Category: soccer

soccer

MLS vs. Mexico: The Goonies are not good enough

Posted on by Beau Dure

MLS teams made another predictable exit from CONCACAF Champions League play this week, and this time, one of the opposing coaches saw fit to kick a little dirt northward after the final whistle.

Toluca coach Jose Cardozo: “(San Jose’s players) were all just sat back. Here (in Mexico), they say soccer has grown a lot in the United States, but I honestly don’t know in what way.”

Ouch.

MLS fans can protest, of course. Sure San Jose plays that way, but isn’t Real Salt Lake fun to watch? And the U.S. talent pool did a bit better than Mexico’s in World Cup qualifiers, right?

And hey, the optimistic line goes, things will pick up when we get more money in MLS to develop and maintain a wider talent pool. Just wait until the Academy teams develop more players and the new TV deals let MLS teams spend more on players. And then more players will skip college to play on reserve teams in USL Pro, and they’ll be great, and we’ll come back and beat all you sorry Mexican teams and take your World Club Championship spots. Just you wait!

Maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Maybe soccer players and coaches in the USA just aren’t that good.

MLS has cast a pretty wide net. College players? Got ’em. Caribbean players? Come on over. Europeans, either big names getting Designated Player contracts or fringe youngsters looking for first-division play? Sure, they’re here.

Mexican teams are typically drawing from Mexico. Toluca and Cruz Azul certainly do. They may have more money to spend, but they’re just using that money to keep their top players home, not bring over Robbie Keane or Jermain Defoe. An exception is Tijuana, which looks a bit like old-school D.C. United — a few non-internationals from Argentina along with some skillful Americans.

And that brings us back to the Big Youth Soccer Paradox of this decade. We in the USA are taking youth soccer oh so seriously these days. The Bradenton’s U17 residency program debuted in 1999 with Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Kyle Beckerman and Oguchi Onyewu. A few more good ones followed — Eddie Johnson, Mike Magee, Freddy Adu and Michael Bradley. (Yes, and Tijuana player Greg Garza.) The program expanded to 40 players. We have a curriculum or two or three. We’re funneling players into national leagues and telling them not to play high school soccer any more.

All that, and the USA’s international youth tournament results have actually declined since the days of sending a bunch of unprepared kids in mullets to face down the top youth players of Europe, South America and Africa. And our MLS teams don’t look any better than D.C. United and the Los Angeles Galaxy of the 1990s.

So what are we producing? If MLS lands a megabucks TV deal — something that isn’t the least bit confirmed at the moment — and breaks open the wallet, what will that money buy?

Maybe it’ll take a combination of patience and investment. Maybe it’ll take a few more steps away from the enforced parity that MLS once had.

But maybe it’ll also take some players looking at themselves and saying, “You know what? What we just did wasn’t good enough. My performance wasn’t good enough. Forget the salary cap and TV deal for a minute — this is about me. What am *I* going to do about it?”

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soccer

Gender and soccer: Running smarter, not harder?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Researchers at Sunderland University, undoubtedly seeking a distraction from the local Premier League team’s dreary season, compared male and female soccer players in the Champions League. The conclusions:

1. Women complete fewer passes than men and give the ball away more easily.

2. Men run more at “high intensity,” though they don’t end up covering much more ground.

3. Women, particularly on the flanks, drop off in their running in the second half.

She Kicks editor Jen O’Neill didn’t dismiss the study but raised a couple of qualifiers:

The women’s game is constantly improving and the last few finals and latter knockout stages have included some fantastic matches but there are massive differences in fitness levels and playing status from team to team, even within the Women’s Champions League (only a handful of teams across Europe could be said to be ‘professional’ and this can sometimes lead to very lopsided results and hence less competitive second half contests), never mind comparing it to a men’s competition where every side contains players who are paid to play full time. It goes without saying that full time players will be able to sustain high intensity physical performance for a more prolonged period. Comparative studies between the men’s and women’s game are always riddled with such nuances and flaws because even with the best intentions they are rarely comparing like against like.

I wonder if tactics also play a part. Are men more likely to pick and choose their spot to run fast while women keep it in top gear for longer periods of time? And how different would this study be if we were comparing NWSL to MLS rather than European clubs?

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The indoor soccer wars, part 3,785

Posted on by Beau Dure

Imagine if, in 2002, five MLS teams had broken away from the league to seek a stronger future in the A-League.

