European Overview

I haven't done an update on the various European teams I follow for a while and with new seasons getting ready to kick off I think now is a good time to take a trip around the continent.

Blackburn Rovers: Blackburn has certainly moved up to my "second" team after seeing them a couple of times in person.  In 2017-18 they promoted back to the Championship and last year they settled into mid-table for most of the season.  A late season dip had some fans a little worried about relegation but they turned it around and finished 15th.  In the offseason they've improved the squad and somehow kept star attacking midfielder Bradley Dack.  I think hoping for a playoff spot is a stretch but a finish just behind that (7-10th) is not out of the question.  They open the season on Saturday hosting Charlton Athletic.

Queen of the South: The Doonhamers had a rough year last season, with manager Gary Naysmith parting ways with the team before the relegation playoffs.  Yes, relegation playoffs.  Despite having one of Europe's leading scorers (Stephen Dobbie, look it up) the team suffered through a two month losing streak after the holidays.  They finished 9th but won the relegation playoff and stayed in the Championship.  Dobbie is back this season with a new manager and a rebuilt team, but the early start has not been great.  They were eliminated from the League Cup in the first group stage this month.  Their first league game is Saturday at Arborath.

CD Tenerife: The Chicharreros had a pretty typical season for them, settling in above the real relegation danger in the Spanish Segunda division but not much higher than that.  14 of the last 21 seasons have gone about the same way.  Tenerife brought in defensive reinforcements this offseason, including former Barcelona keeper Adrian Ortola to deal with their 50 goals allowed last season.  They start the season at Real Zaragoza in two weeks with their big home derby against Las Palmas on Sept 8th.

TSG Hoffenheim: In Julian Nagelsmann's last season in charge of 1899 the team stumbled a bit.  a solid 9th place finish is nothing to sneeze at but it was certainly a drop from the 3rd and 4th places of the prior two years.  They also finished 4th in their group in the Champions League, which meant a direct drop out of Europe, not a shift to the Europa League.  This season the biggest change is at manager, with wunderkid Nagelsmann moving on to RB Leipzig and being replaced by former assistant Alfred Schreuder.  After finishing with the 3rd best offense in the Bundesliga last season the team has doubled-down on the attacking strategy, bringing in multiple wingers to bolster the attack.  A little good news for German football fans today, after this coming season the Bundesliga rights will move from FOX to ESPN+.  Hoffenheim start the season with an away cup match at Wurzburger on the 10th and their first league match at Eintracht on the 18th.

English Non-League: After two trips to England where I learned a bit about non-league football, and actually saw a non-league game, there are two non-league sides I'm keeping my eye on, in different but equal divisions.

In the National League North I'm watching Chester FC.  Last season was the first back in the North for the Blues after relegation the prior year and after a quick start they finished just short of the promotion playoffs in 9th place.  They had a run of bad luck with weather and cup matches rescheduling a number of games early in the season (a bad storm all but destroyed the operations center of the stadium when the roof failed, forcing many postponements) leading to a very congested fixture list and a reallocation of resources.  This season they have some new investments lined up and there is hope that they'll be pushing for promotion back to the National League.

In the National League South I'm watching Wealdstone FC, who I saw play at home in April.  That loss to Dulwich Hamlet seemed to end their playoff hopes but a great run in the last couple games, including a miracle set of 4 results on the last day got the Stones into the promotion playoff.  As the bottom seed they had a long road to promotion but their miracle run continued for a bit.  They first went to Bath and won 3-1, then went to Woking at took a 2-0 lead in the first half.  The magic ran out at halftime though, with Woking scoring 3 times in the last 15 minutes of the match and knocking Wealdstone out of the playoffs.  There's hope for a return trip this year however.

So that's the circuit, from Dumfries to Tenerife to Hoffenheim.  Who knows, maybe I'll add a Greek team soon. :D

Up And Down The English Pyramid

Sorry I've been quiet but as some readers know, I spent last week in London.  My plan on returning was to recap the two games (DC and Chicago) that I had missed but, really, nobody needs to suffer through a recap of those messes.  Instead lets talk about something more interesting, my trip up and down the English pyramid.

