Month: June 2018

pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

SafeSport, SUM and other U.S. Soccer issues

Posted on by Beau Dure

Funny thing about engaging with Soccer Twitter: You can find yourself assigned a lot of volunteer work. A bunch of people who will never donate to your Patreon page or buy a book from your Amazon affiliate links (in some cases, they even think it’s an imposition to go to your blog, where you’ll make 0.01 cents on their visit) will demand that you do X, Y or Z, just because you’re a soccer journalist.

But every once in a while, there’s a legitimate question that I can answer. That happened this morning …

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012297332124258304

Good question, and I did some recent reporting on it that was trimmed from a story — not for any nefarious reason but because it was a long story, and this didn’t fit that well.

So here’s the part that was trimmed:

(START)

The U.S. governing bodies for several other sports — gymnastics, volleyball, taekwondo and swimming — are dealing with horrific sexual-abuse scandals. Congress has responded with the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 was signed — despite the name, it was signed in 2018 (Feb. 14).

A month later, U.S. Soccer member programs manager Caitlin Carducci discussed the law with state associations and affiliates. A couple of weeks later, U.S. Soccer issued a statement on the basics, specifically the need to report abuse allegations to law enforcement within 24 hours.

U.S. Club Soccer has gone a few steps farther, requiring online SafeSport training of its members.

U.S. Club’s Kevin Payne stresses the urgency. A well-meaning coach, he says, could end up violating federal law by taking internal steps without meeting the 24-hour window to report to law enforcement.

“People who’ve devoted their lives to youth sports will have their lives destroyed because they didn’t report something quickly enough,” Payne says.

So the U.S. Club effort here is essential. It costs a bit more money, but it’s one soccer expense that is absolutely worthwhile. Better to pay a little more now than defend a lawsuit or deal with the horror of abuse.

(END)

So there you have it. Some info compiled from public statements, then a bit more from an interview, along with some context and even a recommendation. Do with it what you will. It’s a good question, it’s an issue I’ll keep pursuing down the road, and everyone else should feel free to keep asking as well.

Then there’s SUM, on which I get stuff like this:

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012287440571297795

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012288098519146497

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012289261532581888

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012296841592000519

Good grief. We know immigrant children are being separated from their parents. We don’t know SUM, USSF and MLS are doing anything objectionable beyond the things we know about (to which some people have objected — some reasonably, some a little tinfoil-y).

I think that’s reasonable. And perhaps people can come up with good ways to apply pressure for more transparency. Carlos Cordeiro said he’d be more transparent, and he actually has worked as VP to change the governance. That may not be enough, and there’s nothing wrong with pressing USSF to open up a bit more, especially when the next deal comes up.

I might be able to answer other questions:

From my reporting before and after the election, the full board (including people who aren’t part of the supposed cabal) has always approved everything with SUM —  unanimously. I even specifically asked if the “unanimous votes” were all shenanigans, like the local hospital board I once covered that had a split vote (roughly 6-3 or something like that) but immediately moved to let the record show that the vote was unanimous. I was told — again, by people in and out of the supposed cabal — that the votes were legitimately unanimous.

Now — you could argue that the board shouldn’t be holding so many executive sessions, or that the minutes should reflect what was discussed in executive session. (Not “we all ganged up to silence a Youth Council rep and then gave a national-team coach a negative performance review,” but perhaps “the board then went into executive session, where it discussed the renewal of Soccer United Marketing’s contract and the latest complaint from the North American Suing League.”) I’d frankly like to see a delegate raise that point from the floor at the next Annual General Meeting, if not sooner.

But yelling at one freelance journalist (which, to be clear, Nick isn’t doing) isn’t going to get us very far. I’m actually in less of a position to get to anything than, say, this guy …

Good on you for asking, Chris.

And yeah, perhaps it would help if people with full-time journalism gigs would ask. So go harass the people swimming in venture capital at The Athletic.

