Category: pro soccer

pro soccer

The ESPN+ deal with the UFC and what it means for MLS (and other sports properties)

Posted on by Beau Dure

The literal big deal in sports media yesterday: In January, ESPN will start paying the UFC $150 million a year for a package including:

  1. 15 live events on ESPN+, the new $49.99/year subscription service
  2. Other shows, including Dana White’s Contenders series and some new untitled program, on ESPN+
  3. Weigh-ins, preview shows and press conferences on ESPN+ (yes, MMA fans watch that)
  4. Archives, archives, archives! (Again, yes, MMA fans watch this. Every once in a while, someone thinks, “Hey, I really need to check out the first St. Pierre-Serra fight” and checks out Fight Pass (see below), even though FS1 and FS2 currently show hours and hours of repackaged UFC replays each week.
  5. On ESPN’s cable networks, as opposed to ESPN+, a 30-minute preview show and the aforementioned UFC “library programming” (replays).

IMG-20110603-00019For MMA fans (and former MMA writers like me), this seems too good to be true. The UFC currently offers something called Fight Pass for twice as much ($9.99/month), and it sounds like ESPN+ will have most of that content. But we’re not sure. As Ben Fowlkes points out at MMAJunkie (the blog of USA TODAY Sports, where I was the first MMA beat writer), we don’t yet know what happens to some oddball programming such as the Eddie Bravo Invitational (grappling), overseas MMA promotions and Invicta FC, which is not a soccer organization but actually a compelling all-female MMA promotion. We know Fight Pass and pay-per-view events will be available through ESPN+, but you have to pay a bit more.

So what does this mean for MLS, which has also shut down its in-house subscription service to put games on ESPN+?

https://twitter.com/ErikStoverNYC/status/993852938945785856

(To clarify/expand — as you’ll see above, it’s much more than just those events.)

Consider this: The UFC currently has a deal with Fox networks for $120 million per year, starting in 2012. WME/IMG bought the UFC itself in 2016 for a ludicrous $4 billion, hoping for bigger deals down the road.

And that seemed to be a dumb investment. As industry insider Dave Meltzer points out at MMA Fighting, the UFC is down by so many metrics — pay-per-view buys, TV ratings, box office, etc. My lukewarm take: MMA has peaked. It’s not going away, but neither is it likely to grow. As Deadspin asked in a very-un-Deadspin deep analysis of the UFC’s rights: “Who Cares About The UFC in 2018?”

In fairness to the UFC, the promotion has had some rotten luck recently. Ronda Rousey lost, then lost worse and raced over to pro wrestling. Jon Jones has shown a catastrophic inability to get his life together, and Conor McGregor has outright flipped out. Those are the biggest stars. The people who actually hold UFC belts are sometimes anonymous, thanks to the convoluted manner in which they win the championships. Consider Robert Whittaker, who won the interim middleweight title in July, watched as UFC legend Georges St. Pierre returned to the cage to win the non-interim belt from Michael Bisping, was promoted to full champion when St. Pierre fell ill, and hasn’t fought since. It’s a rare fight card these days in which the top fights proceed as planned, thanks to injuries, illnesses or botched weight cuts.

But this downturn shows the UFC’s base level when it doesn’t have A-list stars like Rousey, McGregor or Chuck Liddell on fight cards. As with golf or tennis, a big crossover star might give it a temporary boost, but it’s unrealistic to think it’s going to be bigger on any long-lasting level.

And yet, the UFC is getting a raise as its Fox deal runs out at the end of the year. The ESPN deal doesn’t cover everything. Someone’s still going to pay good money for the rest of the UFC’s events (excluding pay-per-views) each year.

That bodes well for everything else in sports. Bloomberg’s headline: “UFC-ESPN Deal Suggests Endless Appetite, Money for Sports Rights.”

So if the declining UFC can command a raise, what will happen to the stagnant Major League Soccer when its deals expire?

As you’ll recall from the Riccardo Silva unvitation to buy the rights for $4 billion, MLS renegotiation is a few years off. To be precise: 2022. Combined pay between ESPN, Fox and Univision: $90 million.

(That’s solely in the USA. I haven’t seen the rights fees for Canadian deals with TSN and TVA, which run through 2021. Overseas, as noted in the post on the NASL’s unvitations to MLS, the league seems to have improved its distribution since switching from Silva, who’s mentioned above, to IMG, which is also mentioned above because apparently only three companies control everything in sports.)

Perhaps that’s unfortunate. The current climate — prodded by new ventures from ESPN, YouTubeTV, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — might not last four years.

But maybe it will. And maybe MLS, no matter what comes of this year’s lawsuits, will emerge with a much better deal than it has now. (And perhaps these shadowy TV execs — not media-bundling companies — who claim they’ll offer eleventy billion dollars for rights fees if MLS goes pro/rel will emerge from the woodwork in 2021.)

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pro soccer, us soccer

A really radical North American pro soccer idea …

Posted on by Beau Dure

I get it.

Everyone loves to talk about promotion/relegation.

No one likes to talk about actual ideas (like this one) that would make it palatable to all parties in this country, including the people who’ve been building stadiums and youth academies, among other long-term investments.

Fine. Let’s go really radical …

Presenting the Total Madness Cup, which will determine the professional champion of the United States and Canada. 

Basically, it’s an NCAA tournament (think basketball if you like, but you could also think soccer or most other team sports) involving all the Division I* leagues in the USA and Canada.

* Yes, we’re going to redefine “Division I” here. Think of it as the college basketball Division I, which has more than 350 teams. We won’t go that crazy, and we will have some standards, but they won’t be nearly as onerous as the current Division I criteria in the Pro League Standards. Within 10 years, maybe we could have 100 clubs?

If you don’t like borrowing ideas from U.S. college sports, fine. Consider it a Champions League of sorts.

Here’s how it works:

  1. MLS divides into three regional conferences of 10 clubs each. They can keep all their marketing deals (though selling Soccer United Marketing to a third party might be a good idea at this point — go ahead and cash in on the investment, but then cut the intertwined links with the federation). They’ll be the equivalent of the “Power Five” conferences in football — the SEC, the ACC, the numerically incorrect “Big” conferences and the geographically incorrect Pac-12.
  2. The NPSL absorbs the remnants of the NASL and forms a couple of regional fully professional conferences of its own. If they want to have pro/rel to determine their top teams, go for it.
  3. The USL forms a couple of regional conferences as well. They can also have pro/rel — in fact, they need to have multiple tiers so the MLS reserve teams are not D1.
  4. Canadian Premier League? Yep, you’re in the mix, too.
  5. Maybe we’ll even have 1-2 more. NISA, if it gets enough teams? Sure, why not?

The requirements for these conferences (revised Pro League Standards):

  1. Performance bond.
  2. Ownership group wealth. Not one primary decamillionaire. Rational decamillionaires are in short supply.
  3. Stadium requirements of some sort. Not going to get into details here because if I do, that’s all you’ll talk about.
  4. A youth academy. Because isn’t one of the major points of all this to make sure we have opportunities for youth?
  5. A women’s team. Yeah, we’re going to end up with a pretty substantial women’s league system out of this, too.
  6. Single-table, double round-robin to determine the champion.
  7. No more than 12 teams (22 games).
  8. At least 10 inter-conference games, with at least five of those outside your league. In other words, an MLS East team can play a few games against MLS West and MLS Central teams, but it also must play at least five games against teams from the NPSL, USL, CPL and any other league that pops up. These aren’t really “friendlies” — they’re the equivalent of nonconference games in football and basketball, like Notre Dame playing Southern Cal. Lose too many of them, and you’re not making the tournament.

Here’s how it could look:

And then … the tournament.

