One of the greatest women’s soccer players ever, Michelle Akers, is upset that the U.S. Soccer powers that be haven’t taken her up on her offer to help out with the national team:
Per a phone conversation with Sunil (Gulati, USSF president), he told me I did not have enough experience to coach at that level,” Akers said. “I disagreed.”
Which raises a general question: Can a former player with no known coaching experience* contribute to a major coaching staff in a meaningful way?
(*Update – She is listed as a volunteer assistant at Central Florida. In a lengthy Twitter conversation, she revealed that she does indeed have a B license.)
Several MLS clubs have had success with players going straight from the field to the sideline. Jason Kreis, winning MLS Cup with Real Salt Lake less than three years after abruptly retiring from the field to take the reins. Ben Olsen did a brief apprenticeship as assistant coach before taking over with D.C. United, which stuck with him through some difficult times before getting to the top of the East. Others haven’t quite caught up to the realities of leading a team.
If you want to coach a pro team in the USA, you need an “A” license. You get a two-year grace period. So sayeth the professional league standards.
Former athletes get fast-tracked through the process, to an extent. Those of us who didn’t play at a high level need more than two years to get to the “A” license. Those with five years of Division 1 pro experience can skip straight to the “B.” College players, like my House league colleague who played at Stanford with Julie Foudy, can often skip some lower level licenses.
A licensing course won’t turn a bad coach into a good coach. But it’ll give a prospective coach, even one with the playing experience of an Akers or an Olsen, a few new ways of looking at things. (Update: And again, she does indeed have the “B.”)
The worst coaches you’ll see, at any level, are those who learned one way of doing things and think that the only way things are supposed to be done. They’re the youth coaches who yell and scream and run unproductive drills because that’s the way they were taught. They’re the pro coaches who can’t relate to players with a skillset that doesn’t easily match something they’ve seen before.
So it’s a little disheartening to read a statement from Akers that’s all about the past. Does the USA always need to play the Anson Dorrance style? Would Akers be able to relate to a new-school player like … oh … right … they never bring in new players.
But there’s another issue of basic compatibility. Whether you agree with the latest trends of Euro-inspired possession ball or the Jill Ellis number system, would you really want a coaching staff with such contrasting visions?
The only former U.S. men’s player on the U.S. national team staff is Tab Ramos, who was always an atypical U.S. player and doesn’t seem to be trying to push the Steve Sampson style on Jurgen Klinsmann.
Sure, the U.S. women have been a tad more successful than the U.S. men through history. But both games are evolving. Bringing in someone from the past is hardly an automatic positive.
Update: Akers has taken issue with this post on Twitter, and her general point is that more people from era should be involved with the program today. And indeed, it’s a larger issue than one person’s experience. A common complaint in U.S. soccer circles is that few women are going into coaching — MLS sidelines are full of MLS veterans, NWSL sidelines are not full of former players. And then there’s the question of whether the U.S. women’s program is just too insular in general, even to the point of shutting out thoughts from previous generations.
So some interesting discussions can flow from these questions. Not that we’re likely to see anything change before the World Cup later this year.
Well, I think so. That’s the conclusion I reached after reading Chapter 7 of Ted Philipakos’ excellent forthcoming book, On Level Terms.
That might not be Philipakos’ conclusion. He’s an agent and an academic who clearly has a solid grasp of the 10 cases he discusses in the book, but he plays the role of dispassionate reporter here, passing no judgment but simply summarizing these complex cases in plain English — a difficult task he does well.
He starts with U.S. cases, leading off with the big one, Fraser v MLS — the players’ 1997 lawsuit against the then-new Major League Soccer. That suit is a full chapter in my book Long-Range Goals, and I was flattered that he cited me. But he adds valuable insight, especially in following the case through the Court of Appeals and diving headlong into the murky world of single-entity law.
Next up: two cases from the old NASL that might change some impressions of the good old days, one more antitrust-ish case and a concussion case still in progress.
The European cases are another interesting grab bag, ending with a TV-rights case I’d never heard of. As you’d expect, Philipakos has a good solid chapter on the Bosman case, which established greater player movement and wiped out a lot of restrictions on foreign players. That case made the Premier League the melting pot it is today, and the federation arguments made at the time sound positively quaint even though they weren’t made that long ago.
So what’s the deal with Chapter 7 and my clickbait headline?
The issue here is the Football Creditors Rule, which ensures clubs seeking protection from creditors must pay off their “football creditors” — players, clubs to which they owe transfer fees, etc. — in full. Other creditors — say, the UK tax agency known by the cumbersome name Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — might only get a few pennies.
Seems fair — until you see how many clubs abuse it. “Sure, we’ll sign you to a multimillion-pound contract even though we don’t get EPL TV money and we only draw 8,000 fans per game. If we go broke, we’ll just go into administration and tell the rest of our creditors to shove it.”
So as I’m reading it, Football League clubs can still keep paying 90 percent of their revenues in player payroll, and if they can’t pay their taxes, that’s just too bad for the rest of the country’s taxpayers.
One unique aspect of soccer development as opposed to football and baseball is that we in the USA are all worried that other countries are doing it better. Little League and Pop Warner coaches surely don’t spend quite as much time absorbing the lessons of Barcelona, Ajax and Tahuichi as those of us in soccer.
In basketball, the USA is just starting to ease into that discussion, thanks in part to one U.S. star raised in Italy — Kobe Bryant, who shook up the basketball establishment a few days ago by saying European players are getting better skill development than the AAU-bred Americans.
