Woo, made it to day two with this new concept or idea rather. I know I’ve been a bit quiet today with post, blame the load of actual paying work that I have at the office for that. We also have a couple MLS teams in action tonight, two facing very important matches, and the third being a big time friendly. But more on those in a second.

I mentioned earlier on Twitter that I will be doing a post about each club’s remaining schedule. That may be up by the end of the week. I was hoping to get it out today but again work kept me from getting finished with it. I believe my stopping point was either Dallas or Houston. I do hope to finish it soon though.

Anyways, down to the business at hand, a few links/stories for your evening reading.

2009 SuperLiga Final

Chicago Fire host Tigres UANL of the Mexican Primera Division.- 7pm CST on Telefutura

I would expect nothing less than a Fire win really. I hear the Fire are taking this game serious and from the sound of it so are their supporter’s, which is really good to see. Tough part is until this tournament gets an English broadcast on FSC or something like that no one will care about it (you can watch it online though). I asked folks on Twitter earlier if they cared and those that responded didn’t see too unless they were actually a Fire fan.

CONCACAF Champions League Play-In Round

New York Red Bulls host Trinidadian side W Connection – 8pm EST on FSC

This is big and it is a make or break kind of game. If the Red Bulls win and advance they could at least salvage a little bit of their pathetic season. All they need is a win or even a 0-0 or 1-1 tie to advance. It is that simple. All MLS fans need to get behind New York tonight and hope they advance. If they don’t it will just add fuel to the fire on so many things surround this club.

International Friendly

Seattle Sounders FC host FC Barcelona – 10:30pm EST on ESPN

This should be fun. Tune in to ESPN2 tonight for this one folks. I know Seattle held their own against Chelsea a while back but I would be impressed if they are able to do the same against Barca. If I were Sigi Schmid I would be resting key guys as much as possible in this one, even if it means getting beat. With the playoffs coming up you don’t want to lose someone because of this game.

Jozy Moves To England

Link

The big topic today was Jozy Altidore and all his tweeting about moving to England to play for Hill City. The best part was reading all the reports with quotes from Jozy’s Twitter feed. I guess that is the world we are starting to live in, when players say something on twitter before the press get ahold of them in person.

Cooper Introduced in Germany

Link (to photos)

No need to say much, Cooper is finally over in Europe and looks happy in the process.

Argentina League Season Put On Hold

Link

Wow, big news down in Argentina is that a new season was suppose to start in two weeks. However that has been put on indefinite hold due to a deep financial crisis at many of the clubs. No other actions were announced. This could very well mean we could see a flood of players come north if nothing is resolved soon.

Yeah, another anti-SuperLiga post coming up right here. While I won’t complain about the clubs involved this time around or the lack of playing any of these games in Mexico, I will harp a little on how the first round went this year.

Thanks for Daune Rollins for posting this one on his super-Canadian soccer blog the 24th Minute, Rollins listed out the attendance for all the first round games. And as you can imagine the numbers won’t lie that this tournament will need some major changes in the very near future if it even wants to survive.

• 8,421
• 11,197
• 9,126
• 9,126
• 9,157
• 7,411
• 5,278
• 9,512
• 5,378
• 5,378
• 7,411
• 10,385

But where do we go to fix this? Moving the tournament up the calendar a bit to say March? Would that even make a difference? I know having a lot of the games in New England where the fans really could care less about some sub-park Mexican clubs really did a number on the attendence here but this is rather pathetic. Hell even FC Dallas can post better numbers than this tournament.

So is this tournament really worth saving if we are going to see numbers like this? Can SUM really continue to make money on this venture? I highly doubt it.

Going back to Friday’s thoughts about the 2009 edition of SuperLiga, I realized that maybe one thing to help improve the tournament’s ability to reach people may be to do what happened in St. Louis this past weekend.

For those who don’t know the city of St. Louis hosted an opening round game for Kansas City since their current stadium was a bit busy with minor league baseball this past weekend.

St. Louis stepped up and hosted a game in a slightly smaller stadium that holds just over 6,000. It turns out that the final number of folks that were there was just a shade over 5,200.

One has to wonder if putting more games in random towns like St. Louis to test out potential MLS markets would work for SuperLiga. One also has to wonder in St. Louis’ case if they would be able to handle a MLS club full-time based on the numbers they pulled in this weekend for the SuperLiga contest. Some have said that even though the announced final attendance was pretty good for the stadium size that there were plenty of noticeable empty seats in the stands.

What do you make of St. Louis as a MLS market now that you’ve seen a fairly big game there? For me I still believe the league needs to be in that market. I know Don Garber agrees still with that even though the money just isn’t there still for a potential owner.

So what do you make of the potential with St. Louis? Also do you believe SuperLiga would be good in other markets that don’t currently have a MLS club? Would that rasie the level of interest any for this tournament?

As mentioned earlier in the weekend preview, this weekend marks the start of the third (annual) SuperLiga tournament between MLS clubs and Mexican league clubs.

I am a bit happier about how this year’s tournament is set up for those MLS clubs involved. No longer are we going to see clubs play in both SuperLiga and CONCACAF Champions League. The league front office and owners got that one right when they called for a new plan of how teams qualified for each tournament.

The thing is we now have a tournament that went from very interesting in year one to so-so in year two to a flat-out uninteresting in year three. Even though I do support having middle of the pack MLS clubs going against Mexican league teams for experience what we in turn got this year was a bunch of middle of the pack Mexcian league clubs facing middle of the pack MLS clubs.

