Aston Villa are crossing The Pond and playing a few international friendlies against MLS teams, to include one against my club, St. Louis City SC. For Aston Villa, the stakes are low, as preseason friendlies are just warm ups for the upcoming season, which starts in August. For City, the stakes are nonexistent, as this match takes place during, but apart from, the regular MLS season and has no consequences, win or lose. OK, so maybe, in some oblique way, it could demonstrate that MLS play is getting better compared to European leagues, but probably not.
Can I expect to watch two bench squads play half-assed (as to avoid risking injury) football, or do the players and teams give it their all in these situations?
Years ago I say Manchester United vs Bayern Munich in Chicago and ManU didn’t play a single starter. Bayern did in the second half, but it was clearly a practice / pre-season tune up for both teams. I thought that the teams would care about the quality on the field for branding reasons, but that was a distant second or third in priorities.
Yeah this is pretty much a fact of footballing life that friendly matches are pretty half arsed. Its a saying when a match is low energy and no one seems to be trying that hard, “this match seems like a friendly”
That said they are elite professional sportsmen, even if this is not the game of their lives, they are still going to play football very well indeed.
And while the main stars won’t give a crap (and more importantly really don’t want to get injured), players further down the pecking order who don’t normally get a start will be motivated to impress and cement their place when the season starts.
I don’t think so? But even if they do, for the top players who are on 100s of thousands of dollars a week a win bonus is not going to be much incentive unless it’s silly money
I don’t think any player is giving it their all in a friendly, but you’ll see more effort from two distinct groups: youth/fringe players looking to impress their manager in the hopes of getting more playing time when playing time really matters, and players nearing the end of a contract who may feel they’re in the shop window, looking for a new team to sign them in an upcoming transfer window, if even only on a loan basis.
Yeah, pretty much. The only effort from veterans whose jobs are safe might be in trying new stuff, so in baseball, maybe a new pitch. In soccer/football, it could be a new turn or other ball skill.
99.5% of friendlies are boring opportunities to either watch new players or see disinterested older players (pretty much like the spring training analogy above). That said, 0.5% of the time something happens - someone gets pissed, or there’s already backstory and tension between the teams, and a real game breaks out…US v Mexico is a good example.
Even if a player is giving it their all, I’d say there’s a psychological aspect to this too whereby you’re not going to be quite at the same level as during a competitive game. In the same way I imagine an Olympic level runner is not going to break world records in training. But you could also argue when the pressure is off that some may actually perform better?
Come to think of it, a lot of sports have a championship tournament of some sort, where only a fraction of the teams qualify, and it’s common for some of the lower-performing teams to be mathematically eliminated from the tournament with a few games yet to go (that is, even if the low-performing team wins all of their remaining games, and the team they’re trying to edge out loses all of their remaining games, they still won’t make it). Do those games see the same sort of lack of effort, at least by the mathematically-eliminated team?
If your tournament has a bit of thought put on it you’ll have relegation (so you can’t lose too many matches or you’ll be in a lower league next year) and the top three or four teams classifying to international tournaments, so basically no one is without a reason to win.
I’m not familiar enough with relegation to make a value judgement as to whether it’s good or bad, but I do know that it’s not a thing in any major American professional sports (and I suspect not in any American professional sports at all, because the minor sports don’t even have multiple levels of leagues).
I think you’re more likely to see the lack of effort / reserve players from teams that have already qualified for the post season; an injury to one of their players has more consequence.
While American leagues don’t have pro/rel (although I believe the United Soccer League just instituted id) there are often draft order considerations that are still relevant at the end of the season. Although those would often mean the teams want to lose.
One great think about European leagues (and other leagues?) is that qualification for various competitions (Champions’ League, etc) and relegation can make more than half the teams still be in play for something at the end of the campaign. Now, that “something” can be good or bad, but at least it’s something.
So actually the opposite can be true. Its pretty common for a team to see an uptick in form once they officially relegated (as in mathetically they will still finish in the bottom three even if they win all their remaining games and everyone around them loses). As at that point the pressure is off them and they are just playing for pride. This is what happened in last seasons premier league (with the added motivation that Southampton were attempting to avoid being the worst ever team in the premier league, which they just managed, ending with the second lowest points total in premier league history)
The whole European complaint that American soccer is substandard because we don’t have pro/rel has been done to death on these boards and elsewhere. American soccer is substandard for many reasons, not just the lack of pro/rel. But we simply cannot have pro/rel. We have a second and third division of professional-ish soccer (seriously, do the players in our second and third tier leagues even get paid, or do they have day jobs like 6th-and-below tiers in England?), but instituting pro/rel would effectively require tens of millions of dollars changing hands, mountains of paperwork, and an entire dismantling of MLS’ structure. To say nothing of the fact that, in Europe, cities of 70k, 80k, 90k, and such (like Wrexham, which has a population similar to that of Joplin) can support professional soccer teams. Joplin can’t support a professional soccer team. Even if Joplin had a strong soccer culture, like, I dunno, a city of a similar size with a large immigrant population, it still couldn’t support a professional soccer team. Hell, baseball is king in Joplin, and Joplin couldn’t even support a AAA* baseball team if they had one. Everyone is inside watching Yellowstone.
As I’ve said before, the US is about century behind Europe when it comes to soccer culture. Give us another hundred years, and IF baseball continues its slow death and IF gridiron football also experiences the same fate, then maybe, MAYBE, we’ll have a strong-enough football culture that we can have pro/rel.
*For those who don’t know, AAA is the lowest division of professional baseball in the US, and the organizational/ownership structure of baseball teams forbids pro/rel within baseball.