Because from my perch on the thinnest branch of the U.S. soccer tree, I see things this way:

  1. It’s a lot easier to get answers when you’re (A) inside the organization or (B) working for a major news organization.
  2. In terms of major issues facing U.S. Soccer right now, I consider the January formalizing of the SUM deal very far down the list. For these reasons:
    1. USSF and SUM were demonstrably acting with a deal already in place well before 2018.
    2. At some point, we have to ask why we’re so angry about a deal that provides USSF a considerable amount of money. Same with Copa Centenario. You’re welcome to argue that the SUM deal and other USSF governance oddities give MLS too much power, but you don’t need me to spend a month investigating things for free to make your case there.
    3. Youth soccer is a freaking mess, and that’s where every U.S. player starts (aside from those we import from Germany).

Besides, there’s a lot of nastiness in the world today. I often think about ditching soccer journalism entirely to do something that might help turn back the fascist tide in this country. That might happen one day.

In the meantime, if it’s OK with everyone on Twitter, I’m going to get back to youth soccer.

After the morning World Cup games, of course.

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us soccer, world soccer

The old “secret society” of soccer fandom and what we’ve lost

Posted on by Beau Dure

Remember when the U.S. soccer community was all united and welcoming?

No? Then you’ll have to trust me. It did indeed happen.

If you don’t trust me, trust Michael J. Agovino, author of The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game (coincidentally, thanks to a buyout of my publisher, now issued by the same press — University of Nebraska — as my book Long-Range Goals) and a recent guest on Tim Hanlon’s “Good Seats Still Available” podcast.

Agovino talks about discovering the game in the early 1980s while living in New York City, where it wasn’t particularly easy for him to get to Cosmos games. Like a lot of us that age, he sought out magazines and whatever broadcasts could be found in whatever language.

Without mainstream acceptance, soccer fans formed what Agovino called a “secret society” before backtracking because the “secret” adjective implies some sort of exclusivity that soccer fans weren’t seeking. Soccer fans were welcoming, Agovino says. If you found someone else who liked the game, you found a friend.

And that’s how I remember things as well — not just in 1982 but even in the late 1990s. I was excited to move to the D.C. area in part because I knew there was this sports bar called Summers that showed soccer. I could go and see soccer with other soccer fans. Sure, Greensboro had the late, lamented Keegan’s Pub, where 4-5 people would show up for Saturday morning EPL broadcasts, but this would be different.

We were still outnumbered by a wide margin. People hated soccer. Hated it. It’s not like cricket or rugby, toward which nearly everyone I met was indifferent. Hated it.

So perhaps we soccer fans were nice to each other because we were united against a common enemy. Perhaps we had to cling to each other because we simply didn’t have many other people who shared our interests.

Or perhaps Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.

 

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us soccer, world soccer

American exceptionalism and other things that aren’t great but are

Posted on by Beau Dure

Am I understanding “American exceptionalism” incorrectly?

Yesterday, I tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1011435039547121664

At the time, I think I was thinking more about politics than soccer. But it was a little of both.

A couple of responses:

https://twitter.com/NipunChopra7/status/1011436252300808193

https://twitter.com/dmwahl/status/1011460577582092288

So I said this (specifically responding to Dr. Chopra, a neuroscientist in addition to being a soccer journalist):

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1011563238780219392

https://twitter.com/NipunChopra7/status/1011583420353470469

I can agree with that. But not everyone can …

https://twitter.com/TheDukeNGS/status/1011584261860753408

If you go to Wikipedia, you’ll find several attempts to define (or, in some cases, redefine) the term. Start with the greatest observer of 19th century America, Alexis de Tocqueville:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.

(Yes, feel free to argue that we are indeed “lapsing into barbarism” now. De Tocqueville was perceptive and eloquent, not psychic.)

Another definition from an AP Government crib sheet: “the belief that the US is special and unique because we have an optimistic and humanistic view on society to change the future and learn from the past.”

Really? Hmmmm. Maybe AP courses really aren’t that useful.

Back to Wikipedia for what I’ve found is the best-written definition, from Scottish political scientist Richard Rose: “America marches to a different drummer. Its uniqueness is explained by any or all of a variety of reasons: history, size, geography, political institutions, and culture.”

