Mid-day football news feast for your face.

It’s international week, so unfortunately there’s already a raft of England crap in the old timeline. One of those nuggets however details the enthusiasm for England’s upcoming game against San Marino. The Indy reports all 90,000 tickets for Wembley have been sold. Whether it’s actually filled is another thing, but the sellout alone puts Canada—a nation that has only recently understood it has a national team that plays soccer in Toronto from time to time in games that matter—in its place. I’d link to a Canadian Content piece but the most recent link isn’t working.

Elsewhere, there is a giant crater where Brazil’s World Cup mascot used to be:

Daily Mail has the story here.

Following Newcastle’s Willy Wonga controversy (which seems increasingly canned as other teams have made deals with the short term loans company), the Telegraph does a slideshow of other troublesome sponsorship deals. Controversies that notably went nowhere and had little lasting impact. Fucking media bastards, eh?

This story out of Spain deserves more media attention than John Terry ever did: the president of the Spanish FA says “racism doesn’t exist” there. This sort of head-in-the-sand approach is arguably worse than players screaming epithets at players because it is a falsehood that provides cover for fans to be racist. What the hell Spain? Why the racist blind spot?

It’s getting to crunch time in MLS. Jason Corliss has a great piece on what it’s like to be a Red Bulls fan. Also, the Whitecaps on the verge of making the playoffs, needing a solitary point from their last two games to make the jump.

I’m not gonna lie: an epic choke would make me smirk, if not smile. But there’s another part of me that wants the Caps to be the final nail in the face of Toronto FC.

Joe Ross sent me this: MLS has been knocking around a survey asking users whether they’d like to see a change to the playoff format so that each stage has a name, which apparently is a thing in North American sports.

Again…why can’t soccer be exceptional in the US? Is MLS so uncomfortable with itself it needs to rename their playoff rounds to appear more NFL-like? The attempt to imitate the SuperBowl in the MLS Cup final are embarrassing enough.

And finally, Fernando sent me this: a list of Twitter users in order of most followers. Kaka and Ronaldo are in the top thirty, and are the highest ranked athletes.