Month: February 2012

soccer

Why the Borislow-WPS case won’t die

Posted on by Beau Dure

Yes, I know. Only masochists and bored legal scholars are still reading legal documents in this case at this point.

But since the court held an inconclusive status conference this week (I’ve heard “trial in April,” “the judge still hasn’t ruled on the motions” and “cannot comment at this time”), I’ll give an inconclusive status update.

The latest filing from Dan Borislow’s legal team shows how far apart the sides are at this point. It’s a position statement offered before the status conference. Enjoy.

What we have now are a couple of different possibilities for what has happened, depending on whom you believe:

Version A: We made a deal, but the U.S. Soccer Federation said they didn’t think it would work. We went ahead and asked again to see if we could work it out, and they said no. So there’s no deal. Independent of that, our chances of playing in 2012 went from slim to none soon after we agreed to the deal. There’s no point in issuing a temporary injunction for a league that isn’t playing in 2012, and we’ve started the arbitration/mediation process, so shouldn’t we be out of this court right now?

Version B: Seems awfully convenient that USSF told you the deal wouldn’t work. You never had any intention of settling, did you? We’re going to pursue discovery of you and maybe the USSF to find out. (Note: Not exaggerating here — see page 2 of the document above.) This was just a little delaying tactic you made because you knew you were going to lose. (Again, see the document.) We still have a deal, and we’re going to pursue it in case you’re able to get things in gear for 2013.

So that leaves the following questions:

1. What has the USSF allowed or not allowed?

No idea, and they’re not saying. There’s a bit of confusion over whether Borislow would be allowed to sign five national team players, four, one or none, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s worth getting into what each side is saying. The voice that matters is USSF. Which is silent.

2. Would any league take magicJack?

WPSL, likely not, from all that’s been reported. W-League? Haven’t asked. This is relevant for this reason: If magicJack is a member of a league and wants to play some exhibitions, what limitations could USSF place then?

3. What kind of damage could discovery do to WPS?

Maybe someone can tell us what sort of trouble WPS would be in if — and we can’t stress the word if enough — the discovery process finds some sign of bad faith in negotiating the deal, either by having advance knowledge that USSF would say no or that they were already about to pull the plug on the 2012 season.

Conspiracy theories aside, few businesses like to have all their dealings made public. WPS has been keeping things guarded for months — they haven’t gone public with expansion candidates, among other things.

4. Can WPS get a fair hearing in Florida?

I’ll rephrase my own question: Did WPS negotiate the deal with Borislow because they had simply lost confidence in their chances to win in this court? Even though the Jan. 18 hearing that was averted would’ve been WPS’s first real opportunity to present witnesses and make its case against Borislow? All they had done before then was defended (unsuccessfully) its termination procedure.

5. What can WPS do to get out of court?

Agree to play exhibition games against Borislow in 2013? That, along with a couple of smaller issues that don’t seem to be controversial, would satisfy the deal. Then there’s no need for a motion to enforce a settlement or anything else. (Unless some other issue arises.)

6. Why don’t they?

No idea. Maybe a couple of owners balked? Maybe USSF won’t let them?

7. So that leads us back to Question 1?

Yep.

I’m always happy to crowdsource these legal documents. Comments welcome.

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sports culture

Sports and religion … oil and vinegar? (Or “oil and Linegar*”?)

Posted on by Beau Dure

David Brooks, one of the more independent-minded and therefore one of the more thoughtful pundits around today, offers a thoughtful but flawed take on sports and religion, citing the Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow crazes.

Ascent in the sports universe is a straight shot. You set your goal, and you climb toward greatness. But ascent in the religious universe often proceeds by a series of inversions: You have to be willing to lose yourself in order to find yourself; to gain everything you have to be willing to give up everything; the last shall be first; it’s not about you.

Not that Lin and Tebow are exactly the same, as my terrific former colleague Cathy Lynn Grossman points out at USA TODAY. Tebow, perhaps through no fault of his own, sparked a conversation about divine intervention in sports. I don’t see Lin doing that. As someone who would struggle to explain why a divine entity would mess with field goals but not with famine, tsunamis and so forth, I’m therefore a little less agitated by the Lin craze than I was with Tebow-ism.