This isn’t the first time Kobe has said something like this. Here’s what he told Jack McCallum nearly two years ago (“Chaos Theory,” SI, Feb. 25, 2013 — I couldn’t find it in the online vault):
I feel fortunate that I was over in Italy (from ages six to 13) when AAU basketball (got big) over here. They stopped teaching kids fundamentals in the United States, but that didn’t affect me. Over there, it wasn’t about competition and traveling around and being a big deal; it was about fundamentals, footwork, spacing, back cuts — all of those things. Look at Pau Gasol. Look at the skills he has compared to the guys who grew up playing AAU ball.
The irony is that this is the opposite of our concern in U.S. soccer — to an extent, anyway. We’re worried that U.S. soccer players don’t spend enough time playing on their own. Not enough “free play.” I haven’t heard anyone raise that concern about U.S. basketball players, who typically go to the gym or the playground for some pickup games if they’re not practicing.
As long as college coaches use AAU and travel teams, rather than high school sports, as the basis of their recruiting, and parents continue to spend their money and time putting their kids in the youth sports machine to reach lottery-like dreams of a college athletic scholarship, the system will continue as we know it. Plus, in every profession, the road to developing talent and actually getting the job you want is not always the same.
Mike DeCourcy, a soccer guy in his own right, has a few related and sensible prescriptions for U.S. basketball, including more USA Basketball camps for younger players and hockey-style draft rules in which NBA teams can draft players and maintain their rights while they stay in college.
The latter would make sense; therefore, we shouldn’t expect the NCAA to do it.
I recently came across a classic Frank DeFord piece on the MISL — Show, Sex And Suburbs — and got curious to see what else Sports Illustrated had written about the heyday of the indoor game and the nadir of U.S. outdoor soccer.
Fortunately, SI’s vaults are open (to subscribers, at least), so I was able to trip through history.
Here we go …
July 9, 1979: Watch Out! The Sky Is Falling: The Houston Hurricane jump-started its outdoor season with a successful run indoors.
Houston Forward Kyle Rote believes the indoor experiences did more than just instill self-esteem in the Hurricane players. “Eight of our 11 outdoor starters played indoor, and we gained a lot of technical skills, particularly the Americans,” he says.
Feb. 18, 1980: They Get Their Kicks On A Hockey Rink: Bob Rigby offers up what might be the first mention of the phrase “human pinball” while SI contrasts the surging indoor game with the fading outdoor game.
Foreman also finds a chauvinistic satisfaction in the arrangement. “We felt that people wanted to see American kids, their own kids, playing,” he says. “The NASL hasn’t done much for them. We wanted to be the league where no American would wind up holding Beckenbauer’s warmup jacket. …
No wonder that some of the most talented young Americans are now signing up with the MISL instead of the NASL and finding themselves beneficiaries of the early stages of what could develop into a bidding war between the two leagues. Professional-quality U.S. soccer players are still in woefully short supply. Ty Keough, 23, a talented defender, signed with the MISL’s Cincinnati franchise when he graduated from St. Louis University in ’78. He now plays with the Steamers–Cincinnati being defunct–but last summer he was loaned to the NASL’s San Diego Sockers. He is now considering offers for the coming outdoor season. “I’m happy I signed in MISL,” Keough says. “I get a lot of game time and I can be choosy about NASL offers. I’ve got a steady income.”
(The story also has a Joe Machnik sighting.)
Feb. 15, 1982: Stan the Fran, Free Spirit: Even with the NASL and the Cosmos still going, SI found a good story in Stan Terlecki, who had challenged Polish authorities and found a home in Pittsburgh.
Did you hear about Brezhnev calling all the top Soviet scientists together, Terlecki asked, and telling them how disappointed he was that the U.S. had beaten Russia to the moon? He proposed that the U.S.S.R. land a cosmonaut on the sun. One scientist had to tell Brezhnev that this was impossible because of the sun’s great heat. His boyish face beaming. Terlecki looked around the table to make sure everyone was ready for the punchline: ” ‘No problem.’ Brezhnev says, ‘we will land at night.’ ” Terlecki roared, and the group spent another 15 minutes cracking Brezhnev jokes. By the time the check finally arrived, everyone had defrosted.
I was dismayed by the article by Clive Gammon, which purports to explain the many reasons for the near demise of the NASL. Gammon is another of the closed-minded “experts” who put the blame on everything from the players to the owners to artificial turf. What they can’t admit is the simple fact that outdoor soccer fails in the U.S. because it’s boring. While the NASL plods along with talk of “world sport,” the Major Indoor Soccer League has spruced up the staid European game and made it fun to watch. We Americans shouldn’t be ashamed of our preference for excitement. Our heritage is one of innovation.
The original story will be an uncomfortable read for NASL enthusiasts, scoffing at everything from the goofy rules to ignorant owners while labeling its non-Beckenbauer players as listless shadows of themselves or second-division European fodder.
June 18, 1984: The Blast Had One At Last: The Baltimore Blast, coached by one Kenny Cooper, won its first MISL title.
Most ebullient of all, though, may have been lame-duck team chairman of the board/director Bernie Rodin, who, after helping found the MISL six seasons ago, had just seen his final game as an owner. Last March Rodin sold the Blast to a local businessman, Nathan Sherr, for $3 million, effective June 15. “I’m the only original owner left in the league,” Rodin said, grinning. “I helped write the rules for this sport. It’s an incredible feeling. Like being Abner Doubleday, only I’ve got one thing Abner never had. A team that won the championship.”
March 4, 1985: Not In It For The Kicks: All about Ricky Davis, the U.S. national teamer playing indoor out of necessity. And there’s a club vs. country undercurrent worth reading — not just the difference in the outdoor and indoor games but a looming schedule conflict.
