Tag: sports

Defense is Not a Spectator Sport

That was some impressively bad defense over the last two days, first by Brazil, then the USA.

Gabriel is not capable of going toe-to-toe with Erling Halland physically. He knows this from their Premier League battles. He just got overpowered on Halland’s first goal.

Both Gabriel and the other Brazilian were a little lazy on Halland’s second goal. He was obviously going to shoot, but he wasn’t far enough out for them to be content with that. Gabriel just waited in the box and the other defender didn’t go down to one knee to block the shot, which is what allowed Halland to put it right through his legs. But you have to commit to blocking the shot at that range, especially when you’ve got a man behind you for support in case it’s a fake and he is going to break into the box.

I only saw the first half of the USA-Belgium game, but Tim Ream was terrible. Not only did he stand around and watch the Belgian forward score the first goal, but he jumped too early and took himself out of position for the second one. And every time he had the ball, he’d hold it too long, then pass it backwards.

I really don’t understand these coaches who just love passing the ball backwards and are content with one single shot per half. Do they understand that you don’t get any points for possession? The primary correlation with winning in soccer is shots on target, not time of possession. Anything you’re doing that reduces shots on target is reducing your chance of winning. The USA had 56% possession, lost the shots on target contest 7-2, and lost 4-1.

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Germany Learns the Hard Way

An African team has never won the World Cup.

And Germany had never lost a penalty shootout in the World Cup until yesterday. But although the media prefers not to discuss it, everyone in football knows that Africans are notoriously poor at taking penalties.

And now both Germany and Holland are out of the World Cup in the first knockout stage, defeated by football powerhouses Paraguay and Morocco.

It’s almost as if relying upon people who have never won the World Cup when playing for their own nations to win it for your own is a suboptimal strategy.

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No Chance in Hell

Before the game started, I pointed out Vinicius to Spacebunny and told her there was a very good chance that he would score a hat trick against Scotland. We’re 20 minutes in, he already has two goals, and Brazil hasn’t had to work for either of them.

The Scots look like a poorly-coached children’s team that hasn’t been taught not to dribble at the back.

UPDATE: FIFA is trying to prevent Brazil from running away with the game and disallowed the goal on the basis of a phantom foul that only VAR could detect but doesn’t show up on the replays.

Ridiculous. I was sympathetic to the Scots prior to that. Now I hope Brazil drops 10 on them.

Nice to see Switzerland go through, although Rodriguez looks beyond cooked to me and their defense has real problems with defending set pieces and long crosses. Nice unselfish play up front from Embolo with the assist on the second goal.

UPDATE: And I would have been correct about that hat trick before the end of the first half without that absurdly disallowed goal. And once again, Scotland couldn’t either a) clear the ball or b) mark the triggerman. 2-0 courtesy of Vinicius’s second. And it would have been 4-0 if the Scottish keeper hadn’t made a brilliant save right before the end of the half.

The problem is pretty clear. Scotland’s manager is having his team play an inappropriate system for the situation. They’re just not good enough to play ball control against Brazil.

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Never Been More Wrong

Lionel Messi has become the leading goalscorer in World Cup history after netting his 17th goal in the competition to open Monday’s meeting with Austria. Messi became the first player in history to feature at six World Cups earlier this summer—later joined at that tally by Cristiano Ronaldo—having played at every tournament since his first in 2006.

Messi downplayed the significance of the record in the aftermath of the Algeria game, insisting it was “just a statistic, nothing more,” while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of sitting in the same bracket as Klose, Ronaldo and Gerd Müller.

Alongside breaking the scoring record, Messi also became the first player in tournament history to score in six consecutive World Cup games, having netted five across four knockout games all the way back in 2022.

I was, for a long time, an advocate of Pele as having been the greatest soccer player of all time. Now, in my defense, this was in 2020, when Messi had yet to win either a World Cup or a Copa America, so there was legitimately a rather glaring gap in his resume, even in comparison with his own fellow Argentine, Diego Maradona, much less Pele. Yes, football is a team sport, but it’s not as if Argentina was a non-competitive team prior to 2020 or that Messi was being forced to carry them singlehandedly.