Brooks says Lin, being a thoughtful guy who surely had to grapple with deep questions at Harvard, has wrestled with the balance of God and team:

In a 2010 interview with the Web site Patheos, Lin recalled, “I wanted to do well for myself and my team. How can I possibly give that up and play selflessly for God?”

It’s a strange question to those of us who grew up in the “muscular Christianity” ethos of the Athens YMCA and its camps, where I was taught to be a good Christian by beating the crap out of other kids in games like “water basketball” (basically water polo with less officiating, more water in lungs) and “ball” (essentially, whoever has the ball is fair game for just about anything).

But somehow, we were also taught sportsmanship and respect for opponents. We believed we could compete all-out, then pray together afterwards, as NFL players such as my fellow YMCA alum John Kasay have done for decades. (Yes, before Tebow.)

Sports and religion can be an awkward mix on the personal level. MMA fighters and boxers sometimes say plenty of nasty things about each other before a fight, only to follow up the fight with a shout-out to Christ for making everything possible. Some athletes — like a lot of celebrities, politicians and other people in power — take advantage of their positions for all sorts of sordid behavior, whether they profess to be religious or not.

And Brooks has a point about the balance of self-confidence in competition and humility in Christianity. Athletes may need to ask themselves whether their competing to better themselves or destroy others. The former is easy to fit in religion, teaching lessons of self-sacrifice and perseverance that can be sustained in other aspects of life. The latter is more difficult.

Ironically, more secular Europe might be better at competing for all the right reasons than the Bible-thumping USA. Crowds gather for Olympic-sport competitions and cheer all the athletes — maybe a little louder for their favorites, but  they’re not antagonist. Soccer is an exception, of course, and the nastiest antagonism is actually the sectarian-driven nonsense most notable in Glasgow but also seen elsewhere.

But even once you get past the rowdier crowds, you have athletes who often compete with mutual respect. Some American pundits lament that respect, longing for some mythical good old days in which the Colts and Packers genuinely hated each other. Those days, if they ever existed, have faded. What we see now is (mostly) honest competition.

Brooks’ piece is worth a read. But the conclusion rings false to those of us who have talked with elite athletes who can psych themselves up to hit each other without hating each other. Ultimately, Brooks’ conclusion puts a limit on the human spirit. And sports are all about challenging such limits.

* I have now fulfilled my obligation as a sports journalist to make a Lin pun. I don’t intend to make another.

(HT: @JeffKassouf, who also disagrees with Brooks)

1
soccer

WPS teams move on; WPS does not

Posted on by Beau Dure

If you’ve been looking for just a little bit of good news in pro women’s soccer, you got it today. The Western New York Flash and Boston Breakers will play this season, and a couple of well-established WPSL teams (FC Indiana, former WPSer Chicago Red Stars) will be moving into an “elite league” to join them. I’m guessing Marta won’t be involved, but this will give a lot of WPS players a few options other than fleeing the country.

But if you read what I’ve written at espnW, you’ll see things aren’t quite as rosy for the league as a whole.

Dan Borislow’s motion for a temporary injunction is morphing into a motion to enforce “The Deal.” Many readers believe “The Deal” was never finalized. Borislow’s legal team argues most vociferously that it was.

(Sorry I’m not embedding the document this time — these two combined would probably break my blog. Here’s the Motion to Enforce Settlement.)

The second document — Declaration of Louis S. Ederer (Borislow’s attorney) — is enough to make you wonder when and how this case will ever end.

As I say in the story, one revelation here is that the league’s laundry lists of accusations against Borislow (you remember — the stuff Deadspin called “The Angry Emails That Helped Cost Boca Raton Its All-Star Pro Soccer Team”) was basically ignored by the court to this point. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised, given that the court has thus far limited itself to the termination procedures. But this was brought up early, when the league was trying to get the case dismissed. The league says back in its opposition to Borislow’s original motion that it’s a bit rich for Borislow to point to these agreements after (according to the league) breaching his own responsibilities so many times.

