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Well my summer plans were looking up as I was even thinking about applying for credentials to head to Vegas on August 5th to see Real Madrid and Juventus play, after my trip to Baltimore to see Liverpool vs. Tottenham on July 28th. It was going to be a perfect way to add to my season of watching RSL play, but earlier this morning those plans got trashed as I saw the first tweet about Juve backing out of their US tour. The reason for their backing out, is someone wants to go to China instead, in yet another case of what clearly is China offering up a bigger paycheck, the Italian team decided to break their contracts in the US and chase the money.
How sad that is but it got even worse as I found out today who the World Football Challenge got as an replacement, no they didn't find another European team to fill in but instead they went south of the border and got Santos Laguna. Yuck, now I get that Santos has a fair share of fans in the US, but they are here all the time via Champions League and I could care less about seeing them play, so that match just dropped in value to me by about 50%. Problem is that despite the change to a much less desirable opponent, there has been so far no change in pricing of the tickets. Here is the link to the updated ticket site.
In what could have been a huge event for Vegas and soccer fans, to well something less. Now I had some complaints about how the event was being handled anyhow, questions about extra high ticket prices (compared to other WFC matches), no hospitality packages or VIP packages (really in Vegas, nothing special being done), yet it still was a chance to see two world class teams. Now however it holds a lot less attraction to me and several others who were interested in going.
A shame for the many fans who intended on going to one of the matches that had originally had Juventus schedule to compete in. I know that I will consider this a very bad black eye given to that franchise that clearly made a choice to chase the money after already scheduling matches. Very Bad Form.
OFF MY SOAPBOX