Farewell 2010. A highly varied year for the soccer world. A World Cup year -- but it turned out to be a far from brilliant World Cup, one that, at the very end, was tarnished by a cynical and just plain dirty performance from the Dutch. They got what they deserved -- they lost -- and Spain, after promising so much for so many years -- was finally crowned world champion.

If MLS wants to make a place for itself among the world's top leagues -- and why shouldn't it? -- then it will have to start paying a lot more attention to the players that it signs.

Statistics and soccer are never a happy mix -- amusing, yes, they can be that (in the sense that they can be maneuvered into proving or disproving almost anything you wish). Therefore, they can be misleading, and therefore they are not to be trusted.

One of the oldest of the many idiocies that infest soccer is the one that says that if you work hard and everyone likes you, you should always be rewarded with the prize. There's this World Cup business, for a start.

The Red Bulls will be without Juan Pablo Angel next season, which is a pity -- they're losing a hell of a player, a terrific goalscorer, and a class act, a real gentleman.

What the old North American Soccer League had, and what the new Major League Soccer does not have, was pizazz.

The idea -- somewhat strange at first, admittedly -- of an air-conditioned World Cup held in a tiny little Middle East country which, you can be sure of this, most people would have difficulty locating with any certainty, begins to sink in. I mean ... Qatar?

Of course Sunil Gulati is correct to indicate that politics - FIFA politics - are the key to understanding the voting that gave the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 version to Qatar - and left the USA out in the cold.

Yet again we find ourselves confronted with a massive soccer drama that, truth be told, has very little to do with the sport itself.