Go through that quote, the rest of the Wikipedia summary of scholarly debate and other sources, and you come up with the following things that are different about the USA:

  • Our Protestant/Puritan history
  • The absence of a feudal history
  • The lack of a monarch that has ever reigned on U.S. soil (King George III was an absentee monarch. And an amusing lunatic. See Monty Python.)
  • Everyone here is from somewhere else. A handful of people can trace their ancestry back to pre-Revolutionary America, but even they only arrived 350 years ago, and most of us have been here for a much shorter time.
  • This country is huge. Really huge. Just staggeringly huge.

Now … do those things make us better? It’s an interesting argument in its own right.

  • Pros: We have a blank slate on which the Founders built a new democracy, we benefit from waves of immigrants coming in and bringing their perspectives, and we have a “can-do” attitude dating back to our frontier days.
  • Cons: We overran Native Americans, then turned around and heaped scorn on any immigrant with the temerity to come along after us. Also, we have a lot of fundamentalists who refuse to believe science, and we have a general sense of arrogance. Basically, we do what we want, and we don’t listen to others.

So what does all this have to do with soccer? Why am I writing this on a soccer blog in response to other Soccer Twitter folks?

Well, I did get this accusatory tweet …

It goes back to the essential book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (yes, that’s an affiliate link, so if you’re adamantly opposed to Amazon giving me 10 cents, buy it somewhere else).

From Amazon: “The authors argue that when sports culture developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativism and nationalism were shaping a distinctly American self-image that clashed with the non-American sport of soccer. Baseball and football crowded out the game. Then poor leadership, among other factors, prevented soccer from competing with basketball and hockey as they grew. By the 1920s, the United States was contentedly isolated from what was fast becoming an international obsession.”

The authors, Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman, are hardly out on a limb here. In my book, Long-Range Goals: The Success Story (yes, I’d change the subtitle now if I could) of Major League Soccer, I referenced Offside along with other works — Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy and Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World — to demonstrate the history and sociology that work against soccer in the USA. (Read that passage on Google Books if you like. Or buy the damn book.)

So to answer Kyle’s question … um … yes? Maybe?

“Central to my worldview” is a bit of a loaded statement. It implies that I’m happy about American exceptionalism. I am not. I wish we would borrow European ideas on health care, social services, mass transit, and yes, sports.

I do think some of those ideas need to be modified to account for what’s different about the United States. As much as I’d love to be able to go around the country by rail as I did in Germany, that’s not really feasible in the USA, at least when you start going out West. And when we talk about how we’re going to organize sports, we need to account for our unusual sports history.

American exceptionalism exists in the academic definitions listed above. Some aspects of it (the size of this nation, barring secession) will never change. Other aspects are driven by our attitude. We think we’re different; therefore, we are. (To quote Crash Davis alongside Descartes: “If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you *are*!”)

We can try to change that attitude. We can at least try to chip away at it so we can have single-payer health care, reasonable gun laws and a more open soccer system. But we can’t deny it exists.

 

 

 

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youth soccer

A U.S. youth soccer reform update (FourFourTwo piece and beyond)

Posted on by Beau Dure

My FourFourTwo piece from yesterday gave a multi-part plan for rescuing youth soccer from the pit of despair or some other dreary place of your choosing, and it features input from Kyle Martino, Kevin Payne and two U.S. Soccer officials.

The intro:

“Promote a more unified Youth Soccer landscape where our members—rather than fighting each other for players—work together to bring more young people into our ranks as registered players and where we focus on Youth Soccer less as a business and more as a way to develop talent on the field and nurture our next generation of young adults.”

So read the platform of Carlos Cordeiro in his successful campaign for the U.S. Soccer presidency.

Cordeiro has spent the first four months of his presidency traveling the world on behalf of the ultimately successful USA/Canada/Mexico World Cup bid. In the meantime, youth soccer has progressed from a moderate level of chaos to a full-fledged tropical storm mixed with a Nor’easter mixed with Memorial Day beach traffic.

This piece had a long gestation period, but the timing is good. The World Cup bid effort is finished. Now it’s time for Cordeiro to look at the rest of his agenda. His platform has plenty of ideas that look good on paper — I didn’t recall any other candidates arguing against diversity, stronger adult leagues, etc. — but will require some effort to translate into reality.

