Local soccer genius Bruce McGuire put out a call yesterday for votes for Minnesota United season awards - pre-playoffs but post-season. I cast my votes, but I thought I’d expand on them here.

Most Valuable Player: The easy pick here, of course, would be Emanuel Reynoso. He is the team’s best player, certainly; when he’s really on, he might be the best player in the whole league.

That said, I still remember the Loons teams that conceded 70+ goals two years running. The (sadly) now-departed Ike Opara won MLS Defensive Player of the Year merely for stabilizing that ship, but since concussions drove him out of the league, it’s been down to Michael Boxall and Bakaye Dibassy to step in at center back. Which is not to discount the performances of Roman Métanire and Chase Gasper at fullback, either, nor of Brent Kallman, who started 13 games at center back. They helped give the Loons what was, again, one of the stingiest defenses in the league.

I could have picked any of the back four - back five? - but Dibassy seemed like the steadiest this year.

Attacker of the Year: Reynoso.

Midfielder of the Year: Ozzie Alonso. This probably isn’t fair to Wil Trapp, who led the team in minutes played and was a steady force all season in the center of the field. Alonso made just 15 starts, but I’ll give you a stat: in those 15 games, the team gave up 15 goals. In the 19 he didn’t start, they allowed 29.

Defender of the Year: Dibassy.

Newcomer of the Year: Franco Fragapane. This was an easy call. The Argentinan scored five goals and set up nine more, and was up there with Reynoso in terms of creating offense. The team did not start to roll until Fragapane arrived to play the left wing. We speak of Kevin Molino’s 2020 season in hushed tones, and after Molino departed, there were no good options on the left. The Loons tried Hassani Dotson there (and learned he’s not a winger), they tried Reynoso there (and let’s be honest, he was never going to actually play as a wide forward), they even tried Ethan Finlay there (and he worked his socks off, God bless him, but he’s not as good on the left as he is on the right). That the team is in the playoffs is due as much to Fragapane’s quick acclimation to MLS as to anything else.

Young Player of the Year: Joseph Rosales. Assuming that this is only under-22 players, which is generally the league cutoff for Young, the Loons - who simply do not play young players - are down to exactly two choices. Rosales played 122 minutes, more than Patrick Weah’s 22 minutes, and impressed in limited time.

Comeback Player of the Year: Tyler Miller. After missing much of 2020 with an injury and losing his starting spot to begin the season, Miller came back after four season-opening losses to steady the goalkeeping ship. He was solid, if not spectacular, and tied the team record for clean sheets with 11 in 30 games. According to FBRef.com, Miller ended the year in seventh place among MLS goalkeepers, saving four goals more than expected.

As the U.S. Men’s National Team tries to carefully navigate its way through World Cup qualifying, there’s one thing that everyone - coaches, players, fans, TV pundits, internet pundits, me - keeps saying: A point on the road is a good result.

The reasoning is sound: a team that wins all its home games and draws all its road games will finish in the top three and qualify. (This is not a mathematical certainty, but it’d be utterly amazing if it didn’t happen.) And road games in CONCACAF are difficult; either you’re playing in the cauldron of Azteca Stadium, on ice planet Hoth in Canada, or in the uncomfortable environments of the Caribbean and Central America. So, as everyone keeps saying every time the USMNT draws a road game against a seemingly beatable opponent, a point on the road is a good result.

With this in mind, I wondered what the standings would look like if we awarded points solely based on this metric. So we award no points for a home win, minus-2 for a home draw, and minus-3 for a home loss; two points for an away win, zero points for an away draw, and minus-one for an away loss.

Here’s how the standings look so far. (Pts is number of points in the table so far. Mrg is the calculation that I mentioned above. Chalk is the number of points the team would finish with if it won its remaining home games and drew its remaining away games. Home is the number of home games remaining.)

The takeaways here:

As frustrating as the USMNT’s dropped points are, they come out of this comparison in okay shape. Ultimately, their loss in Panama will be the most frustrating, since at the moment Panama is the only team throwing a wrench in the North American dominance of this qualification tournament.

Things might not be as bad as they seem for Mexico, even after losing twice in this window. They lost what are likely to be their two most difficult away trips, but they still have four home games remaining, and their two away trips are to Jamaica and Honduras. It would not be entirely surprising to see Mexico end qualifying with six consecutive wins.

Canada, leading the standings and undefeated, comes out surprisingly badly in this comparison - mostly because they’ve already played five home games. That said, they’ve already earned road draws in the USA and Mexico; even with just two home games remaining, they might have the easiest schedule overall. It feels like they’re, like, one road win away from the World Cup, for the first time since 1986 (their only previous appearance).

Seven points for Jamaica from eight games is bad, there’s no way around it. But the Reggae Boyz also have four home games, and while one is against Mexico, the other three are Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador. If they can pick up points on the road against Canada and Panama they could just drag themselves back into this race.

El Salvador and Honduras are done for.

Costa Rica has maybe the hardest remaining schedule, with a trip to Mexico and home games against the USA, Canada, and Panama. They aren’t that far out of the qualification picture, but it seems like their most likely role is causing frustration for one of the top four.

