If Arsenal ever sell Mesut Ozil to a club in the Spanish league, Real Madrid have the right to match the transfer fee. And if they decline, Ozil’s former club would still be entitled to 33% of the playmaker’s final price.

Those are some of the revelations from a leaked version of Mesut Ozil’s transfer agreement that has been posted to the site Football Leaks, the same outlet that published a version of Gareth Bale’s contract last week. That leak debunked Real Madrid’s continued contention that Bale’s summer 2013 transfer fee was less than the price paid for Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United four years earlier. Bale’s fee was confirmed by the leak to be just south of 100 million euros.

SEE MORE: Latest January transfer window deals and news.

While Ozil’s contract doesn’t include similar record-setting sums, a number of clauses paint the transfer as far more complex than a normal player sale.

The leaked documents confirm Arsenal agreed to pay a 44 million euro transfer fee for the German international in Sept. 2013, a figure that could reach as high as 50 million euros thanks to one add-on clause. For every season Arsenal reach UEFA Champions League’s knockout round during Ozil’s first six at the club, Arsenal owes Real Madrid an additional one million euros.

That’s fairly straight forward. The deal gets more complex on the topic of Arsenal selling Ozil, specifically back to a Spanish club. Should Arsenal choose to do so, Real Madrid must be notified and given up to 48 hours to match the bid, according to The Guardian, depending on how close the agreement comes to the end of a transfer window. Should Real Madrid decline to match, the club would still be entitled to one-third of the final fee, should the price exceed 50 million euros.

Given the current state of Spanish club finances, this reads like language to prevent Ozil from moving to Barcelona, though it is not beyond the realm of possibility to think Peter Lim could conjure up the money at Valencia, or Atletico Madrid could sell other players to come up with the fee. As Espanyol, recently taken over by ambitious Chinese investors, show, there’s always a chance outside ownership could inject money into another La Liga club. Even if that investment eventually wanes, as it has at Malaga under Sheikh Abduallah Al Thani, it could result in a temporary buyer in the transfer market.

That scenario aside, Real Madrid stand to be rewarded greatly if Ozil ever returns to Spain. Either he will be back in white at the Santiago Bernabeu or Real Madrid will receive compensation for seeing him adorn the colors of a rival.

Long-time United States international Jermaine Jones joins Toronto FC stars Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore in a US January camp squad divided between Major League Soccer stalwarts and national team prospects getting their first shots at a long-term camp. US Soccer announced the 23-man squad on Wednesday, with players set to report to Carson, Calif. on July 11 for the senior program’s annual winter training camp.

This year’s camp runs through Feb. 6, with the near-month-long evaluation culminating with friendlies against Iceland (Jan. 31) and Canada (Feb. 6). Both matches will take place at StubHub Center in Carson.

“As we always do, we start out our year with a January camp where we give the opportunity to the next wave of players to come in and make an impression and see if they are ready to step it up into international level, if they are ready to understand what it takes to become a National Team player.” Klinsmann explained, via US Soccer. “This camp will be a little bit different because we’re going to mix it with almost half-and-half with senior players that are already National Team players or some that are older and maybe get the chance to play their first cap, and a lot of the Under-23 players that hopefully qualify us for (the 2016 Summer Olympics in) Rio de Janeiro.”

Altidore, coming off his first season back in Major League Soccer, is the senior member of a forward group that includes former Stanford University standout Jordan Morris and Galaxy attacker Gyasi Zardes, two players who’ve been frequent callups over the last year. But the strike force also includes Columbus’s Ethan Finlay, New York City FC 22-year-old Khiry Shelton and Stuttgart prospect Jerome Kiesewetter. Finlay will be looking to establish himself in Klinsmann’s player pool, while the latter two will have their sites on this summer’s Olympic games.

“The January camp has always been the camp of opportunities for players that badly, badly want to knock at the door of the Senior National Team and want to become a player of international status …” Klinsmann said.”You want these players really to come in and make a point and take that opportunity to try to come back into that group by the end of March and maybe play World Cup Qualifying.”

In midfield, Bradley is joined by fellow national team regulars Jones and NYCFC’s Mix Diskerud, as well as fellow Major League Soccer veterans Darlington Nagbe (Portland Timbers), Lee Nguyen (New England Revolution) and Wil Trapp (Columbus Crew). Highly-regarded San Jose midfielder Fatai Alashe is also part of the corps, as is Columbus’s Cameroon-born veteran Tony Tchani, who moved to the U.S. from his country of birth 12 years ago.

“The camp will be led by Jermaine Jones, Michael Bradley, Jozy Altidore, and the established guys that badly want to use this camp to get a head start into their very busy season,” Klinsmann explained. “The other huge focus really is that we need to help our younger, standard U-23 players to get a head start because they still need to qualify for Rio de Janeiro.”

In defense, Sporting Kansas City’s Matt Besler is the most experienced of a group that includes New York Red Bulls’ Matt Miazga and two players who can play fullback as well as midfield: FC Dallas’s Kellyn Acosta and Montreal’s Eric Miller. Chicago’s Matt Polster and Vancouver’s Tim Parker, coming off their first MLS campaigns, get their first extended senior team looks, while San Jose midfielder Marc Pelosi, previously part of Liverpool’s system, is listed as a defender by US Soccer.

In goal, DC United’s Bill Hamid is joined by Red Bulls veteran Luis Robles, who will look to build on the one senior cap he earned in at the 2009 Gold Cup.

The January camp roster, as announced by US Soccer:

GOALKEEPERS (2): Bill Hamid (DC United), Luis Robles (New York Red Bulls)

DEFENDERS (7): Kellyn Acosta (FC Dallas), Matt Besler (Sporting Kansas City), Matt Miazga (New York Red Bulls), Eric Miller (Montreal Impact), Tim Parker (Vancouver Whitecaps FC), Marc Pelosi (San Jose Earthquakes), Matt Polster (Chicago Fire)

MIDFIELDERS (8): Fatai Alashe (San Jose Earthquakes), Michael Bradley (Toronto FC), Mix Diskerud (New York City FC), Jermaine Jones (Unattached), Darlington Nagbe (Portland Timbers), Lee Nguyen (New England Revolution), Tony Tchani (Columbus Crew SC), Wil Trapp (Columbus Crew SC)

FORWARDS (6): Jozy Altidore (Toronto FC), Ethan Finlay (Columbus Crew SC), Jerome Kiesewetter (VfB Stuttgart), Jordan Morris (Unattached), Khiry Shelton (New York City FC), Gyasi Zardes (LA Galaxy)

“Is that the best you’ve got?”

Ed Woodward should spit those words out the moment Louis van Gaal picks up his phone. Manchester United’s executive vice chairman and manager reportedly talked after the team’s loss at Stoke City, with some outlets reporting today’s visit from Chelsea represented Van Gaal’s last shot. Although today’s shot was closer to its target, United still missed their mark.

When a team of United’s resources must comfort itself with “good” 0-0 draws, something is wildly amiss. But we knew that before today’s game against Chelsea. We knew it before United threatened to reach its first four-match league losing streak since the 1930s. We’ve known it since early in the season, when the team’s insipid attack and comatose ingenuity quieted preseason hopes they could compete for a title.

Nobody talks like that anymore. Instead, fans are left to take pride in relative progress. Wayne Rooney didn’t score or set up any goals on Monday, but at least he didn’t look like a corpse. Anthony Martial became the latest attacker to make Branislav Ivanovic look like Martin Demichelis, so nobody’s worried that he’s being played out of position. And with Ander Herrera back in the team and Juan Mata almost giving United a rare lead, people seem willing to engage the positives. The new United! Not quite as moribund as the old one.

Oh, but the bottom lines. In a season that’s been thrown wide open by the Premier League’s mediocrity, United are in sixth place. They’re closer to the table’s bottom half than Arsenal’s lead. While teams with little hope of competing for the title before week one challenge Manchester City and the Gunners, Manchester United’s placating themselves with treading water. A 0-0 draw? It could have been worse!

And yet, against a team that’s only three points above the drop, one that has been so bad that it recently fired one of the best managers in the world, Manchester United can’t even claim they should have won. That they were better? Sure, but this wasn’t the type of one-sided draw that leaves fans ruing points lost. No, if it weren’t for some cataclysmic finishing from Nemanja Matic, or a Real Madrid fax machine that’s become notoriously erratic, Manchester United could have lost its fifth in a row.

In that way, this was one of the most disappointing results of United’s winless month. Health issues, suspensions, poor form, lack of intensity – these were all poor excuses before, but they were used nonetheless. None of them are applicable now.

United had their players ready and had the right opponent. They were at home, had rested some players on Saturday, and were dealing with an unambiguous mandate. They were even helped by an opponent that played below their already dwindling standard. Yet come full time, as the players reconciled new effort with stale rewards, United were left with the two numbers which have defined their season: zero, and zero.

Is it too romantic, to see these goals by Southampton’s Cuco Martina and Stoke City’s Xherdan Shaqiri as the range that soccer has to offer? One, a powerful strike demanding the instincts and execution of a top-level player. The other, a touch a 12-year-old could execute, but only if that child’s feet extended from the mind and reactions of a near-world class talent.

We’ll start with the latter, the more recent, a goal that left Everton goalkeeper Tim Howard with little recourse on Monday at Goodison Park. How often do you see an attacker hit this on the half-volley, trying to lob the keeper rather than settling Bojan Krkic’s ball into the space in front of him? Howard, like the rest of us, was expecting the Switzerland international to take a touch before having a shot. And Howard, like the rest of us, was left shocked as Shaqiri scored his second goal of the day:

In terms of power, Shaqiri’s goal rests on the subtle end of the spectrum, the end that balances what we saw from Martina. Southampton’s second choice right back gave us Saturday’s goal of the day against Arsenal, opening the scoring with a blast out of Roberto Carlos’s arsenal. Cutting across the ball with his right foot, hitting it with the outside of his boot, Martina rendered David de Gea irrelevant, starting his shot well outside the `keeper’s right post before the ball dove into the left side-netting.

Different techniques, different levels of power, but the same outcome; one an envy-inducing act of aggression, the other defying empathy. For most, Martina’s will be the better goal; for most, his is also the more explicable. We can all relate to throwing our foot through a ball, striking it at just the right angle and finishing that shot you’d only imagined before.We’ve all hit and hoped. Whether you can relate to Shaqiri’s, though, comes down to whether you’d even consider doing that with your first touch.

United States international Omar Gonzalez has been transferred from Major League Soccer’s LA Galaxy to Liga MX’s Pachuca, the Galaxy announced on Wednesday. The move ends the defender’s seven-year stay at the MLS club.

“We thank Omar for his contribution and dedication to this club throughout the past seven years,” Galaxy head coach and general manager Bruce Arena said in a statement published by the club. “We wish Omar the best of luck with Pachuca.”

Gonzalez, 27, is a 30-time US international who helped the Galaxy to three MLS Cups and two Supporters’ Shields during his time in Los Angeles. He was named MLS Defender of the Year in 2011 and was voted to the league’s Best XI four times between 2010 and 2014.

That level performance earned Gonzalez a Designated Player (DP) contract in 2014, with the former Maryland Terrapin guaranteed $1.45 million in salary during the 2015 season. But Gonzalez’s DP status, alleviated by targeted allocation money (TAM) last season, limited the Galaxy’s flexibility, with Steven Gerrard, Robbie Keane and Giovani Dos Santos set to occupy the team’s three Designated Player spots. Though the Galaxy could have tried to use TAM to offset Gonzalez’s DP status in 2016, they’ve instead allowed their best defender to move to Mexico.

Pachuca has won five Mexican league titles but have not claimed a crown since 2007. In Liga MX’s just completed Apertura, the Tuzos finished in 12th place, six points out of the league’s playoffs. Pachuca, having allowed a league-worst 33 goals in 17 games, will hope Gonzalez quickly forges a partnership with veteran Alquivaldo Mosquera in a solidified central defense.

For the Galaxy, it was a move that had been rumored since the team’s disappointing loss in the first round of MLS’s playoffs. Expected to maintain his performance as one of the league’s best defenders, Gonzalez say his performance wane in 2015, so much so that Jurgen Klinsmann left him off the 23-man roster for the United States’ CONCACAF Cup showdown with Mexico this fall. Given a choice between Gerrard, Keane, Dos Santos and Gonzalez, and with defenders Leonardo and AJ DeLaGarza still in the squad, Gonzalez was the obvious choice.

Along with a likely pay raise, the move gives Gonzalez a new challenge, one which could propel him into the rest of his prime. It also represents a risk. Gonzalez has spent his entire career in Los Angeles, leaving him with no experience adapting to new clubs.

SEE MORE: On the 20th anniversary of Bosman, MLS still behind the free agency curve.

For Los Angeles, this may have been a necessary move, but it’s one that lowers the ceiling on their potential, with the team’s most talented defender leaving the club. It also marks the end of an era, with a player who was a key component to three titles in four years forced to leave the club.

Perhaps forced too strong a word. Given Gonzalez’s transfer fee remains undisclosed, it’s possible the Galaxy received an offer they could not refuse. Or maybe Gonzalez wanted to move. But on the surface, this move looks like a function of the Galaxy’s strategies and the league’s restrictive rules.

In the face of decisions to bring in Gerrard and Dos Santos, Los Angeles had to sacrifice another of its Designated Players. In another league, or maybe at another time in the Galaxy’s plans, Gonzalez would have seen out his troubles at Home Depot Center. Instead, he’s off to Mexico.

This time last year, talk of Vincent Kompany’s inconsistency began defining his reputation, with the once vaunted central defender reduced to a precarious place among soccer’s elite. Now, with Manchester City undefeated in the league when the imposing Belgian is in the lineup, the debate about his value has gone silent. Whatever ground Kompany gave last year to the world’s best defenders, he made up during a dominant start to City’s season.

Unfortunately for City, performances like Monday’s 1-2 loss to Arsenal make that start evermore irrelevant. With an injured Kompany watching from the stands at the Emirates, City fell to their fifth loss of the season, leaving them six points off the pace atop the English Premier League.

But to imply results like today’s would be reversed by Kompany’s health would be to overlook another key absence. Yes, the team has yet to lose without their captain in the lineup, but as former Arsenal right back Bacary Sagna continues to deteriorate before our eyes, the absence of Pablo Zabaleta, the Premier League’s best right back, becomes more pronounced. Until Zabaleta joins Kompany in City’s lineup, the team’s title chase is stuck in neutral.

The goals City gave Arsenal illustrated it perfectly. The first (below) was an exquisite Theo Walcott finish from the left of the penalty area, a shot that seized on one, maybe two, feet of space Joe Hart had to give at his far post. From one perspective, it was an unstoppable blast, one for the best finishes you’ll ever see from Walcott. Yet it also a shot that shouldn’t have been so easy to line up. Perhaps in the face of more urgency from Sagna, or positioning that made it more difficult for the attacker to cut onto his right foot, Walcott still releases an unstoppable shot, but no defender should be content with hypotheticals.

Then there was Sagna’s countryman, Eliaqium Mangala, who continues to show he’d be better placed with a title contender in Italy, France or Portugal. Thanks to some quick and precise execution from Aaron Ramsey and Mesut Ozil, the 24-year-old’s demoralizing attempt to switch the ball to the right flank became Olivier Giroud’s game winning goal. But unlike Arsenal’s first, where Walcott’s execution some credit, Giroud’s winner felt thoroughly preventable. Had Mangala’s pass been better executed, or a safer decision been made in the first place, Nicolas Otamendi wouldn’t have been left pursuing Giroud into a vulnerable channel, left helpless to prevent Arsenal’s second goal.

To City fans’ lament, today’s performance isn’t an isolated case, even if Arsenal’s approach wasn’t as blatantly exploitative as Liverpool’s or Stoke’s. Whereas Reds’ boss Jurgen Klopp seemed to outline a game plan for a high pressure approach that would destroy City’s insecure defense, Arsenal declined to follow in Stoke’s footsteps and replicate that plan. Instead, the Gunners exhibited Wenger’s trademark lack of game-to-game flexibility, something that seemed destined to derail the team after City’s opening 30 minutes of control.

SEE MORE: Chelsea’ upheaval should have City thinking twice about swapping Pellegrini for Mourinho.

But then City reverted to their own trademark; at least, the trademark that’s come to define this season. Though the team’s had to deal with Sergio Aguero’s injuries, David Silva’s prolonged absence, Yaya Toure’s inconsistency and Wilfried Bony’s non-Edin Dzeko-ness, it’s been their defense – their inability to find answers among Sagna, Mangala, Otamendi and Martin Demichelis – that’s undermined their fall. Instead of continuing to boss an Arsenal team that went back to the counter-attacking approach that won them January’s meeting at the Etihad, City’s defense allowed the game to turn.

Strangely, the weaknesses on display at the Emirates are exactly the reason so pundits remain in City’s camp. With Kompany in the team, City hasn’t lost in 10 league games. When he’s out, though, City plays like this, allowing the difference between City and Arsenal to be reduced to his health. When he’s fit, the logic goes, City is the better team, with Monday potentially providing more proof.

Yet now, after another game of Sagna’s failings, Zabaleta’s absence has been shown to be nearly as important. Can City win the title if only one of Kompany or Zabaleta’s returns soon? Or, perhaps better put, how long can those two stave off their next injuries? If either miss a significant part of the season’s second half, can City surpass Leicester and Arsenal?

For Pellegrini, there are other solutions. Improved play through the midfield is the obvious one. There, though, the solutions are less obvious. A new balance may have to be struck, and with any change to their approach, City risk losing what they’ve already got.

At the back, they only need health, but until Kompany and Zabaleta return, it’s impossible to consider City on the same level as Arsenal.

Expect the main criticism of Chelsea’s parting with Jose Mourinho to center on turnover, a word only used when “change” is not ominous enough. But that kind of cynicism’s to be expected after another managerial change at Stamford Bridge. Since Roman Abramovich assumed control of the club 12 years ago, 11 men with 12 tenures of varying lengths have managed the club. When Mourinho’s replacement is named, Abramovich will have as many managerial changes as seasons in charge.

That the next manager will likely be Guus Hiddink will only fuel criticism, with critics pointing to the lack of stability — the turnover — as undermining the club. That a team that’s claimed 15 major honors since changing owners can be considered compromised is the type of logic you rarely see beyond sports, but the analysis is inevitable. Yes, Chelsea’s won so much, but given Abramovich’s resources, where would the team be if it also had stability, the thinking goes.Oh, they should have never fired Mourinho in the first place. Or Carlo Ancelotti! When will Roman ever learn?

SEE MORE: Juande Ramos a surprise candidates to replace Mourinho at Stamford Bridge.

In the face of Hiddink’s impending appointment, though, I see the critics’ point. Ever close to Abramovich, Hiddink has come to Chelsea’s rescue before, assuming the manager’s role in Feb. 2009 after Luiz Felipe Scolari couldn’t bend to Chelsea’s player-empowered culture. Three months later, Hiddink delivered the FA Cup, restoring the confidence of a squad that would go onto claim the 2009-10 Premier League, 2010 and 2012 FA Cups, 2011-12 Champions League and 2012-13 Europa League. Hiddink doesn’t deserve much credit for those triumphs, but play out the scenario where Chelsea is allowed to flounder under another boss and it’s difficult to see them rebounding so soon. If Hiddink didn’t do something remarkably right, at least he accomplished the caretaker’s number one goal: avoiding the catastrophically wrong.

With the turnaround, Hiddink bolstered a reputation earned with PSV Eindhoven, South Korea and Australia, but cup triumph also masked his massive failures with a Russia side whose talents will be forgotten. From 2006-2010, with a silver generation led by Andrey Arshavin, Igor Afinkeev, Sergei Ignashevich, Yuri Zhirkov, Roman Pavlyuchenko and the Berezutski twins (Aleksei and Vasili), Russia became darlings of Euro 2008, bowing out to Spain in the semifinals after eliminating a Netherlands team that had played like tournament favorites through group stage. Widely expected to carry that momentum into the 2010 World Cup qualifying cycle, Russia disappointed at home against a rebuilding Germany, were relegated to second place, and saw their world renown manager — the world’s highest paid boss at the time — outfoxed by Slovenia’s Matjaz Kek in the qualifying playoff.

Hiddink left Russia in June 2010, but his struggles persisted. In 16 games with another set of generational talents, Turkey’s, Hiddink won seven of 16 games from Aug. 2010 to Nov. 2011, eventually resigning after failing to qualify the team for Euro 2012. Three months later, he moved to Anzhi Makhachkala and had the virtues of a team that could afford to pry Samuel Eto’o away from Inter Milan. The Russian upstarts finished third in league and qualified for Europa League’s Round of 16 before Hiddink departed early the next season.

Then, most recently, Hiddink second spell with the Netherlands fomented disaster. Tasked with what was seen as sure qualification for Euro 2016, Hiddink collapsed a team coming off a semifinals appearance at the previous World Cup. He won only four times in 10 games in charge of the Oranje from Aug. 2014 through June 2015, with the Dutch eventually becoming the most notable name missing from next summer’s confederation championship.

Four months with Chelsea and 17 with Anzhi are the only positives in the last nine years of management for Hiddink. Considered an elite boss when he left PSV in 2006, Hiddink’s become a journeyman, floundering at lucrative appointments while failing to leverage two countries’ talented products.

At 69, it’s tempting to think the game’s past him by, even if it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where. Hiddink hasn’t been good for some time, yet his reputation allowed him to land a number of high profile job. Had we looked beyond his renown, when might have seen when Hiddink stopped being special.

SEE MORE: Watch Mourinho talk Hazard’s injury, being “betrayed” by players.

That’s the worry for Chelsea fans. This is not only more managerial turnover; it’s recycling of a spent product. It’s falling back on old ideas, expecting old results. It’s an indication that, for all the club’s creativity with Financial Fair Play and managing its vast array of talented young purchases, Chelsea lacks the same planning when seeking out managers. For every young Mourinho or Andre Villas-Boas, there’s a reach for the tried and true. There’s a Scolari, Hiddink, Rafa Benitez or Ancelotti. Most of those men brought success, but none were kept long enough to change Chelsea’s coaching cycle.

Ancelotti had a 61% win ratio when he was sacked. Mourinho’s during his second spell? 63, even with this season’s terrible results. Though that number flatters Mourinho’s current state, it’s still a reminder: Chelsea has been down this road before, and they haven’t come up with any new ways to navigate it. Each time they try to do better, it’s the same pattern: a short-term solution, then an aspirational hire, followed by a rebound in results, a descent, and a repeat of the cycle.

