Carnival of Soccer #5

Welcome to Soccer Carnival 5.

I am your moderator, the Manly Ferry, and I inherited the job from Mike H over on My Soccer Blogs. Mike also helped me with the few technical kinks involved, which, for some dang reason, posed such a big problem for me (go figure). So thanks to him on that.

The inspiration for this post came in response to a question someone left on a post I wrote for ArmchairGM. Here’s the question (comes from a nice fella named Alex Holowczak):

“I need to get into MLS to understand who all the teams are, and the relative hierachy. I need to look at the Standings, I presume Armchair has them?”

We can safely ignore the second half of that question, but, whether it matched the commenters’ intention in posing the question, the phrase “relative hierarchy” got me thinking about the history of the league – more specifically, it got me thinking about the teams, not just their character and tradition but how they interact. And that, essentially, is the subject of Soccer Carnival 5.

If someone asked you to describe the character of each of the 12 teams in Major League Soccer, what would you say? What’s the story of each Major League Soccer club from where you sit?

Naturally, no one is obligated to discuss all 12 teams; for instance, I frequently forget that Colorado even has a team – which is, in itself, says something I suppose. But the challenge is to explain what you think about the teams in the league, your own as well as the others. Who, for instance, are MLS’s “Oakland Raiders” – e.g. who are the league’s biggest bastards?

The deadline for submissions will be, oh, let's call it Wednesday, September 20, 2006. That way, I can put up the Carnival of Soccer 5 post on Thursday the 21st - for whatever reason, I view Thursday as the slow news day in the soccer world. Have fun with it. And shots below the belt and all manners of vulgarity are entirely welcome.

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