The picture of Inter Milan without real explanation confused a lot of people. While I still can't give a full detailing of the reasons why I put it up, I can give some back story. A couple years ago, someone from an English soccer team ... err, football club ... contacted me about whether the style of injury analysis I do for baseball teams would work in soccer. My answer was "I have no idea, but I'd like to find out."

Let me preface this by saying I loathe soccer. It may be the beautiful game and many in the world are as passionate about it as I am about baseball, but it's boring. Yes, what I call boring, others call beautiful, so I'm not asking anyone to change it and in fact, I can appreciate now some of what they see. The athleticism is amazing - players regularly run 10 miles in a game - and the opportunities for analysis are astounding. Just like baseball has PitchFX, the Premiership has Sportrak, a system of cameras that tracks each player and can use their movement to generate a distance run.

Moreover, the passion that fans and the people inside the game really sucked me in. I wanted to know why fans are so rabid, to the point of functioning as street gangs in some cases. Outside of Boston and New York, the type of local and even inherited team sense just isn't in place here for anything. ("America has no history," one of my soccer mentors explained to me, trying to explain why losing teams don't lose fans in England.) In my seasons of consulting, I came to feel some of the passion. While I don't think my consultations had much effect -- most of my recommendations were completely ignored -- I did come to think of the team as "mine."

Most interestingly, there is a sick amount of money in European soccer. The transfer system is not unlike the posting system used to bring Japanese players over and the payrolls of the top teams would make the Yankees look frugal. The sponsorships - right on the jerseys! - are much more noticeable than even Spiderman bases. An influx of loaded ownership from all corners of the world, including the US and Russia, have amplified this. Add in the Champions League, which is like a second season in the midst of a season, and the various country games, which always take precedence and players, make it almost like having a World Baseball Classic every year.

Now as the season in the Premiership ends, so too does my consulting arrangement with the team I've come to call "mine." People I know and respect have moved on and it looks as if I probably will as well. That's not a bad thing, but it does feel a bit mercenary ... which is exactly what it is. I'll learn a new team, develop some passion for it, and maybe feel a bit of pain when my new team meets my former team, the way you think about a first girlfriend. People have been doing it in sports for years and I'll do it as well.

But one thing will remain -- Man U sucks.