Author: Beau Dure

The guy who wrote a bunch of soccer books and now runs a Gen X-themed podcast while substitute teaching and continuing to write freelance stuff.
soccer

Jill Ellis stubbornly goes forth into the World Cup

Posted on by Beau Dure

U.S. women’s soccer coach Jill Ellis talked with Grant Wahl, at last giving someone a chance to ask questions that have been kicking around in the Twittersphere for a while.

wnt-tacticsOn Twitter, they were often phrased something like “What the &*%$! is that midfield supposed to be?!” Here, it’s “Why don’t you consider using a pure defensive midfielder?”

A few takeaways:

1. Ellis still talks about a core of 13-14 players. That would be an unusual approach. In 1999, Tony DiCicco rested several players in the final group game against North Korea — Michelle Akers and Kate Markgraf sat the whole way, and Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy played one half. Supersub Shannon MacMillan started and scored the team’s first goal; reserve Tisha Venturini started and scored the next two. Sara Whalen played half the group stage, sat out the quarterfinals and semifinals, then was entrusted with a spot on the field throughout the final’s dramatic extra time. This year, we’re talking about more games, aging players in key roles, and artificial turf.

Write it down — at some point in this World Cup, the 15th or 16th player on a given squad will have a major impact.

2. That said, Ellis hints at a center mid rotation. Oh, the whole Carli Lloyd-as-nominal winger thing? That was just because Megan Rapinoe was hurt, Ellis tells Wahl. Lloyd will be playing a good bit of center mid, where she excels, in the World Cup.

But so will the duo occupying those spots the last couple of months, awkwardly converted playmakers Lauren Holiday and Morgan Brian. All at the same time? Probably not. Lloyd and Holiday, with Brian as backup? Some sense in that, sure.

And yet it leads to the question everyone has been dying to ask …

3. Ellis cares not for your defensive midfielder wishes. Here’s the money quote:

A center mid has to be able to playmake and also be able to defend … Lloyd and Holiday spray a ball around better than any midfield I’ve seen. So I value that. If I went for a potentially a pure defender, now am I getting that from them? Probably not.

In a way, it’s reassuring that U.S. soccer has evolved from the days of defensive midfielders being one-dimensional. But let’s emphasize something: “be able to defend.”

DiCicco’s 1999 squad was able to move a powerhouse scorer like Michelle Akers deep into the midfield because if she needed to win the ball, she was going to win the damn ball. That’s not true of Holiday or Brian.

4. Abby Wambach’s role is clear as the Beijing sky. Everyone’s OK with that, right?

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soccer

Fuzzy memories of soccer’s good (ironically) old days

Posted on by Beau Dure

You may not have noticed this, but I’m old. I’m not yet in the AARP, but by the standards of modern journalism, I’m a fossil. (How ironic in an age of long life expectancy that our media keep getting younger.)

Today, I wound up in a fun Twitter conversation about soccer journalism, and we wound up winding back to the days in which the U.S. soccer media barely existed. We also had scant access to the U.K. soccer media, so we weren’t able to keep up with the tabloids’ totally fictional transfer rumors or the pundits’ Cro-Magnon dismissals of women’s soccer. (Gee, what a shame.)

But we had a few lifelines. If you grew up in the 70s, you watched Soccer Made In Germany and learned terms like “equalizer” and “relegation” from Toby Charles:

I was vaguely aware that the USA had its own league, the NASL, but I never watched it. I don’t think I was a Eurosnob. I think it was a function of my father controlling the TV and watching a lot of PBS. He also was a biochemist who had traveled quite a bit and had a casual appreciation for the Bundesliga. Or maybe he just liked to say “Bundesliga” in his Virginia/Georgia drawl.

In any case, the bulk of my exposure to the NASL was Soccer Made In Germany‘s report on Franz Beckenbauer signing with the Cosmos. A couple of years later, the Atlanta Chiefs were reborn, and I read game reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Never made it to a game, though.

I also learned about the World Cup. When I realized I would be away at summer camp (where we did occasionally play soccer with oddly shaped cube-shaped goals), I asked my mom to cut the World Cup scores out of the paper and mail them to me every day. I dutifully kept group standings in a notepad at my bunk.

