English, Soccer, and English Soccer

I'm coming around on soccer, at least in theory. The World Cup was thrilling, but that won't be back until 2010. There are 3 other leagues of soccer that are of varying interest to me right now:

Premier League (England)
This is league is known by many names, F.A. Premier, Premiership, Barclay's Premiership, English Premier League. This is the world's most popular/most watched sports league of any kind--followed by over a billion people. I like how teams get promoted and demoted and I like the atmosphere in the stands with the singing and what not. I even like how the colors are supposed to mean something, Chelsea's blue signifies blue-blood, while Arsenal's red is a working class team. I don't like how the uniforms (kits) have sponsors on them, and they also lack the team's name, making it hard to tell which team is which when you're learning the sport.

Arsenal's Home Kit. Obviously.

I also like that each team plays every other team twice, home and away. It seems that they need a salary cap as the top teams spend big bucks to get good players, and stay on top. In the 20 team league, only 4 teams have won the league in the last 14 years. One thing that's also confusing is that I don't speak English, I speak American. Because I don't know a lot of words in this sentence:

"Preposterous Scholes lunge, mark I: just the one foot this time, the ginger wizard took enough of the ball along with Makoun's leg to escape a booking."

UEFA Champions
This is pretty cool because it takes the top clubs from leagues all over Europe and turn it to a basically a Europe Cup for club teams. The downside is that it is scattered across the whole year. This started in August and is now to the round of 16. The Final isn't until May. Also, the results from the previous year is used to determine who makes it in.

So you could easily finish in a top spot in May 06 in the Premiership, get into the Champions League in August, meanwhile the next year of the Premiership starts and you stink, and you're still in the Champions league all year.

Why couldn't they just treat Champions league like a playoffs and hold it over the summer after the other leagues end? Then you could use the current results to seed the teams.

MLS
Part of the reason no one in America like soccer, is because the soccer isn't very good. Or so I'm told, I've never really watched the MLS. Seriously, I think one of the drawbacks is that it's not seen as an important league, so it's not worth watching, so it never becomes important.

When you see the energy of the World Cup, it's hard to not get excited. But who cares who wins the MLS?

In order to become popular, the key ingredient is not exciting play, but importance. If the games and the league matters, people will watch. I'm curious to watch Beckham and see what happens, but it still seems like it's far from being relevant in America.