With Hiddink’s recent record, that process might skip its best steps, but two years from now, after the whims and aesthetics of the Abramovich regime have broken Diego Simeone, we’ll be right back where we are now, looking at another Hiddink, Benitez, or Juande Ramos, wondering how much this chaos holds back an otherwise successful club.

Former Sevilla, Tottenham and Real Madrid manager Juande Ramos has emerged as a potential replacement at Chelsea for Jose Mourinho, according to reports out of England. The 61-year-old Spaniard, whose most recent job was with Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, has been unemployed since the end of Ukraine’s 2013-14 season, but he has surfaced as a surprise short-term option as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich considers Mourinho’s future.

According to The Times, Abramovich is holding emergency meetings on Wednesday to consider the future of his current manager, whose job has become the source of increased speculation in the wake of Chelsea’s 2-1 loss Monday at Leicester City. The defeat left the Premier League’s defending champions one point above the relegation zone, continuing the worst start to a title defense in league history. Per reporting from the AFP, a contract buyout of Mourinho, who signed a four-year extension last season, would cost Chelsea between $15 and $40 million.

SEE MORE: Chelsea consider replacements as board meets over Mouinrho’s future.

Despite that price, as well as the support of a fanbase that’s begun singing to “The Special One” during home matches, Mourinho’s position has become increasingly untenable. After post-match comments on Monday in which Mourinho confessed to feeling “betrayed” by his players, the relationship between the three-time Premier League-winner and his squad is being questioned. In addition, Mourinho’s skepticism over an injury to Eden Hazard, who removed himself during the match at the King Power Stadium, has spurred questions over the man management of Mourinho’s most important talent.

The furor marks the second time this season Mourinho’s job has been the subject of major speculation, with Chelsea’s board having previously issued a vote of confidence amid links to former Blues bosses Guus Hiddink and Carlo Ancelotti. Now a new name has emerged, with the veteran Ramos connected with the club for the first time. If he is appointed, it will mark his first job in England since being fired by Tottenham on Oct. 25, 2008.

Who is Juande Ramos?

Ramos’s departure from White Hart Lane came nearly one year after he’d been appointed to replace Martin Jol, with the move reaping immediate rewards when the two-time UEFA Cup winner took Spurs to the 2007-08 League Cup. But over the course of 54 league games, Ramos only produced 21 wins, and when he left Spurs two days short of his one-year anniversary, Tottenham were at the bottom of the Premier League.

That winter, Ramos was appointed Bernd Schuster’s replacement at Real Madrid and went on to preside over one of the one-sided Clasicos in the club’s history. Despite an 18-match unbeaten run before the teams’ spring 2009 meeting, Real Madrid lost to Barcelona at the Santiago Bernabeu, 6-2, sparking a streak of four consecutive defeated that ceded La Liga’s title to Barca.

Ramos went on to a short-lived tenure at CSKA Moscow before resurfacing in Ukraine with Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. Helped by an uptick in investment from the club, Ramos won 56 percent of his league matches during four seasons in Dnipropetrovsk. In 2013-14, the club finished second in Ukraine’s Premier League and, one year after Ramos’s departure, would make the final of Europa League.

SEE MORE: Mourinho still intent on steering Chelsea’s turnaround.

During a coaching career that began in 1990, one that’s included stops at 15 different clubs, Ramos has claimed two UEFA Cups, one UEFA Super Cup, a Copa del Rey, a Spanish Super Cup and England’s League Cup. He won promotion from Spain’s second division with Rayo Vallecano in 1999 and Logrones in 1995. During his last year in Ukraine, he led Dnipro to the club’s best league finish in 22 years.

Now, one year after leaving Ukraine to spend more time with his family, Ramos has emerged as a surprise contender for one of the world’s most prestigious jobs. Though early reports hint it will be a short-term appointment, not unlike fellow Spaniard Rafa Benitez’s time at the Bridge from Nov. 2012 through May 2013, the job would com with some distinct perks: a shot at Paris Saint-Germain in Champions League; the opportunity to safe a club’s season; and an opening to reestablish himself as a viable option for big clubs across Europe.

1. 2009 seems so long ago.

What’s so special about 2009? Well, 2008-09, to be precise. That was the last Champions League tournament where England qualified three teams for the semifinals, an achievement the Premier League had managed three years in a row. Though it’s fading into a blurry, irrelevant distance, there was a time when England was the defining power in Europe.

Now that dominance seems like a bygone era. In the six years since, England has sent only three teams to the Champions League’s final four: Manchester United once (2010-11), and Chelsea twice, including the year the Blues won their first European crown (2011-12).

Of the 24 spots in this decade’s semifinals, England has claimed one-in-eight. Spain has claimed 11; Germany: seven.

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW: Arsenal handed Barcelona; Chelsea-PSG rematch.

Today’s draw won’t help matters. Arsenal, leading the Premier League coming out of the weekend, were handed defending champion Barcelona, considered by many to be the best team in the world. Chelsea, struggling to stay above the relegation zone at home, were given Paris Saint-Germain, a team whose lone defeat this season was a 1-0 at the Santiago Bernabeu.

Manchester City were more fortunate, drawing Ukrainian champions Dynamo Kyiv, but two out of England’s three Champions League survivors are underdogs to reach the quarterfinals. Though kinder Europa League draws should help the country’s waning UEFA coefficient, England’s facing another disappointing spring in Europe.

2. Spain and Germany avoid each other.

Speaking of UEFA coefficients, Spain and Germany currently lead the table, maintaining solid grips on four Champions League spots. Perhaps remarkably, given the number of teams the countries have alive in Europe (seven and six, respectively), La Liga and Bundesliga sides managed to avoid each other in today’s draws. Even if a couple of the leagues’ teams are picked off in their next rounds, Spain and Germany should continue sprinting away from the field.

Germany only has two teams alive in Champions League, but both will be favored in the Round of 16, with Wolfsburg facing Gent while Bayern Munich deals with Juventus. In Europa League, though, the Bundesliga could see a couple of teams bow out. Bayer Leverkusen, so inconsistent throughout the season, were drawn against a Sporting CP side that leads the Portuguese league, while Augsburg will be underdogs against Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool. Borussia Dortmund may be the strongest team in UEFA’s second competition, but they’ll be tested by FC Porto, while rivals Schalke face a talented and dangerous Shakhtar Donetsk.

As for Spain, the country may not need any luck to see all seven of its teams advance to their next rounds. Villarreal, drawn against a Napoli team that was perfect in group stage, should be considered underdogs, but only slightly. The rest of La Liga’s Europa entrants — from an Athletic team that faces Marseille, a Valencia side drawn with Rapid Wein, and a Sevilla squad that will tackle Molde — will be favored to advance, as will Barcelona, Real Madrid (facing Roma) and Atletico Madrid (PSV Eindhoven) in Champions League.

EUROPA LEAGUE DRAW: Liverpool get Augsburg; Manchester United face Midtylland.

Spain’s lead atop the UEFA coefficient list seems insurmountable. It’s unfathomable to consider the collapse that would have the country to drop to number two, let alone fourth (the level at which a country loses a Champions League spot). But thanks to today’s draw, Spain should continue padding its lead on rest of the continent, with Germany likely to forge some more breathing room between itself and England.

3. Paths are paved for some surprise quarterfinalists, semifinalists.

One of Gent or Wolfsburg will qualify for their first Champions League quarterfinal. Benfica or Zenit will make the final eight, as will one of Dynamo Kyiv and Manchester City. Perhaps even more exciting: The possibility of those winners being drawn with each other in the quarters, thus ensuring one will make the final four.

The last time there was a truly surprise semifinalist was 2010-11, when Schalke eliminated defending champions Inter Milan in the quarterfinals before bowing out to Manchester United. Perhaps Atletico Madrid’s place in the final four two years ago should also be considered an outlier, but beyond that, typical names have dominated recent final fours. Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid have each appeared in five of the last six semifinals.

Perhaps that trio will return to the penultimate round, but if they do, they could be joined by a true upstart. With a little luck in the quarterfinal draw, 2016 could be Manchester City’s long-awaited breakthrough. Maybe Zenit maintains their group stage form, or perhaps Wolfsburg can replicate Schalke’s unlikely run. Regardless, today’s draw has kept a Cinderella’s hope alive, for now.

Yesterday’s report on agent fees was as much a glimpse of that cottage industry as it was an update on player power. The $195 million siphoned off by lawyers, fathers, best friends and former night club doormen was the headline, but remember the silver lining: Players are moving all the time, to bigger places with better salaries, enjoying a hard-fought mobility that wasn’t available for most of soccer’s history. It’s a good thing, even if terrace whispers laced with anachronistic envy dog the Raheem Sterlings of the world.

In other ways, player power is taking a more traditional form, one of unity against deaf authorities. The Venezuelan men’s national team is just the latest example. According to reports, 15 Vinotinto players are threatening to quit unless federation coaches and officials are replaced. Should the players start their boycott, the ongoing 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign will be compromised.

Venezuela currently sit bottom of CONMEBOL’s 10-team, round-robin qualifying campaign, having failed to register a point through four rounds. Head coach Noel Sanvicente’s team is seven points back of the confederation’s final automatic Russia 2018 qualifying spot.

That gap could get much worse if the players don’t get a response. In a statement, as translated below by The Guardian, Venezuelan players insist the environment around the team must change immediately:

“We the players are no longer in agreement that this group of leaders of the FVF should continue as it’s not acceptable the way we’ve been treated and the way they’ve managed the project to take the national team to the World Cup,” read the statement.

“We strongly believe the team needs a complete managerial change lest we lose the work done over the last eight years.

“Our integrity is non-negotiable and the damage done can only be repaired by a total overhaul of the leaders of the FVF. We can’t continue playing in an environment so damaged by these leaders.”

Those eight years of progress have created expectations in a baseball-first country. In 2011, Venezuela reached the semifinals of Copa America, fostering to hopes the team would qualify for Brazil 2014. But the ensuing campaign proved a disappointment, transferring those expectations onto this cycle. Now, thanks to legacies like those of like former Borussia Moenchengladbach midfielder Juan Arango, Venezuela allows itself hope. Each qualifying campaign could be the first that ends with a World Cup.

Midfielder Tomas Rincon posted an image of the team’s letter on Twitter:

Venezuela’s next qualifier is scheduled for Peru in March.

In previous years, this protest may have been met by talk of privilege. Perhaps it still will. Playing a sport for a living is something so many would love to do, we’d be told. And playing for your country? Even more so. Sure, it is a bit of a fallacy to imply most of the world still thinks like this, but if there’s any sport that needs no reminder of the power of corrupt and negligent administrators, it’s FIFA’s.

CONMEBOL 2018 World Cup qualifying, through four rounds. Table from FIFA.com.

Let’s also remember, this is CONMEBOL, not exactly the front lines of reform. This is the continent of Grondona, Havelange, Teixeira, and Leoz, and while it’d be unfair to assume Venezuela’s federation inherited their playbook from Argentina or Brazil, their executives and players exist in a part of the soccer world where authority has been abused. The same disconnect between the game and administrators that makes daily headlines is as alive in South America as anywhere in the world.

That’s why it’s difficult to fault players for wanting their slice of the pie, and while it’s often difficult to empathize with agents, it’s through their work that the scales have started to sway away from the boardrooms. Things get complicated when agents start having seats at that table (did you hear Valencia had to change coaches?), but by and large, voices that were previously ignored now have a say. Players shouldn’t merely be overlooked.

It’s what made the coverage of France’s debacle at the 2010 World Cup so disappointing. That’s when Les Bleus famously flamed out, finishing at the bottom of a winnable group as players revolted against head coach Raymond Domenech. But Domenech had been a problem for long before South Africa, yet the FFF allowed him to continue. It was hypocritical for France’s decision makers to take such a hard line with Nicolas Anelka, Patrice Evra, Franck Ribery and Jeremy Toulalan when they’d allowed a fractured setup to enter the world’s biggest stage. The FFF, with an arrogance and detachment that’s become stereotypical of most soccer associations, was complicit in the debacle.

If the Venezuelan players are to be believed, there is a similar situation building in South America: a team that doesn’t respect its coach; a federation failing to act; a team that’s under-performing. Only this time, instead of revolting on training grounds and team buses, the players are going public. They’re using social media and the press to weave their own narrative. Would Ribery and Evra’s fate had been different if players were as Twitter-savvy in 2010?

It’s just one part of the player power that’s on display. There’s also the scarcity – the inability to outright replace 15 national team members without appearing apathetic about the qualifying cycle. There’s the growing support importance of soccer in Venezuela, something that makes accepting poor results less palatable, but it’s also the timing. Players are going public during one of the biggest gaps in the qualifying cycle. They’re being smart, giving the federation three months to work through this. They’re not holding feet to the fire, waiting until days before the next qualifier kicks off. There’s a level of empathy to them bringing this up now.

The players obviously care, so much so that they’re going to extremes. To save their qualifying campaign as well as their “personal and professional values,” they’re enacting an extreme version of player power. They’re threatening to walk out, risking much in the process. If the world’s unsympathetic, they’ll be lumped in with France’s 2010 squad – players the world saw as abusing their privilege. If, however, the world’s prepared to be more reasonable this time around, Venezuela’s players might be depicted as fighting a negligent, even privileged power. And this time, a protest might not be seen as a crime against sport.

She’ll retire as women’s international soccer’s all-time leading scorer, but unlike the regret fans expressed as teammate Lauren Holiday brought her career to an end on Sunday in Orlando, Abby Wambach, long the figurehead of the U.S. women’s national team, faces a more mixed response with her announcement. According to today’s release from U.S. Soccer, the 35-year-old will retire from soccer at the end of 2015, concluding a year of uncertainty about her place with the women’s national team.

From U.S. Soccer:

Abby Wambach, the leading scorer in the history of international soccer and one of the world’s all-time greatest players, has announced her retirement.

Wambach, 35, will end a spectacular 15-year international career that began in September of 2001 at the age of 21 when she debuted against Germany …

Wambach will be with the team for all four of its December matches, but her final game for the USA will come on Dec. 16 against China PR in New Orleans …

SEE MORE: Four must-knows from the biggest day of the NSWL offseason.

Wambach’s resume is beyond reproach. With 252 international appearances, 184 goals, a World Cup and two Olympic gold medals, the Rochester-born forward is as accomplished as any soccer player the United States has ever produced. In an exposure vacuum that remained after the U.S.’s famed “99ers” faded from the competition scene, Wambach became the face of U.S. women’s soccer, and through her recent place at the front of issues such as gay rights and the equality battle that emanated around the 2015 World Cup, Wambach exhibited a leadership that transcended her role on the field.

U.S. head coach Jill Ellis:

“Abby is a player who has transcended our sport and her legacy as one of the world’s greatest players is set forever. What she has done for women’s soccer and women’s sports overall with her amazing talents on the field and her personality off it has been inspiring to watch. I am just extremely happy that she could end her career with that elusive World Cup title and go out on top, right where she deserves to be.”

SEE MORE: Morgan now NWSL’s Herschel Walker | Be careful about married athletes’ motives

But Wambach’s role on the field had become a point of uncertainty. Before the 2015 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) season, Wambach announced she would not play club soccer in preparation for the World Cup. In the lead up to that tournament, Wambach brought on controversy by calling her teammates “scared” and questioning the motives of a referee in Canada. Come the end of the competition, her role had been reduced to late match cameos, with her ineffectiveness at the start of the tournament costing her a starting spot.

In the wake of Canada, Wambach’s future had remained an open question. Participating in the U.S.’s Victory Tour, Wambach left it unclear whether she’d return to the NWSL or seek a spot at next summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. With roster sizes reduced from 23 to 18 between the two back-to-back major tournaments, Wambach’s potential inclusion was already a point of debate.

With today’s announcement, however, that debate recedes, and fans can again focus on Wambach’s positive contributions. As `99er Mia Hamm faded from the public eye, and the controversy surrounding Hope Solo at the 2007 World Cup became the most notable thing about the U.S. program, Wambach’s dominance on the field provided a much-needed focal point for the program’s public face. That focal point became absurd at times, as it did in the relentless “#ChasingMia” promotions as Wambach sought the all-time scoring record, but the path she took to that point was a singular one. While a generation of stars faded away before a true second coming could emerge, Abby Wambach was U.S. women’s soccer.

Wambach:

“After much deliberation and talking with my friends, family, teammates and our coaching staff, I’ve decided to finally bring my soccer career to an end. While we still have more work to do for women’s soccer, after bringing the World Cup back to the United States this summer, I’m feeling extremely optimistic about the future of our sport. It’s been an amazing, wonderful ride and I can’t wait to see what the next chapter of my life brings.”

NWSL OFFSEASON Qs: 1. Ready to expand? | 2. Eyes on games | 3. USSF partnership

On Dec. 16 in New Orleans, when the United States faces China, Wambach’s path finally comes to an end. She will not be at the Olympics or in the NWSL in 2016, but after 15 years with the national team, 14 in professional soccer, three different club teams and the most enviable statistical record in soccer history, there was nothing another year could accomplish.

Two months from now, Wambach will leave all the glory and controversies behind and get the sendoff she deserves. And with it, the most prolific striker the game has ever known will say goodbye to her sport.

We see this once or twice a year – the United States’ women’s national team going outside of their comfort zone to call in new faces, the way most national teams do on a more regular basis. But given how infrequently head coach Jill Ellis, her staff, and her immediate predecessors introduce significant new talent into the team’s player pool, you’ll forgive the women’s soccer world for being abuzz after today’s announcement: The US’s camp for the next games of its Victory Tour will feature eight players who were not part of this summer’s World Cup, including seven who will get their first time with the national team this year.

The Victory Tour is, ostensibly, a series of matches to celebrate this summer’s first place finish at Canada 2015. But with Lauren Holiday, Lori Chalupny and Shannon Boxx set to retire from a squad that was the already oldest at this summer’s tournament, new blood is going to be needed at some point in the coming cycle. Now, as the team occasionally does in the offseason when it has a prolonged period of time together, a series of new-ish faces have been brought into the fold. (Full roster, below.)

Some players have made national team appearances before. Washington Spirit midfielder Christine Nairn, absent from the senior team for six years, was originally capped as an 18-year-old. Samantha Mewis, one year removed from a stellar career at UCLA, originally got a look while still in school. Lindsey Horan, recently hobbled by a knee injury while plying her trade with Paris Saint-Germain, was at one time on the brink of a breakthrough under former head coach Tom Sermanni. Crystal Dunn, part of the last team camp but not the World Cup squad, was the National Women’s Soccer League Most Valuable Player.

The rest of the septet is brand new. Forward Stephanie McCaffrey (22 years old) is coming off a rookie season for the Boston Breakers in which she posted three goals and three assists in 19 appearances. Jaelene Hinkle (22), debuting last season with Mewis in Western New York, played every minute of the season in defense. Emily Sonnett, a 21-year-old midfielder and defender from the University of Virginia, is the second Cavaliers player to get a look as an undergrad in recent years. Both her and former teammate Morgan Brian played for U.S. assistant coach Steve Swanson at UVa.

The biggest surprise, though, is the inclusion of Gina Lewandowski. A regular contributor for Bayern Munich in the Frauen Bundesliga, the 30-year-old defender seemed to personify the problems players have getting a significant chance while playing Europe. Though Lewandowski has developed into one of the most reliable players on a German title-winning team, she has yet to get a meaningful chance with her national team, with many onlookers inferring her age and club geography meant her time had passed. Surprisingly, those onlookers may be proven wrong.

Unless significant injuries happen during camp, don’t expect to see many of these faces on the field in Seattle (Oct. 21, against Brazil) or Orlando (Oct. 25, against Brazil). This is still a Victory Tour, and for three players, it will be their last hurrah. But as with the regular callups, the time each new face has with Ellis and her staff should be more meaningful than whatever minutes they earn in a friendly. Impress in the coming week, and you could be in line for additional callups later this winter. Fail, and you could be back waiting for the US’s next set of shock recalls.

KEY NWSL QUESTIONS: 1. Expansion | 2. Growth | 3. The Partnership

Whether this set of recalls signify a meaningful change in national team policy remains to be seen. The team is reputedly hamstrung by selection and cost issues derived from its labor agreement with its players, one that almost requires any national team player that’s healthy and established in the pool to be called in. The situation reached an absurd level last winter when a handful of NWSL veterans participated in the US’s U-23 camp in lieu of being brought in to the senior national team. Unlike on the men’s side, where Jurgen Klinsmann has developed a large and rotating pool of players, the women’s national team seemingly needs players to fade out before new talents can be brought in.

Today’s callups also beg a series of questions about players who weren’t call in. Defensive midfielders Keelin Winters (Seattle Reign) and Jen Buczkowski (FC Kansas City) have become exemplars of fans’ frustrations with national team callups. Chicago midfielders Vanessa DiBernardo and Danielle Colaprico can reasonably argue they deserve places in this group, while goalkeeper Adrianna Franch, once seen as a future number one for the program, may still worry about her chances now that she’s been exiled to Norway after failing to agree to a new contract with Western New York. FC Kansas City’s Leigh Ann Brown, teammate Erika Tymrak, Portland’s Allie Long as well as Seattle defenders Lauren Barnes and Kendall Fletcher, among others, could work if this new, open door will be as inviting for them in the future.

With the exception of Dunn — somebody who will compete for a spot on the 18-woman squad for next summer’s Rio de Janiero Olympics — today’s new group may yet be victims in a calculus that limits the senior pool to a select few. But, with Holiday, Chalupny and Boxx likely the first of many to transition out over the next year, these new faces have the inside track to become the entrenched veterans of tomorrow. If they can’t cement spots, a deep pool of potential candidates is waiting to fill their shoes.

