Via: Steve Dykes / Getty Images

There's no straight-up proxy in American sports for what aging-but-not-washed-up soccer stars do with their careers. When Chipper Jones can't be a full-time contributor to the Atlanta Braves anymore, he doesn't go to play for the minor-league team in Chattanooga. Henry is still capable of top-notch plays — like the bicycle kick or this sneaky goal during his brief return to Arsenal on "loan" last year — but is too old to be a team centerpiece at the highest level. But he can still be a centerpiece in MLS — and earn a lot of money doing it. Henry's making $3.75 million this year, which is a lot more than your typical Chattanooga Lookout. There's also a semi-philanthropic angle, in that Henry can use his fame to help spread the popularity of soccer in the U.S. Also appealing: he gets to live in one of the world's greatest cities in relative anonymity. Which is to say: if Chipper Jones could pull down $4 million a season to live in Rio, hit home runs in full stadiums, and become one of the faces of an up-and-coming game in a new country, he'd probably be on the beach right now.

View Entire List ›

Via: Clive Brunskill / Getty Images

Neymar has scored more than 100 goals in his career, exceeding 40 in a season twice. He's led his club, Santos, to the Brazilian championship and its first South American title since Pele did the same in 1963. He's been on the cover of a video game. He's sponsored by Nike. He's the seventh-highest-paid player in the world. He has an appallingly "fashionable" haircut. And he's only 21. By about every standard, he's what you would call a "worldwide superstar."

Except this one: We're not sure if he's that good. As in, no one has any idea. He might be the greatest soccer player in the world not named Messi, and he might just be another talented 21-year-old Brazilian, of which there are enough to populate a small European principality. No one knows, because a combination of caution and coincidence has kept Neymar from playing almost any meaningful games against top world-class competition.

Not knowing is weird, especially today when toddlers are presumably being recruited by USC and Real Madrid is actually signing 7-year-olds, and the longer Neymar stays in Brazil, the weirder it'll get. Right now, he is Kyrie Irving if Kyrie Irving stayed in school — and that school was the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Brazilian soccer is in a strange place. The national team hasn't won a World Cup since 2002, which, for any other country wouldn't be long, but in Brazil it is, and they didn't even advance past the quarterfinals in 2006 or 2010. Meanwhile, their club teams are the soccer-world equivalent of Division II, or Triple-A, though they have become slightly bigger players on a world scale of late, as Tottenham coach Andre Villas Boas bemoaned after Brazilian club Internacional declined his $19.5 million offer for striker Leandro Damiao during the January transfer window. The fact that Neymar is still playing in Brazil is considered by many to be a sign of national pride and health. (Although, the president of Brazil — as in, you know, THE PRESIDENT — supposedly had to help Santos attract new sponsors and cable partnerships to afford Neymar's contract. So who knows how true this actually is.)

The league, at least, is doing well enough financially, and it's fun to watch, and a lot of people care about it — but it's in a bubble. The soccer played in Brazil is different from what's played in Europe. There are positions that don't exist anywhere outside of Brazil. (See: Chelsea's David Luiz, who in Brazil played as a "quarto zagueiro," a freelancing midfield-defense hybrid who sort of roams wherever he wants.) Defense is an afterthought. Time on the ball is plentiful. It is — and this description is totally overused, but there's merit to it — soccer as a means of expression. The individual is the focus, rather than the team. Which is unique and interesting in the context of every other professional sport, but also just not the best way for 11 people to transport a ball into a goal.

Neymar is great at this type of game — maybe better than anyone in the world at it. Watch any clip of him on YouTube, which, for most of the world, is where he exists. He plays like he doesn't have knees, or any bones in his legs, and his hips are vaguely hips. His lower body all just kind of moves, pulling and rolling the ball in one of 360 ways. There's no discernible pattern to anything he does (sure, he likes to cut in from the left side of the field, but that's too general a notion to be helpful to a defender, like saying that Derrick Rose likes to drive to the hoop), and the ball's moving through your legs or over your shoulder or just back and forth in front of you and then he's gone. He's so fast, the ball looks like there's backspin on it when he dribbles. He'll take a big touch, and the ball should keep rolling away, but then he'll be back on it within a step. It looks fake, almost — or just incorrect.

