probably the space most teams should aim to occupy.

Soccer offsides seems straightforward in most cases to me, but you have the sometimes cases getting to dangerously-NFL-existential debates about who's involved in the play, which is where I think the problem lies. That and the VAR/technical assist where a forward imperceptibly has a centimeter of their boot offsides, which doesn't feel like the spirit of the rule to me. I kinda want to say that offsides can't be VAR'ed or there needs to be a length rule, like the whole of the forward's boot needs to be off for it to be called. In theory maybe the phrase "clear and obvious" should have clarified this but it's done the opposite.

Paying that money for Bogaerts til he’s 41 is insane, but that doesn’t let the Red Sox off the hook for offering insultingly low extensions to him and ensuring that they would find themselves in this position to lose him. Trevor Story could walk down the aisles of any Stop-n-Shop and be totally anonymous; good luck counting on him to get butts in seats.

Really won’t know what to think if he’s ever reporting on a neighboring house catching fire.

The most Portuguese areas of America i know of are southeastern Massachusetts and Newark-ish New Jersey. The Revs and the Red Bulls both have massive holes in their center forward positions. Won’t happen, just can’t not see it.

Big-market teams spending like big-market teams? Interesting concept.

Spain is the new England as far as PK narrative goes... This is interesting from one of my fav Athletic writers: