Month: February 2015

soccer

MLS has already lost the collective bargaining talks

Posted on by Beau Dure

Deal or no deal? At this point, it hardly matters. A players strike, which would surely be brief given the limited resources the union can bring to bear, will harm Major League Soccer less in the long term than the league’s failure to seize the moment.

MLS has been at the crossroads before, and the league has usually gone the right away. From near-death in 2001, the league rebuilt itself with surprising speed and strength. This country is never going to be easy for a soccer league — it competes domestically with four better-established team sports, and it competes globally with much better-established soccer leagues — but MLS has carved out a nice sturdy niche.

And even as the soccer-hating dinosaurs slowly die off, some people in this country will always be unreachable. Some fans will always be Eurosnobs, much in the same way that some people refuse to watch Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons because their cynicism won’t allow them to believe it could ever be as good as the old days. Some coaches will always insist MLS academies don’t mimic Germany’s or England’s or Bolivia’s to their satisfaction, and they’ll try to steer players away. Some people won’t be happy until the USA has a promotion/relegation pyramid like the one that took England 100 years to establish. You can’t please everyone, and trying to win over the crankiest people on Twitter is a fool’s errand.

Nor would a simple raise in salaries make MLS clubs the equal of Everton, let alone Manchester United. MLS could quintuple its salaries, and couch potatoes choosing between La Liga and MLS on TV may still opt for the former more often than not. There is no amount of reasonable spending that will build Barcelona in New England’s green and pleasant land.

But the league’s goal of being a “league of choice” for players and fans is still reasonable. MLS doesn’t have to be No. 1 — it just has to be worth seeing. Yet through its stubbornness in collective bargaining, the league is undermining its “league of choice” goals.

As former MLS player Bobby Warshaw put it: “The players will point out that there’s a strange contradiction here. The league talks about being a ‘destination league,’ both for players and for fans, yet they do nothing to make the league attractive for players, which would, ultimately, make it more attractive to fans.”

A league with no free agency and with bureaucratic restrictions on player rights will not be a “league of choice” for young players, many of whom are opting to go to Mexico, let alone Europe. It will not bring Herculez Gomez home from Mexico. It will not attract international players who are choosing between MLS and the Netherlands.

And the eagerness to play hardball with players sends a poor message to fans. How are fans supposed to believe the league is on the rise when it’s claiming poverty and insisting that the whole structure falls apart if an eight-year veteran is allowed to negotiate a pay raise or move to a city closer to his wife’s family?

The league’s stance is simply tone-deaf. No one believes that MLS will go broke if two teams bid up a veteran’s player to $200K when, thanks to the salary cap, that money simply comes from another player’s potential pay. No one understands why it’s OK to compete in every other sense — for Designated Players, in building youth academies, in worldwide scouting — but it’s not OK for teams to compete for a non-DP’s signature. The fan base is too sophisticated, and it no longer sees the need for MLS to take baby steps on player movement while it’s making bold investments in academies, stadiums and Steven Gerrard. And MLS has simply not made a plausible case for maintaining its grip on intraleague movement.

If MLS folded tomorrow, it would still deserve a ton of credit for building the game in the USA, just as we credit the decidedly non-traditional NASL of the 70s and 80s for stirring up some interest in the soccer-unfriendly country. What’s been done over the last two decades is remarkable. But that doesn’t mean the league can afford to stagnate. Over the years, it has evolved — allocations aren’t driven from the league office any more, clubs have more control, and the salary budget bends to include Designated Players. That evolution needs to keep going, and what the players are asking is far cheaper than the other investments the league is making.

I’m sometimes asked to write a sequel to Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer. At this point, that book would be Short-Term Thinking: How MLS Threw It All Away.

This offseason was the perfect time to demonstrate that MLS was stepping confidently into the modern soccer world, ready to compete for players and fans. That step forward would’ve required significant time to figure out how to move into free agency and perhaps toss out the vestiges of the league’s “allocation” system. They’ve run out of time to do it. MLS may eventually force its players back onto the field, but the league and its players will be poorer in the long run.

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soccer

U.S. Soccer Players union weighs in on MLS labor situation

Posted on by Beau Dure

And they’re totally pro-management! No, no — longtime union rep Mark Levinstein is absolutely behind the players’ push for free agency and oddly insistent that the minimum salary needs to jump to $100,000.

The arguments:

Unlike the history in Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, or the NHL, in this case MLS has protection from any serious adverse financial consequences from the first introduction of free agency because of the existence of an MLS salary cap. The dire predictions from the MLS about free agency causing dramatically escalating team salaries make no sense when owners remain protected by the salary cap – free agency just means at some point in their career players will have some say in where they play, where they live, and where they raise their families.

That’s true.

Players will not have to threaten to play overseas to get fair financial treatment.

Yes … but … there will be losers among the players in a brave new world of free agency. And “overseas” is a vast term that includes everything from the Premier League to countries that aren’t renowned for paying players on time.

Of course, if you’re still touting the possibility of another antitrust suit against MLS, you’re probably thinking Levinstein shouldn’t have mentioned the whole “overseas” option.

But the takeaway here, once again, is the case MLS has not made: Why complain about players competing for slices of a limited pie?

Some media reports of the labor situation point to baseball and how quickly salaries escalated in the free agent era. That’s misleading. Baseball still has no salary cap. And baseball has convinced people to pay an awful lot of money to televise its games or eat hot dogs in their ballparks.

A $100K minimum salary would be an interesting bargaining point. At least then we’d be pretty sure all the players are making more than all the journalists. But we don’t know that the MLS union is actually asking for that. If they were — would it be just for the players who spend the whole season with the senior club? Or will we see squads full of USL players making $100K?

In any case — we still have no evidence that players are pushing for anything unreasonable. And that’s going to be a PR problem for MLS for the foreseeable future.

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soccer

U.S. women vs. England: The game in Tweets

Posted on by Beau Dure

In the soccer equivalent of watching an aging heavyweight champion win a split decision over an outclassed journeyman, the U.S. women beat England 1-0 thanks to a Lauren Holiday cross, an Alex Morgan goal, and an errant flag.

The general themes were:

  1. Why is Jill Ellis persisting in the experiment of Lauren Holiday and Morgan Brian as the central midfield? It didn’t work against France. The only reason it may have worked here was because the Lionesses attacked like shy kittens.
  2. Can everyone please stop talking about Hope Solo? Maybe the Hope Solo of the 2008, 2011 and 2012 finals would’ve knocked the one dangerous England shot out of play. Not the Hope Solo who plays in the NWSL.
  3. No, seriously, stop talking about Hope Solo.
  4. In Becky Sauerbrunn and Ali Krieger we trust. Everything else, we check.
  5. Alex Morgan apparently needs to shake off some rust to go from being the best attacker on the field to the best attacker on the planet.
  6. Why is Jill Ellis waiting until the last few minutes to make any subs? Who uses just 11-14 players at a World Cup, especially one with a lot of travel and artificial turf?
  7. Why is England waiting until the last few minutes to put on its best attacking players?

Here’s how it played out on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/566313050182279168

https://twitter.com/TheStuartPearce/status/566336053460860929

(Maybe they knew England was going to be uncharacteristically passive today?)

https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/566335970799521792

(Somewhere, message boards exploded …)

https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/566336076026220545

(People liked the DiCicco-Whitehill point/counterpoint. As did I.)

https://twitter.com/emmalucywhitney/status/566338897052200960

https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/566346085372006401

(Commentators — I forget which ones specifically — faulted Holiday and Brian for being flat. So that tandem didn’t work at all against an attacking French team, and it was caught out by a non-aggressive English team. But it’s great against Martinique.)

https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/566346283599011840

https://twitter.com/thrace/status/566353760851869696

(Yay! We … lost by fewer goals!)

 

 

1
soccer

MLS, the NASL, USL, Armageddon and fuzzy memories

Posted on by Beau Dure

My post today at SoccerWire asks a provocative question: Is North American pro soccer headed toward Armageddon?

“No, probably not” is a reasonable answer, but I humbly suggest the post is worth reading anyway. Pro soccer (and I’ll clarify: in this case, I’m just talking about men) has a lot of moving parts at the moment. The lower divisions are in their usual state of upheaval, this time with two entities going head-to-head with contrasting visions, and MLS is clinging to the remnants of its 1996 business model in a way that might leave it weaker. And I didn’t even mention indoor soccer, which has had some interesting characters this year, or the new iteration of the American Soccer League.

But all of these entities have been polite, more or less. This is not the open warfare of the “Soccer War” of the 1920s, where leagues and the federation were trying to bring each other to heel. Everyone says the U.S. soccer pie is big enough for everyone to share. And they might be right.

To show how these semi-competing entities could work, let’s rewind 15-20 years:

In the mid-90s, I was a Carolina Dynamo fan. My favorite player was Yari Allnutt, one of the few players you’ll ever see who can get away with a deft flick past his own ear at the top of the box and a mid-game mini-speech to the crowd to get them more involved. They also had a few bruisers, most notably Scott Schweitzer. He played alongside Tommy Tanner and Curt Johnson, still names to know in the pro soccer world, on an N.C. State team that would do all manner of evil off the ball. In a Dynamo game, Schweitzer once walked alongside an opponent leaving the scene of a nasty incident, then threw himself to the ground as if he had been punched in the face. Good times.

When the Dynamo dropped out of the second-division A-League, Allnutt and Schweitzer joined the Rochester Rhinos and started alongside Tanner on the underdog team that won the 1999 U.S. Open Cup — the last non-MLS side to do so.

A year later, the Rhinos were less fortunate in the Open Cup, losing early to D.C. United. I covered the game and went into the Rhinos locker room to chat with Allnutt and Schweitzer (neither of whom knew me, though I had introduced myself once to Allnutt). I asked Schweitzer why the talented, gritty players on the Rhinos weren’t playing in MLS.

He looked straight at me and wasted no time in answering: “Because MLS isn’t paying what we deserve.”

And MLS players had little leverage at that time. They couldn’t form a union while a suit filed by players in 1997 was slowly working its way through the courts.

So the second division at that time worked pretty well to keep MLS on its toes. They had backed away from the notion of A-League teams being MLS affiliates — Allnutt was called up to Kansas City in 1996 and scored one goal in 45 minutes of action. They were scoring a few wins over MLS clubs in the Open Cup, and Rochester was averaging more than 10,000 fans a game.

It didn’t last. From a height of 30 teams in the late 90s, the A-League dwindled to 16 teams in 2004. The league still had some talent — top players included former MLS All-Stars Alex Pineda Chacon and Dante Washington, along with a young forward named Alan Gordon. But a lot of teams either self-relegated or folded.

Renamed the USL First Division, the league started to get swamped by MLS expansion, which swallowed up Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and Montreal. By then, ambitions were all over the place, and a split was inevitable.

Out of all this was born the NASL.

And to some extent, the NASL is now doing what the old A-League did — keep MLS teams on their toes. They would dearly love to follow the Rhinos’ footsteps and take the Open Cup. And if MLS teams fail to find a place for someone like Miguel Ibarra, an NASL team will be happy to take him.

Meanwhile, the USL and MLS have done something clever, essentially merging what was left of the USL’s pro ranks and the MLS Reserve League. Makes sense, right? More teams, fewer travel costs, and it’s common in other countries around the world (except England).

So all is well, right? Well …

First off, there is a bit of muddying of the waters in progress, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. And while the NASL has, by all accounts, a fine relationship with MLS, it’s not just the fans who are pushing it not just as a second division nipping at MLS’s heels but a viable alternative.

I spoke with Kartik Krishnaiyer, who worked for the NASL for a couple of years. He saw a change in the league’s approach: “I think everything changed at NASL the day the Cosmos
joined. We went from being focused on stabilizing second division, something badly needed in the domestic game, to suddenly thinking we were in the same league as MLS. When Bill Peterson took over as Commissioner, the attitude became hardened about ‘the other guys’ and the hostility became more overt.”

