Originally posted by gng007:WojBhoy,
Wow! Thank you very much! That was great and I really appreciate it. I think I probably know more about soccer now than anybody I know. Woot wooot! Thanks again.
So which team do you support? Do you go to a lot of matches?
I just bought a flex pass to Real Salt Lake MLS games (I get 10 seats to use at any game(s) I want) - so I can take 10 people to 1 game; or 5 people to 2 games; or 1 person to 10 games. You get the idea.)
I'm so excited for the CONCACAF championship game (should I quit calling it a "game" and call it a "match"?) that I am going to tomorrow night. I'll post some pictures tomorrow.
THANK YOU AGAIN.
No worries man
always happy to chat about football, it's my favourite sport 
and if I'm of any help, I'm glad to be of service. As far as terminology goes, game and match are equally appropriate I'd say. The CONCACAF match sounds amazing, hope it's worth your going!I support Norwich City, who at the moment are playing in the Championship, so the 2nd highest tier of English football. We're a sizeable club; not the biggest club, but pretty sizeable - probably in the top 30 in the country as far as support, financial muscle and recent success goes. Norwich is a city in the east of the country, e.g. if you look at a map of England, we're somewhere in the big lump to the right hand side. Unlike a lot of cities in England, we've only got the one major team here - cities like London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester have lots of different teams which creates a lot of local rivalries, whereas for us, our nearest domestic rivals are Ipswich, the nearest big city to us who are some 40 miles away. I grant you that, in American terms, 40 miles might as well be around the corner, but England being the small country it is in comparison, 40 miles is a fair distance for a 'local' rival.
Like I said earlier, the domestic season is nearly over, and with 2 games to go we're sat in 2nd place in the Championship, so we could be getting promoted this season. That in itself is a great thing, but the thing is, in the last 5-6 years we've been relegated twice. In 2003/04 we got promoted to the Premiership as champions of Division 1 (The Championship as it was before the name changed for sponsorship reasons), but we were relegated from the Premiership after only the one season.
Going up a division is always tough because the teams are generally better and have more money, and in the Premiership the financial gap is huge. The Championship playoff final is the most expensive prize in world football - the winner gets something in the region of £80m, so, 100m dollars or more? My currency conversion isn't the best but it's a shitload of money either way, and that gives you and idea of how being in the Premiership does for a club's bank account. The system of player transfer is different in European and most of world football to that in the states, i.e. we don't have draft picks and rosters etc., teams can buy and sell players as they see fit, to all intents and purposes.
However, back to Norwich. Like I say, we were relegated from the Premiership. However, after a succession of crap seasons, crap managers and general crap, we were relegated to League 1 two season back (2008/09), playing in the 3rd tier of English football for the third time in 50 odd years. We got promoted back to the Championship as champions of League 1 last season, but that's what makes this season all the more crazy, that we could be getting promoted twice in consecutive seasons - that rarely EVER happens in football because of the difficulty of adjusting to the league above, although there are clubs in recent years who've managed it on occasion.
Right, I need to crack on and get some sleep 'cause it's gone 4am and I need to head back to university today to start revision for my finals, but I'll be back to chat all things football etc. later if you should so wish! Take it easy bud
or even higher defeat.