Last month I wrote an article for the Blackburn fanzine 4,000 Holes (its from a John Lennon song) about how a guy in Denver ended up being a Rovers fan.  I mentioned my Twitter handle in the article and after it was published the week before I left Rob from the London branch of the Rovers Supporters Group reached out to me and invited me to a special meeting of the London group the night before the QPR-Blackburn game.

Picture from Rob's Twitter

After a day at the Natural History Museum and Camden markets my wife and I had dinner in Leicester Square and I headed to the pub where the group was meeting while she went back to the hotel.  The Red Lion pub across the street (literally) from St. James Palace is a small place that claims to be the second oldest drinking house in England.  Upstairs was a small room where I met 25-30 fellow Rovers supporters who had gathered for a chance to have a Q&A with Blackburn Rovers CEO Steve Waggott.

CEO Steve Waggott, picture also from Rob's Twitter

Surprisingly I was one of the 4-5 youngest people there.  Rob and some of the old-timers joked about their average age being 95 and hoped I could bring that average down a bit.  After a bit of socializing Steve Waggott took the floor and talked for a few minutes and then spent close to an hour answering questions from the group.  I didn't have anything to ask but just listening in and hearing about how the business side of a major club works was very interesting.  Rovers may be a recently promoted Championship club, but they are one of only six teams to have ever won the EPL.  Something Steve said probably couldn't happen today with current UEFA Financial Fair Play rules and the ridiculously to-heavy English system.

After talking with him I came to the conclusion that the English system is fundamentally broken and will either result in a collapse or a breakaway of the top teams while the rest of the pyramid resets itself in a new paradigm.  Right now Huddersfield Town is guaranteed to finish in last place in the EPL and be relegated.  They will have gotten $130 million from this year's EPL TV deal plus another $40 million as a parachute payment for being relegated.  Meanwhile (at least) one of Leeds Sheffield United, and WBA will not get promoted and will start the 2019-20 season in the Championship as the strongest non-promoted team.  They will have gotten $7 million for this year's EFL TV deal.  Their $7 million will be competing with Huddersfield's $170 million for promotion next season.  That's almost a 25 to 1 ratio just from TV and parachute payments.  And it only gets worse as you go down the table.  Its no surprise that its hard for any team to stay up for any length of time and even harder for them to compete for anything other than avoiding relegation.

Overall though it was a fascinating evening.  One thing I took away was Steve's understanding about the need to attract and "hook" the next generation and how the digital age and ability to follow any team from almost anywhere on the planet makes it hard to get kids interested in their local team, something that MLS teams have struggled with as well.  Generally though i came away with the feeling that Blackburn should be a pretty solid Championship team for a long time to come and while we may never get back to the EPL, I'd rather be competitive in the Championship than to just fight for survival a level up.

The next day was Good Friday, a bank holiday, so the lower league games had been scheduled for Friday instead of Saturday. After watching the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, I headed to the Shepard's Bush neighborhood of West London to see the Rovers take on QPR at Loftus Road.

Loftus Road opened in 1904 and, well, you can tell.  Its a great experience to go but the stadium has very few amenities and the seats were obviously put in to a stadium designed for standing terraces.  I literally could not sit with my legs closed without kneeing the person in front of me in the back of the head.  That said, the viewpoint, even as an away supporter, was great.  I was dead center behind the goal in the School End Upper Tier, the deck traditionally given to the travelling fans.  It was a gorgeous day for football and everyone was in high spirits.  Blackburn took an early lead when Lewis Travis was taken down in the box and Danny "he scores when he wants" Graham stepped up to put the penalty away.  

The second half started quickly with Bradley Dack getting a goal in the first minute right at my feet (or at least that's how it felt) to put the good guys up 2-0.  After that it felt like Blackburn was going to coast to their 3rd straight win but a goal by QPR just at the start of 6 minutes of stoppage time made thins a little tense before the final whistle and a 2-1 win.  Then it was a quick tube ride back to the hotel to meet my wife for dinner.

