DarkKnight1 said:

American footballers = athletic

Footballers = athletic

Neither could play each others' sports at the highest level with their sport specific physiques and taking into account the sociological factors. Specific skills need to be learnt, to be improved from a young age without cessation. How you're socialised makes a difference too. All the training in the world won't necessarily make a great footballer or American footballer, regardless of fitness or physique.

Beckham Could Be Joined In The United States By Two Premiership Players




Edgar Davids and Robbie Fowler





Liverpool coach Rafael Benitez has made it clear that Fowler's contract will not be renewed at the end of the season and the player has decided to investigate the possibility of a move to the MLS.

"Robbie's agent is in talks with a number of American clubs," said a source close to the player.

MLS coach Steve Morrow, meanwhile, revealed that negotiations to bring Edgar Davids to the US had "come a long way" and that he was "hopeful" of securing the Tottenham player's signature.

Posh Beckham starts house hunting as celebs snap up tickets



Victoria Beckham has arrived in Los Angeles to start house-hunting in preparation for a move to the city by the first family of football.

Former England captain David Beckham signed for the Los Angeles Galaxy last week in a deal worth 250 million dollars over five years.

His wife, formerly known as Posh Spice from the hit band The Spice Girls, arrived in the city over the weekend to hunt for a suitable abode but there is no word yet on which neighbourhoods she is searching in.

Meanwhile the arrival of the soccer superstar is already having a financial impact on his new team, which has sold thousands of season tickets since the signing was announced. Among the buyers are a host of celebrities, including Rod Stewart, Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Lopez who have paid 2,900 dollars for the tickets. "It has been quite amazing," said club spokesperson Patrick Donnelly.

Why America will fall in love with Beckham


Millions of Americans regularly play and watch soccer - so the time is ripe for David Beckham's arrival on the scene.

Here's something that might surprise readers outside the US trying to make sense of what the owners of the Los Angeles Galaxy could possibly be thinking by agreeing to help David Beckham on his quest to gross a quarter of a billion dollars over the next five years: in 2006, the final game of Major League Baseball's World Series, in St Louis, was watched by 16.3 million Americans. A few months earlier, the final match of FIFA's World Cup, in Berlin, was watched by 16.9 million Americans. I thought of these numbers last week, when I heard the Guardian's sports correspondent Paul Kelso on the Newsdesk podcast assert that "US indifference" to football would mean that David Beckham would soon find himself "playing in front of crowds of 20,000, many of whom may not know quite what's going on."

That may have been true 30 years ago, when galacticos like Pele, Johann Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer were parachuted into New York to play for the Cosmos. But an explosion of youth football since then means that Beckham will soon be beamed down to a place inhabited by millions of young adults who played the game as children and would, in fact, know half-decent football if they saw it. As those television ratings for the World Cup suggest, the audience for football in the US, while small as a percentage of the whole population, is actually quite massive in terms of raw numbers. As a point of comparison, consider that the same Italy-France match last July was watched by 16.7 million viewers in Britain.

The point is that football in the States doesn't have to compete with baseball, basketball or American football to become popular enough to support a decent domestic league. The country is big enough to supply a fan base to professional leagues in even marginal sports, like ice hockey, for example, a sport which contests matches before 20,000 knowledgeable fans on a regular enough basis to pay the wages of some of the best athletes in the world.

Since Beckham's wages in L.A. will apparently be in the range of about $10m per year (he expects to make the rest of his fortune flogging mobile phones, football boots and shirts), there's no reason to believe that the owners of the Galaxy have made a ruinous investment by bringing him in to signal that half-decent football will indeed soon be on offer in suburban stadiums outside many of the nation's major cities. And it'll also be on offer in a neighboring country with 80,000 seat stadiums as well. The Galaxy timed its announcement of Beckham's signing to coincide with the roll-out of a new North American competition modeled on the Champions League, the Super Liga, which will begin this summer, pitting several Major League Soccer clubs from the States against the top clubs in Mexico.