Five years later, I was in college, where I had the opportunity to heckle Tony Meola (belated apologies, Tony, but we did these things at Duke), marvel at Mia Hamm, and recoil in horror at the dirty play of Tab Ramos’ N.C. State teammates. I had also discovered Soccer America, which carried standings and scores from leagues all over the world.

Then I was back in the wilderness, rarely getting a chance to catch a glimpse of soccer beyond some assignments to cover high school games. The 1994 World Cup was a welcome relief. After that, a lot of us asked the same question: “Now what?”

Home Team Sports, now a Comcast Sports Net affiliate, provided another lifeline, picking up an hourlong Premier League highlight show. Tony Yeboah quickly became my favorite player, with the last two goals on this reel etched in my memory:

I also occasionally listened to shortwave radio. But at the time, it was kind of random. I knew if I tuned into the BBC on Saturdays, I might hear something soccer-related.

By 1995, I’d discovered the Internet and the North American Soccer mailing list, to which I paid tribute last fall. We argued about the direction Major League Soccer was going as it prepared to launch, and we shared information about any soccer we were able to see — APSL games, USISL games, colleges, broadcast info and so forth. Then I found the wonderful rec.sport.soccer archive site, which looks exactly the same today, and Soccernet, which doesn’t. Thanks to them, I knew what I was watching on ESPN’s weekly games, and I knew when to search for the BBC on my shortwave to hear Coventry City escape relegation once again. (This was 1997, when the Young Player of the Year was a Manchester United lad with swept-up hair named David Beckham.)

Of course, I also set my VCR while I was at work so I could come home and watch this:

(Note the MLS logo that the Clash had to paint over.)

Meanwhile, back in the world of non-broadcast media, a few of us were fighting to get coverage for this long-derided sport. In 1999, at a wire service, I pitched coverage of the Women’s World Cup. A contemporary of mine said, “What?” I explained. He laughed, “We don’t even care about MEN’S soccer in this country!”

(Same guy called Duke a school for Ivy League rejects. No idea how I made it through a year of working there without resorting to violence.)

I moved on to USA TODAY, which had a history of legitimate soccer coverage. But as space in the paper shrank, soccer coverage was the first thing to go. Online, I was sneaking bits of coverage onto the site however I could.

In my day (no, you can’t get through this without reading that phrase), there was no such thing as a “soccer journalist.” Steven Goff had other duties at The Washington Post. Online, the Post’s site featured editor Alex Johnson’s World of Soccer column. Grant Wahl mixed soccer and college basketball at Sports Illustrated. Jeff Bradley was more or less the voice of soccer at ESPN’s site, though he was busy with other beats.

Nothing in this story should be surprising. But I find it’s often forgotten. We wake up Saturday mornings and flip on the TV to hear Rebecca Lowe introducing the first of three EPL games, and we forget how far we’ve come.

It’s too easy for today’s Twitterati to think soccer journalism in the USA started with MLS. (Some in the Twitter world actually think all soccer journalists in the USA are employees of MLS, which will surely make local newspapers, SI and a bunch of newly flourishing websites wonder why they’re paying all these people.)

Some of us grew up on the world’s game and followed it any way we could. We watched the Bundesliga and the Premier League, then went out to see USISL games with 30-minute stop-action countdown clocks and a “shootout” on the seventh team foul.

That’s the way it was and … well, I wouldn’t say we liked it better than today’s 24/7 soccer landscape. But it’s an experience we’ll never forget, and it helps us appreciate what we’re seeing today.

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soccer

Brazilian style (leagues) in the USA?

Posted on by Beau Dure

The United States is, in addition to all the things mentioned in my soccer culture post, a nation of tinkerers. We want to fix things or improve them.

That’s not to say Europe is bereft of innovation — they’ve certainly done a better job of, say, integrating alternative power sources.  But when it comes to sports, we’re far more likely to take things that already work and rethink them. The NFL changes rules more often than I shop for shoes. Wake up an NHL fan who was cryogenically frozen in 2002, and he or she might not make sense of the standings.

In soccer, we’ve often been a laboratory — sometimes with FIFA’s assistance or insistence, sometimes not. Shootouts. Bonus points. For old-time USL/USISL fans, the blue card.

