It is worth pointing out that what brought me to this forum was the highlights on the main page, but I stuck around because this place is full of level-headed, thoughtful fans of the beautiful game.

Which makes this interview with Kaka that was posted recently on the MLS website hit home for me, and there are several things he said that stood out:

“The real thing about sport is that it is just a game; you can win and you can lose and everyone knows that you try your best. There is good balance between sport and real life.”

Fairness and balance crop up a lot in Kaká’s view of the league and its structure, concepts that can be difficult to find in Europe where he played almost 14 years for Real Madrid and AC Milan, two of the continent’s biggest names but hardly bastions of egalitarianism.That also makes him a fan of the NFL and NBA, with their salary cap and nods towards parity. He grew up watching American basketball and football, and is fascinated by the prospect of last year’s doormats becoming this year’s all-conquering heroes.

Anyway, as a North American who was brought up on the ideas of parity within sports, I found his comment very interesting - in addition to his perspective that while many Americans appreciate soccer, just like every other major sport here, (baseball, football, basketball, etc) they don't go crazy over sports the way he saw in other part of the world. Here in America, we just get great videos from miserable fans regarding their consistently awful franchises.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRBDMMVctu8

Watch that, you won't regret it.

Getting to why I posted this stuff here, as a big promoter of the MLS, I want to hear your thoughts on parity within a league, and the attitudes and passions of fans around the world.

As a ManU fan who tried to fit on most soccer/futbol forums, I always felt out of place among the MANCHESTER UNITED IS THE BEST CLUB IN THE WORLD AND WILL WIN EVERY GAME AND IF YOU DISAGREE THAN YOU CAN GET THE **** OUT, which seemed to be the rule, not the exception.

Well, just letting you guys know that I appreciate you - and I'd like your insight regarding these topics. Also, the article on Kaka is here:

http://www.mlssoccer.com/news/article/2015/07/16/1v1-kaka-part-1-orlando-city-sc-superstar-mls-parity-and-his-new-life-centra

Top comment underneath the article was good too:

We should take notes as fans. I think a lot of fans here think we need to become more extreme and more "fanatical" in our support for our clubs, becoming more like Europe or South America. But we have something different here and I think that's okay. I love soccer, love it when my club plays well, but I love my life outside of soccer more.

Football to me is extremely important. I cannot stress to you the urge to watch every single Real Madrid match that airs. I basically bleed blanco. I'm sure many of you feel the same way for your clubs. Sometimes sports can just be considered as pass-time hobby, but sometimes it's just bigger than that.

Clubs like Real Madrid, Manchester United, Boca Juniors have history. There is something associated with them that makes you proud to be a supporter. And that pride is what we live off. We love to see our teams succeed and beat other teams. Just look how this forum explodes when one of the big-scoring games come up between rivals (e.g. United 8-2 Arsenal). The reactions you get from that shows you just how important football can be to our lives. Sports like cricket, which have only recently started "clubs", and basketball, which has been largely American and only broke out world-wide in the late 80's/early 90's, do not compare to the importance of football to European and South American supporters. I can even guarantee you that Asian countries (including South-East Asia and the Middle-East) are crazy for football.

Tl;Dr European/South American football has so much history to it that it makes it a much bigger deal than any other sport.

I understand your point entirely. Ever since I began following the sports I do, I have felt that same pride. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that the grand majority of fans take that pride way to far (see: literally any fan website on the internet).

One of my biggest frustrations with this sport is just how much ego people have wrapped up in it. I was watching Football Daily on Youtube the other day and they had a ManU transfer special. There was a United guy from FullTimeDevils there (one of those aforementioned fan places) and he was such a piece of work the whole video. His reaction when one of the other people there mentioned how much money ManU was spending firmly put them in the realm of a spending club, he literally spent the next ten minutes explaining how ManU earned their money from being good and winning trophies. Which is true...to a point. The diehard fans can't handle any criticism at all, and yet they dish it out on whomever they like. How many players have been wreaked from a fan standpoint because they strung together a couple bad games? (see: Bale)

I think what Kaka was saying was that the MASSIVE pressure associated with playing at a high level is tempered in smaller leagues. We've been hearing for years that the England talent pool has been ruined by expectations and pressure. Many of the better players we have in the world today were developed at smaller clubs in smaller leagues while the bigger clubs (with some clear exceptions) haven't developed almost any of the superstars we have now.

