THE DAYS THAT SHAPED 2007 - THE DAY WE BECAME MARGINALLY LESS INDIFFERENT ABOUT SOCCER...TEMPORARILY

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

Over the next 10 days or so, you will be inundated with cheesy, clichéd drivel from all corners of the sports media, disguised as the "2007 year in review." Well, I'm out of post ideas for the year, so I'm going to join the fray. For the next couple weeks I will bring you one blogger's opinion of The Days that Shaped 2007! The events that were so ludicrous, so stupid, and so utterly inexplicable they made me thank God I had a sports blog as an outlet to make fun of them.

Today's installment: The day soccer went from having no impact on the American sports landscape, to having *virtually* no impact on the American sports landscape.

January 11th - A red letter day in soccer history. This was the day that David Beckham announced that he would be leaving his top-flight Real Madrid team and legions of European fans to come across the pond to join the talent-starved MLS to play for the awful LA Galaxies in the soccer-apathetic United States.

That's right, a team fighting to stay out of the basement (in a league no one follows), led by "the guy with the hair" from the World Cup team from a decade ago, paid a quarter-billion or so dollars for a past-his-prime, oft-injured, free-kick specialist with a wife who is significantly more famous than he is. This was what we call a blogger's dream.

No, Beckham didn't start many games. No, he didn't score many goals, or really have much of a discernible effect on his team's record at all-- they finished in next-to-last place -- but his arrival got people talking about soccer! It was only about a week, and most of the talk centered around his waifish-bordering-on-skeletal wife, his phantom injuries, and the fact that he didn't live up to his contract, but dammit, they were talkin' soccer!