These days, all our ideas veer toward the more traditional. Shootouts are gone. Overtime is gone. As much as I would love to see what League One America rules look like in action, it’s not going to happen. We debate single table and single entity, and we even the occasional promotion/relegation idea that’s nearly workable. (It just needs some way to even things out between clubs that made megamillion investments and those who would play their way in. I’m not a big fan of giant expansion fees, either, but you do have to consider that we’re trying to build the same infrastructure in 20 years that has been built in other countries — where soccer is the dominant sport — over a century or more.)

So here’s an idea borrowed from Brazil with a bit of a twist to solve a couple of uniquely North American problems …

Regional leagues running part of the year.

In Brazil, clubs play in state leagues for the first few months of the year before shifting to national competition. The state pyramids and the national pyramid are mostly separate — a team could theoretically be in the first division nationally and a lower division in its state league. (I can’t find a current example, though.)

The climate in the USA and Canada won’t let us play year-round as they do in Brazil. A regional league in the spring and national leagues (MLS, NASL, USL) in the summer and fall won’t leave enough time.

But we have an interesting window for regional leagues — the international break that we currently aren’t taking in MLS.

This year, CONCACAF’s Gold Cup runs through most of July. National teams will assemble a couple of weeks before that, so figure on about a five-week window. MLS will muddle through without its CONCACAF internationals. In other years, we have the World Cup or the upcoming pan-American Copa America. (Yes, I know the winter Qatar World Cup will mess everything up, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

During that stretch, suppose we suspended the national leagues and played regional leagues?

And yes, I’m talking about leagues with promotion/relegation. Why not? These leagues wouldn’t affect the structure of MLS. A club with a 5,000-seat stadium that couldn’t play in MLS could still compete with MLS clubs in a short regional league system.

So we solve several problems:

1. MLS finally gets a full international break.

2. Players who aren’t on international duty get to keep playing.

3. Stadiums still get meaningful games, and not just the one-offs of the Open Cup. (Incidentally, this is the year an NASL club wins the Open Cup. MLS teams will be weakened for the fifth round and quarterfinals, and it’s clear the NASL really wants that trophy.)

4. Lower-division teams get to test themselves against the big pro clubs, albeit weakened versions of those clubs. They should be able to sell a few tickets for those games, too.

5. “Summer league” teams in the PDL and NPSL get more interesting competition.

6. Pro/rel fans get to see pro/rel leagues. Maybe it’ll open the door for national pro/rel down the road, maybe not.

Five weeks doesn’t give us a lot of time, so we’re probably talking about four teams playing a double round-robin or maybe seven teams playing a single round-robin.

A couple of sample leagues with the initial divisional setup (based mostly on last year’s standings, so I haven’t verified to see if all these clubs … you know … still exist):

TEXAS/OKLAHOMA LEAGUE

Division 1: Dallas (MLS), Houston (MLS), San Antonio (NASL), Oklahoma City (USL)

Division 2: Austin (PDL), Laredo (PDL), Tulsa (NPSL), Oklahoma City (NPSL)

Division 3: Corinthians San Antonio (NPSL), Dallas City (NPSL), Midland/Odessa (PDL), Houston Dutch Lions (PDL)

Division 4: NTX Rayados (USASA), Liverpool Warriors (NPSL), Fort Worth (NPSL), Houston Regals SCA (NPSL)

CASCADIA LEAGUE

Division 1: Portland (MLS), Seattle (MLS), Vancouver (MLS), Edmonton (NASL)

Division 2: Kitsap (PDL), Victoria (PDL), Washington (PDL), Tacoma (NPSL)

Division 3: North Sound (PDL), Spartans (NPSL), Khalsa (PCSL), USASA team

MID-ATLANTIC LEAGUE

Division 1: D.C. United (MLS), Philadelphia (MLS), Carolina (NASL), Richmond (USL)

Division 2: Harrisburg (USL), Baltimore (PDL), Reading (PDL), Carolina (PDL)

Division 3: King’s Warriors (PDL), Gate City (NPSL), Virginia Beach (NPSL), Maryland Bays (USASA)

I’m not sure about including reserve teams here, given the already-weakened senior squads. If they play, I’d limit them to Division 3 or lower.

Within a couple of years, maybe we’d see some amateur teams establish themselves in D2. Maybe an MLS coach will be grousing about relegation to D2, and we’ll all yell at that guy to win a few games and get back up.