Please go to the ESPN college football standings page and scroll down. Notice anything that maybe you don’t see from other standings / tables / posiciones?

Every conference has two sets of standings: CONFERENCE and OVERALL. Look closer and you’ll see that the sorting of the standings is by the conference record. The overall record may be important for the handful of teams that are vying for the national championship and the spot in the College Football Playoff, but for most of the country the conference record is tracking the team’s actual progress - towards the conference championship, or more commonly towards the division championship, at title which includes a spot in the conference championship game.

I mention this because last week, MLS released their format for 2022. Charlotte FC is joining the league next season, bringing MLS to 28 teams. Nashville SC is moving to the Western Conference so that there will be 14 teams in each conference, but the 34-game season is staying put. Each team will play home and away against the other 13 teams in its conference, and then play eight games against the opposite conference.

28 teams is a pretty awkward number for a league. Playing the traditional home-and-away double round robin would require 54 games, which is too many - but reducing that to a single round-robin leaves just 27 games, which is too few. Anyway, MLS had an Eastern Conference and a Western Conference even when the league was just 10 teams. But with 14 teams in each conference, the league is at the point where it is less a single league, and more like two.

If the league is going to break itself into two parts, I say they lean into it. I want to see two columns in the standings next year - one for CONFERENCE, one for OVERALL.

The overall standings can still determine playoff places and the overall Supporters Shield, but I want to see a Supporters Shield — a president’s trophy? A conference cup? The Wondo Trophy and the Valderamma Trophy? something, anyway (and the first person to suggest Legends and Leaders for this gets slapped upside the head) — awarded to the winner of each conference. Both conferences are playing a perfectly even double round-robin, so let’s give the winners something. These championships should also have berths in the CONCACAF Champions League. Should the trophy winners also get the top conference seed in the playoffs? Hey, you said it, not me, but I’m glad we’re talking about these things.

I don’t love geographic conferences, if I’m being honest. They’re annoyingly Eastern-centric, because half the United states population lives in the Eastern time zone; any benefits of reduced travel or convenience are all for those in the East. (Ask fans of the six Western Conference teams in the Central Time Zone how much they like repeated 9 or 9:30 pm starts for games on the West Coast; ask Nashville SC about travel, given that it’s now in a different conference from the five nearest MLS cities to central Tennessee.)

MLS is now at a point where it’s two regional leagues with some inter-league scheduling, though. And since we all know that the Supporters Shield is a great trophy, let’s have more. Name them what you will; award the original Supporters Shield the same way we always have, for tradition’s sake, if you must. But if we’re going to have these two regional conferences, they should matter for something more than just scheduling.

Monday, I tweeted a note about the Loons, and specifically about coach Adrian Heath. He’s one of four coaches in MLS that have coached the last three full seasons and made the playoffs in each one, along with Brian Schmetzer (Seattle), Gio Savarese (Portland), and Jim Curtin (Philadelphia). I’ll add here, in this unlimited space, that the Loons are one of only seven MLS teams to make the playoffs in all three of those seasons; the others are NYCFC, the New York Red Bulls, and the New England Revolution.

Many people on Twitter were quick to point out that Heath, alone among that quartet, still has an empty trophy case. Curtin won the 2020 Supporters’ Shield, Schmetzer won MLS Cup in 2016 and 2019 (and made the title game two other times), and Savarese won the MLS is Back tournament last year with Portland.

Heath, meanwhile, has only a handful of near and semi-near misses, losing the 2019 U.S. Open Cup final, and reaching the MLS is Back semifinals and last season’s Western Conference Final.

It’s inarguable. The Loons are not Seattle, not even close; even if you take the Sounders’ annoying consistency out of the equation, the Loons are a step below several other teams. Philadelphia has finished in the top three in three consecutive seasons, all while developing young players at a rate that’s perhaps matched only by FC Dallas. Sporting Kansas City missed the playoffs in 2019, but has otherwise qualified every year since 2011, and has earned two MLS Cups and four U.S. Open Cups over a quarter-century. Even among recent expansion teams, Atlanta United and LAFC have already earned trophies.

Just making the playoffs isn’t the whole story, either. The Loons have finished seventh, ninth, and 11th in the overall standings in the past three seasons. They haven’t yet qualified for either the CONCACAF Champions League or the Leagues Cup. They have won two playoff games all-time. And mentioning stats about the last three years ignores the previous two abysmal years.

The Loons are fine, even good, but haven’t yet been great. For Minnesota sports fans, it’s a familiar look. The Vikings, under Dennis Green, reached the playoffs eight times in ten seasons, but made zero Super Bowls. Ron Gardenhire had six playoff appearances in 13 years with the Twins, and won one playoff series. Mike Yeo made the playoffs three times in four seasons with the Wild, winning two playoff rounds, and got canned halfway through his fifth year.

All of this is very frustrating. And then, way down at the bottom of the abyss, is another option: the Timberwolves.

Monday night, the Timberwolves played in Memphis, their ninth game of the season. They lost, 125-118 in overtime. It was their sixth loss, and their fifth in a row.

