They Are Especially Functional Outside Of The Car, Too

The Story Behind Why Soccer Players Sit In Race Car Seats

“The story about the car seats at the sidelines goes back to the 1990s,” Tilman Schaefer, a company representative told me via email. He went on, saying the owner of Recaro at the time, Ulrich Putsch, was on the board of the German soccer team F.C. Kaiserslautern, and apparently gave the team’s manager Kalli Feldkamp a sports car seat because “the guy had back problems.”

It wasn’t long before, in 1994 according to the company’s website, the rest of the team wound up sitting on a “custom-tailored players bench,” with Schaefer saying: “They put the seat right next to the bench. Because the players thought the seat to be just gorgeous Ulrich had a complete bench produced for the home team” as a part of a sponsorship deal.

That’s when customized sports car-inspired seats began taking over the sidelines around the world, and other seat manufacturers from other industries also wanted in, with Schaefer telling me:

Other teams became so excited that they ordered benches from RECARO – so this became a special sales project over the years.

Other seat producers–even airline seats–followed line and started to supply seats to teams they sponsor.

So this is kind of a standard today on soccer sidelines (plus baseball in Japan, plus business seats in the stadiums). In Europa and Japan RECARO is probably the biggest supplier.

Today, according to Recaro, over 70 top soccer teams—including Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid, Debreceni Vasutas SC and Ferencváros Budapest—sit on Recaro bucket seats.

As for the reasons why, Recaro’s spokesperson put it simply: “[The] seats are very comfortable and often supplied with a seat heating for the winter. And [they] look great.”

(Jalopnik.com)

When You See It

Realistic table soccer

(Bits&Pieces.us)

Will The Program Ever Change?

Why are European and South American soccer teams so much better than the USMNT and what are the most important elements of success lacking in the US Team? 

2. Creativity: This one is totally an education issue or, in this case, over education and is totally in US Soccer hands to fix. If you are a boy growing up in South America, Europe or Mexico you just go play on the street or the park and there is where you can run wild, try to do crazy things with the ball and do it over and over. It is all unsupervised from the coaching point of view; it’s just kids playing soccer.  America takes the opposite approach: everything is scripted. Leagues like AYSO are great for introducing kids to soccer but they are so heavy on instructions and drills that the kids’ creativity has no place to develop. American soccer needs to get away from being so rigid on formal training.

3. Coaching: Most coaches in South America and Europe (not only at the pro level but pretty much every level below it) have spent their whole life either playing or coaching soccer. The elite ones have gone abroad to study and learn from the best soccer academies of the world. Tell me how many American coaches have had a similar life, not many.

(CavemanCircus.com)

Did You Know - Leicester City Football Club

10 things to know about Leicester City -- and the city of Leicester

Started from the bottom, now they're here

• There are many reasons why Leicester City's rise to the top of Premier League table is so improbable. But paramount among them: The team wasn't even in the Premier League two years ago and was in danger of being relegated back to the Football League Championship, the second-tier league in the English soccer system. Just seven years ago, the Foxes were in Football League One, the third-tier league. The Foxes were dead-last in the Premier League last season for 4 1/2 months between late-November and mid-April, including a 13-game winless streak, which was the longest in the league. They staved off relegation by winning seven of their last nine matches, but no one saw that as a sign of things to come. If anything, most pundits had them fighting off relegation again this season.

Where in the world is Leicester?

Well, first of all, if you're talking about the city and not the football club, Leicester is a city in the East Midlands of England and the county town of Leicestershire. The East Midlands region of England consists of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Northamtonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and most of Lincolnshire. If none of that makes much sense to you, it's a 100-mile drive north on the M1 motorway if you're in London, or you could hop on the East Midlands Train from London and get there in a little over an hour. Leicester has a population of about 330,000, which would put it on par with Corpus Christi, Texas, or Riverside, California. Leicester, which was known for its hosiery factories in the 19th century, was a finalist for the UK City of Culture Award in 2013 but lost to Kingston upon Hull.

Complete list (ESPN.com)