He's maybe the most exciting player in the world to watch highlights of. But the question that still hasn't been answered is this: Could he do this anywhere else?

View Entire List ›

Fernando Torres, the January transfer window's most legendary horror story.

Via: Philip Brown / Reuters

One of the reasons free agency in the NFL, NBA, and MLB is so unbearable — and why you, me, and your typical fan still can't totally tune it out — is because it happens before the season, when there's hope that things will be different for your favorite team. We follow and daydream about all the rumors because there is NOTHING ELSE TO DO. Hell, even if your team doesn't sign anyone, it's easy enough to talk yourself into the idea that "it's all part of the plan" because you're "clearing cap room" or "stockpiling assets." (We are all, in the end, sheeple.)

But what if free agency happened during the season? You could follow along with it at your discretion, game-watching still making up the majority of your sports diet. You could take bites of free-agency news whenever you felt a need, instead of subsisting on rumors about the Jets' interest in "kicking the tires" on a 49-year-old Randall Cunningham or the Yankees' plan to purchase Central America. And, just for fun, let's say that every player on every team was always available, because wouldn't that be fucking insane? Yes, that would be fucking insane.

Well, this happens every January in European soccer's transfer window, and what results is the greatest and most blatantly-on-psychedelics player-movement period in all of sports. It's the NFL's free agency and the MLB and NBA's trade deadlines rolled into one kaleidoscopic neon space-tunnel and compressed into 31 days.

Most of the time in soccer, players switch teams by way of purchase: one team offers another team money for one of its players; if the player's current team accepts the offer and the player is able to agree to a contract with the offering team, the deal is done. There are no real restrictions as far as transferring players between countries. Outside of purchase, there's also free agency (known as "a Bosman transfer," thanks to Jean-Marc Bosman), which includes pre-contracts that can be signed, publicly, while a player is still on a different team. Then there are loans, in which a good team allows a young player to go play for a worse team for a set period of time usually so that he can get playing experience when he'd otherwise be riding the bench, and player-swaps, which can be straight-up (trades, pretty much) or with cash and other small-potatoes stuff thrown in. For those who enjoy hypothesizing about moves their team might make, that's a lot of angles to think about.

Since soccer doesn't have salary caps and many soccer teams have more-than-humanly-conceivable amounts of money, it's possible for any transfer to happen, as if the Shanghai Sharks could offer Heat owner Micky Arison $100 million cash for the right to negotiate with LeBron James even if he had five years left on his NBA contract. Couple that with the unscrupulous nature of the European press, which will report basically any half-cocked idea some bottom-level scout whispered in his girlfriend's ear, and the transfer windows (besides January, players can move during the offseason as they would in the United States) turn into something like basketball or baseball free-agency on steroid-enhanced bath salts.

Originally, there were no transfer windows, and players could be moved all throughout the season. Some leagues across Europe began limiting in-season transfers to a winter window in the early 1990s, though, and in the first part of the 2000s UEFA, European soccer's governing body, ruled that all leagues should have a uniform, one-month, in-season January transfer window. With everything compressed into a short timeframe, many teams feel pressure to make a move right now, super-inflating player prices in January. If a team thinks it needs to buy a player in the middle of the year, that team thinks it really needs to buy a player, and it usually needs to buy a player in the first place because it's not a managerially-sound club. Well-run teams generally don't do much buying in January. January is filled with bad teams talking themselves into big moves that don't work out and middling teams that thought they'd be doing better making disastrous crater-signings in an attempt to live up to expectations.

The most-recent and most-obvious example of how terrible January decision making can be is the 2011 menage-a-transfer involving Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll. On the last day of the window, Chelsea bought Torres, the epitome of the flashy but flaky Euro striker, from Liverpool for $80 million, which Liverpool then used to purchase Carroll, who is little more than a battering ram of a head and left foot, from Newcastle for $56 million. The Torres deal broke the British transfer record, and the Carroll deal would've broken it, too, had it not been for Torres. (Remember that the teams also then had to sign each player to a contract, in addition to paying the transfer fee. Mucho $$$.) Fast-forward to today: the pair have scored a total of 21 goals in the two years since the move. (For reference, Robin Van Persie has scored 18 goals this season. Manchester United bought him for $31 million over the summer.) Torres appears to be on his way out at Chelsea, while Carroll isn't even on Liverpool's roster right now; he's on loan at fellow Premier League club West Ham. Neither move was a sure bet at the time—Torres was clearly battling an injury, Carroll an unproven player — which just makes the enormous sums paid for both guys all the more January-esque.