The Wolves led by 13 points with 4:45 to play in the game, but - hauntingly, inevitably - face-planted. Memphis went on a 20-4 run, and the Wolves needed a 40-foot banked-in prayer from Karl-Anthony Towns at the buzzer merely to push the game to overtime. Of course, in overtime, they immediately resumed their plummet into the pit of despair, and lost by seven.

This is not even that notable, for the Timberwolves. Longtime Wolves fans know that no fourth-quarter lead is ever completely safe. Longtime Wolves fans know that you can change the players, the coaches, even the owners, and Minnesota will still lose.

The Wolves have an all-time winning percentage of .393. This is the worst winning percentage of any MLB, NFL, WNBA, or NBA team (we’re throwing out the NHL here, since the loser point skews the calculations, but they’d be on the bottom there too).

When you include MLS teams, the Timberwolves start to have some company. Using this table from worldfootball.net, and doing some NFL-style winning percentage calculations to compare this, there are three recent expansion teams who have been Wolves-level futile: Inter Miami (.397, 2 seasons) Austin FC (.324, 1 season) and FC Cincinnati (.253, 3 seasons).

If this had been written after two Minnesota United seasons, the Loons would have been right down there with them, at .375. Even worse than the Timberwolves. Even worse than Inter Miami. That’s bad.

Over the last three seasons, though, the Loons are at .556. That’d be top five all time in league history.

Put those five seasons, they’re at .478. That’s good for 18th in league history, right between D.C. United and the Vancouver Whitecaps.

There are many, many numbers in this blog, and for good reason: you can draw just about any conclusion that you like from these numbers. As for me, I think it’s reasonable to judge Adrian Heath on his overall five-season record and not just the past three years, but I think it’s also important to note that - according to reports - Heath has increasingly been given more control over roster-building as well as on-field coaching, and that this has coincided with an upturn in the team’s fortunes.

More than anything, though, I’m currently considering whether I need to stop watching the Timberwolves, not as a lifestyle choice but simply to preserve my own mental health. I have to imagine that there are FC Cincinnati fans doing the same after another futile year. I’m heading into next baseball season knowing that the Twins will go at least 18 years without a playoff win; I’m resigned knowing that next Sunday is the next step towards another failed Vikings season.

Yes, the Loons haven’t lifted an MLS trophy yet. But as we get ready for the playoffs, I can’t help but think about how it could be so, so much worse.

Two weeks ago, Minnesota United seemed to be impossibly short of attacking players. Mid-season signing Franco Fragapane was dealing with a medium-term injury. Leading scorer Robin Lod injured his calf in training. And first-choice backup winger Niko Hansen hurt his hamstring, leaving manager Adrian Heath to play Hassani Dotson out of position at left wing.

The Loons gritted their teeth and tried to make the best of things. With a two-week rest coming after tonight’s game against the Houston Dynamo, Minnesota’s best hope was to pick up as many points as possible with a makeshift lineup, before getting healthy over Labor Day.

It turns out, when it comes to injuries, we hadn’t seen anything yet.

Three more Loons have since been added to the injury ward. Midfielder Jan Gregus sprained his ankle against San Jose. First-year winger Justin McMaster injured his thigh last week. And worst of all for United, Sporting KC so repeatedly kicked do-everything playmaker Emanuel Reynoso that he not only missed the midweek MLS All-Star Game, he’ll miss the game against Houston.

Even new signing Joseph Rosales, who we’ve yet to see with the first team, is already listed as out with a knee problem. Add in striker Juan Agudelo, who’s listed as questionable, and defender Bakaye Dibassy, who’s suspended due to yellow card accumulation, and it was almost easier to list the available Loons instead of the unavailable ones.

Despite the signing veteran striker Fanendo Adi, whose greatest skill at this point of his career is his ready availability, manager Adrian Heath may well not be able to fill out an entire eight-man bench for tonight’s game, unless he drafts in all four goalkeepers.

Social media stood ready to draft in 17-year-old keeper Fred Emmings, who stands 6’5”, as an emergency striker.

Heath has shown a willingness to change from his preferred 4-2-3-1 formation to a more compact 4-3-3 on the road. With the injuries, though, who knows?

Here’s the available squad:

GK: Miller, St. Clair, Zendejas, Emmings DF: Métanire, Boxall, Kallman, Gasper, Raitala, Taylor MF: Alonso, Trapp, Dotson, Hayes FW: Finlay, Weah, Hunou, Adi, Agudelo (questionable)

On defense, Michael Boxall returned to the lineup against Sporting KC last Saturday, replacing Brent Kallman. “It was a really difficult decision, because I don’t think Brent Kallman has done an awful lot wrong - in fact, he hasn’t done anything wrong,” said Heath.

The change may serve Minnesota well, in that Boxall now has a game under his belt. He and Kallman, who had started eight consecutive games before last weekend, will likely be the center backs.

17-year-old Patrick Weah got his second appearance of the year last Saturday as a forward, though Heath described him as a “work in progress.” Said Heath, “He’s got a lot of natural talent. A lot of natural ability. The one thing he can do, he can beat people one on one. It’s a project. But there’s certainly some talent there.”

It seems unlikely that Weah would get a start, but Heath’s other choices might be Agudelo, in some unknown state of healthiness, or Adi, who hasn’t played this season.