I say “according to the league” because Borislow denies all this. He firmly believes the league had no reason to dismiss him.

And I should clarify one thing from the previous post on this matter. It wasn’t Borislow’s business plan to say “Nah, I’m not going to buy sign boards because I’m putting the money toward players.” The sign-board disagreement is more about Borislow’s objection to his lack of TV games and some related disputes.

So from all this, we have a bunch of questions I’d like to throw open to my civil, thoughtful commenters:

1. Who’s joining the four teams already announced for the WPSL elite division?

2. There’s no sanctioning problem with that division, right? Right? (Shouldn’t be — WPSL has had pro teams in the past.)

3. Which players will be around to play for these teams?

4. What’s the deal with “The Deal”? Can Borislow compel teams to play him in 2013 if they return to WPS as scheduled?

5. What did U.S. Soccer say about “The Deal,” when did they say it, and to whom did they say it?

6. Why such an insistent discovery process over the suspension of the 2012 season, which neither party apparently believes is a violation of “The Deal”?

7. What’s the way forward from this?

Comment away …

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soccer

Business plan (Lisa needs braces!) – roots of a WPS conflict

Posted on by Beau Dure

You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one – John Lennon

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. – Rebecca West

I had been planning to write about the underlying business-model dispute in WPS today, and then I saw that Fake Sigi had already chimed in on the topic of marketing WPS as a “cause.”

I’ve said before that there are plenty of reasons to own a sports team or invest in it. You could argue that Barcelona is a “cause,” and it’s sometimes hard to tell if that cause it the “more than a club” philosophy or Keynesian theory on economic debt. (Yes, econ nerds, I know I’m oversimplifying. Bear with me here.)

What we saw in 2011 wasn’t so much “cause” marketing as a different type of ownership. Dan Borislow and Joe Sahlen differ on a few things, but they had some similarities. They were willing to spend money on talent. And their teams were, in part, outlets of their brands. Borislow named the team after his product; Sahlen bought heavily as a league sponsor with naming rights on their stadium.

So when we ask why Abby Wambach has sworn allegiance to Borislow or why other national team players haven’t spoken up about the current legal mess or Ella Masar’s incendiary blog post, are we really asking what these players believe is possible in WPS?

That idea, beyond anything Borislow has done, is seductive. Just find enough wealthy people who are willing to spend money with little in return — at least for now — and you have a league of people enjoying competitive play and relative comfort between World Cup/Olympic cycles.

The question those investors might ask: How long am I expected to lose money, and how much? Anschutz and company sank tens of millions into MLS, but even with their accounting as private as it is, you have to figure they’ve earned a good bit back by selling a lot of teams as their value was soaring.

And future owners likely will need to spend more on a front office staff and other ancillaries than Borislow has. Critique the league’s front office all you want, but the fact is that magicJack benefited a great deal from having an infrastructure in place and from other teams’ marketing efforts. Abby Wambach would’ve drawn just as many fans to her hometown of Rochester if she had been playing for the Washington Freedom or Atlanta Beat or Chicago Red Stars as she did playing for magicJack.

The league also had smartly reached out through social media, a byproduct of the great decision to bring in Amanda Vandervort. The players’ Twitter presences exploded after the World Cup, but you can thank the league’s former management for building up the efforts on that front.

Now a lot of that infrastructure has been depleted by budget cuts. It’s not exactly going to build up during a season with no games and a lot of legal fees.

So when Wambach goes to Kansas City and speaks to a crowd larger than the announced attendance at many magicJack games, then says the league needs a bunch of positivity and wealthy people, is she dreaming?

Signs point to yes. The Washington Freedom, which once boasted Wambach, Japan’s Homare Sawa and France’s Sonia Bompastor, had to move because they didn’t find anyone willing to do what Borislow did. Not even in the wealthy enclaves of McLean and Bethesda, where the Freedom had done outreach for years with the powerful youth soccer clubs. If you can’t get some D.C.-area tech entrepreneur or Capital One executive to gamble a few million on a pro team that would provide coaches and inspiration for a couple of youth juggernauts, what are the odds of finding someone elsewhere?