The situation in general:
At the moment, this is where U.S. soccer happens to be. Fans have turned from the outdoor NASL—its 1985 season, with three living franchises, down from 24 in 1980, is in grave jeopardy—and are flocking to the MISL. The league is headed toward an attendance record for the second consecutive year; at present St. Louis is No. 2 on the list with an average of 12,829. Davis reportedly earns $100,000 a year from the Steamers, yet the indoor game that affords him so much fame and fortune may also be a barrier to the fulfillment of his dream.
Let’s be serious. The possibility that the U.S. might win the World Cup in 1986 is too remote even to consider. But the U.S. could win a berth in the final 24-nation field.
And you just have to read this part …
That lesson, along with his ever-improving skills and wholesome good looks, has made Davis the most visible symbol of the American game. “Davis has replaced Shep Messing as the pinup boy of soccer,” says Baltimore Blast coach Ken Cooper.
“True, but I have a better body,” says Messing, who once helped publicize soccer by posing nude for Viva magazine. Such a thing would be unthinkable for Davis, whom U.S. national team coach Alkis Panagoulias calls “a magnet and a model for American youth.”
“Put it this way,” says Messing. “The difference between Ricky’s image and mine is that I do Skoal chewing tobacco commercials, and he does Ivory soap.”
June 9, 1986: Dynasty With An Asterisk: The dazzling, fractious San Diego Sockers win their fifth straight indoor title between the NASL and MISL.
Any boring, bovine team is an endangered species in the MISL, which has been a slaughterhouse for 17 franchises in its eight-year history. The league held firm with 12 teams this season, and playoff attendance rose to an average of 11,985 per game from 8,509 last year. Things should get even better next year, when a new franchise in New York, the Express, will join the league with co-owner Shep Messing in goal.
But the game is the thing, and it has evolved into a good one as more players have come in from the outdoors. “The game is streaks away from where it was four years ago,” says Newman, an indoor coach since 1980. “It takes a soccer player to play this game, and we’ve started getting some really good ones.”
Oct. 27, 1986: Alive But Barely Kicking: A look at the post-NASL landscape, with Paul Caligiuri, John Kerr and David Vanole scraping by.
The NASL’s major sin was trying to make soccer a national sport without developing a foundation for the future. After an over-the-hill Pele gave the fledgling American game a star, naive owners continued to pay exorbitant amounts to so-called world class foreign players whose name recognition was zero and whose motivation to perform was possibly even less. Meanwhile, American talent remained undeveloped. ”Everyone thought Pele was a messiah,” says Cliff McCrath, coach of the Division II champion Seattle Pacific. ”It wasn’t his fault, but in my opinion, Pele was our executioner.”
The scars run so deep that the idea of launching another national outdoor soccer league anytime soon seems absurd.
Tatu is a promotional dynamo. He makes unpaid appearances at the birthday parties of his youngest fans, puts on soccer clinics, coaches a youth team, makes instructional films, poses for posters and signs autographs until the last kid has gone home happy. ”Tatu Toffee” is the latest Baskin-Robbins flavor to hit the Big D.
”I am determinated to make our game work in this country,” he says.
Other players are among Tatu’s biggest fans. They take no offense at his protracted postgoal celebrations, possibly because they are used to seeing people involved with indoor soccer lose their shirts. Recently the New York Express, whose projected success was thought to be the key to landing the MISL much needed national exposure, went under. Before Tatu came to Dallas three years ago, two soccer franchises had failed in the Metroplex.
”He’s not doing the shirt thing to put it in your face,” says San Diego Socker defender Kevin Crow, who often marks Tatu. ”He’s doing it to put people in the stands. Everybody is for that.”
I could not find anything about the MISL (then rechristened MSL, just to confuse everyone) folding. An AP story from 1992 has the news of the league’s final collapse and says its existence had been threatened each of the preceding years since 1988. Andy Crossley’s blog Fun While It Lasted rounds up several MISL teams’ histories, and David Litterer’s American Soccer History site has several essays on indoor soccer history.
But the SI pieces are particularly interesting — relics of a time in which indoor soccer had a lot of believers. And the outdoor game was all but dead in this country.
I will be speaking about my forthcoming book, Single-Digit Soccer: Snazzy Subtitle to Come, on Jan. 17 at the NSCAA Convention in Philadelphia. (Yes, I’m on at the same time as a Laura Harvey presentation, but she’s doing several, so you can still see both of us.)
Single-Digit Soccer is about youth soccer, specifically the “single-digit” years — ages 9 to 6, 5, 3, etc. For parents, it’s a guidebook through all the complexities, oddities and entertaining bits of youth soccer. For coaches and administrators, it’s a plea for sanity.
The presentation will be for coaches (though some of them are surely parents as well). I’ll be dealing with issues and radical ideas, a few of which I’ve already addressed in blog posts:
UFC fighters may have several legitimate points about how they’re treated. The lawsuit against the UFC will, at best, force a stronger discussion of those issues and maybe even a few changes. But it’s going to be really difficult to get an outright court victory.
You’ll find a lot of good analysis on this suit — economist/antitrust guy Paul Gift at Bloody Elbow, Dave Meltzer at MMA Fighting (read especially from the Bellator reference onward to the end), sports law specialist Michael McCann warning in SI of the worst-case scenario of “unraveling” the UFC, a 90-minute chat with Luke Thomas, and Josh Gross with a few details I haven’t seen explored elsewhere along with the embedded lawsuit document itself. And generally, you should keep up with Bloody Elbow, where Brent Brookhouse and John Nash broke the story.
