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waste of a meal then

I personally think you should have gone with Tractor Sazi just to piss your cousins off Nah, sounds good! I find following some more "obscure" leagues kind of rewarding, especially when you have a personal connection, and Iranian football is underrated in the West anyway. Your grandma is from Shiraz, right?

@nudge idk if you even care, but fuck it I want to tell someone. So apologies if you don't give a shit. I have picked two teams - which might be kind of weird because... they could potentially play each other. But I'm not a normal Iranian, so why should I support Iranian football teams normally. I'm going with teams based off family connection. I've got family from (mostly) Tehran, a bit in Shiraz, and some family up in some town by the Caspian sea in Gilan province. So for Tehran, Persepolis FC wins out because most of my family are Persepolis FC fans. It's also the easiest Iranian team to watch matches of outside Iran except for maybe Tractor Sazi. Persepolis also covers Shiraz! This is a stretch... but they're named after that ancient palace Persepolis... which is really close to Shiraz. And Shiraz doesn't have any teams in the top flight so... close enough! The next team is SC Damash Gilan, it looks like people mostly call them Damash. They're in Rasht, which I think is the capital of Gilan province. I'll probably never get to see them play unless they get promoted up a division though, because they're in the league just below the Iranian top flight. Jahanbakhsh & more importantly Mehdi Mahdavikia (imo Iran's best player in my lifetime) played for them. Mahdavikia started and finished his career at Persepolis too, so I think I've found two good clubs for me.

I can't tell you about baseball at all or what the fans of that sport think of their officials, tbh. But honestly, NFL refs are about a million times more respected by fans than any football referee I've ever seen in my life... and quite frankly, that's because they make the correct decision most of the time. The times where calls are disputed, it usually gets talked about for weeks. You compare that with the refereeing oddities we see in England now and you get at least 1 high profile error each day there's a side playing it feels like. With the NFL referees go to review the video footage, they overwhelmingly make the right call. The one time I'd heard of NFL referees being shite consistently was when the actual professional referees went on strike and they had to bring in school referees who were nowhere near as good (a lot of them are trying to become actual NFL refs and tbh it's a hard job to get, with lots of people trying to get that job and with the bar for entry being very high). It was basically like having League 1/2 referees in the premier league, it was incredible how bad they were. I think that might have actually been my first or second year in America, but it was definitely the first year I'd tried to get into the NFL so I remember that pretty vividly. With the actual referees that are supposed to be officiating, I only really remember one really really egregious wrong call after it went to video review. NFL referees aren't perfect... but they're really fucking good in comparison to referees in a lot of sports. But it's American football, it's a sport where there's a shitload of dead time - the referees aren't getting absolutely knackered constantly running everywhere. They've also got huge teams of officials and (as far as I know because they want to be a bit secretive about VAR for some reason) use far more camera angles for reviewed decisions. So there's obvious differences between the two sports - but I do think there's things we can learn from the standards the US expects of the NFL referees. We could go one step further and add a bit more transparency to VAR review by having the referees mic'd up so and asking them to explain their decision-making process to the TV. The NFL doesn't do this, but that short term XFL league from earlier this year had it (before COVID killed that league off) and... it was actually pretty great, and tbh any sport with video review should have the ref mic'd up.

My preferred starting eleven below: Before people point out certain exclusions, they'll be heavy rotation needed with the fixtures this year so just because I've left certain players out, it doesn't mean they won't be getting enough game time. For me, we played our best football last season in the shape below and it also I think suits the attacking players we have. Zouma on the left I'm unsure about. I think it gives us the most balance. Mount centre left being able to come in on his right, Havertz centre right being able to come in on his left. Mount's work rate will help us out defensively and it puts him in his best position. Pulisic and Ziyech also in their best positions. Giroud up top to act as the focal point for the attacking players and to also help us out physically. He also gives the full-backs someone to aim for with their crosses.

From here she is looking like the (acting) leader of the free world, in the absence of a responsible US president.