And Wambach’s plea for unity may come across as a little tone-deaf. Fans are in an uproar: See StarCityFan2’s comment here saying she didn’t seem to care how her teammates were treated. And league backers could respond to her “can’t build something from negativity” comment by asking, “Wait a minute — who’s suing whom here?”

But should we question Wambach’s desire to dream of a time in which WPS gets such backing? Is it really wrong to hope that some combination of Nike, Ellen DeGeneres and some youth soccer phenom-turned-tech CEO will swoop in to build a better league? Do we have to go to Peter Wilt’s souped-up semipro model already?

Perhaps not. But the question in the meantime is how you keep today’s arguments from sweeping away the platform from which tomorrow’s soccer can be launched.

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soccer

Soccer Hall of Fame: Decisions, decisions

Posted on by Beau Dure

Last year, justice was done in the Soccer Hall of Fame voting. Cobi Jones and Eddie Pope were easy calls, though the fact that Jones got more votes than Pope is a little alarming. The Veterans Committee rectified the voters’ error of omitting Bruce Murray. And at long last, voters realized that Earnie Stewart scored the first winning goal for the USA in a men’s World Cup since 1950, then stuck around to make sure the USA kept getting back to the big show.

(Speaking of 1950 — let’s take a moment to remember Harry Keough and be glad that his exploits finally got a bit of respect in his lifetime.)

To me, that leaves one egregious omission — Marco Etcheverry. The Hall is full of foreign players who did a bit of time in the NASL. To omit El Diablo is to suggest foreign MLS players need not apply. He was the driving force of the early D.C. United dynasty — MLS MVP in 1998 and a finalist the years before and after. He was fourth in voting last year, continuing to hover around 50%.

I have three more returnees from my ballot last year:

– Shannon MacMillan. Fifth in last year’s voting. I may have left her off in the past, but she had too many vital moments with the U.S. women’s team to overlook. She’s staying in my ballot.

– Carlos Valderrama. After Roberto Donadoni, he was the most famous foreign player to sign on with this crazy thing called MLS in 1996, and he was the first MVP. Then he stayed for several years, shuffling his feet and dropping the ball on a dime to forwards for seven seasons. Perhaps a less obvious choice than Etcheverry, but El Pibe is going to keep getting my vote.

– Roy Lassiter. I know this one’s controversial. Even Dan Loney won’t vote for him, and Loney would probably vote for 15 people if he could. Other players are up near the 50% mark in each year’s vote — Lassiter checked in under 20% last year. He has the single-season scoring record in MLS, but people are writing off 1996 as a “live ball” era in which defenses weren’t quite as locked-down as they are today. So at this point, I’m probably voting for him just to make sure he stays on the ballot and has a bit of momentum when he ends up in the Veterans Committee’s hands.

So that’s four. Now we consider the newbies, and for reasons Dan already explained, it’s a pretty easy choice — Tony Meola and Claudio Reyna are no-brainers. No one else is really in the mix.

That’s six. I could easily call it quits there. But I think it’s time to re-examine a few people. If I’m voting for Lassiter to keep him in everyone’s thoughts until the vets weigh in, why not Robin Fraser? Or Jason Kreis? Or another guy getting 50%, Joe-Max Moore?

In Kreis and Fraser’s cases, perhaps I’m being swayed by the fact that they commanded enough respect in the soccer community to get coaching jobs — and Kreis has taken his opportunity and run with it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Moore is actually close enough to have a shot at the Hall this year. I always thought of him as a complimentary player rather than a star. But he averaged a goal every two games in his first MLS stint, comparable to Lassiter’s pace. And he scored a few vital goals for the U.S. men, just as MacMillan did for the women.

So I’ll include Moore this year, with apologies for my past ballots. And while Kreis and Fraser (and Lassiter) would need a sea change among voters’ attitudes to get in, I think they at least deserve the recognition of a few Hall of Fame votes.