I’m going to come at it from this angle: Precedent, including the MLS players lawsuit against the league in the 1990s, tells us the antitrust argument will fall on one key word: “market.”
What’s the market for mixed martial arts fighters? Does the UFC have unfair control of it?
The MLS players lawsuit (covered in my book) failed to prove that MLS had unfair control of the soccer market. The suit is often portrayed as a challenge to the league’s “single-entity” structure, but the verdict and appellate court decision left several “single-entity” questions unanswered. The specific words from the appellate court, addressing a part of the suit the jury didn’t consider: “(T)he single-entity problem need not be answered definitively in this case.”
The suit unraveled when MLS convinced the jurors (and the appellate judges agreed) that soccer players could go elsewhere — Europe, Latin America, the A-League (which, like the current NASL, could occasionally pay an MLS fringe player more than he would make on an MLS bench), or even indoor soccer.
Cung Le et al will tie themselves in a knot trying to define the market. Here’s Gift’s take:
We haven’t heard from the UFC yet, but the fighters have already revealed their interest in a small geographic market by claiming “the relevant geographic market for both the Relevant Input Market and Relevant Output Market is limited to the United States and, in the alternative, North America.”
Legally interesting, practically absurd. (The fighters, not Gift.) The UFC would not have the clout it has today without signing the best fighters in the world. It’s almost as much of a Brazilian company as it is an American company these days.
In MMA, fighters can sign with smaller MMA promoters like Bellator or international promoters like One FC. The soccer marketplace is similar — players can sign with the NASL or hundreds of soccer leagues around the world. And that argument killed the player suit. Ridge Mahoney’s Soccer America summary: “Once the jurors decided both a global market existed and other domestic entities could compete with MLS for players, the players’ case collapsed. No further deliberations were necessary since the jurors had determined the monopoly alleged by the players did not exist.”
Note that the UFC lawsuit isn’t strictly a monopoly lawsuit. It introduces the word “monopsony,” which is more or less the inverse. The fighters aren’t really UFC employees. They’re contractors, and the UFC bids for their services. The UFC is in many senses a buyer, not a seller.
And the key to the case is not necessarily whether the UFC controls the marketplace. At Bloody Elbow, former FTC antitrust lawyer David Dudley puts it like this:
Outside the merger context, the question or market power is considered alongside the particular conduct at issue. The worse the conduct, the less evidence is necessary to establish market power. Conversely, the more benign the conduct, the greater the necessary showing of market power.
That’s good news for the fighters in a way: Everything the UFC does wrong in its contracts is fair game. The fighters wouldn’t have much of a case if the UFC was treating fighters well, even if it controlled 99% of the marketplace. (Of course, they probably wouldn’t be suing in the first place if that were true.)
But it’s bad news in the sense that, as Gift says, the UFC isn’t doing anything wrong by simply beating the competition. The allegations on pages 47-50 of the lawsuit look weak. The UFC didn’t “force” Affliction out of the fight promotion business; Affliction overpaid for fighters and was unsustainable. Near the end of the suit, when the plaintiffs seek “injunctive relief barring Defendant from engaging in the anticompetitive scheme alleged herin,” we need to ask, “How?” Quit holding fights the same night as Bellator fights?
Here’s another problem: What would MMA look like without the UFC?
In the MLS lawsuit, players were unable to convince district judge George O’Toole that someone else would’ve formed a Division I soccer league operating at anything comparable to MLS level if MLS hadn’t done it. In other words, MLS essentially created the market. To argue that MLS monopolized the U.S. Division I soccer market is a bit like me inventing some sort of palatable peanut butter wine and then monopolizing the peanut butter wine market.
In the MLS suit, the players brought out some sports economists to make dubiously specific claims that having multiple Division I leagues in the USA would have sent player salaries skyrocketing. That led to one of my favorite Paul Gardner quotes:
For an entire session, this totally fictitious exercise dragged on, as the good Professor Zimbalist revealed charts and calculations to ‘prove’ what must have happened had a whole series of improbable conditions existed. They never did exist.
That “whole series of improbable conditions” would include having two leagues in a spending war with each other that were somehow not splitting the previously nonexistent (since the NASL died) Division I soccer market. With MLS bleeding red ink and nearly going out of business in 2001-02 (just after the initial lawsuit verdict but before the appellate ruling) even with the power of a “monopoly,” those conditions were beyond improbable. They were impossible.
And in sports, monopolies (or monopsonies) aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Would the World Cup be the World Cup if we had two competing organizations, with Germany winning one and Brazil winning another? As much as everyone with half a brain and a payola-free bank account wishes FIFA would see the light on basic ethics, no one wants a world with a disputed world soccer champion. No one wants to see Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki on separate tennis tours.
With the demise of PRIDE and other organizations, few people would dispute that the UFC’s champions are generally the best in the world. That’s a good thing.
So what happens next?
After the players lost the lawsuit against MLS, they formed a union, and they have collectively bargained since then. (They’re doing so right now, trying to race against the expiration of the current CBA to get the next season started on time.) Fighters may need to form an association rather than a union — I’m hazy on the details, frankly — but perhaps we could see an end result like that.
As Luke Thomas says, “Keep in mind what success actually means.” Baseball player Curt Flood lost before the Supreme Court, but the cause of free agency was ultimately successful.
In the UFC’s case, their position as the top promotion in the world isn’t cast in stone. It’s impossible to imagine someone challenging Major League Baseball’s supremacy at this point. It’s not impossible to imagine top fighters opting for Bellator or some other promotion instead of the UFC.