Maybe it’s a crazy idea. But if there’s a negative other than giving up a couple of MLS games when the teams are missing their internationals, I don’t see it.

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soccer, sports culture

USA soccer culture is and is not what you want

Posted on by Beau Dure

The United States is, as Schoolhouse Rock reminded us, a great melting pot. It’s not always pretty. As Dave Chappelle said on Dr. Katz: “I saw two Irish guys beating an Italian guy — these people are specific.”

Culturally, we’re in a constant state of flux. We’re still young. We’re almost a blank slate.

In soccer culture, we’re even younger and more blank, as Nigel Tufnel might say. Whatever supporter culture existed in the ASL glory days of the 1920s wasn’t handed down in any meaningful manner. The NASL had some serious supporters (as has been pointed out to me when I’ve written about it before), but the lingering “culture” was still shootouts, cheerleaders, disco and Bugs Bunny.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and as soccer has zoomed into the mainstream over the past two decades, we’ve seen a galaxy’s worth of matter rushing into that vacuum.

The result? Let’s put it this way — I wasn’t quite right when I agreed a few years ago that the USA has no soccer culture. We have many soccer cultures.

In a lot of ways, that’s fun. Our supporters groups bring a mix of traditions and languages. We can choose from the best coaching practices around the world.

Or, as I more or less said in my SoccerWire piece today, we can each take our own interpretations of how soccer is supposed to be and just scream at each other all day.

I covered the coaching angle at SoccerWire — the country is crawling with know-it-alls who think their personal experience or some academy they once saw is “the way it’s done around the world.” I did forget to include this Princess Bride clip that I think shows what these coaches think of every other school of thought that isn’t their own:

The “culture” angle as a whole is just as complicated — and aggravating when we fail to fully appreciate our diversity.

Take a look at the City Guides MLSSoccer put together in its season preview. In Chicago, the Fire shuttles fans from “pub to pitch.” Go to D.C. for a Lot 8 tailgate and bounce in the stands with the four supporters groups on the “loud side” at RFK. Take in the tifo in Seattle, cheer for a chainsaw in Portland, or go to Salt Lake and sing along with a chant written by the drummer for punk band Rancid.

“Oh, that’s not authentic,” someone might sneer. Really? That’s less “authentic” than venerable English club Bradford City playing a knockoff of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads?

Over the weekend, I saw some Twitter traffic by a Premier League fan who was puzzled by seeing streamers on the field at an MLS game. A few astute folks pointed out that this is typical behavior in several countries, moreso in South America than in Western Europe.

Some people don’t like the MLS playoff system. I don’t either, but if you’re going to dismiss the idea entirely, then don’t look at the most popular soccer league on U.S. TV. (Nope, not the Premier League.) A few other South American leagues also have playoffs. You don’t want to know what happened in Brazilian soccer in 2000.

Some fans like drums. Some like tifo. The only thing we agree on is that we hate vuvuzelas.

Some of our internal battles are more serious. When Sam’s Army started the quest to bring supporter culture to the USA, one thing was sacrosanct: We will not be hooligans or racists. The American Outlaws are bigger than Sam’s Army ever got, but they’re struggling with some unsavory elements. (At least we don’t have any of the European idiots who hurl bananas at players who aren’t white.)

If you’re trying to duplicate England or Germany or Brazil in the USA, you’re going to be disappointed. If you appreciate strength through diversity, you’ll appreciate the unique opportunities we have here.

Or, you know, you can just insist things are better elsewhere because you say so. Whichever. Free country and all that.

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soccer

2015 MLS preview by someone catching up very quickly

Posted on by Beau Dure

The CBA is done. It’s not great, and someone still needs to ask the league office and the owners how they can reconcile their tough stances on free agency and raises with the “league of choice” ambition.

But now, we actually have a season. That means those of us who’ve been following the CBA and little else need to take a quick look around and see what’s actually happening in the league.

Knowing the league used to be easy. My goal the last couple of years I was at USA TODAY was to go to enough D.C. United games to see every team in the league, and I’d usually go to the visitors’ locker room to touch base with everyone. Over the course of a season, I’d get a good sense of every team’s style and personnel.

Now? Not so much. While embedded with the Washington Spirit, I don’t get to RFK as much as I used to, and watching on TV is limiting.