Full roster, via US Soccer:

GOALKEEPERS (3): Ashlyn Harris (Washington Spirit), Alyssa Naeher (Boston Breakers), Hope Solo (Seattle Reign FC)
DEFENDERS (12): Lori Chalupny (Chicago Red Stars), Crystal Dunn (Washington Spirit), Whitney Engen (Western NY Flash), Jaelene Hinkle (Western NY Flash), Julie Johnston (Chicago Red Stars), Meghan Klingenberg (Houston Dash), Ali Krieger (Washington Spirit), Gina Lewandowski (FC Bayern Munich), Kelley O’Hara (Sky Blue FC), Christie Rampone (Sky Blue FC), Becky Sauerbrunn (FC Kansas City), Emily Sonnett (Univ. of Virginia)
MIDFIELDERS (9): Shannon Boxx (unattached), Morgan Brian (Houston Dash), Tobin Heath (Portland Thorns FC), Lauren Holiday (FC Kansas City), Carli Lloyd (Houston Dash), Samantha Mewis (Western NY Flash), Christine Nairn (Washington Spirit), Heather O’Reilly (FC Kansas City), Megan Rapinoe (Seattle Reign FC)
FORWARDS (7): Lindsey Horan (Paris Saint-Germain), Sydney Leroux (Western NY Flash), Stephanie McCaffrey (Boston Breakers), Alex Morgan (Portland Thorns FC), Christen Press (Chicago Red Stars), Amy Rodriguez (FC Kansas City), Abby Wambach (unattached)

It turns out World Cup corruption isn’t limited to your Qatars, Russias and other developing parts of the soccer world. No, even the most historic of soccer strongholds, like Germany, aren’t immune to FIFA’s infamous pay-to-play game.

According to a report today from the Der Spiegel, Germany won the right to host the 2006 World Cup with the aid of a 10.3 million Swiss franc slush fund supplied by former Adidas chief executive officer Robert Louis-Dreyfus. The funds were used to secure votes of four Asian representatives on FIFA’s 24-person executive committee, giving Germany enough votes to host the 2006 finals.

“The money had been paid into a FIFA bank account in Geneva,” Der Spiegel reported, according to the Associated Press. “From there, FIFA allegedly promptly transferred the money to a Zurich account belonging to Louis-Dreyfus.”

Louis-Dreyfus, who died in 2009, was repaid after Germany secured the World Cup. According to Der Spiegel, Franz Beckenbauer, who headed the bid committee, and Wolfgang Niersbach, the current head of the German federation, knew about the slush fund in 2005, at the latest.

In July 2000, Germany was competing with South Africa, England and Morocco for hosting rights to the 2006 tournament, with England and Morocco eliminated from the process after two rounds of voting. After the second ballot, Germany and South Africa each had 11 of the committee’s 24 votes. On the final ballot, Germany won by a 12-to-11 vote, with Oceania’s representative abstaining from the process after being pressured to vote for South Africa.

South Africa was awarded the 2010 World Cup, but had it not been for Germany’s slush fund, Africa would have had its first finals four years earlier. According to today’s report, Germany used Louis-Dreyfus’s funds, then valued at $6 million, to augment the eight-vote European block it had already secured. The four Asian votes pushed Germany to 12, meaning the country only had to pull one more vote into its camp to have a majority.

Although Germany never got that vote, the slush fund’s power still came good. When Charlie Dempsey, Oceania’s representative, abstained in the third round of the 2000 vote, Germany had its majority, ensuring FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s tie-breaking vote, which would have gone to South Africa, was not cast.

This isn’t the first allegation of corruption surrounding Germany’s 2006 bid. Earlier this summer, German outlet Die Zeit reported the German government sent Saudi Arabia grenade launchers in exchange for support in their bid. Even before that, Dempsey’s decision cast doubt on the validity of the process, with New Zealand’s sports minister calling the surprise abstention of his countryman “distressing and embarrassing.”

With that history surrounding the 2006 World Cup vote, today’s revelations fall far short of shocking. They do, however, add to a growing list of scandals surrounding FIFA, which has seen its president secretary general and a powerful executive committee member recently suspended. This is in addition to the United States Department of Justice investigation that’s led to 14 indictments as well as an ongoing criminal investigation from the Swiss government.

SEE MORE: Sponsors demand change | Big three suspended | Who is Issa Hayatou?

In that sense, the most alarming parts of today’s report are the scale of Germany’s involvement as well as the participation of an active Adidas representative. To this point, there has been little hard evidence of collusion between soccer official representatives and their sponsors. If anything, sponsors have begun pushing back against the graft they’ve come to support. Here, however, is evidence that the most powerful officer at Adidas, one of the game’s oldest and most powerful sponsors, was colluding with one of its most valued partners to secure the World Cup.

This isn’t the perception of corruption we get from those that want to go back to the ways – those who deride the democracy of giving all members — even developing nations with little soccer history — a say in the process. This is Germany, one of FIFA’s cornerstone nations, as well as Adidas, the governing body’s most valuable partner. This is the old school showing that corruption likely transcends CONCACAF and CONMEBOL scandals; that in lieu of strength in numbers, older, more established members can leverage their strength in prestige, potentially using the powerful relationships they’ve cultivated over the years to affect the same types of corruption.

This is why nations in Africa, Asia, North and South America supported Blatter for so long. For most of FIFA’s history, corruption like this was the rule – corruption that screwed places like Africa out of World Cups. Thanks to the stances of officials in nations like England, France and Germany — nations that get the most coverage in the western media — we were given a devil to know, that of corruption festering in the rest of the soccer world. As today’s news reminds us, those stances only obscured corruption that’s always been endemic to FIFA, which somehow, ironically became the devil we ignored.

Between the allegations around Germany and Adidas, as well as Michel Platini, this clearly goes beyond the support that kept Blatter in office, making any worries about who will replace the soon-to-depart president even more prescient. Rather than seeing FIFA as a body incapable of preventing corruption, it may be better to see it as one defined by graft, scandal and abuse. Surely there are nations that don’t take part in this, but they appear to be few and far between. And they seem incapable of preventing the flow of scandal that’s emanated from Zurich and Europe for the last six months.

A full-blown coaching crisis. I’ve been waiting so long. Never in my lifetime has there been this much scrutiny on a United States head coach, yet after Saturday’s 3-2 loss to Mexico, the United States have an undeniable soccer “crisis” on their hands. The team’s not progressing. Fans are pissed off. Is this what it’s like to be an Arsenal fan?

Still, there’s a stale feeling to it all. Sharpened pitchforks. The same, unrelenting voices only amplified after Saturday’s result, drowning out the more nuanced tones that sound genuine alarm. The tactics? Klinsmann (and, most who follow Tuca Ferretti) seemed unprepared for Mexico’s three-front. Responses? Gyasi Zardes, the obvious sacrificial lamb for the first adjustment, was left out for far too long, and more could have been done (quicker) to shake up a stagnant front two.

SEE MORE: Gulati to blame for US decline | Dark day for US Soccer, ‘progress’

But after Saturday’s final, the whys and hows became irrelevant. The pitchforks are back, stirring a conversation that’s never been a fair one on either side. Those initial, persisting criticisms of Klinsmann still hit a jingoistic note, sometimes from those defensive about the idea of a foreign coach being brought in to revolutionize US soccer. Subsequent criticism held Klinsmann to the letter of his words (more technical play, positive tactics, a deeper and better player pool) as if they were easily achievable goals, as if a desire to change how players are groomed can effect change in one cycle. Instead of measured critiques that considered the obstacles, detractors became Antonin Scalias, holding Klinsmann to a literal, immediate interpretation of his words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKT2ObW07y0

For his part, Klinsmann has often come across as arrogant and aloof, his jabs at Major League Soccer and US fan culture providing a callus target that’s too easy to detest. MLS, so crucial to maintaining the talent pool at hand, has been the constant target of his criticism, be it for its level of play, allegedly short seasons, or the training players get while with their clubs. And fans? Well, they don’t understand, quite yet, because the United States isn’t a full matured soccer culture. But won’t worry, all. Our new, cultured stepdad will surely get us there, some day.

The most annoying part about our new dad, though, is that sometimes he’s right. Take the player pool, for example. Looking at where players are playing and what they’re accomplishing at club level, this is one of the weakest player pools over the last 21 years. With the exception of Fabian Johnson, a player who was not reared by this country’s development system, there are no US men’s national team members playing in UEFA Champions League. The comfy stock of Premier League players we had a few years ago? Now we have Geoff Cameron and Brad Guzan, neither of whom is performing at the levels of in-their-primes Clint Dempsey and Brad Friedel.

SEE MORE: Don’t overlook US’s systemic problems | Softball questions don’t help

Perhaps we’re in a moment where the US’s Champions League-caliber players just happen to be choosing MLS. Maybe it’s cyclical — or, more accurately, varying — and players like Gedion Zelalem and DeAndre Yedlin will lead the player pool into a brave new tomorrow. More likely, this moment defines a more uncertain transition, where the old Champions League-caliber players (Dempsey, Jermaine Jones, Tim Howard, Landon Donovan) are phasing out before a younger group shows it can take over.

Unfortunately for Klinsmann, that diminished state has hoisted him on his own petard, portraying him as an all-talk, no-product politician who’s about to being found out. Oh, we have so many problems, and I can fix them. Really, Jurgen? How? Well, you see, I have this track record, so just trust me, because I know how it’s done in the rest of the world. Yet four years into the job, there’s no reason for trust.

Klinsmann has a program-best winning percentage. He got the US out of a tough group in Brazil and has registered a number of notable friendly wins. He can rightly claimed to have done slightly more than Bob Bradley, but certainly not enough to meaningfully separate the two, let alone trumpet progress. And if the reason for that lack of progress is the dwindling pool you inherited, fine, but where are your solutions? US soccer fans are dying to know.

Even if Klinsmann has been proven correct about the US’s development problems, he’s been shown dramatically wrong about something else. Over the years, he’s hinted US fans don’t put the same pressure on coaches that you see in other countries. Yet here we are, 48 hours after the most meaningful result of his tenure, and Klinsmann may be the least-popular national team coach of our lifetimes. That we won’t see a coaching change despite those indictments is bringing U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati under fire. That unsophisticated fan base which can’t ratchet up pressure is suddenly sophisticated enough to see beyond one man’s results.

This is the world Klinsmann has made. He’s prodded, goaded and antagonized fans and players long enough. And he hasn’t delivered. He’s trolled fans so often and on some many levels that they’ve become as vocal as those stereotyped fans from abroad. And in time, that level of scrutiny he drew out of fans may cost him his job.

If Klinsmann is looking for signs of progress, this is it. The results on the field may not be getting better, but US soccer fans are stepping up to his challenge. It’s not just pitchforks anymore. They’ve been joined by pragmatics and the patient fans who once held hop.

Where there was once a divide, there’s a growing unity. More and more, rightly or wrongly, most fans want him gone.

Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, and then what? The only other sure starters for the United States might be Fabian Johnson and Jermaine Jones, but even then, there are questions. Fitness issues mean US head coach Jurgen Klinsmann might talk himself into an XI missing one or both of those stalwarts. And as for the rest of the seven positions, they go from ‘one clear favorite,’ to ‘depends on the setup,’ to ‘nobody has a clue.’

It makes predicting Saturday’s XI akin to an 11-team parlay. You may have a good feeling about six, maybe seven spots, but to get to 11 correct picks, you’re going to need some luck. The sure (im)probabilities of the task mean you’ll likely end up wrong.

We’d never put you in that position. Instead, we want to know who you would start when the US faces Mexico. There’s no getting behind Klinsmann’s steel blues. Instead, let’s worry about what we know to be true – the XI we know would beat Mexico.

Use the comments to tell us who you think should start, and if you need a refresher on the squad’s current state of play, here’s how each position breaks down before tomorrow’s showdown:

Goalkeeper

Brad Guzan is the number one. Klinsmann has said as much. But in the rearview mirror is the man who abdicated the job after Brazil 2014, the man many think is still the best goalkeeper in the pool – Tim Howard. The Everton goalkeeper has not started since his legendary 16-save performance against Belgium at the last World Cup, but if Klinsmann truly believes the 36-year-old his best backstop, a winner-take-all match against Mexico would be the perfect time to put him back in the starting XI.

Nick Rimando is also on the roster, but he’s not in serious contention to start.

SEE MORE: Out-of-form defenders complicate decisions for Klinsmann.

Defenders

As Steve Davis pointed out, things are a bit of a mess at the back. The center backs are constantly rotating. The first choices fullbacks have either been hurt or trying to retire. Nobody is truly distinguishing himself at club level.

Let’s work from left to right:

• Klinsmann continues to talk up the importance of DaMarcus Beasley, who had previously tried to ride off into the sunset. But he was convinced to come out of retirement, and now, based on his experience and performances with the Houston Dynamo, the 33-year-old may be the team’s preferred option. Fabian Johnson and Tim Ream are other potentials at the spot, but given Johnson may be needed elsewhere and Ream has yet to start a big game under Klinsmann, Beasley is the favorite.
• In the middle, John Brooks would be a likely starter, but he’s injured and not with the team. Ventura Alvarado has been getting the nod in recent friendlies (as well as at the Gold Cup), but his performances have left the door open. Can Matt Besler reclaim his spot? Will Klinsmann opt for Geoff Cameron, who has been playing center back at Stoke? Michael Orozco, Jonathan Spector, Ream and even Brad Evans can also play in the middle, but with Omar Gonzalez not being called in, whatever pairing Klinsmann chooses will be a relatively new one. As for a real wildcard: What happens if the Jermaine Jones, center back experiment is suddenly rekindled?
• On the right, Fabian Johnson is the likely starter, but it’s possible he will be pushed into midfield, which means somebody like Evans or Spector could get the call. DeAndre Yedlin is also an option, but Klinsmann has continuously lumped him in with the midfielders. Cameron, too, could slide back out to right back, one of Klinsmann’s favorite spots for him, but that may depend on whether the U.S. boss thinks an Alvarado and Besler pairing could work in the middle.

Midfield

It would be shocking if Michael Bradley and Jermaine Jones weren’t starting. Where Klinsmann goes from there, however, is anybody’s guess.

• Three-man middle: One option is to play three central midfielders, with an anchor below Jones allowing the ranging Revolution disruptor to be freed from protecting the defense. If that happens, Kyle Beckerman, Danny Williams or Cameron could end up in the starting XI, with Beckerman being the odds on favorite. The other option for a three-man middle: Play Jones as your deepest midfielder and use Alejandro Bedoya higher up. Most attempts to get Jones, Bradley, and/or Bedoya balanced in the middle of the park have failed.
• Two-man middle: If you ask Jones and Bradley (with a little help from Clint Dempsey) to hold own the middle, then players like Yedlin, Gyasi Zardes and Graham Zusi would find spots in the starting XI. Bedoya looks like a probably starter, regardless, but who Klinsmann tabs for the other midfield spot is less certain. Zardes or Fabian Johnson on the left with Bedoya on the right seems like a possible scenario.

SEE MORE: Klinsmann ‘crisis’ unavoidable with loss | Clash of styles with Tuca

Forwards

Clint and Jozy. Jozy and Clint. When they’ve been healthy and in form, they’ve started, and although there have been questions about both regarding form and health, the squad’s other options hint the duo will start.

Chris Wondolowski is unlikely to see the starting lineup on Saturday (he wasn’t started at the World Cup, when Jozy Altidore was hurt), while moving Zardes into a forward role would come at the expense of one of the team’s two established goal scorers. This is Jurgen Klinsmann we’re talking about — anything is possible — but it’s still unlikely we’ll see Clint Dempsey and Zardes starting up top.

KNOW MEXICO: Ferretti’s legacy at stake | Defense surprisingly settled

Staff Picks

Steve Davis:  Guzan; Johnson, Cameron, Besler, Beasley; Beckerman; Jones, Bradley; Bedoya, Dempsey; Altidore

Kartik Krishnaiyer: Guzan; Johnson, Cameron, Ream, Beasley; Williams; Bedoya, Bradley, Zardes; Dempsey; Altidore

Richard Farley: Howard; Johnson, Cameron, Besler, Beasley; Beckerman, Jones; Bedoya, Bradley; Dempsey; Altidore

MORE CONCACAF CUP: FOX vs. Univision | Where will you watch? | Why USA vs. Mexico matters

Let us know who you think should start … and why your lineup can beat Mexico.

The major qualm with Jurgen Klinsmann when he was hired by the United States became embodied in Philipp Lahm’s autobiography, where the Bayern legend and former German international portrayed Joachim Loew as the real tactical mind behind the 2006 Nationalmannschaft. Klinsmann dwelled on fitness, never talked about tactics, and left the players to figure out how they would play the games, Lahm reported. “You have to score a goal” was the extent of one of Klinsmann’s halftime talks.

After Klinsmann’s four-plus years with the United States, Lahm’s criticism takes on a different look. Although his tactics are still debated among national team fans, Klinsmann has often made clear tactical choices, ones that betray the idea of an ambivalent toward how the team functions. From using Eddie Johnson as a player to target coming in from wide positions, to pulling midfielders into fullback roles to help control games in CONCACAF qualifying, Klinsmann has shown flexibility. We’ve seen teams that have varied from handcuffed by their own possession to ones that rely on counterattacking, depending on the strengths of their opponents. We’ve seems teams that become lopsided, building down only one flank, as well as teams that play more directly to their forwards.

If anything, a lack of consistency (or, coherency) is a bigger problem than a dearth of ideas, with Klinsmann’s want to leave people in the dark responsible for his Lahm-fueled reputation. Players are given places but not orders. Choices go without explanation. A style of communication, debatable in its own right, gets portrayed as tactical naiveté.

That label, a scarlet letter for coaches, is one that has also been sewn onto Klinsmann’s Saturday adversary, interim Mexico head coach Ricardo Ferretti. But as opposed to being inconsistent and nebulous, the man Mexico hired to bridge the gap between a fired Miguel Herrera and Juan Carlos Osorio tends to err too far toward clarity. With Tigres, his teams already play 4-4-2, relying on wide midfielders alone (with rare help from fullbacks) for width, usually placing one forward in a withdrawn role. It’s an approach with produces clear game plans, often leaves responsibilities with its players, and, as recent high-profile games have shown, can leave Tigres as sitting ducks.

As the Mexican Soccer Show did such a good job breaking down in a recent podcast, Tuca’s approach left his team second best in the 2014 Apertura, when a 1-0 win over América in Liguilla final’s descended into a sea of conflict, red cards and goals in the second. The Aguilas won at Estadio Azteca, 3-0, and claimed their 12th Mexican title.

SEE MORE: Mexico’s defense looks surprisingly settled ahead of USA playoff.

Just under a year later, with Tigres on the verging of become the first Mexican team to claim Copa Libertadores, Ferretti oversaw another 3-0 in the final. This time it was Argnetina’s River Plate, having survived its trip to Mexico with a 0-0 draw, that exploited Ferretti’s team.

Each time, Tigres’ ever-growing payroll gave Ferretti enough talent to compete, if not expect victory. Each time, fans were left wondering if consistency of Ferretti’s approach allowed more flexible opposition to produce multi-goal margins.

In some ways, that consistency made Ferretti the perfect man to fill Mexico’s interim role. He doesn’t need to be clever, or force intricate ideas on his squads. For better or worse, he’s willing to give players the platform to succeed or fail, something that could have also become a virtue had he chosen to take permanent charge of Mexico’s talented squad.

On Saturday, though, it leaves an El Tri team prone to underachieving in a precarious position. In a one-game, winner-take-all event – on foreign soil, albeit in front of a sympathetic crowd – Ferretti will likely rely on the likes of Carlos Vela, Oribe Peralta, Hector Herrera and Andres Guardado to be the difference against the United States, and while those players have the talent to do so, their recent results against the U.S. inspire doubts. It’s been four years and six games since El Tri beat the U.S., a stretch that includes 180 scoreless minutes at Azteca. Through coaching chaos and the scare that was 2014 World Cup qualifying, Mexico’s core has repeatedly stumbled against its rivals. Not since the peaks Chepo de La Torre has a coach been able to get El Tri up to face the U.S.

SEE MORE: Why I’ll be watching the CONCACAF Cup on FOX Sports 1 instead of Univision.

If Ferretti stays true to form, he may again opt to be clear instead of clever. That clarity may take the form of a four-man defense, or he may opt for Piojo’s Herrera’s wingback approach. Regardless, he’s likely to leave his players in familiar roles, betting on talent and simplicity over recent history.

Even then, just like as it was America and River Plate, Tuca’s team could be a sitting duck. That could leave Klinsmann and his staff with easy targets when identifying space for Clint Dempsey to roam. It will leave them with certainties as they try to strike a balance in midfield, one that could allow Michael Bradley and Jermaine Jones to again shine in the middle of the park. They’ll know how many chances Fabian Johnson can take getting forward, where Alejandro Bedoya will me most effective, or to what extent DeAndre Yedlin will need to help with players like Miguel Layun and Guardado. They’ll know all this because, just as against the Aguilas and in Copa, Tuca won’t overcomplicate his approach.

Maybe Klinsmann will find a note of inspiration, like using Johnson’s athleticism from wide to exploit smaller fullbacks. Or, maybe it will lead him to moment of arrogance, like assuming Dempsey and Bradley could play out of position at the World Cup. Regardless, though it’s sometimes been ugly, Klinsmann has found a way to get results in games that have truly counted, and if, unlike this summer’s Gold Cup, the man Lahm derided as naive decides on something new, it could very well be at the expense of Mexico’s less adventurous boss.

“The club wants to make it clear that Jose continues to have our full support.” That sentence, the first of Chelsea FC’s statement in support of Jose Mourinho, should quiet doubts instead of inspiring them. But that’s not how momentum works, and at this moment – with Chelsea off to their worst start since 1978; with Mourinho, in a purportedly dreaded third year on the job – the narrative is in control, and that narrative is either in the second act of a remarkable comeback or winding up the final scenes of a predictable conclusion.

If you have a gambling addiction and nothing better to, put it on Mourinho departing from Chelsea sometime in the next five months. Every indication points in that direction. Despite Chelsea’s vote of confidence, Roman Abramovich has never had patience for this type of disappointment, while Mourinho’s own combination of ambition and self-destruction makes this, another line from Chelsea’s statement, the most important part of the club’s assurance (emphasis added):

“However, we believe that we have the right manager to turn this season around and that he has the squad with which to do it.”

If, come February or March, Mourinho only has Chelsea at the edge of Europe, Abramovich will use that clause as his justification. He’ll insist that beyond form, aging and regression, a the team that won last year’s Premier League could not conceivably be that bad, even if Liverpool (last year), Manchester United (2013-14) and his own Blues have made similar slides in recent seasons.

And that will leave a special one on a special journey – perhaps the first time since he left Benfica in 2000 that he’ll have to actively seek a job. When he left Stamford Bridge before, an Inter team stonewalled in Europe were blessed to have him. And when he left the Santiago Bernabéu? Chelsea welcomed him back with open arms. Not since club politics undermined his first job has Mourinho tasted true uncertainty.