So the UFC needs to think about “success” as well. Winning in court won’t be enough. They’ll need to “win” in the sense of continuing to have the goodwill of fighters and fans that recognize it as the top promotion in the world. And the UFC has done a few things that don’t look good in the all-important court of public opinion:
Imposing a Reebok sponsorship on its fighters on top of harsh restrictions on sponsors that have helped fighters in the past.
As alleged in the suit (the UFC may argue differently), sponsors may either be exclusive to the UFC or banned from the UFC.
“Ancillary rights” clauses giving the UFC rights to likenesses in perpetuity.
Starting fighter pay: $6,000 to show, $6,000 to win? That’s not much. And fighters often have to pay training expenses out of that money.
And even if you’re a fringe UFC fighter with only two bouts in a given year, you can’t go taking a bout on someone else’s fight card.
To date, the UFC has been tone-deaf in reacting to fighters’ concerns. A “tepid piece on fighter pay,” to quote the ubiquitous Luke Thomas, on ESPN’s Outside the Lines drew a hysterical response from the UFC.
That approach can’t fly any more. The fighters may not be able to win in court. But if the UFC doesn’t recognize their leverage, everybody loses.
Let’s try to wrap up a tempestuous day in North American soccer …
The D.C. Council cast aside its mourning for Marion Barry long enough for a heated discussion and vote on (and, mercifully, in favor of) a D.C. United stadium deal. The NASL announced it will run the owner-deprived Atlanta Silverbacks next year. The W-League (North American version) lost another traditional power in Ottawa.
(Insert gratuitous photo of proposed United stadium here)
And MLS commissioner Don Garber held his annual State of the League press conference in yet another new format, this time relaxing in comfortable chairs in a TV studio with a roomful of journalists who just happened to be affiliated with MLS rights-holding organizations.
Fans at least had a roundabout way into the room. They could ask questions on social media while Amanda Vandervort, the meta-guru for social media in the U.S. soccer community, sorted through everything. That was a thankless job.
Even when things are going pretty well for a sports league, you’re always going to see a bit of snark floating around. Just imagine what Vandervort’s NFL analogue would have to see if Roger Goodell tried this format.
Garber also made the occasional gaffe or oddball statement. One was simply amusing: In explaining for the umpteenth year why MLS isn’t likely to go to a fall-through-spring European-style calendar, he described the temperature in a prospective MLS city as “minus zero.” I’m not sure what to call that. It’s not a double negative. Maybe a one-and-a-half negative?
The other was more worrying. He said, in an unexpected bit of candor that didn’t sit well with other glowing assessments, that the league isn’t performing financially as well as owners would hope.
That’s apparently not a gaffe per se, because he doubled down on it in talking later with the Associated Press.
From that story:
Garber said the teams and the league are losing more than $100 million combined as they invest in player acquisitions, stadiums and league infrastructure. And he said owners are making financial investments that they were not expecting to still be making at this point.
The possible reactions to that story — some reasonable, some not:
1. This is just posturing for the collective-bargaining talks with the union.
2. This is a conspiracy — there’s no way the league is actually losing that much.
3. This means little — they’re investing a lot of money now in facilities, academies and Designated Players, and while they’re in investment mode, they’re going to deposit a couple of $100 million expansion fees. If MLS wasn’t investing for the future, it would probably turn a profit. SOP for a growing business.
4. Oh crap — everything is collapsing.
5. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! MLS will soon collapse, and we can usher in a new era of American soccer!
I’m inclined to go with 1 and 3, maybe a bit of 2. It’s not unusual for a league commissioner to talk in glowing terms about the league’s prospects moving ahead for the benefit of fans and sponsors, then plead poverty when the players are asking for more money. That said, MLS surely doesn’t have the financial security of better-established leagues.
The root of a lot of MLS debate is that some people are sick of being patient. They didn’t imagine in 1996 that we would be nearly 20 years into this venture and our national team wouldn’t be significantly better. Or that the league would still trot out obscure, unusual policies to get players like Clint Dempsey and Jermaine Jones to the teams they want.
On one hand, we still have to be patient. While D.C. United, NYCFC and a couple of other teams are sorting out their stadium issues, this league is still in start-up mode on some fronts. (So, no, MLS isn’t ready to start promotion and relegation while its teams are still investing on the assumption of being first-division teams — but at least Garber said “not anytime soon” rather than “never,” right?)
On the other hand, it’s disappointing to hear the commissioner going into CBA talks pleading poverty and failing to reassure everyone that the league won’t have a work stoppage. Investing in academies and facilities (and USL teams) is great, but are we really going to go to the brink with current players and risk a work stoppage that would shatter the league’s credibility?
It’s always helpful to remember things can change. So it was a nice coincidence that Vice Sports recently had a piece on a bit of U.S. soccer history — people chasing down collectibles from the glory days of the Major Indoor Soccer League. And that piece linked back to a Frank Deford piece from Sports Illustrated that offered a snapshot of the indoor and outdoor game circa 1983:
This season the NASL, which has atrophied to 12 franchises (from 24 in 1980) but still managed to lose that $25 million in 1982, permitted three of its franchises—Chicago, San Diego and Golden Bay—to field teams in the MISL as well. The toothpaste is out, and it’s never going back in the tube. Whenever the two leagues achieve some form of consolidation, it will be the NASL that must end up as the subsidiary partner. Already Samuels acknowledges that next year two or three more of his outdoor franchises will want to play indoors, too. Lee Stern, the owner of the Sting, which now plays in both leagues, says, “There’s no way pro soccer can survive anymore in this country without indoor soccer.” And Bob Bell, Stern’s counterpart with the San Diego Sockers, says, “I’m convinced now that indoor will be what makes soccer in the U.S.”