So now that I’ve given you absolutely no reason to read on … read these season predictions:

WEST

1. Seattle: The Shield winners lost DeAndre Yedlin but returned most of the core, including Clint Dempsey, Obafemi Martins and the occasionally ailing Ozzie Alonso. The back line has Brad Evans and Chad Marshall. They’re solid once again.

2. Los Angeles: Farewell, Landon. Hello, Steve Gerrard (eventually). Other than that, very little has changed for the champions. Jaime Pinedo is a capable keeper, Gyasi Zardes is a breakthrough talent, and Robbie Keane is Robbie Keane.

3. Dallas: Best team in the league when healthy? That’s what Matt Doyle said. They picked up GK Dan Kennedy in the farewell-to-Chivas-USA draft. Fabian Castillo and Blas Perez are part of a fun midfield.

4. Real Salt Lake: No more Kreis, and now no more Lagerwey. The Dukies are gone. They still have Kyle Beckerman, Javier Morales, Nick Rimando and Alvaro Saborio. They lost Nat Borchers and Chris Wingert, but Jamison Olave is back. So it’s still a recognizable team, with some youth talent coming in as well to join Luis Gil. I’ll disagree with PST – I think this team still gets into the playoffs.

5. Kansas City: Over to the West go the former Wizards, where Peter Vermes will always keep things organized. A lot of players have departed — Aurelien Collin, Claudio Bieler, C.J. Sapong — but Roger Espinoza is back from England. Their lineup has star power that the glitzier cities would envy — Graham Zusi, Benny Feilhaber, Matt Besler and Sydney Leroux’s husband, Dom Dwyer (24 goals across all competitions).

6. Portland: Nat Borchers, he of the most massive beard this side of Tim Howard, has joined the back line. They’ve got Darlington Nagbe. They’ve got DPs — Fanendo Adi up front, Liam Ridgewell at the back. Coach Caleb Porter also got an international keeper from Ghana, Adam Kwarasey. Getting Diego Valeri back from injury in May would put them in contention.

7. Vancouver: The Whitecaps probably get less credit than they deserve among us East Coasters who don’t often get to see them play. MLS Analyst Matt Doyle says they’re a dark-horse Cup contender. On Soccer Morning today, Andrew Weibe touted Pedro Morales as an MVP candidate. Costa Rican Kendall Waston is a solid center back. Kekuta Manneh is a dangerous winger. Under a good bit of pressure: Young Designated Player Octavio Rivero, a forward charged with igniting the offense.

8. San Jose: Dominic Kinnear is back in the Bay Area, and they’ve got Chris Wondolowski and Swiss international Innocent Emeghara up front. Matias Perez Garcia is the playmaker, and Marvell Wynne joins Clarence Goodson and Victor Bernardez at the back.

9. Houston: No more Dominic Kinnear. That just feels strange. They have Premier League vet Owen Coyle in charge, and they won the Cubo Torres sweepstakes. They’ve also got DaMarcus Beasley and ever-dangerous Brad Davis — not young, but they should be effective.

10. Colorado: As Jerry Seinfeld might say, who are these people? Coach Pablo Mastroeni might be tempted to run out on the field and play. They have a young DP in Argentine midfielder Juan Ramirez, and they’ve added Sam Cronin and Michael Harrington. Can Dillon Powers make a breakthrough?

EAST

1. D.C. United: Worst to first last year, but losing badly to Alajuelense in the CONCACAF Champions League doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, and Fabian Espindola has to sit out a few games to start the season. Bill Hamid is behind a strong defense. Is Chris Pontius actually healthy?

2. New England: A surprise MLS Cup finalist last year, and now they’ll have Jermaine Jones for a full season. Lee Nguyen was an MVP candidate, and they have a gaggle of former phenoms who can produce — Juan Agudelo, Charlie Davies, Teal Bunbury.

3. Columbus: The MLS Armchair Analyst puts the Crew in the hunt for the Supporters Shield. Might be ambitious, but having Kei Kamara running around up top while Federico Higuain pulls strings in midfield and Michael Parkhurst anchors the back isn’t a bad start.

4. Toronto: We have big names, yes we do. We have big names, how about you? Michael Bradley, Jozy Altidore, Robbie Findley, actual Italian international Sebastian Giovinco. Can the rest of the roster produce?