All conference champions are automatically in. Fill the rest of the bracket (yes, bracket) with at-large teams, just like an NCAA tournament. If you like, you can have some mathematical coefficient like they use to determine how many teams from each country reach the Champions League.

I’m not going to specify whether this tournament is 16 teams or 24 or 32, or whether it should be two-leg aggregate or single-elimination or whatever.

Nor am I going to specify whether this tournament takes place in December (would have unique place in calendar and could be a neutral warm or domed sites, but we’d still have our transfer window issue until the Gulf Stream forces England to go March-November) or May-June (good weather and transfer window, but there’s just a bit of competition in the sports landsCAPe).

I’m simply going to toss out this idea and let people have at it.

Initially, I was thinking this would be kind of a joke. But the more I think about it, the more I like it. It provides the following advantages that people are seeking from pro/rel:

  1. Opportunity for clubs and investors. Want to buy your local club, invest in it and chase national glory? Fine. Nothing’s stopping you from being the Gonzaga or Butler of this system. Over time, just as some college conferences have risen and fallen, some pro conferences might get stronger. Maybe in 10-15 years, the NPSL is stronger than MLS. Again, nothing’s stopping you. (And, again, that’s another reason why we’d have to break up the SUM/MLS/USSF relationship in some fashion to make this fair. MLS owners’ divesting/cashing in seems like the simplest solution to me.)
  2. Jump-starting investment in academies. We want to develop domestic players, right? Something about not missing the World Cup again?
  3. You want “sporting merit” to meet a muddled FIFA statute? This is sporting merit.

Now if you have a better idea, fine. I’ll tell you up front that having four full national divisions in an English-style ladder is not a better idea. No one wants to see the Wilmington Hammerheads fly to face the Spokane Shadow for a fourth-division league game. Your idea needs to have two things:

  1. A pyramid rather than a ladder.
  2. Some way of mitigating all the things the Deloitte report told us we need to mitigate. (Yeah, sorry, pro/rel zealots — some of us read past the “I Can Haz Pro/Rel?” headline.)

But I honestly think if we start talking about ideas rather than suing and slandering each other, we might make progress.

Or not. As Ron Swanson said, “Add ketchup if you want. I couldn’t care less.”

If you want a revolution, fine. We’d all love to see the plan.

Until then, I’ll cringe over Liverpool’s collapse, watch a few MLS games, watch a few NWSL games and slowly die on youth soccer fields.

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pro soccer, us soccer

Dispatches from the NASL offensive …

Posted on by Beau Dure

On the heels of Monday’s Commisso-palooza, NASL interim commissioner for life Rishi Sehgal presented a more palatable take on the issues, speaking with Nipun Chopra at SocTakes

Sehgal is not Commisso. He doesn’t have the Trump-style tendency to laud himself in easily refuted terms (e.g., “I’m the only investor in this country who played soccer”). He actually listens when people point out evidence that contradicts his claims. Where Commisso apparently buys whole-hog into the Twitter-troll conspiracy theories that MLS is conspiring with the NFL to limit soccer’s growth in this country, Sehgal gives credit where credit is due. (He says, “Nobody is trying to take away the great things MLS has done,” which isn’t literally true but shows some willingness to work with existing parties.) In short: You can have a reasonable conversation with Sehgal.

And his interview doesn’t have anything I’ve flagged as outright wrong. That’s good. I hate to think that’s the bar we’ve set in sports and sociopolitical discourse in general these days, but that’s a start.

But for the benefit of soccer newbies, including those who are looking to invest (attention, Chattanooga summit participants), let’s put a few things in proper context. Just as Ranting Soccer Dad intends to give soccer parents the information they need to make good decisions about their kids, this space can be used to give soccer investors the information they need to make good decisions with their money — especially when all soccer fans have a stake in seeing things done wisely.

Going through the Sehgal interview …

(T)he end game is to help the NASL and to bring the NASL back to the pitch in 2019. So the investment of $250 million of his own money, and then lead a fundraising effort to raise another $250 million which will be used to support the NASL.

You can make a compelling argument that we as the U.S. soccer community need to preserve and enhance multiple divisions in U.S. pro soccer. (Or we could have 300 pro clubs, all in one division, and decide the champion with an NCAA-style tournament, but that’s another rant.) It’s much more difficult to make a compelling argument that we need to preserve the NASL, a brand name that has never made sense for what 21st century NASL owners have tried to accomplish — even as that group of owners cycled in and out rather quickly.

First, go back and re-read the timeline of the neo-NASL. You can also get another take from former NASL employee Kartik Krishnaiyer. It’ll take time, but I promise it’s worth it. And it’s necessary, if you really want to understand the issues here.

Then ask yourself — why preserve this brand? Why not merge with the NPSL to form a new league structure within which it’ll be easy to do promotion/relegation? Why not work with Peter Wilt’s NISA?

Honestly, the NASL’s intention of building a pro/rel pyramid has often come across as an insincere play to the Twitterati. Just see the hostility that broke out when the NPSL suggested joining forces with the NASL in 2015. And today’s NASL apologists are telling me Commisso’s literally unbelievable suggestion to have pro/rel “no later than the 2020 season” was just a suggestion.

Indeed, that suggestion comes after a list of five bullet points in the letter that sound pretty much like the reform ideas of 6-7 presidential candidates in this year’s USSF election. Aside from an anti-poaching clause that surely wouldn’t survive the slightest legal challenge, they’re somewhat reasonable. It’s just that (A) other people have made the same points and (B) they’re not at all relevant to what Commisso is seeking (10 years to build the NASL without pesky standards in the way).

(Actually, hold up a second. He’s not seeking 10 years to build the NASL. He’s seeking 10 more years on top of the work that’s been done since the Big Split in 2009. Commisso’s account of the USSF-NASL dispute tends to start when Commisso bought the Cosmos less than 16 months ago, but the league has been striving for stability for a long time.)

So on that note, let’s look at another of Sehgal’s statements …

I understand that sometimes people have problems with the way certain people speak. I get that. But pay attention to the message.

Part of the message, again, is general “change” ideology that isn’t unique. Other parts of the message are NFL conspiracy talk, which also isn’t unique (or worth hearing). Or pro/rel, a banner that others (say, Wilt) have made a better case for carrying.

That really leaves the message that the NASL — the brand name — is worth saving. See above.

Sehgal himself actually has more of a message. I’m curious to hear more about modular stadiums. I’m skeptical — if cheap stadiums were such a great thing, the Crew wouldn’t be in danger of moving, and you still have to find suitable land to hold a full-sized field and 20,000 seats (or more, given the conspiracy talk I recently saw suggesting MLS was limiting soccer in this country by building small stadiums). I suppose the cost of converting the Maryland SoccerPlex’s main field to a 20,000-seater would be in the low eight figures at worst, but the neighborhood folks would never let you do it, and you’d be stuck in traffic for eons. All that said, I’d like to hear the advantages of this.

Back to Sehgal …

I read the Twitter (laughs), and I see the nonsense out there and much of it is a waste. A lot of people calling this or MP Silva’s previous offer a publicity stunt — that’s nonsense.

Hi, Rishi, thanks for reading. Good to see you in Orlando. Please hit me up to give me more detail on modular stadiums.

But the definitive word on the Silva offer was written not by me or anyone else on Twitter but by Graham Parker, who also wrote about the Commisso offer Monday. (Coincidentally, Parker was writing for the same two publications that are my current freelance clients these days.)

