As soon as the final kick of the 2008-09 season gave European soccer two months to put its feet up, the sport's movers and shakers exploded into life to manufacture the busiest summer in recent memory.

With hundreds of millions of dollars exchanging hands in the transfer market and some of the game's biggest names relocating to a new zip code, the soccer landscape will be decidedly different once official hostilities recommence this month. But if wheelings, dealings and unveilings aren't your thing, the United States' dramatic run at the Confederations Cup helped keep the soccer junkie entertained.

Here we take the first tentative steps into a new campaign by looking at the offseason's biggest stories, plus the backstories that may turn out to have an even greater significance.

Big story No. 1: Cristiano Ronaldo leaves Manchester United for Real Madrid. When the World Footballer of the Year switches teams, light bulbs pop, expectations rise and accountants rub their hands. Ronaldo's

It has been a heady July for soccer in the United States and Major League Soccer wants to believe the best is yet to come.

The league bills its All-Star game as a showpiece in the domestic calendar, pitting the finest MLS players against a European club. This year, the opposition is Everton from the English Premier League. Yet after a month in which soccer, at least in terms of attendance, made a serious play to be recognized as mainstream, Wednesday's game in Sandy, Utah, is in danger of being an afterthought.

The welcome invasion of high-profile international teams prompted a swell of interest this summer, with crowds flocking to games in eye-opening numbers. A total of 336,813 witnessed the six matches of the World Football Challenge, an invitational exhibition tournament featuring Chelsea, AC Milan, Inter Milan and Club America. Then there was the Gold Cup, which greeted 79,156 to Giants Stadium for Mexico's 5-0 trouncing of a weakened U.S. side in Sunday's final.

At a time when

With all of its imbalances, intangibles and contrasting styles, CONCACAF is perhaps the strangest of all world soccer's regional federations.

Mexico's 5-0 thrashing of an under-strength United States in the Gold Cup final on Sunday throws another element into the muddied mixture that forms the battle for bragging rights in this part of the globe.

South of the border, the result was greeted with predictable glee. It ended a 10-year wait between road victories over the U.S. as Mexico recaptured the Gold Cup trophy for the first time since 2003.

It mattered little to the Mexican public that the hosts were playing what was effectively a third-string team at Giants Stadium last weekend. The result, and its resounding nature, was taken as a portent of better things to come for a nation that has so often lamented the recent difficulties experienced by El Tri.

In pure soccer terms, though, little has been proven by Mexico's triumph.

It showed that Mexico has significantly greater strength in

Nearly a month of sweat and toil ended Sunday, as the Tour de France came to its traditional conclusion smack dab in the center of Paris.

With subplots, scenery, the return of the greatest champion in cycling history and, thankfully, no positive drug tests, 2009 will go down as the year the Tour made a spectacular comeback.

Here we take a look at the big winners and losers of this unique and unpredictable race.

WINNER: Lance Armstrong

The seven-time champion could only finish third this time around, but that represented a major success given his three-year absence from the sport.

Armstrong's improved mood and demeanor endeared him to a French public who had previously been highly skeptical, and he became clearly the biggest story of the race.

With a new team and a full year's preparation behind him, expect big things in 2010.

LOSER: Astana

The Kazakhstan-backed team had the biggest name (Armstrong) and the best rider (Alberto Contador) in the race, yet somehow came away looking

Barring mishap or miracle, Alberto Contador will be sipping champagne in Paris on Sunday having just been crowned Tour de France champion.

Yet even the sweet taste of success mixed with France's finest bubbly may struggle to rinse away the broiling bitterness that has seethed in Contador's mind throughout this year's event.

Tipped for victory since before the start of the race, the 26-year-old Spanish rider has found that one truly is the loneliest number and heads toward the finish line of this three-week test of mind and soul nursing a series of grievances.

Contador should be the happiest man in the field, with a lead of more than four minutes on nearest challenger Andy Schleck on the eve of the race's last significant stage.

But the souring of relations within his own team, Astana, has gnawed away at him. He has felt isolated within the camp, largely due to the close and long-standing friendship between team director Johan Bruyneel and returning star Lance Armstrong.

Contador felt

The role of the domestique is one of those puzzling time-honored vagaries which run through the seam of professional cycling. The concept of sporting self-sacrifice is one that is either resoundingly noble or mildly unsavory, depending on your view of the ideal of athletic competition.

The life of a domestique can be thankless, an existence out of the spotlight, carrying water bottles for, operating subserviently to and shielding the wind from a colleague who will claim all the glory.

Lance Armstrong claims to have embraced the role in the second half of this year's Tour de France, happy to play second fiddle to Alberto Contador once it was apparent that his Spanish teammate was the strongest man in the Astana squad.

Yet while Armstrong appears to have given up his own chances of victory he has not, and will not, ever be considered be a typically unheralded teammate.

For a start, it is now clear that Armstrong was not ready to win this year in any case, with 42 months of inactivity and

TURNBERRY, Scotland – One by one, the dreams of Turnberry withered and died, ensnared in the trapdoors of heartache secreted amid the reeds and gorse bushes and cruel undulations of this Scottish links course.

It was a British Open packed with drama and storylines that defied reason and belief in equal measure, but one which largely will be looked back on through moistened eyes.

Stewart Cink's victory was as deserved as it was impressive, yet a pervading sense of sadness and gloom hung over the windswept coastline long after the patrons had departed.

For so long it seemed a fairy-tale ending was inevitable. Wherever you looked around this proud old beacon of history, with its clutching rough and vertical bunkers, there were tales of intrigue.

All would perish, extinguished amid the confluence of circumstance that gave the ice-cool Cink his finest hour.

The last one to go was the most painful to watch, as Tom Watson's extraordinary attempt at age-reversal fell apart at the final hurdle.

TURNBERRY, Scotland – The fine folk of Scotland could be forgiven for thinking the new Open champion is not the most serious of characters.

Stewart Cink's Turnberry adventure has been a whirlwind of comedic anecdotes, with the garrulous Georgia Tech alumnus holding court on everything from swine flu, mountain bears, pints of Guinness and condoms. Eh? Don't worry, all will be explained later.

But beneath the wit lies a serious golfer with a serious work ethic, one which paid off in the most satisfying fashion deep into Sunday evening. Cink didn't tame Turnberry's wilds, but he survived everything this extraordinary edition of the oldest championship had to toss into his path.

From the improbable surge of a golden great to the turbulent gusts bursting in off the ocean, to sickness he briefly feared was the deadly swine flu, Cink met it all with an unflappable mood and a cheery disposition.

These weathered links of west Scotland spent the weekend gleefully dicing the game and the psyche