There is, however, no way of knowing yet whether indoor soccer can do what hockey failed to do—win national acceptance and network contracts and become America’s fourth major professional team sport. But for better or worse, it’s becoming clearer all the time that if soccer does succeed as a spectator sport in the U.S., it will be the indoor brand that will thrive.(*)
Sure, soccer fans these days may think of Deford as the curmudgeonly vestige of old-school anti-soccer cynicism. But this piece was written more than 30 years ago. And at the time, it certainly seemed like he had a point.(**)
About 15 years ago, reasonable people thought women’s soccer would outpace men’s soccer as a big-time sport in the USA. Then 13 years ago, MLS nearly died, struggling to turn the corner from its debt-ridden start as the recession kicked in.
So things can change rather quickly in soccer. In the time it took Landon Donovan to go from youth prodigy to retiree, we’ve seen European soccer go from the occasional ESPN/Fox Sports World curiosity to big-time U.S. programming. We’ve seen MLS expand to 20 teams while only losing three along the way, a record not many leagues can match in their first two decades. We now see kids walking around wearing Beckham, Messi, Rooney and Dempsey jerseys.
When I checked in about the Garber quote with someone at MLS, asking specifically whether fans should be worried, what I got back was, “Don’t worry — MLS isn’t going anywhere.” And yes, it’s unlikely that the whole thing would go belly-up. But it faces a challenge in terms of thriving in an ultracompetitive environment. The USA is one of the few countries in which soccer isn’t the dominant sport (Australia, Ireland, India, Pakistan, maybe China, Japan and Indonesia), and it’s one of the few leagues in the world in which its domestic fans are repeatedly badgered for supporting the league at all.
Fans cannot take MLS’s future success for granted. Nor can MLS take it for granted. With all the long-term investment in place, MLS isn’t exactly complacent, but it’s time to get creative — or in some cases to just take off the training wheels.
What about actual free agency? What about a nice pay raise for first-team players? How about replacing the muddy allocation system with a simpler revenue-sharing plan that makes teams pay into a general pool when they splash out on a big contract?
And why aren’t we closer to a CBA at this point, just 82 days before D.C. United is expected to field a team in the CONCACAF quarterfinals?
(Also in the State of the League roundtable, Rob Stone won fans and admirers by holding Garber’s feet to the fire on NYCFC and LAFC’s lack of concrete stadium plans, Garber wants to press onward to 24 teams but isn’t thinking of anything beyond that, the commissioner tossed out a neat idea for aligning the final meaningful games of the MLS regular season at the same time and getting the best ones on TV with NFL-style “flex” scheduling, and the 12-team playoff might not be happening after all. See RSL Soapbox for the rundown.)
** – The whole story is a recommended read. It has some amusing anachronisms (hey, remember when SI and The New York Times set the sports agenda for the nation?), but some of the arguments over special treatment for American and Canadian players are still ongoing.
We’ll need to be clear — the Wars include some reasonable debate topics, especially those related to Jurgen Klinsmann, someone I would see as an underachiever at this point in his reign as U.S. Soccer national team coach and semi-official overseer of all things. But they also include promotion/relegation discussions that devolved into personal attacks around 2009 or so, and there they remain.
So the past couple of weeks have seen a confluence of SCW activity that I hope will actually bring about an end to things.
My retirement — not that I had been particularly active for some time — was based in part on conversations that reminded me how irrelevant these conversations really are. And then, as if soccer wanted to spite me one more time, a couple of well-intentioned people took such topics seriously.
It’s coincidence, of course — Sean Reid has been working on the book Love Thy Soccer for years and had no plans to publish it at the same time that Howler magazine published Kevin Koczwara’s piece on Ted Westervelt, the man who believes we can get pro/rel in this country if we just get on Twitter at scream at anyone perceived to be part of the status quo. It’s just bad timing for those of us who are resolving to ignore Ted and his circle of demons once and for all.
Let’s be clear — Love Thy Soccer is a book worth reading. It’s an expansive five-year survey of the good and bad of American soccer. I haven’t made it through the whole book yet, but what I’ve read is terrific except for the flaw of taking Westervelt seriously. There’s a chapter on promotion/relegation that relies heavily on Westervelt and brings up one person (Phil Schoen) to give the “con” argument. If you want to do a real pro/rel discussion, it needs to look a bit more like John Oliver’s climate change “representative debate,” in which he brought out 96 people to join Bill Nye against three climate-change deniers, thereby representing the actual scientific consensus on the matter:
Howler’s decision to do a Westervelt profile is a difficult one, and I wish editor George Quraishi would be a little less dismissive of those who disagree with it. That said, I think it turned out pretty well. I know Dan Loney was quite annoyed with his unwanted role in the story, and Loney decided to subject Koczwara and Quraishi to a constant barrage of Twitter harassment to see how they liked being on the receiving end of such nonsense as Westervelt and company perpetuate. But I view it the same way I would view a story on the woman marrying Charles Manson — I don’t expect to sympathize with her, but there could be some value in knowing what drives her to such action — in other words, asking what the hell is wrong with her.
And Koczwara is a terrific writer. Until I searched his name, I didn’t even realize he had written a piece about hockey enforcers that I loved six months ago. Loney’s objection notwithstanding, I think he did a good job handling this sensitive story, neither piling on with cheap shots nor letting Westervelt appear more sympathethic than he deserves to be.