Here’s Parker on the Silva offer:

That assumes this is a good-faith offer in the first place. The timing, outlandish scale and key contingencies of the offer seem more a shot across the bow than genuine desire to work together. …

The dissonance between the proposed scale and the current reality is key here. Glancing from the number $4 billion to the current realities of the NASL puts me in mind of looking at the Photoshop renderings of the New York Cosmos proposed stadium at Belmont while sitting in the cramped press box at Hofstra Stadium. It’s neither an insult to the Cosmos nor a failure of imagination to find it impossible to visualize a path between the suburban, college-astroturfed reality and the gleaming pixelated spaceship being proposed.

(Also noteworthy on the Silva offer — it’s funny that so many people who have a problem with Soccer United Marketing would see nothing wrong with the marketing rights to Major League Soccer being in the hands of one club owner who would want his club to be in the mix. That’s not a conflict of interest? Also — note that Silva’s company handles NFL rights in Europe, which will make the conspiracy theorists’ heads spin. And in that same paragraph, the second-to-last of Parker’s piece, you’ll notice MLS made some international breakthroughs after Silva’s tenure as its international-rights broker ended, something you can also read in Sports Business Daily.)

Here’s Parker on Commisso’s offer:

Like fellow NASL owner Riccardo Silva’s offer of $4bn to MLS provided they adopt a model of promotion and relegation, this tactic could feel like an offer made to be refused. This latest sum targeting NASL is more modest, but just as pointed a symbolic challenge to the existing ecology of soccer in the US. In his latest letter, Commisso cites Anschutz, Hunt and Kraft and claims that “All I am asking is that USSF afford me the same opportunity to help my league grow.”

But his price for investing would come at the cost of Cordeiro acknowledging and addressing what Commisso sees as the wrongful nature of the current structural and financial relationship between US Soccer and MLS – something Commisso must know there is little political will to do from the current regime. So he’s left with his law suits and to paint a public picture of what he thinks could be, in the hope that one or both forces a concession.

So I think the notion that these offers are more about PR than practicality is more than the mere ranting of people on Twitter who haven’t done the heavy lifting on the reporting end.

In this case, I haven’t done the heavy lifting of Parker or Brian Straus, the hardest-working man in soccer media. But this reminds me of a story in which I did the heavy lifting for months. It was another story of a man with a big ego, passion and a lot of money.

Dan Borislow.

Borislow didn’t kill Women’s Professional Soccer, which was teetering on the brink before he got involved. But it’s difficult to imagine, even with benefit of hindsight, how it could’ve survived with him. As with Commisso, it wasn’t just the tone of what he said. It was what he said itself. It was a refusal to work with those in authority, much less abide by their decision.

I’d like to think Commisso is as complex a man as Borislow was. As you can tell from my remembrance, I was ultimately glad that I got to know Borislow, even though part of my job (and I was actually getting paid for this — thanks, ESPN) was to fact-check his accusations. I’ve gotten to know his brother over the years as well, and I always appreciate his take from the grassroots of youth soccer.

Let’s give Commisso the benefit of the doubt here. Let’s say, with the help of Sehgal and some of the others who are keeping the NASL and the Cosmos afloat, we can find a role for him and his money.

Here’s an idea …

Put it in the NPSL. (He can’t buy the NPSL because team owners have equal shares, but perhaps he could put it into seed money for a fully professional top division.)

Again, an NASL-NPSL merger might not be as simple as it sounds, even though Cosmos VP Joe Barone is also the chairman of the NPSL board and VP of the NPSL’s Brooklyn Italians. (And even though all MLS franchise-owned USL teams are ineligible for the Open Cup, no one complains when Cosmos B faces Brooklyn. Go figure.)

But imagine what could be gained here. The NPSL, which already has dozens of teams, could build up into the pro ranks. We could get a clear sign that something new is being built rather than propping up the remains of the twice-failed NASL.

My sense so far, unfortunately, is that Commisso may be quite interested in talking but not so interested in listening. And those conversations never amount to much.

1
pro soccer, us soccer

Will Commisso’s money and bluster lure the grownups to the table?

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m not going to devote a lot of my own time to reporting on and analyzing today’s revelation that New York Cosmos owner Rocco Commisso is pledging $250 million to, in essence, prop up the NASL as Phil Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Robert Kraft propped up MLS in the early oughts. The ratio of “important stuff going on” to “number of people reporting on it” is higher in youth soccer than it is in pro soccer, so I’m sticking with youth stuff in the near future.

But you should check out the two big pieces on this today …

  1. In The Guardian, Graham Parker spoke with Commisso to follow up.
  2. At SI, Brian Straus has some additional reporting as well.

And Jason Davis will be chatting with Commisso at 1 p.m. ET on SiriusXM FC.

I received the letters at the heart of the matter this morning, just as they were tweeted out.

https://twitter.com/nathenmcvittie/status/990938195289366529

So you can read all that and get up to speed yourself. And you can draw your own conclusions.

And your conclusion will probably veer toward one or the other extreme, because I can’t help thinking this is political grandstanding that assumes the two calcified opposing stances on the NASL will remain intact. Most reactions will either be “See, there’s money to be made if USSF will just do what the NASL and pro/rel people want!” or “Great, yet another vaporware offer by a bunch of people who don’t even really want change but just want to inflate their own egos.”

One reason for that — as I peek through my email and sort through these attachments, I see Commisso included the danged “Fricker Plan,” which Steve Holroyd put in proper context nearly three years ago but is still trotted out every few months like some long-lost piece of Scripture uncovered in the dust of Bethlehem. (“And verily did Bethlehem Steel trot forth upon the pitch …”) Commisso is either unaware that we’ve all already discussed all this or just doesn’t care.

But while a certain amount of jaded pessimism is justified here, we shouldn’t be completely cynical and dismissive. Can anything good come of this communication?

Maybe.

Several managements ago, the NASL’s goal was to forge its own path. Former commissioner Bill Peterson often used a golf analogy, saying the NASL was focusing not on enmity with MLS but was intent on “playing its own ball.” And that path was to build a new way forward, eventually creeping toward a pro/rel pyramid, attracting investment regardless of divisional sanctioning.

Commisso is more or less offering to restart that process here. He says he’ll invest $250 million of his own money and is confident he’ll have a group putting forth $500 million. Forbes pegs Commisso’s “real-time net worth” at just shy of $4 billion, and other estimates have it higher than that, so he can indeed deliver on that.

Forming a pyramid in the “lower” divisions and seeing if that catches fire isn’t the worst idea in the world. It could eventually make MLS take notice and make a deal to join forces.

Now, in addition, Commisso pledges to buy USSF media rights for a higher sum than Soccer United Marketing is paying. I’m a bit more skeptical of that.

As The Guardian notes, this might be a PR stunt. “Like fellow NASL owner Riccardo Silva’s offer of $4bn to MLS provided they adopt a model of promotion and relegation, this tactic could feel like an offer made to be refused. This latest sum targeting NASL is more modest, but just as pointed a symbolic challenge to the existing ecology of soccer in the US.” (My original headline here, before I went in a more productive direction — “Rocco Commisso offers to give the NASL the most expensive Viking funeral in history.”)

And Commisso insists upon promotion/relegation “no later than the 2020 season.” Even a lot of the more obstinate, factually impaired Twitterati call for a 10-year plan. Silva commissioned a much-ballyhooed report from Deloitte that pro/rel zealots have held up as the definitive study despite a couple of flaws, and even that report says the following:

The opening of the US club soccer pyramid could present a number of significant risks. However, through careful consideration these could be effectively mitigated. …

(S)occer is now full of examples of effective regulation controlling costs (as is
common in US sports), such as UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. The
implementation of cost control measures would be critical considerations for any
league. …

Clearly those who have invested in a league over time and/or through the payment of a franchise fee may feel that relegation represents a major new risk which would
undermine and unnecessarily jeopardise this investment. A managed transition with properly structured promotion and relegation could have upsides that could offset this loss and more importantly be of benefit to all stakeholders in the longer term. Equally the implementation of new equity structures and revenue distribution models for leagues may further offset and protect against any perceived or real losses.