(Spend enough time moving the available pieces around the board, and you’ll utterly convince yourself of your own unlikely arrangement. For me, that was a three-man central defense with Boxall, Kallman, and Jukka Raitala, and Hunou playing as a second striker while Adi plays as a target forward. Try your own version!)

At least, Heath was optimistic that some reinforcements might be ready by the time the Loons go to Seattle on September 11. “I’m hopeful when the two weeks are over, Lod will be available and Fragapane will be available,” he said.

The Loons’ three-game stretch last week was unkind to their spot in the standings. With only two points from the three games, United dropped into fifth place, seven points behind the LA Galaxy in fourth.

The only comfort is that many of the teams nearest them in the playoff chase are in disarray. Freddy Juarez, the coach of sixth-place Real Salt Lake, quit midweek to take a job as an assistant with Seattle, a bizarre turn of events even by MLS standards. Eighth-place Portland has managed just five points in its last seven games. Ninth-place LAFC has lost four in a row. 10th-place Vancouver, despite an eight-game unbeaten run in the league, just fired their own head coach.

Heath often says, “I’ll never turn down a point on the road,” but playing at Houston is a different story. The Dynamo is on a 14-match winless run and has plummeted to last place in the West.

The two-week break won’t look so positive to Minnesota if they don’t get a good result in Houston. And things don’t get any easier after the break. It’s another stretch of three games in eight days, and they’re all with teams in the Western Conference top four: at Seattle, at SKC, and home against the Galaxy.

The schedule is about to get quieter. If the Loons are lucky, they’re about to get healthier. But the only thing for sure is that, for the Loons and their quest for the playoffs, things are not about to get any easier.

Twice a year, when Mexican soccer begins anew, I’m reminded of the hidden truth of soccer in the United States: the most popular soccer league in the USA is not the one that’s in the USA. By TV viewership, the way that we measure everything in the United States, Liga MX is the most popular league in the USA. It’s not particularly close.

Like a lot of people, I didn’t realize this for years, though, because A) I was too busy comparing MLS to the most famous leagues in Europe and B) I didn’t have the Spanish-language cable channels.

Find those channels, and you’ll be kind of amazed at just how much Mexican soccer is on TV. There are times when the same match will be on both TUDN (Univision’s sports network) and either Univision or UniMas, which would be like putting the same match on both NBC and NBCSN at the same time. There are times when the same match is on both TUDN and ESPN Deportes at the same time. That seems unfathomable to me, the English-speaking viewer. Can you imagine FOX and NBC showing the same NFL game at the same time?

Maybe the most amazing thing is how consistently you can watch every single Liga MX game, if you so choose. Virtually every one is on Univision, ESPN Deportes, FOX Deportes, or Telemundo. Monterrey, Santos Laguna, and Tijuana even have regular English-language cable broadcasts on FS1 or FS2, with their Spanish broadcasts on Fox Deportes. Chivas occasionally has English-language broadcasts on NBC Sports, too.

Let me just stress here that this means that all 18 Mexican soccer teams have, effectively, a national broadcast contract in the United States. If you speak Spanish, every single one of these teams is the Atlanta Braves on TBS Superstation in the 1980s. Even if you speak only English, you have three and occasionally four teams that broadcast their home games, nationally, in your language.

When you realize this, you begin to understand why MLS and Liga MX are so eager to hook together their wagons. For MLS, it’s a chance to tap into the die-hard interest in its southern neighbor. For Liga MX, it’s a chance to reach a loyal market that’s north of the border.

Take the annual Campeon de Campeones match, played between the winners of each half of the Mexican season. Since 2015, it’s been played not in one of Mexico’s cathedrals of fútbol, but in the United States, specifically in the LA Galaxy’s home stadium, the StubHub Center / Dignity Health Sports Park / whatever we’re calling it today.

This year it was Cruz Azul, finally champions after years and years of painful near misses, against Club León. The surprise, seeing it on TV, was that there were some fans in the stands in Los Angeles that were NOT wearing Cruz Azul’s blue and white. It seems like virtually all of Mexican soccer is focused on the three Mexico City teams, Club América, Pumas, and Cruz Azul; on Chivas, the most popular team in Guadalajara, Mexico’s traditional second city; and now, grudgingly, on Monterrey and Tigres, the two teams in Monterrey, which has grown into the second-biggest metropolitan area in the country.

(As an aside, it’s hard not to get a real 1951 Major League Baseball vibe from Mexican soccer, sometimes. Three teams in Mexico City, two in Guadalajara, two in Monterrey, with scattered other teams around the country. You could probably even assign pairs, down the lineups: América is the Yankees, Cruz Azul the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pumas the New York Giants; Chivas is the Red Sox, Atlas the Boston Braves. Monterrey is the White Sox, Tigres is the Cubs. Ignore the implications of the American League vs. the National League for purposes of this paragraph, please.)

The stands in Los Angeles were absolutely packed to see Cruz Azul win 2-0. Put Cruz Azul most places in the United States and you’ll draw a full house. Which is why both MLS and Liga MX are interested in finding as many ways as possible to put Cruz Azul, and any others they can, most places in the United States.

