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Did I just learn why the negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement are so contentious? Did I find out just how disrespected the Vietnam league is? Or did I discover that MLS doesn’t think he’s worth it? There is plenty to learn from the professional path taken by Lee Nguyen, but at present, all I have are questions.

Talking to Nguyen back in November of last year it seemed certain he would be playing in a MLS uniform in 2010. Once high school player of the year and college freshman of the year, as recently as last fall Arsenal had nice things to say about the 23-year-old Texan who played within the national team system at almost every level. He’s spent time at PSV Eindhoven, Randers FC, and HAGL in Vietnam. In an environment where nearly every talented young American player runs from MLS to foreign countries for better competition and compensation, here is a guy who wants to come back home. Done and done, right? So why am I waking him up at 6:45 AM in Vietnam—Lee thankfully awake from the half-day time change and jet lag before his new season starts at the end of the month? Click HERE for the full story…

TIAS’s Senior Hair Band Correspondent scores world exclusive with the Group of Death

If you were one of the lucky few who snagged a t-shirt in Seattle during the Supporters Summit, than you might know the Group of Death. For the rest of you, it’s merely the hardest group, with the toughest teams, pooled together in one group during the World Cup draw–which goes down today at Noon, setting off a full day of wholly unique soccer events in New York…

Which brings us back to the Group of Death–not the group, but the band. The vagabond heavy metal band of soccer loving, hairspray abusing, face painting leather freaks that tours once every four years. Talk to them and it’s, “awesome this,” “melt off that” to the point where the music becomes the least of your problems when trying to glean any sort of information out of them. Or at least that was my experience with the band of misfits-doesn’t-even-get-it-close. The Group of Death. Why they wanted to do an interview with TIAS, I’ll never know. Should I feel proud? Ashamed? Or scared about just how easy it is to find me?

And on Friday, it will be very easy to find me, as it’s one of those great days to live in New York. World Cup draw at the international bar or restaurant of your choice from Noon-3. At 4pm I’ll be at Niketown NY to finish up my first on-camera work during Live With Landon, a streaming event broadcast live on Facebook. Then straight from there to Nevada Smiths for the opening night of GoD’s world tour, which I think is called ‘GoD Help Us’.

Somewhere while sitting down with the four members of the Group of Death, between their music making me self conscious and their juggling causing my ears to bleed, I was able to get in a few questions and three separate confrontations. Click HERE for the full story…

QUICK PROGRAMMING NOTES:

TIAS, Du Nord, The Original Winger, Soccer By Ives, and The Offside Rules will be hosting a party Friday night 9pm in downtown Seattle at Kell’s Irish Pub (FYI - bar charges $5 cover, which is not going to us). It’s a true soccer bar I’m told, should be a good time. Won’t you join us?

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New Podcast Coming To iTunes: WaitingForGaetjens.com
Hear me butcher first and last names and attempt to make co-host Greg Lalas laugh as he tries to bring serious analysis to the world of American soccer. We’re looking towards a weekly schedule to begin after a special week of several run-up shows revolving around MLS Cup. Those few shows will also be downloadable at MLSnet.com. The plan is to pull in the best guests we can and keep it entertaining and informative. Please check it out–RSL GM Garth Lagerway joins us tomorrow–and let us know who you would like to see on the guest list. We’ll get it right next time.

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Now back to regularly scheduled programming already in progress…

I can’t remember the last time I put up a player interview on the site, but I’ve been fascinated with Lee Nguyen for awhile now. And then over a stretch of one month this fall the 23-year-old attacker went from Vietnam superstar to Arsenal trainee to FC Dallas off-season practice attendee. Curious, I went looking for some info, but found few answers. Here’s this kid living large over in Vietnam, cover of GQ, etc, etc. But we never hear much about him Stateside. We can’t begin to pronounce his Vietnamese club team and know nothing of his life in the far East, which is entirely different from every American soccer player, maybe in history.

On the phone the Texas native with Vietnamese roots sounds like his fellow Texan Clint Dempsey–that rough southern drawl lazy on the crackling cell phone satellites…

Click HERE for the full story…

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Want improvement? A century ago as America’s eastern cities overpopulated it was, “Go west, young man.” For soccer a century later the trumpet sounds the same. Only going west means tracking back to the previous western frontier. In mainland Europe. Or at least that’s what Simon Kuper believes and writes in his and economist Stefan Szymanski’s new book, Soccernomics.

I transcribed the entire interview, and he didn’t say it once. Maybe it’s the American wife and three American kids. Maybe it was living in Palo Alto as a kid or Boston as a young man. Maybe it’s why he wrote a new chapter (NFL v EPL) and had the book edited and printed specifically for an American audience. But not once in my hour-long conversation with Kuper did he use the word football. I don’t think that means anything, but it was nice.

The PR take-away is that it’s Moneyball for soccer, but has it come too late? Can soccer even compete with baseball when it comes to statistical break down? It’s surely tempting fodder for those for whom soccer is religion and those who see sport as science. But those two will always fight. And while it will instigate and educate, Soccernomics can also ring all too true for the pragmatic few who can subtract passion from reality and who have been cursing the fiscal and emotional insanity of professional (Western European) soccer for years. But no matter your take-away, at least it’s not another book about some strange and historic season of Anytown FC.