And with USL’s latest rebranding, we may have national leagues competing head-to-head as “Division II” leagues. NASL and USL are already competing in several senses — this move would just formalize things.

It’s a little strange to see so much interest in divisional sanctions. Peterson says “divisions” don’t really make sense in a country without (UPDATE: corrected from “with”) promotion and relegation, and he has a point. That said, even a cursory glance at the rosters, facilities and attendance of the three USSF-sanctioned leagues would tell you which belongs to which divisions.

At least, it will, as long as MLS doesn’t get complacent. Which leads to this point …

Second, having a second division (or another league) keeping MLS on its toes only works if MLS reacts. But they’re digging in on free agency, saying clubs won’t bid against each other, even as the “haves and have nots” feud in public about Designated Player contracts.

Let’s be clear — NASL hard-cores are some of the most tedious people on social media. You say “business plan designed to bring stability to North American soccer at long last,” they say “conspiracy designed to make NFL owners even richer.” In the name of traditional soccer, they’ve hitched their wagon to a new-ish league that revived the brand of the least traditional soccer league that ever played (not counting any League One America exhibitions). The old NASL had shootouts, a bonus point for each of the first three goals a team scored, Bugs Bunny, and artificial turf that makes today’s FieldTurf look like Wembley Stadium after two weeks of ideal grass-prepping weather. But they at least say they’d like to start the discussion on promotion and relegation.

Notice that we don’t see a lot of concrete proposals on pro/rel. Certainly not while they’re pushing for stadiums to be built. Might not want to tell a stadium investor that the club might be in the third division, and not just because U.S. Soccer said so.

So to wrap up this ramble: The three-league system should work. The NASL can play the role the A-League used to play, picking off players that MLS clubs have undervalued and gunning for upsets in the Open Cup, all the while forcing MLS to make smart decisions and perhaps even spend a bit of money on players. The USL can expand pro soccer’s footprint and give fans in towns like Wilmington (my former home!) a few games against those hotshot reserves from MLS clubs.

But this triangle, like any love triangle in a soap opera, has the potential to get messy.

(And I’m going to have another proposal for revamping the whole system later in the week. I apparently enjoy spitting into the wind.)

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soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: Making our own “Miracle”

Posted on by Beau Dure

In the new ESPN “30 for 30” documentary Of Miracles and Men, we see footage of Anatoli Tarasov, the man given the unlikely job of starting Soviet ice hockey from scratch. In a 1992 interview, he says he was told he would have little to see of other countries’ games and would need to “work on his own hockey.” “They were right!” he exclaims.

More footage from his coaching days shows him imploring players to smile, have fun, and love each other. He borrowed more from ballet than Canadian hockey.

His daughter, Tatiana Tarasova, picks up the thread in the present day with a brilliant quote:

“If you follow someone else’s road, you will never get ahead.”

Does this apply at all to U.S. youth soccer?

(Tarasova, incidentally, coached and choreographed figure skaters such as Michelle Kwan, Sasha Cohen, Johnny Weir, etc.)

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soccer

Promotion/relegation in England: The big drop

Posted on by Beau Dure

England’s vaunted soccer pyramid is a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in expanded form.

“League football” — the professional tiers, back in the days in which the FA maintained a clear distinction between “amateur” and “professional” — expanded to four tiers in the early 1920s. The League continued the practice of making its bottom clubs stand for re-election, while clubs from the “Non-League” ranks could apply to take their places.

After World War II, the door was nearly deadbolted. Four teams joined the League in a small expansion in 1950, then only seven more teams joined in the next 36 years. Six teams lost their spots; one (Accrington Stanley) resigned its League place midseason. Some teams from the patchwork Non-League landscape would run year after year and be denied. (Click the bottom divisions at footballsite.co.uk for year-by-year vote counts.) Two teams admitted in this period (Wigan, Wimbledon) reached the top division.

Here’s how everything changed:

1979: The Alliance Premier League collects the top non-League teams, putting forward only one candidate each year for Football League election rather than the vote-splitting five, eight, 10, umpteen each year. And yet, it doesn’t get any more teams promoted.

