MVN - Most Valuable Network

That Ronaldinho Guy Is Pretty Good

I don’t know much about soccer. I can name one MLS team (the Los Angeles Galaxy), one soccer player currently in America (David Beckham), a pair of European soccer teams (Manchester United, Real Madrid)…and that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the beautiful game.

However, despite my extreme ignorance towards soccer, I am fully aware that this Ronaldinho goal is indeed awesome:

In other soccer news, David J. Warner has an intriguing idea to make the sport more popular in America (I know, this is approximately the 10,328th proposal we’ve heard to get soccer to catch on in the United States, but I think it could work). Ladies and gentlemen, futsal:

Futsal is played between two teams of five players, one of whom is the goalkeeper. In addition each team may have seven substitutes. Unlike some other forms of indoor football, the court is delimited by lines, and not walls or boards that players can use to rebound the ball. Futsal is played with a smaller ball with less bounce than a football. The emphasis is on improvisation, creativity and technique.

Could the American public actually take an interest in futsal? I think it’s possible. Futsal is much higher-scoring than traditional soccer (definitely a plus) and features trick plays and fancy moves — think of it as the street ball of soccer, the “And 1 Tour” of the world’s most popular sport.

So futsal has lots of action and plenty of highlight reel plays…yep, those are pretty much the two main criteria for a sport to gain popularity in the United States. It’ll be interesting to see if any futsal leagues start popping up in America.

Hat tip: Ballhype

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.