With its credibility swaying in the wake of a betting scandal, the very last thing the league needed was to be in business with a prediction platformThe timing of the suspensions was unfortunate. Or perhaps it was karmically inevitable.Forty-two days after Major League Soccer announced a new partnership with Polymarket – a prediction platform that lets its users bet on just about anything, including whether, when, and where one country will bomb another – a press release went out. A pair of Ghanaian-born former MLS players, Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah, had been banned from the league for life for betting on games, including their own.Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University. Continue reading...