Minnesota United is halfway through its 2018 season, and so far, the first half of 2018 has been just as bad as either half of 2017. For 1500 ESPN, I identified three areas that need to improve - and if things don’t get better, I am expecting consequences.

For the Star Tribune this week, I wrote about the knockout round of the World Cup, and the expected favorites.

Unexpectedly, the paper also asked to print my picks. I leave them for posterity here:

Quarterfinalists: Uruguay, France, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Croatia, Switzerland, England

Semifinalists: France, Brazil, Spain, England

Final: France 1, Spain 0

(I also wrote about 100 words why each team would win in the final; I’m sure whichever unlucky soul had to edit it laughed bitterly as he had to cut it down for the actual space alloted, which was about 20 words per team.)

Near as I can tell, Mexican soccer and American soccer are the same. Same challenges, different languages. And so at Soccer Insider today, I wrote about how Mexico beat Germany - and how the United States might have the same in its future.

The World Cup is on right now, and two of Minnesota United’s players - one of whom I admit I forgot about - are playing in Russia. At 1500 ESPN, I wrote about what this tournament might mean for those players, and for Minnesota.

I remember being unsurprised, when the United States got out of its group at the 1994 World Cup. I knew very little about soccer, but I’d seen the Olympics, and I was pretty used to Americans winning at everything. Plus, it wasn’t like the rest of the tournament was filled with countries with huge soccer reputations. Bulgaria? Norway? The United States was in a group with Romania and Switzerland. Who even knew they had teams?

Since then, of course, I’ve learned a lot about the history of American soccer. How the team qualified for the 1990 World Cup, but only as an accident. About how the United States got hammered at that tournament. About how everyone expected them to get hammered again in 1994.

Into this stepped Eric Wynalda, who even then was brimming with confidence. His free kick goal against Switzerland, in the first game of the tournament, not only earned the United States a 1-1 draw - it was what launched everything that came after. That moment was the beginning of pro soccer in the USA.

Along with Minnesota United beat report Megan Ryan, I made my 2018 World Cup predictions in today’s Star Tribune.

I am not the first person to turn against instant replay, in soccer or anywhere else. A year or so ago, I was all in favor of using replay to help blunt the effect of refereeing mistakes on the outcome of games.

I was very wrong! It turns out that in soccer, just like every other sport with refereeing, introducing a video referee just doubled the number of chances refs had to screw up - all while also taking a huge part of the entertainment away from the game. Soccer needs to act fast, soccer needs to act now. Kill VAR before it kills soccer.

I recently turned in a draft of a book about soccer stadiums around the world, which needed to include an American stadium. I chose Providence Park in Portland, not because it’s the nicest soccer stadium in the United States, or the most comfortable, but it’s absolutely the best to watch soccer. This week’s Soccer Insider relates to my trip to Portland, and the goosebumps I got there.

How in the world did Liverpool make it back to the Champions League final? This week’s Soccer Insider looks at Jurgen Klopp, the wildly likeable and irrepressible coaching genius behind Liverpool.

Just about every big European soccer team has at least a few Minneapolis-St. Paul fans. The most popular team of all, though, might be Tottenham, which has more than 500 people in its local fan club. Soccer Insider looks at why Minnesotans might feel so connected to their North London bretheren.

Minnesota United is trying to create something good on the offensive end. You can see that desire from their signing of El Cientifico, Darwin Quintero - their first big-money deal, and a move that’s entirely about offense.

At 1500 ESPN, I look at the identity that Minnesota wants - and the identity that they have, which is far away from that goal.

There was a time, not that long ago, when Major League Soccer thought that Americans probably would never watch soccer - not without some tweaks to the rules, at least. (Ties! The horror!)

Soccer Insider looks back at a bygone area of rules changes - a time that’s hopefully gone forever in American soccer.

I’ve been reading a lot about the NASL, WUSA, and WPS - the three failed major soccer leagues in America. Right now, MLS is doing well and the NWSL has been more successful than any of its predecessors. But could they still fail?

(This is in the Star Tribune, where “Is MLS going to make it” is far more of a legitimate question than elsewhere.)

I’m writing Minnesota United columns every two weeks for the website of 1500 ESPN, a sports talk radio station in town. The first looks at Loons midfielder Ibson, whose skills are evident - but who may not be a match for what United needs right now.

Toronto lost the CONCACAF Champions League final this week, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth from Major League Soccer. Soccer Insider looks at how Mexico has become the MLS measuring stick, and why.

Arsene Wenger announced that he was stepping down at Arsenal after the season, one of those moves that suggests that he simply had been allowed to leave slowly, rather than being fired. Soccer Insider looked at his Arsenal tenure, and his status as the last capital-M Manager of a Premier League team.

The farther we get from Hillsborough the more impossible it seems to explain. The fans were in… pens surrounded by spiked metal fencing? They herded fans into them and didn’t bother to count how many people had gone into each one? How is that… possible?

This week’s Soccer Insider looks back at the darkest day of English soccer, which was also the last day of a bygone era.

If you are a soccer fan, reading this, you already know all about Zlatan Ibrahimovic. You know he’s one of the greatest target forwards ever; you know that his trophy case is stuffed to bursting; you know that he may or may not be a crazy person.

However, the Soccer Insider column really isn’t for people who already know about Zlatan. It’s for people like my dad, who don’t watch all that much soccer (and frankly what Dad watches is mostly so he can talk to me about it, which is very nice of him.)

Last weekend, as Zlatan put his immediate stamp on MLS after arriving in midweek to play for the Galaxy, my Dad was furiously texting me about him. Forgive me, but if Zlatan’s big enough that Dad is interested, then it’s time to try to explain Zlatan to the rest of the Star Tribune readership.

I keep coming back to one statistic from this week’s Soccer Insider column about the Portland Thorns. Take the Thorns out of the mix, and the NWSL draws about 3,600 fans per game league-wide. Meanwhile, the Thorns draw an average of 17,400.

There are other teams that play in soccer meccas, there are other teams that are owned by MLS teams, there are other NWSL teams that don’t have to compete with Major League Baseball in the summertime, but Portland’s the only place where the NWSL is taken seriously. The league’s goal is to figure out why.

(Side note: I really, really hope that one of those places ends up being St. Paul.)

The combined USA / Mexico / Canada bid is everyone’s front-runner for the 2026 World Cup. That said, though, Morocco is just the kind of country that FIFA loves picking, because FIFA loves nothing more than brand-new shiny usless stadiums to show off during the World Cup.

This seemed like a good time to make fun of FIFA, then.

Things got out of hand at West Ham last week, with fans verging on a riot against club ownership. That doesn’t happen in America, unless an owner tries to steal someone’s team. It’s a reminder for MLS: #SaveTheCrew.

College soccer is kind of a weird thing. They play an entirely different game in college, one that’s full of substitutions (nearly unlimited) and with frequent games (two in a weekend, three in a week, usually, in order to fit the entire season into the autumn).

Men’s college coaches are leading a push to make the season span across both fall and spring, in order to ease the schedule burden, but for the moment the NCAA and pro soccer are two very different things.

Soccer Insider tries to cover a little of this.

This week’s Soccer Insider looks at why the NASL died while the USL thrived - because one worked with MLS, while the other worked against it.

It’s time for the SheBelieves Cup, the tournament with the bad name and all the best women’s national teams - the USA, France, Germany, and England. The USA is still rebuilding its defense after its 2015 World Cup win - and this tournament will be a key test on its road to the 2019 World Cup.

Soccer Insider this week looks at Toronto and Tigres, the favorites for the 2018 CONCACAF Champions League.