News and Notes from Around American Soccer

While the Euro­pean sea­son winds down Soc­cer is gear­ing up state­side with many major devel­op­ments the past few days.

Miami based GOL TV has acquired exclu­sive Eng­lish Lan­guage rights to the Copa Amer­ica this sum­mer. Since sur­veys of the Amer­i­can His­panic pop­u­la­tion indi­cate almost half of their demo­graphic actu­ally watch Soc­cer via an Eng­lish lan­guage plat­form if avail­able, this is a coup for GOL TV’s strat­egy of being the go to soc­cer net­work for His­pan­ics in the USA. In addi­tion, the return of the US National Team to the com­pe­ti­tion after a 12 year absence will help ratings.

Speak­ing of GOL TV, one of Ray Hudson’s favorite play­ers Jeff Cun­ning­ham was traded to Toronto FC in exchange for Alecko Eskan­dar­ian who is now a mem­ber of Real Salt Lake. While I have often been crit­i­cal of the sys­tem MLS has of trades which usu­ally include the dreaded “par­tial allo­ca­tion,” or “player to be named later,” this is a big trade that should help both teams attack.

Bad news as Red Bull New York’s pro­posed sta­dium in Har­ri­son, NJ will be delayed by a sea­son. New York’s atten­dance has been poor despite the acqu­si­tion of Juan Pablo Angel and the superb play of soon to grad­u­ate from Boca Raton High, Jos­mer Altidore.

Per­sis­tant rumors out of the New Jer­sey area sug­gest that Red Bull may sign Teddy Sher­ing­ham if when is released by West Ham United. Sher­ing­ham maybe 41, but he’s a phys­i­cal won­der. He scored the win­ning goal in Cham­pi­ons League at 33, led the EPL in goals and 35, led Spurs in scor­ing at 37 and stim­u­lated Portsmouth to an unlikely sur­vival in thier first EPL sea­son at 38.

Another rumor is that Rivaldo may sign with the LA Galaxy. I have only seen this pub­lished in one place so I would put less stock into it than the Sher­ing­ham speculation.

All MLS teams except per­haps British player heavy Toronto FC are going to be dec­i­mated by the CONCACAF Gold Cup, FIFA Youth World Cup and Copa Amer­ica. For exam­ple Juan Pablo Angel and Jos­mer Alti­dore will both be gone from RBNY for a long period of time which is why Sher­ing­ham is a hot tar­get for RBNY. Also con­sider the poten­tial plight of Hous­ton who have a total of nine play­ers who are cur­rently in the USA or Canada’s player pool.

Gabe Fer­rari the only Italian/American in Serie A (if you do not count Giuseppe Rossi) has been called up to the US train­ing camp for the Youth World Cup. Fer­rari has dis­missed spec­u­la­tion that he would accept a call up from Italy’s Senior Team in the future by stat­ing, “I’m Amer­i­can. I’m born Amer­i­can, grew up in the US and that is the coun­try I would like to play for if I get the chance” If only Giuseppe Rossi had the same attitude!

The Mex­i­can Clausura Semi­fi­nal match between Chivas of Guadala­jara and Club Amer­ica was watched by close to 5 mil­lion house­holds in Span­ish this week­end. (includ­ing mine even though my Span­ish is poor and I couldn’t under­stand half the com­men­tary.) I’m won­der­ing if ESPN and the jock dri­ven sports media even noticed, but I am sure that is more view­ers than watched any NHL or MLB game over the weekend.

Let’s hope the Superliga which debuts this sum­mer gets some of these Mex­i­can fans hooked on MLS, espe­cially if an MLS club can win the competition.