*NOTE: This appeared at SoccerCentric. *

For fans, trades are simple – a player comes in, a player goes out, and things move on. So when Minnesota United made two trades over the summer break, dealing Bryan Arguez to Carolina for Floyd Franks, and trading Etienne Barbara to Tampa Bay for Mike Ambersley, everything seemed fairly neat: one central midfielder and one supporting forward out, one of each coming back. Cut and dried.

For the players, though, there’s more to it – especially for guys like Franks and Ambersley, who had been with their clubs long enough to become established players. Franks had spent most of the past three and a half years in Carolina, this spring as the team captain, while Ambersley had been in Tampa Bay since the beginning of 2011. Both assumed they’d be part of future plans – right up until they got some shocking news from the manager.

“It was a big surprise, actually,” said Ambersley, who was told of the trade just two days before the opening of the fall season. “They never mentioned a word about to me during the whole summer break, which I would have appreciated, but that’s just not how it went. I was totally caught off guard.”

Franks echoed his new teammate’s bewilderment. “I definitely didn’t see that coming,” he said. “I’ve been in Carolina for four years on and off, and so it kind of felt like it was a bit of a home, so that was disappointing to feel maybe like they – it’s just disappointing when you’ve been in a place for so long and you know all the people and things like that, and then they move you on.

“It’s a small league, but I guess it’s changing. It’s part of the business, that’s what everybody kept telling me. I don’t work that way, but I guess that’s all right, that’s the way things are, so I’ve got to live with that. I enjoy working with the people I have a relationship with and have formed some loyalty and trust with. In business, and I guess that’s the way the league’s going, it’s not so much like that any more.”

After the initial shock wears off, it’s time for the scramble to the new place. It took Ambersley almost a week to get to Minnesota, just from having to get his family from Tampa to Minneapolis – a move that the St. Louis native says he’s enjoying. “I’m a Midwest boy, so I love the weather here, I love the atmosphere, my wife loves it here,” he said.

There’s also the challenge of fitting into a new locker room, something that both guys say was easy, despite having to do it at midseason. According to both, being a veteran helps. ” I’ve known a lot of guys from around the league,” said Ambersley. “I’ve been in the league for eight years now so I know most of the players, so the transition was easy, and I’m having a blast right now.”

United was hit with rumors of locker-room dissent in the spring, something the trades were designed to combat, in part. Franks says that he’s yet to see any evidence of that schism. “I honestly haven’t seen anything like that,” he said. “It’s a healthy locker room. It’s got to start there, and then that translates out onto the field.”

Both are settled in now in Minnesota; both have played in their first games in a United shirt. For Ambersley, now comes the part he’s most used to: re-proving himself. “I always feel like I have something to prove,” he said. “I always play with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, and now I might have two chips.

“It comes down to a team wanted me, and from what they tell me, that’s why I got traded, because Minnesota wanted me here. That’s a good thing, a good feeling for me here, because you always want to be somewhere where you’re wanted.”

NOTE: This appeared at SoccerCentric.

Saturday, the Tampa Bay Rowdies come to Minneapolis – for the moment, at least, as the first-place team in the NASL. It’s been an eventful fall season for Tampa, even two games into the year; in week one, they played perhaps the match of the year, falling behind 3-0 at San Antonio after 18 minutes, then scoring four goals before halftime to retake the lead and eventually winning 7-4. This was followed up in week two with a scoreless draw, but one against the New York Cosmos, the renewing of a rivalry from the old NASL – a rivalry that was strong enough to sell out Al Lang Stadium in Tampa Bay, even now.

To get the lay of the land with the Rowdies, I talked to Mike Manganello, who covers the Rowdies for the Tampa Tribune.

SC: Rowdies midfielder Luke Mulholland, who might be the league’s best player, was sent off last week after getting two yellow cards, and won’t play this week. What happened?
The first one was very strange. The Cosmos goalkeeper had the ball, and I think Luke was just pressuring him too much, or when the keeper dropped the ball he was too close and made contact – it was a really strange, a very soft yellow card. And then the second one was for a tackle that ended up being about 30 seconds before the final whistle. He could easily have made it out of that game.

SoccerCentric: That epic 7-4 game – what happened there?
Mike Manganello: It seemed like [Tampa head coach] Ricky [Hill] was trying to play the ball on the carpet the first twenty minutes. Because the the team hadn’t played any preseason exhibitions, it wasn’t working, and they couldn’t control the ball like they needed to. They kept giving it away, and they got burned very quickly. After the 18th minute, when they were already losing 3-0, they kind of changed tactics and wanted to play over the top a little more, and that helped them get back into the match. And then I think the confidence of erasing a 3-0 deficit can propel you pretty far.