On Saturday I had my choice between four games in the London area that were easily accessible on the Tube.  In the EPL West Ham was hosting Leicester City, Arsenal was hosting Crystal Palace, and Chelsea was hosting Burnley.  Also in the National League South (level 6 of the pyramid) Wealdstone FC was hosting Dulwich Hamlet.  After a morning at the British Museum I headed out to the northwestern suburb of Ruislip to Grosvenor Vale, the home of Wealdstone FC.  I've always wanted to see a non-league game and given the price difference it made sense to go see the lower-league game over the EPL.  Ruislip is on the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines of the Tube with the main Ruislip station a 5-10 minute walk from the stadium.  The Vale is down at the end of a cul-de-sac in a residential area, without the signs on the main drive nearby you wouldn't even know it was there.

The ground reminded me a lot of high school football here in the U.S.  No in areas like Texas where high-school football is a religion but in areas where its something for the town to get behind but not the main topic of the town.  Its listed at a capacity of 3600, with about 700 seats.  There are three different stands with seats, none more than 7-8 rows deep, and the rest is terrace area for standing or just spots on the fence around the field.  The club shop/snack bar, with the PA announcer on top, is clearly built from a converted shipping container but other buildings, such as the locker rooms and clubhouse, are older fully built structures.  Amenities are pretty minimal, a snack bar and a burger place, one team store, and a long-time fan selling pins of every team in England and most of the rest of Europe ever game, and the clubhouse with a couple of different bars.  But at 13 pounds for a general admission ticket you don't expect much.  I wandered around the whole perimeter of the field, stopped in and bought a scarf at the team store, a soda at the snack bar, and a couple of pins from the long-time fan, and settled in on one of the terraces behind the goal Wealdstone was attacking.

Now I'll be honest, the soccer wasn't great.  But these are guys who are semi-pro and hold down other jobs.  They show up to practice 2-3 times a week after work and then show up for the games.  For this they get 200-400 pounds a week.  They're playing for the love the game and, for the younger guys, the hope they can be the next Jamie Vardy (Vardy played non-league football for 5 years before being signed by Leicester City and leading them on their miracle run to the EPL title).  In reality, the best of them might make it to full time professional contracts in League Two or maybe League One.

At halftime I noticed that since the whole stadium was general admission the supporters had an understanding that they would switch sides at half along with the team.  So the Wealdstone supporters moved to the other end of the field and the Dulwich Hamlet supporters filled in around me for the second half.  Dulwich Hamlet is based in the Southwark borough of South London so they had ha decent (relatively speaking) crowd of travelling supporters who came up on the tube.  With the shuffle of fans a spot opened up on the fence and I moved up there for the second half.

As you can see, when I say "on the fence" I mean literally "I could touch the nets".  That last picture is a PK that Dulwich Hamlet earned and I'm pretty sure I was closer to the ball on the spot than some of the players on the edge of the box.  In the end Wealdstone needed a result to keep their promotion hopes alive but Dulwich came to play and ran up a 3-0 lead before giving one up late for a 3-1 final score in their favor.  Dulwich's pink & navy color scheme needs some work though.

I'm really glad I went to see what the non-league game is like.  I'd be happy to go back to Wealdstone or another non-league game on a future trip.  These two teams play in the National League South, with the top team and the winner of a playoff both being promoted to the National League.  The top team in that league and the winner of a playoff gets promoted each year into the English Football League League Two becoming one of the 92 fully professional teams in England.  (Dagenham & Redbridge, the team Tim Howard and his investors in Memphis 901 bought, are in the National League and play in the east of London.  I wanted to go see them but their game was the same time as the Blackburn game.)  I highly encourage any soccer fan who's in England to go check out a non-league game at least once.

So that's a look at the higher and lower levels of the English pyramid.  All these teams have good social media presences and websites where you can follow the team, so if you're interested take a look around and find a team you like and keep an eye on them.  I've been keeping an eye on Chester FC since I visited Chester on our England trip two years ago and now I'll be watching Wealdstone as well.

