Vancouver Whitecaps and EA Sports — maker of FIFA 11, the hottest-selling sports video game, well, ever — announced a new partnership that will see EA promoting the Whitecaps through its technology, and putting in support for the development of grassroots soccer in British Columbia. The Whitecaps become the first pro soccer team in North America to become an official partner of EA.

The referees are on strike in Scotland. They have had it. They’ve had it with the criticisms of coaches and players. They’re tired of being made the scapegoats whenever a close decision goes against a fiery manager with an axe to grind. Good for them. They’ve gone on strike, leaving the Scottish FA scrambling to find refs for this week’s matches. Polish and Portuguese refs who the SFA thought it had secured to officiate this weekend’s games have gone back home. Scotland did find enough foreign refs to keep the Premier League going, so fans could be treated another weekly instalment of Rangers, Celtic and Everybody Else.

Will more and more teams be willing to give away their draft picks? Are NCAA players becoming less and less relevant year after year? MLS now allows its member teams to bring in as many players from their academies as they want, allowing teams to bring in players when they are teens and skip the NCAA route altogether.

The shop window featured a heck of a lot of high-priced talent. The Vancouver Whitecaps weren’t buying.

Even though both the Montreal Impact and Vancouver Whitecaps are moving to MLS, both are retaining their memberships in the second-division NASL. NASL chief executive officer Aaron Davidson confirmed that MLS is aware that both the Impact and Whitecaps are retaining their memberships in NASL, even though Vancouver makes its debut as an MLS city in 2011 and Montreal makes the move in 2012. “They can still have teams in NASL; those teams can have synergies with the MLS franchises or they can be standalone teams,” said Davidson Tuesday, over the phone from Paraguay.

Here are some of the interesting possibilities out there for Vancouver and Portland in Wednesday’s expansion draft. Here are five names that really jumped out on the lists of unprotected players released Monday.

DPs for sale or rent... rooms to let 50 cents... OK, apologies to Roger Miller for that one. But, when Major League Soccer released the lists of players its existing 16 teams had made available for Wednesday’s expansion draft, the Designated Players jumped off the page. The Vancouver Whitecaps and Portland Timbers could each max out the three DPs allowed on their rosters in the first three rounds of the draft. Not that either would do that.

As the Colorado Rapids gathered on a platform placed at the centre of BMO Field, jumping up and down, surrounded by sky-blue confetti, holding the MLS Cup aloft, FC Dallas midfielder Dax McCarty stood on the field, staring at the celebration. The rest of his FC Dallas teammates, losers of a 2-1 decision after extra time in Toronto, had left the field. But McCarty stood and stared at the Rapids’ celebration. Wondering what could have been. Wondering what would have happened if a ball off the foot of Colorado sub Macoumba Kandji hadn’t taken a strange deflection off defender FC Dallas George John in the 108th minute and looped past the goal line. What could have happened in penalty kicks had John’s last-gasp effort at redemption, from point blank range, not been stopped by the outstretched hand of Rapids’ keeper Matt Pickens.

Basically, the league will look at a new format in which teams would start play in the fall, take a winter break, resume games in late February or March and finish the season in the spring.

Colorado Rapids coach Gary Smith wants MLS MVP David Ferreira to read the following quote. That was obvious at Saturday’s post-practice press conference at Toronto’s BMO Field, ahead of Sunday’s MLS Cup. “I think he’s feeling the pressure a little bit,” the Rapids coach deadpanned after being asked how his team planned to stop FC Dallas’ elite playmaker. “Everyone is …