That’s roughly what we’re seeing now in the latest twist of indoor soccer, which had a fractious history in its heyday and continues to have as many views on the way forward as it has prospective owners.

In another sport, perhaps we would have been surprised to see a championship game immediately followed by a statement about the USL’s commitment to moving forward with a top-quality league … without a few teams.

Fundamental to the resulting reforms that will be implemented is ensuring that our most important partners, the team owners, not only share our vision, but are also capable of meeting the operational, economic, and legal standards of participating in a high-level indoor professional soccer league.  As a result, several teams that possess a different philosophy on how to structure and operate an indoor professional soccer league will not be returning to the MISL.

As a follow-up, the USL released a video explaining the situation:

It didn’t take long for the “several teams that possess a different philosophy” to reveal themselves …

Syracuse president/head coach Tommy Tanner, whom some may remember playing on some “physical” N.C. State teams of the late 80s: “What I want to see is a league that’s sustainable, that year after year we don’t lose teams, that we can grow the sport. We definitely are on good terms with the MISL. But we need to find more teams.”

MISL champion Missouri Comets president Brian Budzinski: “We told the league a year and a half ago that we’re committed to this league, but we need to see some sort of growth. We need you guys to step up and get more teams, basically. They haven’t done enough to make us happy. The four of us, if we don’t see some sort of immediate changes, then we’re leaving.”

The other two teams besides Syracuse and Missouri — Rochester and, the unkindest cut of all, indoor soccer cornerstone Baltimore.

Left out of the mix at the moment is another venerable indoor franchise, Milwaukee.

They have another option besides the MISL — the PASL, which launched a professional league a few years ago. It’s not a model of stability, either, and most of its teams would be thrilled to have the attendance figures posted by MISL clubs. But it has more teams, including two that have some institutional links to the glory days — the Dallas Sidekicks and the San Diego Sockers. You may remember the Sockers, who claimed the record for longest professional winning streak ahead of the Washington Kastles of World Team Tennis.

So will we see these four teams move to the PASL? Or will they grab the Sidekicks and Sockers and a couple of as-yet-nonexistent teams to form yet another league? Or will the MISL make a massive comeback again?

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Spirit preseason: Scrimmage between snowstorms

Posted on by Beau Dure

A couple of weeks ago, the D.C. metro area was buried in snow. The forecasters say it may happen again Sunday night.

So everyone was happy to be outside on a lovely spring day at the Soccerplex, where the Spirit had a festive intrasquad scrimmage and autograph sessions. (Yes, plural.)

They played on the main stadium field, unlike the open practices the Spirit held last season, but the lines on the field were roughly 75×50 for the 9v9 game. The smaller field and smaller numbers made a goalfest that much more likely. So did the presence of Tiffany Weimer, who scorched the defense for four goals and an assist in the Red team’s 5-2 win.

A couple of those goals were defensive miscues by people who won’t be on the roster in three or four days. But Weimer also beat a couple of veterans. Better yet, she combined well with Danesha Adams, who set up one of those goals with a nifty back heel.

The highlight for the White team was the midfield pairing of Yael Averbuch and Jordan Angeli. Averbuch had a few slick passes, and Angeli opened the scoring.

The postgame highlight was seeing Angeli, who has been out of competition for nearly three years, talking about her goal and the feeling of playing in front of a crowd. She was near tears. Though Mark Parsons says she’s still a couple of weeks away from full match fitness, Spirit fans have good reason to be optimistic she’ll contribute. Angeli fans have even better reason to be happy.

But Spirit fans might worry that too many players are coming back from major injuries. Caroline Miller, whom a few message board posters are abandoning all too quickly, played about 20 uneventful minutes. Candace Chapman looked solid on the back line in limited time. Colleen Williams didn’t play.

It’s too soon to tell whether anyone will emerge from the trialists. Honestly, we couldn’t really identify most of them — the jerseys had no numbers, leaving us all to sort one ponytail from another. And a couple of them haven’t learned the art of waving when they’re introduced as starters.

Gloria Douglas converted her big chance after Weimer cut into the box with the ball, drew the defense and centered. But she’s trying to crack into a forward group that includes Weimer, Adams, Miller, Renae Cuellar, Jodie Taylor and maybe Williams (pending health and positioning).

