The 2014 - 2015 Football season kicked off in England with Blackburn Rovers entertaining Cardiff City on Friday 8th August 2014. The score was a 1 - 1 draw with most of the possession going to Blackburn Rovers (65% according to BBC Sport). The first game of the season is always a cagey affair, so it's no surprise when most football matches in the first week of August end up as a draw or a narrow 1 - 0 win.
Nathan Thompson Swindon Town Player of the Year 2013 & 2014
In League 1, Swindon Town take on Scunthorpe United at the County Ground and Robins fans can only hope for a season similar to the one just gone. Mark Cooper and Lee Power seem to have the know-how to get the best out of younger players and it's heartening to see Nathan Thompson, a product of the club's youth academy and still only 23, being given the Captain's armband for the coming season. With missing out on the play-offs in May a disappointment when, at the start of the 2013 - 2014 season, relegation fears were uppermost in most Swindon Town fans' minds, the story unfolding at the County Ground this coming football year will be equally as interesting as the one told between August 2013 and May 2014.
One thing that has kept my football interest going since the end of last season, the FIFA World Cup notwithstanding, is the ongoing development of my Football Knowledge website. All the teams for The Premier League and The Football League Championship for this season now have an entry and their histories, notable players and other facts are now just one click of a button away. The idea has always been to give football fans a brief overview of, not only their own team, but the other clubs in the world of football - it is an ongoing project with the whole of the football world to map!
Fulham's Bedford Jezzard
Sheffield Wednesday's Redfern Froggatt
The Football League Championship, for me, is going to be a more fascinating league than the Premier League this season. It is such an eclectic mix of teams whose rich histories and past glories will see ex-European Champions rubbing shoulders with teams who last saw top drawer action in their formative years when the Football League was in its infancy. The names of players such as Fulham's Bedford Jezzard (3rd Top Goalscorer) and Sheffield Wednesday's Fedfern Froggatt (3rd Top Goalscorer) evoke images of Hobbits in Tolkein's Middle earth rather than the rain and mud of a mid-week football match in the depths of an English winter.
One of the most notable of all the Football League's former players must be Steve Bloomer of Derby County (and Middlesbrough) fame. An England international, he was interned at the Ruhleben civilian detention camp at the onset of the First World War having gone to Germany to coach Britannia Berlin 92. His story is a fascinating one and is probably deserving of more than the traditional song, Steve Bloomer's Watching, played at Derby County. I would encourage all true football fans to research his story.
The next phase in the development of the Football Knowledge website will be League 1 - the chance to discover further stories of the teams that make up the Football League makes the journey a joy rather than a slog.
For some time now, English football has adopted and has been playing, a simple play off system at the end of each season to decide the last promotion place from the Championship, League 1, League 2 and the Blue Square Premiership. It's structure has changed very little since 1987, the year that this scheme was adopted for deciding the final promotion place, the main difference being that, rather than over two legs, with the aggregate score deciding the winner, the final is now a one-off game played at Wembley. Swindon Town has featured many times in the play offs over the years, so it would be churlish to deride this method of promotion, but, personally speaking, aside from the excitement it gives to the involved teams' fans at the end of the season and the chance to have a day out at the English national stadium, it really is only a money-making exercise. After all, if your team has finished third (fourth in League 2 and second in the Blue Square Premiership), then haven't they won the right to be promoted above those that have finished below them in the league?
The Aviva Premiership for Rugby Union has adopted a play off system to decide the champion at the end of the season. Here, the team finishing first could have romped to the top of the table, stayed there all season, but then lose the mantle of being the best team in the Premiership, because they then lose to one of the three teams who finished below them that season. Such a system is patently unfair to the top of the table team and, as pointed out above, is in my opinion, a money-spinning exercise rather than an exciting end of season finale.
So where did this play off mentality come from. Well, we just have to look across "the pond" to see the way American Football, ice hockey and baseball finish their respective seasons to understand where the influence for our play off systems originated. With the USA being notorious for trying to squeeze as much profit from every professional sport within its borders, the play off process allows the governing bodies of each sport to introduce further competition at the end of the season, thereby wringing further income from the wallets of the fanbase. It's not surprising, therefore, that those persons in control of British sport looked at this money-making racket and decided that they wanted some of the action too.
All of the above takes me to the title of this blogpost; Major League Soccer...How Does that Work? It can only be this American mentality of squeeze every last cent out of a sport that has caused them to really screw up the notion of Association Football. In order to fit it in with the American psyche of how their existing professional sports are organised, the MLS is arranged into 2 conferences where there is no relegation or promotion, the prime raison d'etre of all other football leagues in the world. For a country that revels in competition, it seems ludicrous that there is no incentive in the form of at least an upper and lower division in the MLS. Further, not only do teams play each other within their own Conference, Eastern or Western, but they play the occasional match against the odd team from the other Conference. The MLS version of the FA Cup is not simply a knockout competition either. Rather than stick with a tried and tested system of organising a sport, the Americans take it, meddle with it and come up with something that bears little resemblance to the original article. For instance, in the early days of football in the USA, the notion that there could be a fair draw as a result at the end of a game seemed a difficult idea for them to grasp and the 35 yard, 5 second shootout was implemented. The "win at any cost" mentality meant that those tasked with converting the locals to the beautiful game in the USA bastardised the rules to the point where the English looked across the water and were left bewildered with the way our "cousins" didn't get the point of one of our national sports.
As a football fan, I would like to see the MLS develop and become the successful football league the USA needs and deserves. However, I feel that the concept of Association Football that has been implemented in the USA needs a rethink. Hopefully, and as we say over here, "third time lucky"!
