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Note: PSP is looking for a volunteer to write our Thursday news roundups. If interested, please email dwalsh@phillysoccerpage.com.
Philadelphia Union
Head coach Jim Curtin had some strong things to say about kneeling during the national anthem and about the nation’s president.
An update on Union injuries. A lot of players are “day-to-day.”
A good piece by the Union about their recruiting process.
Tomas Romero is one of the Union’s most promising young prospects.
The Union Academy teams had a great week.
Local
Promising young prospect Matt Real was called into USA’s U-18 camp.
Two Union Academy prospects made their first starts for Bethlehem Steel this week.
MLS
Updates on MLS Expansion.
Around the globe
The United States, Mexico, and Canada have narrowed the list of host cities for their joint World Cup bid. Don’t worry. Philly made the cut.
Updates and how to watch the U-17 World Cup as well as players to watch.
Good for Curtin! Proud that he is woke and unafraid. Now if we could just get him to be a more flexible tactician on the pitch…
Was going to say the same thing. Good on you, Jim. Good on you.
I have a hard time hating that guy.
Yep, exactly. It’s why I feel especially bad thinking he needs to be replaced.
Jim’s a nice guy. The players like him, the staff like him, the fans like him. But, he absolutely needs to be replaced.
I really wish the Union had given Curtin a mentor – either bringing in an experienced assistant coach he trusted (so no looking over his shoulder), or hiring an experienced coach and letting Curtin serve as an assistant.
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I prefer if they had done the latter, but the former would’ve been fine too.
Good Job Jim, way to stand up and be woke! You almost make me feel bad now for crapping on you all the time…………….nah!
I don’t care what the head coach of my soccer team thinks about politics. He could vote for the same politicians I do perfectly, but if he doesn’t win games, to hell with him. And if he wins the MLS Cup, he can come out wearing a Hitler mustache for all I care.
That the opinions of random sports figures matters to people baffles me.
Does your own opinion baffle you? Your just a random person. Why should your opinion matter to anyone? Right?
You’re* just a…
To answer all of those questions:
No. I am. It shouldn’t. No, I said it shouldn’t.
A guy, if you don’t even value your own opinion, why bother? You can’t have it both ways. You, writing here, means you have an opinion you want to be heard, whether you can admit that to yourself or not.
It’s because for the most part, people like other people who are similar to them or think the way that they do.
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On the surface, these thoughts and opinions won’t help Curtin perform any better at his job, but you also have to realize that Curtin’s comments in the press aren’t just for fans and media, they are also for his own players and coaching staff. If you believe that your head coach/leader thinks the way that you do, you’ll likely be more committed when that person asks you to do something.
Devil’s advocate…what if one of the players is a hard-right type of person. You’ve alienated them and potentially made them worse off and potentially wrecked the locker room.
That Trump successfully made this a thing is honestly hilarious to me. The left and the NFL players walked right into it like the dummies they are.
Trump needs distractions from the fact that he colluded with a hostile foreign nation to win an election. So he blathers on about as much divisive nonsense as he can to control the narrative. He offends NFL players. NFL players offend the right. Now we are all dancing to the tune puppetmaster Trump wants.
He’s using the same playbook Aleksandr Dugin planned out for modern Russia in “Foundations of Geopolitics.” Create chaos. Use chaos to gain control of the message. To confuse. To gain power. Step into any and all power vacuums created by the chaos.
Which, ironically, is exactly what Russia is doing to us by exploiting the various thought bubbles that have emerged from social media. The US elected an orange-faced dimwit with fascist tendencies because the plot got hijacked.
Meanwhile, a plutocracy is quietly forming. Automation and AI are replacing human labor. Eventually making the majority of workers more and more irrelevant to said plutocracy. The value of a human being is decreasing minute after minute, day after day as we descend slowly and slowly into the abyss of a post-capitalistic dystopia.
And in 50 years when we’re all unemployed and hungry…we’ll think to ourselves…well…at least the NFL players got to kneel. We sure showed Trump.