Does Commisso’s plan address such concerns? (Jason, could you ask him?)

Carlos Cordeiro’s response is, as you’d expect, quite formal but also accommodating. Cordeiro himself is tied up with a World Cup bid that is anything but a slam dunk at this point, but he does want to open discussion. He’d like to know more about Commisso’s consortium, of course.

Commisso responds that he’s disappointed that Cordeiro can’t find time to meet, suggesting this proposal is really important and all that World Cup stuff can wait. (Is that too harsh a summary? It’s all linked above — read as you like and make up your own mind.)

So let’s consider a few things:

1. Commisso basically wants the same opportunity as MLS had to build itself up. One problem with that: Any soccer federation has a compelling interest in making sure its country has one substantive men’s professional league. What soccer federation has a compelling interest in bringing about two substantive men’s professional leagues?

2. Commisso, like many a politician, continues to make pronouncements that simply are not based in reality. One such comment to The Guardian: “I think of the rich investors in this country, I’m pretty unique in the sense that, besides the mind that I have, I’m the only one that played soccer.” Wrong. Meet Clark Hunt. The LAFC ownership group includes one of the best players of all time. (She surely doesn’t have as much money as Commisso, but wouldn’t it be nice if accomplished soccer players made as much as media moguls?) The Vancouver Whitecaps group includes Steve Nash, who’s better known for basketball but I’d bet was a better player than Commisso in his day. I haven’t done the research to know whether the owners in KC, Houston or New York ever played, but do you think Commisso has done it?

3. Would Jacksonville’s Robert Palmer be one of the investors in a Commisso consortium? I wonder how that would fit with Palmer’s current plans on the lower end of the pyramid.

4. We want to move forward, right? Why are we propping up the twice-tarnished NASL brand name?

So we have some interesting conversations. But I’m not sure Commisso, having shown a tendency to sue everyone short of MLS mascots when he doesn’t get his way, is someone USSF really wants to deal with at this point.

Here’s what I’m going to suggest. Start with this tweet:

So step forward, Mr. TV Exec. Maybe MLS would rather deal with you than Commisso. Maybe you can get MLS and Robert Palmer together to build a pyramid that’s based in reality, with a logical transition plan that addresses the concerns of the Deloitte report.

As cynical as this post may sound, I’m an optimist. I think we’re getting closer to having an open-ish system that would include all the benefits of a pro/rel pyramid — primarily opportunity for all. But you’re not going to get it by storming into Soccer House waving around your wallet and a half-baked plan while insisting upon firing everyone who ever worked with the NFL. You’re going to get it by getting everyone on the same page and talking.

And listening.

2
pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

Why are soccer clubs obsessed with going nationwide?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Well I was rolling down the road in a minivan
I had a keeper in the back and a guest player at the wheel
We going cross-country and we’re skipping school
We tired and I’m lost – I wonder why this is cool

Oh I’m bad … I’m nationwide

We know we’re not supposed to do this, right?

At the youth level, we have six national championship-ish events despite legitimate concerns that all we’re doing is rewarding families that can spend a lot of money on travel. And despite the legendary Horst Bertl (Dallas Comets, now FC Dallas) quote: “National youth championships in the USA are the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Whoever thinks these up should be stoned.”

At the adult level, we fret over the costs a team like Christos FC incurs when it advances in the Open Cup. Then we see teams fall all over themselves to enter national leagues on top of national tournaments.

And the trend is only accelerating. Consider the news from the past week …

    1. U.S. Youth Soccer is revamping the regional pyramid that forms the base of its national league system, which is really a series of national showcases because no one really expects Tennessee Soccer Club to schedule a U15 league game against Greater Seattle Surf.
    2. The UPSL, the first league to institute promotion/relegation besides all the other adult (and youth) leagues that have had it for generations, is rapidly expanding — Columbia, S.C.; Silver Spring, Md.; Alton, N.H.; Hollywood, Fla.; Perris, Calif.; Aurora, Colo.; Dallas; Wake Forest, N.C.; etc. I count just north of 170 teams in the league now.

 

borgLike the Borg, the UPSL has grown in part through assimilation. The Premier League of America (which, despite the name, covers a relatively compact area around Lake Michigan) simply merged into the UPSL and became the Midwest Conference. A few other teams have moved over from existing amateur leagues such as the Colorado Premier League (a U.S. Specialty Sports Association affiliate), Texas Premier Soccer League (U.S. Club Soccer), the nominally professional American Soccer League, the apparently defunct American Champions League, the apparently defunct Champions Soccer League USA, the People’s Front of Judea (OK, that one’s fictional), and elsewhere. They also have a partnership with the traditionally strong Maryland Major Soccer League (home of the aforementioned Christos FC), one of the USASA’s Elite Amateur Leagues.

To some extent, the UPSL is a loose network of regional leagues. It’s much bigger in California than it is elsewhere. But it does have a national playoff and advertises a separate Cup competition called the Admiral Cup, though that doesn’t appear to have been contested recently.

A national playoff of this sort is a little curious. If you’re one of the many people annoyed with the USA for doing things that other countries don’t do, well, this is something other countries don’t do. I don’t see a national Regionalliga championship in Germany — just playoff games to determine the promoted sides, with no overall winner. Nor do I know of any English divisional championships after the fifth tier, which is the last nationwide league. (England does have the FA Trophy, a cup competition for those in tiers 5-8, and the FA Vase for anyone lower than that. But the U.S. counterpart to that would be the U.S. Amateur Cup, which many UPSL teams enter, and that winner can play in the supercup-ish Hank Steinbrecher Cup.) European clubs in regional leagues try to win that league and progress as far as they can in their cups.

But that playoff is, in the words of Douglas Adams, mostly harmless. It’s the summer leagues, PDL and NPSL, that have counterproductive national playoffs. These clubs serve a valuable purpose — giving college players a few more competitive games in the summers. Then they cut their regular seasons short to race through a set of playoffs that no one really cares about. (Seriously — lower-division fans can all remember U.S. Open Cup upsets such as Reading United over the New York Cosmos, Michigan Bucks over everyone, Des Moines Menace over a couple of pro teams, Chattanooga FC over Wilmington, etc. Name the last PDL champion. Or try to remember anything from the NPSL playoffs other than Midland-Odessa scraping together a team to play the final after the bulk of its roster went back to school for the fall.)

That’s the state of adult soccer. What about youth soccer?

Maybe the new U.S. Youth Soccer leagues will be an oasis of sanity. Unlike the Development Academy and the ECNL, they should have enough entries to split into sensible regional divisions. (The DA has a few good clusters at U12 but hits peak absurdity by U15, while ECNL travel budgets are rather excessive even in the long-established girls’ divisions.)

And somewhere in the ashes of the 2018 U.S. Soccer presidential race lies an interesting idea — a national Youth Cup. This exists in England, where the FA Youth Cup draws hundreds of U18 entries (and note that the age range is not by birth year) and Broxbourne Borough of the Spartan South Midlands League Division One (unfortunately, the senior team is facing relegation down to England’s 11th tier) was one game away from the quarterfinals last year.

One national championship. (OK, maybe two — England has a national U18 league with north and south divisions that face off in a national playoff, but that’s about it for national travel, even in a country that requires no airplanes for away fixtures.) That seems sensible. And the top academies might have to face off with a Broxbourne Borough in a meaningful game instead of sitting in a silo.