Then, he ended up at União de Leiria, a team that’s now in the Portuguese third division. Within three years, he was winning the Champions League at Porto. Could another reset do him a similar service? Odds are he won’t have to be so humbled, but if he does leave Chelsea, the timing and trajectories of a few potential landing spots could dictate where he ends up.

And, obviously, some of those potential destinations make more sense than others:

Paris Saint-Germain

“I know the PSG project well, I know it well because when they start this project with the owner, the president and Leonardo, I was to be the coach.” – Mourinho, Feb. 27, 2015.

PSG was also heavily linked with Mourinho when Carlo Ancelotti replaced the Portuguese at the Santiago Bernabeu. With Chelsea in the mix, that was never going to happen, so the Parisians went with Laurent Blanc, a man who has delivered domestic titles but little else. The progress that French hegemons seek in Champions League continues to be elusive, with PSG yet to taste the semifinals.

Mourinho, in contrast, is one of only four managers to win the Champions League with two different teams (Ancelotti, Jupp Heynckes, Ottmar Hitzfeld). The only time a team from outside of England, Germany, Italy and Spain has won the Champions League in the last 20 years was Mourinho’s Porto in 2004. In the last 12 years, his teams have made the semifinals eight times. Along with Bayern’s Pep Guardiola, a two-time Champions League winner with Barcelona, Mourinho has the most impressive Champions League resume of any active manager.

Perhaps PSG keeps Blanc if they make the semifinals; even then, if they lose, it may matter how well they play. Regardless, if Mourinho is out of a job this spring, Blanc may end up in a must-win situation. Replacing him with Mourinho may be too much for Nasser Al-Khelaifi to resist, while José can seek a title on a fifth major European circuit.

Juventus

“Every now and then he is pathetic … He continuously repeats the same things and it becomes banal. I think he is very talented but his arrogance hides insecurity.” – Massimiliano Allegri, Aug. 21, 2015. 

Stylistically, it feels like a conflict – the aristocratic, often austere feel of the Agnelli family with the brash braggadocio of Mourinho. But for as much as Mourinho clashed with Italy’s media, league and culture, he was dominant at Inter. If Juve should find itself in need, it could justify bringing Mourinho in, potentially under the guise of becoming a true and consistent contender in Europe.

That’s the spin. But what’s the reality? Right now, Max Allegri is doing his own Mourinho impression, taking a league champion and camping it in Italy’s bottom half. The losses of Carlos Tevez, Arturo Vidal and Andrea Pirlo buy him time (and there is a lot of evidence to suggest time will be an ally), but what if the team doesn’t improve? What if the dominance Juventus has enjoyed since Mourinho left the peninsula gives way to a type of pre-Antonio Conte swoon? What if Allegri really does repeat his trajectory from Milan, where he also won a title before, eventually, struggling to keep his team in the table’s top half?

Teams in those situations have a way to justifying extremes. They take what they thought was philosophy and spin it, concentrating on bottom lines over marketing ones.

Juventus isn’t dogmatic, and they lack no love for adding to their vaunted, record scudetti total. Just as he was when he went to Real Madrid, Mourinho might become a lightning rod among the fan base, but he’d also, like he does everywhere, take the club forward, if only by inches.

Valencia

“A conservative estimate is that [Diego] Costa will become the seventh Mendes client Mourinho has signed for Chelsea over two spells. And at least one other is to follow. Add in Inter Milan and Real Madrid and Mourinho has made at least 12 signings involving Mendes.” – The Telegraph, June 5, 2014.

This is where things get creative, though thanks to Mourinho’s relationship with agent Jorge Mendes, landing at Valencia isn’t out of the question. If Blanc and Allegri succeed and, in the face of other possible compromises, Mourinho decides Spain, a club deeply influenced by his agent, and a salary potentially in line with his previous jobs is acceptable, Valencia could happen.

Just as with PSG, Juventus, or any other club, though, that’s predicated on what happens with the existing coach. Nuno Espirito Santo is coming off a highly regarded first year at the Mestalla, and having been brought in by owner Peter Lim thanks to his tight relationship with Mendes, he enjoys a special security at the club. It’s going to take more than a slump to see him go, so despite early, vocal displeasure from fans this season, Nuno’s place seems reasonably secure.

Would he enjoy a similar status if Mendes could deliver Mourinho? No, but whether that promise is enough to change coaches is another question. But if Valencia struggles to challenge for fourth, and if they disappoint in the Champions League, Lim may wonder who he can continue taking his ambitious project forward. Would it be too to ask Mendes to deliver Mourinho, should Jose fail to land another job?

For Mourinho, a chance to compete with both Barcelona and Real Madrid would provide motivation, as could a large voice in a project like Valencia’s. However, even with such a prestigious coach, it is hard to see Valencia truly competing in Europe during Mourinho’s first three or four years on the job, and although Diego Simeone proved you don’t need the big two’s talents to win La Liga, snaring a spare Primera title or Copa del Rey proved unsatisfactory to Mourinho at El Real.

Portugal’s big three

“I have respect for a coach who was absolutely everything to this club and in this country.” – Julen Lopetegui, Sept. 28, 2015.

One of the worst case scenarios: All the clubs that can both afford Mourinho and appease his want to compete for big things don’t need coaches. Time passes, days of listening to Jamie Carragher on the set of Sky Sports start to bore him, and Mourinho can’t shake the itch. He has to get back on the sidelines, even if it means taking a step back. No matter where he goes, success will open doors.

The answer could be a spot with one of Portugal’s big three, whose rate of managerial turnover almost guarantees a quick opening for Mourinho. Over the past decade, counting caretaker and interim managers, 30 different coaches have managed games for Benfica, Porto or Sporting Club (Sporting has had 15 coaches since the summer of 2005). For such prestigious and resourceful clubs, it’s an astounding rate of turnover.

But it arguably creates a perfect situation for Mourinho. At any of these clubs, he could have enough talent to win the league and advance out of his group in the Champions League – accomplishing things that would restore his reputation. And just as so many other managers (like himself) have used those jobs to leap to bigger league, he could, too, be back in a big-four league within a year, after a brief sojourn back home.

Portuguese national team

“The job is for me when I want to finish my career; the job is for me when I realize that I need a little rest but at this moment I want to train, I want to play. I want to play many competitions at the same time; I want to play at least three days; I want Champions League; I want the championship; I want everything. It is not a job for me to be two years waiting for a World Cup or for a European Cup, I can’t do that now.” – Jose Mourinho, March 7, 2014. 

Then there’s the job Mourinho’s said he’d like to have one day, albeit a day far down the road – when he develops an affinity for fine wine in the same way Fabio Capello as sought Russian art. Maybe, once Mourinho reaches that point of his career he’ll take up Portugal. But now? NOW?

Again, it comes down to circumstances. PSG and Juventus don’t open up. Nuno recovers at Valencia. Mourinho doesn’t want to go to a Portuguese club, or, the most obvious factor, perhaps none of these clubs are real options anyway. Maybe all these hypotheticals I’m drawing up never amount to anything more than hypotheticals?

But then there’s Portugal: poorly qualifying Portugal; still likely to be in a major tournament in less than a year Portugal; potentially a short-term job Portugal. Get them through Euro 2016, add that line to your resume, and then, Jose, jump back into the club world.

It’s bizarre to even think about. Mourinho. On the sidelines at Euro 2016. With a national team. How do we even get there from here? At the same time, is it any less bizarre than Chelsea sitting 16th through eight rounds?

As long as we’re talking about bizarre, let’s address two other jobs that have come up in the past:

Manchester United

This is the job that Mourinho is said to covet more than any other, but it’s not going to happen. The culture shock would be even more drastic than at a place like Juventus, which looks more like a fitted glove than the tourniquet Mourinho would become at Old Trafford. As much as much of paranoid draconian that Alex Ferguson was at his worst, at least his teams generally produced good soccer.

For Mourinho to get the United job, he’d have to wait until 2017-18, when Louis van Gaal will likely leave. Ryan Giggs will have to be passed over, and then out of the feeding frenzy that will be the agent horde that descends on United’s job, Mendes may have to crush the name plates of the other Guardiola-level candidates – the other great coaches in the world who presumably wouldn’t have just been fired from their last Premier League job.

United States’ men’s national team

We are a U.S. site, so I feel obliged to bring this up, because every summer somebody sticks a microphone in front of Mourinho and gets a quote about how much he likes the States. With Jurgen Klinsmann’s job being questioned and so many fans seeing the U.S. as a great mind away from new levels, Mourinho’s name will come up.

Don’t take that seriously. Just as with the Portugal job (or, jobs in Portugal), he’d have to take a severe pay cut to fit with U.S. Soccer, and while the United States may be a dream project once he’s accomplished all he’d like in Europe, taking the job after being fired by Chelsea would seem like a cop out. Rather than reestablish himself in Europe – fight that hard fight to regain his reputation – he’d be taking a vanity job. For a man that still contends he’s one of the world’s best, it’s not a good look.

Odds are, long before the U.S. comes up on the list, another opportunity will emerge. The obvious fit is with PSG, but across Europe, once somebody like Mourinho becomes available, club presidents will start looking at their own managers differently. All it would take is the right combination of significance, resources and timing to give Mourinho a chance at redemption, should he need it.

Brendan Rodgers’ time as Liverpool manager, of late, was a symptom of bigger problems: ideas, but not answers; potential, but no certainty; journeys, but no arrivals. The final chapter of his reign had taken on the same feeling of Roy Hodgson’s short, ill-fated stay with Liverpool, where you knew a good coach roamed Anfield’s technical area just as much as you knew something was amiss, and for the best of both parties, a changed needed to happen. Hodgson found his salvation at West Brom, where there never seemed to be any doubt as to whether he’d succeed, just as Rodgers’ thin confidence might seem to have gravitas were he at a Fulham, Birmingham City, or even Newcastle. Now that he’s been sacked, Rodgers can find another home, where he can be a hero instead of a target.

Rodgers is, without a doubt, a good coach on some level, but Liverpool’s a level that can still draw bigger names. And as long as a name like Jurgen Klopp remains in the conversation, and with reporters like The Guardian’s Rafael Honigstein confirming the former Borussia Dortmund boss’s interest, Rodgers’ potential for progress doesn’t matter. Now that there’s been a change at Anfield, the door is open for a manager of Klopp’s caliber.

That Klopp appears to better than Rodgers should be beyond debate, but around Premier League circles, the obvious sometimes gets obscured. This is, after all, an environment that steadfastly believes that Spain is still a two-team league (it’s not), or that the circuit they watch still offers the highest quality soccer in the world (it doesn’t). In much the same way, Klopp has been tainted by ignorance, with too many people focusing on a 2014-15 season where Borussia Dortmund largely out-performed their record. Constantly out-shooting and creating more good chances than their opponents, BVB’s slow start was tied up in variance, bad luck, and yes, diminished performances, but as the last five months of their season showed, they were still capable of being their old, dangerous selves.

The slide, however, allowed for a convenient breaking point. Klopp had been at Signal Iduna Park for seven years – far longer than most managers should stay in their jobs. He’d taken the team from one with some history and infrequent results to a club that repeatedly toppled Germany’s giant. Dortmund became more than the type of well-run, strongly supported team that inhabits Bundesliga clichés. It became a continental force.

It’s far more than Rodgers has ever done, which is not a slight on Rodgers. What Klopp accomplished at Dortmund makes him more impressive than 999 out of 1000 people who’ve every coached, if not more. Yet as it concerns our main question, whether Klopp is riht to succeed Rodgers, that isn’t enough. Each job is unique, and just because a man has superior skills doesn’t mean those skills map neatly onto the task. Klopp may not be the right fit at Anfield.

It seems evaluating that fit comes down to three vectors. The credentials, we’ve already touched on, but there is more to say on that. Klopp’s style is another concern, as the pressing that he built Dortmund’s success on is not ideal for all squads. Then, too, there’s the task at hand at Anfield, where a once great club appears to be in need of another rebuild.

SEE MORE: Brendan Rodgers claims conspiracy against him by outside influences.

Klopp’s history

Twice Klopp has coached teams. Twice they rose through the Bundesliga, and twice they eventually fell, spectacularly so. At Mainz, where he began managing at the end of his playing days (2001-2008), Klopp saw the team into the Bundesliga before, one year before he left, seeing them out. In the 2. Bundesliga, he was unable to push the club back into the top flight and left his job.

He quickly moved to Dortmund, inherited a team that finished in 13th place the season before his arrival, and build a champion. Within three seasons, BVB won the Bundesliga, doing the same the following year. It won a German Cup, two German Super Cups, and appeared in a Champions League final. In the seven years before Klopp’s arrival, BVB had won one major honor – the 2001-02 Bundesliga. During his seven years in charge, they claimed five major honors and finished runners up for seven more.

Doubting Klopp’s success is an ignorant affair, but it would be just as ignorant to ignore the context of that success. Three years before Klopp arrived, Dortmund was on the brink of bankruptcy. A year later, the club was nearly relegated. A year later, Thomas Doll guided the team to the German Cup final, but BVB was still entrenched near the bottom of the league table. It was a historic club with a great fan base, hinting at huge potential, but it wasn’t good.

SEE MORE: Liverpool dismiss claims they have approached Carlo Ancelotti.

Klopp’s style

Klopp changed that. The same type of success he brought to Mainz was replicated at Dortmund, only one a large, more supported level. The club jumped to sixth, then fifth, then won two straight titles. Initial struggles in Champions League were replaced by a run to the 2012-13 final, where the team nearly defeated Bayern Munich. When Klopp left BVB last summer, the team had just completed its fourth straight season in Champions League. It had missed out on European soccer entirely in the four years before his arrival.

Perhaps the most discussed part of Klopp’s style was his team’s pressing, though it certainly wasn’t the only hallmark of BVB’s approach. Still, the intensity Klopp instilled in his squad, including a tactical attention to detail that was both successful and, in the end, exhausting, dovetails with a defensive approach that made gegenpressing a buzzword for years.

Lose the ball? Okay, win it back, as quickly as possible, before the other team can transition. And if you can’t win it back, well, at least stunt anything they were trying to do. Eventually, we’ll fall back into our defensive shape, but if we do our job right, they’ll be kicking the ball around the back, enjoying a sigh of relief while we’re setting up.

There are a number of qualities that go into this approach, not the least of which are the physical and technical qualities of the players. You need players who are intelligent, fast and disciplined in defense, but in attack they must have the passing, movement and (again) intelligence to play in the restricted spaces required to make the press work. If your team is spread across too much of the field, you won’t have the numbers in small spaces to press the ball winner, or shut down passing lanes, or mark the men needed to instill whatever version of the “counter press” you need.

How does this style fit with Philippe Coutinho, an undoubtedly talented player, but not one whose work rate will be confused with Shinji Kagawa? How do Jordan Henderson and James Milner – quality players, but not known for the speed with which they move the ball – fit this approach? Can Martin Skrtel be relied on to win one-on-one, open-field battles without finishing a season with 20 yellow cards? And what of Christian Benteke, a man more akin to a tank when targeted out of your defense. Can he be relied on to do the defensive work we’ve seen from strikers in successful versions of this system?

For other players, the fit could be glorious. If Daniel Sturridge stayed healthy, he’d be a brilliant number nine. Emre Can could conceivably round out into a poor man’s version of Sergio Busquets. Nathaniel Clyne playing a role which would demand a midfielder’s mentality with a wing back’s range might take his career to another level. A player like Adam Lallana might, in time, adapt nicely to a Marco Reus-esque wide role. Maybe Joe Allen could, once again, have new life in a system that prized quickness of both mind and foot.

But it will take time, and for most of the squad, it seems like a poor fit. All the money Liverpool has invested in the Roberto Firminos of the world could be wasted, making the cost of a coaching move greater than merely replacing Rodgers. And even if Fenway Sports Group were to make that commitment, the Klopp effect would take months, if not an entire summer, to bed in. Right now, Liverpool’s not ready for Klopp.

Klopp’s personality

Trumping all of that, though, may be the man behind the results. For all his success on the scoreboard, Klopp has had a more profound effect emotionally at his clubs. With Mainz, he was inspirational partly because of his connection as a player, but with Dortmund, has was able to replicate that with his intensity, passion, honesty and, of course, results.

This is part of the reason why Dortmund, amid a highly competitive transfer environment in the Bundesliga as well as abroad, has been able to convince Mats Hummels to stay. They were able to keep Reus away from Bayern when he was moving from Borussia Moenchengladbach. They’ve been able to draw played like Robert Lewandowski, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, as well as less renown (or, less successful) players like Adrian Ramos, Ciro Immobile, and Gonzalo Castro. Dortmund has become a destination of choice, not only because of its success but also its style and environment. Partially because of what Klopp built, players want to go to the Westfalenstadion.

In that sense, Klopp is the perfect choice for Liverpool. He has said he doesn’t need to go to a club that’s sitting atop its league’s table, comments that dovetail nicely with his previously reported preferences for clubs with history, and established support. They were the comments that had people wishfully linking him to West Ham last spring but make him an even better fit for Liverpool now.

The seemingly constant hum of disappointment we hear around Anfield is what’s creating that link to the Hodgson era, but it’s also a hum of potential: potential for this team to improve; potential for the Kop’s mood to improve; but potential for Liverpool to be an influential club once more. In their disappointment, in their anticipation, supporters are demanding this, and their cross-armed glares from Anfield’s stands have become a verdict on Rodgers.

Even if Klopp’s style doesn’t fit, his personality would. Anfield would stand behind a man who brings his emotions to the touchline. He’d support a coach who strives to connect with them. They’d give time to a man who had a clear vision, even if that vision meant turnover, and they’d relish a boss who made Liverpool’s bench prestigious once more.

As evidenced by the ways he left both Mainz and Dortmund, Klopp doesn’t exist on a cloud above the fray. He became entrenched, sensitive to what’s been built. He’ll know the expectations, as well as when he’s failing them. He won’t be like Benitez, or like what Rodgers has become. He won’t be oblivious to what’s wrong.

Fortunately for Liverpool fans, should Klopp arrive on Merseyside, his failures have only come years and years down the road, and only after great successes. And in that way, Klopp is not unlike most great coaches throughout the history of the game. Though his last year in Dortmund may linger in fans’ memories, it’s the broader, 14-year picture that should matter more, because not since Benitez left the Spanish coast for England’s northwest has the club had a chance to draw somebody so renowned.

He is still in pursuit of Raúl atop Real Madrid’s all-time scoring chart, but on his way to that inevitable record, Cristiano Ronaldo has passed another milestone. With today’s goal in Sweden against Malmo in UEFA Champions League, the 30-year-old icon notched his 500th competitive goal, reaching the landmark in only 753 career appearances.

The total covers his time for both club and country, with 322 of his goals coming during his six-plus seasons with Real Madrid, Before arriving at the Santiago Bernabéu, Ronaldo scored 118 times for Manchester United and five times for Sporting Lisbon. His 55 international goals are a Portugal national team record.

Here was Ronaldo’s milestone strike:

What a moment! @Cristiano Ronaldo scores his 500th career goal for club and country. #UCL @HeinekenSoccer #UCLonFOX http://t.co/7UNv9rwzWV

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) September 30, 2015

Count Gary Neville among the people who were keeping an open mind about Anthony Martial, the Monaco attacker Manchester United made the most expensive teenager of all time in the last transfer window. But having seen the 19-year-old in person three times, and focusing specifically on him this weekend at Old Trafford, the Sky Sports analyst has been won over.

Last night, on Sky’s Monday Night Football, Neville broke down Martial’s performance on Saturday against Sunderland, highlighting the movement that’s helped give United’s attack a much-needed spark. His conclusion: “In the first three weeks, he couldn’t have made a greater impact on me.” Sold.

https://youtu.be/VCm2Psj0gCA

Had Iker Casillas written his own script, his vindication would have been Lisbon, a year-and-half-ago, when he wore the captain’s armband as Real Madrid claimed their 10th European crown. But it’s been a some time since San Iker could author his own fairytales. Over the past five years, a player that was once considered among the world’s best goalkeepers has waned, doing so disputably, dramatically, and ultimately, sadly. Even on that Saturday 16 months ago, when he would lift UEFA’s Champions League trophy for a third time, Casillas’s shaky display against rival Atlético nearly cost his team its coveted decima. Now 34, Casillas is no longer in the conversation as the world’s best. He’s no longer even at the Santiago Bernabéu.

Ask those who still call Casillas San and there’s a clear villain in his script – a man who was brought to Madrid five years ago, ostensibly to ensure that decima. In that, José Mourinho ultimately failed, but during his last season in charge of Los Blancos, he accomplished something few dreamed imaginable. By the time he left the Spanish capital in the spring of 2013, the self-dubbed Special One had thrown Casillas’s career into turmoil, benching the El Real and Spanish national team captain and accelerating a decline that persists to this day.

On Tuesday, at the Estádio do Dragão in Porto, Portugal, Casillas will have another chance at vindication (live on FOX Deportes and ESPN3 at 2:45pm for viewers in the United States). There, in goal for FC Porto, Mourinho’s former charge will be part of a team that welcomes the icon back to his old ground – the place where he first came to European prominence. And should Casillas perform to the standard Mourinho no longer thought him capable of, Saint Iker can accelerate what could be one of his adversary’s greatest failures.

That failure, of course, could be this season at Chelsea, the third in Mourinho’s return to London. Having seen mild success in Madrid, delivering a league title few thought the Merengues could take from Barcelona, Mourinho returned to Stamford Bridge in 2013 amidst a pique of nostalgia, with both he and owner Roman Abramovich longing for the days before petulance broken them apart. Staying the slow declined that started after Carlo Ancelotti’s 2011 departure, Mourinho brought the Blues back into title contention, delivering the Premier League to Blues’ supporters in his second season in charge. In just over five seasons with Chelsea (spread over two different spells), Mourinho’s claimed seven major honors.

This year, however, has been a relative calamity, albeit a small one, in temporal terms. Through seven rounds, Chelsea sits 14th in the Premier League, off to their worst league start in over 25 years. Sample size caveats apply, but the team’s disappointing start hasn’t been remarkably unlucky. Eighth in shots faced per game but fourth in shots taken, Chelsea’s underlying numbers hint at a team that should be in European contention. They don’t however, read like a title contender’s.