Even though it pulled off the highway robbery that was that Carroll sale, Newcastle isn't off the hook, either. A year removed from nearly finishing in the top four in England — which insures placement in the prestigious and lucrative UEFA Champions League — they've fallen to 16th place, and their January response has been to buy every B-level French player in the world (is your name Jean-Luc or Moussa? Do you have feet? Expect a call), to the tune of $23 million for five (at best) fringe guys. Elsewhere: Tottenham bought a German player who they've already signed and who would have been arriving in the summer anyway, basically paying $2.4 million so he could play the last 15 games of this season; Galatasaray of Turkey signed Dutch attacking-midfielder Wesley Sneijder for $10 million, and he hasn't played soccer since the end of September; and QPR, who are in last place in the EPL, spent a club-record $12.5-million on a 26-year-old French striker who'd scored two goals this season. (Meanwhile, one of their starting centerbacks is the head coach of an MLS team in Canada and plans to leave the team in February. Yes, really.)

Player-movement intrigue is a nice way to pass the time, but in American free agency — and during the summer soccer window — the sideshow is our only lifeline to the game. At those points all the rumor-mongering in the world is never satisfying. In January, however, the season goes on and any transfer nonsense can be tuned out or feasted upon at your discretion. Sometimes, you can cackle knowingly as your team takes advantage of some desperate swap partner. And during those dark stretches, when it's your team scrambling to sign an aged David Beckham? Then you can grit your teeth, try and talk yourself into it, and, when that fails, just go and watch a game.

He's all like, "Peace out, y'all! I just scored mad goals!"

Via: Phil Noble / Reuters

From 2004 to 2011, Zlatan Ibrahimovic played for five soccer teams in three different countries. His team — in order, he was on Ajax, Juventus, Inter Milan, Barcelona, and AC Milan — won its league championship every year. Five teams over eight years, all championships. This fact might suggest that 1) Zlatan is really good and 2) Zlatan is adept at learning how to fit in wherever he goes. Number one is true, but number two is emphatically not.

In some ways, Zlatan is the prototypical modern soccer player — big, athletic, strong; skilled, smart, and calculating — but that’s where it ends. If the best modern players are all part of a system, pieces that move and click and make their teams function as efficiently as possible — some, like Messi, more vital than others but still part of an 11-man machine — Zlatan is as old-school as they come. When Zlatan gets the ball, whatever flow or rhythm the game had gets reset to his whim. He played one year at Barcelona — the system of all systems — but was sold after a falling out with then-manager Pep Guardiola for these exact reasons. As Zlatan told Guardiola, “You bought a Ferrari but drive it like a Fiat.”

Some Zlatan facts: he was born in Sweden to a Croatian father and a Bosnian mother. He was bought by Ajax of Amsterdam at age 19, where he came up with Dutch star Rafael Van Der Vaart, who Zlatan purposely injured in a friendly between Sweden and Holland in 2004. He’s kicked enough people in the head while not playing in soccer games to make a multi-minute YouTube video. (He’s a black belt in taekwondo.) He wrote an autobiography, I, Zlatan, which is basically just a long tirade against FC Barcelona (“Guardiola was staring at me...I thought ‘there is my enemy, scratching his bald head!’. I yelled to him: ‘You have no balls!’") He’s the most expensive soccer player ever. He injured three teammates in his first day of practice with his new team, Paris Saint-Germain of the French league. He routinely refers to himself in the third person because of course he does.

Which brings us to that goal. That fucking goal!

