I’d say England’s chances of winning are just slightly ahead that of the U.S. The “Three Lions” just don’t have the attacking/playmaking flanker and midfirlder that is required to compete with the top teams.
Flanker?
This isn’t a rugby thread, you know.
The word that comes to my mind starts with a “W”… aha! yes, “Winger’s” the one I’m after…
Sorry bout that. My high school team used flanker as the term and it stuck.
You’re still wrong! 
I’m pretty sure that the Galaxy owns his contract. Designated players (of which Beckham is one) follow different rules than the rest of the players in MLS.
I believe you will find that there are no franchises in MLS. Each of the teams is a unit of the entity MLS. They are managed by their primary MLS “owners” but the entity which owns the contracts is MLS. This was done in a deliberate attempt to circumvent US anti-trust laws, and avoid player salary wars.
So all players, regardless of team and status are employees of MLS. The financial accounting simply varies for the special ones like Becks.
While we’re on the subject of MLS… ye gods, are those team names goofy.
DC United. Real Salt Lake. Houston Dynamo. I mean, really. They might as well just have named a team Indianapolis Wednesday or Shakhtar Atlanta.
LA County and San Francisco Athletic would work tho’.
Real Salt Lake is the one that cracks me up. Lot of Spanish royalty in Utah, is there?
“LA Galaxy” I quite like, though. Space-y. Like, whoa, man - they’re stars, but we’re all made from stars too, right? Deep.
Well, when the league started, back in the mid '90s, the original teams all had pretty goofy names, and if you go back and look at the uniforms of the time, pretty ugly uniforms as well (there were, as I recall, two main uniform patterns the league bought, one used by three teams, the other by six, with only the colors changed from team to team). I mean, really: Chicago Fire? Columbus Crew?? :rolleyes:
The one exception was the team in the nation’s capital. D. C. United not only sounded like a soccer team, it looked like one. It had both a home and an away strip that might well have been found on a team from anywhere in Europe. Not surprisingly, that team also was much more professional soccer-like in other ways, and it showed on the field. They were the undisputedly best team of the first few years. And the fans ate it up.
So as the years passed, MLS began to think that it should try to emulate that sort of approach. Sadly, somewhere between the very good thought “Let’s do more of what they did!” and the execution, the same, relatively unsophisticated minds that had engineered the stupidity of a name like the Kansas City Wiz and the Dallas Burn (we loved Wiz - Burn games!) managed to screw up the execution of imposing a sense of soccerdom on our league. So you have Real Salt Lake. Why? Because someone looked around Europe and noticed that “Real” was used in certain successful Spanish and Hispanic clubs. But they had no idea why it’s used, nor did they appear to care. Same with Dynamo.
Fortunately, there have been some better decisions that have gone along with the recent moves. Toronto FC and Seattle Sounders FC are examples. And I maintain it was positively brilliant to have Chivas USA created (you should have seen the crowd that showed up in 1997 IIRC when the owners of the now-defunct California Jaguars put on an exhibition with the developmental squad from Club Deportivo Guadalajara, which was played in a high school stadium in the tiny town of Gonzales, California).
I don’t know, I think a lot of team names are are pretty stupid. Sheffield Wednesday, Tottenham Hotspur, Racing Santander? While I think MLS’s idea of copying European team names is pretty dumb, all that matters in the end is that is that the fans like it. Personally, I think Seattle Sounders is a dumb-ass name, but suggest that to one of their fans and they will froth at the mouth like a rabid dog. Real Salt Lake, as dumb as it sounds, at least makes sense from the perspective that they are partners with Madrid.
By the way, I caught the A-League final last night. Queensland Roar and Perth Glory are as bad as anything MLS has thought of.
Poor MLS. Ten years ago, when the teams were called San Jose Clash, Dallas Burn, and MetroStars, it was mercilessly mocked in many quarters for not having “proper” football names. Now, the pendulum has swung completely towards names that would be instantly familiar to current soccer fans, and the league is mocked for being poseurs. It’ll never win.
(P.S. Two weeks until the 'Quakes home opener. This is our year!?)
-Piker
I just love the fact that Houston, of all places, is named after a Soviet national sporting program. Reds in Texas!
If I recall, the fans voted to name the team Houston 1836, the year of Texas independence from Mexico, but the owners nixed it for fear of alienating potential Mexican-American fans.
Considering the tons of Hispanic fans that the team has, it was probably a good idea.
Sure, they’re stupid, but they’re organic. They didn’t come about just because the owner said, “hey, that would be cool!”
Tottenham Hotspur is named for Sir Henry Percy (Hotspur from Shakespeare’s Henry something-or-other) whose family owned most of the area where the team was founded.
Sheffield Wednesday is so named because the cricket club which eventually gave rise to the football team only played on Wednesdays.
Racing Santander is properly Racing Club de Santander- named for the club which sponsored the original football team.
That’s because they didn’t pick proper football names. You can’t just call a team United because other teams are called United. The other teams are called United because they were formed by combining two or more other teams.
If you want a “proper football name”, you just name your team after the city it plays in, and let the nickname come. Obviously, adding FC is no big deal. Anything more than that is just cheesy.
Wow, what a bad example to pick. I wonder how the most famous United club in the world came about that name?
From wikipedia (I know, I know . . . ).
You can’t pick Man U as an example of anything. They’re like the Yankees- they suck and their fans are idiots.
It pisses me off no end that as a Buccaneers fan I have to root for a team owned by the people who also own Man U.
I can’t vouch for myself being an idiot, but in what world do they suck?
But about Houston Dynamo. Shouldn’t it be Dynamo Houston if they want to copy/paste cool names? I kinda figured they were named after an electric generator 
What a conveniently easy way ignore an example that counters your argument. A quick stroll through the “United” page on wikipedia has more evidence that you’re wrong, unless you find another reason to ignore it.
British clubs called “United” not because of a merger, but because it sounds cool:
Leeds United
West Ham United
Hartlepool United
Colchester United
Peterborough United
Carlisle United
Sheffield United (maybe, depends on the history of the cricket club it was named after, which a quick google search is of no help)
Dundee United
Airdrie United
Non-British Clubs:
Tampere United (Finland)
D.C. United (United States)
Adelaide United (Australia)
The idea that DC United isn’t authentic because it wasn’t formed after a merger, unlike “proper football clubs”, is pure, unadulterated eurosnobbery.
-Piker