Voting for nine of the maximum 10 may seem generous. But I’m still omitting some players whose resumes are better than some current Hall members. Peter Vermes evolved from U.S. forward to standout MLS defender. Cindy Parlow was a matchup nightmare for anyone who faced the U.S. women. Chris Armas may frankly be one poorly timed injury away. And Dan is going to punch me in the stomach one day for omitting Mauricio Cienfuegos, whose contributions to MLS aren’t far behind Etcheverry’s or Valderrama’s.

The final nine: Meola, Reyna, Etcheverry, Lassiter, MacMillan, Valderrama, Moore, Fraser, Kreis.

Prediction for the 2012 induction class: Meola, Reyna, Etcheverry. If voters are suddenly getting generous after years of being misers, then MacMillan and Moore.

6
soccer

Glimpse inside Florida courtroom raises more questions in WPS-Borislow case

Posted on by Beau Dure

Today’s espnW story hints at the direction the WPS-Borislow legal proceedings will take in the wake of league’s decision to suspend the 2012 season.

A key issue: Would U.S. Soccer allow exhibition games between a magicJack exhibition team and WPS teams? WPS says definitely not. Borislow’s legal team says it wasn’t cut and dried, and in any case, the court transcripts show that the deal wasn’t even dependent on that.

Look at these court transcripts and decide for yourself. First up, the court hearing that was supposed to be a four-hour session on “irreparable harm” but instead became the announcement of the deal:

Then the telephone conversation between the parties and the judge:

I’d love to hear everyone’s comments.

The other news today: Abby Wambach appeared at a celebration in Kansas City, and ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel was there to get a word with her. The quote getting the most attention:

The truth is that the responsibility is all of ours. Nothing rises or fails with one person. We all need to step back, look at ourselves, and take responsibility for all of the things. Nobody is talking about the amazing things Dan did and how he treated his players. Everybody focuses all the attention on the negative. And that’s not how we’re going to get the WPS back and running. You can’t build something great on negativity. It has to be in a positive manner.

That’s not going to calm magicJack critics, who think players were so content with their salaries and creature comforts that they turned a blind eye to the issues raised by the league, the union, Ella Masar and others. And when you have WPS founders like Peter Wilt saying the whole thing needs to be scaled way back, you have to wonder how many other investors would be willing or able to step forward and match the “amazing things” Wambach’s describing.

But Wambach has also called for people to lose the egos and get past the issues that have come between them. Judge Sasser could very well order people to do that next week. We’ll see how that goes. And as one lawyer says in the transcripts, the devil is in the details.

10
soccer

Again with the promotion/relegation: Investors STILL needed

Posted on by Beau Dure

I was kidding when I mused aloud about suing a certain promotion/relegation zealot for defamation. I think.

As I’ve said before, the people (particularly the ringleader) of the promotion/relegation movement tend to personalize things. We’re not just idiots if we don’t see how American soccer would obviously be better if everyone saw the “open system” light. We’re on the take from Major League Soccer as part of a grand conspiracy to rid the world of the league system that began when England had too many soccer teams applying for its league.

We soccer journalists can say we like pro/rel but don’t find it feasible in this country at the moment, we can say it might happen someday when we reach critical mass, we can say our income wouldn’t change if MLS were to disappear tomorrow. We could probably even post our tax returns online, and they’d insist that someone from MLS is slipping us cash in a secluded room somewhere.

That’s all a good way of deflecting attention from the fact that we soccer journalists have plenty of evidence — some of it brilliantly compiled this week by Kenn Tomasch — and they have little but a voice in their heads saying, “If you build it, they will come.”

The current argument tack appears to be that they don’t need investors to build a league. They can just change things at the federation level, and then everyone will have to get on board with promotion/relegation.

Just a couple of problems with that thought:

1. Current investors could easily run screaming from such a change.

2. Again, there’s no evidence that we have people who would invest in soccer clubs that want to get promoted. In fact, the current leagues of choice are cheap amateur leagues — PDL, W-League, NPSL, WPSL.