Do you really think that’s what this article is about? Or are you just ignoring the fact that he was asked the question? Tannenwald was there when the question was asked. Whether Tannenwald asked it, or some other reporter, is not made clear. Either way, Jim answered. Jim did not call a press conference to get his opinion out there. Someone asked a question. He answered.
the only way people can be dummies about players protesting is to make it about trump. the players who do the protesting and most people on the left (and jim curtin) that i read or hear from never shy away from explicitly saying the protests are about state sanctioned violence and racism. the protests are to call attention to this violence so we stop treating it as normal or justified. its only about trump insofar as he is an overt supporter of the racist policing that can happen in america (see his pardoning of joe arpaio, a truly vile and racist policeman that was allowed to serve for years). i can guarantee that anyone who is participating in these protests is just as (if not more) motivated to get trump out of office than you are. getting people thinking about and engaged in politics will make this more likely to happen
A guy – I would expect that Curtin would know generally how the dressing room would receive his comments and if he thought it would hurt the group, he would have said things differently. That’s all.
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All4U – Yes, he was asked a question at a press conference and he answered it in this manner which could have been tailored to play well in the changing room. Everything else that you wrote is irrelevant to my original point as I didn’t imply those things at all.
I believe the protest started before Trump, did they not? Oh yes, they did. Trump just stole the spotlight. As he does with many things. You point out he is doing these things to provide distractions from what he’s done, basically saying the public is in awe of Mr. OZ, instead of looking behind the curtain. Essentially blaming the public for falling for his schemes. But who is really to blame? Is it those who actually voted for him and allowed this disgrace to take the highest office in the land? Or was it those who were indifferent? Those people who sat at home last November thinking there was no way such a thing could be elected. Mr. King said it best “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Those against equality have been there the whole time. The majority of those having stayed in the shadows for many years until they felt they finally had a voice in Trump. This country has been divided for a long time. It was because of us who have stayed silent in the name of an uneasy peace, that have allowed hateful symbols of oppression like Confederate statues and Flags, to still exist in the public eye so many years after the war of oppression was fought. We have done this to feel comfortable in our own skins. To avoid how the minority has been treated and shunted aside. While there may be an attempt by Trump to use these unsettling times to distract from his ineptitude and malice, that does not mean we should ignore the underlying basis for these problems. Nor does it exclude us for seeing Trump for who he is. You see him for who he is. But do not let your focus be only on him. He is an effect of the underlying problem, not the singular cause of.
country has always been a plutocracy…A guy. always.
Club is a mess and he goes politics. Guess that gives us something else to talk about than the poor season he and Earnie have produced?
Brilliant move, really. Machiavellian Jim.
+1 lol
Ernie, go get this guy –
https://www.socceramerica.com/publications/article/75176/firing-american-coach-is-emotional-for-german-club.html
Why can’t MLS just stop at 24 teams? Scheduling works perfectly (12 interconference games and 22 intraconference = 34 total). They could then even put in a schedule where traveling is setting up 4 interconference windows where the whole league plays interconference on a weekend-weekday-weekend basis. 2 would be East at West and the other two would be West at East. That way the Union make one trip to the Pacific Northwest and one to Texas/Kansas (or 1 to CA and one to the Rockies/Minnesota) and they’ve got all of their western away games handled in two trips.
$
This^.
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Stated with an economy of words.
You can’t continue to run a ponzi scheme without a constant influx of cash * wink *wink
Sorry Jimbo but I disagree and kneeling just isn’t working…..unless you think you’re woke. Why not say something like we have a problem but no real answers. It’s hard to speak on this when the organisation I work for is part of the problem and so is the fan base. Maybe if we paid our taxes to Chester on time and encouraged the fans to get out of the parking lot and go spend some money at some of the bars on second street pregame, well maybe that would be more helpful to the community. Hit some of the local stores instead of running in and out. Sadly we haven’t delivered on the things we promised when it comes to the development of the river front even though the owner is a developer. Some of the things that could be a game changer is jobs and things that expand the tax base so Chester can spend on educating their youth and give everyone a better quality of life. But hey I’m white and I guess I should just keep quiet. Oh and yea Trump’s the problem not ordinary people who can make an immediate impact in the community.