But in an effort to prove my case for Pele, I went to the statistics. And there I was astounded to discover that not only did Messi rank as one of the top scorers of all time, he also ranked as a top ten assist-provider as well. In fact, statistically, at that time he was essentially the equivalent of BOTH Cristiano Ronaldo AND Zinedine Zidane every single time he walked on the field.

To put this in American football terms, it would be equivalent to Peyton Manning leading the NFL in passing yards and rushing yards, not only for a season, but over his whole career. It’s unthinkable. How do you both a) score more than everyone else and b) help others score more than anyone else? Even Michael Jordan never led the NBA in both scoring and assists. The only real comparison is to Wayne Gretzky, which tends to underline the Messi’s case.

And this was BEFORE he added two Copa America championships and a World Cup championship. And he’s now scored 5 goals in the first two games of the current World Cup Finals with football powerhouse Jordan next on the schedule. At this point, I won’t be surprised if Argentina wins the championship and Messi wins the Golden Boot.

Anyhow, I just thought I should acknowledge that while I have been wrong about things in the past, and I will be wrong about things in the future, I have never, ever, been more wrong than I was when I argued, sincerely, that Messi was not the greatest of all time.

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Players Unions vs Pride

It’s time for the NFLPA and the other professional sports unions to use their collective power to stamp out all the satanic Pride propaganda. Because at least some owners are making it clear that publicly serving Satan is more important to them than actually fulfilling their primary purpose of playing the sport.

York Revolution, a minor league baseball team in Pennsylvania, forfeited a game on Thursday that was scheduled to be played during its annual Pride Night event. The Revolution, who play in the North Division of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball (ALPB), announced the news in a statement released late Wednesday night.

“This decision was not reached lightly. Unfortunately, several of our players have refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jersey and the club decided that hosting the event is more important than forcing players to wear jerseys they are not comfortable with and playing the game,” the statement read.

“As a result, and out of respect for the Pride Community and the York community as a whole, the York Revolution has decided that the game on Thursday, June 18 will be forfeited and that Pride Night will continue on as the feature element of the evening at WellSpan Park.”

It’s reached the point now that the players are going to have to put a stop to it. And there are certainly enough Christians in the NFL to make it happen. Even the most corrupt members of the league office and the ownership will back down once it becomes clear that there is no way the players are going to bend the knee for anyone except Jesus Christ.

Fewer than nine players on the 28-man roster were willing to wear uniforms that featured a rainbow design on their sleeves, a team official said.

They shouldn’t settle for opt-outs or allowing players not to wear the satanic imagery. No Pride, no rainbows, no rhetoric or nobody plays.

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Switzerland 1, Qatar 1

Very disappointing. This is what happens when you don’t play to finish off a team that you’ve beaten. There are few things I despise more than a team that has complete control of the ball, but is content to just take the occasional half-hearted chance here and there rather than bear down and finish off the weaker opponent.

Champions are killers. People who try to win games by holding on are failing to understand that they are planting the seeds of their own future failures. If dropping the two points in the 95th minute cost the Swiss a place in the knockout stages, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The USA played a much more aggressive, much more impressive game in taking apart Paraguay 4-1. But it’s obvious why Pele’s prediction about African success in the World Cup never came to pass; many, if not most of their best players have been stolen by the European teams and the USA.

I don’t think this is a healthy development. The games already don’t sell out. How long are people going to care if Nigerians in one jersey can beat Nigerians in a different jersey? If you’re going to do that, why not just watch the Champion’s League?

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Why Chicago Lost the Bears

I very much doubt that Chicago is going to be the last minority-dominant Blue city to lose its professional sports franchise. This is nominally about economics, but it’s actually about immigration and demographics.

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that’s been in the city since 1921.

They didn’t lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they’d rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year. Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move. They lost them for two reasons. The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they’re bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack. Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn’t even exist yet. That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn’t reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois. Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting. So now it’s all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything. Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they’re “an $8.5B valued business” that doesn’t need propping up. But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works. Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team. And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: “I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team.” There it is. “Billionaire-owned.” That’s how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you’re saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line. Meanwhile they’re running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You’re living in it. Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that’s $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances “the point of no return.”

