No one is particularly fond of hedge fund managers, or the peculiar subphylum of Wall Street bullies and corporate scions who bestride world markets gathering sports franchises like baubles. But let’s be clear and clear-eyed: These guys aren’t pursuing National Hockey League franchises these days, or hockey clubs anywhere. Todd Boehly’s recent purchase of Chelsea F.C. means nine of 20 English Premier League clubs are today majority-owned by American-led consortia. Should Minnesota-based investor Maciek Kaminski consummate his recent offer for [...]

It’s not every day an American soccer journalist, even the author of a new book spotlighting the very futbol moment most associated with Seamus Malin, sits down for a drink with the man himself. Still, when he and I met for an early October libation in Cambridge, not a single note was taken. Instead we gabbed as friends might — about his daughter, the traffic, Shep Messing, Rai Copeland, Gregg Berhalter and my parents, who had courted right there in [...]

In the spring of 1996, when I traveled to Munich for a trade show, naturally I set aside a Saturday afternoon to check out a Bundesliga match. Back then, as the Allianz Stadium remained but a twinkle in the eye of some insurance CEO, Bayern Munich still played its home games at the Olympic Stadium, and so did its local/lesser rival Munich 1860. Because Germany’s Big Red Machine wasn’t in town that weekend, I settled for 1860 home to Dusseldorf, [...]

I’ve been wracking my brain all week, trying to remember the details of my last conversation with Bruce Murray. It took place December 2021, when he was gracious enough to spend a bit more time talking to me about Generation Zero — about Chuck Blazer, his Olympic Development Program days, former teammate and lifelong friend John Kerr Jr., and his time training with the Swiss club Luzern, among other things. I’ve just gone through my notes. The subject matter ranged [...]

When it comes to Generation Zero, the late 1980s, and the contemporaneous making of soccer in America, there is no getting around the mullet. Oft mocked but never ignored, this seminal coiffure was everywhere during this period. National team defender and three-time World Cupper Marcelo Balboa summed it up best, when we spoke to me in 2018: “We wanted to leave something behind, a legacy — and I think it was the mullet. We tore it up on the mullet [...]