Specifically concerning the MLS, the league has only been in existence for two decades, but using baseball or American football as another example, those leagues have been around for over one hundred years and while passion is clearly there, the pressure associated with playing at a high level there is nothing compared to Europe's top leagues.

What I'm really asking has nothing to do with any individual's pride as a fan, but instead how much said pride hurts the development and/or mental state of the players involved.

Actually i think its the opposite, the fact is that Football is a global sport, from Chile to South Africa to North Korea to Sweden, everybody practices Football while in US in some sports, they arent that popular in other countries....
Football due to several way of playing and world wide tactics is developping each year and those who does not the upgrade properly looks outdated.
Football has become a cash machine just lately, the difference between Europeen Football and US sport is that sports in USA are based on winning money : ( hundreds of adds, a lot of show ), the aim of those sports is the entertainment and its not just in Sport, its everywhere like in Music or politics. Because there the population has became a consumer society, you watch the super bowl because its a big show.
In Europe and some other parts of the world, its much different, like in Spain, in Brazil, in England...

The thing you did here is typically US, you take the way you live there or things being there and think it should be applied everywhere. In France for example, you will fail miserably because the people are on constant fight to keep their social rights, a society based on entertainment is good but makes you unable to defend your rights and this is the main problem in the US, the entertainment lobbies in US are as developped and strong as the war lobbies and you see people with no rights no job, no future dancing on Nicki Minaj music and not even fighting for their future.

The US model is the one i want to avoid, giving 80% of the country resources and lands to the 1% rich popilation would be a nightmare for 99%, we arent fans of the american dream who bring sadness and frustration to 95% of people.
But the rich people in France are full of praise of this model, because they will double their benefits and exploit the people in any domain, and the best way to start from is to destruct the school and the family but this is another subject...

In Spain, a country where Football was for people a way to face dictatorship, Football is and was more than a sport. In Brazil Football is the flag of the country, many positive opinions in the world on Brazil as a nation came from their national team strenght...

All this to say, that the world is different, you cant only look to the world and try to understand it by only your country view, you should look closely to nations History and their people specificities...

The parity is a way to earn more for a league, each team has their fans who buy items, attends to Stadium with Huge prices and make sponsors and advetisements lucrative, thats good for buisness...
this doesnt reflect the actual world, so if teams with bad management always draft the best players, the level isnt increasing...
No league can do this in Europe because they will loose competitivity toward other leagues, in US you cant judge the sports level because they arent as developped in other countries like in US. But for Football, any bad form or crisis in a country is very visible because there are a lot of models, And this helped the sport to reach the level it is in.

I would want to see some parity in tickets, attending the stadiums, let poor people attend big events rather than having a 2000 dollar ticket, that would be the real equity.

Salary cap and nods towards parity. Not a fan at all of the American model with drafting and sharing the resources between the teams. For me, it makes the sport somehow shallow in the US. The beauty of football is its imperfection with every club having their own history and philosophy and their own resources to archive their goals. The beauty of football is the upsets that can be when weaker teams beat better teams.

With that said I don't know what tikis point was. This is football, not poltics.

Football and politics are linked, in fact everything is linked to politics from the movie you watch, to the music you listen, to the food you eat...
Its hard for me to talk about something without talking about the politics involved in, or you will only discuss the visible part of the iceberg wich doesnt help much in understanding the whole point.

fair enough Tiki but "The US model is the one i want to avoid, giving 80% of the country
resources and lands to the 1% rich popilation would be a nightmare for
99%, we arent fans of the american dream who bring sadness and
frustration to 95% of people." is bullshit and hasn't got anything to do with the question. Just your usual prejudice against the US. But I agree that we (the rest of the world) should never adapt the American sports model. At the same time sports like Icehockey, baseball and American football wouldn't be the same without it and hence I understand why some people from the US would want to adapt it to football too.

