Good Soccer/Bad Soccer Vol. 1

Welcome to Good Soccer/Bad Soccer, a weekly roundup of American soccer things that your friendly neighborhood Soccer Eagle (that's me) came across during his soccer travels.

Since this is the first edition of GS/BS, let me give you a sense of what we're doing here:

It's American soccer. Always American soccer. If it's not American soccer, it's not fit for the roundup. Of course, as the curator of GS/BS, I reserve the right to determine what count's as American soccer. You'll probably find my definition is, for good reason, somewhat expansive.

If you enjoy GS/BS or any other feature of the Soccer Eagle newsletter, please subscribe and share.

LET'S GO.

Where Have All The Cowboys Gone? They're Playing Soccer.

It's not all that long ago that a feature of being an American soccer fan was navigating the insipid opinions of sports columnists, sports fans, and the general public that the sport was (among other things) "communist", "Euro", "unAmerican" or—the most hateful and irredeemable of them all—"gay". At every sign of the sport's growth in the United States a reactionary element popped up to push back against the idea that soccer could truly fit out national character (whatever that is). People of influence worked overtime to diminish the game by any means necessary and American sports fans largely followed their cues.

So forgive me pausing to process the news that USL League One will add a team in Celina, Texas next season wrapped in rodeo and cowboy imagery, two of America's most precious expression of frontier masculinity. Yeehaw! Hit the overlap!

Now I'm neither a cowboy nor a Texan so I can't tell you if Rodeo SC's brand is "good" or not. Is it cosplay-y to dress up a soccer team in the motifs of ranches and bull riding and lassos? What I can say for sure is that there isn't another club in the country with branding like Rodeo SC and that has to count for something.

And I suppose it can't be cosplay if the club's owner is a former bull rider himself.

I'm not going to defend this, though. My best guess is that Rodeo FC, almost a full year before it plays an actual game, though an April Fool's joke was a good idea.

Mad Keeper and MULTIBALLLLLLLLLLL

Goalkeepers going behind the goal to retrieve a new ball when time is tight and their team is desperately searching an equalizer is a regular feature of the game. Those are precious seconds and the goalkeeper—especially when his team is playing away from home—can't rely on a ball boy to help him restart play in a timely fashion.

Usually, though, the goalkeeper rushing a new ball into play happens on his own end as he scurries to play a goal kick, not in the opponents end with the intent to...slow down a counterattack?

Points for creativity, I suppose.

Sorry Soccer Moms...Minivans Are About Balls Now

Just when I thought we were past all of the antiquated stereotypes about soccer that infected far too much of my youth, I caught this post on Bluesky.

Honestly, this is just extremely confusing. Chrysler doesn't want their new updated minivan to be associated with soccer, a sport that is even bigger in the US than it was when the minivan got pigeonholed as the vehicle of the soccer mom? "More balls" meaning what, exactly? That insecure men who hold on to old ideas about the most popular sport in the world can now safely choose to drive a Pacifica because it's macho now?

This reminds me of a piece I wrote on the whole "soccer mom" thing for Brian Phillips' Run of Play a lifetime ago.

Anyway, car marketing is weird. There's a particular set of truck ads I keep getting on a particular streaming service (no, I don't pay for the no ads version, what about it) that includes:

1. Ultra Patriotic themes
2. AI generated scenes
3. Impossible shots of a truck parked alongside the Tidal Basin in DC which greatly offend me as a denizen of the DMV

We'll Always Have Chili's

Now that the international window is closed and the USMNT arrested any and all momentum towards a home World Cup with a pair of desultrous friendlies, we know for certain that the only truly good and pure thing to come out of the March camp was Chris Richards' ode to that American institution, Chili's from Pardeep Cattry's piece on the central defender.

"The Triple Dipper you have to get but then I think it's the endless chips and salsa, but then also there's sports on TV and also the chocolate molten lava cake and it's just like you're sitting there and you're looking at the ground, the tile," Richards said. "You're like, this is beautiful. This is nostalgia. This is really America … I think that's one of the things that makes us American — places like Chili's are like a staple and I think they finally could have that stamp on their passport now that they've had Chili's so I was happy for them."

That last part kills me. Richards is talking about taking a pair of U.S. internationals who grew up in England, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Antonee Robinson, to a pretty pedestrian American restaurant chain that serves burgers and fajitas and portraying it as a life changing experience. A "stamp on their passport".

If US Soccer has any sense, we'll get a World Cup travelog with Chris taking his foreign-raised teammates to all of the bedrock American dining establishments: Chili's, Applebee's, T.G.I. Friday's, Pizzeria Uno. Fill up that passport.

This is the part of the newsletter where I once again ask you to subscribe and share and drop a few more links on you for the other things I make.

We're closing on 200 subs and while I know that's a drop in the bucket for some of my soccer media colleagues, it would represent a big milestone for me after so many years out of the opinion writing game.

The Best Soccer Show will drop tomorrow (Friday) with an autopsy of the USMNT window. If you sign up for the show's Patreon page, you can find my review of Mauricio Pochettino's postgame press conference (CLOSE THE DOOR!) and get access to the Besties Slack community.

Since I'm not sure where everyone is getting their podcast these days, I'll give you options: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.

That's it. Thanks for reading.