The curiosity was North Carolina’s Meg Morris, a 5-2 tank. If you met her randomly away from the field, you’d never guess someone of such stature played soccer. But she’s surprisingly athletic and showed a bit of tactical sense. As Chris Henderson’s analysis points out, she was a consistent starter at Carolina but didn’t play a ton of minutes, rotating in the Anson Dorrance hockey-style line changes. If someone starts a women’s indoor league, she’d be dominant.

The other player who stood out was Mexican center back Bianca Sierra, who impressed Parsons with her poise. With Marisa Abegg retired and Chapman’s fitness still a question mark, she could be a sound insurance policy.

But it’s one game. I remember seeing an early practice last season in which Miller and Tiffany McCarty were absolutely dominant. Miller was starting to show it in the games last season before she was injured. McCarty lost her confidence somewhere early in the season and surely needed the change of scenery she got in the offseason.

This Spirit squad has a few players who can string together passes in the opposing third. A few fans were clearly drooling over the idea of Diana Matheson joining the fun when she returns to the Plex.

The two-word summary: Cautious optimism. We’ll check in again after we dig out from more snow.

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NWSL media guidelines: Is the door open?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s say you’re running a fledgling women’s soccer league. Do you let reporters run around all over the place or keep them at arm’s length?

Organizations on their way up are often eager about opening up as much as possible. When I covered mixed martial arts for USA TODAY in the late 2000s, the UFC made it really easy for me to chat with Dana White and anyone else they could gather at almost any time. Now that the UFC has grown, Dana can’t spend a free hour chatting with some dude from USA TODAY about the music they play when fighters walk to the cage.

And that’s typical. Call a league that isn’t swamped with media requests, and you’re more likely to get through than you are if you say, “Hey, NFL? I write a blog. Can I talk with the commissioner today?”

Generally, I’ve found that women’s soccer is more of a closed community than men’s soccer. Read Steve Sirk’s book Massive, about the Columbus Crew, and you’ll find he had much more open chats with the players than I did in Enduring Spirit. Part of that is the locker room — door’s open in MLS, closed in the NWSL. Part of it was Columbus player Frankie Hejduk, as outgoing an athlete as you’ll ever find. And part of it, from my experience, is that women’s soccer players are more protective of the inner workings of their team than men’s soccer players.

Note the weasel words in that paragraph. First, “generally.” Sure, women’s soccer has its exceptions. And then there’s “from my experience.” I couldn’t tell you if the Portland Thorns are more forthcoming than the Timbers. If anyone has different experiences, please share.

The Spirit organization worked well with me for the book, but we did set some boundaries along the way. I only went to one team meeting — the one with the entertaining game of charades. And after preseason, the team and I agreed that I would usually come out to midweek practices, not the Friday practices in which they went over the tactics for the next game. At those practices, I made an effort to keep a respectful distance, though they appreciated my efforts in chasing down loose balls that had rolled down the many hills at the Soccerplex.

All of these access decisions were easy to work out among reasonable people with good communication. If you just drove up to the Soccerplex and started watching the team practice without telling anyone, you were going to get someone walking up and asking who you are and what you’re doing there. (The family that was just taking a snack break before going to lacrosse camp on a neighboring field was OK; the guy who was intently watching from a distance drew a few more questions.)

And to be honest, I didn’t see a lot of reporters coming out to practices, and I’m sure the Spirit didn’t turn a busload of people away every day. Still, the league quite rightly saw a need for standardized media guidelines, published on its site.

Last week, those guidelines read in part:

Media Access to Practices: Clubs are encouraged to make all practices open to media. If a practice is closed, clubs must grant a 15-minute media access period at the start or end of practice, as well as making the coach and players available for interviews following the conclusion of practice. Clubs are strongly encouraged to ensure that ballwork is at least part of the 15-minutes access period. If practices are open to the media, as defined above, they must be open to all media; if practices are closed to the media, they must be closed to all media.

Seems reasonable, and it’s consistent with what I’ve seen in other leagues. (That said, we’ve always joked about what teams are doing in practice that they don’t want others to see. “Oh, wow — are they doing a possession drill? They must want to possess the ball!”)

That section now reads as follows:

Media Access to Training Sessions: Teams are highly encouraged to make every training session open or at least partially open (i.e., if a session is declared “closed,” teams are required to have a 15 minute period for b-roll and photos at the start and time for media interviews following the session).