The MLS-Liga MX tie-ins that already exist can be a little hard to keep track of. The one that’s best known, the CONCACAF Champions League, is continental, not just specific to North America - though the later rounds do tend to feature Mexican teams beating up on teams from Canada and the United States. The Campeones Cup is newish, meant to be a showpiece between the the Mexican champions and the MLS Cup winners; this returning at the end of September, Columbus against Cruz Azul. The Leagues Cup is meant to supplement the Champions League, and involves the best four teams from both leagues that did not make it to the Champions League; that one begins next week.

This year’s Leagues Cup could be kind of fascinating, especially in the sense of “which of these teams will take this seriously.” The MLS representatives are Seattle, Kansas City, New York City, and Orlando; Liga MX is sending León, Tigres, Pumas, and Santos Laguna.

On the MLS side, Seattle is second in the league, but the whole team is injured, and they’ve already been reduced to playing teams made up of teenagers and stadium vendors in MLS matches. Who knows who they’ll put on the field? Orlando is having its best season in some time, but in the space of a few weeks, they got beat 5-0 by NYC and lost to Chicago, which is probably more embarassing than losing 5-0. NYC is repeating its yearly commitment to being good without actually winning anything, and for the 40th year in a row, Kansas City is almost-but-not-quite the best team in MLS.

I find the Mexican teams impossible to predict, simply because there’s no telling which players will be on the field. I’ve been watching El Rebaño Sagrado, the Amazon Prime documentary about Chivas, and it’s fascinating to see the club’s attitude towards Copa MX. It’s clearly very important to the team that they do well and win it, but at the same time, it’s the opportunity for guys who aren’t getting on the field in Liga MX to show their stuff.

I have zero doubt that every one of these Mexican teams will want to dominate, and in the past, Liga MX second teams have been capable of beating MLS first teams (the benefits of depth, in action). With the Europa League vibe of the Leagues Cup, I’d expect more Copa MX teams in action.

That said, the first time around in the Leagues Cup, the same thing was true, and all four Mexican teams beat their MLS counterparts, and we were treated to the silliness of an all Liga-MX final in Las Vegas. Ah well.

No matter how this year’s edition goes, though, I think you can expect to see as much MLS-Liga MX collaboration as the two leagues can manage. It’s in both of their immediate interests, and it fits with the joint 2026 World Cup that’ll be held across North America.

And for those of us in the United States, brush up on that Spanish. If you really want to know what’s going on in American soccer, you’ll need it.

In my fridge, I have a bottle of what is labeled “Irish mustard.” How it got into my refrigerator is not important; suffice it to say that this came from a neighboring state, with a sterling recommendation from some residents of said neighboring state.

I won’t bring up the name of the company that sells this mustard because there’s no reason to drag them into the discussion, but there is a story on the side of the bottle. According to this legend, the recipe originates with a local with an Irish surname, who made homemade mustard that was locally famous.

You can find a lot of foods, especially condiments, with similar stories on the side of the bottle; they are the ones that are on the top shelf at the grocery store and generally cost at least 50% more than the most widely sold version of the same condiment. The stories are plausible without sounding true, like a campfire story.

This “Irish mustard” is fine, tasty even, but it doesn’t really taste like mustard. It certainly doesn’t taste like American mustard, the kind that comes in a big yellow bottle and tastes like a little like mustard and a little like turmeric. It also doesn’t taste like brown mustard or Dijon mustard or whole-grain mustard or any other familiar mustards.

What it does taste like is sugar. In this, I suppose it’s most comparable to honey mustard, though even honey mustard is probably more tangy than this “Irish” mustard. It tastes like if Sweet Baby Ray made a mustard barbecue sauce, and also didn’t care whether one tablespoon had more sugar than an entire can of Mountain Dew.

The thing that really has made me ponder about this mustard is this: why “Irish”? Though I am not a mustard expert, the Irish mustard in my fridge doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Emerald Isle. If anything, the Internet says that Irish mustard is whole-grain mustard that’s whiskey- or Guinness-infused; this mustard is neither of those things.

Technically speaking, almost any regionalism could have gone on the bottle, as long as you came up with a plausible surname to plug into the story. And given that mustard is pretty close to a worldwide condiment, one of those spices that connect the cuisine of Europe and Asia and the Americas and Africa, almost anything is technically in play.

However, knowing that this one is being sold in the north-central United States, it’s interesting to consider the regionalisms that wouldn’t work. “French” suggests either Dijon mustard or French’s yellow mustard and so must be eliminated. “German” is too associated with the type of whole-grain brown mustard that you get if you order a bratwurst at a German restaurant. “Canadian” is out because this mustard doesn’t taste like maple syrup.

When you consider the whole range of worldwide cuisines that use the mustard seed, the surprising part is probably just how few regionalisms could even be considered for a Midwestern mustard like this one. It almost certainly would have to be “from” a Northern or Eastern European country. It probably couldn’t be Scandinavian, because Midwesterners would assume it was a thinly-disguised cream sauce. It probably couldn’t be British, because we’d assume that it was something else entirely, given the Anglo-American differences between (for example) pudding.

And so, I give you the following ranking of potential regionalisms for theoretical Midwestern mustards, based on how delicious I think they would theoretically be.

