Joseph Weber @jweb425

God is Good.. All the time!🙏

#FlyTheL

In America they told me the football game starts at 1 PM. I arrived at 1 PM. I was five hours late. The parking lot was already a city. A man had built a living room beside his truck. Not metaphorically. He had a couch. A television. A chandelier powered by a generator the size of a small horse. He was grilling enough meat to feed a village, and when I walked past he said, "You hungry?" I said I had not been invited. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has apologized for breathing. "Brother," he said. "You're here. That's the invitation." He handed me a plate. It was not a small plate. The brisket hung over the edges like a man sleeping in a bed he has outgrown. I ate it standing beside a stranger's couch in a parking lot in October, and it was among the finest meals of my life. A woman across the row had a tent, a smoker, a speaker system, and a flag so large it could have sheltered a family of five beneath it. She had been here since 6 AM. The game had not started. The game, I began to realize, was not the point. I asked the man what time he would go inside the stadium. He said, "Depends." I asked on what. He said, "On whether the ribs are done." I want to be clear. He had a ticket. He had driven four hours. He had assembled a small civilization from the back of a pickup truck. And he was considering not going to the game. Because the ribs were not ready. In Japan we tailgate nothing. We do not build living rooms in parking lots. We do not grill for strangers. We sit quietly on trains and think about whether we remembered to bow at the right angle. I have since attended eleven tailgates. I have never once cared who won the game. Nobody has. The game is inside the stadium. America is in the parking lot.

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year. That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer. FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset. US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records. So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros. Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability. Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business. They will not.

dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DandyGeorgism

4 weeks ago

“And every four years when the World Cup comes around, we will say that we’d dominate if we had a stronger youth program.” “And will we develop a stronger youth program?” “We will not.”

166 3K 56K 5.7M 1K

This generation of players still doesn’t have a signature win 🇵🇾 34th ranked team in the 🌎 🇦🇺 28th ranked team in the 🌎 🇧🇦 61st ranked team in the 🌎 🇹🇷 Lost to the 27th ranked team in the 🌎 🇧🇪 Lost to the 8th ranked team in the 🌎 Out in the R16 again Failure again

Remember that these technologies exist whenever we’re trotting out two sticks connected by a chain this fall to see if someone got a first down.

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If anyone is interested I have 4 tickets for sale to the Australia vs Egypt World Cup game this Friday. If you're interested please reach out 214-909-4763.

Facts 👇

@brettskireal Holy Toledo! Congrats Brettski!

We joke about winning the life lottery, because we were born in the USA, but it’s not far from the truth. These visitors here for the World Cup are getting to experience what we often take for granted. I live in Alabama. I can start in Mobile and drive north for 5 hours, and still be in Alabama. My state has beautiful sandy beaches, and also has the foothills of the Appalachians. In between, we have a super speedway that pushes the limits of American muscle. Talladega. NASA is here. The Army’s rotary wing flight school is here. We have a festival every year to celebrate peanuts. We celebrate the harvest of a crop with funnel cakes and music. 2 teams from my state are currently in the College World Series, and that isn’t even our most popular sport. Don’t even get me started on football Saturdays in the fall. It’s something else entirely. My state is just 1 of 50 states that are all equally wonderful. This country is awesome, and I do love it so. 🇺🇸

A four-goal thriller in Dallas. 😮 #FIFAWorldCup

Proud of this team. GSG.

The @TexasLonghorns and AD @_delconte have secured their 5th NACDA Learfield Directors' Cup Championship. The award is given to the top performing athletic department. The Longhorn's top performing teams include: 🥇🏆 @TexasRowing 🚣‍♀️ @TexasSoftball 🥎@TexasMSD 🏊‍♂️ 🥈 @TexasMTN 🎾 🥉 @TexasWBB 🏀 @TexasWSD 🏊‍♀️ @TexasBeachVB 🏐 5th place @TexasVolleyball 🏐 @TexasMGolf 🏌️‍♂️ @TexasWGolf 🏌️‍♀️ 7th @TexasBaseball ⚾️ (ongoing) Congrats to all the athletes and staff who have made this possible. **Note: This assumes Stanford W Track does not win the Championship. Their max score is 30 points in the meet and no team scoring 30 or fewer points has finished higher than 5th place.** Hook Em 🤘 Photo: @UTFootballEdits

“I think everybody was feeling good. I didn't want us to get too happy about one win... I think since the end of Game 2 we've still been confident that we're gonna win this series. That's what we plan to do." —Stephon Castle (via @NBA)

i'm not kidding, the US travel/tourism board (whatever that is at a Federal level lol) should sponsor the rest of that German guy's trip through the US, dude is doing insanely good PR for the South

I don’t have beef with this Texas Tech squad. Teams are going to build themselves in whatever way they think is best for them. Big respect to Coach Glasco for these comments. (Courtesy of @KCBD11)

🏆 BACK-TO-BACK 🏆 NATIONAL CHAMPS 🤘 @TexasSoftball @NCAASoftball x #ItJustMeansMore

YOUR TEXAS LONGHORNS ARE NATIONAL CHAMPIONS… AGAIN 🤘🏆 #HookEm

BACK-TO-BACK NATIONAL CHAMPIONS‼️ Texas takes the #WCWS Finals sweep 🔥💪

built for this 🤘 #HookEm