The context: he’d already scored three goals to England's zero, and it was injury time of a meaningless friendly. Joe Hart, England’s goalie and one of the best in world at the position, misplayed a ball with his head, which was only “misplayed” in the sense that Zlatan was nearby. In a matter of seconds — before the soft header had come down — Zlatan turned his entire 6’5’’, 210-pound body, took five steps in the opposite direction, launched upward feet first, and then, totally upside down, gravity and basic human perception gone to complete shit — remember, he’s 40-some yards from goal right now — whacked the ball with his foot at the perfect angle and with more than enough power to parabola-launch it precisely into the net.

No one else in the world would think to do a 40-yard bicycle kick. Hart’s clearance would’ve been fine against Brazil or Spain or Germany or any other phenomenal team in the goddamn world, but this was against Sweden, and Zlatan plays for Sweden. It wasn’t possible until he did it. Zlatan is playing a different game — or inventing a new one — when he’s on the field, and therefore so is everyone he’s playing against. Look at some of his other famous goals: on this Ajax smash-slalom, normal defensive tackling stops working. (The first guy gets flipped up like a child.) After this heel flick against Italy, you now have to be ready even if a guy’s back is to goal and the ball’s three feet to his side, four feet off the ground.

With the recent rise of ball-playing, pass-and-move soccer — which, don’t get me wrong, is a great thing for the sport and anyone who watches it — there’s so much value placed on doing the simple things right, and making the most five-yard passes, and playing within the boundaries of the game as well as anyone could ever imagine to. But who can repress the naturally-human desire to do something special — play a note out of rhythm or off-key that ends up sounding even better than what’s on the sheet? This is what makes Zlatan so especially great right now. He plays a game that only really vaguely resembles what soccer has become. He’s a folk hero, like our own college basketball stars who whizz onto the scene but fade away because their games can only work in certain conditions and if enough people are willing to accommodate them. Except his game keeps working. Zlatan’s only condition: Earth. The sport will go back to what it was or what it is whenever Zlatan retires, which makes it all the more great that he's here right now.

When Ibrahimovic moved to PSG this summer for $25 million, his agent Mino Raiola, who, unsurprisingly, is also a madman, said something typically attention-grabbing: “With the arrival of Ibra, Paris now has another reason to be considered a city filled with beauty. Now I think the people in Paris will have something else to see besides the Mona Lisa."

Grandiose, sure. But the thing is, he's right.

View Entire List ›

Guhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is boring change it back to Jersey Boo Boo Housewives

Via: Matt Sullivan / Reuters

Let’s say you got into United States soccer during the last few years. You want to watch the national team in action; you see that they’re set to play a World Cup qualifying match, like they are tonight. You know that doing well in the World Cup is, essentially, the ultimate goal of United States soccer, and that not qualifying for one would be a catastrophe. The stakes are high. But here’s what you see when you tune in for the World Cup qualifier: a bunch of guys who just took thousand-plus-mile flights to train for a few days with teammates they only see every few months, playing on a terrible-looking field in a game managed by suspect referees. It doesn’t look like Clint Dempsey or Landon Donovan are even in the country. The United States loses to, let’s say, Jamaica. The announcers sound a little disappointed, but it doesn’t really seem to be a big deal. Your only solace is that you are not a German fan watching your team play the Faroe Islands in a 6,000-seat stadium.

Meanwhile, the World Cup is still soccer's best spectacle, an epic, one-in-every-four-years bonanza — but it’s not the showcase for the best soccer in the world. Goals have declined ever tournament since 1990, which doesn’t necessarily mean players are getting worse — but does suggest that games are getting less interesting, likely the cumulative effect of managers whose players rarely get to play together adopting a lower-risk defensive approach. “Everyone always looks forward to the World Cup as if it’s going to be the greatest thing ever,” said Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson after the 2010 tournament, “but you have to go back to Mexico ‘86 for the last good one.”

The epic national chauvinism of soccer fans is perhaps the game’s most defining characteristic. Every World Cup game — even, or especially, in the modern era — has more viewers than there are atoms in the universe, we’re constantly being told. With all this audience and all this energy, why are most international games, especially those between World Cups, so tepid? The short answer is that soccer's global popularity has, perversely, undermined global soccer competition. As in other sports, the money that you/we pour into our fandom is responsible for many of the things that make fandom so aggravating.