1. Polish mustard
2. Hungarian mustard
3. Ukrainian mustard
4. Irish mustard
5. Czech mustard
6. Belgian mustard
7. Bulgarian mustard
8. Dutch mustard
9. Slovakian mustard
10. Romanian mustard
11. Swiss mustard (ranking dropped significantly thanks to existence of Swiss chard)
12. Icelandic mustard
13. Austrian mustard
14. (tie) (any other former Soviet republic) mustard

Mid-season form

The European soccer season ended on Sunday with the finals of the European Championships, and began again yesterday with the beginning of preseason friendlies.

Arsenal played at Hibernian, and it was like the offseason never happened. Actually, because all of the players Arsenal loaned out were back in the fold, it almost felt like most of last season had never happened. There’s Ainsley-Maintland Niles. There’s Sead Kolasinac. There’s Willian, whanging passes that land twenty yards from anyone. I was expecting Mesüt Özil to stroll onto the field, arm-in-arm with Gunnersaurus, just to complete the whole group.

Proving that time is a flat circle, Arsenal gave up a comedy goal that came after a brain-dead back-pass and a goalkeeper air-kick, missed a penalty, and lost 2-1. It was all very familiar! I am very aware that pre-season friendlies mean absolutely nothing, that any reaction other than “huh” is silly given that pre-season training started about three days ago, but still.

The most amazing thing to me, though, was how I watched the game. For UK viewers, possibly across Europe, I read on one site or another that Arsenal members could email the club for free access to watch the game on the club’s website, but otherwise, those fans would have to purchase an outrageously-priced pass.

That’s not what I did! I clicked on ESPN, where the game was being broadcast both in English (on ESPN3, online) and Spanish (on ESPN Deportes, on actual TV).

Every so often, I remember to be amazed at the amount of soccer that I can watch, in America. It’s true that I subscribe to a near-embarrassing number of services and packages, including both old-fashioned cable and online, but even with basic cable, or only ESPN+, or only Paramount+, or only one of several other packages, it’d be a never-ending smorgasbord.

For the longest time, I was as caught up as anyone in the evangelistic nature of American soccer fandom, and I’ll admit to you it was purely selfish. I just wanted soccer to be popular enough that the games, especially the big games, were on TV so I could watch them (without paying $20 for pay-per-view, as I remember doing for big Premier League games back when I did not have $20 to be throwing around on such things). Now I can watch Arsenal play Hibs in a meaningless friendly in two different languages.

Fortress Wembley

“We run a stadium, not a fortress.” – Football Association chief executive Mark Bullingham, quoted in The Athletic, upon being asked why Wembley Stadium didn’t have more security for the Euro 2020 final

Sunday, thousands of fans managed to force their way into Wembley Stadium to watch England play Italy in the Euro 2020 final. It was a throwback to the bad old days, in the sense that these stories were commonplace at one time in English soccer; there’s a chapter in Nick Hornby’s “Fever Pitch” about going to Wembley, finding that people had broken into the stadium and stolen his seats, and being able to do absolutely nothing about it.

In another sense, of course, it wasn’t a throwback at all. The video footage of people rushing at barriers until they broke, of crowds stampeding where they weren’t supposed to be, of random acts of violence utterly not in keeping with the location and the occasion, is obviously fairly familiar to anyone who has watched American news at any point over the last year or so.

The same day as the Wembley incidents, the U.S. men’s national team played its own home game in a continental championship, taking on Haiti in Kansas City in the Gold Cup. The stands were maybe half full, because tickets were ridiculously expensive, as they always are for the national teams. The real shock was that anyone at all paid that kind of money to watch the USA’s B-squad struggle against Haiti in a game that most people will have forgotten by this time next week.

And so, I can’t quite come up with a good American soccer comparison, or even an American sports comparison, for England playing in its first major-tournament final in 55 years, at home. Maybe if the Dallas Cowboys played in the Super Bowl in their home stadium, except that it was also the last Super Bowl ever played, and also maybe they were playing a team of extra-terrestrials for control of Earth?

The experience of watching soccer in England has changed entirely from the old stories you read about, where fights and stampeding crowds and hooliganism were weekly occurrences. Every once in awhile, though, those stories break through, like a TV broadcast that bounced off a far-flung planet and was reflected back to Earth, fifty years later.

Messi isn’t coming to Miami

Every time Lionel Messi was rumored to want out of Barcelona, there would be rumors that what he really wanted was to play in Miami, where he could… be reunited with Gonzalo Higuain? Play for Phil Neville? Frankly I could not understand anything you put after “could” in that sentence, but it’s all moot now, as ESPN reports that Messi has signed a new five-year contract with Barcelona.

He also is said to have taken a “significant” pay cut, but given that his last deal paid him $149 million a year (according to that same article) (I can’t believe that’s not a typo), he may well be able to afford a few years of relative poverty. Especially since Barcelona are famously out of money and are currently trying to sell anything that’s not nailed down.

Inter Miami continues to be one of the most remarkable clubs in MLS history. Not for what they’ve done on the field, but even if they win the next six MLS Cups, it will never not be funny that in their first year, they secretly signed five designated players, got fined huge amounts for doing so once the very obvious fraud was discovered, and still finished in 19th place.

