It’s Finals Time
Austin FC‘s roster will start coming together in a hurry next week, as the team will select up to five players in the MLS Expansion Draft – livestreaming at AustinFC.com on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 5pm. As the only expansion team this year, AFC will get 15 minutes to select from among a pool of players that MLS will publish on Monday. Then a free agency window opens the next day, a Re-Entry Draft starts the day after that, and a week from now, we should start to have a good idea what your team’s going to look like when they take the field in March. Exciting times.
Meanwhile, there’s a flurry of action as the year winds to a close, starting with Saturday’s MLS Cup, which offers an intriguing matchup of teams who got here two different hard ways: Seattle is in their fourth final in five years, but they had to come from two goals down in the last 20 minutes of the semifinal to do it; Columbus, on the other hand, almost lost their team two years ago – they were set to move to Austin before MLS granted the Austin FC expansion franchise instead – but are back from the brink and will host the final Dec. 12 (7:30pm on Fox) in a swan song for their old Mapfre Stadium. They’ll be in a brand-new downtown facility next year.
The CONCACAF Champions League finals play out next week in Orlando: seven games in eight days, all on FS1, starting with a pair of quarterfinal doubleheaders at 7 & 9:30pm Tue.-Wed., Dec. 15-16. All four games feature MLS teams as underdogs (in order): Montreal Impact vs. CD Olimpia; NYCFC vs. Tigres; Atlanta vs. Club América; LAFC vs. Cruz Azul. Semifinals are Sat., Dec. 19, and the final is Tue., Dec. 22, 9pm.
American teenager Gio Reyna‘s curling 17-yard strike for Dortmund on Saturday, after a slick move, earned him Bundesliga Goal of the Week honors; see it here.
In a bizarre incident Tuesday, both teams walked off the field of a European Champions League game in Paris, after the Romanian fourth official allegedly used a racial slur against Istanbul Baakehir’s Cameroonian assistant coach Pierre Webó. The game was suspended, and finished yesterday with a new refereeing crew… That ended the group stage, with Manchester United failing to advance, and Germanyand Spain landing four teams each in the last 16.
This article appears in December 11 • 2020.