squidpants

so I've been trying to get a USA soccer jersey for awhile now, it's a real pain in the ass. I'm looking for a legit jersey with a number and name on it, preferably Brian McBride or Eddie Pope, but I'll take about anybody except Adu. But no dice.

For one thing, the jerseys with numbers are at least $80 on the US Soccer website, which is expensive. So I turned to eBay to try to get a cheaper one, but most of the ones on there are pretty bad knock-offs or made of flimsy material, and they all ship from Asia, meaning they might not even get here before the World Cup ends. Yahoo and Amazon also didn't have any.

So then I went back to the US soccer website and tried to order one, and they're all out of stock, which is ridiculous. You'd think they'd have a ton on hand, considering the world's biggest sporting event has been coming up for 4 years and the US team is ranked 5th in the world. But no.

So I tried looking at sporting goods stores' websites to see what they had, and it seems like there's some kind of cabal - none of the stores have US jerseys, but every single store has the exact same things, and they're even all organized the same way, with the same categories. It's bizarre. I assume these stores are not all owned by the same company, but who knows. They have jerseys for the team from Porto, Portugal and other European (and Mexican and Brazilian and Turkish) cities, but no US. It's ridiculous. So I'm going to the mall today and try (probably unsuccessfully) to buy a jersey.

It's clear that US Soccer doesn't really care about selling jerseys and getting their name out there if there's only one place to buy them, and they're all sold out. Way to go.