But there is a danger in giving fringe voices a mainstream platform. Just look at cable news, where Ann Coulter and James Carville take turns poisoning our political system. Or other aspects of our postmodern media, where climate-change deniers and even creationists are often on equal footing with the “side” that actually has the plurality of facts.
Some people who are new to all this might not realize how far on the fringe these people are. But thankfully, they decided to demonstrate it on Twitter yesterday:
I’m not sure whether he’s referring to me, Brown or someone else. I’d ask him to tell us which person he’s addressing and why he thinks that person is “disingenuous,” but he has apparently taken the position that his points are too brilliant to explain.
And the larger point here is that Westervelt and company were eager to jump onto this non-discussion.
(A comment from Pothunting appears to have been deleted.)
Then, subtly, the position started to change. Oh, we’re not really talking about pro/rel, even though it was explicitly mentioned in Kleiban’s tweet. It’s about the U.S. power structure, leaving Brown wrestling with the accusations of the absurd.
That would be the same Soccer Morning that gave Westervelt a chance to call in and demonstrate that he’s a reasonable person, incidentally.
Here’s the thing: This is not unusual. This has been happening for YEARS. This is why most people in soccer — writers, administrators, etc. — no longer engage with these people. Read the Howler story for more on that.
The argument goes as follows: Anyone who points out the realities about pro/rel in the USA is one or more of the following:
An upholder of the status quo and therefore an apologist for everything that’s wrong with U.S. Soccer — failure to win the CONCACAF Champions League, “pay to play” travel soccer (which, in the real world, MLS is trying to address), etc.
A paid spokesman of MLS and the shadow conspiracy behind it that seeks to make money off soccer without making it better.
Nonexistent. I’ve actually met Dan Loney, as have other people, but we’re all not trustworthy, apparently. In comparison, the Obama birther conspiracists seem sane. At least they admit Obama exists. (I do wish Howler hadn’t said “puppet” in the headline on the Westervelt piece — most people on Ted’s hit list have visible real names, while his “allies” include a few anonymous accounts.)
For the record, I’ll go through these allegations about myself. I don’t think anyone disputes my existence — I’ve led a rather public life with bylines in many major news organizations. I wrote a few fantasy columns for previous MLSNet management more than 10 years ago, and my book was written with MLS’s cooperation but no backing from the league. (I didn’t even let a guy pay for my lunch.) Currently, I have no season credential to cover MLS, and I haven’t been paid to write about the league for years.
My main project these days is a book on youth soccer. And that book will challenge the status quo on several fronts. Then again, it will also challenge soccer coaches with a God complex who think they have the answers to everything and refuse to hear evidence to the contrary.
If promotion/relegation happened in the next 5-10 years, it would surely be a net gain for me financially. I could write a sequel to Long-Range Goals and show how things have changed. I could probably sell a few freelance stories.
And no, I wouldn’t be selling out any principles in doing so. My position on promotion/relegation is actually one that can’t be wrong as such. Here it is:
It would be cool. (Debatable)
It is not feasible right now at the top divisions because the game’s investors have already taken on a lot of risk and are not in a position to take more at this time. (Only slightly debatable — and if it turns out investors are able to take that risk at some point, it’s still true because of the qualifiers “right now” and “at this time.”)
It’s already in place in many amateur leagues (fact) and could be used in other lower divisions (speculative).
It would not be a panacea for everything that ails the U.S. soccer talent pool. (Probably the most contentious part of my position, but it’s well-supported.)
I hope we see it down the road, in part because it would be a symptom (not the cause) of a strong domestic game.
So three things could happen in the next, say, 20 years:
Pro/rel does not come to the USA’s top divisions. I was right.
A major pro/rel attempt is made, but it fails. Also right.
Pro/rel comes to the top divisions and works. Right again.
Maybe it’s not the bravest position, but I don’t care. I don’t have any interest in crusading one way or the other and winning a pointless debate on Twitter that won’t move the needle on pro/rel’s feasibility one bit. On pro/rel, I’m just a reporter.
I think there’s a place in this country for fans to tell U.S. Soccer they’d like to see pro/rel. I did an interview recently with a grad student writing a thesis in which he tries to overcome the actual factors against pro/rel (they’re mostly financial and logistical) and come up with a system that works. The advice I’d have for such people is this:
You’re going to be judged by the company you keep.
This is real. It’s why people who have had an interest in lower-division soccer sometimes have trouble taking the NASL seriously. (It’s also amusing to see the pro/rel folks talking up the NASL’s strength and setting themselves up as fountains of historical knowledge while forgetting how many USL/A-League teams have made great runs in the Open Cup. One day, an NASL team will win the Open Cup — just as the Rochester Rhinos did in 1999. MLSSoccer.com recognizes the Rhinos, but it doesn’t fit the “NASL = newfound second-division strength” narrative of the pro/rel zealots, nor does the fact that the USL actually dabbled in pro/rel and found that it didn’t magically make everything better.)
So there you have it. When it comes to the Soccer Culture Wars, the pro/rel zealots aren’t leading some sort of movement. They’re just typical Twitter trolls, spewing hate to feel better about themselves. For those who are new to this discussion, you had a chance yesterday to see their true colors — false accusations of everything from payola to racism. We know who they are.
And that’s why I have no interest in continuing to participate. We can talk about the real issues in U.S. soccer — the upcoming MLS collective-bargaining talks, whether Klinsmann is a mad genius or simply mad, what the NWSL needs to survive and thrive past the crucial third year, and why youth soccer has devolved into an arms race of parents who think they need to invest massive quantities of time, money and gas to their kids can realize their potential.