1986-87: The APL is renamed the Conference, and it gains one automatic promotion slot (assuming the first-place club meets League standards, which wasn’t a safe assumption).

2003-04: The Conference gets a second automatic promotion slot, this one settled in a playoff.  The next year, Non-League soccer gets a full reorganization. The divisions are called “Steps” — the Conference is Step 1, Conference North and Conference South are Step 2, three leagues are Steps 3 and 4, then a whole bunch of feeder leagues are at Step 5. Raise your hand if you actually say “Step 3” rather than “seventh tier.”

So now we’re in the modern era, with the Conference as de facto fifth professional division and you can rest assured that the Wessex League Premier Division is two divisions ahead of the Leicester Senior League Premier Division.

Perfect time to do a little research to see how teams have fared as they pass through the League/Non-League gateway, right?

Naturally, I overcomplicated it. Every answer led to more questions. Some of the clubs that have gone down and/or up were reconstituted and may or may not be considered a new club. Digging back to see how far some clubs have climbed means figuring out which step the Kent League and Kent County League were in a given year.

But I came up with a few factoids of interest out of my muddled spreadsheets:

Dropped from first tier to fifth since 1987: Luton Town, Oxford United.

– Luton Town, the first employer of U.S. national team goalkeeper Juergen Sommer back in the early 90s, was in the first tier for a decade ending in 1992. Three successive relegations, the last prodded by a 30-point penalty for financial irregularities, saw the club drop from the Championship (2nd tier) to the Conference (5th). They were a nearly perennial playoff team in the Conference before winning their way back to League Two last year.

– Oxford United fell more slowly. The club last played in the top tier in 1988, last played in the second tier in 1999, last played in the third tier in 2001, and spent 2006-10 in the Conference. They’re back in League Two.

Other top-tier teams to drop out: Bradford Park Avenue, Carlisle United, Grimsby Town.

– Bradford Park Avenue is one of the the grand old names of English football, but that’s really all it is. The original club was in the top division just before and after World War I but was in the lower tiers from 1950 to 1970. The club finally folded in 1974. A phoenix club claiming the old history started in 1988 and was promoted three times to reach the sixth tier. It dropped twice more but is now back up in Conference North (sixth tier).

– Carlisle United barely qualifies for this list, having spent one season (1974-75) in the top tier and one season (2004-05) in the Conference.

– Grimsby Town was in the Football Alliance for its whole run: 1889-92. Like most Alliance clubs, it was assigned to the Second Division when the Alliance merged with the League. It had a couple of runs in the top division, most recently in 1948, and one season (1910-11) out of the League entirely. Relegations in 2003 and 2004 dropped them to the fourth tier (League Two), and their century of League football ended in 2010.

Dropped from second tier to fifth since 1987: Bristol Rovers, Cambridge United.

– Bristol Rovers was a perennial third-tier club with a couple of spells in the second tier, the last from 1990 to 1993. In 2001, they fell to the fourth tier (Division 3, then League Two). They went back up in 2007, back down in 2011 and finally out of the League in 2014. (They’re almost a sure bet to make the playoffs.)

–  Cambridge United was one of the few teams to make it up into the League via election in the postwar years, getting the golden ticket in 1970. They had a couple of spells in the old Second Division, placing fifth in 1991-92 to come close to being in the Premier League in its first season. Then came a couple of drops, one bit of back-and-forth movement, then relegation to the Conference in 2005. The club also went into administration but stabilized in the fifth tier for nearly a decade before earning promotion via the playoffs in 2014.

On the way up: AFC Wimbledon, Crawley Town, Dagenham and Redbridge, Fleetwood Town, Yeovil Town

– AFC Wimbledon is the club you might know, rising out of protest when the original Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes. The new club was promoted five times in nine seasons, up from the ninth-tier Combined Counties League through two Isthmian League divisions and two Conference divisions up to League Two.