But with all due respect to the other issues on that platform, youth soccer needs to be his first priority. (The transparency/diversity issues should be addressed concurrently, and other issues certainly shouldn’t be forgotten. Hopefully we can drop the nonsensical idea that Cordeiro’s next priority needs to be rescuing the NASL. We have a functioning Division 1 league and a functioning Division 2 league. If Cordeiro is going to devote a second of his time to any pro league in the next two years, it should be the NWSL. Period.)

One of my goals here is to keep asking questions and providing analysis. The outlets through which I can do so are dwindling. This sort of thing is a little too esoteric for The Athletic — and besides, I need to reach parents.

So I’m going to be working hard over the next few months to build Ranting Soccer Dad into a substantial brand. You can help on Patreon if you like (I’m going to make magnets and T-shirts!), but anything you can do to share my work would be appreciated. Especially if you can share it with parents. Maybe not parents who sit and watch every World Cup game like you do, but any parents looking for a good youth soccer experience.

At some point soon, I need to write about the next contested election. U.S. Youth Soccer holds its Annual General Meeting on July 28, and I know of at least one challenger to incumbent chairman (and USSF Board member) Jesse Harrell.

 

1
world soccer

National anthem parodies: England

Posted on by Beau Dure

This series hasn’t taken off as I thought it would, so I’m not going to do all 32 teams.

But we just have to do one more …

 

James Bond and British Rail
Python and Holy Grail
Love Actually

If we can win the Cup
We’ll tear our Brexit up
But we’ll more likely (bleep) it up
Mo-ost def’nitely

 

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world soccer

World Cup anthem parody lyrics: Egypt-Uruguay

Posted on by Beau Dure

Schedule reminder and previous anthem parodies (times ET):

Thursday, 11 a.m.: Russia-Saudi Arabia
Friday, 8 a.m.: this one

EGYPT

These melismas are killing me …

Mo Salah, Mo Salah, Mo Saaaa-lah
Likely you’ll be-e-e our leading scorrrr-er

Bob Bradley, Bob Bradley, Bob Bradley
Thanks to you, we’re now better than the ni-ineties 

We inven-n-ted lots of stuff
Saying “thaaank you” wouldn’t hurrrrrt 

Yes we know the Sphinx lost its nose
We’re sorrrrry Napoleon was blamed

The tourists, the tourists, the tourrrr-ists
Count for twee-lve percent of our worrrrk-force

Repeating, repeating, repeeeeeating …
Does this anthem just ha-ave seven worrrrrds?

URUGUAY

(Instrumental fanfare until the 1:08 mark. Sing “Kill the wabbit” where it fits.)

1930 and then 1950!
Yes, we’ve won this thing once and again

(Repeat)

This is really a long brutal anthem
And it goes on and on and on and on

(Repeat, even though the meter really doesn’t fit — the original has the same problem)

Yes, it goes on and on … 

This is really a long brutal anthem
And it goes on and on and on and on

And it goes on and on …
Four minutes more!

(Seriously, this anthem never ends. Most of it is about dying for your country.)

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podcast, women's soccer, youth soccer

RSD36: Player pathways, college and elite leagues, with Lesle Gallimore

Posted on by Beau Dure

Lesle Gallimore has been head women’s soccer coach at the University of Washington since 1994, and she’s the current president of United Soccer Coaches.

In this conversation, we talk about how college coaches adapt their recruiting to the new “elite league turf war” environment. And we talk about how players adapt and whether they *can* adapt.

For example: Could Gallimore’s most famous player, Hope Solo, work her way through the system today and be discovered?

Coincidentally, Solo made a lot of news this week, and I discuss that before the interview (which was recorded before all that news happened). The Gallimore interview starts around the 10-minute mark.

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world soccer

World Cup anthem parody lyrics: Russia-Saudi Arabia

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m probably starting too late in the game to make this work, but here’s the goal — I’m going to provide parody lyrics so you can sing along with each nation’s anthem in the World Cup.

We start with the opening game between two totally democratic and peaceful countries, Russia and Saudi Arabia!

