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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28917 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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In 2009, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost a spring training game to Manatee Community College. In 2019, Chelsea lost to their own youth team. By your logic, the Pirates should have forgotten about Andrew McCutchen (who played in that game) and signed some of the Manatee players, who were readily available. I do not believe any of them ever got so much as a rookie league contract.

The US Women's team thing wasn't even that level of a loss, because it wasn't even a real scrimmage, because national teams don't do scrimmages. They were sharing a training facility in Texas with the boys youth team and when the youth team came over to watch them practice/get autographs they ended up agreeing to play a kick around game. They don't play games like this a tune-ups or anything because the team members would have played about 60 games per year between the pro and national teams. The only reason anyone even knows about this is because that particular camp was interrupted by contentious contract negotiations with US Soccer, and US Soccer decided to release the results without any context to gain leverage (while sabotaging their own product). Just think about it for one minute: If you're a player or a coach, are you going to risk injury by trying to win the game? Or are you going to treat it like a fun treat for the kids that under normal circumstances nobody would hear about? Look at the NFL; they play fewer games than soccer players but are averse to playing in the preseason and absolutely allergic to the Pro Bowl. Now imagine that you aren't making nearly as much money and that your pro career can end in an instant.

This is simply slander against the U-14/16 team they played. Those boys won. They would have won unless the refs cheated in favor of the females. The gap between Chealsea youth and the professional team is orders of magnitude less than between Chelsea men and the US female world cup team.

What are you basing this on?

Watching soccer. The women at the time stunk. They still are bad.

Presumably that youth players often rise to the full team when very young (I think Walcott got in at 16?) but no woman has. And then we can look at their relative level of competition to see if it's just bigotry

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