– Crawley Town spent decades in the Southern League, worked its way up to the Conference in 2004, then shot up with back-to-back promotions in 2011 and 2012 to reach League One.

– Dagenham and Redbridge formed in a 1992 merger in the Conference, dropped to the Isthmian Premier League in 1996, then returned for a long spell in the Conference before moving up in 2007. They’ve had one season in League One, the rest in League Two.

– Fleetwood Town is the bullet team of English football. They formed as Fleetwood Wanderers in 1997 but quickly changed to Fleetwood Freeport, playing in the 10th tier in the North West Counties Division One. The rest of the story: Promotion to the NWC Premier in 1999, changing the name to Fleetwood Town (previously used by two defunct clubs) in 2002, then going up in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2014. The leagues: Northern Premier League First Division, Northern Premier League Premier Division, Conference North, Conference, League Two, League One.

– Yeovil Town was a founder member of the APL in 1979 and bounced between the fifth and sixth tiers until earning promotion to the League in 2003. They moved up to League One in 2005 and got all the way up to the Championship for one season (2013-14).

Gone since 1987: Aldershot Town, Chester City, Darlington, Halifax Town, Maidstone United, Newport County, Rushden and Diamonds, Scarborough

The good news? Most of these clubs have had phoenix clubs return in their place.

Here’s one of the spreadsheets in case you’d like to dive into more detail or tell me something that needs correcting:

[gview file=”http://www.sportsmyriad.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/England-div-movement-Clubs-in-out-1950-.pdf”%5D

Sources:

http://www.rsssf.com/tablese/engall.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Conference

http://www.fchd.info/indexa.htm (and all the other index pages)

http://www.thepyramid.info/stats/updownyear.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_non-League_football_system#1979

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_Football_League_clubs

And the wonderful site by the late, great Tony Kempster: http://www.tonykempster.co.uk/

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medal projections, olympic sports

2016 medal projections: Handball (men’s)

Posted on by Beau Dure

The World Championships are all over bar the shouting. And people are shouting about Qatar — the country you know as the dubiously selected FIFA World Cup host in 2022 but now known as the country that bought a bunch of ringers for its handball team, bought a bunch of fans for this tournament and got so many questionable calls in its favor that one beaten opponent sarcastically applauded the refs.

That was after the powers that be realized Germany wasn’t in the tournament, so Oceania champion Australia was unceremoniously dumped so the handball-watching country could get a wild card.

Like South Korea’s soccer team after the 2002 World Cup, we need to ask whether Qatar will be able to duplicate this performance away from home. You have to figure refs in Rio won’t be quite as amenable to Qatar’s whims as they were in Qatar.

That said, I’m already second-guessing myself for omitting Brazil, the only team to place in the top 16 in the last two World Championships that isn’t listed here. They were 13th in 2013, 16th this year. So they’ll have fewer performance points than anyone else on the list, but if I gave them a five-point adjustment (as I did for Poland, based on more or less a gut feeling not related to them sarcastically applauding the refs), they would move ahead of Egypt.

But they’re a long shot in any case. France has won the last two Olympics and three of the last four world championships, the last by silencing Qatar in a tense final. They’re the obvious favorites.

Denmark has been a consistent European medalist and took silver in the 2011 and 2013 Worlds. They took fifth in Qatar, rebounding from quarterfinal disappointment to win their next two games.

The team that beat Denmark is Spain, which also managed to beat Qatar in group play. They lost to France in the semifinals and dropped the third-place game to Poland.

Croatia and Germany, both perennial powers, won their groups but lost in the quarterfinals. Germany, though, has had some qualification issues in recent tournaments.

And qualifying isn’t easy. Only 12 teams make it, including host Brazil, one team from the Americas, one team from Asia, and one team from Africa. That leaves a maximum of eight teams from Europe, and any team that makes it from there has a shot at a medal.

So we’ll need to revisit this after qualification. At least one team with more than a 30 percent chance of qualifying will miss out.

Until then, here’s the chart of contenders, with projected medalists: France, Denmark, Spain.

[gview file=”http://www.sportsmyriad.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handball-men.pdf”%5D

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