When you run things this badly, you sell what’s left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect. Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check. But a fixed property tax rate for a team that’s been here 106 years? That’s “propping up billionaires.”

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn’t outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren’t a disaster. Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero.

Immigrants and minorities are intrinsically parasitical in Western societies. This isn’t to say they can never be beneficial in certain circumstances, or that they are inevitably negative, but they can never be, in the favored language of the AI systems, “load-bearing”.

There are no societal systems as such. The Chinese implement communism very, very differently than Russian, or German, or South American communists. So changing the demographics necessarily means changing the societal structure and the society itself. Different peoples have different priorities, as they should and as they always will; no one would ever mistake the way Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are run for an NFL operation.

NIL is going to compound this effect. Already universities in California are suffering badly in the recruiting process because no 18-year-old athlete wants to throw away 13.3 percent of his income. The Big 10 schools are presently riding high because their massive alumni bases allow them bigger budgets, but it won’t be long before the state income taxes begin to penalize them as well.

Chicago may be the first to lose its professional sports team over taxes, but it will not be the last.

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Monday Night Football is Back

It’s really rather remarkable that the NFL is the one institution that is observably capable of self-correction:

It’s human nature to resist admitting mistakes. The bigger, richer, and more powerful a company is, the less likely it will be to acknowledge an error. That makes the NFL’s willingness to scrap the Monday Night Football doubleheaders even more significant.

Appearing recently on The Schrager Hour podcast, NFL V.P. of broadcast planning Mike North was surprisingly candid about the league’s decision to declare defeat and retreat.

“Yes, the Monday night doubleheaders are a thing of the past,” North said, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. “I don’t know why that didn’t work. Quite honestly, I thought it was fine. I thought it was good for us. That Monday night game, if it wasn’t your game on Monday, it would’ve been Sunday at [1:00 p.m. ET], among eight, nine, or 10 other games. You probably weren’t going to watch it anyway. Having it on Monday, a national broadcast . . . it just didn’t work. The fans didn’t appreciate it, and it probably wasn’t a good use of an NFL asset.”

I hated it. To be honest, I don’t even like the Thursday night games. But MNF was always special growing up; I was allowed to stay up and watch until the halftime highlights were over, and then my mother would write the final score on a piece of paper and tape it to my door so it would be the first thing I’d see in the morning. There was something about the music, and Howard Cosell, and the halftime highlights that just infused the game with more importance than usual.

That carried on into adulthood; a Monday Night Football game between the Vikings and Packers was an all-day event in the Twin Cities and there would invariably be a party at someone’s house with an 80-20 mix of Vikings and Packers fans.

So I hated, hated, hated the idea of a Monday night doubleheader. It felt like holding two Super Bowls on the same day. The college football administrators would do well to learn from the NFL’s self-correction, because they’re going to need it with their excessive expansions of a) March Madness and b) the College Football Playoff.

64 is the correct number for (a) and 8 is the correct number for (b).

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Arsenal Takes the Title

Arsenal have been crowned Premier League champions, ending a 22-year wait for the English title since the Invincibles team of 2004. Manchester City drew 1-1 with Bournemouth on Tuesday night, giving the Gunners an unassailable lead at the top of the table after they beat Burnley on Tuesday. Mikel Arteta’s men have been runners-up in each of the last three seasons but finally overcame Pep Guardiola’s team to be able to call themselves Kings of England.

Give Them Grass

The NFL owners are providing the real grass for the World Cup that it won’t provide for the NFL players who make their stadiums possible. The NFLPA has released a statement:

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in one month, and work is underway to install fresh grass surfaces in NFL stadiums for the world’s top soccer players.

NFL players have spent years advocating for safer, high-quality grass fields at their place of work, but when the World Cup is over, most of these stadiums will revert back to turf for the NFL season.

Our players deserve workplaces that prioritize their preference, protect them against the weekly wear and tear of the game, and support their long-term health and performance.

I don’t usually have much sympathy for the NFLPA, but this is one area where they are absolutely right and the league’s position makes no sense. Football is much better on grass, and NFL teams make more than enough money to make sure they are playing on it.

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