At games, there are those giant American flags in the stands, and it seems the East Coast and Sam’s Army has a monopoly on them. Keith wants to change that fact.

HELP AMERICAN OUTLAWS DES MOINES BUY THE FLAG OF THE MIDWEST!

I propose we all band together to help AO Des Moines buy a 20′ x 30′ flag. We may not be the biggest chapter, but we typically have members at every game around the Midwest. Our founding members go to ever World Cup, and we travel to Nashville, Chicago, KC, and Detroit. You want the flag, we’ll bring it. And we want to bring it to the Gold Cup!

OUR GOAL: $650 by June 1, 2011

If you want to help pitch in, Keith provides instructions on how to help.

Let’s give a flag a Midwestern home!

But not everyone agrees. From the Left Wing’s Jennifer Doyle says:

People seem to like Alejandro Iñárritu’s ad for Nike’s 2010 World Cup campaign (“Write the Future”). I don’t. Women appear in it only as sex objects and jokes.

She continues by demonstrating her point with three different aspects of the ad.

Amanda of Needs More Kittens had some vitriol for the Paving the Way ad.

Who’s shown matters, and even more, who’s excluded matters. What Nike is saying here, intention aside, is that only boys can be inspired by the men’s national team. Only boys can take pride in “that goal,” or the other goal. Girls? You’re invisible, and therefore irrelevant, unless you grow up “hot” and we can use your body to sell shirts for the men’s team.

That latter comment is in reference to the use of Playboy models to sell jerseys.

Is it true? Is Nike’s marketing sexist? Or are people being overly sensitive?

Watch the Write the Future ad. By my count, ANY female portrayal is a couple of seconds at most.

In the Paving the Way ad, the only people being inspired by the US Men’s National Team’s run in the 2010 World Cup are male.

And Playboy models to sell jerseys?

If you’re not paying attention, you could think it doesn’t matter. Sex sells, and Nike needs to sell. They sell jerseys for other nations as well, especially some where sex in advertising is incredibly common, so for the sake of brevity, let’s ignore the hyper-sexualized marketing efforts for now.

That leaves us with their other ads. Now, Nike does do advertising for the US Women’s National Team, but it’s not nearly as inspirational, to say the least:

But let’s focus just on the advertising for this World Cup. With no women and no young girls talking about how inspired they are by the US Men’s team, what does that say about Nike’s intentions?

It says that they had no intention to include women in their advertising.

That is, Nike’s marketing is clearly just for boys with no thought to the females in the world’s audience. One stat I’ve seen thrown out: 30% of the fan base for men’s soccer is female. That’s a LOT of people to alienate and ignore.

The problem isn’t just Nike’s portrayal of women as sex objects and jokes. The problem is that women are hardly portrayed at all. It’s like women don’t exist in Nike’s fantasy soccer-based world. In fact, if you want a women’s US Men’s National Team jersey, you can’t get one.

Nothing’s absurd about wanting to make sure that women and young girls are included. Nike’s marketing efforts should keep them in mind.

EDIT: And Match Fit USA also wrote about it in Nike’s Thank You Ad an Exclusionary Boys Club.

My favorite part: “Thank you for not diving.” The last 15 seconds talking about inspiration is also really good.

Here’s to 2014. Go, go USA!

So what’s happening to Europe? One thing people keep pointing out is that the club teams in Italy, England, and elsewhere keep importing talent. Argentina’s Lionel Messi plays in Barcelona, Spain, for instance. Many of the top teams, such as Inter Milan of Italy, are made up primarily of foreign players, which means the local boys aren’t generally in those top teams.

There is a great way to visualize how the world’s soccer talent is outsourced at Estadão.com. While I don’t know Portuguese, you can move your mouse over the top flags to see where the players on a national team play for their regular jobs. If you move your mouse over the bottom flags, you’ll see which nations provide the talent for local clubs.

For instance, if you mouse over the United States at the top, you’ll see that only four of the players actually play in the United States regularly. There are a couple of members who play in Mexico, but everyone else plays in Europe. Click the image below to see a larger version:

Meanwhile, of the 7 World Cup players who are in American soccer leagues, primarily Major League Soccer, one plays for Honduras and two play for New Zealand. Again, click the image below to see a larger version:

If you want more detailed information, check out the site yourself.

What’s more, you can even check the same kind of data from past World Cups all the way to 1994. By and large, you can see that countries picked their players from local clubs in the past. Italy by and large continued that tradition throughout the past World Cups, which might be why American-born Giuseppe Rossi, who plays for Spanish club Villarreal, wasn’t picked for the final Italian squad this year. However, between 1994 and 2010, more Italian club players are coming from other nations than before, a trend the rest of the world is also demonstrating.

Does that mean that foreign-born talent is ruining soccer for everyone? No, I think it simply means that we’ll see new World Cup winners soon. No one outside of South America or Europe has won the World Cup, but the way things look, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see a team from Asia, Africa, or even North America bring home the trophy in the near future. After all, technology and the ease of modern travel makes living abroad easier, and so talented individuals can go wherever they want so long as someone is willing to pay. If leagues in Spain, Italy, and Germany are some of the top leagues in the world, and more players in those leagues represent nations outside of Spain, Italy, and Germany, it only stands to reason that those foreign players will eventually use their talents in the World Cup for the benefit of their own countries.

For example, in 1994, only 7 US players plied their trade abroad, whereas today most of the US team was earning a living in Europe. When Landon Donovan was on loan to Everton, many US national team fans rejoiced. It meant that LA Galaxy’s Donovan was excelling in one of the toughest leagues in the world, and that meant the United States would compete that much better against the world.