Don’t look surprised. I really don’t know how you could have thought I was in the mood to endure any more of your cruelty.
You remember a couple of weeks ago. The indoor soccer game in which one team outshot the opposition by something like 40-20 and lost 10-9. Then an outdoor scrimmage (thanks to your cousin, Nature, for the lovely fall day) in which a bunch of players suddenly figured out the joy of passing, making beautiful runs and playing as a team. Yeah — they lost 3-0. Simple goalkeeping errors.
Great. Really nice job teaching our kids that their dedication to learning will pay off. We know, we know — we’re supposed to pay more attention to the “development” of these players than winning. But could you toss these kids a bone at some point?
You certainly didn’t do it in the tournament this weekend. A bunch of big kids stomping their way through the smaller kids who thought they had signed up for soccer, not wrestling. Parents cheering on the carnage. Refs ignoring it.
You don’t reward coaches, either. We can go to every class for every certificate, and for what? So we can “develop” our players by having them play properly and then watch them lose to the coach who showed up at game time and asked how many players we’re using. (Seriously, this happened to me at All-Stars one season.)
And it’s not as if you’re rewarding older players, either. Look at the team I covered — the Washington Spirit. Caroline Miller was a humble rookie with immense talent who wasn’t content to rest on her college honors. She’s been in so many walking boots in the last 18 months that the orthopedic industry ought to be offering her an endorsement deal. Michael Jordan had Air Jordans. She should get Ground Millers. We’re not even going to talk about Colleen Williams getting injured on her return to New Jersey and then getting re-injured on trial with her home-state club.
And now Diana Matheson, the only player who responded to my postseason interview request. Really, soccer? Are you kidding me?
They deal with it all with class, grace and good humor. Not me. Because I see through you now. All these promises of rewarding our patience — the supposed joy we’ll feel when those 385-minute goal droughts end. When our local club finally puts it together. When our kids’ games are decided by brilliant plays rather than defensive mishaps.
You are just disappointing me at every level. I’ve finally retired from the brutal indoor league in which I play because I’ve seen how long it takes my aging body to heal. No, I still can’t bend my middle finger all the way. But I can gesture with it.
Then Liverpool, my son’s pick for his favorite club, signs one of his favorite players in Mario Balotelli. How’s that working out? Huh? It’s as if you want my kids to pick up lacrosse instead. Go Chesapeake Baystix or whatever.
And shall we talk about the way this sport is governed? At the youth level, parents are driving themselves crazy and spending themselves broke just to make sure their kids are on the best Elite Developmental Champions Premier Club Sandwich whatever. Then they might have a chance of playing for their high school teams.
At the international level? Can’t even think about it.
Even the people who follow soccer are getting difficult. A Twitter troll features prominently in a new book and magazine article. Even as I type, I’m sure there are people on Twitter chortling about things I didn’t say, paychecks I didn’t receive, conspiracies that don’t exist, and things that don’t matter but still drive people to slander.
I’ve had it. I can’t watch any more. I certainly can’t play any more. I can hardly write any more. I may need to switch to something more lucrative like collecting pennies off the interstate.
Coaching? Do you really think I’m going to head out there again and face a bunch of eager young kids who are just one step, one realization away from learning how to move the ball around the field, support each other and get ever closer to the beautiful experience of getting that ball to nestle in the net so sweetly …
Sigh …
OK, fine. When does the spring season start? And who’s in the first EPL game on Saturday?
Here’s proof, once again, that soccer karma doesn’t exist:
Through the Spirit office, I asked several players (not all, so don’t go accusing people) a few follow-up questions about the 2014 season, thinking I would publish a short epilogue to the tale of their 2013 season, Enduring Spirit. The epilogue didn’t come to pass, and I wound up passing along what I had gathered in a blog post providing a snapshot of the team at a late-season practice.
The one player who responded was Diana Matheson. And now she’s hurt. Again — no such thing as soccer karma.
She responded before she was injured, which just goes to show how negligent I’ve been in posting her comments. I figured the least I could do was go ahead and post them here with apologies for being so late. I really appreciate her taking the time she did here and over the past two seasons with the Spirit, and I think all women’s soccer fans are rooting for her to recuperate in time for the World Cup.
Enjoy …
1. What was different this season compared to last year? (Besides the record!)
This season had a very different feel in almost every way. We knew from the beginning that we were a team that could compete with any other team in the league and we put higher expectations on ourselves. We had a more experienced group and every player brought their own professionalism to the club.
2. Were practices different with more veterans and few rookies on the roster?
I think training was overall at a higher level than last year. I think that speaks to a different group of players and also the fact that Mark had us for the whole year.
3. Who was the most improved player on the team from 2013 to 2014?
I’m not sure who the most improved player is, but the most unsung player on the team both seasons for me has been Tori Huster. She does the job in any position she’s asked to play.
4. Did you feel in 2013 that defenses were focused on shutting you down, figuring that you didn’t have much help on offense? Was it different in 2014 when Jodie Taylor established herself as a goal-scorer?
It was a lot of fun playing with players like Jodie Taylor this year. I think we had a good connection on the field and we worked well together. It’s always good to have many people scoring goals, which we were glad to have this year.
5. Did Rapinoe foul Toni Pressley when she swiped the ball for the winning goal in the semifinal?
Don’t know.
6. I know your living arrangement changed this year. Where were you?
I was in a townhouse with Robyn, Danesha and Jodie. Robyn and I both missed Ingleside at King Farm and we went to visit our friends a few times for lunch or dinner throughout the season. It was nice to be in a more independent living situation with our peers as well!
Duresport.com 