Two months ago, nobody saw this coming. Short-sightedly, but almost unanimously, Chelsea was seen as an overwhelming favorite to win the league – the team which, having lost nothing from its championship core, would take advantage of a wayward Manchester United, the ennui at Arsenal, and a Manchester City that failed to significantly stock up. Eight weeks later, United are on top of the league, City seem title favorites, and preseason punditry has never looked worse, with a blind belief in Chelsea possibly our greatest summer fault.

If Chelsea doesn’t improve, Mourinho will lose his job. There’s no precedent for Abramovich tolerating this, and there’s no example of Mourinho maintaining his composure through such trials. And if Casillas can lead Porto to what may not even be a upset on Tuesday, he can make the Dragons into a version of Rosenborg BK – a team whose surprise result at Stamford Bridge early in the 2007-08 Champions League helped lead to Mourinho’s first downfall.

That Casillas is even in position to pull off such sabotage is a minor, under-discussed miracle, if we took to calling unfortunate turns miracles. It is nonetheless somewhat miraculous that he finds himself in Portugal, having taken the swift step from no. 1 at the Bernabéu to playing out his final days in a footballing netherworld. Porto is a highly accomplished and respected club – a two-time European champion that’s became masterful in arbitrage of the South America-Europe pipeline – but it’s doesn’t occupy the same spotlight as a Real Madrid, nor is it a bonafide vacation home like those in Turkey, the Middle East, China or the United States. Porto is, at a time when so many historic giants are struggling, a compromise between significance, geography and, perhaps most important to Casillas, Champions League.

If the Champions League wasn’t so important to Casillas, he would have ended up in Milan, with either AC Milan or Inter. That’s the logical step, once you exit the Bernabéu. But neither of those teams are in Europe this season, let alone Champions League. And Juventus? For all the iconography around Casillas, he is not Gigi Buffon; at least, not in the eyes of juventinos.

SEE MORE: When did Jose Mourinho stop being special?

Perhaps following the footsteps of another departed Real Madrid captain, Raúl, to Germany would have been possible, but Schalke is not in Champions League this season, either. Nor is Borussia Dortmund, who could have justified a perceived upgrade in goal. The idea of moving to a Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen, or a Borussia Mönchengladbach? They’re possibilities that helped bring a team like Porto into view.

Arsenal had long been linked to Casillas, but Petr Cech moved to the Emirates from Chelsea early in the summer. City had Joe Hart, United was engaged with Real Madrid on other fronts (David de Gea’s front), while a reunion with Mourinho at Stamford Bridge was not an option. In other days, Liverpool would have been possible, especially in those days when a former Castilla man was in the coach’s box. But Champions League has become a rarity at Anfield.

And Champions League cannot be a rarity to Casillas. Not while he still sees himself as viable. Not in the months after he was fighting to stay on at Madrid. After years at a club that defined itself, for better or worse, by how it did in Europe, Casillas couldn’t just leave it all behind. If he is still good (and, in his mind, he is), then he’s good enough for Champions League. And if he’s good enough for Champions League, Milan, Inter, Liverpool aren’t options.

A unique confluence of history (the wane of the Milans), elite goalkeeper placement (Buffon at Juve; Manuel Neuer at Bayern) and timing (Casillas having not resolved his situation until late in the summer) left one option – a team that could justify a luxury in goal. Paris Saint-Germain would have made sense, as would a swap to Manchester United, but it was Porto, a team that assumes the spotlight for derbies and Europe but little else, that could welcome the fallen icon. And perhaps the summer of 2015 would be the only time they could pull it off.

It’s hard to describe what’s happened without besmirching Porto, but there’s a fundamental absurdity to it all. Casillas had all the makings of a mythical one-club man, but when that went sour, there should have been another move. Cech, at a similar point in his career, had Arsenal. Where was Casillas’s soft landing? Not in Italy; nor England, Germany, or even France. Sixteen months ago, Casillas was captaining a team to Europe’s greatest glory. Two summers later, he had been recycled to the Dragão.

The move is, perhaps, a belated victory for Mourinho. When he benched Casillas shortly into the 2012-13 season, he insisted it was for sporting reasons, remarkably arguing that Antonio Adán was a superior `keeper at the time. That proved not to be the case. Adán was shaky, almost immediately hurt, and did little to convince a divided Bernabéu that politics weren’t part of Mourinho’s motives. With the Spanish dailies reporting Mourinho was trying to break up a locker room headed by Casillas and Sergio Ramos, an alternate narrative took hold. This wasn’t coach versus player. This was icon versus icon.

Diego Lopez was brought in that January, but when Real Madrid stumbled in the league and failed to get past the Champions League semifinal, Mourinho moved on. Carlo Ancelotti was brought in from Paris and won the long-sought decima, but he did so while making Casillas a cup specialist. Though he was on the field when El Real claimed both the Champions League and Copa del Rey, Casillas had not fully won back his job. He wouldn’t do so until the next year, when Lopez, the man who donned the gloves for Real Madrid’s league matches, was sold to Milan.

Real Madrid didn’t win anything in Casillas’s final season in goal. Barcelona reclaimed La Liga. Juventus upset Madrid in the Champions League’s semifinals. For the second time in three years, Real Madrid would go without a trophy. And for the second time in three years, the team would also change coaches.

This time, though, it would also move on from its longest tenured player. Form that continued to wane left the Bernabéu divided about Casillas, providing club president Florentino Pérez enough of a window to act. Pérez has moved on from stars even when they’ve been valuable, so his desire (perhaps unconscious) to undermine his most talented players may have won out, regardless. But with Casillas’s continued decline, Pérez didn’t have to justify the move in footballing terms. And with Costa Rican international Keylor Navas in the wings, letting Casillas go could be argued as best for the club.

When the departure finally happened this summer, Pérez claimed it was Casillas’s choice. Technically, he may have been right. Casillas wanted to leave, finally, but mostly because so many at the club didn’t seem to care if he stayed. Rather than being an icon like Buffon, somebody that has become treasured in Turin, Casillas had a Madrid that was willing to buy out his contract to let him leave. He wasn’t merely being relegated to a backup. He wasn’t wanted, at all.

It took two years, but it was the ending Mourinho had set in motion. He was wrong when he argued Casillas was not as good as Adán, but the more subtle message proved correct. Not only was Casillas in decline, but he was not indispensible. The San Iker so many at the Bernabéu saw as integral to the image of the club was no longer a unanimous figure of renown. Madrid could, indeed, survive without him. Other goalkeepers could, it seem, fill his gloves. There was no need to fear a day when Casillas was not in goal.

SEE MORE: Messi and Ronaldo: La Liga will return to normal when its big two are gone.

He was disrespectful in how he went about it. He was prideful, egotistic, and insensitive about how he managed the transition. He was José Mourinho, almost archetypically so, but he was right. A transition needed to happen. And as the gods would have it, they way he handled the transition gives Casillas an ultimate chance at redemption.

In a perfect world, Casillas would have been vindicated by the decima. He would have also finished out his career at the Bernabéu. Thankfully for us, the world is more fair than perfect, making for much more interesting viewing. The 2014 Champions League final was a reflection of what Casillas actually is rather than a boring iconography, one that was based more on image and emotion than on-field performance. In previous generations, he wouldn’t have ended up at Porto. That he did gives us something more than the regular superstar shuffle.

It also gives Casillas a chance at the ultimate vindication. No, Mourinho won’t lose his job if Chelsea loses in Porto, but it could be a significant turn, particularly if a stellar performance from an old nemesis helps define the game. At a time when his leadership is coming under renewed scrutiny – when Mourinho’s camera-facing antics are again overshadowing his team’s performance – what questions would be asked if somebody he judged so harshly defied that judgment? How would perceptions of Mourinho continue to change if Casillas comes out on top?

If perceptions change at all, it will only be slightly, but it could have a snowball effect. A week of Casillas’s glory on the front of English, Spanish and Portuguese broadsheets? After two days to stew, Mourinho has to face the press on Friday. He didn’t answer questions about Casillas before Porto. He’ll be even less likely to do so oshould Chelsea lose.

The mood continues to turn, Chelsea continues to perform poorly, and Mourinho’s lesser self takes over. The same man we saw struggle with adversity in Madrid, or near the end of his first spell with Chelsea, could resurface. In the face of failure, Mourinho doesn’t reevaluate. He becomes incredulous, confrontational. He’s the porcupine that flashes its quills, unknowing that the mere need to do so shows fear and weakness.

What if the man Mourinho so famously went to war with wins what might be their final battle? What if Casillas, a player whose personality lends so many to see a hero, plays heroically against an adversary so easily cast as a villain? What if, at this time when Mourinho’s more vulnerable than he’s been in eight years, a player not good enough to hold off Antonio Adán beats him at his old stomping grounds?

Ah, so many ifs, but at one time we could have asked: What would happen if Casillas left the Bernabéu? That time has come. What would happen if Mourinho left Chelsea? Or, came back? Both of those things have happened. What if Mourinho was actually right about Casillas three years ago, and what if, in the twilight of his career, Casillas got one more chance to prove him wrong? And what if all that happened at the place where Mourinho originally made a name for himself?

Sometimes, if is the most powerful word we’ve got. And if Porto derails Chelsea tonight, a new world of doubt will surround José Mourinho.

Early success in Europe could have former U.S. men’s national team head coach Bob Bradley on the brink of a prestigious move, if today’s reports out of Norway are correct. The current Stabæk boss and former head coach of the Chicago Fire, New York/New Jersey Metro Stars, Chivas USA and the Egyptian national team is reportedly on the radar of Molde, the defending Norwegian champions whose league struggles and early exit from the UEFA Champions League playoffs left the team in search of a new boss.

According to Norway’s VG Sporten, Bradley has met with representatives of Molde, who hope to quickly fill a coaching vacancy created six weeks ago with the firing of Tor Ole Skullerud. Asked by VG Sporten about the job, Bradley claimed he didn’t know about a possible move, and that although “you don’t know what will happen, because this is football,” his “focus is on what’s going on [with Stabæk].”

Molde, winners of three of the last four Norwegian titles, have fallen to the middle of the Tippeligaen table, but it’s a club that could  muster the ambition and resources to allow Bradley to take the next step in his coaching career. But after a season’s worth of struggles, it will also be a club without European soccer next season, something Bradley is on the verge of clinching in his current job.

SEE MORE: Overrated and underrated: The truth about the value of the Confederations Cup.

Bradley’s Stabæk, currently second in the Tippeligaen, are coming off a 1-0 win Sunday over seventh placed Molde. Stabæk, eight points behind first place Rosenborg, maintain slim hopes of claiming is first title since 2008, having shot up the table since rejoining the first division two years ago.

Last season, having hired Bradley upon returning to the top flight, Stabæk finished ninth in the 16-team division. This season, with five games left in the campaign, the Bærum-based club is on the verge of its first European qualification since 2009, when a third place finish earned a spot in Europa League.

That improvement has reportedly put Bradley on Molde’s radar, who won the 2014 Tippeligaen by 11 points. But after losing of a group of key players, including goalkeeper Ørjan Nyland (Inglostadt), and attackers Björn Sigurðarson (Copenhagen) and Daniel Chima (Shanghai Shenxin), Molde has plummeted down the table, leading to the departure of Skullerud one year after winning the league-cup double.

The move to Molde could be a complicated one for Bradley, who is valued by Stabæk management but also has a chance to move to a club with significant recent success. But although Molde climbed to the top of the Tippeligaen under the departed Ole Gunnar Solksjær, the club’s only Norwegian titles have come over the past four years. In addition, Sunday’s defeat eliminated the club from contention for European soccer. Stabæk, on the other hand, looks ready to clinch a spot in next year’s Europa League.

With a record of success both in Major League Soccer and with the U.S. men’s national team, Bradley’s performance at Stabæk could also position him for jobs beyond Norway, and while it’s unlikely rumors of Premier League positions will resurface, Bradley could start taking more meaningful steps up the European ladder. Success next year in Europa League could draw additional attention from clubs in northern Europe.

SEE MORE: Who is Lynden Gooch? Another US prospect on Premier League radars.

On the surface, it appears to be a high risk move for little long-term reward, but if Bradley sees his long-term future in Norway, a switch to Molde could be a smart one. In addition to whatever personal financial benefits he sees, Bradley will be moving to a club that was on the brink of a dynasty before its downturn, one that has been able to recently pay six-digits transfer fees, with an occasional seven-digit purchase.

Regardless, the interest is vindication of Bradley’s choice to move to Norway, with his efforts to establish himself seemingly paying off. In two years, he’s taken a recently promoted team to second place. Apparently, the rest of Norway has noticed.

Holders Chelsea will visit Stoke City while Arsenal and Manchester United drew Championship opposition in the fourth round of the Capital One Cup. The draw for the competition’s round of 16 took place late Wednesday night, with Premier League-leading Manchester City given one of the round’s tougher matchups with a visit from Crystal Palace.

Arsenal, coming off their Wednesday victory over rival Tottenham, were handed a visit to second-tier Sheffield Wednesday, while Manchester United were rewarded for a convincing win over Ipswich Town with a matchup against Championship club Middlesbrough.

Leicester City, the only remaining undefeated team in the Premier League, also drew Championship opposition with a trip to Hull City.

In addition to Chelsea and Manchester City’s ties, the draw features potentially three all-Premier League matchups: Aston Villa’s visit to Southampton; Everton hosting Norwich City; and Liverpool welcoming Bournemouth to Anfield, should they advance past Carlisle United. Liverpool and Carlisle were in extra time of their third round tie at the time of the draw.

The fourth round will take place the week of Oct. 26 and will be broadcast in the US on beIN Sports.

Fourth round draw

Stoke City vs Chelsea
Hull City vs. Leicester City
Sheffield Wednesday vs. Arsenal
Southampton vs. Aston Villa
Everton vs. Norwich City
Manchester United vs. Middlesbrough
Liverpool or Carlisle vs. AFC Bournemouth
Manchester City vs. Crystal Palace

Pep Guardiola thought he could get by without his best forward, starting Robert Lewandowski on the bench as a quick turnaround from weekend action saw Wolfsburg, last season’s Bundesliga runner ups, visit Bayern Munich in the league’s sixth round. However, fortunate to go into halftime trailing only 1-0, the Bayern boss didn’t hesitate to bring the Polish international on to start the second half.

The results were mind-blowing. Starting in the 50th minute, Lewandowski scored five times in less than 10 minutes, shifting a match where Bayern were second best into a typical FCB rout.

The first goal capitalized on some good fortune, with a sprawling challenge from former Bayern defender Dante deflecting a ball roll to Lewandowski, who finished into a nearly empty net in the 51st minute:

Moments later, Lewandowski eschewed the need for any good fortune by beating Wolfsburg keeper Diego Benaglia from near the top of the arc, giving Bayern the lead in the 52nd minute:

Lewandowski made life difficult for himself on his third, initially putting his attempted hat trick off the left post before beating Benaglio for a third time, making it 3-1 in the 55th:

A fourth goal saw Lewandowski put an adroit touch on a high, bouncing ball, with Douglas Costa’s cross finding an open space near the penalty spot, allowing the his teammate to put home his fourth of the night in the 57th minute:

And finally, in the 60th minute, Lewandowski offered his best goal of the evening – a volley on a ball in from the right; one which, driving into the left side of Wolfsburg’s goal, gave Benaglio little chance to prevent a historic performance:

Coming into today’s game, Lewandowski had three league goals on the season. In just under a quarter of and hour, he nearly doubled that total, coming off the bench to score five times in Bayern’s 5-1 win over previously undefeated Wolfsburg.

Two days into this season’s Champions League, and we may already have our goal of the tournament, with the crowd at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico left in momentary raptures after a 50-yard shot from Roma fullback Alessandro Florenzi went off Barcelona goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen’s post and in, completing one of the more remarkable long distance goals in recent memory.

RT FOXSports "RT FOXSoccer: Unbelievable! Roma's Florenzi scores an early contender for goal of the year vs Barcel… http://t.co/DwlM4hnpuH"

— Tommy Mason (@tommymason006) September 16, 2015

On the rare occasion we see a long distance goal, as we did this summer from the United States’ Carli Lloyd in the Women’s World Cup final, it usually comes from closer to the center circle, after a quick midfield turnover gives the shooter a chance to catch a goalkeeper off his or her line. Today, however, Florenzi carried the ball from the edge of his defensive third over the center line, launching a hopeful shot as he was being closed down by a Barcelona defender.

Ter Stegen, certainly caught off his line, gave Florenzi little margin for error, but the midfielder-cum-defender took advantage of the opening. Looping his shot over the Barcelona keeper at just the right angle, the nine-time Italian international put prayer off the left post, the ball bouncing in for an unlikely 31st minute equalizer.

Barcelona had taken the lead 10 minutes earlier through a header from Luis Suarez, who put home a lopping cross from Ivan Rakitic at two yards out. The Champions League holders maintained control of the match after their opener, but Florenzi’s shocking equalizer had the home team even just past the half-hour-mark.

They’re just preliminary rosters — far from the final teams that Jurgen Klinsmann and Ricardo Ferretti will select for Oct. 10’s playoff at the Rose Bowl — but the possibilities for the United States and Mexico are now narrowed to 35 and 32 players per side – the players who were named to the teams’ initial Confederations Cup playoff squads, as distributed by CONCACAF this morning.

The usual suspects are there for both. Stalwarts Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley and Fabian Johnson have been included by Klinsmann, who will hope the health problems that have dogged his best attacker (Dempsey) and wide player (Johnson) will abate between now and next months’ playoff. For Mexico, famous names like Giovani dos Santos, Jonathan dos Santos, Guillermo Ochoa and Jesus ‘Tecatito’ Corono — players who missed September’s friendlies against Trinidad and Tobago and Argentina — are on the provisional list, with both teams set to cut their squads to 23 before the much-anticipated showdown in Pasadena.

The winner of the October playoff will qualify for the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia. The United States booked their spot in the game by winning the 2013 Gold Cup. Mexico booked theirs by winning the same tournament this summer.

With squads nearly 50 percent bigger than a national team’s usual call up, you’d expect few surprise omissions, but each team is missing names that will likely spark conversation among fans. For Mexico, Francisco ‘Maza’ Rodriguez, capped 106 times but recently injured while playing for Cruz Azul, failed to make the cut, while six players from Ferretti’s Tigres team were selected. The United States continues to pass on Sporting Kansas City’s Benny Feilhaber — an MVP candidate in Major League Soccer — while Stanford University’s Jordan Morris is the only non-professional named in either squad.

For the 67 players named, the time to impress starts now, and while players like Andres Guardado, Alejandro Bedoya, Carlos Vela and Jermaine Jones are unlikely to play their way off their teams, hopefuls like Jurgen Damm, Lee Nguyen, Javier Guemez and Tim Ream have just under a month to make their case.

SEE MORE: Azteca spins infamous Trump speech into amazing playoff promo.

Full preliminary rosters

MEXICO

Goalkeepers
Guillermo Ochoa (Malaga/Spain)
Moises Munoz (Club America/Mexico)
Alfredo Talavera (Toluca/Mexico)
Jonathan Orozco (Monterrey/Mexico)

Defenders
Paul Aguilar (Club America/Mexico)
Diego Reyes (Real Sociedad/Spain)
Rafael Marquez (Hellas Verona/Italy)
Hector Moreno (PSV Eindhoven/Netherlands)
Miguel Layun (Porto/Portugal)
Hector Herrera (Porto, Portugal)
Oswaldo Alanis (Guadalajara/Mexico)
Arturo Rivas (Tigres/Mexico);
Miguel Herrera (Pachuca/Mexico)
Jorge Torres Nilo (Tigres/Mexico)

Midfielders
Israel Jimenez (Tigres/Mexico)
Andres Guardado (PSV Eindhoven; Netherlands)
Jose Juan Vazquez (Leon/Mexico)
Jesus Duenas (Tigres/Mexico); Javier Aquino (Tigres/Mexico)
Jonathan Dos Santos (Villarreal/ Spain)
Luis Montes (Leon/Mexico)
Carlos Pena (Leon/Mexico)
Javier Guemez (Club America/Mexico)

Forwards
Oribe Peralta (Club America/Mexico)
Raul Jimenez (Benfica/Portugal)
Carlos Vela (Real Sociedad/Spain)
Carlos Esquivel (Toluca/Mexico)
Jesus Corona (Porto/Portugal)
Javier Hernandez (Bayer Leverkusen/Germany)
Elias Hernandez (Leon/Mexico)
Jurgen Damm (Tigres/Mexico)
Giovani Dos Santos (LA Galaxy/United States)

United States

Goalkeepers
Brad Guzan (Aston Villa/England)
Bill Hamid (D.C. United/USA)
Tim Howard (Everton/England)
Nick Rimando (Real Salt Lake/USA)

Defenders
Ventura Alvarado (Club America/Mexico)
DaMarcus Beasley (Houston Dynamo/USA)
Matt Besler (Sporting Kansas City/USA)
John Brooks (Hertha Berlin/Germany)
Geoff Cameron (Stoke City/England)
Brad Evans (Seattle Sounders FC/USA)
Greg Garza (Atlas/Mexico)
Omar Gonzalez (LA Galaxy/USA)
Michael Orozco (Club Tijuana/Mexico)
Tim Ream (Fulham/England)
Jonathan Spector (Birmingham City/England)
DeAndre Yedlin (Sunderland/England)

Midfielders
Kyle Beckerman (Real Salt Lake/USA)
Alejandro Bedoya (Nantes/France)
Michael Bradley (Toronto FC/Canada)
Joe Corona (Veracruz/Mexico)
Mix Diskerud (New York City FC/USA)
Fabian Johnson (Borussia Mönchengladbach/Germany)
Jermaine Jones (New England Revolution/USA)
Alfredo Morales (FC Ingolstadt/Germany)
Lee Nguyen (New England Revolution/USA)
Danny Williams (Reading/England)
Gyasi Zardes (LA Galaxy/USA)
Graham Zusi (Sporting Kansas City/USA)

Forwards
Jozy Altidore (Toronto FC/Canada);
Clint Dempsey (Seattle Sounders FC/USA)
Alan Gordon (LA Galaxy/USA)
Aron Johansson (Werder Bremen/Germany)
Jordan Morris (Stanford University/USA)
Chris Wondolowski (San Jose Earthquakes/USA)
Bobby Wood (Union Berlin/Germany)

The National Women’s Soccer League will expand to Orlando next season, according to a report today in the Guardian. The franchise would be the 10th in the United States’ women’s professional league and the circuit’s first foray into the U.S. southeast.

