Zach Lawless

Texas A&M '15 | Columbia ‘21 | AI/ML | I enjoy playing golf and sitting on patios

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year.

That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer.

FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset.

US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records.

So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros.

Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability.

Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business.

They will not.

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@KVanValkenburg If Great Britain was hosting and England was playing Mexico at Wembley, think anyone would make a fuss?

[Josip @l3d1c]

Only a low IQ non-technical person thinks that a wireless sensor inside a ball with a shitty polling rate that is kicked around for hours is precise enough within low millisecond range to register a string of hair on the ball’s surface, yet magically immune to the pressure wave of someone missing it by 2mm and do all of this over the air in real time across hundreds of meters.

It's an accelerometer. It picks up vibrations and pressure changes from EVERYTHING nearby, even it hitting an insect in the air, then FIFA decides which spike counts as a ‘touch’.

[FC Dallas @FCDallas]

Christopher Jeffrey Richards after the red card.

[Pardon My Take @PardonMyTake]

Build the statue of the flight attendant that wouldn’t let Baloguns mom on the flight

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Dirk Nowitzki @swish41]

That’s not a red!!! 🤦‍♂️

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

Make it make sense...

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@TheEliJordan Scattershooting a few that come to mind

13 at Dallas National
8 at Split Rail
7 at Mira Vista (haven't played it since the reno)
8 at Stevens Park
8 at Texas Star

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@samnestler Harley-Heiskanen vs Hughes-Faber

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@OwenNewkirk Second line concerns me given Steel and Rantanen are battling lingering injuries and look a step slower than usual, overall good changes though. Just win, nothing else matters.

[Robert Tiffin @RobertTiffin]

Shot attempts: 40-38 for Dallas

Shots on goal: 25-11 for Minnesota

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@OwenNewkirk Second to every single puck all night, one team clearly wanted this more

[x - Clean Sheet of Ice @CleanSheetofIce]

Wild fans will tell you that this is completely normal and that we complain about the refs too much..

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

Enzo played in both 0-3 defeats to PSG and Everton.

[Absolute Chelsea @AbsoluteChelsea]

Liam Rosenior:

“Any team will miss Enzo [Fernandez]. Myself backed by the leadership group and sporting directors made a decision for the long-term of the club…”

[via @SkySportsPL]

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

This man speaks too much.

Pep won everything at Barca and Bayern before going to City.

Jurgen won a Dortmund before going to Liverpool.

Both had a championship resume, Rosenior has proven nothing.

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🚨 Liam Rosenior: “Even Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, they had a year to solve things out”.

“I came in January! But I know I need to win now...”.

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@TronCarterNLU Not showing Scottie's missed birdie putt or co-leader Burns's double bogey on two is certainly a choice from CBS. Glad we got even par Harmon on 16 though.

[Conn @ConnCFC]

Feel bad to anyone who watches Chelsea play week in week out. It’s disgusting. We all deserve better

[Zach Lawless @ZachLawless]

@ExpectedChelsea Obviously need to pass around more notes to get better results

[Josh Hart @joshhart]

What happened to my club…?