I've Been A Wild Rover For Many A Year...

...And I've spent all my money on this seat right here

There's no point in saving for a rainy day

Cause I'll be a wild Rover till my dying day

And it's no nay never

No nay never no more

Cause I'll stay a wild Rover forever and more

(sung to Wild Rover)

Sorry for the silence but I've been out of the country for most  of the last two weeks.  On Saturday I was at Ewood Park in Blackburn to see Blackburn Rovers in person for the first time.  The opponent for this Championship match was another Lancashire team, Preston North End.  While not Rovers dreaded rival Burnley it was a local derby and the travelling fans were there in force as well.

Sadly Blackburn gave up the equalizer in the last minute of stoppage for a 2-2 draw (the same score the Rapids game would have later that day).  I'm really glad I made the trip to northwest England for this game.  Not only because I'm a Rovers fan but I enjoyed seeing what most people think of as the roots of the game.

Despite Rovers' historic success Ewood Park is no DSG Park and Blackburn is never going to be Arsenal or Chelsea.  Blackburn is a town of about 100K somewhat out of the way in England.  For the most part the supporters of Rovers are local fans or fans who have some ties to the local area (though the season ticket holder sitting next to me told me there was a Norwegian sitting in my seat a few weeks earlier).  I saw a very loud five to six thousand Preston fans filling up the Darwen end and I heard the Blackburn supporters overcome them after a rough start.

Ewood Park has one large video screen in the corner between the Riverside Stand and the Darwen End that showed the lineups and the score.  Occasionally it would show a replay but only on goals, close misses, and the very occasional foul.  Other than that the stadium has a small board on the Darwen End that showed the current score and minute (no seconds, just the minute).  That was it for displays.  Much different than the Dick that has the electronic board around the top of the whole stadium along with the video board on one end and the score/time board on the other.  Also my seat was literally an arm's length from the Preston subs.  I can't imagine ever getting that close to players in-game in the U.S.  Of course when the team has played home games on the same spot for 135 years like Blackburn has, some things are done because they've always been done that way.

I've included some more  pictures from the game below.  I'll get back to some commentary on the hot mess that is the Rapids right now in the next few days.  With the international break and the rescheduled Dallas match we have more than two weeks until our next game action so there's plenty of time to talk about what's working and what really isn't.

The River Darwen and the Riverside Stand

The Jack Walker statue, Blackburn's greatest supporter

The Blackburn End stand and the pregame festivities

Not exactly a C38 tailgate

 Panoramic from my seat

Preston's subs and assistant coaches

The Darwen End stand showing the two electronic boards in the stadium 

Both managers on the touchline

On Sunday we went to the National Football Museum in Manchester where I got my picture with the FA Cup and the EPL Trophy.  You're not allowed to lift the FA Cup but you can lift the EPL trophy.

Overseas Season Round-Up

Its a little late due to everything going on, but its time for the season round-up for the clubs overseas that I follow.

Queen of the South: As reported earlier QoS stormed through their season, being the first team in the UK to clinch a championship and the promotion that goes with it.  They also won the Ramsdens Cup over 1st Division Champions Partick Thistle.  Queens received awards galore including Manager of the Year and Team of the Year.   As soon as the offseason hit though, the negative side of their success appeared.  Leading scorer Nicky Clark will not be going up with the team as he was bought by another Second Division team, a little club you might of heard of called Rangers.  Just yesterday manager Allan Johnston agreed to a contract with Kilmarnock of the Premier League.  An impressive move by a guy who has 1 year (admittedly a great year) of managerial experience.  Next year the Doonhamers are back in the First Division after their one year absence.

Blackburn Rovers: A bad season for Rovers after last year's relegation saw them go through 5 managers and barely avoid a second straight drop, finally finishing 17th in the Championship.  Venky's ownership continued to spin the club out of control, leading to as many off-field problems as on-field problems.  Leadership seems to be getting sorted out but the club still has quite a financial crisis which will tie their hands for the coming season.  The bumpy ride isn't over yet.