@KTBFFH

<http://www.thenation.com/article/explainer-how-did-inequality-america-get-so-bad-and-what-can-government-do-fix-it/>

http://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=https://assets.motherjones.com/politics/2011/inequality-page25_actualdistribwithlegend.png&imgrefurl=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph&h=263&w=630&tbnid=IeM99FMCXGoSfM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=216&usg=\__hfWj_NNsCXX1icpnR-9rwESlNiA=&docid=ZE6LcvDmn9KBCM

I wish you were born in the bottom 40% ( half of the popultation ), '' the American dream '' would lead you to jail or to the grave.

Have a nice read ( of course if you are interested )

W/o getting to the politics, just want to say that I've found footyroom best too. I just hate ppl here that are SO naive, but fortunately it isn't the case most of the time in forum, but in the highlight section about 90% of the ppl are so damn naive. They're the same ppl who follow troll football on fb - I find them so disgusting that I don't even think they have the REAL passion for football, they just follow the team that succeeds the best & try to egoboost themselves by saying constantly things like "ARSENAL ARE SHIT HAHAHA, U GUYS ARE F*CKING IDIOTS FOR EVEN SUPPORTING THEM, HAHA YOU LOSERS". Not forgetting then the mandatory "#KTBFFH" just to act that you belong to a group, eventho u probably haven't heard what that even means, but you saw it on twitter.

Using chelsea & arsenal was just example, that sh*t happens in probably all the fanbases.

Well, I'm not sure even where to start with this, because everyone went way off-topic. The main question I asked was this:

What I'm really asking has nothing to do with any individual's pride as a fan, but instead how much said pride hurts the development and/or mental state of the players involved.

Ok, tiki, time for me to get around to your points, so this could get interesting.

Aside from attracting fans to a team (through tv rights and marketing) politics doesn't have as much to do with sports as you think it does. Each club or franchise is privately owned, which means the politics within are completely up to the owner and board. As we have seen throughout many clubs, this can mean drastic changes in policy and politics, so I don't quite get how that affects the clubs.

As a student of history, (still in school here), I can tell you that those numbers you put up are fairly accurate. In America if you work really hard and get a good education, anything is possible - to a point. People need to stop believing this "you can do anything if you really want it" jargon. However, that's not just America. That's capitalism everywhere. The economic responsibility of a business is to make more money for its shareholders, and that's just as true in any capitalist country as it is in America. And you're right, this same idea bleeds into clubs. Using Newcastle as an example, some owners simply don't put money back into the club. But here is were parity comes in. Manchester United makes, I don't know, twenty times the money of a Newcastle. The Newcastle can NEVER compete for any real stretch of time against a team like United, because of your capitalist society, it is impossible. That's a very English example I just gave, so I'm very confused why you think this only applies to America.

When parity comes in, (and btw, don't ask how the LA Galaxy afforded Gerrard, the league literally went and made a new rule so it could work out) the teams are, in MLS, in theory on an even playing field, while in other American sports such as American football, they have an amount of money they can spend that they CANNOT exceed. Every team has just as much chance to succeed as any other, as a result, the ones with good coaches and great management win. Do you really think, that in theory alone, if this system was introduced to Europe, all the top clubs would hold their place? Teams with awkward management (Real Madrid immediately springs to mind) would utterly collapse. Without the power to spend, European football giants are basically minnows.

Now, I'm not saying this SHOULD be instituted. I'm just saying that it is food for thought.

Under that system we see clubs that can develop youth, have excellent management, truly wonderful coaches get rewarded with titles. In the BPL, the team that immediately jumps to mind is Southampton. They literally sell half their players every year and STILL manage to climb he table every year. Can you imagine the youth development and senior management of that club? Do you think any major club in the world could sell half their best players and replace them with players deemed as inferior and do better? I don't. And yet Southampton will never be rewarded in trophies for what they are doing. I think it is very easy for a fans of a larger club to simply say, wow, look, I am the 1% of world football, why should the other 99% stand a chance? Tiki, you've become the millionaire in real-life football society.

On the other hand, your points about international football I understand completely, most of Brazil's international reputation is solely based off their national team. For clubs, it would be the same with local pride, except it's not. The grand majority of fans for the big clubs don't even live in the same country, let alone the same city as the team they support. That's not a problem, but it kind of takes away from any points about local support.

Going back to the original point about this discussion, which seems to have been lost in this mess, I will say again:

What I'm really asking has nothing to do with any individual's pride as a fan, but instead how much said pride hurts the development and/or mental state of the players involved.