The structure of the international game, august soccer historian Colin Jose explained to me, was determined at a time when players' services were much less in demand, fewer countries were interested in playing, and power was less centralized. Every continent is awarded a pre-selected number of World Cup slots and holds its own tournament (formats vary by region) to determine who fills those slots. So, from the very start, the system is designed not to produce the kind of big powerhouse cross-continental matchups that would be fun to watch between World Cup years. And, in a situation analogous to college football's BCS system or the United Nations, individual continental organizations have outdated power structures. Their member countries don't necessarily have the interests of the average soccer watcher foremost in mind.

In Europe, for example, Germany and the Faroe Islands enter the World Cup qualifying process at the same level, a result of a regional system which treats each nation equally. Germany’s won three World Cups; the Faroe Islands have won zero World Cup games. Meanwhile, Germany's team members are playing upwards of 60 games per year with their club teams under ultra-Belichick-ian managers in an environment where everything they eat, drink, breathe, and think (well, soon enough) is monitored. It’s a routine totally dedicated to the success of the club. Then they're asked to play bursts of international games in less than a week every few months with guys they only see a few times every year.

German players discuss the diversification of the Faroe Islands' economy during training for their September match. "You shouldn't just be relying on fishing in the modern era," Lars Bender is saying. "Think of the year-to-year fluctuation, not to mention the uncertainty instilled by climate change."

Via: Ronny Hartmann / Getty Images

“Take, for example, a player that plays in England on a Saturday where the temperature is 40 degrees and it’s pouring with rain,” Jose said, “and he arrives in Central America the next day where it's hot and humid and 90 degrees. Remain in that climate and play perhaps four games in 10 days, then fly back to cold and rainy Britain. Consider the impact on his system, then consider that in his absence he could lose his place in his club team." And you don’t want to lose your spot with your club team because that’s your career and therefore where you make your money. Like, a-whale-filled-with-100-dollar-bills amounts of money. To give you a sense: Premier League television rights sold for more than $4.8 billion dollars in June. Manchester City spent $64 million on players … on the last day of the summer transfer window. Total wages in the Premier League have risen by 14 percent to over $2.5 billion over the past year.

Money aside, even, it's understandable that someone used to playing big-time club matches is not going to be very excited about the stakes of the kind of lopsided matchups that the qualifying system presents. There's almost an incentive for top players to skip games until, say, a game against Guatemala, like the one the United States is playing tonight, is a do-or-die reckoning. And so while players might be gung-ho about the World Cup (and biannual continental cups), their only reason to be committed to their national teams before the moments those tournaments actually begin is patriotism and/or patriotism-related guilt. Which is enough, actually, to get almost all of them to play most of the time. But it's not enough to make the games much fun.

So, what to do, then?

“There are already too many games in the season for the big clubs,” Jose said, “and playing in the off-season is not a good idea. Players need a break or they become jaded. The World Cup and the European Championship impose a strain on players who have already played a long season. So we need to reduce the number of games played in the regular season and in qualifying for international competition.”

It's a nice thought. But while it’d be great (for the players) to cut down on the club schedule, that’s just not going to happen because the clubs have all the money. More games means more money, and “you get less money and we go play for someone else” is a negotiation non-starter. It does seem the best first step — taking, say, a quarter of the games out of the club schedule — but the clubs will never allow it.

View Entire List ›

Robin van Persie, newly of Manchester United, celebrates.

Via: Shaun Botterill / Getty Images

A lot of Americans watch soccer. You’re actually allowed to say that now because, well, it’s true. More and more people are tapped into the success, failures, and frustrations of the U.S. National Teams. ESPN went all out with their 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012 coverage. And Twitter is punch-drunkenly active early every Saturday morning when the English Premier League kicks off. You’re interested; now it’s time to get to know the game on a deeper level so you can act like a good sports fan by complaining about your useless [expletive] players and brain-dead team management.

My team is playing a 4-4-2. Two forwards! Why aren't we scoring more?