RUSSIA

We’re hosting the World Cup
It’s too late to stop us
You say that we’re despots; we say “yo’ mama!”

Our dear shirtless Putin
(This line is redacted)
At least our great leader knows our anthem’s words!

Hooome-laa-annd, home-land
We sing ou-ur praise here
Almost as good as “The Americans” (singing note: stress that last syllable!)

Thank you for casting Keri
But, Sarah Palin, please shut up
Or we will hack all of your xBox games

Yes we wrote an anthem with changes in meter
That should teach you all to leave our (bleep) alone
Our hooligans fighting in woods south of Moscow
It’s better than flying to Vladivostok

Weeeee gave the world Tchaikovsky
And great writers like Tolstoy
So get the hell off all our freaking backs! 

Yes, it is really cold up here
You try living in permafrost
FIFA won’t let us play all the rest

(Actually, they probably won’t even get that far. But it’s in Russia, so who knows?)

SAUDI ARABIA

(Instrumental intro — note where the singing starts in the clip above)

We are free, assuming you are male …
If you aren’t, could you please wear a veil?

Our biggest fear is the electric car (boo, Elon)
(skipping this line)
Oil is ours!

Desert heat … prepares us for the next World Cup
And remember ’94 — that goal! Owairan!

Guns and planes, we’ve got ’em by the ton
And we’ve even got some Cinnabon

Our biggest fear is the electric car (boo, Elon)
(skipping this line)
Oil is ours!

All our team … plays here in our domestic league
Can we sign somewhere that’s cooler — hey, PSG!

 

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pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

When will the soccer “change” movement get serious?

Posted on by Beau Dure

This will start out on a personal level, but bear with me — it’ll get to big-picture stuff. And we’ll talk about the desperate need to change a few things in U.S. soccer and at U.S. Soccer.

I think the state of the soccer “change” movement can be summed up (pardon the SUM pun) in three conversations I had this weekend and another one in which I did not participate.

One: Someone on Twitter was surprised to learn I am not paid by MLS or SUM.

This person apologized.

I asked why he made the assumption in the first place.

“Likely because I’ve seen folks attribute that to you on Twitter.”

Not the first time I’ve had a conversation that follows this path:

  • Person attacks me, thinking I’m a paid MLS/SUM shill who hates open systems or any criticism of MLS.
  • Person learns I am none of those things and that I’ve actually put forth several plans to work toward promotion/relegation (or, failing that, a wide-open “Division 1”), few of which have gained any traction because everyone’s so firmly entrenched these days. (Some on Twitter insist pro/rel is all or nothing, which will come as a great surprise to people in the Netherlands, where they can’t seem to open a full gateway between the second and third tiers. Maybe that’s why they didn’t make the World Cup, either.)
  • Decent conversation ensues.

For those of you who are new, here’s my restatement of facts (skip to the next bold type if you know all this):

  • The only time I was ever paid by an MLS/SUM affiliate was when I wrote fantasy soccer columns for MLSNet, the forerunner of MLSSoccer.com that was run by a different company. They also hired Eric Wynalda, who suffers no accusations of being an MLS shill today though he wrote far more than I did. (And used to play for the league. Him, not me. Obviously. I played U14 and beer league.)
  • Yes, I wrote a book called Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer. I was iffy on that subtitle at first but agreed to it because the standard at that time was survival. I would agree that it’s fair to set a higher standard for “success” today. MLS gave me access but paid me nothing. The book is old now and barely sells, so whatever MLS does next isn’t likely to affect my bottom line. (Maybe I’d write a sequel if something substantial changes, which means my self-interest would be in change, not the status quo.)
  • I am not personally against promotion/relegation. As a fan, I’ve enjoyed pro/rel drama since I was an elementary schooler watching Soccer Made In Germany. As a journalist, I’ve simply found occasion to explain why it hasn’t happened so far. I believe it’ll happen when the marketplace is ready for it, and I believe calamity will ensue if any entity tries to force it to happen in a way that harms MLS while its teams are investing in facilities and academies.
  • Summing up (again, sorry for the pun): I have absolutely no interest, financial or otherwise, in the status quo.
  • The fact that people claim otherwise about me should make you very suspicious of those people’s motives.

newsletter

Two: Respected people in soccer continue to associate with and even amplify anonymous Twitter accounts that regularly slander people. 