SC: Tampa has been the league’s best road team this year – but has won just once in seven home games. Why?
MM: I have no idea, and no one on the team or the coaching staff seems to know either. We always talk about how, despite having low numbers, the crowd support seems enthusiastic. Their home field is set up for home-field advantage; there’s always a cross-wind that other teams tend to struggle with when they’re playing the ball in the air, the field is very small and compact, which other teams may not normally be used to, the grass isn’t perfect… it feels like the kind of stadium where they should be able to dominate every home game, just because it’s so strange to the away team. There really isn’t an explanation. I’m not sure.

SC: United and Tampa made a trade during the summer break. We know why United sent Etienne Barbara to Tampa, but why would Tampa pull the trigger on sending Mike Ambersley to Minnesota?
MM: I think the team didn’t quite have enough faith that he was putting in his full effort to recover from the knee sprain he had all spring season. I think that they saw him as a guy that was just kind of collecting paychecks, getting back on his own schedule, rather than his schedule. He’s been here awhile, things can get stale. He’s a player that had a lot of success here. It was kind of a risk worth taking for the Rowdies; if they can be the team that settles Etienne, then he can pay huge dividends.

SC: Did the Rowdies make any other moves during the summer break?
MM: No, they didn’t. They pretty badly needed a defender that they never got. They could use a left back – they have Andres Arango playing there, he’s not necessarily an outside back, more belongs in the center. If they could get a left back, they could move him to the center and take **Jay Needham **out of the starting lineup, which would be beneficial.

SC: Former Minnesota striker Amani Walker tore his ACL in San Antonio, and will miss the rest of the year. How does that hurt Tampa?
MM: Well, we’ll see how reliable Etienne can be. I think with his arrival, Amani was going to be facing limited opportunities anyway. It just depends on how much Etienne wants to play here and how well he gets along with the staff and all that. It was strange – Amani apparently didn’t even leave San Antonio injured. He was subbed off for tactics. And then the next day his knee was swollen and they sent him for an MRI and it turned out he had a torn ACL.

SC: How has Tampa Bay been lining up, up front, in the fall season?
MM: Georgi Hristov started, Etienne came off the bench. Evans Frimpong was – I don’t want to say up front, he was a wide player that was always kind of pushing up the side. It was kind of a single-striker front with Georgi and then Etienne came on as a support striker at the end.

My thanks again to Mike; follow him on Twitter at @MikeManganello, if you’re looking for info about the Rowdies.

I was a little surprised how self-congratulatory everybody in baseball was for the Biogenesis suspensions that came down last week. And so, to the satire machines!

(/cranks up satire machine)

(/sound of farting)

*A little something new at SoccerCentric this week – an international roundup. *

Generally, this means that the game is between two powerhouses; the last four years, the game has involved some combination of Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea. And so even though winning the Community Shield means nothing, it has served as preliminary skirmish in the battle for the real prize, the Premier League title.

Wigan’s FA Cup victory over Manchester City last May, though, meant that Sunday’s game was a little less glamorous. Wigan were the first team in history to win the Cup and be relegated in the same season, making this a matchup of the Egnlish champions and a second-division side. Maybe 5,000 Wigan fans showed up at Wembley Stadium, compared to at least ten times as many United fans, possibly more.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Red Devils won rather breezily, 2-0. Robin Van Persie scored in the sixth minute, and in the 59th, and Wigan hardly troubled the ManU goal. Most of the coverage focused on the fact that new United manager David Moyes had not, after all, screwed up in his first game as the replacement for the irreplaceable** Sir Alex Ferguson**.

There is more ManU drama ahead – striker Wayne Rooney is said to be desperate to move to title rivals Chelsea, and wasn’t in the squad on Sunday – but for now, all is calm at Old Trafford.

Also, I would be remiss not to mention that Partick Thistle beat Ross County 3-1 in the Scottish league, mostly because I can’t help but mention a team as wonderfully-named as Partick Thistle at every opportunity.

