Here's some sports news that may have actually slipped under the radar for a lot of otherwise plugged-in sports fans.
Wilfried Nancy, a very successful coach in MLS (one MLS-adjacent Canadian Championship, one MLS Championship, one Leagues Cup Championship, and one Coach of the Year honor just in the space of four seasons) accepted a job with Scottish power Celtic.
He lasted a mere 33 days in charge there, with 2 wins and 6 defeats.
That's not particularly news. The difference in sports culture between the U.S. and Europe is massive. In Europe, you are absolutely expected to win right away. Ownership tends to have the patience of your angriest message board fan in the U.S. Losing streaks are, as or more often than not, not survivable by the manager.
This meshes nicely with some larger tenets of European sports culture and how it differs from the U.S., in ways that strangely contrast with socio-politics.
In Western Europe, most of the governments and societies are well to the left of the United States, with strong social safety nets. In sports, it's the opposite. No salary caps. No salary floors. No meaningful players unions. It's the Wild West.
One unsurprising result of this sort of system is the same teams dominate, year-after-year. This was something well-written about by my colleague here at Sports Central Andrew Jones all the way back in 2010.
This lack of parity is most pronounced in Scotland, where Celtic or Rangers have won the title FORTY FRICKIN' YEARS IN A ROW. How fun.
With all that out of the way, let me tell you what is surprising about the fallout of Nancy's firing, or rather, was surprising at first glance, but in retrospect, probably should not have been.
A whole bunch of users came out of the woodwork on my twitter feed to crow about the firing and present it as proof positive of the superiority of the European way of doing sports in general and the superiority of the Scottish Professional Football League to the MLS, in particular.
Look, MLS! Your best manager can't even hack it six weeks here! That was the general sentiment. Not just Europeans, either. There were no shortage of Americans tweeting the same thing. In fact, they were the ones most glowing in their assessment of the SPFL/European soccer and most insultingly critical of the MLS.
It seems clear those Americans are gunning for some sort of honorary European status. Look, Europe! I may be a yank, but I'm one of the good ones!
In this space, I often preach a sort of zen approach to sports fandom. This stuff is supposed to be a distraction from real life. Don't turn it into a source of stress for you.
But reading these tweets, I must admit, was making me mad. I don't even want to go back and find the worst offenders.
First, do I really need the defend the idea that it takes time to implement your style of play, and acquire players well-suited to it? Apparently, I do.
Second, you know there are counterexamples, right? Ruud Gullit. Frank De Boer.
Third, using this as an indictment of U.S. sports and an endorsement of European sports is so astonishingly ridiculous. With even playing fields engendered by salary caps and salary floors, the titles go to the teams that are smartest, rather than richest. Who honestly would not want it that way?
I mean besides Colin Cowherd, who loves dynasties. Good news about that, too. You can in fact be successful year in and year out. Look at the Kansas Chiefs from 2015-2024. Or the New England Patriots before that.
What I sense in these SPFL chest-thumpers is a bit of an inferiority complex. I don't remember English footy fans going berserk on Americans after Bob Bradley's unsuccessful tenure at Swansea.
It might be a different story in Scotland, though. More reason to rattle the bars. The algorithm used by GlobalFootballRankings.com posits the English Premier league as the strongest league in the world. MLS? 10th.
SPFL? #32nd.
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