I’ve actually learned who runs one such account. Not a well-known name, but it’s hilarious that it’s someone who has played and coached for “Christian” schools. I guess they’re soft on that whole “bearing false witness” thing, though the school’s site does say good people of the Bible should not engage in “profanity” and “lying.” They list those two right before “homosexual behavior.”

When I spoke with a particular supporter of such accounts, someone I certainly respect, I got a deflection to a conspiracy theory involving Kyle Martino.

Which was far from the strangest thing I heard along those line this weekend …

Three: Someone in a position of responsibility in U.S. soccer (not the Federation) lumped together most of the presidential candidates and a few other folks into a conspiracy theory.

This theory — again, offered by someone in a position of power whose actions certainly affect others — included the following people:

  • Sunil Gulati (no surprise)
  • Don Garber (also)
  • Kathy Carter (yeah, OK)
  • Kyle Martino (again, not the first to say that)
  • Merritt Paulson (MLS/NWSL owner, OK)
  • Grant Wahl (SI writer — stretching here)
  • Steve Gans (wait … what?)
  • Hope Solo (whoa … seriously?)
  • Eric Wynalda (OK, hold on here …)

I asked for proof. I was told this person had been advised not to offer proof at this time.

But this person, apparently in an effort to demonstrate insider knowledge, pointed out to me that he/she said back in December how everything was a setup.

For Kathy Carter.

Who didn’t win.

Four: The conversation in which I didn’t participate involved the consternation that Rocco Commisso was unable to get an audience with U.S. Soccer for his “proposal.”

Hey, it’s tough to get an audience with U.S. Soccer. Much tougher than it should be. Believe me, I feel your pain. I won’t go into details here, but I’m starting to think it’d be easier to get an interview with Prince that it would be to get some specific information I’m seeking now. And yes, I’m aware that Prince has passed away. (Dammit.)

But when NY Cosmos owner Rocco Commisso told U.S. Soccer he wanted a meeting to discuss a possible $250 million investment (expandable to $500 million when others join in) if they let him have 10 years to build up the NASL, the response should’ve been the following …

Dear Mr. Commisso,

Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately, we are not able to discuss anything involving the NASL or the Pro League Standards while we are engaged in legal action, some of which you initiated, on each of those entities.

If you would like to make a significant investment in an existing league (NPSL, USL, UPSL) or a newly proposed league (NISA), you are welcome to discuss the matter with those leagues.

Unfortunately, U.S. Soccer dragged this along, letting Commisso and his apologists dictate the narrative.

Which brings us to an important point …

federation

The Federation needs change. 

When the U.S. Soccer delegates who had just elected Carlos Cordeiro left the room in Orlando a few months ago, the path forward for changing the federation seemed clear.

Voters had rejected the anointed MLS/SUM candidate, Kathy Carter, in favor of someone who masterfully claimed the “outsider, but with experience and willingness to delegate to experts” ground. A few delegates spoke from the floor, urging the “change” candidates to stay involved. The soccer community was plugged into all the issues on all levels — youth, adult, pro, even a few words about the oft-neglected Paralympic, futsal and beach soccer sectors.

Stodgy old U.S. Soccer had gotten a wakeup call. Fans demanded change after missing the men’s World Cup. Parental ire over misguided youth soccer mandates had finally reached the Board of Directors. Every issue was in play:

  • Accessibility for all to play youth soccer at a level determined not by their money but by their ability level.
  • Clearer pathways to identify and develop all talent.
  • Getting the NWSL to fill its long-vacant commissioner position and build up the league’s standards and wages.
  • Making coaching education affordable and available (and good)
  • Easing the tension in pro soccer and helping lower divisions grow.
  • Hey, don’t we have national teams that need general managers and/or coaches?

I’d add one issue that has popped up since the election: Figuring out the role of state associations when youth and adult leagues are crossing state lines and ODP is being devalued.

And then … it all stopped. Mostly.