“Not a chance. These have been the best six weeks of my life.” - England backup center back Conor Coady, when asked if he regrets not playing a minute in the European Championships despite being part of the squad

The soccer season is a long, long season. Europe is consumed between the beginning of August and the end of May, give or take a few weeks at either end or in the middle. Terrible weather in the United States forces MLS takes the three worst months of winter off, and even that short break is one of the longest breaks of any league in the world.

This makes it easy to forget that there’s anything important besides club soccer. That there are three or four competitions all going at the same time contributes to the breathless quality; speculation abounds whether (say) Manchester City can conquer the Champions League, finally, and if they can defend their Premier League title, or win the League Cup again, or the FA Cup, or all four at once.

And because of this, the media and the fans spend all year assigning glory to teams and coaches and players based on what they accomplish with their clubs. Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp have reached near-sainthood; Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has redeemed himself from (insert redemption arc here if we can ever figure out what he did wrong except be reasonably successful); Jose Mourinho has been cast into the pit of fire, or at least sent to Rome.

Then the summer tournaments roll around. Then the players form these temporary teams – yes, they play during the year too, but only for weeks at the time, as minor interruptions to the clearly more important things like the Champions League group stage or the FA Cup sixth round – and after a couple of weeks of training and a few games, it becomes obvious.

These big international tournaments, these temporary brotherhoods and sisterhoods, these times where entire nations come together: they mean way, way more to everyone than club trophies.

England’s trip to second place at the Euros has been notable on the pitch, sure. Wise Norwegian sage Lars Sivertsen probably put it best:

In my lifetime England have been this weird team with great players whose legs and minds suddenly turn to mush when they play tournaments.

This summer the players looked like themselves, were one of the best teams in the tournament, got to the final.

This is huge progress.

— Lars Sivertsen (@larssivertsen) July 11, 2021

What’s happening on the pitch isn’t the most notable thing about England, though. Off the pitch, it seems like the team has all fallen in love with each other, and in turn, the country has fallen in love with the team. Every player has publicly spoken about the brotherhood of this team, the deep bonds of the shared experience, and this from the country that absolutely pioneered the “national team broken apart by club rivalries and also possibly conflicts between significant others” model.

It’s not to say that this is guaranteed, of course; France is still stuck in the throes of a reckoning about what one player’s mom said to, and about, another player’s dad. And don’t dismiss this just because they are, you know, French; after winning the 2018 World Cup, everything I said about England could probably have been said about France. Winning breeds brotherhood, it’s true.

Of course, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t forget about the importance of the national team, of the profound and unshakeable bond among a national team and in turn between fans and the team itself, it’s people in the United States. We’re currently in the midst of another epoch of dominance by the U.S. Women’s National Team, and all of the greatness that England has just re-discovered is stuff that we’ve seen for going on five, or ten, or 35 years now.

I could spend four thousand words just buried in statistical minutiae, trying to paint a complete picture of how great the USWNT has been, but in the context of England I’ll go with this one: the England men’s team went 55 years without reaching the final of a major tournament. Since FIFA finally deigned to play a Women’s World Cup in 1991, and the Olympics started playing a women’s soccer tournament in 1996, the longest the USWNT has ever gone without reaching a major-tournament final is five years.

This is also their longest drought without winning a World Cup or a gold medal, in case you were wondering.

The point, though, is that every time the USWNT wins one of these tournaments, the quotes from the players don’t focus on how much talent is on the team or how great the NWSL is for players or how the culture of the national team breeds success. It’s on how close the team is – “23 best friends,” as one of the 2019 World Cup winners said.

This brotherhood and sisterhood is important because it paints a picture of how important and special these experiences are for the players. But while they’re important to the players, for the fans it’s absolutely the pinnacle of the fan experience.

As all-consuming as the Premier League and the Bundesliga and MLS and Serie A are, I rarely hear stories of how the club game sucked in new fans, except in the sense that those fans were indoctrinated by parents and grandparents and siblings and uncles and aunts. There’s a certain inevitability to the “my dad took me to watch [club] every week” story; it’s like telling someone that you’re six feet tall because your dad was six feet tall.

National teams, though, bring in people who were never fans before. Half the men’s soccer fans in the United States are fans because of the 1994, 2002, or 2010 World Cups – and given the instability in women’s club soccer, the percentage of women’s soccer fans with similar stories about the too many USWNT triumphs to list has to be far, far higher.

When these international tournaments roll around, it’s so easy to be blinded by the myopia of club soccer. The European Championships seem like too much to ask of players, after the longest club season ever. That the NWSL and MLS take a break around summer tournaments seems broadly unfair, even more so when you consider the teams who lose players for national-team duty.

And then the tournament takes over, and we remember. For the players, this experience can be the pinnacle of their careers. For the fans – new fans and old fans – these tournaments are the time of their life. For everyone, this experience is far more meaningful than anything club soccer will ever have.

Tonight, Argentina meets Brazil in the Copa América final. Tomorrow, England meets Italy in the Euro 2020 final.

