And it’s Plastic Pitch. Today, we announce a Kickstarter campaign for a planned new tablet publications/e-magazine that will cover Canadian soccer as extensively as The 11 did, but in the long-form format. Head over to Kickstarter to see how you can get on board and to hear more of our story.

The Eddies and the Alberta Soccer Association announced a new Regional Performance Centre will be launched, and that centre will link to the Excel Program, which helps identify talent for the Canadian national program. Sergio Teixeira will be the FC Edmonton ladies’ coach, and 20 players from age 14-16 have been recruited to take part in the program.

What we want to know is how you feel about the way MLS does business as a league. Is it time for a change? Do you trust MLS is ensuring a level playing field with a salary cap, or that constant rule changes are giving certain teams unfair advantages that defy the cap model? How do you feel about allocation money, secretive contracts and allocation orders?

If Leiweke is serious about a major overhaul, are shiny new Designated Players enough? Or should he consider more radical changes to the team?

And that opinion? That "minor league" would be overstating just how poor the league’s efforts were in communicating its product to its fans and, more importantly, to its potential fans.

Judging from the readership numbers — which spike every time we put up a story about new kits, redesigned kits, anything to do with kits — we've surmised that, to be a Canadian soccer fan, you have to be a bit of a fashionista.

Also included in the release was an artist's rendering of an envisioned stadium, giving fans a taste of what a new home for the Eddies could look like.

Make no mistake, the CSA’s decision to protect a national Div. 3 vision, while at the same time endorsing a report which backs away from a national Div. 2 strategy, represents a major, major win for NASL over USL. FC Edmonton and Ottawa will be recognized as Div. 2 in NASL, while USL can’t cross the border — at least not in a way that would be recognized as, well, Canadian.

So we went under the website’s hood and looked at the analytics. And, we were able to rank our 11 most-read stories of the year. Now, we present them in order.

Here is a portion of the written statement we received from FIFA.