There Are No All Stars in Football…

By: Greg | June 14th, 2007

…But there are in “soccer.” This happens to be an international club football convention that I love. While you have awards for players of the year and pundits and bloggers alike debate who was the best XI of the season, club football leagues seem not to have (correct me if I’m wrong here) any semblance of a mid-season exhibition All Star game.

The concept is a lot easier to pull off in the US where leagues are divided up pretty much by geographical location. East vs West is the way the teams/games are split up in basketball and hockey (although hockey has dabbled with the World vs North America). Major League Baseball and the National (American) Football League are divided up into two divisions and those divisions’ all-stars play against each other. The MLS All-Stars play against a different club team each year.

These games are ALL lame. Oddly enough, the only one actually worth watching is probably the MLS game. The other games are not taken seriously by the athletes, feature almost no real contact in hockey and football, and the NFL’s Pro Bowl takes place AFTER the Super Bowl which gives it basically no steam whatsoever.

Baseball tried giving the All-Star game some juice a few years ago by making the winning league have home field advantage in the World Series. This has yielded extremely lackluster ratings each successive year. One year the game even ended in a tie! (For the uninitiated, baseball and ties are not bedfellows).

Consider for a second just where they might squeeze in an all-star game in for a league like the English Premier League… They have the regular league games, the FA Cup, the Carling Cup, the European tournaments and International duty to contend with. There literally is NO room for an all-star exhibition in the season schedule. Maybe at the end of the year when they have like thirty five seconds off? Yeah, the players will be signing up by the busload for that. And how to divide the league up? Do you guarantee each team at least one representative? Pragmatically speaking, the two teams of ’stars’ would probably be made up of nine or ten players each from the top three or four teams.

I hope there isn’t some thinktank or braintrust trying to figure out how to make an all-star game work in any of the European leagues. Look to the US as a cautionary tale.

P.S. – Nelly easily picked up on the hyperbola/e picture reference the other day. Figure out the lead in picture and its relevance THIS time and color me impressed (or you can Color Me Badd if you like). And please don’t go trying to click on the alt tag or picture properties, I’m not that stupid.