I’d mentioned in a tweet yesterday that I’d been doing some research into Senegal lately. The reason for that mainly had to do with a couple of referenced to the capital, Dakar, that I’d run across while reading about the Dakar Rally and this Ringer article about the US Men’s National Team that beat England in the 1950 World Cup.

As it turns out, though, Wikipedia doesn’t take as deep a dive into the history of Senegal as I’d like. It, like much of Africa, has been home to human civilizations for thousands of years and remains home to dozens of ethnic groups stemming from one conquering group or another. One interesting part of Senegal’s pre-colonial history is that, at one point, there was an imperial government that ran most of modern-day Senegal based not on conquest but rather on an agreement between different kingdoms that this one guy or family should preside over all of them, provided he/they could maintain those constituent kingdoms’ political support. That’s not totally unheard of, but it is kind of a global rarity. Hell, Germany wasn’t a unified state until the mid 19th century.

Anyway, apparently Dakar is, or at least was, one of the more cosmopolitan cities on Africa’s west coast when boats were still a primary means of travel between the New World and old. That meant, after the Second World War, that lots of English soccer teams taking summer international tours, including the 1950 version of the Three Lions, would stop there, and thus Senegalese interest in soccer was born. Now you know!

• FiveThirtyEight.com has updated their global soccer club rankings, and Louisville City finds itself rated as the fourth best club in the US of A. Some (many) may scoff at that assessment, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s 100% correct and I won’t hear otherwise. Coming for that #1 spot, ATLUTD.
• Austin’s new MLS team, which will likely sound the death knell of yet another Austin USL team once they start playing in a couple years, was formally introduced yesterday, complete with song sheets and a badly misconceived nickname, “El Tree.” Astute observers have pointed out that their nickname should properly be Broccoli FC based on the team crest, and the visual delight of what will happen when they lose road matches to Portland.
• While we can all celebrate the Louisville Airport Authority’s decision to rename Standiford Field after Muhammad Ali, we can also look forward to the day when they rename Bowman Field after Niall McCabe.