These are similar games, in that they’re the continental championships of soccer’s two biggest continents. Brazil and England are both playing home games, somewhat unexpectedly — Brazil because it’s only hosting the tournament after Colombia and Argentina couldn’t, England because Euro 2020 is a strange pan-European beast, but they had to put the final somewhere. (And also it’s a surprise because England’s in it.) Which brings up the other similarity, which is that both have a strong “can they stop the streak” flavor; Argentina hasn’t won anything since the 1993 Copa, England hasn’t won anything or even played for anything since the 1966 World Cup.

Even so, though, these games are going to feel remarkably and wildly different. Brazil-Argentina at the Maracanã, England-Italy at Wembley, it’s hard to come up with fixtures that are much bigger than that. But Wembley will have 65,000 fans, 64,000 of which will be living and dying with every English action. The Maracanã will be at… 10% capacity, it sounds like? Seven or eight thousand fans?

Fullish stadiums have been slowly coming back for awhile now. Most American states have ended restrictions on large gatherings, and so MLS games are back to full capacity (or in the case of Dallas, their usual 40% or so — zing, tip your waitresses, try the veal, etc). The CONCACAF Nations League final between the USA and Mexico put 37,000 fans in Denver’s NFL stadium, about half capacity, enough that there were roars on both sides like the usual Stateside cross-border game.

The one I’ll really remember, though, was the first match at Puskás Aréna in Budapest, for the game between Hungary and Portugal in the group stage at the Euros. They mostly packed it, with more than 54,000 baying Hungarian supporters in the stands, and after a year of empty stadiums, even the televised experience was overwhelming.

The noise! The roars shook the camera and rolled through the stadium like water in a bathtub. Every time the referee called something against Hungary, the dismay from the crowd was palpable, almost physical. A year and a half ago, this would have been normal; after all this empty-stadium time, it was almost overwhelming, even on TV. I expected the stadium announcer to plead with the fans: PLEASE, FOLKS, THE REFEREE IS JUST DOING HIS JOB. CAN WE HAVE QUIET? QUIET, PLEASE, FOR THE SOCCER.

It was like seeing the sun after a day trapped in a basement, or putting a bucket over your head and screaming after being shushed in a library. I forgot about that! I forgot about that physical sensation of crowd noise, that earthquake of people that shakes the camera and affects the game.

And that, of course, was one of the reasons that sports are great. They call soccer “the beautiful game,” but the truth is that in every single sport, you can find someone writing about it in idyllic terms — about the crack of the bat in baseball or the sound of skates on ice in hockey or the powerful WHOOMP of a car going by in auto racing.

It’s reductionism, an attempt to find meaning in the game itself, and it’s valid as far as the in-person experience goes, or the experience of playing a sport goes. Hitting a perfect shot in golf is to feel like the universe is at your command. Seeing someone hit a top-corner volley in soccer is to feel the life of the universe flow through you.

As it turns out, though, that experience is interesting on television, but in the same way that the Weather Channel is interesting. If you stick around for an hour, you’ll find yourself murmuring about low pressure and cold fronts, but sticking around for an hour is a challenge; either you’ve got a passion for meteorology for its own sake, or you’re life-threateningly bored, or a combination of both.

Without the crowds in the stands, soccer — and all sports —turned out to be no different. I watched a lot of sports without crowds over the last year and a half, and I enjoyed them, but not nearly in the same way. Unless I had a personal rooting interest or a genuine curiosity, like I wonder how Kimmich and Goretzka are going to fare in the same midfield against PSG — you know, something utterly crucial and important like that — it was hard to get involved, even for a genuine nutcase like me. I spent a lot of the year turning on a game and failing to get interested in it because I couldn’t remember which team was which. Without crowds, it’s just red-shirted people against white-shirted people, kicking a ball.

And so I find myself trying to find specific things to get interested in with Brazil and Argentina tonight. There are lots! Starting with Messi! Lionel Messi has lost final after final with Argentina, un león con varios gatos, and he’s running out of chances. He’s driven the Argentinian bus, foot on the gas, through the whole tournament, but he usually does that; can he finally drag his team through Brazil, which has been a juggernaut lately? More to the point, how will he play — facilitator or protagonist, scorer or assister, calm or desperate, joyful or angry? They could put the camera solely on him and it’d be its own opera.

But England-Italy, now that is going to be some Sports right there. Brazil-Argentina is a film, but England-Italy is going to be a movie, the Movie-Going Experience Of The Summer, See It In Surround Sound and Gorgeous 3D. Sinews will be strained. Italian names will be shouted. (Try it yourself, it’s genuinely joyful: Locatelli! Insigne! Immobile! Chiellini! Donnarumma!)

Everyone wants fans back in the stands. Fans want to be there, teams want them to support the team and spend some money, TV broadcasters need the roars — and as much as anything, we all want the pandemic to leave us alone, and large group gatherings have become as much of a sign of that as anything, as the first thing banned and the last thing to return.

The Bundesliga was the first league to come back, in 2020, and the first week it came back, the Borussia Monchengladbach ultras put a sign in the stands that said FOOTBALL WITHOUT FANS IS NOTHING.

After this last year and a half, I understand how right they were. And if you watch tonight’s game and tomorrow’s game, I expect it’ll make sense to you too.