CD Tenerife: After two seasons in the third division and coming oh-so-close to promotion last year they got over the hump this year.  They won their group by 3 points and then won their promotion playoff 3-2 on aggregate over L'Hospitalet.  Facing Alaves for the Segunda B championship they lost by a two-leg score of 3-2.  Next season its back to their normal stomping grounds of the Spanish Segunda where they'll meet their Canary Island rivals Las Palmas.

Melbourne Victory: The Victory bounced back from a rough season with a 3rd placed finish in the A-League behind Western Sydney and Central Coast, who ran away from the rest of the pack.  3rd place was good enough to get the A-League's AFC Champions League qualifier spot for the 2014 competition.  Much like MLS, the A-League's season is offset from much of the rest of the confederation which leads to a big delay between champions league qualification and actually playing.  In the A-League playoffs the Victory won their first round battle before losing to eventual champions Central Coast in the semis.

TSG 1899 Hoffenheim: This is a new club I've been rooting for, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law visiting that part of Germany a couple of years ago and bringing a scarf back from the club for me.  Hoffenheim was backed in 2000 by one of the founders of SAP, at the time they were playing in the 5th division of German soccer.  Between 2000 and 2008 they earned 4 promotions to end up in the Bundesliga. The club is also the home of 2 young German-born American Nats players, Daniel Williams and Fabian Johnson, and a 3rd American, Joe Gyau, who has played for the U.S. youth national teams.  This year Hoffenheim struggled in the Bundesliga, going through 4 different managers, ending in 16th place and in the relegation playoff.  In the playoff they beat Kaiserslautern 5-2 to keep their place in the Bundesliga for the 2013-14 season.

So, two teams promoted and none relegated, not a bad season.  Next year there's 2 top division teams (Melbourne and Hoffenheim) and 3 second division teams (Queen of the South, Blackburn, and Tenerife).

Relegated

My Overseas Roundup of the teams I follow is coming a bit late this year because I had to wait for the Spanish promotion playoffs to finish today.  Unfortunately its pretty much universally bad news.

Blackburn Rovers - EPL - Finished 19th of 20.  In the biggest failure of the year Blackburn Rovers was relegated out of the EPL.  The same year a 5th team finally joined the ranks of EPL winners Blackburn were relegated for the second time since the founding of the EPL, the only EPL champion ever to be relegated (but when the only other ones before this year were Man U., Arsenal, and Chelsea that's not a huge surprise).  This was Venky's first full season in charge of Rovers and they proved they don't have a clue of what they're doing.  My fear is that this coming season will be the first of many in the Championship.  Unlike last time we were relegated we won't bounce back up the next season.  Let's just hope our plummet stops in the Championship!

Queen of the South - Scottish First Division - Finished 10th of 10.  Money finally caught up to the Doonhamers.  They were barely able to keep the team full-time and had to slash all of their existing contracts to so that.  They put everyone, including the manager, on one-year deals in order to remain financially viable and from an economic perspective it worked, but at the cost of our First Division spot after 10 years.  The club has announced they plan to stay full-time in a bid to move back up to the First Division ASAP.  They turned down investment from an outside company, deciding that they club should remain in the hands of local Dumfries fans.  The club will be moving training back to Dumfries from Glasgow (where its been for the last few years) and are laying new surfaces for the stadium and the practice field this offseason.

CD Tenerife - Spanish Segunda B - Finished 2nd of 20.  The Spanish Segunda B is split into 4 20 team groups with promotion playoffs for the top teams.  Tenerife was unlucky to be draw into the same group as Real Madrid's reserves and not surprisingly the royal backups ran away with the group.  The group winners only have to win one home-and-home playoff series to clinch promotion (which Real Madrid B did) while the 2nd-4th placed teams in each group had to win 3 such series.  Tenerife won the first 2 and went into today's promotion playoff final at home with a 1-0 deficit to Group 2's 2nd placed team, Ponferradina.  Unfortunately despite having the home advantage they lost the game 2-1 and will remain in the Spanish Segunda B for another season.