The top FMF club finished 9th last season, while two others battled in the never-good regulation zone. What happened was a similar decision by the FMF to not include clubs going to the CCL in this tournament. What also happened was two other clubs turning down the chance at playing in this tournament (both Chivas and UNAM declined participation). I know San Luis was first overall in the 2008 Apertura but they failed to get out of the quarter-finals of that tournament.

I can’t say looking at this I am overly excited for this tournament or its chances of having a good future. While I am all for the mid-level clubs in both leagues getting a shot at things here I have to say this tournament needs some spice in the terms of playing some games in Mexico. I really believe that is the only way this tournament gets any better than it already is right now.

Plus how can we actually get better as a league internationally until we win outside our country? Until things change with this tournament set up we will never know.

This week has already been interesting and we’ve only seen one MLS game. The DC-Seattle game on Wednesday should have been a marquee thing but as we all saw ESPN and the family of networks dropped the ball a bit on getting the MLS game shipped over to another channel to make us MLS folks happy until the college world series game was over on the deuce.

Yes it was unfortunate but there was some good out of it. SoccerAmeria just posted a great article on the 80 seconds of silence that Glenn Davis and Kyle Martino did at the start of the broadcast when the game was finally shown on ESPN2. Looking back on the tape of that game I saw and heard those 80 seconds. Boy it was pretty neat to say the least.

Aside from the ESPN fail on Wednesday this week and weekend are pretty big. We’ve already seen Toronto FC blow away Montreal last night in the final game of the Canadian Cup to advance to this year’s edition of the CONCACAF Champions League tournament. MLS will now field five teams with Toronto now to take on Puerto Rico in the preliminary rounds with a chance to be grouped in with the Columbus Crew.

We also have another competition starting up for a few clubs this weekend as well. The 2009 edition of SuperLiga comes at a good time for teams like Chivas USA and Chicago Fire. Both clubs play on Saturday in their opening matches of the tournament. Kansas City and New England will see their first games on Sunday. All SuperLiga matches can be seen live on the SuperLiga website.

But let’s get down to business as far as the MLS weekend slate goes. Plenty of decent games on the menu for us including one that I am very interested in out in Colorado between the Rapids and DC United.

As always feel free to leave your score predictions below. Continue Reading…

For those who enjoy this summer clash between MLS clubs and Mexican clubs. Start your planning now. The schedule has been released for this year’s edition of SuperLiga.

The SuperLiga field of teams is divided into two groups, each with two representatives from the respective leagues:

SUPERLIGA™ 2009 SCHEDULE*
(All Times Eastern) / * Subject to change

Saturday, June 20
Chicago Fire vs. San Luis (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill) 20:00
Chivas USA vs. Tigres UANL (The Home Depot Center – Carson, Calif.) 22:00

Sunday, June 21
Kansas City Wizards vs. Atlas (Venue TBD – St. Louis, Mo.) 16:30
NE Revolution vs. Santos Laguna (Gillette Stadium – Foxorough, Mass.) 18:30

Tuesday, June 23
Chicago Fire vs. Chivas USA (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 20:00
San Luis vs. Tigres UANL (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 22:00

Wednesday, June 24
NE Revolution vs. Kansas City Wizards (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 19:00
Santos Laguna vs. Atlas (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 21:00

Saturday, June 27
Chicago Fire vs. Tigres UANL (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 20:00
Chivas USA vs. San Luis (The Home Depot Center – Carson, Calif.) 22:00

Sunday, June 28
NE Revolution vs. Atlas (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 16:30
KC Wizards vs. Santos Laguna (CommunityAmerica Ballpark – Kansas City, Mo.) 18:30

Wednesday, July 15
Semifinal 1 (TBD)
Semifinal 2 (TBD)

Wednesday, August 5
Final (TBD)

Just how much do marketers in New York (or wherever SUM is located) hate this SuperLiga final match-up between New England and Houston? Before the tournament they saw plenty of dollar signs with the Mexican teams coming over to play in a bragging-rights kind of tournament, plus not to mention solid ratings with those teams on TV.

Now, they get two American teams that have played each other in the MLS Cup final each of the last two years. I’m not saying this won’t be a great game but clearly this isn’t what SUM and the directors of this tournament wanted in the beginning.

Having one Mexican team and one MLS team would have worked fine and been great, so would have two Mexican teams. But two MLS clubs just won’t sell, especailly for a tournament that has lost it’s luster since the first kick a couple weeks ago.

But in all honesty, the two clubs that are left deserve to be where they are…in the final.

Right now MLS fans couldn’t have asked for a better matchup. New England has clearly been the league’s best club for a while not and Houston is starting to really hit their strides here (thanks to SuperLiga). To say this match won’t be at least half way decent is an understatement.

So the game will be in New England, a place where the Revs have dominated the Dynamo in recent years (another annoyance of this tournament is that the final isn’t on a neutral site). The last meeting in Foxborough was a 3-0 slamming on the Dynamo on the first day of the MLS season. Sure that game was ages ago but the sting is still there for the Dynamo and the sting of two straight losses in MLS Cup by the Revs is still there.

Tonight’s game will be good, probably a bit sloppy at times as both clubs will want to win but will not want to risk too much for the rest of their season. I see New England coming out on top though. As good as Houston has played recently, a trip up north just doesn’t sound good for them right now. Plus I really like how New England has played in this tournament.

As usual, Steve Ralston and Shalrie Joseph are the difference makers for the Revs.

WVH Prediction: New England 2, Houston 1