Basically, if you’re going to have a national championship, maybe it should include everyone in the nation — at least those meeting a certain criteria like “amateur” or “Division 3 or below” or “Division I college teams.” Otherwise, why spend time flying when you could be playing?

2
pro soccer, us soccer

Things about U.S. pro soccer that are still true

Posted on by Beau Dure

A quick interlude in my youth soccer work to reiterate some things that, based on discussions I’m seeing, need reiterating:

1. Before MLS, the USA had two substantial pro men’s leagues. The ASL of the 1920s and early 30s was successful for several years and provided the bulk of the players who helped the USA take third in the 1930 World Cup (don’t get too excited — only 13 countries entered) before falling apart in a series of stubborn arguments with national and international federations. (Sound familiar?) The NASL started in the late 60s and peaked in the late 70s before collapsing in the mid-80s, having done little to put down solid roots. In the rest of those decades — 40s, 50s, most of the 60s, late 80s, early 90s — U.S. pro soccer was a wasteland.

2. At times, the USA has been outright hostile to soccer, even if Jack Kemp walked back his complaint that the sport is “socialist.” Sort of. Newspapers often refused to cover it seriously. Academics have spilled boatloads of ink explaining why soccer faced an uphill cultural battle in this country until a few things changed the scene (say — 1994, 1999, 2002, etc.)

3. If big events on TV were any indicator of interest in regular professional competition, the highest-rated shows would be the NWSL and the Diamond League. (I’m betting a lot of you are opening a new tab and Googling “Diamond League.”)

4. Since 2001, MLS has grown substantially by every metric except TV ratings, which is indeed an issue and may be explained by any mix of three factors: substandard games, substandard TV production, the growth of EPL and other leagues on U.S. TV. Every other metric — number of teams, number of teams doing well at the gate, overall attendance, number of committed ownership groups, investment in facilities, investment in youth academies — is trending strongly upward.

5. MLS is not part of a conspiracy to keep soccer from getting as big as the NFL. There’s no record of MLS turning away substantial investment aside from the vaporware media rights “offer” Riccardo Silva made, knowing MLS couldn’t accept. Indeed, several MLS owners today — Stan Kroenke, City Football Group, Jason Levien — also have ownership stakes overseas, so they directly profit from the EPL and MLS chipping away at the U.S. sports marketplace. And if Anschutz, Hunt and Kraft wanted soccer to fail, they would’ve let MLS fail in 2001 instead of digging far deeper into their pockets to keep it going.

6. While the USSF Pro League Standards have some criteria worth arguing, U.S. Soccer is not unique in having standards. Check out what you need to be in the Football League in England — 2,000 seats under cover, a closed-circuit surveillance system, an external boundary wall of 2.2 meters, individual seats with back rests (sorry, no high school stadia with bleacher seating), a computerized turnstile monitoring system, directors’ boxes with guest rooms, press seating with 20 desktops and 10 power points, etc.

7. Plenty of soccer clubs in the USA have meticulously chosen their level — amateur summer leagues, amateur fall-spring leagues, USL, etc. — and don’t want to change.

8. If you subscribe to the notion that the U.S. men’s national team has gotten worse (not that the competition has gotten better), you have to account for the fact that more players in the old days were produced through pay-to-play clubs and college soccer.

9. The NASL (the new one) made its own bed and now, thanks to constant turnover and the quiet disappearance of a lot of big-talking backers, lacks the institutional knowledge to remember that it did so.

10. Just as the NY Cosmos argued that their investment was based on retaining Division 2 status, a lot of investment in academies and infrastructure over the past 20-plus years has been predicated on retaining Division 1 status.

11. The USA is huge. Like, really huge. Yes, Russia’s bigger, but the area hosting the 2018 World Cup is smaller than the USA, even including that little hop over Belarus to Kalinigrad, and the Premier League just has the occasional team from the Pacific Coast. (Besides, do we want to copy Russia?) Ensuring a national footprint is a worthwhile goal.

12. You can make a good case for promotion/relegation (or, at the very least, for other reforms) in U.S. soccer without denying the truths listed above and accusing the people who remind you of those truths of being paid shills setting up Twitterbots on behalf of the MLS illuminati. So why not give it a try?

1
pro soccer, us soccer

Can the promotion/relegation debate be saved?

Posted on by Beau Dure

The theme music of the promotion/relegation debate should probably be Carmina Burana. The part we all know from hundreds of pop culture references (“OOOOOOO FORTUNA” — if you ever want to be creeped out, check out the scene from The Doors set to that music) is at the beginning and the end of the composition, suggesting a wheel of fortune in which every spin comes up bankrupt.

And the lyrics translate roughly to “Fate. Monstrous and empty. You whirling wheel. You are malevolent. Well-being is vain and always fades to nothing. And you go home and you cry and you want to die.”

(OK, so I added a line from the Smiths. Did you even notice?)

But despite listening to such depressing music in college, even as we all wondered if we would be drafted into Gulf War I, I’m optimistic. Like this New York Times writer suggesting social media is worth salvaging even as various platforms inevitably descend abuse and cynical data-mining, I think something is worth saving in the pro/rel discussion.

We’ll need, as the NYT writer suggests, a reset button.

So imagine (to cite a more hopeful piece of music) if the pro/rel debate started this year …

Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? MLS is pretty well established, with facilities and academies built up in several cities. But it could use something to get to the next level.

Meanwhile, the lower divisions are changing. In the past, a lot of D2 and D3 teams eagerly “self-relegated” to the amateur ranks, where they could play short seasons with unpaid players. A lot of teams will be happy to stay there. But we may have a critical mass of parties interested in moving up.

We could all kick around ideas. A English-style ladder, with 20-24 teams in each of the top five tiers, doesn’t make much sense in a country of this size. We should have more of a pyramid, with regional play in the lower divisions so we’re not asking an amateur club in Spokane that got promoted to D3 to fly to Miami for a league game.

We could take into account all the things that make the USA different — the generations of cultural antipathy and hostility that left us far behind on infrastructure, the fact that soccer still isn’t and may never be the No. 1 team sport in this country, and the fact that soccer from the youth level upward is in the hands of many different organizations. (In Germany, as the NSCAA presenter from the DFB reminded everyone, it’s one.)

So we could have a reasonable discussion, right?

The problem is the baggage. We call pro/rel the “third rail” of U.S. soccer for a reason.

That’s unfair to well-intentioned newbies. We have a generation of soccer fans who grew up with unlimited choice of soccer broadcasts, and they wonder why the USA doesn’t have a league to rival the Premier League or La Liga. Some of them do some research and begin to sketch out ways to build a club at the grass roots.

Unfortunately, when they turn to Twitter or any other medium, they encounter two groups that have been long ago gave up any semblance of trust or honesty …

  1. The “pro/rel” crowd, whose arguments were pretty flimsy when the USA was desperate for anyone to run a professional soccer team, resorted to lies and slander 10-15 years ago.
  2. The “anti-pro/rel” crowd is sick of hearing it, and whenever they hear someone talking about pro/rel, they assume they’re ignorant haters who are beyond reason.

So we have this cycle:

  1. Newbie starts asking why we don’t have an “open system.”
  2. Newbie gets an overly hostile history lesson from people who are used to dealing with full-time Twitter trolls.
  3. Newbie gets sympathy from the “pro/rel” long-timers.
  4. Newbie starts to believe what the “pro/rel” long-timers say.

That means the newbie is exposed to a whole bunch of myths …

Everyone who questions the obvious solution of promotion/relegation to address most of U.S. soccer’s problems must be compromised in some way — either paid by MLS/SUM to discredit the movement or actually a sock puppet/bot, or perhaps a journalist afraid of losing credentials. 