*NOTE: This appeared first at RandBall, your home for posts saved in drafts. *

It occurs to me that the hardest thing for any televised sport to do is to make the viewer, at home in his living room, feel like something is at stake. This is why baseball draws great TV ratings in local markets, but terrible ones nationally. Fans will tune in to see their home nine try to win, because something is at stake; nobody will watch the Pirates play the Braves, even if both are very, very good teams, because in a 162-game season, a single game doesn’t matter.

There are two sports that have become absurdly popular, in part, because they have this figured out. One is college football, which has the weekly Top 25 poll to lean on. It takes two seconds to figure out what’s at stake when you turn on a college football game; if you see #3 vs. #6, you know it’s a big game, even if it happens to be Boise State vs. Oklahoma State, or some other matchup of nontraditional powers. Throw in the regional rivalries, and what’s at stake comes through the television loud and clear.

The other one is English soccer, which has gained a surprisingly large foothold on American television. A combination of a much freer market for talent, the lack of an effective salary cap, and teams owned by oil gazillionaires mean that only three English soccer teams have a shot at winning the league title, and only about seven have a chance of being any good at all. This is terrible for league parity, and I imagine if you happen to be a die-hard Fulham fan, it’d be immensely frustrating. For American fans, though, it makes the league intuitively easy to understand; even casual fans know that Chelsea vs. Manchester United is a big game, and that if Manchester City is playing Swansea City, then Swansea are the scrappy underdogs. Either way, knowing what’s at stake is simple.

This week, American soccer star Clint Dempsey made a surprise return to America, leaving English club Tottenham for the Seattle Sounders. Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated covered the details of the transaction, but the thing that stood out to me is that Major League Soccer – which is run as a single entity, and thus governs player allocation in cases like this – made no bones about wanting Dempsey to go to what it clearly considers one of the league’s marquee teams in Seattle.

MLS has long suffered from a decided lack of big teams and big games. Even if they’re both good teams, the excitement of a Colorado-Montreal game just doesn’t come through the screen. It’s possible that this Dempsey allocation, while potentially not great for league parity, at least shows that MLS is starting to think about making the league interesting to the casual fan.

*On with the links:

*Weekend links favorite Parker Hageman talks with Jared Burton about pitching, and it’s fascinating.

*This cartoon by Molly Brooks explains, better than I ever could, why sports are better than fiction and reality TV and pretty much every other form of entertainment.

*Clint Irwin is the Colorado Rapids’ starting goalkeeper, but as somebody who’s making the league rookie minimum and has played in the lower North American leagues, he can describe for you exactly how hard it is to scratch out a living.

*At Grantland, Sean McIndoe fixes the NHL, and I must say I pretty much entirely agree with him.

*Joe Posnanski writes about Cap Anson, but really about the entire Hall of Fame debate and who belongs in the Hall.

NOTE: This appeared at SoccerCentric.

Minnesota United went on quite the slide to finish the spring season, losing their final three games in progressively uglier fashion. The Fort Lauderdale Strikers, if anything, outdid them, going seven winless games to close the spring, including four losses to end the half.

It was enough for the Strikers to fire coach Daryl Shore before the spring had even ended. Over the summer, they replaced him with Austrian coach Günter Kronsteiner, who brings a wealth of experience from both coaching and playing in Austria. Fort Lauderdale has also, like Minnesota, signed a raft of new players, including former Minnesota forward Martin Nuñez, who scored five goals for the then-Stars in 2012. The Strikers have also brought in four MLS players on loan, and signed wonderfully-named Brazilian forward Paulo Jr.

For United head coach Manny Lagos, tonight is an important chance for his team to right the ship. “The team has been through one of its tougher runs, historically, in a long time,” he said. “We know we’re not playing as a unit as good as we should, and the results have not gone our way. I think this is going to be a huge challenge because we’re going to be playing against a team that’s going to be at home, they’re going to have energy, they’re going to be excited to start their season off on a better foot than they did last season. It’s a big game for us, for a lot of reasons, besides that it’s important to get points.”

Both teams lost last week, the Strikers rather painfully, as Alessandro Noselli scored in the 93rd minute for the New York Cosmos to snatch a 2-1 win – a goal that game after the Strikers had, confusingly, headed the ball back into their own penalty area, where Noselli managed to deflect it in. The streaks have continued – five losses in a row for Fort Lauderdale, four for Minnesota. Something has to give tonight.

Ambersley available, Daley arrives, Mallace and Ubiparipovic locked in

Lagos confirmed that forward Mike Ambersley, Minnesota’s return in the trade that sent Etienne Barbara to Tampa Bay, arrived midweek and trained with the team on Thursday. Ambersley is in the 18-man squad that made the trip to Fort Lauderdale, though is unlikely to start after just one practice.