We have a few exceptions. The Chattanooga summit failed to unite NPSL, NISA and UPSL, let alone all the other factions in U.S. soccer, but at least it brought a few good issues to the fore with some rational discussions. “Change” candidate Kyle Martino jumped to the board of Street Soccer USA to do some of the grassroots work he had hoped to do as president. Surely hundreds of youth coaches and administrators have been energized to do more work at the local level.

But the national discourse is firmly in the hands of a different group of people. I’m not just talking about the usual toxic stew on Twitter. That’s been around longer than Twitter itself, and it hasn’t done a bit of good. (If anything, it’s hardened attitudes against promotion/relegation from people who otherwise would’ve been ambivalent or receptive.) I’m talking about the people who actually have influence.

And what we’ve seen from a lot of camps are purely symbolic gestures. Yes, that includes Commisso’s proposal, which I’ve often called, in Seinfeld-speak, an “unvitation.” He had to know there was no way USSF would or could meet those demands, and now he gets to claim (as Silva did before him) that the Federation has turned down easy money out of sheer stubbornness. A similarly PR-related proposal came up at the Annual General Meeting — more precisely, at the USSF Board meeting the day before the National Council meeting in Orlando. John Motta proposed cutting registration fees, currently $2 per adult and $1 per youth player, in half. That wasn’t going to fly, given that many presidential candidates had their own plans in mind (evening out the fees between adults and youth players may come up again). Sure, Sunil Gulati was unnecessarily condescending in his response, but the result was never going to change.

Is there a chance that soccer’s would-be reformers are self-sabotaging? In some cases, maybe. Much of the public discourse is designed more for status (as superior thinker or as victim) than for solutions.

Perhaps that’s not a surprise. For generations, being a soccer fan in the United States has meant rebelling against the norm. We are the “other” — by choice. A lot of soccer fans are like those tedious people we 40-somethings knew in college who used to be into R.E.M. but thought they sold out with Automatic for the People.

myspace-stewie

So as soccer has grown more popular, that hipster “outsider” status is harder to achieve. And we all love victim status as well, which means we need an oppressor. Generations of soccer neglect are harder to personalize than That Guy Who Said Something You Don’t Like on Twitter. Or That Guy Who Had More Impact in the USSF Presidential Election Than You’d Like.

I can’t tell other people how to move forward. I’ve tried, perhaps too hard and too harshly. All I can tell you is how I plan to proceed:

  1. Muting more conversations on Twitter. I still plan to block only the incorrigible few.
  2. Getting back to work on youth soccer issues in particular.

If I had any pull at SiriusXM, I’d lobby to get Eric Wynalda back on the air. If I had any pull at other media outlets, I’d suggest more investigations on where the “change” agenda stands now. And if I had any pull at U.S. Soccer … where do I begin?

If you want change, pick a spot and get to work.

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pro soccer, us soccer

The Hall of Fame, women’s soccer, curious case of Cherundolo and bad timing for Garber

Posted on by Beau Dure

The Soccer Hall of Fame finally has a physical location again. It’ll be in Frisco, Texas, folded into FC Dallas’ home stadium.

Coincidentally, voters decided to support more than one athlete this year. We have a two-player class from the general pool, both quite worthy — Brad Friedel and Tiffeny Milbrett. And plenty of voters wanted to see an even bigger class. Consider this breakdown of the top five vote-getters for the past few years, compiled at Kenn.com and updated with the latest from Soccer Insider:

Place 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
1st <66.6% 95.00% 95.83% NA 68.97% 88.1%
2nd <66.6% 91.67% 65.63% <66.6% 60.92% 75.2%
3rd <66.6% 64.17% 57.29% <66.6% 50.57% 64.5%
4th <66.6% 52.50% 50.00% <66.6% 48.28% 60.2%
5th <66.6% 45.00% 41.67% <66.6% 44.83% 47.3%

We actually came quite close to the first three-player class since 2011 (Cobi Jones, Eddie Pope, finally Earnie Stewart) and had the highest total we’ve seen for fourth place in the modern era of voting.

So will you be spared my annual rant about stingy voters? Not quite, but it might be a little less intense than in past years.

