Most Pro Soccer Leagues Starting a New Season

The 2018-19 season for most of the world's premier soccer leagues has just begun or is about to begin in the next two to three weeks...Mexico's Liga MX regular season is already a week old.  For most of the rest there is still a short wait...but in the meantime some of the top European teams from different leagues have been playing each other in the International Champion's Cup...sounds impressive and important doesn't it? Fact check: they are only exhibition matches, held in the United States and other countries to promote more interest in the sport.  However, these games, also called "friendlies", while bringing with them most of the rosters of the different participating teams, are missing the star attractions...where are Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, and the rest?  Well, Chelsea is one of those featured teams and its manager/coach Jose Mourinho has recently complained that his best players are missing because they are recuperating from the recent World Cup, making his club appear worse than they are.  But I've seen these International Champion's Cup matches in past years when there hadn't been a World Cup and the stars were still often missing from the field.  Still, even without them it's fun to watch these matches...I noticed that since they don't actually "count" in the standings or official tournaments, there are a lot fewer spectacles of players feigning injuries to impress the officials after fouls as they writhe around on the ground with masks of agony...only to get up a few seconds later and sprint down the field...

It looks as if television will cover the upcoming soccer leagues as they did last year.  Univision, along with Galavision at times, will cover much of the Mexican soccer (in Spanish, of course) while NBC/Sports and NBC will show the English Premier League, most of whose matches take place (from our time vantage point here) on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Germany's Bundesliga will have their games...often delayed or on replay...broadcast by Fox 1 and Fox 2 Sports.  America's Major League Soccer, which has been going on since spring and whose regular season is winding down toward the playoffs, can be seen on a number of different channels although most of their matches can only be viewed through special paid subscription...a policy I think is foolish when they are trying to stir up more interest in the sport within this country.  What teams am I following? UANL Tigres in Mexico, Leicester City and Arsenal in England, Orlando City and Portland in Major League Soccer...and Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, for no other reason than I might as well since they win the championship every year, why not?  One side note: Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the world's best soccer player and who had been playing for Real Madrid in Spain's La Liga the last few years, has jumped leagues over to Italy's Serie A and will being playing for Juventus this year.  Maybe that will help to boost that league's stature among the others after its recent decline the past few years... 

2018 FIFA Men's World Cup of Soccer Begins Knockout Rounds Today

Now that the group stage is over and half of the FIFA Men's World Cup of soccer's teams are down to sixteen survivors, it is time for the "knockout" stage of the tournament, whereby countries face off each round in single elimination until only two are left to play the championship match.  Most of the favorites in the group stage made it this far, the stunning exception being defending World Cup champion Germany, a favorite this year as well, losing their final group stage match to South Korea 2-0, with Sweden that group's surprise winner.  Also unexpected, albeit not as much of a shock, was Japan surviving their group while Poland went down.  Well, that's over and it's time for some more exciting high-level international soccer...starting later this morning (this article was published shortly after midnight Saturday, June 30).  Here's the schedule for the eight matches in the "round of sixteen" for the next four days, with the starting times given in Eastern Daylight Time...

Saturday, June 30: FRANCE vs. ARGENTINA, 10 am
                              URUGUAY vs PORTUGAL, 2 PM

Sunday, July 1: SPAIN vs. RUSSIA, 10 am
                          CROATIA vs. DENMARK, 2 pm

Monday, July 2: BRAZIL vs. MEXICO, 10 am
                           BELGIUM vs. JAPAN, 2 pm

Tuesday, July 3: SWEDEN vs. SWITZERLAND, 10 am
                           COLOMBIA vs. ENGLAND, 2 am

Fox and Fox 1 Sports channels are showing the games live...I've enjoyed watching the World Cup so far.  It's hard to tell at this point which teams will keep playing well enough to advance, but at least in the group stage Croatia, Uruguay, and Belgium have impressed me the most.  Brazil should be playing better than they have, and this is doubly true with Argentina, which just barely passed the group stage.  We'll see whether they can get their acts together as they face stiffer competition than ever before.  I'm a bit disappointed in the matchups this week...I wanted both Brazil and Mexico to advance far into the tournament: instead they're playing each other.  The same is true for Colombia and England.  The one team I'd really like to get booted out the most is Russia, the automatic entry because it is the host nation.  Nothing personal...and I really love the Russian language, music to my ears whenever I hear it...but it's bad enough that this country, which has been interfering in our politics while threatening or invading its neighbors, is getting all this free positive publicity...

Reported Discrimination Against Conservatives Speaking at Some Public Colleges

I was watching one of the C-Span channels this morning and there was a program featuring lawyers representing conservatives who claim to have been discriminated against at some public universities regarding speaking engagements.  Two colleges in particular...California @ Berkeley and Washington...were cited by the attorneys for stifling the free speech of conservatives who had been invited to speak on campus by student groups, usually the campus Republican group.  The college administrators' tactics were similar with politically right-leaning speakers: (1) charge an exorbitantly high security fee that is much lower or completely waived for liberal speakers, (2) force the conservative speaker to make his or her presentation in a remote location, often off-campus far from public transportation, (3) place a "curfew", often around 3 pm, as the mandated finishing time for the speech (which inherently creates a schedule conflict with students attending classes), and (4) impose a gag rule prohibiting the student group from promoting the event in the media.  The lawyers noted that speakers for liberal groups and causes were not treated in this manner, and they showed as an example how differently conservative and liberal guest speakers were treated during a calendar period.  I was impressed by the program, but so far haven't found it on the network's webpage...

Free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment is NOT designed to protect speech that people want to hear: it's aimed at protecting speech that they DON'T want to hear.  If you're a professor, administrator, or student at one of these publicly-funded universities and can't handle someone with a different point of view expressing themselves, then why should you realistically expect those who disagree with your viewpoints and philosophies to respect you when you want to communicate them?  There are two forces going on that are making our society more and more divided and full of hostility.  One is the resurgence of racism and hate groups and the other is runaway political correctness, the adherents of which automatically slap "racism", "sexism", "hate", and other labels on people who don't fit the accusations but who have a different way of seeing things nevertheless.  It's a shame that so many folks idolize their own set ways so much that they are incapable of tolerating another perspective to the point where they fight to prevent its expression...