USA

The USMNT's prospects for winning the Confederations Cup playoff next month against Mexico are not looking very good, if the team's form against Brazil Tuesday is any indication. Brazil annihilated the USMNT 4-1 behind two goals from Neymar. This is a result that demands a bit of wild speculation, which we are only too happy to deliver, in the form of positive and negative takeaways from the game.

There were quite a few negatives. Here are three.

Does Jurgen Klinsmann have any idea what he's doing?

The USMNT take to the field this Tuesday in a glamor friendly against Dunga’s Brazil at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

If the rest of Didier Drogba's MLS tenure is anything like his first start, the league better hold onto its hat.

Drogba scored three times in his first start for the Montreal Impact (he's made one appearance off the bench), and looked by and large like the prolific scorer he was for Chelsea and the Ivory Coast National Team. 

The outburst came against the Chicago Fire, the MLS team that first acquired Drogba's rights before trading him to Montreal. The 37-year-old's hat trick helped the Impact to a 4-3 victory against the Fire.

The college soccer season is just beginning, but South Carolina's Jeffrey Torda is off to a great start.

Torda scored a sublime scissor-kick goal to put South Carolina up 3-2 on Georgia Southern (they would go on to win 4-0).

The play was the number two selection on SportsCenter's Top 10 Plays, and for good reason. What a rip. 

It’s been just a few days since she announced her decision to retire, and Rachel van Hollebeke is busy. She starts medical school on Monday, August 31st, just six days after her announcement on the 25th. That’s six days until a transition that is four years in the making begins. 

Rachel has been deferring acceptance to medical school since 2011. Her decision means that her soccer career is ending, and as much as she has been looking forward to medical school, it was a hard choice to make. 

MLS fans have been ramping up the hooliganism lately, mostly in the New York/New Jersey area. This is not in itself surprising, as hooliganism emanates naturally from the New York/New Jersey area.

What is surprising, however is that one of New York's finest deployed a stun gun on a New York City FC fan outside a NYCFC game at Yankee Stadium. It's not entirely clear what the fan did to deserve having thousands of volts of electricity pulse through his body, but it must have been really bad, considering what New York City cops have to deal with on a daily basis. 

It must be difficult balancing two first teams — a men's team and a women's team — under the umbrella of the same club, but that's what the Portland Timbers and Thorns, and their various associate personnel, have to do to make their business work.

Collegiate soccer programs began to truly emerge sometime in the 1980s. For women, the passage of Title IX opened up opportunities for female athletes that were only available to men playing football (the oblong type) and basketball. Men’s soccer programs have been around significantly longer (the first NCAA championship was played in 1959), but consistently take a backseat to padded football and madness of basketball.

It seems with each passing game the USMNT acquires a new potential savior, the athletic, skilled player that will become a superstar and lead the U.S. to glory and cement America as a world power. Right now, fans are bandying about around five potential saviors, and we have uptades on all of them (except for maybe John Brooks, but whatever).

Bobby Wood