You could call it progress that fourth-place Kate Markgraf, who was down near the 30-percent mark a few years ago, moved up a resounding 15.37 points to 60.2 percent. She just needs a little push to get in, and I think Anthony DiCicco may have provided it:

https://twitter.com/DiCiccoMethod/status/1002301760101285889

It’s not as if Markgraf was some one-year wonder. She has 201 caps. She won Olympic gold in 2004 and 2008. This ain’t hard, folks.

Two of her teammates, as DiCicco’s picture shows, are going on this year. Milbrett is mentioned above. Cindy (Parlow) Cone got the nod from the veterans’ committee ahead of teammate Tiffany Roberts and the luckless Marco Etcheverry, whose lack of induction here should (but won’t) put a damper on the conspiracy talk that MLS is controlling this whole thing. (And no, the Athletes Council members didn’t get on the ballot as part of some Carlos Cordeiro voting conspiracy — see Kenn’s appropriate head-shaking on that one and educate yourself on how players are nominated.) Let’s just say plenty of NASL 1.0 players with inferior resumes are in the Hall.

So that’s the good news. After years of baffling decisions (Briana Scurry barely made it after a few years of coming up close), voters are giving female players their due.

Things get a little weird on the men’s side, where ballot newcomer Carlos Bocanegra nearly made it while Steve Cherundolo’s support dropped by nearly 1 percentage point. I voted for both (more on that later), but I’m not that attached to Bocanegra, a solid center back who worked his way to Fulham, over Cherundolo, who means even more to Hannover than Brian McBride means to Fulham.

If I had been forced to vote for five players, I would’ve voted for Friedel (no doubt about that one), Markgraf, Milbrett, Jaime Moreno (another unjustly overlooked star of MLS’ early days) and Cherundolo. I added Bocanegra, Thierry Henry, Clint Mathis and Steve Ralston because I felt like I needed to remind people they can vote for as many as 10, and given our current backlog, we should be.

Did other voters feel the same way? Not really. After that pretty strong top five, no one really came close.

A few players gained a couple of percentage points: Moreno, Aly Wagner and Josh Wolff. We saw small drops for Eddie Lewis, Pablo Mastroeni, Steve Ralston, Heather Mitts, Mathis and Tony Sanneh. Support for Gregg Berhalter, Ben Olsen, Frankie Hejduk, Taylor Twellman and David Beckham plummeted.

Cone, again, earned her spot through the veterans’ vote. The builders’ committee picked longtime USSF president Dr. Bob Contiguglia, who just finished his lengthy tenure on the Board as past president, by a narrow margin ahead of USISL (now USL, PDL, etc.) founder Francisco Marcos.

So that’s four people. Wait, make that five. And the timing here is horrible.

Make no mistake — whatever you think of what he’s doing now, few people have done more to build the sport in the USA than Don Garber, who took over Major League Soccer in 1999 and steadied it through near-collapse. Without his leadership, pro soccer in the USA would’ve died in 2002, and no matter what the conspiracy theorists says, we would not have been better off if it had.

But Garber, like Arsene Wenger, is nowhere near his peak, and plenty of people would like to sincerely thank him for his service and say goodbye. Yes, the MLS metrics are better than Arsenal’s, but the TV ratings and declining original markets point to a worrying stagnation. As I wrote in January, he has a couple of pressing items to address in the last year of his contract, one of which is the fate of the Columbus Crew. Allowing the Crew to march southward to Texas would accomplish the rare feat of uniting old-school MLS fans and the league’s detractors, both against MLS.

Garber was actually elected to the Hall a couple of years ago but did something it’s hard to imagine anyone else getting the leeway to do. Like an NFL team winning the coin toss, he deferred.

Yes, the commenters have noted that another good way to honor the Hunt family would be to leave the Crew in that other facility the family built, the no-frills but lovable stadium in Columbus.

Maybe Garber could’ve waited another year? Or maybe he could’ve deferred until the Crew find local ownership?

So it’s a flawed class entering the Hall. But don’t let that detract from the justified congratulations.

And next year, let me repeat: Markgraf. Markgraf. Markgraf.

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