Melbourne Victory - Australian A-League - Finish 8th of 10.  This was expected to be a rebuilding year for the Victory, and it was.  After hanging around the edge of the playoff spots for the first 2/3rds of the season a series of poor results in the final stages found them dropping to 8th and staying there for the last third of the year.  Melbourne were 8 points out of a playoff spot, missing them for the 3rd time in their 7 year history.  The A-League is going through a lot of financial issues right now so its hard to tell what kind fo season to expect next year.

Rough Overseas Season Ends

Long time readers will remember my Weekend Roundup posts on the 4 overseas teams I follow. This past offseason was very busy for the Rapids so I stopped doing the regular updates, but I figured I'd do an end-of-season Roundup on them.

Queen of the South - Scotland Division One

QoS had a rough year due to the bath weather in Scotland. The team had 11 different matches in December and January postponed due to snow and frozen pitches. They managed just 3 matches in that time period which put a financial hurt on the club that they managed to struggle through, then it put a competitive hurt on the club in the back half of the season as all those games had to be made up. The team managed to make the final of the ALBA Challenge Cup (Cup competition between all DI-DIII teams), which was originally scheduled for November 28th but due to weather and rescheduling didn't get played until April 10th, which Queens lost 2-0. The team finally finished 5th in Division One, a solid finish given their congested schedule.

Blackburn Rovers - English Premier League

Rovers started out well, sitting in mid-table and getting an influx of new cash as the team was sold to the owners of Indian chicken processor Venky's. Fans saw them as the white knight riding in to bring Blackburn to the next level, but they immediately became the villains as they fired manager Sam Allardyce and replaced him with assistant manager Steve Kean in early December. No cognizant explanation was given and after that point Blackburn plunged down the table, highlighted by a 7-1 loss at Old Trafford. Blackburn later had to watch United celebrate their EPL title at Ewood Park after a 1-1 draw in the penultimate game gave the Red Devils the championship but did not assure Rovers of safety. That didn't happen until the final week when Blackburn went to Wolves and took a 3-0 lead in the first half, only to hold off a furious comeback and win 3-2, assuring themselves of another year of top-flight football as they finished 15th.

CD Tenerife - Spanish Segunda Division

After dropping from La Liga last season Tenerife had high hopes of bouncing right back up. Unfortunately just the opposite happened. CDT lost 6 of their first 9 games and didn't win until game 10. A good streak gave a little hope, but 8 and 10 game winless streaks doomed the team. Tenerife had 3 manager changing this year, which didn't help. With one game left in the season the chicharros are already relegated to Segunda B for the first time in 24 years with a guranteed 20th placed finish (out of 22 teams). They have a chance to salvage something out of this season this weekend as they travel to Las Palmas for the Canary Islands derby. The teams tied in Santa Cruz de Tenerife earlier in the season so the winner on Saturday, if there is one, can claim dominance of the islands until the teams meet again. Unfortunately Las Palmas will not be going down with CDT, so they'll be able to flaunt that until Tenerife recovers.

Melbourne Victory - Australian A-League

The Victory, coming off a disappointing loss in last year's final to their rivals Sydney FC, was hoping to continue their dominance of the A-League. Unfortunately it appears that they tried to push their aging team one too many years before rebuilding as the team suffered from mixed results all season, highlighted by captain Kevin Muscat committing an unforgivable red-card tackle (similar but worse than Mullan's) that got him banned for 8 weeks until the end of the regular season. He announced his retirement at the end of the Asian Champion's League, in which the Victory finished last in its group. Melbourne managed to finish 5th and qualify for the playoffs, but they were bounced in the first round by Gold Coast United. The team seems to have started a rebuilding process before next season.