The 4-4-2 is the formation everyone played in high school, and it dominated pro leagues in the '90s and aughts. But as the game’s evolved, the formation’s been overrun by other more efficient systems. Still, for some (including people who get paid to coach soccer), the thinking wrongly goes: Two strikers! More goals! Put plainly, the best soccer teams do not play a 4-4-2. More than half the Premier League, the MLS, and the English national team do, but that does not change the previous sentence. Successful teams don’t play 4-4-2 because successful teams found more efficient ways to use the entire field — dispersing players into more than three horizontal lines — and exploit the 4-4-2’s weaknesses by overloading the midfield and employing hybrid-type players who play between levels.

Across Europe, the best teams tend to play with only one defined striker, in either a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3. The most prominent teams — Barcelona and Spain — aren't quite the right ones to look at; Spain doesn’t even play with one recognizable striker, while Barcelona has Messi, and complaining about not having “a Messi” is like being angry you don’t live in a moon compound. In a way, though, Spain/Barcelona are less outliers than they are extreme examples, a culmination of what’s been happening with soccer for the past 10-15 years. No longer do strikers play offense, defenders play defense, and midfielders do both. You might have heard that the Dutch pioneered the approach, called “Total Football,” in the seventies, but it never achieved such widespread acceptance/success until recently. Now, everyone does everything — even goalies — and at the same time, the roles have become more specialized. If your coach is consistently deploying a 4-4-2 and still playing lumbering center-backs who only break legs and kick balls into the press box, your team is probably getting passed by.

One of the soccer world's most notoriously lumbering center-backs is this pile of lumber.

Source: static2.publicphoto.org

So the best soccer pros are like five-tool baseball players?

Kind of, but it’s more like what’s happening in basketball. Players like Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James and Kevin Durant have undermined the distinctions that once divided big men into small forward, power forward, and center categories. The strict definitions for positions in sports are disappearing, and it’s all for the better. Offenses are harder to stop, defenses are more creative, and games play out in new ways. [Your team here] needs to stop living in the past.

How does this play out in soccer?

Players are getting more amazingly versatile every year. The strategic concept of, say, a defender making an attacking run while a midfielder moves back to cover his spot isn’t new, but what today’s players are doing goes further than positional interchangeability. What they’re doing is positioning themselves in spaces that might have seemed “wrong” to observers twenty years ago, because they didn’t fall within the strict defense-midfield-or-striker definitions. Now, like LeBron running the Heat’s offense from a posted-up power forward spot, the best players have the all-around and specialized skills to flourish in these areas. Take Sergio Busquets, of Spain and Barcelona. He never scores and never even really sets up any goals, but he sits between the midfield and defense and breaks up attacks as well as anyone. He’s also the pivot between offense and defense. Watch this video (and maybe turn off the sound), and see how many times he makes a simple-looking pass or turn that diffuses pressure and allows an attack to continue — sort of like an outlet pass. Having someone like Busquets, rather than strictly defensive midfielders like Nigel de Jong or Mark Van Bommel (sorry, Dutch fans from 2010), will make it easier to watch your team.

Further up, every good team, it seems, has at least one player, an attacking midfielder, who gets the ball to awkward positions between the opposition’s midfield and defense — through dribbling and off-ball movement — which creates openings and new angles. Think of how Chris Paul and Steve Nash dribble in circles, going in and out of the paint and holding onto the ball for long periods in a way you’d never recommend to a young point guard, in order to open up passing lanes. Mesut Ozil — and Messi, because he’s the best at everything — are the best in the world at this. Attacks become predictable without players like Ozil getting into strange positions. You create goals by creating chances, the thinking goes, and not by just putting a bunch of goal scorers on the field. The 0-0-11 doesn’t even work in FIFA 2013, coach.

View Entire List ›

5:50: I set my alarm for 5:30. It’s been going off, that awful Apple crescendo-ring sound that maybe makes you gag whenever you hear it on TV, for 20 minutes and I finally wake up. I don’t normally wake up at 5:30.

I wander out to my street corner because my window has bars over it and faces a parking lot. The sky looks nice, or weird, or something. I don’t really know. I start to doze off on a street corner in Brooklyn, so I go back inside.

6:20: My brain’s currently functioning at about the capacity of a tranquilized pig's, so I decide to work out. But I want something easily doable and doable from my bedroom because I’m not real sure I’m ready to go back outside again.

View Entire List ›