26 January 2006

Confirmation Days

What a morning... Need to tell Don Garber to stop calling me for advice on how to run MLS. Or something like that. Anyway, todays theme is confirmation:

The 36ers: First, Houston 1836 is confirmed as the name for the new Houston team. Enjoy, my friends. I like your orango colo[u]ring, but your logo is a bit too modern for me. I don't think that's a soccer thing, I think it is a sports thing. Thus the interest in throwbacks and all. Look at the Caps, who ditched their blue away jerseys with the stylized eagle for the shield logo on the black jerseys. Sure, both logos were new, but one looked old school. (Update: Eric McErlain is a pretty good barometer of the sophisticated sports fan mentality (well, provided you really like the NHL), so when Off-Wing Opinion likes the Houston 1836 name, you're doing okay.)

Make Some Noise: Second, Joe confirms my interest in the column by Andrea Canales with some thoughts of his own about good soccer fan behavior. Comments are well worth reading in the earlier post on this, so let me state a few things: RFK has good atmosphere, but it could be better. The so-called quiet side could be louder, but they do get into it from time to time. I think we do a damn good job. Houston, take notes.

DCU No Sale: Steve Goff, when you read between the lines, seems to confirm my earlier speculation that what doomed the United sale was a lack of capital on the part of Global Development partners:

From what I can tell, the investment group didn't have the money to support a pro sports franchise. I'm sure there's more to the story and it will come out over the next few months.
Right, and I suspect that the reason they didn't have the money was that with other projects falling through, potential investors and funders were nervous about giving large amounts of cash money to Global. Before, when the projects seemed viable, it was expected that Global could raise the cash they needed. The question is whether AEG was naive, or overly optimistic about Global's abilities. I would like to know...

Cleveland 2006ers: And supposed on Big Soccer there's a thread where Peter Wilt says something along the lines of "Garber didn't mean Milwaukee, and Cleveland's making progress." Now, that doesn't confirm the information we gave you earlier, but it does support it, and the DCenters is still trying to confirm our material.

I Missed Lunch, So This Sounds Good: Finally, MASR and a bunch of places note the "Brunch with DC United", which will confirm the necessity and rightness of DCU fandom all over again. Yes, I will watch.