The franchise would be a notable addition in what will be a landmark year for the league. NWSL’s two predecessors — Women’s Professional Soccer (2009-2011) and the Women’s United Soccer Association (2001-2003) — failed to reach a fourth season. In contrast, the NWSL is looking to reach the 10-team mark in its fourth campaign.

Neither the NWSL nor the expansion team’s reported owners, Major League Soccer’s Orlando City SC, confirmed the Guardian’s report.

The NWSL began play in 2013 with eight teams, including a franchise in Portland, the Thorns, which was owned by MLS’s Timbers. That model was replicated a year later when the league expanded to Houston and is set to be used again in Florida with Orlando City.

Orlando, having joined Major League Soccer this season, have enjoyed strong support as MLS’s first Florida franchise since 2001. In a statement to the Guardian, the team hinted there would be an announcement in the near-future:

“Considering the massive support for top-caliber soccer in Central Florida, we continue to evaluate all opportunities to bring the highest levels of the sport to the market in the future. We hope to have more information to share in the coming weeks.”

According to NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush, the league will discuss its expansion plans on Oct. 1 in Portland, the site of the league’s championship game. Plush also told the Guardian he would like to have next season’s plans set as soon after the final as possible:

“We’d like to be able to immediately after the final know what 2016 looks like. Our work for 2016 on some level has already started, but it starts in earnest somewhere around midnight of 1 October. That’s certainly our plan but the reality is you’re going to expand when the timing is right, when the people are right, when the geography and stadium are right.”

Orlando City are one of numerous Major League Soccer teams that have been linked with NWSL expansion, including Real Salt Lake and fellow expansion team, New York City FC.

SEE MORE: Orlando’s privately-financed stadium paves way for MLS teams.

Through home games this season, Orlando have averaged 31,987 attendees per game, the second-highest total in Major League Soccer. Sunday’s game against Sporting Kansas City drew a season-low 22,241, while its season high is 62,510.

The team is playing it inaugural season in the Florida Citrus Bowl but expects to open its own facility next season.

Wayne Rooney will be unavailable for Manchester United during Saturday’s visit from Liverpool, according to late Friday night reports out of Manchester. England’s new all-time leading scorer will be sidelined by a hamstring injury, with Marouane Fellaini expected to get his first start of the season.

Rooney scored his 49th and 50th career international goals while on duty last week for the England national team, but a hamstring injury picked up this week at United’s Carrington training ground will see him miss the season’s first North West Derby. United welcome Liverpool to Old Trafford for Saturday’s final Premier League kickoff.

The Manchester Evening News were first to report Rooney’s injury on Friday.

SEE MORE: It’s time for the English media to fully appreciate Wayne Rooney.

Rooney failed to check into United’s team hotel on Friday night and is also questionable for the team’s UEFA Champions League opener on Tuesday against Dutch champions PSV Eindhoven.

Healthy upon his return from England, Rooney reportedly heard a pop from his hamstring while training on Friday – his first day back training with the team.

Though United’s first four games of the Premier League season, Rooney has played all 360 minutes, failing to record a goal or an assist while putting only three shots on target.

Captain for both club and country, Rooney’s league performances have sparked a debate as to whether he’s being used appropriately by manager Louis van Gaal, with strong performances for England and against Belgium’s Club Brugge for United helping temporarily offsetting criticisms that the 29-year-old should be played deeper in United’s formation.

Against visiting Liverpool, van Gaal is likely to choose a player who can serve as a more traditional target in Belgium international Fellaini. There is also the possibility that Anthony Martial, recently made the most expensive teenage transfer in history, could see time in Rooney’s spot, with the 19-year-old having moved to Manchester from Monaco at the close of England’s summer transfer window.

Four teams — two from the Premier League, two from Major League Soccer — meeting in a mid-summer, trans-Atlantic, trans-federation battle. And we’re not just talking about random teams that volunteer for the task. No, we’re talking about a partnership between MLS and the EPL, one that would see each circuit’s league and cup winners descend on New York each summer, creating a fan, television and marketing bonanza.

Chelsea and Arsenal. LA Galaxy and DC United. For so many Premier League-loving MLS fans, what could possibly be better?

In this case, the right answer is the obvious one: Games that actually matter.

SEE MORE: MLS ratings on ESPN see unexpected August boost.

Today in Manchester, at a SoccerEx expo that gives soccer bigwigs a chance to showcase their TedTalks, MLS commissioner Don Garber not only repeated his “league of choice” goal to pull his league level with England and Spain, he also floated an idea that would have MLS start to take a big, bolder role in the growing summer exhibition circuit.

From The Guardian

“We have been talking to the Premier League about doing some sort of official competition as opposed to just having clubs come over to the country on a random basis playing in a tournament that takes place every summer …

“I would love to find a way that we could play our cup champion and our league champion against an FA Cup and league champion in a tournament and play it in New York City every year…”

If not every year, then every four years, he said. And if not England’s champions, then maybe Mexico’s, or another league’s. I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here.

Only with Garber, nothing is ever spitballing. A consensus-maker, somebody that values cultivating cooperation within his group, Garber rarely lets something like this out unless it’s been hashed out among his council. This may just be a trial balloon, but it’s certainly one that’s been floating around small rooms in MLS HQ for some time. Else, the idea wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

In that way, this is more than Garber taking the stage at SoccerEx’s open mic night. It’s very much a request for comment. With that in mind, allow us to react: While this doesn’t seem like a bad idea, it doesn’t seem like a particularly innovative one, either, and the costs of trying to impose an “official competition” on a league already struggling to balance scheduling concerns could be annoying.

Like it or not, mid-summer friendlies are here to stay. Big European clubs love coming to the United States, promoters and venues love selling tickets to see them, and devoted fans with little access to teams and players in Europe get a rare glimpse of their favorite stars. Scene after scene of parents taking their toddlers to this games, pointing to Real Madrid and Barcelona talents like they’re rock stars on tour, should convince anybody that there’s value in these games.

SEE MORE: It’s time for MLS teams to bring in more Designated Player defenders.

But why does MLS feel the need to up the ante? Garber didn’t explain, but the reasoning may be tautological. MLS wants in because it is a big deal, and because it is not going away, and while Soccer United Marketing (MLS’s marketing arm) play a huge role in bringing in European super clubs, there’s still space in the market. So if MLS can dominate that space by having an official, showcase event — one it can argue is not only official but part of a partnership — then, theoretically, it can have the upper hand in that market.

To a certain extent, it has worked with the All-Star Game. What was once a format-morphing Ambien analog has become a showcase event, with the likes of Bayern Munich jetting its players in from a World Cup to be part of it just over a year ago. Manchester United, Chelsea – there is no team too big to be part of the showcase, one that gives MLS a cornerstone promotional week on its calendar. What the NBA All-Star Game is to winter, MLS’s event could, in time, be to the summer.

So this isn’t a question of whether MLS can make something out of nothing. It’s a question of whether that something will have anything of value. The league already has a marquee summer showcase. And its marketing arm is the major player in arranging summer friendlies for super clubs. Is there any value in piling on, upping the stakes by telling people it’s “official,” and repackaging something that already exists?

That’s for the fans to decide, but if they vote with their wallets and cast their support behind tickets, flights, hotel rooms and other tourism dollars, MLS can have an annual trademark even in its backyard. It can continue to try to rule New York, no matter how long that takes. And whether more exhibition games in the middle of the season make sense for hardcore fans who just want real soccer, the less critical fans that make up more of MLS’s target audience will have the ultimate sway.

But put yourself in the shoes of MLS’s schedule makers, already in one of the most difficult positions possible. The league plays a March-to-December schedule – fine. But some teams have to have open dates in the summer to have their own lucrative, irresistible friendlies. Those aren’t going away. Plus, the league wants to take U.S. Open Cup seriously. And CONCACAF Champions League, too. It wants to expand, but maintain something close to its current 34-game schedule, but it also wants more playoff teams, which means, eventually, a slightly longer postseason.

Now the league might take two teams — two teams more likely to go far in Open Cup, CONCACAF Champions League, and the playoffs — and, let’s say, pull them out of action for a week. Maybe the tournament format is like the Emirates Cup — two games over three day — but there’s no sense in doing this without promotional commitments. This isn’t just soccer; this is an event.

It’s an event the league can sell to television partners – potentially new ones. It’s a chance to put Steven Gerrard and Eden Hazard on a billboard in Times Square and have John Strong interview Garber in front of it. It’s a idea that could forge new relationships with coorporate partners all over the globe, because unless it’s a Euro or World Cup year, what else are those soccer fans doing each summer? Even then, there will always be an appetite to carry over that excitement into the new club season. If MLS can use the star power of Hazard and Ozil, Ronaldo and Messi, Ibra and Luiz to create a new summer classic? Well, it’s at least worth a shot.

But how do you think Bruce Arena, who complains almost annually about having to travel for U.S. Open Cup, will react to this? Especially since his team is unlikely to forgo those full-house friendlies they have each year at StubHub and the Rose Bowl. Think he’s going to enjoy a drop everything, fly cross country, bring his big names (because there are mics here, Bruce) and play two-in-three tournament. Knowing Bruce, I’m sure he’ll love it.

There seem to be two interlinked, otherwise non-issues that become a problem when ideas like this come up. First, MLS is not on a similar schedule to the teams that come over, meaning there will always be a second issue – a preseason-versus-in-season dissonance. Don Garber doesn’t want to move the schedule yet, which is fine, but this conflict is an externality. No matter how seriously MLS will want to take this event, the Chelseas and Arsenals of the world are still likely to play kids, while the Bruce Arenas of the world could bring out their benchwarmers.

In reality, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t have everything your way, and if a sacrifice of playing March-to-December means some exhibitions that don’t count in the standings get treated as, well, exhibitions, so be it. But it does bring us back to the obvious issue with Garber’s new idea: To what end? Living in a world where there will always be a ceiling on how popular these games can be, why double down, throw some weight behind a new tournament, when you’re not changing the realities of that world?

SEE MORE: Are you for or against promotion-relegation .. and why?

And ultimately, you have to consider the alternative. What if Major League Soccer just … didn’t? What if it just played actual games, in front of loyal home crowds, where the results matter in the standings? What if, instead of making your business model about diversions, you continued to crack that elusive but all-important nut: Getting people to care about the product the same way they care about the NFL or NBA; not one an event-to-event basis, but on a game-to-game, night-to-night basis. Implicitly, with every reach for a new event to deliver what fans want, there may be an acknowledgement that the league’s core product is still not strong enough.

Then again, Major League Soccer is much farther along than some of us thought it would be. Its growth under Garber has been practically exponential. If he and his team do prove us wrong, it won’t be the first time. And the soccer landscape might be better for it.

Don’t know TV Azteca? For most of the U.S., there’s a good reason for that. The Mexican broadcaster is a player in the FMF soccer world and will be broadcasting Oct. 10’s Confederations Cup playoff between the United States and Mexico, but unless you’re a Spanish speaker or a Liga MX diehard, you’ve probably never ventured onto the network.

Today, however, Azteca made a name for itself among a new batch of U.S.-based fans with one of the more entertaining promotional spots in recent memory. Capitalizing on the ongoing Donald Trump craze, Azteca took comments from the presidential candidate’s infamous candidacy announcement to promote its upcoming coverage.

SEE MORE: Tuesday a failure on all levels for Klinsmann, U.S. Soccer.

The full video, which can be seen, above, had over 60,000 views at the time of this posting – mere hours after the clip went public. Some of the highlights:

• As Trump says, “When Mexico sends its people (to the United States), they’re not sending their best,” Azteca edits in video of Cuauhtémoc Blanco, Jorge Campos, and Giovania dos Santos, all of whom have played in Major League Soccer.
• When Trump says, “Our country is in serious trouble,” Azteca intersperses video of El Tri goals among the confused expressions of Michael Bradley, Landon Donovan, Oguchi Onyewu, Tim Howard and Bob Bradley.
• When Trump says, “[The U.S. doesn’t] have victories anymore,” Azteca cuts to dos Santos’s famous goal in the 2011 Gold Cup final – Bob Bradley’s final game in charge of the U.S.

The clip ends with Trump bombastically pronouncing “the American dream is dead,” as if Azteca’s producers had secretly written his announcement speech with this video in mind.

SEE MORE: Klinsmann’s experiments equal a frustrating viewing experience.

No matter what you think of Trump’s politics, it’s an ingenious use of what’s become a notorious  speech. If FOX Sports can offer a similar response — being it building on Miguel Herrera’s airport decorum or Ricardo Ferretti’s sideline “tactics” — we might get a buildup that matches the hype of the much-anticipated playoff.

We’ve entered year five of Jurgen Klinsmann’s reign as U.S. men’s national team coach, and his world remains a nebulous, volatile one. The progress fans were promised when he succeeded Bob Bradley has yet to arrive, and any hope that the program’s reinforced foundations have a.) actually been reinforced, and b.) will offer a better tomorrow is obscured by the present, one where half the fanbase see Klinsmann as acceptable; the other half, a fraud.

This international break’s two results did little to unite those worlds, but a subtler, less equivocal truth is starting to emerge. As Klinsmann continues to use friendlies to experiment — as he starts the likes of Michael Orozco and Ventura Alvarado in central defense for what should be a high profile match — the importance of actually watching these games gets diminished. As Steve Davis said last week, drawing big lessons from these games is always a mistake, but now the joy of viewing them is starting to evaporate, too. When it comes to the actual quality on display, some of these games just aren’t actually that good.

For the most devoted of national team fans, supporting the team is not optional, but for those of us who take in soccer as entertainment, this summer has been rough. Poor Gold Cup performances with brow-furrowing team selections have established a pattern that extended into this break. The excitement of a coming U.S. friendly has been replaced with memories of sitting through two hours of alternating boredom and frustration – the type of performances that leave people feeling so disappointed by international soccer.

It’s not fun to see a team, matched up against a foe with Brazil’s talents, use the game as a test bed for Alejandro Bedoya in defensive midfield. It’s not entertaining to see a team match Championship-level defender Tim Ream against Premier League-caliber attacker Willian. It’s not a fun soccer experience to see Jozy Altidore abandoned at the top of a formation, and a game’s entertainment value destroyed when a cast of players in unfamiliar roles lack the chemistry to execute attacking movements.

These games are on ESPN and FOX Sports. The networks send their A-list talent to cover them. We get pregame shows, one-on-one interviews, a barrage of coverage from the usual suspects with the idea that this is entertainment.

But it’s not. It’s more akin to a bad movie than something that generates excitement. The pomp, circumstance, ritual of the U.S. friendly has the feeling of a big Pixar blockbuster, but the experience has become Pixels – a trite idea from a bad production company, pandering and poorly executed, with a leading man so many have grown tired of.

And yet, this is exactly what the U.S.’s leading man, Klinsmann, should be doing. Before, when the U.S. was less prone to wild experimentation in friendlies, did consistency serve the greater good? Perhaps, but perhaps not as much as giving Herculez Gomez more time before the 2010 World Cup would have. When Bradley trotted out 4-4-2 after 4-4-2, did the U.S. become a better team? Probably. The U.S. mastered the system that served it so well that cycle, but it also left the team inflexible, reliant on one approach, and short on answers when injuries and poor performances called for new solutions.

Klinsmann hasn’t exactly solved those problems – though it’s hard to dispute the program uses a much deeper player pool than it did before. He is trying, though. Instead of looking at matches against Brazil and Peru as points of pride, tying himself to an obligation that only serves to obscure the program’s real goals, Klinsmann has started DeAndre Yedlin in midfield. Instead of looking at the Gold Cup as a be all and end all, he rolled the dice with a defense centered around John Brooks and Alvarado. And instead of bringing players like Geoff Cameron and Bobby Wood into camp this summer, he felt the team’s long-term goals would be better suited by letting them battle for time with their clubs.

SEE MORE: Is Klinsmann right about his first choice defenders, or is he feeding us nonsense?

In that sense, constantly selecting hamstrung, experimental teams seems like a sound strategy. In the short-term, though, it makes for a terrible product. In flashes, the U.S. can be very entertaining to watch, with the rest of the world justifiably enamored with Klinsmann’s perceived transformation of the program. But what the rest of the world gets in distilled highlights, hardcore U.S. fans have to wrestle out of 90 often arduous minutes. The flamboyant displays we see against Germany and Holland are actually just stints in a broader, less convincing spell of performances.

That’s the type of description you give to a team that’s struggling, but to say the U.S. is struggling would be harsh. Yes, the team just lost 4-1 to Brazil on home soil, but we’ve been here before – starting second-choice teams against a world power, leading to a “well, we’re just not sure” conclusion. Be it in training or when players are back at their clubs, most of the team’s progress goes on outside of what we see in their occasional 90 minutes on the field. To draw conclusions from games alone seems to make sense, but particularly under Klinsmann, it may be a small piece of the picture.

Is the team making progress toward Oct. 10? Hard to tell. Are we getting a better idea of who will start in defense? Not really. Did anything happen this week that a month of club performance can’t overshadow? No. For as much as he stresses in-game performance, Klinsmann seems to have developed a decision-making process that far transcends what we see on the field. And because these friendlies aren’t treated with any urgency, we’re left reading scattered tea leaves from an otherwise dull meal.

At some point, that will change, be it in World Cup qualifying or, if CONCACAF doesn’t regain some of its swagger from Brazil, in Russia. Then again, the last qualifying cycle gave us experiments like Jose Torres at left back, Eddie Johnson at left wing and Brad Evans at full back. None of those players even made the trip to Brazil.

SEE MORE: Jurgen Klinsmann’s eventual replacement; How about Peter Vermes?

Until these games have some real stakes, whenever that may be, we are adrift at sea, with our ability to enjoy the U.S. at the mercy of our mercurial master and commander. Many of us are Russell Crowes, passionately imploring the horizon via 140-character bursts. Others of us are Paul Bettany, indulging in diversions between chasing rare quails at port.

But we are all waiting, hoping, passing the turbulent days the same way we embrace the peaceful – with irrelevance. Stress, hope, demand or demur, we’re trapped on this ship until Moscow’s tented roofs come into view, left to wait out the journey as if each day, each meaningless game, isn’t as irrelevant as the one before.

Perhaps we’ll reach shore in 2017, a year before we need to, but until then, our goal will be unchanged. We’re left to wait out the years until a game final matters, until our captain has to put out a real crew, and we can finally talk about these games without sounding absurd. We can pray that day is Oct. 10, but if the U.S. doesn’t qualify for a Confederations Cup, they’ll be no worse for it. It’s not like the glories of 2009 vaulted the U.S. to new heights.

But maybe, just maybe with the pressure of a U.S.-Mexico showdown, Klinsmann will give us a product to justify our time. Unfortunately, between now and 2018, it may be one of the few times we’ll have something entertaining to watch.

Converting a penalty kick in the 84th minute of England’s 2-0 win over Switzerland on Tuesday, Wayne Rooney passed Bobby Charlton on the England men’s national team’s all-time goal-scoring list, becoming the first Three Lions player to reach the 50-goal plateau.

Rooney’s finish high into the left of the Swiss goal broke a tie with Charlton that he forged last week, when his goal against San Marino moved him even with the Manchester United legend’s 45-year-old mark.

SEE MORE: It’s time for the English media to finally appreciate Wayne Rooney.

Rooney entered the international break tied for second on England’s all-time list with Gary Linker, who retired from international soccer in 1992 with 48 career goals.

Tuesday’s record-=breaking goal came in Rooney’s 107th international appearance, one more than Charlton made in an England career which ran from 1958 to 1970.

Harry Kane, starting at the top of Roy Hodgson’s formation, opened Tuesday’s scoring with a goal in the 67th minute, his third in four international appearances. Rooney gave England its final margin 17 minutes later after Raheem Sterling was brought down in the penalty box by Swiss midfielder Granit Xhaka. Though Yann Sommer guessed correctly by diving to his right post, a near-perfect kick high into the Swiss goal gave Rooney his celebrated mark.

SEE MORE: The question of where to play Wayne Rooney continues as ‘striker’ ties goalscoring record.

The victory was England’s second 2-0 win over Switzerland in Euro 2016 qualifying, having opened the campaign with a win by the same score in Basel. The result also maintained the team’s perfect record during qualifying for France 2016.

The Three Lions finish qualifying next month with games against Estonia and Lithuania.

Danny Welbeck has not featured for the England men’s national team since March. Now his manager fears recent knee surgery will sideline the Arsenal forward until the same time next year.

Roy Hodgson, speaking in the wake of England’s 6-0 Euro 2016 qualifying victory over San Marino, expressed concerns about the injury status of both Welbeck and Liverpool’s Daniel Sturridge, but amid early word from Arsenal that Welbeck will miss “a period of months,” the Three Lions boss shared fears he will not get one of his 33-time international back until shortly before before next summer’s tournament.

“Welbeck bothers me now,” Hodgson confessed on Sunday, revealing the recovery time for the forward’s recent knee surgery will be longer than some had initially hoped. “He has already been out for me since March and for Arsenal since April, so that’s over four months, isn’t it? And now I hear it’s another six months, so I can only hope that Danny recovers a bit quicker and then hits the ground running.”

SEE MORE: Welbeck undergoes knee surgery, expected to be out ‘months’.

Welbeck, a Manchester United product, had his first season at the Emirates cut short by what was initially treated as a bone bruise. But when the striker’s recovery stalled, surgery became the recommended treatment, with Arsenal announcing last week that the 24-year-old had undergone the procedure.

The lengthy absence will increase concerns for Hodgson, who has seen injuries to Welbeck and Sturridge limit his options at the striker position. Though new joint all-time goal scorer Wayne Rooney is entrenched at forward, and options like Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling and Theo Walcott persist, Hodgson has had to expand his player pool to try and fill Welbeck and Sturridge’s spots. Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy and Queens Park Rangers’ Charlie Austin have been recent surprise beneficiaries of the thinning squad, while West Brom’s Saido Berahino has been a standout for England’s under-21s.

“Daniel [Sturridge] is a bit the same [as Welbeck],” Hodgson explained. “It’s getting on for a year now [since he played for England]. They are always in my thoughts ­because I think they’re very good players and they did extremely well when they were playing in the national team I was coaching, but I’ve got to make certain that there are a few Vardys and Kanes and Walcotts, because we can’t keep going around talking about the ones who aren’t there.”

SEE MORE: It’s time for the English media to appreciate Rooney’s virtues.