I’ve gotten the occasional lecture from various people in power about why something I wrote is the stupidest thing ever, but I still got credentials to cover an Open Cup game involving an MLS team last year and the USSF Annual General Meeting this year. I used to go to MLS pressboxes all the time, and a lot of them credentialed everyone with a laptop.

A lot of journalists have written for MLSSoccer.com over the years. I wrote fantasy columns for its predecessor, MLSNet, before I started writing frequently as part of my duties at USA TODAY. (And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned it — see the seven separate references on Ranting Soccer Dad and Duresport dating back to 2014 and at least 10 times on Twitter. It wasn’t exactly hidden before then — the columns had my name on them. You can’t find them now because MLSNet now exists only on the Wayback Machine, where you might my columns alongside those of Eric Wynalda. It was kind of a fun site.)

If you want to declare everyone who has recently written for MLSSoccer.com “compromised,” OK. I’d point out that the freelance marketplace is in tatters, and a lot of people are just writing wherever they can make money. My experience is that a lot of people are capable of writing a Timbers-Galaxy game story and still making up their own minds about things, but it’s really up to you to weigh everyone’s work on its own merit.

But even given all that, there are hundreds of people writing about soccer who are in no way financially connected to MLS’s quasi-independent sites and never have been. Some are beat writers for what’s left of local newspapers. Some are amateur (but well-informed) bloggers. Check out The Washington Post, The Columbus Dispatch, SB Nation, Howler, The Athletic, FiftyFiveOne, Canadian outlets, ProSoccerUSA, Philly.com, The Oregonian, ESPN, The Guardian (where I write, but usually about non-MLS topics), Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press.

(And yes, some people who write for SB Nation and Howler write for MLSSoccer.com. You may note it didn’t stop Howler from publishing Peter Wilt’s promotion/relegation manifesto, nor did it stop SB Nation from ripping USSF over its lack of outreach to underserved communities. U.S. Soccer is not Sinclair Broadcasting, and these outlets are not local TV stations desperate to please their corporate masters.)

But Deloitte did a study proving U.S. soccer would be better with pro/rel!

You mean this one?

As it stands however, US club soccer is not immediately ready for promotion and
relegation – for the topic to move forward several key topics needs to be addressed
including:

  • Decisions made on the optimum number of teams in the existing leagues;

  • The continued development and stability of a second tier competition to develop clubscapable in management and football terms of joining the first tier; and

  • Consideration of the mechanism by which long term league investors have their “equity” protected, at least in the short term, from relegation.

In other words, Deloitte basically said what a lot of the supposed “anti-pro/rel” crowd has been saying for a long, long time.

Pro/rel works in the rest of the world

And yet China, India and tons of other large countries with large economies are worse than Uruguay.

But those countries are DIFFERENT!

Exactly. So is the USA.

If you doubt anything about an open system, you must be perfectly happy with MLS and U.S. Soccer the way they are.

sith

No one’s telling you — well, maybe not no one, but most people — that promotion/relegation is a horrible system that should be done away with in Europe. (Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened — the oligarchs buying soccer clubs could easily break away and tell the respective FAs to deal with it.) Most people are just telling you when you have a weak argument.

MLS isn’t really competitive because of single entity and so forth.

Go into a postgame locker room sometime and see what you think. Or talk with a player who just got cut from a roster. It’s not that simple.

Which leads to …

Promotion/relegation would obviously (A) make our youth development better and (B) lead to massive investment. There’s no downside at all!

Yeah, again — it’s not that simple.

But we can discuss all that. We should.

So here’s what we need to do …

  1. Ignore the trolls and haters on all sides.
  2. Drop the accusations.
  3. Learn the history, not just from one source. Read the books on my soccer bookshelf or anything else you can find.
  4. Build on what’s positive about an open system, especially opportunity and the idea of building a larger footprint for our soccer culture. Quit telling people they’re idiots for not seeing how obvious it supposedly is.

I hear from so many people who insist they’ve distanced themselves from the obnoxious liars and scoundrels of Twitter. Then they repeat mythology that those liars and scoundrels have spouted for years. I still believe you when you say you’ve distanced yourself from them, but the next step is to distance yourself from their skewed take on things.

And then — yeah, you “anti-pro/rel” types. Quit treating everyone like they’re same people who got laughed off BigSoccer 10 years ago and spend half their time whining about it on Twitter.

My position — which, not by design, can never be wrong — is that pro/rel will happen in the USA when we’re ready for it. We’re getting closer. We’re finally starting to see investors who want it to happen. We’re running out of space in a one-tier MLS.

So let’s talk as if the last 15 years of b.s. never happened.

Hi, I’m Beau. I live in Northern Virginia. I like Liverpool, and I’m always going to be biased toward my favorite places from my 2011 Women’s World Cup coverage — Augsburg, Leverkusen and Berlin. And I know a lot of people because I’m old and I’ve been writing about soccer for a while. Nice to meet you.

3
pro soccer

February … frenzy? How U.S. pro soccer could have its own madness

Posted on by Beau Dure

bracket-emptyTucked away in some of my modified promotion/relegation ideas and then expounded upon in an Open Cup idea is this notion — meaningful tournament games played in February in warm-weather and domed venues.

Suppose we could …

  1. Come up with something akin to the NCAA’s March Madness?
  2. Come up with something that gives soccer clubs what they’re all seeking through promotion/relegation — opportunity?

Let’s point out early — this is not a substitute for a promotion/relegation system. This idea works with open systems and closed systems. It works if the USA remains on the Brazilian calendar or switches to the English calendar.

It does work best if pro soccer has, like the NCAA, a lot of regional leagues. (Or regions within a larger national framework, if you prefer.) We should have that. In a country this size, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a national third division, then a national fourth division and so forth. Other countries split into regional play a few levels down the pyramid — Germany and France at the fourth, Spain at the third, even England at the sixth.

In fact, if you prefer a soccer model to a basketball model, just tell yourself we’re modeling all this after the German Futsal Cup.

Here’s the idea: No more MLS-only (or, if we’ve radically changed the league system, no more Division 1-only) tournaments. Maybe not even a national tournament for a Division 2 or Division 3 league, but if someone wants to put together the equivalent of an FA Trophy or special event to crown a “D3” champion, fine.

But this is the tournament that determines the USA and Canada’s professional champion. Each year, we’ll have three top-tier trophies:

  • Pro League Champion: Determined by league play, wrapping up either in May or December, depending on which calendar we pick.
  • U.S. Open Cup Champion: Probably determined in August, depending on whether we want this to include “summer league” teams (PDL, much of the NPSL, etc), but that’s another conversation.
  • Pro Cup Champion: Late January through February.

The format would depend on many factors. But here’s one hypothetical idea:

  • 24 teams: The champion of every regional pro league (D3, USASA, whatever), a couple of teams from D2 and the rest from D1.
  • Three-team round-robin groups. Everyone gets at least two games that way.
  • The eight group winners play a simple knockout tournament. Total of five games for the finalists.

Maybe you could also do a 32-team tournament. Maybe double-elimination instead of the round-robin groups. All good.

You could do brackets, like the NCAA Tournament. You’d have the occasional blowout, but you’d have the occasional upset.

It would finish up in late February, one of the deadest times in the U.S. sports calendar. Not yet NCAA Tournament time. Not yet the stretch run of the NBA or NHL. No baseball, aside from autograph-seekers in Florida. No gridiron. (During Winter Olympic years, you’d have a conflict, but maybe creative scheduling could help.)

And every pro team would have an opportunity to win a national championship. Every year. No matter which division they’re in.

Opportunity’s what everyone wants these days. Right?