5. Montreal: The worst team in MLS last season just beat Pachuca in CONCACAF. That’s like Leicester City knocking Milan out of the Champions League. Argentine DP Ignacio Piatti gets a full season with the Impact, and the CONCACAF win proves Frank Klopas might be some sort of wizard. Can the defense hold?

6. Philadelphia: Jim Curtin will have an opportunity to solidify a solid core — Maurice Edu, Cristian Maidana, Sebastian Le Toux and the returning Conor Casey. They’ve added Benfica defender Steven Vitoria. But they just seem to be a few pieces away.

7. Chicago: Must learn to spell David Accam (Ghana international) and Kennedy Igboananike. They’re new Designated Players. They have good young-ish talent in GK Sean Johnson and Harry Shipp, and they have 2003 U17 world champion Adailton in defense with Jeff Larentowicz. Massive turnover — it’ll take a few weeks to get a feel for this team. In Frank Yallop we trust.

8. Orlando: Never easy to be an expansion team, but they’ve got Donovan Ricketts, Kaka, Brek Shea and Aurelien Collin added to some carryovers from their USL days. Playoffs might be difficult. Respectability? I think so.

9. NYC FC: Still wrapping my head around the fact that this team is actually going to play. It smells of Chivas USA Mark II. They’ll supplant D.C. United in the “team that desperately needs a stadium” spot. They have Jason Kreis coaching, which is good. They’ll have splashy signings in David Villa and (eventually, we think) Frank Lampard.

10. New York: Thierry Henry retired, and then Ali Curtis came in and immediately dismantled a pretty good team. Sure, they have Sacha Kljestan now, but I’m ranking them last out of principle.

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soccer, sports culture

On Twitter arguments …

Posted on by Beau Dure

Quick disclaimer up front: I’m not referring to any single conversation or even any single group of people here. I’m talking about 20 years or so of talking on the Internet about many topics on many platforms. Twitter just accelerates things a bit.

I’m a lucky man. I have friends who question me. As much as I may joke about wishing I had a chorus of yes men around me (or at least some people who’ll jump in when someone is pestering me on Twitter, rather than just grabbing popcorn and letting me do all the work), I’m glad my friends — real-life, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — are quick to call me out when I’m wrong. (Though, sometimes, I’m not.)

And several of them ask me why I bother to argue with people on Twitter and elsewhere.

It’s surely not good for my career, though the flip side would be that the lack of a corporate umbrella over my head gives me some freedom. People who have or want steady journalism jobs don’t spend their time trying to reason with often-unreasonable people.

Part of it is an unhealthy compulsion on my part to stamp out ignorance. When people say things that are simply wrong — “reporters who cover MLS are all paid by the league” or “only uneducated psychos would watch MMA” — it’s hard for me to bite my tongue.

Part of it is an actual desire to engage. I’ve had social media discussions that started out as hostile but moved into something productive. (And, sadly, vice versa.)

At NSCAA, a presenter shared a wonderful quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn of him.

That’s what NSCAA itself is all about. Translating that sentiment to Twitter is more difficult.

Well before Twitter, though, the Internet has been full of ideologues and their echo chambers. Ever been to the Flat Earth Society’s message board? It’s a hoot. And arguing with people like this is a bit like slamming your head into a brick wall, breaking that wall, then finding another wall behind it.

Even then, I think there’s some value in the discussion. I’ve found myself better able to articulate the facts and put them in context after a head-banging discussion. That won’t change the minds of the know-it-alls, but maybe it’ll help me refine what I’m writing for the benefit of others.

Do I spend too much time on this? Yes. I’ve actually given up several social media platforms during weekday hours for Lent. I couldn’t do Twitter because that’s actually a source of news, especially during this MLS collective bargaining process.

Do I wish I had the Zen mastery of Twitter that Alexi Lalas demonstrates? Most definitely. I’ve been too snarky at times. It’s one thing to make a soccer player mad when you’re raising reasonable questions; it’s another thing to make a tactless comment that drives off someone whose conversations you enjoy.

We’re all a work in progress. We’re all lifelong learners. I could probably do better with more followers and readers, but I’m glad I don’t get so inundated with input that I have to slam the door shut. I don’t want an echo chamber.

That said, I think it’s time to put some people back on “block” or at least turn away a bit more. Gotta get some actual work done.

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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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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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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!)

 

 

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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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