Not in the travel squad is winger Omar Daley, who the club officially signed midweek. The Jamaican international was signed as cover for an area that Lagos noted needed some help. “He’s both an experienced player, and provides some width and speed,” said the coach. “I think our depth wide is probably the slimmest [on the team], particularly in guys who use their pace to try to get in behind and break teams down.”

Also worth a note is that the MLS mid-season transfer window closed Thursday. For United, this means that the loans of Calum Mallace and Sinisa Ubiparipovic are officially permanent for the fall; Montreal could only recall them as long as the transfer window was open (though there would have been a financial penalty for doing so, as per the terms of the deal.) The pair started in midfield Saturday against Atlanta, and could well do so again tonight in Fort Lauderdale.

United is reasonably healthy; only backup center backs Brent Kallman (ankle) and Kevin Friedland (calf) will miss out tonight.

**More coverage? Why not?
**

With the fall season now in full swing, the club has ramped up their in-house content, bringing several local writers on board for a blog on the team website.They’ve brought three writers on board that I like, in Steve McPherson, Lindsay Guentzel, and Jason Concepcion, and rather than read my ramblings about how great they all are, just trust me and go check out the blog.

Game details

It’s a 6:30pm start in Fort Lauderdale tonight, and you can watch live online at NASL.com/Live or at MNUnitedFC.com. The club is hosting an official watch party at Brit’s Pub in downtown Minneapolis, while the Dark Clouds, the team’s supporters’ group, will be at the Nomad World Pub on the West Bank.

NOTE: This also appeared at SoccerCentric.

We discussed the Wolves’ summer, Major League Soccer, Andrew Albers’ future career, Brian Dozier, Greg Jennings, and a whole bunch of other stuff this week on the Sportive.

Of course we went off on tangents, too. Proof: the phrase “Chapstick and a bottle of Thunderbird” was used.

NOTE: Hey, Rand is back! This post appeared first at RandBall, your home for journamalism.

The NFL returns this weekend, as Miami and Dallas play tomorrow night’s Hall of Fame Game to kick off the 2013 preseason slate. The league is in a strange place; it’s the most popular thing on television, but the league is genuinely concerned that it’s so much more fun to watch on TV that people will just stop buying tickets. On the flip side, you have baseball, which has posted its nine best seasons for ticket sales in the history of the game, all in a row, all while national TV viewing numbers for MLB have crashed down to near-NHL levels.

Look at last night’s Twins game, for example; the Astros, baseball’s worst team, are in town. The Twins had lost four in a row, playing a near-Triple-A lineup in several of the games. And, even with all that, more than 30,000 people went to Target Field last night, because going to baseball games is actually fun. It’s fun for kids, it’s fun for grandparents, it’s fun for college kids and middle-aged drunks and sewing circles. “Fun for the whole family” generally means “fun for kids, plus any other members of the family who could also possibly be entertained by a moving ceiling fan,” but baseball can genuinely lay claim to the actual cliche.

I’m not sure the NFL can say the same. It’s generally the most expensive local option, and the in-stadium experience is generally only fun if you like drunkenness and swearing. To try to police the crowd, though, would be foolish; part of the NFL’s appeal on television is that every game feels like a gladiatorial spectacle, and what gladiatorial spectacle would be complete without a baying mob in the stands?

Football has yet to see a real drop-off in attendance, and if there’s any sport that can continue to increase TV viewing while keeping ticket-buying fans, it’s the NFL. But as the league kicks off another year, I wonder – is this the year that the turnstiles begin to stop ticking?

*On with the links:

*Chris Brown explains how the Vikings are using a half-century-old play to let Adrian Peterson dominate. (Bonus link: he also writes about how NFL teams will defend Colin Kaepernick and other practitioners of the read option.)

*Wright Thompson at ESPN writes what I suspect will become the defining portrait of Johnny Manziel’s college years, of the quarterback who’s both a superstar and still a kid.

*Can Diamond Dallas Page change the world, or at least save a couple of fellow pro wrestlers? Tom Ley of Deadspin heads to Georgia to find out.

*Ignore the final two paragraphs of this Economist article about football and head injuries, and it’s as good of a defense of the game as you’ll likely find.

*And finally: sometimes, in addition to everything else they do, dads have to step in and get slaughtered in a Legion baseball championship game, too.