It's that time again. Time for SBI readers to send their soccer questions my way for the latest SBI Live Q&A.
There are plenty of topics to discuss today. Juergen Klinsmann? Check. The MLS playoff race? Check. Tonight's Akron-Tulsa college showdown? Check. The European soccer scene? We'll discuss that as well.
Send me your soccer (and pop culture) questions and I'll try to respond to as many of them as possible over the course of the next few hours.
Let's get started (The Q&A is after the jump):
Club América interfered with Reinaldo Navia going to Veracruz. Chivas asked for a transfer fee for Bravo, even though his contract either belonged to la Coruña or Depor had let him go as a free agent.
Apparently the “gentleman’s agreement”(pacto de caballeros)also applies when players play out their contract in Mexico, their club acts as if it still owned the player’s contract.
When I was going through the “draft” to find out where Edgar Castillo ended up I kept seeing “Fulano, jugador libre, cedido a préstamo a club x”–Joe Blow, free agent, sent on loan to club x. I didn’t understand that until I did a little fact checking on my comment above.
I believe that’s a violation of FIFA rules, by the way.
The Mexican league is going downhill fast.
The shift to the two semester two playoff system has made impatient fans, and more important, impatient owners, all too eager to change players and coaches any time there are a few losses. The lack of continuity keeps teams from developing and improving over a reasonable time frame.
A couple of powerful owners get to more or less write their own rules as well(the gentlemen’s agreement among the owners about players having to come back to Mexico with their old club; it applied to Omar Bravo with Chivas and Reinaldo Nava with América, but Vicente Sánchez came back to América with no compensation to Toluca).
As far as I know, the players have no collective bargaining agreement either.
On the maybe plus side, Femexfut does have a rule about each club in the Primera giving young Mexican players a certain amount of minutes each season. The hope is that this will develop young Mexican players.
Great chat with good questions!
I don’t get to watch the mexican league, and I see MAYBE one MLS game a week…but i’ve assumed MLS was about 5+ years from catching the MFL. I guess the next question, if MLS is that close to the MFL, is “how long until MLS is the best in the West(ern Hemisphere)?” 2018?
“Not sure there’s a player I “want” to interview that I haven’t been able to. There is one player, who will remain nameless, who I keep coming close to interviewing but he keeps bailing out. I’m not holding my breath on that one.”
Edgar Castillo?