Even if Sturrdige and Welbeck are options two and three on his depth chart, Hodgson’s dilemma falls far short of crisis levels. Having the likes of Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane to call on would be the envy of most coaches. It does, however present a problem for his preparation. If Hodgson is trying to build a team that maximizes his squad’s talents in France, does he imagine Welbeck and Sturridge in the team? Or do injury concerns mean he has to assume he’ll have a different, more hamstrung squad?

While most Champions League previews focus on individual clubs, the leagues’ positions could also be changing this season. The Premier League is in danger of losing its fourth Champions League spot. One of three leagues that qualify three teams directly into the group stage, with a fourth given its chance through a pre-tournament playoff, the Premier League has enjoyed a privileged place thanks to years of Chelsea, United and Arsenal advancing deep in the competition. But with the days of four English teams breaking into the quarterfinals expired, Italy, having ignominiously lost its fourth slot to Germany three years ago, is on the verge of overtaking England.

Through a system that allocates points to federations based on how teams do in Champions and Europa leagues, UEFA currently has England with 65.034 points, a reflection of how its teams have done over the last five seasons. That total is just behind Germany’s (66.749), who overtook England this summer, but leagues behind Spain, whose relative dominance of UEFA’s two tournaments leave it with 85.142 points. Spain gets four Champions League spots, but given that gap, it might deserve an honorary fifth or sixth place in the competition.

The gap behind the big three is not as pronounced. Italy, once in danger of falling behind Portugal or France, is back on England’s heels. Thanks to Juventus’s strong showing in last year’s Champions League, as well as a number of teams excelling in Europa, Italy gained more than five points on England last season. Now sitting at 60.605 points, Italy can overtake England with another season like last year.

The obvious quibble with that view: Italy’s 2014-15 was remarkable – perhaps too remarkable to expect from a consistent basis. The 19 points its teams earned in one year was by far its greatest total in the current five-year cycle (beginning in 2011-12). England, on the other hand, has bested Italy in each of 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14. And though it’s early, England also has most points this season, 3 to 1.666 (in case you cared).

Those numbers, however, reflect a history where England was performing far better in Europe. But last season, the Premier League failed to get a team into the Champions League’s quarterfinals. Same for Europa League, where only Everton broke into that tournament’s final 16. Odds are England will do better this year — long-term trends say so — but if the league happens to stumble, and if Italy has another big year, England will lose a Champions League spot for the 2017-18 tournament.

That’s a lot of ifs, but it’s also why last week’s UEFA Champions League draw was so important. Chelsea, with Porto as the toughest team in its group, will be favored to finish first and get an advantage come the Round of 16 draw. Same goes for Manchester United, who lucked into a group with PSV Eindhoven as its seeded team. Even Arsenal and Manchester City, slotted with Bayern Munich and Juventus, respectively, will be favorites to reach the next round, albeit in second place.

Of course, there are no guarantees, but with all of its teams avoiding groups of plague, famine and death, England should collect some valuable coefficient points. Even if Italy collects another 19 points (second to only Spain in last year’s competition), it might not be enough to reclaim that fourth Champions League spot.

The whole situation is still a warning, though, one that reminds us how fast things can change. England, not so long ago top of UEFA’s coefficient rankings, has suffered through the wanes of United and Liverpool, seen Chelsea unable to pose a serious threat in three years (hat-tip to that semifinal appearance, though), and still waits for Manchester City’s European form to match its payroll. If Arsenal also continues stumbling in the knockout round, England will be vulnerable.

That may be the biggest takeaway here, perhaps more telling than the actual rankings. Many moons will have to align to see England lose its last Champions League spot this season, but it’s no longer unforeseeable. Whereas once England was placing three teams in the Champions League semifinals, now its hard-pressed to get multiple teams into the quarterfinals. Extend those results year over year, and Spain pulls away, Germany catches up, and Italy can hold legitimate aspirations to England’s all-important final spot. Here, quantified (albeit imperfectly), we have an actual measurement of England’s regress, one that’s on the verge of major consequences.

Consider just how important that final Champions League spot has become. Last year, it was Manchester United’s salvation, with Louis van Gaal using it to steer an inconsistent team back into the world’s most lucrative competition. For years, Arsene Wenger used it as justification against his critics, often intimating that qualifying for Champions League, even as the league’s last qualifier, was more important than winning a cup. Manchester City used a fourth place finish under Roberto Mancini to vault to its current heights, while Tottenham used its Champions League appearance six years ago to go on a memorable quarterfinal run (at least, it was memorable for Inter right back Maicon).

Lose that fourth spot, and completion at the top of the league dramatically changes. City, Chelsea, and United have become the circuit’s three big spenders, and they’d likely put themselves in position to be near-perennial qualifiers. Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham could be left hoping for the occasional off year. Potentially, they’d have to significantly cut payroll and transfer budgets, no longer able to factor in the possibility of a Champions League payout. Instead of becoming a reasonable goal, Champions League would become a wish – something that’s largely beyond your control. Arsenal’s world could be crushed.

Of course, it’s all hypothetical, but at one point, Serie A’s most devoted saw its state as a hypothetical – a league once considered Europe’s best falling out of Europe’s top tier. Given the Premier League’s financial power, that’s unlikely to happen, and if it does, it won’t persist for long. Yet we’ve still reached a place where, much like the fringes of a drought, another dry year could bring disaster. And for the teams counting on that fourth spot, as well as those who tie their identity to the Premier League’s stature, losing a Champions League spot would be a disaster, of sorts.

Completing their second major signing of transfer deadline day, Everton have announced the permanent capture of Aaron Lennon, with the former Leeds United and Tottenham winger returning to Goodison Park on a three-year deal.

Lennon spent the second half of the 2014-15 Premier League season on loan with the Toffees before returning to Spurs this summer. Manager Roberto Martinez, however, made the permanent acquisition of the 28-year-old one of his last transfer window goals, with Everton declining to disclose a fee that’s been reportedly near £4.5 million.

SEE MORE: Up-to-the-minute transfer deadline deals.

“We are delighted to welcome Aaron back to Everton,” Martinez said in a statement posted to evertonfc.com. “We know we are getting a player our fans know inside out. He had a major role in the second half of our season and we’re looking forward to Aaron kicking on and continuing to enjoy his football, as well as being the productive player we know he can be.”

Lennon arrived at Everton on Feb. 1 and stayed with the club through the remainder of the last Premier League season, making 14 appearances and scoring twice during his time in blue.

Now, having permanently moved west, Lennon is ending a 10-year stint at White Hart Lane, where he made 364 all-competition appearances and scored 30 times after departing Leeds United in 2005.

“He is well-respected in the dressing room, his experience in the Premier League is immense and he will immediately add to our squad and to the ambition we have as a club,” Martinez explained.

The arrival of the 21-time England international bolsters the attacking midfield options for Martinez, who has started a trio of Arouna Kone, Ross Barkley and Tom Cleverley behind striker Romelu Lukaku since the first game of the Premier League season. With Lennon joining Steven Naismith, Kevin Mirallas and Gerard Deulofeu on Everton’s bench, Martinez has the depth he sought at the beginning of the transfer window, even if he was unable to snare the pure backup he’d sought for Barkley for the team’s No. 10 role.

TOFFEES TRANSFERS: Funes Mori | Rodriguez | Stones

The Toffees also signed Argentine defender Ramiro Funes Mori on Tuesday and announced the acquisition to forward Leandro Rodriguez from Uruguay’s River Plate this weekend.

Everton return from the international break on Saturday, Sept. 12 when Chelsea visit Goodison Park.

Manchester United has fired back in its escalating war of words with Real Madrid, responding to a statement the Spanish club posted to its website on Tuesday which attempted to explain United’s failures in transferring goalkeeper David de Gea to the Bernabeu.

United’s statement, issued as the club “[felt] compelled to provide some clarification,” detailed a timeline which largely paralleled the one in outlined by Real Madrid. However, portraying significant differences in how vital steps were executed, United’s version of events cast blame for the negotiation’s late start and failed conclusion El Real.

SEE MORE: Up-to-the-minute transfer deadline deals.

Disputing Real Madrid’s claim that United started negotiations late, United intimated it was not incumbent on them to being the process, as de Gea “is a key member of our squad and the club’s preference was not to sell.”

United’s statement explained that, by lunchtime in England, an agreement had been reached that was dependent on the successful transfer of goalkeeper Kaylor Navas to Old Trafford. With both de Gea and Navas in Spain, the Spanish club was in control of the process, according to United.

Transfer documents for both players were sent to Real Madrid at 8:42 p.m. England-time, according to United. De Gea’s was returned without a signature page at 10:32 p.m., 28 minutes before the close of Monday’s transfer window. By 10:40 p.m., “major changes to the documentation came through … which immediately put the deals at risk,” and only at 10:55 p.m., five minutes before the deadline, did United receive the documentation needed to cancel de Gea’s preexisting deal.

According to United, Navas’s paperwork was still pending at that point in time. By 10:59 p.m., however, Real Madrid had sent the agreement to United, at which time the team uploaded its documentation into the FIFA Transfer Matching System. Real Madrid, however, did not finished its end of the process, according to United:

It is our understanding that the deals couldn’t happen because:

– Real Madrid didn’t upload David’s documents onto TMS in time (Manchester United did)

– Real Madrid didn’t upload David’s documents to the Spanish league in time, per reports it seems some 28 minutes after the deadline

• The fact that Manchester United filed the papers on time was acknowledged by the Football Association, who offered to support that claim in any discussions with FIFA. The Club offered this assistance, as well as its own timestamped documents to Real Madrid but they have chosen not to go down this route.

The Spanish federation ultimately declined to approve the de Gea transfer, citing Real Madrid’s failure to supply the appropriate paperwork before Monday’s deadline.

SEE MORE: United make Anthony Martial the most expensive teenager ever.

Tuesday’s back-and-forth between two of the world’s biggest soccer clubs has overshadowed what’s normally a vibrant transfer deadline day, with rumors of fax machine mishaps, password issues and document format mismatches adding fuel to an already ignited story. But within the low-grade mud slinging that’s transpired from the Iberian peninsula to Britain lies one nugget the Spanish club so far can’t refute. Whereas the Spanish federation has declined to push through the deal on Madrid’s end, United claims the English FA is on board with its version of events. As the two clubs continue to play their digital blame game, that’s one small advantage United can claim in a useless battle.

Manchester United have confirmed the signing of Monaco’s Anthony Martial in a deal poised to make the 19-year-old French forward the most expensive teenager in history. Although a final fee has not been confirmed, previous reports placing Monaco’s price at £36 million would be a new world record for player under 20 years old.

United confirmed the move via the club’s Twitter account, announcing the 12-time France under-21 international had signed a four-year contract with the club. Martial had previously been linked to Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.

SEE MORE: Up-to-the-minute transfer deadline deals.

Martial, a product of the Olympique Lyonnais youth system, moved to Monaco for €5 million in the summer of 2013. Entering the final year of his contract, the Massy-born forward is com,ing off his first season of regular appearances with the club, having made 46 appearances and scored 12 goals in all competitions while helping Monaco to a third place finish.

United’s interest in Martial emerged in the wake of their failure to capture Pedro Rodriguez from Barcelona. With the Spanish international instead moving to Chelsea, and with Javier Hernandez sold to Bayer Leverkusen, United was left with only Wayne Rooney and Marouane Fellaini as striker options among manager Louis van Gaal’s senior squad.

SEE MORE: David de Gea deal falls apart.

Martial, a central attacker with the ability to play either flank, had appeared in five of Monaco’s six matches this season, including two appearances against Valencia in the club’s UEFA Champions League playoff. In 382 minutes, Martial had registered one assist while failing to score.

The French attacker’s signing comes one day after a series of departure from Old Trafford, including Hernandez’s (Bayer), Adnan Januzaj (loan to Borussia Dortmund) and Anders Lindegaard (West Brom). Jonny Evans (West Brom) and Tyler Blackett (loan to Celtic) have also left within the last week, while David de Gea’s move to Real Madrid was unable to be completed before Spain’s transfer deadline.

According to multiple reports in Spain, David de Gea’s transfer saga is over, with the Manchester United having signed for Real Madrid, with Costa Rican international Keylor Navas headed to Old Trafford.

De Gea, in the last year of his contract with United, is set to move in a deal which could reach 40 million euros, one that ends months of speculation the Spanish international was bound for El Real.

SEE MORE: Up-to-the-minute transfer deadline deals.

In a separate deal, United is expected to pay 15 million euros for Navas, who moved to Real Madrid from Levante last summer.

Neither Manchester United nor Real Madrid have confirmed either deal.

De Gea, United’s first choice goalkeeper since joining the club from Atletico Madrid in 2011, has yet to play this season, with manager Louis van Gaal claiming the 24-year-old has lacked the proper mindset to play for the club. During his four previous seasons at the club, however, de Gea made 131 league appearances, helping United to a Premier League title in 2012-13.

Navas, having made only 11 all-competition appearances in his first year with Real Madrid, has yet to allow a goal through two games this season. The 61-time Costa Rican international, who earned his move to Real Madrid thanks to a stellar 2014 World Cup, would compete for United’s starting role with Argentine Sergio Romero, who drew criticism this weekend after conceding twice in United’s 2-1 loss at Swansea.

De Gea would be Manchester United’s fourth departure of the day, with Javier Hernandez (to Bayer Leverkusen), Adnan Januzaj (to Borussia Dortmund) and Anders Lindegaard’s (to West Brom) moves already confirmed by the club. United is also reportedly on the verge of signing forward Anthony Martial from Monaco.

Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez has signed a three-year deal with Bayer Leverkusen, the Bundesliga club announced today, ending the Mexico international’s five-year run at Manchester United. Initially report have Bayer paying a£8.75 million transfer fee for the 27-year-old star.

The arrival of Hernandez will add needed depth to a Leverkusen striker corps that was dependent on 31-year-old Stefan Kiessling, with whom Chicharito will compete for playing time. Both strikers will benefit from a talented midfield that includes Karim Bellarbi, Hakan Calhanoglu and Christoph Kramer.

Hernandez’s United career found instant fame after his transfer from Chivas Guadalajara five years ago, scoring 20 times in 45 appearances in 2010-11. Despite scoring 30 more all-competition goals over the next two seasons, Hernandez’s prospects in Manchester quickly dimmed, with a nine-goal season in 2013-14 followed with a season-long loan to Real Madrid.

SEE MORE: Up-to-the-minute transfer deadline deals.

There, after another nine-goal season, Hernandez returned to United, where he struggled for playing time after Wayne Rooney was moved into manager Louis van Gaal’s striker’s role. Though Hernandez has made three substitutes appearances this season, van Gaal has been reported to prefer other options, with Belgian Marouane Fellaini’s return from suspension making Chicharito expendable.

Gedion Zelalem, Rubio Rubin and Emerson Hyndman are among the 24 players United States under-23 men’s national team head coach Andi Herzog has selected for the team’s upcoming camp in Manchester, U.S. Soccer announced today. The 10-day camp — the team’s final camp before 2016 Olympic qualifying in October — begins on Aug. 30 and includes friendlies against England and Qatar.

The 18-year-old Zelalem, having recently moved on loan from Arsenal to Rangers, will be looking to make his seventh and eighth appearances for the U.S., his six previous caps coming a under-20-level.

SEE MORE: Zelalem is joining a distinguished U.S. men’s national team history at Rangers

Rubin, having just completed his first season with Utrecht in the Dutch Eredivisie, already has three senior national team caps, while Fulham midfielder Hyndman made his senior team debut in Aug. 2014.

Among the other prominent invitees who’ll try to earn a spot on the U.S.’s qualifying roster are Real Salt Lake’s Luis Gil, Columbus Crew midfielder Will Trapp and Tottenham defender Cameron Carter-Vickers.

“These are two important games here because they are our last before the Olympic Qualifying tournament,” Herzog said, in a statement distributed by U.S. Soccer. “We have a strong group of players that we believe in, and now we are able to look as some of the guys who did very well with our U-20 team. This is really the last chance for all of the players to make an impression before we select the final roster for qualifying.”

The U.S. failed to qualify for the 2012 Summer Olympics, with a team led by current Portland Timbers head coach Caleb Porter failing to make it out of the first group stage of CONCACAF’s qualifying tournament in 2011. The U.S. had appeared in four of the five previous Olympics, finishing fourth at the 2000 games in Sydney.

Though Major League Soccer has the greatest representation in the roster, teams from eight countries beyond MLS have players in Herzog’s selection: England (four), Germany (three), Mexico (two), Cyrpus, Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, and Switzerland (one, each).

CONCACAF Olympic qualifying begins on Oct. 1, with the U.S. to face Canada, Cuba and Panama in Group A at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas.

ROSTER

GOALKEEPERS (3): Cody Cropper (MK Dons; Maple Grove, Minn.), Ethan Horvath (Molde; Highlands Ranch, Colo.), Zack Steffen (Freiburg; Downington, Pa.).

DEFENDERS (8): Cameron Carter-Vickers (Tottenham Hotspur; Westcliff on Sea, England), Matt Miazga (New York Red Bulls; Clifton, N.J.), Eric Miller (Montreal Impact; Woodbury, Minn.), Boyd Okwuonu (Real Salt Lake; Edmund, Okla.), Shane O’Neill (Apollon Limassol; Boulder, Colo.), William Packwood (Unattached; Concord, Mass.), Dillon Serna (Colorado Rapids; Brighton, Colo.), Oscar Sorto (LA Galaxy; Los Angeles, Calif). 

MIDFIELDERS (8): Gboly Ariyibi (Chesterfield; Arlington County, Va.), Luis Gil (Real Salt Lake; Garden Grove, Calif.), Emerson Hyndman (Fulham; Dallas, Tex.), Benji Joya (Club Necaxa; San Jose, Calif.), Marc Pelosi (San Jose Earthquakes; Sunnyvale, Calif.), Matt Polster (Chicago Fire; Milwaukee, Wisc.), Wil Trapp (Columbus Crew; Gahanna, Ohio), Gedion Zelalem (Rangers; Bethesda, Md.). 

FORWARDS (5): Alonso Hernandez (C.D. Juarez; El Paso, Texas), Jerome Kiesewetter (VfB Stuttgart; Berlin, Germany), Mario Rodriguez (Borussia Mönchengladbach; North Hollywood, Calif.), Rubio Rubin (Utrecht; Beaverton, Ore.), Maki Tall (Scion; Washington, D.C.).

Amid the inevitable retirements to come out of this summer’s Women’s World Cup, there was one absolute stunner. True, while United States’ international Lauren Holiday’s announcement was, for some, premature (she’s only 27 year’s old), it had been rumored since early spring, when the National Women’s Soccer League season was about to start. The bigger surprise was similar news from someone who, internationally, is a slightly bigger star. Germany international Celia Sasic, also 27, was retiring to pursue life away from the field.

Today in Monaco, Sasic was honored with UEFA’s Best Player award for the 2014-15 season, with the real time vote from a select panel giving her the honor over Lyon’s Amandine Henry and former Frankfurt teammate Dzsenifer Maroszan. Having led both her league and European competition in goals last season, Sasic’s award was certainly deserved, but it also served as a reminder of the immense talent the women’s game has lost.

Sasic is coming off a dominant Champions League in which her 14 goals in eight games helped lead Frankfurt to their fourth European title. Combined with her league-leading 22 goals in the Frauen Bundesliga, Sasic was a favorite for UEFA’s award, having potentially distinguished herself as the best striker in the world. Two years into a three-year deal with Frankfurt, Sasic seemed poised to continue her run as one of the world’s elites.

But in May, Sasic exercised an out clause in her contract. Rumors linked her with a potential payday outside of Germany, perhaps with Chelsea in England’s Women’s Super League. To everyone’s surprise, though, Sasic declined to cash in on the Golden Boot she won at Canada 2015. Instead, in the prime of her career, she walked away from the game.

Though it’s rare, we’ve seen great players do this before, the most obvious example of which is basketball great Michael Jordan. Jordan, Sasic certainly is not, nor is she leaving the game because of the type of on-field, off-field complexities that drove Jordan to the baseball diamond. She wasn’t leaving because of any malice, misgivings or lack of professional opportunities, and unlike stars we see in other sports, she wasn’t making a decision in the face of risks on the field. Thankfully, unlike many women’s professional players, there was no indication money was an issue.

Sasic was merely making a life choice, one that’s rarely as compelling for those operating at the higher profile levels of the game. She’s merely moving on, with the rest of what life has to offer now more compelling than soccer.

From this summer’s retirement announcement:

“I was allowed to play in the Women’s Bundesliga for eleven years, experienced unforgettable moments with the Women’s national team for ten and a half years and was part of an unbelievable development, and that makes me proud. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to begin a new chapter in my life and call time on my professional football career.”

“I’m now looking forward to a range of new things in my life,” she said. “I want to finish my studies, sort out my career path, start a family and a lot more.”

For many Americans — those that become engrossed in women’s soccer when the World Cup resurfaces — this summer was their first real introduction to Sasic. Or, perhaps it was a reminder of a player they only scarcely saw four years before, as a 22-year-old. Unfortunately for those viewers, this summer’s lasting memory of Sasic may be her pulling a penalty kick wide against the United States in the semifinals, turning what looked to be a sure 1-0 second half lead into a chance for the Americans to move on.

That, however, is not how most women’s soccer fans will remember the former Celia Okoyino da Mbabi. They will remember her as a player who, over these last six years of her peak, scored 95 goals in 117 Bundesliga appearances. They’ll remember her as Germany’s best player 2012 and a back-to-back Bundesliga leading scorer. They’ll remember her as a Bundesliga, Champions League, and European Championships winner. They’ll remember her as a player who, when she walked away, may have done so as the standard at her position.

The next Frauen Bundesliga begins on Friday, with heavyweights Bayern Munchen and Turbine Potsdam playing what’s potentially one of the season’s most important games. But the league will also start without one of Germany’s best players signed on – a player who, technically, is not a player anymore at all.

Despite years left in a career which had already accumulated 111 international appearances and 63 goals, Sasic is done. And for all the brilliance she gave in her decade-plus on the field — her sniper’s awareness; her beguiling perceptiveness; the impact she had, even when her team lacked the ball — today’s award was a timely reminder: For most of us, she’s left the game too soon.

Fortunate draws left Chelsea and Manchester United as clear favorites in their UEFA Champions League groups, while Manchester City and Arsenal were placed with European powers during today’s group stage draw in Monaco.

