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)

I Wonder How Comfortable These Are

CLSC x Umbro El Rey

(NiceKicks.com)

And You Wonder Why Soccer Is The #1 Sport Worldwide

(CavemanCircus.com)

Is This The Greatest Of The Unlikely Championship Winners Ever?

Leicester City win the Premier League: their remarkable title by the numbers

2. Leicester City was a 5,000-1 long shot to win the Premier League before this season. Those are the same odds you could have gotten on 15-seed Cal State Bakersfield to win this year's NCAA tournament. English bookmaker William Hill would give you 5,000-1 odds that Elvis Presley will be found alive. By comparison, the longest preseason odds to win this year's World Series were 500-1 (Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta Braves), and the longest odds to win next season's Super Bowl are 200-1 (Cleveland Browns).

3. Leicester City paid around $80 million in transfer fees for its entire squad, over $500 million less than Manchester City paid for its current team. City paid $84 million for midfielder Kevin De Bruyne alone in the summer of 2015.

• Since Blackburn won the Premier League in 1994-95, Leicester are the only team to win besides Arsenal, Chelsea, Man City and Man United.

• According to a story published by Bloomberg on April 28, a William Hill spokesman said Leicester City's title will cost the bookmaker nearly $3 million and may cost bookmakers nearly $15 million across the U.K. He also said that, going forward, William Hill will no longer offer title odds higher than 1,000-1. (Darren Rovell has since assessed the bookies' losses at around $11.4 million.)

(ESPNFC.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)

You Won't Believe Who Has One Of The Longest Championship Streaks In History

The most impressive championship streaks in all of sports

North Carolina Tar Heels

• Championship streaks: 1986-94
• In perhaps the most impressive championship streak, the North Carolina Tar Heels women's soccer team won nine national championships in a row from 1986 through 1994. The Tar Heels have won 21 of the 31 NCAA soccer championships.

Complete list (ESPN.com)

It's About Time This Happened

USWNT stars accuse U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination in EEOC filing

In the latest labor salvo between the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team players and the U.S. Soccer Federation, the five most prominent members of the USWNT have filed an action with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (a government agency) accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination in relation to the money the federation pays to the U.S. men’s national team. 

In a press release announced Thursday morning, lawyers for the five U.S. players—Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn—argue that the USWNT is paid almost four times less than the USMNT, despite producing nearly $20 million in revenues for U.S. Soccer in 2015 (per U.S. Soccer’s recently released annual financial report).

The U.S. Soccer pay figures for the men and women (numbers from documents obtained by SI.com are presented in the table below) were agreed to by the players as part of separate collective bargaining agreements, but the U.S. women’s team argues that its CBA has expired.

U.S. Soccer, for its part, has maintained that the CBA with the U.S. women’s players is still in effect through the end of 2016 due to a memorandum of understanding signed by the two sides in 2013. In an effort to get a court to decide if the CBA is still in place, U.S. Soccer filed its own separate action in February in Chicago. Discovery for that case was set to be completed on Thursday, with oral arguments on the motions set to take place before the Chicago court on May 25.

(SI.com)