Kuper and Szymanski set out in late 2007 to write a different kind of soccer book, to change the discussion, to surprise with data. On the day of the book’s American release, Kuper took time over the phone from Paris to discuss the book, the reaction to it, and what it means for American soccer. Click HERE for the full story…

foreign failure (and a blind date) nets New York DC a soccer film festival

What almost started in London, only to become a gift to New York, is now taking the show on the road with the second installment of the Kicking & Screening soccer film festival in Washington, DC, October 15-18. With three new films that were not shown in NYC, the DC edition still includes Les Yeux dans les Bleus, but adds in a personal favorite, Sons of Sakhnin United, the cult classic Victory, and The Big Green.

After the jump, an edited version of the story behind the film festival, originally published in May. Click HERE for the full story…

If there was ever a sheen on David Beckham for the American soccer fan with a Y chromosome, if he was initially given a pass, if anybody believed anything he said, well, that patina is gone. Beckham can still build urban soccer fields and set up summer camps and buy a MLS franchise, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

“Senator,” someone needs to tell him, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Not that it would do any good.

After the jump, we pick up the second half of my conversation with Grant Wahl, author of The Beckham Experiment, out now from Crown publishers. Read part one here. Click HERE for the full story…

Grant Wahl discusses his new book, The Beckham Experiment, out now from Crown

Why do book reviews have to be summaries of the book? I never got that. I understand it but don’t get it. I do get jacket blurbs, though. Those few sentences of praise on the back of a book–I’m always curious what names are there and what they say.

“Through the prismatic window of its most famous player, Wahl masterfully traces every intersection, follows every turn through the disjointed world of American soccer’s season on the brink… of what exactly is the lasting question.”

“There’s your jacket cover blurb” I wrote in sappy jest to Grant Wahl, when he asked my opinion of his book this past Spring. It was a joke—as if I’d be chosen over Foer, Deford, and other famous writers who praise the book on its back cover. But I have gotten to know Grant a bit over the four years I’ve been producing TIAS (Wahl was my first in-depth interview as I began to position TIAS as place where soccer journalism, not just the sport, was a topic of discussion). So after signing my life away, I was able to procure one of the first galley copies of the book back in May. And before the mainstream got its grubby hands on him, Grant talked his publisher into allowing him to speak to me before the deluge of requests. Click HERE for the full story…

Steve Nash and friends throwdown for the showdown in chinatown, take 2

It’s never as good as the first time. The rain, the grand stand bleachers, the wet turf, the steady cam man on the field, the crane cam hovering over the crowd. What was an underground experiment last year became the mainstream mainstay as Steve Nash and Claudio Reyna hosted their 2nd annual Showdown in Chinatown to benefit each of their namesake charities. The line-ups, tweaked a bit from last year, will star in a Fox Soccer Channel documentary about the game.

That’s not to say it won’t be the best sporting event all summer in New York City. Standing over Thierry Henry’s shoulder while he watched the first half from the bench is not something one takes lightly. It was a mid-eighties Michael Jackson moment for some, which is why this event will forever be, no matter how many times they play it, a once in a lifetime experience. Click HERE for the full story…

When Sports Illustrated Senior Editor Mark Mravic, 46, interviewed for a job at the magazine in 1996, they asked him what he was interested in. He said “soccer,” to which the reply came: “Well, we really don’t do a lot of soccer.” More than a decade later he’s finally the soccer editor. Now will the coverage improve?

SI’s 2002 World Cup preview, in which Clint Mathis graced the cover and was heralded as the new face of American soccer, was the “least-read and third lowest-rated cover story measured since 1995.” Four years later, the 2006 World Cup preview “tied for 199th in readership out of 208 cover stories measured to date.” There has never been a feature profile of America’s present face, Landon Donovan, and the recent David Beckham cover story—“a big get” for the magazine—performed less than stellar with readers.

What’s a soccer-loving editor at the classic American sports magazine to do? TIAS sat down with Mravic in his SI office to discuss the past, present, and future of soccer in America Sports Illustrated. Click HERE for the full story…

foreign failure (and a blind date) nets New York a soccer film festival in july

In a soccer game, as in a movie, a narrative unfolds for the viewer. There are action scenes and sad scenes, comedy and drama. But unlike other sports that stop and start, aiding in the collection of immense data, soccer builds a non-stop story that can challenge the viewer—full of dialogue that may seem meaningless until the entire tale unfolds. And even then you may not get a final payoff; as fans of soccer and Woody Allen films know, you must enjoy the ride. Life follows the same path, so I guess it’s no surprise those three things converge into one around the first-ever American film festival dedicated to soccer.

When Kicking and Screening opens on July 14, that moment of success, that convergence of soccer, film, and life will not be lost on the festival’s founder, Rachel Markus, who had the red carpet pulled from underneith her festival in London before the idea’s resurrection in New York. “Soccer is art,” she says. “Film is art. It’s not a question of the final outcome, but how you got to that final outcome where the beauty lies.” Click HERE for the full story…