If, over time, these teams find that they’re ready to make the leap up the pyramid, they can. But the vast majority of these clubs are in no position to be forced up the pyramid, and they dang well know it!

Let’s reiterate this:

– You can move up the ladder in American soccer if you have the capital and facilities to do so.

– Most clubs choose not to do so.

So how could anyone think there are tons of investors who would invest in soccer if they had a chance to climb the ladder through on-field performance? They can already do so, and they’re not.

3. U.S. Soccer knows this. So they’re not going to ruin the most stable league they’ve ever had by forcing teams to move up and down.

And no amount of personal attacks, no jabs at MLS’s TV ratings, no scoffing at WPS’s troubles will change those basic facts.

 

7
soccer

Borislow: Let’s reiterate a deal

Posted on by Beau Dure

On Jan. 18, I reported the following:

Women’s Professional Soccer averted another court date with magicJack owner Dan Borislow on Wednesday, reaching a deal that allows his team to play an exhibition schedule in 2012 and 2013. Borislow said he has put his temporary injunction suit on hold; the suit was intended to stop the termination of his franchise.

The details of the deal need to be finalized and the plan must be approved by U.S. Soccer.

The Deal was first reported by a mysterious Twitter person who has since deleted the tweets. But it was Borislow who was most enthusiastic about it, though our mysterious eyewitness told the world that “Fitz, O’Sullivan all seemed happy.” (That would be Atlanta Beat owner/WPS board chairman T. Fitz Johnson and WPS CEO Jennifer O’Sullivan, of course.)

News of The Deal even reached Deadspin, thanks to the fabulous (and since-departed) Emma Carmichael, with the classic headline “The Banned Boca Raton Women’s Professional Soccer Team Will Keep Playing In Zombie Form.”

And yet WPS, for its part, never publicly acknowledged such The Deal. The league didn’t acknowledge much of anything.

You may have heard this week that the news has turned a little sour.

In Monday’s conference call about WPS suspending its 2012 season, O’Sullivan addressed The Deal: “What the ownership and league have been struggling to do is put the focus back on the players and this game. We were willing to consider that as an option in order to accomplish that goal.”

This morning, we learned from Beat beat writer William Bretherton that WPS owners were downplaying The Deal. And Johnson thought info about The Deal “was put out when it shouldn’t have been.”

That, of course, is the unfortunate part about going to court. If you’re read all the legal docs that I’ve put out through this site and espnW, you’ll see a lot of things that both parties might not want the public perusing. And The Deal can’t be kept secret when it’s being discussed in a public court hearing. As I said to our mysterious Twitter witness, “FINALLY! The deal is public!!!”

The details, though, were not described in public. And William quotes Philly owner David Halstead as saying WPS and Borislow were on different wavelengths.

Want to know what Dan Borislow has to say about The Deal? Let’s check the motion his legal team filed Monday:

The first paragraph complains that WPS is blaming Borislow for the suspension of the season and, for reasons that aren’t clear to me, boasting that Borislow was likely to win his case. The second paragraph says there’s no point in having a Feb. 1 hearing on an injunction if the 2012 season doesn’t exist, suggesting that the parties meet by telephone instead. (That meeting has apparently taken place.)

Then it gets interesting (emphasis mine):

Further, as the parties reported to the Court at the January 16, 2012 hearing, the parties have already reached a complete settlement of this case on agreed terms, certain of which were read into the record. Notwithstanding the latest announcement by Defendant, it continues to be Plaintiffs’ position that this is a settled matter. The only open issue, that is, U.S. Soccer Federation approval, remains pending, and Defendant has a continuing duty to cooperate in good faith in such efforts. It now, however, appears that defendant is attempting to renege on the settlement.

And then the fourth paragraph says, “Hey, we still have a deal.”

So what have they agreed to do, and what might Judge Sasser — who has already ruled against WPS even on issues that seemed to be cut and dried such as jurisdiction of this case — compel WPS to do?

I’ve written a check to the State of Florida and filled out a request form to get audio recordings of the Jan. 16 hearing and the telephone hearing. It might take a few days, but I’ll let you know.

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