Manchester United, returning to the Champions League after a one-year absence, took advantage of UEFA’s new format that seeded the winners of Europe’s top eight leagues. As a result, United, whose coefficient ranking put them in the second pot drawn, were placed into Group C with Dutch champions PSV Eindhoven. CSKA Moscow and Wolfsburg round out a quartet that will leave Louis van Gaal’s team favorites to move into the knockout round.

SEE MORE: How Manchester United have fared in UEFA Champions League.

Chelsea, one of the first teams drawn from pot one, will face one of Jose Mourinho’s former teams, Portuguese runners up Porto. They’re joined by the champions of Ukraine and Isreal, Dynamo Kyiv and Maccabi Tel Aviv, in Group G – one of the competition’s easier groups.

Arsenal did not share Chelsea and United’s fortune, though the Gunners will still be expected to advance from Group F. Five-time champions Bayern Munich will be favored to top the group, while Olympiacos and Dynamo Zagreb completed the foursome.

Manchester City received the most difficult route of England’s Champions League qualifiers. Drawn out of the second pot, City was placed into Group D with one of last year’s finalists, Juventus. Europa League champions Sevilla were pulled from the third pot, with Germany’s Borussia Moenchengladbach completing one of the competition’s deepest groups.

Defending champions Barcelona avoided major obstacles, though Bayer Leverkusen and Roma were drawn into one of the competition’s most interesting battles for second place. Belarusian champion BATE Borisov is the fourth team in Group E.

SEE MORE: Valencia eliminate Monaco, become fifth Spanish club in Champions League group stage [VIDEO].

Spain’s other giant, Real Madrid, will have a more difficult route than their arch rivals, having been draw into Group A with Paris Saint-Germain and Shakhtar Donetsk. Swedish champions Malmo have the misfortunate of being the fourth team in a top-heavy group.

Another of Madrid’s rivals, Atletico, were the day’s big winners. Drawn out of the second pot, Atleti joined Portuguese champions Benfica in Group C, a quartet that was completed by Turkish champions Galatasaray and Kazakhstan’s Astana.

The competition’s final group projects to be one of its most balanced. Russian champions Zenit St. Petersburg drew Valencia in Group H, where they were joined by French runners up Lyon and Belgian champions Gent.

Champions League group play begins on Sept. 15.

Full draw

Group A: Paris Saint-Germain (France), Real Madrid (Spain), Shakhtar Donetsk (Ukraine), Malmo (Sweden)

Group B: PSV Eindhoven (Netherlands), Manchester United (England), CSKA Moscow (Russia), Wolfsburg (Germany)

Group C: Benfica (Portugal), Atletico Madrid (Spain), Galatasaray (Turkey), Astana (Kazakhstan)

Group D: Juventus (Italy), Manchester City (England), Sevilla (Spain), Borussia Moechengladback (Germany)

Group E: Barcelona (Spain), Bayer Leverkusen (Germany), Roma (Italy), BATE Borisov (Belarus)

Group F: Bayern Munich (Germany), Arsenal (England), Olympiacos (Greece), Dinamo Zagreb (Croatia)

Group G: Chelsea (England), Porto (Portugal), Dynamo Kyiv (Ukraine), Maccabi Tel Aviv (Israel)

Group H: Zenit Saint Petersburg (Russia), Valencia (Spain), Lyon (France), Gent (Belgium)

Belgian international Kevin de Bruyne is expected to travel to England on Thursday to complete a £54 million move to from Wolfsburg to Manchester City, according to reports. The news comes after a summer of speculation linking the former Chelsea prospect with a return to the Premier League, with Wednesday’s developments described as a breakthrough in negotiations.

According to the Guardian, minor details of the transfer remain unresolved, such as the structure of City’s payments of the German club. Wolfsburg, however, are reported to have agreed to the City-record €74 million move, with bonuses in the deal potentially pushing the 24-year-old’s price to €80 million (£58.5 million).

SEE MORE: ESPN FC to deliver expansive Transfer Deadline Day coverage on Tuesday.

After failing to win consistent playing time after transferring to Chelsea from Genk in 2012, de Bruyne was sold to Wolfsburg in the summer of 2014, where he went on to have one-and-half standout seasons. In his maiden Bundesliga campaign, de Bruyne recorded three goals and six assists in 16 matches after arriving in 2014’s January transfer window. Last season, in his only full campaign with the Wolves, de Bruyne was one of the best players in the German league, posting 10 goals and 20 assists in 34 league appearances.

Having led Wolfsburg to a second place finish last year, de Bruyne is ready to return to England, with his wages reportedly set to approach £250,000 per week. With his transfer fee alone, de Bruyne’s acquisition will push City’s summer spending well north of £100 million in fees, having already purchased Raheem Sterling (Liverpool), Fabian Delph (Aston Villa) and Nicolas Otamendi (Valencia).

SEE MORE: De Bruyne was duped into saying he would stay at Wolfsburg, says agent.

De Bruyne’s addition will bolster an already crowded attacking midfield that’s seen former starter Samir Nasri relegated to the bench. Though it’s unclear when de Bruyne will be ready to play for City, the most likely player to give way is current right wing Jesus Navas, who has spent much of his previous two seasons in Manchester occupying a substitute’s role.

With Sterling and David Silva seemingly entrenched in Manuel Pellegrini’s setup, de Bruyne is primed to round out one of the most potent attacking midfields in England, making a team off to a perfect 3-0-0 start even more formidable.

Coming into the season, Manchester United’s biggest question was supposed to be in defense, where fans’ brows furrowed when Daley Blind started the season at center back. Goalkeeper was also a doubt, with Sergio Romero chosen over the want-away David de Gea, while the additions of Morgan Schneiderlin and Bastian Schweinsteiger in midfield hinted at a period of adjustment. Even the arrival of highly-touted Memphis, sure to become a needed source of goals, came with a period of transition from the defense-agnostic Dutch league.

But having shown a solidified defense, competent midfield, and with Memphis flashing periodic hints of acclimatizing, United’s biggest worries returned to an old, wayward soul: Wayne Rooney. The club captain, the team’s highest-paid player, and a man who’s engaged in two prominent gambits to leave the club this decade had only scored once since April. Now, entrenched as the team’s lead striker and freed from the demands of helping in midfield, Rooney was off to a disappointing start.

SEE MORE: Manchester United returns to Champions League with romp in Belgium [VIDEO]

I say “was” because today, with Manchester United looking to confirm its Champions League return in Belgium, Rooney finally broke out. With three adroit finishes in the Club Brugge penalty area, Rooney ended his drought, helping United to a 4-0 (7-1, agg.) victory in the process.

In a way, it was typical Rooney, packing all his goals into a short span, making his overall line look more impressive. Now with three goals in five games, defenders who haven’t watched can argue Rooney’s actually having a good season, just as they’ve been able to defend past, inconsistent performance. But for as productive as today was in Brugge, Rooney’s previous four games had been just as terrible. A consensus was starting to form: Rooney could no longer produce as a number nine.

Rooney, of course, disagreed. After a disappointing performance in United’s 1-0 win against Aston Villa, Rooney fired back at his detractors, saying critics were overreacting to limited results.

“I’ve had one bad game this season and everyone’s all over it,” Rooney said. “I know I’ve had that all throughout my career but hopefully at the weekend I can get off the mark.”

It was a narrow response to a much broader critique – that Rooney was no longer suited for his favorite role. After his performance in Belgium, though, Rooney at least gave that consensus reason to reconsider. And at best, his performance in Belgium gave it reason to reverse course. These weren’t lucky goals perfectly timed to spark a fading talent. They were calm, skillful touches that, while not remarkable goals, were the type of finishes Rooney had blown during his 11-match goalless drought. His early, quick chip off Memphis’s through ball over an oncoming keeper hinted his scoring instincts may not have expired, while his inability to blow his next two chances confirmed Rooney’s first was no fluke.

We’ve seen these outbursts before. Even this spring, before his goals dried up, Rooney scored five times in six appearances between February and March. Before that, though, Rooney had gone nine games without a goal, and before that, he’d again scored five in six.

Overall, the stats don’t look that bad – 13 goals in 34 games for a man that’s spent a large chunk of that time in midfield. But because of his propensity to score in bunches, Rooney has actually only scored in 10 of those 34 appearances, leaving United with 24 matches where they didn’t get an end product from their leading scorer.

SEE MORE: Wayne Rooney insists that his goals will come for Manchester United.

Goals are goals, and Rooney has registered more than his share of assists in that time, but his inconsistency highlights the perils of relying on the 29-year-old as your main scorer. On one night in Brugge, he can be his old, dominant, line-leading self, fueling contrarian notions that he can spearhead a team contending for a title. On most nights, though, he is more akin to “[t]he corpse of a pigeon slowly putrefying in the sun.”

With a young Memphis the next most-likely to score, and with a little-trusted Javier Hernandez in the wings, waiting for another Rooney swoon seems precarious. He may score the 25 goals he and Louis van Gaal predict, but if they don’t come with the consistency of a Sergio Aguero or Diego Costa, United will be weak in one area their main competition is not.

Even then, being weak is better than being terrible, and tonight in Belgium, Rooney was decidedly not terrible.

LA Galaxy left back Todd Dunivant, hampered throughout most of the last two Major League Soccer season with injuries, will retire at the end of the season, the team has announced. During his 13-year MLS career, Dunivant has been part of five MLS Cup-winning teams and was named to the league’s Best XI after the 2011 season.

“I have given this game all that I can and will step away extremely thankful to have played in MLS for the last 13 seasons,” Dunivant said, in a statement released by the club. “It has been an honor to represent four great clubs and is extremely special for me be a part of this league as it has continued to develop.”

Dunivant, 34, entered the league in 2003 with the San Jose Earthquakes and played for the Galaxy, New York Red Bulls and Toronto FC before reuniting with his Red Bulls head coach, Bruce Arena, with Los Angeles in 2009.

SEE MORE: As NYCFC learned, it’s the LA Galaxy then everyone else in MLS right now.

During his time with the Galaxy, Dunivant has won four MLS Cups (2005, 2011, 2012, 2014), one U.S. Open Cup (2005), and two Supporter’s Shields (2010, 2011). Dunivant won another MLS Cup with San Jose in 2003.

“Todd has been one of the best ambassadors for MLS on-and-off the field,” Arena said. “He has represented both this team and our league exceptionally and has been influential in helping it become what it is today. We’re proud and honored that Todd will finish his career with the Galaxy.”

A two-time United States international, Dunivant was acquired by the Galaxy from Toronto for allocation money in 2009. Including his first stint with the team from 2005 to 2006, Dunivant has made 193 appearances with the Galaxy, scoring four times and recording 14 assists.

At one time seen as a prime example of Arena’s ability to leverage veteran talent, Dunivant cemented his own legacy in 2011,  making 36 appearances between the regular season and playoffs as the Galaxy won the league-MLS Cup double. His four assists that season were a career high, while league award voters honored his standout campaign with his only appearance in the league’s postseason Best XI.

To date, Dunivant has 282 career regular season appearances, recording seven goals and 21 assists.

SEE MORE: 10 things we learned from MLS game week 25.

“I want to thank my family, coaches, teammates and fans, who have offered their constant support and helped make my career a successful one,” Dunivant said. “The Galaxy have played such a meaningful role during my time in MLS and I am happy to finish this season while representing this club.”

Still recovering from plantar fasciitis surgery, Dunivant will finish the season in the hopes of helping LA to their fourth MLS Cup in five years. Should he do so, Dunivant will tie Landon Donovan’s all-time individual record of six MLS Cup titles.

A late push from Monaco at the Stade Louis II couldn’t overcome the lead Alberto Negredo helped Valencia reinforce, with Los Che using the striker’s fourth minute goal in the second leg of the teams’ UEFA Champions League playoff to secure a 4-3 aggregate victory, one that gives Spain five teams in this season’s Champions League group stage.

Thanks in large part to last week’s 3-1 victory at the Mestalla Stadium, Valencia washable to withstand Tuesday’s 2-1 loss, joining Barcelona, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Sevilla in the tournament’s 32-team main phase. It’s the first time a single federation has qualified five teams for the tournament’s group stage.

SEE MORE: Preview of UEFA Champions League playoff matches and TV times.

Barcelona qualified for the competition as the competition’s holders, having won the European title in June, but would have also qualified by virtue of winning Spain’s Primera Division last season. Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid, Spain’s second and third place finishers, respectively, qualified with their league finishes, while Sevilla advanced straight into the Champions League’s final 32 after winning last season’s Europa League.

Valencia, fourth place finishers in Spain last season, were forced to qualify through UEFA’s Champions League playoffs and were within one goal of being forced into extra time in Monaco. But France’s third place finishers, quarterfinalists in last year’s competition, were unable to build on Guido Carrillo’s 75th score. Within one goal of extending the match another 30 minutes, Monaco’s Champions League hopes ran out of time, with the one-goal aggregate defeat relegating them to the Europa League.

The match took a decisive turn early when Negredo, given the starting nod over Paco Alcacer, scored in the fourth minute to pull Valencia even on away goals. The tally also made the score 4-1, eliminating Monaco’s tie-breaker edge, forcing the hosts to score three times.

Monaco pulled one goal back early when defender Andrea Raggi beat Valencia goalkeeper Mat Ryan from the middle of the penalty area to make it 4-2. But it would be another 57 minutes before Monaco would get halve their deficit, leaving them too little time to find an equalizer.

SEE MORE: Five talking points as Manchester United visit Club Brugge in Champions League.

Elsewhere on Tuesday, Shakhtar Donetsk defended last week’s 1-0 win at Rapid Wien with a 2-2 draw in Lviv.

Malmo overturned its 3-2 deficit against Celtic with a 2-0 victory at Swedbank Stadium.

Dinamo Zagreb built on its 2-1 lead with a 4-1 win over Albanian champions Skenderbeu Korce.

Basel was upset by Maccabi Tel Aviv when a 2-2 draw in Israel allowed the hosts to advance on away goals, 3-3.

Champions League’s playoffs continue on Wednesday, with this season’s group stage draw scheduled to be held Thursday in Monaco.

One year after arriving on Merseyside, Mario Balotelli is about to return home. The Italian international is set to be loaned by Liverpool back to AC Milan, the club from which Liverpool bought the 25-year-old for £16 million one year ago.

Balotelli expected to undergo a medical at Milan’s training ground on Tuesday.

Balotelli arrived at Liverpool on Aug. 21, 2014 with expectations he would help the void left by Luis Suárez’s departure for Barcelona. Instead, a season of struggles produced only four goals in 28 all-competition appearances, with ineffectiveness limiting the former Inter Milan and Manchester City attacker to only 16 Premier League appearances.

Combined with Daniel Sturridge’s health issues and Ricky Lambert’s poor results, Balotelli’s struggles helped account for Liverpool’s 49-goal decrease in scoring between the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons (101 goals to 52). With Lambert now at West Bromwich Albion, Balotelli looks to be the next striker to leave the club.

Through three matches this season, Balotelli has yet to dress, with Liverpool’s desire to move him an open secret. But Balotelli’s reportedly high wages have left Liverpool with few suitors, leaving the Italian international in exile while a new home was found. Given he was due a six-figure loyalty bonus if he stayed with the club, Balotelli was expected to stay with the club.

SEE MORE: Mario Balotelli’s Liverpool future is in his own hands, says Brendan Rodgers.

Now Balotelli’s expected to move back to an old, favored home. “Super Mario” was controversially photographed in the rossoneri of his favorite club in 2010, during his time at Inter, and he found refuge in red and black after Manchester City gave up on his talents in 2013. After a successful stint with Milan (2013-2014), Balotelli earned a move to Liverpool, allowing Milan to take in some much-needed cash. But after 12 months under Brendan Rodgers, Balotelli appears set for a return to the San Siro.

During his 43-game stint at Milan, Balotelli scored 30 goals in 54 appearances. In the two years that surrounded that move — one with Manchester City, the other with Liverpool — Balotelli’s scored only seven goals in 48 matches.

Arsenal and Rangers have confirmed the loan of United States’ U-20 prospect Gedion Zelalem to the Scottish second-division club until Jan. 3, 2016. The 18-year-old midfielder, who spent Sunday visiting Ibrox Stadium, trained with his new teammates on Monday.

The move allows Zelalem to follow in the footsteps of DaMarcus Beasley, Carlos Bocanegra, Maurice Edu and Claudio Reyna – prominent U.S. internationals who had an impact in Glasgow. Unlike those U.S. internationals, however, Zelalem arrives at Ibrox with limited experience at senior club level. To date, Zelalem’s exposure to Arsenal’s first team has been limited to an FA Cup appearance in Jan. 2014 and a UEFA Champions League group stage bow in December that year.

Four months with Rangers could finally give fans an extended look at the young American’s potential.

“Playing in front of 50,000 fans will replicate what it will be like at Arsenal, and the media spotlight is also similar,” Zelalem explained. 

“The manager wants to play great football too, and they were all factors in my decision to come here.

“Everyone knows the name ‘Glasgow Rangers’ so right away I was interested.”

SEE MORE: Zelalem is joining a distinguished U.S. men’s national team history at Rangers.

The Berlin-born prospect, a former Germany U-level international who was also eligible to play for his parent’s birth country of Ethiopia, emigrated to the U.S. with his father in 2006.

Though he left the U.S. to play for Arsenal’s academy in 2013, he applied for a United States passport after obtaining citizenship in late 2014, a step that would allow him to represent the U.S. at international level.

Thanks in part to U.S. Soccer seeking an exemption to FIFA’s rules requiring five years of ongoing residency in a country before international eligibility, Zelalem was approved to represent the U.S. on May 13, 2015.

Four hundred thousand Euros won’t cover a month’s wages for the world’s best soccer players, but for one Spanish third division club, that relative windfall — its proceeds from Pedro Rodriguez’s move from Barcelona to Chelsea — could mean a new future, one that’s debt-free and stable.

That’s because the €410,000 Tenerife club Raqui San Isidro will receive from the attacker’s sale will allow it to repay its debt to the Spanish government (€22,000) as well as an outstanding bank loan (€80,000) – small amounts, but huge commitments at a level where clubs struggle to meet their day-to-day commitments. With the rest of its windfall, Raqui can invest in property that will ensure the club has a safety net against future troubles.

That kind of security seems a long stretch for 1.5 percent of a player’s transfer fee, but Rodriguez’s price was reported to be €27 million, with an additional three million possible in potential add-ons. While Barcelona will see the bulk of that money, a sliver of the proceeds will travel from Chelsea’s accounts, to the Spanish federation, and into the coffers of the Spanish Segunda Division B club.

The scant figure could prove a godsend for a player who was never heavily scouted. According to AS.com, Barcelona signed Pedro in 2003 while pursuing Jeffren Suárez, who was then playing for CD Tenerife. At the invitation of that club’s president, Barcelona’s head of scouting attended a tournament on the island only to see Pedro star for a collection of local players. After eight anonymous years training in the Raqui system, the 16-year-old was scooped up by one of the world’s most famous clubs.

After spending five years between Barcelona’s academy, C and B teams, Pedro was brought into Barça’s senior team by Pep Guardiola. In the seven years that followed, Pedro scored 99 goals, won five league titles, four Spanish Cups, three UEFA Champions League and, while with Spain, a World Cup and European Championship. In all, Pedro won 20 major honors during his seven years in blaugrana.

SEE MORE: Pedro targets silverware with Chelsea.

Squeezed for playing time at Barcelona, Pedro has moved to England, joining Chelsea this week. The deal’s biggest winner, however, may be the club he’s long left behind. While €410,000 may only cover a fraction of the wages Pedro will earn at Stamford Bridge, it will allow Raqui San Isdro to clear their debts, invest in property on the island’s coast, and be able to survive off rent generated from the property’s apartments.

Economically, it’s the ultimate trickle down effect, from the lofty heights of Chelsea and Barcelona to the humble realities of Spain’s third division. But it’s also a reminder: for most clubs, a sliver is more than enough. Nearly 12 years after seeing him go, Raqui have received their Pedro Rodriguez windfall.

Four days after announcing Sergio Ramos’ new deal, Real Madrid has confirmed the team’s other starting center back, Pepe, will also stay put. Extending a contract that was set to expire in June, the Portugal international has agreed to a deal which will run through the 2016-17 season, giving the 32-year-old a change to reach a full decade of service to the Spanish club.

The Brazil-born defender originally joined Real Madrid in July 2007 from FC Porto for a €30 million fee. Since, Pepe has made 195 La Liga appearances, taking part in two league title-winning campaigns and helping the club claim the 2013-14 UEFA Champions League.

Under new head coach Rafa Benitez, Pepe is expected to begin his ninth campaign with Madrid on Sunday when his club opens their La Liga campaign against newly-promoted Sporting Gijon. Should he see out his new extension, Pepe will have spent a full decade at the Santiago Bernabeu.

Though he has 10 winners medals to his credit during that span, Pepe’s time in white has also cast him as a controversial figure. During his first season with Real Madrid, he was involved in a training ground fight with teammate Javier Balboa. The next season, Pepe earned a 10-match ban for kicking one opponent and striking another during Madrid’s April 2009 game against Getafe.

During his time under former Real Madrid manager Jose Mourinho (2010-13), Pepe was one of the key players in escalating tensions between Real Madrid and Barcelona. In April 2011, he drew a red card during the first leg of a Champions League semifinal against Barça, leaving him suspended for the return leg. In January 2012, Pepe stepped on the hand of a fallen Lionel Messi during teams’ Copa del Rey quarterfinal.

In March 2012, Pepe earned a two-match suspension after confronting a referee in the locker room area following Madrid’s 1-1 draw away to Villarreal. In 2014, Pepe was red carded from a group stage game at the Brazil World Cup after headbutting German attacker Thomas Muller.

SEE MORE: La Liga preview: A new season beckons for Spanish giants.

Amid the controversies, Pepe remained a key member of a Portuguese national team that qualified for two European Championships and the 2010 and 2014 World Cups. In both 2008 and 2012, he was named to UEFA’s European Championship teams of the tournament, while UEFA also named him to their 2013-14 Team of the Season. Pepe also earned two previous contact extensions from Madrid, after the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons.

Though Raphael Varane should continue to see increased playing time next to Sergio Ramos, Pepe’s extension hints he’ll be part of the French international’s transition into a more prominent role. Along the way, Pepe should become one of the rare players who can say they enjoyed a full decade in white for the Spanish giants.