I will be frank here. I have done almost nothing but pack up things in my apartment and watch preseason NFL over the past week. I am dealing with a heavy case of what I call “The Clamp”, which is a physical feeling I get on my brain that feels like it’s being squeezed by a clamp, generally in moments of mental anguish. This at the moment is one of the moments of mental anguish, I hate moving and I’m dreading my next step at the moment, so it’s like a cool double-whammy that’s causing The Clamp to protrude at the moment. It feels like a low-level headache but more so just like there’s a clamp squeezing on the brain. If you need more information about The Clamp or if you’ve felt The Clamp yourself, or if you have another name for The Clamp, or some actual medical literature regarding The Clamp so that I can stop calling it The Clamp (like how I learned the real medical term for the phenomenon I’d called “gastrointestinal warfare” was just “Esophageal Spasms” please let me know.
Anyway, I’ve been sort of half-living over the last week and I’m only going to discuss three soccer games that I watched and also maybe throw one of the pieces of music I listened to in there somewhere.
Last Monday, I attended the Leagues Cup quarterfinal match between Sporting KC and Club Leon in Kansas City. I made a video about my experiences that you can see at this link. Since making the video, and since watching the other three matches of the Leagues Cup quarterfinals, I’ve thought more about what this competition and this match in particular say about the state of soccer in the US, or maybe just in Kansas City.
I can remember about a decade ago being in high school, I think it was my junior year, and this one girl came into my French class and was sort of gloating about how she’d gone to a match between Sporting KC and Chivas the night before and Chivas had won. At this point, I genuinely had no idea that there was a team named Chivas that was positioned anywhere outside of Carson, California, and I was like “why does this girl care so much about Chivas USA, I thought nobody cared about Chivas USA” - which was true, but she was talking about Chivas de Guadalajara, which was the real deal, and they’d played a friendly against Sporting the night before that I didn’t know anything about. It, apparently, went the same way that the match against Leon last week went - Vermes put out a reserve lineup, they got beat badly.
By the way, I think this anecdote probably proves something about me. I had genuinely no serious idea that there were other soccer leagues outside of the United States until I was about fifteen or sixteen. I remember my Dad telling me that Eddie Johnson was moving to a team in England and not understanding really why any American guy would move to England. I just genuinely never thought about it, I guess. Anyway I knew they played soccer in Mexico, I just didn’t think about how they did it. It was a lovely time back then, not being curious about things like that. Now I know what phrases like Galatasarary, Vasco de Gama, Heart of Midlothian, and the Vancouver Whitecaps mean and look where it’s got me.
There was something very transparent about those obvious ticket-sale friendlies. We played Stoke City and Manchester City on their preseason American tours, too. Everybody knew the drill, they’d come in, fuck around for 90 minutes, then leave. I’d prefer that to what we have now where everybody gets all sanctimonious about how Peter Vermes disrespects the Leagues Cup and the valor of Major League Soccer or whatever just because there’s money and a cheap trophy on the line.
I stand by what I said in the video, though, about how Sporting KC needs to basically contend for a championship (Shield, Cup, or both) to fully justify the decision, though, and if the games to come go like the 2-0 Win against FC Dallas on Saturday did, they’ll have a good chance at fulfilling that need. That was one of the more bizarre games I’ve seen just because of the last half-hour or so after Salloi scored the second goal, when Sporting put on a masterclass in wasting time that ended up with a an added ten minutes of extra time when all was said and done.
I know that we’re supposed to hate time-wasting in soccer, and when its the other team wasting the time in a soccer match, I do hate it. But when it’s my team? I’m all for it, and it’s very funny. Some of these guys are absolutely virtuoso performers when it comes to stretching what could be a ten second action into forty or fifty, without going fully overboard. They never got into Arabe Unido stretcher territory, to be fair, but they pushed right up against the line. My favorite incident, late in the match, was when there was a throw-in near a corner by the KC goal and whichever SKC player was throwing the ball in stopped, pointed at another ball on the field down by the touch-line, and called for a fellow teammate to jog over to it, kick it off the field of play, and jog back, which took something like twenty seconds. It’s a beautiful thing if you let yourself recognize it.
Unfortunately, everybody else around us - New England, Seattle, the Galaxy, Colorado - also won, so there were no major gains made with this game. But it was a good win regardless.
As I’ve been packing everything up over the past week or so I’ve been simultaneously listening to this guy’s old school house mixes
He has forty-five of them right now, and counting, so if you’re into this sort of thing or looking to get into this sort of thing then here’s a great place to start.
I said I was going to discuss three soccer matches, and here is the third. I actually watched some of the big European matches this weekend - Arsenal/Brentford, Tottenham Hotspur/Manchester City, Borussia Monchengladbach/Bayern Munich, RFC Seraing/KV Oostende, all of those - but I am naturally going to talk about Seattle/Portland from last night.
Even back before I was trying to watch MLS and USL matches every week (I think I started doing that around mid-2015), I would always try to watch Seattle/Portland every time that they played. I know that both of these fanbases have a tendency to mythologize themselves, but this match absolutely lived up to the hype. This was the first full-on, proper Cascadia match, with full-capacity supporters in the stands and everything, since August 23, 2019, nearly two years ago, and the fans in Portland, from both sides, were just a fantastic sight to see and the atmosphere clearly rsulted in how intense the game turned out to be.
I’ve always wanted to, and still want to, attend one of these games in Providence Park at some point in my life. It’s a fascinating venue to begin with, this converted former minor league ballpark, the Timbers Army stand behind the Northern goal, from a construction standpoint, is unique in terms of active support stands in global soccer. It really stands out on television in particular, how wide it is, how comparably shallow the angle of the stands are compared with a lot of other active support sections, with the roof above it, too.
I have to imagine it’s intimidating when the Timbers are playing well, but in a moment like in the latter moments of last night, the weight of that many fans’ presence in a shared disappointed quietness must have felt wonderful for Sounders players and the visiting fans from up north.
We don’t have a singular geographic rival like this in Kansas City. I don’t think most SKC fans could come to an agreement on who our biggest rival is. I personally think it’s Salt Lake, some would say it’s Houston or Chicago, the league keeps trying to push Minnesota, but there’s not one just obvious geographical rival at the moment. I think that will change when St. Louis joins in 2023. I know that the league’s going to try to push St. Louis as a rival for Chicago, they’ll probably be in the same conference, but I remember in 2015 when their now deceased USL team played an Open Cup match in Kansas City, they brought probably the largest away contingent of support that I’ve seen short of the playoffs or an Open Cup final in Kansas City. But that’s still a season and a half away. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be living whenever that first match between KC and St. Louis is played but I hope I’ll be there in person.
I apologize for how subdued this was but I really cannot communicate how effective The Clamp is at making everything just a little bit more difficult. I hope you have a good week, and I hope that I make more time for myself this week!