Some stories I have read in the past few days, stories you also might like.

Let’s start with this one: In late 2001, Major League Soccer was essentially dead for several hours, after only six seasons and lots of red ink.

Who saved it? The story suggests Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL and a long-time soccer booster, was the key man. But we should not forget the tenacity of Phil Anschutz, who owned six of the 10 teams who survived to play the 2002 season, including the Galaxy and the Columbus Crew, who had the league’s only soccer-specific stadium.

The suggestion is that the U.S. national team’s surprise run to the World Cup quarterfinals in the summer of 2002 proved to be the turning point for MLS, which now operates 20 teams.

On another topic, we hear from a veteran journalist who expresses his amazement that modern tech companies can be openly “age-ist” and get away with it.

As Dan Ryan puts it, when it comes to age bias, “tech companies don’t even bother to lie” … and he wonders if any other form of hiring bias as overt would be overlooked.

He spent 18 months, in his 50s, working at HubSpot, and wrote a book on the experience. The linked story appears to sum up the issues he encountered.

Back to soccer. The Guardian, the English newspaper which does an excellent job of covering MLS, leads off a weekly notes piece with the latest atrocity perpetrate by Nigel de Jong, serial thug and now the responsibility of the Galaxy.

De Jong’s reckless tackle over the weekend drove Portland’s Darlington Nagbe from the game with what looked like a broken ankle but turned out to be “only” a sprain — which can take weeks to overcome.

To see some video of the moment, go to the 1:30 mark of this MLS weekend wrap-up.

And one more soccer bit, from English freelancer Richard Jolly, one of the leading contributors to The National.

In this piece for Eurosport he reports on Manchester City’s 3-2 (on aggregate) Champions League quarterfinals victory over Paris Saint-Germain.

The outcome is good news for the Premier League, which has a team in the final four of Europe’s premier club competition, which doesn’t always happen these days, as well as for Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour, who finally saw his enormous investment in the team produce a deep run in the Champions League. Jolly notes the result also is bad news for PSG and its Qatari owners, who lost this battle of Gulfie-funded Euro clubs.

It says nothing good about France’s top division, Ligue 1, which appears to be scarred and deflated by PSG dominance.

As Jolly notes, Manchester City is 15 points behind Leicester City, in England, while PSG leads Ligue 1 by 28 points.