What's more, I can attest, as one of the editors of a World Cup blog on The New York Times web site that drew in excess of four million page views last summer and generated many thousands of comments, that the depth of football knowledge among those Americans who are interested in the game is far greater than non-Americans seem to realise. Also, the fact that our blog's most popular feature, by far, was live coverage of the American team's matches would seem to dispel the idea that football is only followed closely or really cared about by Spanish-speaking immigrants to the US from Central or South America - as would the fact that less than a third of the television audience for the World Cup final in the States was watching the Spanish-language version of the broadcast.

Of course comparing World Cup and World Series viewerships does not mean that football is now more popular than baseball in the US (or, for that matter, basketball, despite the fact that the 2006 NBA finals drew an average of just 12 million American viewers) but what it does suggest is that the potential audience for good football in the States is now significant - and far from indifferent.

CarrieMpls said:

i am NOT showing you my dick!!

fantasyislander said:

Super Bowl XLI will be broadcast to a worldwide audience of more than 1 billion in more than 230 countries and territories.
[Edited 1/16/07 20:59pm]

july said:

i'd travel to watch him play a game, just for the fact that watching a former spurs player would make me feel closer to my favorite team.

fantasyislander said:

july said:

thanks for the correction! it'll be interesting to see what the real numbers are after it airs.

fantasyislander said:

Okay doke.
[Edited 1/17/07 3:45am]

july said:

i had not heard this!! i follow the premiership in england, but this could be huge for the game over here!!

i am really looking forward to seeing how the love for the game develops and/or changes here in the coming years.

does this mean you aren't going to answer my questions? or try to tell me that you aren't completely arrogant in your attitude towards american football? i mean, come on, your post on your P&R thread says as much as well.

fantasyislander said:

he's a loudmouth pain in the ass and, like Beckham, a has-been! Face it America, y'all are getting Europe's has-beens!!!!!

abierman said:

shut it. he's still , despite his temper, and i LOVE watching him play.

fantasyislander said:

I happen to know the guy, he's a jerk and a wife-beater.....and a has-been!

abierman said:

fantasyislander said:

it's the truth!

and he's not a has-been. i mean, sure, he's got some problems... but...


oh screw you.

abierman said:

how do you know?

abierman said:

His personal life is his own business and as i recall he was never convicted of anything. However the thread is about football and i have to say Davids is a joy to watch, admittedly he has lost a yard of pace and 20 mins of legs since last season and indeed 3 yrds since his hey day but he is still a class act and will teach the guys in his squad a huge amount. His first touch is sublime and his tackling is agressive.

Although he can't get in the first xi at the Lane i for one will be sad to see him go.

mdiver said:

i hope he comes somewhere near here!!! i will sooooo drive to watch him play!!

I'm still findin' this dude, not hot.

fantasyislander said:

Like I said, I happen to know him.....and I happen to know the girl he was dating (better)!

THIS is the only European I'm feelin'!

abierman said:

Dude seriously IF that is true i have no doubt given the money he earns AND the fact she is an ex....IF he had beat her there would have been a massive civil suite and masses of dough changing hands. I am not saying it didn't happen but i would be real careful of labelling people until you get EVERY side of the story. It can be very misleading hearing it from one source.

If the truth is what you want..otherwise...believe everything you hear by all means

mdiver said:

money is a powerful tool, Phil.....it can help you make people shut up!

SureThing said:

abierman said:

I will agree with you there my friend. However no amount would have stopped the "motherfucker" at 4am i am sure!!!!!

Hope you are well

How much skill does Beckham have left?


SIDELINED: Real Madrid's David Beckham watches his team's Spanish first division match against Zaragoza at Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid last weekend.

By Grahame L. Jones, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer January 17, 2007

Still near the top?
click to enlargeOverlooked in the rush to lavish $250 million and 250 million words on David Beckham are the raw statistics of his Real Madrid career.

Over the last 3 1/2 years, in 148 league and cup matches for Real Madrid, Beckham has scored 19 goals — or about one goal for every eight games.

