Ben Jarman Futbol

It seems absurd that a football franchise can gain a million fans overnight, but that is just what Los Angeles Football Club managed to achieve when they signed Carlos Vela back in August. Despite the club never having played a competitive match and only having a handful of players on the roster their future looks bright.  Vela begins his tenure with his new teammates on January the 1st, and the run up to the franchises first match accelerates over the next four months before they take on the Seattle Sounders at home. Their home which hasn't yet been built.  In true American style, there certainly has been theory behind the signing of Vela and one that clearly taps in to the ethnicity of not only Los Angeles, but also to the breakdown of the run-of-the mill MLS viewer. This year alone there was a 75% increase in viewership on ESPN alone, and a 38% rise year-on-year across the play-offs. Football, or soccer, is gaining serious momentum in the United States and the expansion...

In the 1970's under dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina sunk into financial crisis like they had never seen before, the gap between rich and poor widened to record levels and unaccounted Argentines disappeared, beaten to death by the police. Living in Argentina was a life and death struggle. Literally.  Slim, long-haired with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth as he conducted his players, César Luis Menotti was everything Argentina's dictatorship wasn't during the 1970s. Menotti was a socialist, a thinker, a rationalised football man who understood that the game acted as a social voice for the people when it felt that all hope had evaporated. He provided a platform for society to speak and when he spoke himself, quoted writers, musicians and poets to his players. Menotti was a shining light in Argentina's darkest time.  As globalisation enveloped the world and liberalism was surging across South America, Argentina had divided itself in to an 'absolute...