 

 

 

 

 

0
pro soccer, us soccer

Change and Chattanooga: What’s the next step for U.S. pro soccer?

Posted on by Beau Dure

(This post has been updated three times. I blame Zoidberg.)

After a few weeks of post-election doom and gloom on Twitter, it’s refreshing to see the “change” movement in U.S. Soccer moving forward with something constructive.

The Summit for American Soccer in Chattanooga asked a lot of interesting questions:

  • Can we have professional teams outside the restrictive Pro League Standards?
  • Is U.S. Adult Soccer the best gateway to accomplish that?
  • How do we build something sustainable?

And the questions showed how quickly things have progressed. Consider that, as of a couple of weeks ago, Jacksonville Armada owner Robert Palmer was under the impression that the USASA wasn’t an option.

https://twitter.com/rp_robertpalmer/status/966353127153815552

But it can. And that tweet was in response to me asking why they didn’t follow the lead of the ASL, which has already gone that route, albeit in more obscurity than the people at the Summit would want. (Hey, my Twitter feed is good for something!)

What was missing?

The people who could give the best answers.

A lot of intriguing people with interesting ideas were in the room. But aside from U.S. Adult Soccer president and longtime U.S. Soccer board member John Motta, there wasn’t much institutional knowledge.

(UPDATE: Chris Kivlehan informs me that John Motta wasn’t there. I did learn very late in writing this post — it’s the last paragraph of Nipun Chopra’s report — that some U.S. Soccer personnel were in attendance.

(UPDATE UPDATE: Nipun has clarified that no USSF personnel were present.)

“Good,” you might say. “We need fresh ideas.”

Sure, but knowledge is not a bad thing. Whether you consider U.S. Soccer a flawed organization or an outright enemy, nothing good can come from misunderstanding it. And it’s good to learn from people who’ve tried to do similar things in the past, such as the team owners who were involved when the USISL tried to move toward pro/rel in the past.

(By the way — the MLS/USL partnership is a relatively recent thing, and it might not be as solid as you think. Partnership efforts early in the MLS era were clumsy and quickly fell apart, and people who’ve followed the lower divisions for more than a few years will remember when the two leagues were not close. So seeking the advice of a USL/USISL/A-League team owner circa 1998 or 2005 would not be the same as calling Don Garber.)

And there was one notable absentee: Peter Wilt. The explanation I’ve received from Chattanooga FC chairman Tim Kelly, the organizer and host, is that the summit was geared toward clubs rather than leagues, so there was no need to bring in the man trying to get the third-division (for now) NISA off the ground. Other league representatives — the NPSL’s Joe Barone and a few folks from the ASL — are also club representatives. Yet they found room at the last minute for the NASL’s Rishi Sehgal to participate on a panel called “Soccer Landscape,” which seems odd.

But Wilt isn’t just some guy with a league idea that may or may not work. He’s a start-up specialist: Chicago Fire, Chicago Red Stars, Indy Eleven, indoor teams, etc. He’s also a former USSF board member. And it’s not as if he’s some tool of the “establishment” — he campaigned quite vociferously for Eric Wynalda’s presidential run.

At some point, bringing in people like Wilt and others with experience is simply due diligence. You have to do research on several issues. Having too many like-minded people with similar (and not much) experience in one room can quickly lead to unproductive groupthink. And no, having Stefan Szymanski in the room isn’t going to help — like a lot of economists, he falls prey to thinking solely in terms of economic models and ignores the historical and cultural forces that affect pro soccer as well. (See Paul Gardner’s classic column from the MLS players’ suit, where Gardner memorably shredded the testimony of a sports economist called in as an expert witness and ridiculed players who took the stand and pretended not to know that the league below England’s Premier League is below England’s Premier League.)

Let’s be clear here — the tinfoil brigade in the U.S. soccer community may be declining in influence as thoughtful new leaders like Kelly, Palmer and Dennis Crowley rise up. But it’s not gone. Consider what happened this week, thanks to a Twitter account that appears to have some influence among some of the “change” contingent’s most notable voices:

https://twitter.com/wikimls/status/973584597949837312

Which is utter nonsense. The nominees for the Hall of Fame meet specific, objective criteria that are published for all to see. (An omission from those criteria: A nominee who isn’t named on 5% of the ballots in a given year will not be on the ballot the next year. If you find someone who meets the criteria but isn’t on the ballot, that’s the likeliest explanation. The other possible explanation is incomplete records, in which case please let me know and I’ll pass it along to the folks at the Hall. Or tell them yourself. They’re not out to omit anyone.)

I don’t know if that tweet was intentionally misleading, but (A) it would be consistent with that account’s behavior in the past and (B) whoever runs it hasn’t bothered to correct or clarify the record.

These are not the people the “change” contingent wants as allies. They are trying to “change” people with slander, which never works. If you think honesty and transparency are lacking in the current soccer climate, why would you add more dishonesty from the veil of anonymity?

And those folks would be happy to hijack this movement. Consider the truck, parked outside the United Soccer Coaches convention in Philadelphia, which was intended to undermine candidates Kathy Carter and Carlos Cordeiro but may have helped get the latter elected because it was so nasty, clumsy and lacking substance.

Even those with better intentions can get caught up in attributing to malice that which can be attributed to something else. Consider this, from Chris Kivlehan’s report at Midfield Press:

While there was a sentiment to be open minded and give new USSF president Carlos Cordeiro a fair shot individually, the overall feeling toward the USSF board still heavily influenced by Sunil Gulati and Don Garber is one of skepticism. For example, a recently effort to get the New York Cosmos, Jacksonville Armada and Miami FC US Open Cup berths via the USASA was shot down according to one source at the meeting.  Due to the perceived bias of the USSF board toward MLS and USL, many see investing hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars into a professional soccer club under the PLS as risky.

The U.S. Open Cup rules, for better or worse, require a team to be in good standing in a league throughout the competition. That’s why amateur club El Farolito is out this year. The same rules also ban a lot of USL teams from the competition because they’re owned by MLS owners, a rule that was passed in Spain a couple of decades ago and Germany more recently. All of those rules can be debated on their merits, but it’s not some sort of ad hoc decision to ban the Cosmos and Miami this year.

So, as with so many other aspects of U.S. soccer, what some call conspiracy actually has a more prosaic rationale.

(UPDATE: That said, the Cosmos have asked why teams have moved from the NASL to USL have been allowed into the Cup this year. Will probably update again whenever we get a response.)

The “change” movement failed in the election because voters saw too many accusations, many unfounded, and not enough experience to back up the ideas. That’s a mistake this movement needs to avoid repeating.

Frankly, the NASL failed for similar reasons. Starting from the fateful moment in which they turned away from an MLS partnership in 2012 and accelerating through several changes in management and ownership, the NASL gained more bombast and less experience. The league lost a lot of good will. Then lost a lot of teams. Then lost its D2 sanction.

And now what’s left of the NASL has gummed up the works with a couple of lawsuits. There’s no way U.S. Soccer is going to revise the Pro League Standards (or implement my pet proposal to replace the Pro League Standards with Pro Club Standards, which would be in line with the “Club >> League” philosophy we’re getting from Chattanooga) while they’re being sued. (Maybe the Chattanooga organizers invited Sehgal so they could send the message that they care about the remaining NASL clubs but not about the albatross of the NASL brand name? Maybe?)

george

All of which raises another question — does this group really want the backing of Riccardo Silva (Miami) and Rocco Commisso (Cosmos), who seem quite cozy in their embrace of the “burn it all down” brigade?

truth

One more person the Chattanooga change group should consider calling in: Steven Bank, the lawyer who writes terrific explanatory pieces on the soccer law landscape. Bank’s most recent piece (linked above) throws cold water on the assumption in Chattanooga that “adopting promotion and relegation is not only the proper course for US Soccer to pursue legally …”

We should also ask what’s stopping the Chattanooga group from chatting not only with Peter Wilt’s NISA (which could theoretically be part of a pyramid they’re envisioning) but also the USL. I for one don’t think the USL is expanding with the sole purpose of taking markets away from another pro league. I think they’re expanding for the same reason the NPSL adds a couple dozen teams at a time. They want to be bigger.