So perhaps Galaxy fans should not be looking for their new multimillion-dollar man to bend it into the back of the net with any sort of regularity.

Since his teens, Beckham's trademark has been the ability to send swerving kicks to precise locations from all sorts of distances and angles.

But can he still do it, especially since he turns 32 in May and will have somewhat less skilled and considerably less wealthy Major League Soccer opponents lunging at his shins and ankles on a weekly basis?

Bob Bradley, interim coach of the United States men's soccer team, estimates that Beckham is about 80% of the player he was at his peak, but that he should do quite well in MLS."A lot has been written about David over the past two years, that he's washed up, that he's finished," Galaxy Coach Frank Yallop said. "I think he's playing as well as any Real Madrid player at the moment.

"Because he's not playing as much, people seem to think he's not playing because he's not very good. It's so far from the truth. I watched the last six or seven Real Madrid games before Christmas and he started two or three of them. I thought he was outstanding. Excellent.

"His shooting was great from distance. His set-plays [free kicks and corner kicks] are obviously fantastic. His work rate and his fitness was incredible.

"So we're getting a player who is in the top of his form, raring to go over here. He's a great teammate. He's a leader on and off the field. You look at what he's done for the three teams he's played for — England, Manchester United and Real Madrid — and every single player has never said a bad word about David Beckham."

Coaches, sportswriters and one particular club president, have not been as kind.

Former England Coach Bobby Robson suggested this week that Beckham was moving into "semiretirement" by going to MLS and that he had lost his appetite for the game at the highest level.

English newspapers, especially the tabloids, have long delighted in pointing out Beckham's allegedly declining skills.

On Tuesday, Ramon Calderon, Real Madrid's beleaguered president, added his voice to the chorus, claiming Beckham's move to the Galaxy was done out of desperation because no other club wanted him.

"He's going to Hollywood to be half a film star," Calderon said in a speech to university students that was recorded without his knowledge and later broadcast on Spanish radio. "Our technical staff were right not to extend his contract and that has been proved by the fact that no other technical staff in the world wanted him except Los Angeles."

All of this has not gone down well at the Home Depot Center, where Galaxy President and General Manager Alexi Lalas rose to the bait. "There's a thinking that if a player is coming to America that he's being put out to pasture, that any hopes of an international career are gone. That comes much more from a lack of knowledge of what goes on in the U.S. than it does from any real assessment of the quality in MLS," Lalas said.

"For those of us that have been around for a long time, it's irritating to say the least, and certainly offensive, maybe even insulting, to everything that we have over here.

"I have absolutely no problem in saying that, given time, David Beckham could wake up one morning in Los Angeles and say, 'You know what? I'm playing better football than I've ever played before. The level, whether people want to believe it or not, is as good and at times even better.' "

Beckham has spent much of his career out on the right flank, but Yallop intends to play him in central midfield.

"In our league, we need him on the ball as much as possible," Yallop said. "I can't see him being stuck out wide. We need to build a team around him that he can slip straight into and really enjoy playing with these guys. We're trying to do that.

"I want to give him the freedom to just play and not have the shackles on. When the other team has the ball, I don't want him worrying about needing to get back and defend. He will do his defensive duties, but as soon as we win the ball, I want him to enjoy himself."

Some observers have questioned Beckham's speed. As a schoolboy, he was a talented 1,500-meter runner, not a sprinter, but Yallop dismissed suggestions that he has slowed down.

"I've seen him play since he was 19 and he looks the same to me," Yallop said. "He's never struggled with that before. David needs half a yard to deliver a ball of precise quality, to cross a ball. And obviously on dead balls he's got all the time in the world to do that.

"I watch him play and I think his work rate and enthusiasm will absolutely rub off on all our players, especially our young guys.

"You're talking about a guy who has played at the highest level and earned enough money to retire, but he's going to come here and he'll be one of the hardest-working players on our team."

Beckham claims he still has what it takes.

"I believe there's at least four or five years left in my legs," he said before last summer's World Cup.