Blackburn squeak into the FA Cup 5th Round

10 days ago Blackburn escaped from the Stadium of Light with a scoreless draw. After 90 minutes today the teams were still deadlocked at 1 goal apiece. It took until the 209th minute of football in the two games combined for Benni McCarthy to give Blackburn their first lead, and full time was whistled a minute later to put Rovers through to the final 16. Blackburn will host Championship side Coventry City in the 5th Round on Valentine's Day.

Player Comings and Goings Part 2

More roster shuffle this week, both here in Colorado and across the pond in Blackburn.

Last night the Rapids won the "weighted lottery" that MLS held for the rights to Bruno Guarda, an attacking midfielder that has decided not to return to SMU for his senior season and instead go straight into MLS.

(MLS handles these type of players, who become available in midseason, in a similar way to the NBA Draft where every team gets a certain number of balls based on their record over the last season's worth of games. Its unclear how they handled the expansion Earthquakes, but the Rapids had the 3rd or 4th best chance at the player)

Guarda is a Brazilian who went to school at SMU and was expected to be a first round draft pick when he did come out. The fact that he's an international does lower the interest a bit, but he's an interesting young player that could push Ballouchy for playing time. The Rapids signed him to a contract today and made room for him by putting reserve GK Justin Hughes on the season-ending injury list.

The other twist to this signing is the fact that Guarda's former coach at SMU, Schellas Hyndman, just took the head coaching job at FC Dallas and has expressed interest in bringing Guarda to Texas. Dallas has just traded for two international spots, presumably to use one of them on Guarda. You would expect a trade to happen before the Rapids actually signed him and made a roster move to fit him into the squad, but perhaps the Rapids are trying to drive up his value by getting him under contract before making the deal.

Across the Atlantic Blackburn Rovers are also making moves in preparation for the upcoming EPL season. Today they announced that Big Bad Brad Friedel had been sold to Aston Villa for $4 million. Brad has been a rock in the back for Blackburn for the last few seasons, and his shoes will be hard to fill. He was also the reason I first started following Blackburn, but my interest int he team has grown beyond Friedel, so I won't be changing allegiances to Aston Villa (Though my Rapids gear would fit their color scheme). Brad Friedel will join Brad Guzan as the American 1-2 duo in the nets for Villa.

Why Blackburn Rovers?

Another in my occasional series where I explain why I've picked the teams I have.

So why Blackburn Rovers? They aren't one of the "big" names of English football, ManU, Liverpool, etc. Well that was part of it. I don't like to pick the big team, I like rooting for the underdog. The main reason though is Big Bad Brad Friedel.

I'll be honest. The first EPL side I rooted for was Leicester City. When I started following soccer 10 years ago Kasey Keller was (and still is) one of my favorite players. He grew up in the Puget Sound region, like me, and I've always enjoyed watching good goalkeeping. He was playing for Leicester at the time, so I picked them. Eventually though Keller moved on to Spain and Leicester found the relegation zone. until the last couple of years it was difficult, at best, to follow a non EPL side in the States, so I decided I needed another EPL team to root for. I went with my pattern of picking an American keeper, and that was Brad Friedel.

Unlike my following of Leicester though, I've grown to be a fan of Rovers for more than just the keeper. Rovers have added more players that I like, like former DC United back Ryan Nelsen and young striker Matt Derbyshire. They also added former Leicester midfielder Robbie Savage for a while, who was always one of my favorites at LCFC.

More than just the players though, the team has had a good philosophy about their goals. They've made strong economic choices that have allowed them to be competitive in the EPL. They haven't over extended themselves, and yet have been in the running for Europe for the last few seasons, just barely missing getting a slot for the 08/09 season. They will probably never challenge for the EPL title again while the big money of Arsenal and Chelsea is still available, but they're in the next group pf strong teams. Of course much of that is due to manager Mark Hughes, who has just been stolen away by Manchester City. The choice of the next manager will be critical to continue this style of play.

Eventually Brad will retire, and maybe Blackburn will end up relegated. With the advances in soccer coverage in the U.S. and availability of news on the Internet I doubt you'll see me giving up Blackburn like I gave up Leicester.