So that’s a look at who was and was not in Chattanooga and why it matters. Here’s a quick look at some specifics being tossed around, thanks to some info I’ve received and a report by Chris Kivlehan at Midfield Press (and now a report by Nipun Chopra at SocTakes):

Should we form a new federation?

Apparently not. Kivlehan says that idea “was quickly put aside as a quixotic initiative unlikely to succeed in swaying FIFA.”

USSF is a large organization. It’s not about a couple of people on the board. It also includes people who are trying to build up the Open Cup, people who are really trying to dig into youth soccer’s problems, and people who are trying to secure the money it’ll take to fix both of those things. (By the same token — FIFA has good people, too. Not just the people who gave one World Cup to a doped-up dictatorship and another to a desert country building stadiums with slave labor, then look the other way when such things are brought to light. If we’re not breaking away from FIFA over the deaths of abused workers in Qatar, why break away from USSF over the Pro League Standards?)

Should we play unsanctioned professional soccer?

Look, there’s always the MASL! So far, FIFA doesn’t seem to have banned those players from FIFA-sanctioned futsal and beach soccer events.

But Kivlehan points to the problem here: “Another potential route would be to play without sanctioning from USSF, which would introduce challenges around FIFA player contracts, hiring referees for matches and would result in exclusion from the US Open Cup.”

We have enough trouble finding and keeping good referees. No need to split them between a sanctioned organization and an unsanctioned organization.

Um … many of us are still using college players …

That’s a point so many people forget. There’s a slide showing the Kingston Stockade’s financials (all open source, thanks to Dennis Crowley’s vision of ultimate transparency) that shows a couple of areas of improvement from 2016 to 2017. One constant: “Player Roster: $0.”

Some people involved with lower-division soccer insist on referring to it as “pro” or “semi-pro” or “pro-am.” Occasionally, you’ll find a professional team registered in one of these leagues. If a single college player is on that team, it’s not “pro.”

… and we want to keep travel costs down …

This might be an area where reasonable people differ with Peter Wilt, who has been known to insist travel costs aren’t as much of a barrier as people think. The Kingston slide has an exclamation point next to a line item showing “travel and hotel” cost dropping from $10,615 to $0. That’s a pretty big deal for a team that lost $36,799 in 2016.

Here’s Chris Kivlehan again:

Previously there had been talk of a multi-tier setup within NPSL, with a national level (likely consisting of the NASL teams and the 7 NPSL clubs that had NASL Letters of Intent per court documents), a full season elite amateur level for those ready for a longer schedule but not necessarily ready to go fully pro and then the traditional short season NPSL league.  The momentum in this discussion shifted to a flatter, more regionalized setup to start with, but this is likely open to discussion in future meetings.

Please don’t tell anyone Dan Loney, violent slayer of pro/rel propagandists, has been saying the same thing for years.

Also note from that quote from Chris …

Are we playing summer or full-season? 

Here’s a bit of disconnect within the “change” movement. Eric Wynalda insists we should all be on the English calendar to align transfer windows. The NPSL, like the WPSL, UWS and PDL, plays in the summer.

Granted, that’s a side effect of using college talent.

We need stadiums

No kidding. Everyone needs stadiums. And this is where people who’ve been through stadium-building wars (again, Peter Wilt springs to mind) would be useful to have in the conversation. D.C. United didn’t spend 22 years in RFK Stadium because they were attached to the raccoons.

Can fans own the teams? 

It’s a romantic notion that has the backing of Wilt and a lot of folks within the NPSL. It may be limiting in the long run — the Bundesliga may end up doing away with group ownership so German clubs can keep up with the Premier League’s owner-oligarchs — but as long as a club can put up a reasonable performance bond for the level at which it competes, does it matter?

But as Nipun reports: “Per Kelly, the idea of supporter ownership received pushback from some of the attendees.”

That surprises me a bit.

Can we make money streaming?

Ask the NWSL folks. This is where facilities matter — the Maryland SoccerPlex, home of the Washington Spirit, has immaculate fields but wiring that doesn’t lend itself to 21st century Internetting.

MOVING FORWARD

The idea of clubs being more important than leagues is long overdue. One slide put it well: “Leagues should be thought of as networks and platforms for the promotion of its clubs.”

And the message of ending divisiveness is long overdue. U.S. soccer has spent generations beating itself up. The old ASL was huge in the 1920s and then collapsed, thanks to the Depression but also the egos of those involved.

It needs to go farther. Best practices need to be shared more widely. How did Peter Wilt build fan loyalty with the Chicago Fire? What were the early Rochester Rhinos doing well? How did Atlanta United — to the surprise of native Georgians like me — get 70,000 people in the door with a tremendous atmosphere?

Ultimately, this group and the MLS wing of U.S. Soccer need to build bridges. But until that day, calling upon the lessons of history — and calling upon those who lived them — is not a bad idea.

 

 

 

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pro soccer

Modified promotion/relegation would be too complicated? Really?

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m working on a guide to the frequently recurring arguments (FRA?) about promotion/relegation, and I got on a roll when I was answering the complaint that my modified promotion/relegation idea (see an example with teams plugged in) is too complicated for anyone to follow.

Here’s the response:

Let’s say you follow English soccer. The top two tiers of the league are simple, sure — three up, three down, like a sergeant’s insignia or the end of an inning in baseball. Well, the Championship throws in a twist, with the third- through sixth-place teams in playoffs for that last Premier League spot, but that’s not so bad.

And the Premier League has qualification for Europe — assuming England’s coefficient is still high enough, they’ll send three teams to straight to the Champions League group stage, then the fourth-place team to the Champions League playoff round, and the fifth-place team qualifies for the Europa League group stage. Then the FA Cup winner qualifies also qualifies for the Europa League group stage, and the EFL Cup winner qualifies for a Europa League playoff round.

Of course, the FA Cup winner may also be in the top five of the Premier League, in which case that Europa League spot goes to the next-best team in the EPL. And the EFL Cup winner may qualify for the Champions League or Europa League group stage, in which case the Europa League playoff spot goes the the next- (or next-next-) best team.

And the Europa League champions qualify for the Champions League the next year, so that adds a further reshuffling.

So what are those Cup competitions? Well, the FA Cup starts with 737 teams, with the lowest-tiered entries playing in the extra preliminary round, then the preliminary round, then four qualifying rounds before reaching the first round proper, which is when the fully professional Football League enters. But not the Premier League and Championship, whose teams enter in the third round in January and often play their reserves until it looks like they might have a chance of winning the thing.

But wait, there’s also the EFL Cup, now called the Carabao Cup.

Caribous of Colorado, with fringe jerseys
No, not Caribous.

The EFL Cup is only for “League” teams — though the fifth and sixth tiers are no longer the “Conference” but rather the “National League.” The semifinals are two legs, just to add to the fixture congestion for EPL teams after the “festive fixtures” just when some might like to rest up for the resumption of European play. That differs from the FA Cup, in which a drawn game is replayed. (In Football Manager, if my team is struggling with injuries, I may try to lose a close game intentionally just to avoid a replay.)

Oh, did we mention all of these competitions go on at the same time? Maybe Chelsea could recall one of its 33 players on loan.

So what was the question?

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