The change isn’t related to any agitation in the preseason. The latter phrasing is in the 2014 operations manual, the league says. The site was updated this week to match what was said in the operations manual.

So is that enough to meet the limited but occasionally intense media demand?

From a practical point of view, journalists need to give NWSL teams a bit of leeway. The teams don’t have huge staffs to shepherd reporters and photographers around at practice. And players often need to know in advance if they’re doing interviews after practice — they have jobs, classes and other logistical realities of playing for something less than a six-figure salary.

But it’s discouraging to hear, as I have from several colleagues, that a couple of teams have put up a virtual curtain on the preseason.

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‘Enduring Spirit’ and the NWSL preseason

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m planning to get my first peek at the 2014 Washington Spirit on Saturday, and I have no idea what to expect.

A few bits of news about Spirit-affiliated people have trickled through:

– Hayley Siegel, the Reserves’ voice of experience last season, tore her ACL last fall and won’t be back this season.

– Marisa Abegg, as you’ve probably heard, officially retired to focus on her medical career.

– Colleen Williams, whose season ended with a nasty knee injury last summer, is back on the field.

– Heather Cooke, who was in preseason camp with the Spirit but wound up spending the summer with the Philippines national team and MTV, is in camp with Chicago.

But news isn’t traveling fast. I heard today that a Spirit mainstay from last season, Julia Roberts, was waived and is already in camp elsewhere. (Yes, that explains why she says “new city” in this tweet with her colorful injury:)

https://twitter.com/TheReelJRoberts/status/443182548307279873/

I’ve got several emails out in an attempt to confirm this through official channels. Why player transactions are treated with such secrecy is something I’ll never understand.

(Clumsy segue to book plug here …)

The secrecy makes me that much more appreciative that the Spirit let me follow the team around last season for Enduring Spirit. I didn’t have unfettered access by any stretch of the imagination — I went to only one team meeting, and I have no idea what the Spirit’s locker room looks like — but I went to many practices and a couple of road trips.

A couple of months ago, I listed things you’ll learn from reading the book (mostly from the first two chapters). I also did some questions and answers, including my definitive take on the funniest person in the Spirit organization. If you want to try before you buy, check out these two excerpts on an early-season practice and a team-building exercise after Mark Parsons took over as coach.

The book is available in several formats: print (through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and possibly other retailers), Kindle, Nook, Apple and whatever you use to read books from Kobo. You’ve still got roughly a month before the regular season, and I can assure you it won’t take that long to read it. Enjoy.

One more note today relating to the book — one of the inspirations for Enduring Spirit was the Joe McGinniss book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. The Spirit’s story was less controversial than that of Castel di Sangro, where the mafia lurked in the background, but I often found myself thinking back to his approach as I went about reporting and writing. I’m sorry to hear McGinniss passed away yesterday, and I wish all the best to his family and his many fans.

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MLS: Time to quit playing hardball

Posted on by Beau Dure

You may have already seen former FC Dallas player Bobby Warshaw’s epic takedown of anti-MLS snobbery. If not, please pause here and go read it.

Warshaw makes a realistic case, conceding a few problems with the “crazy, messed-up league.” Pay disparities within a team and attendance disparities between them are hardly unique to MLS, but the meddlesome league office and the lack of free agency are a little disorienting.

Then Warshaw hits Eurosnobbery hard. Manchester United? Barcelona? Bayern Munich? OK, those clubs are worth watching ahead of MLS clubs. But: “If you are saying that you’d rather watch Stoke City vs. West Ham instead of Seattle Sounders vs. Portland, you aren’t being honest.”

And if you’ve been watching a lot of Premier League games this season, you know what Warshaw means. On an individual level, most Premier League players are better than MLS players. Of course. But put them all together on a 14th-place team against a 15th-place team, and you can see some dreadfully dull games. U.S. fans may wince watching Jozy Altidore these days, but the rest of Sunderland’s squad isn’t going to move broadcasters to wax poetic, either.

Warshaw wraps it up pretty well:

I’m not sure why you’d rather watch a random European game with unidentifiable Italian and Spanish players when you could watch an equally entertaining game of players who grew up in cities you’ve been to and who attended colleges you’ve visited. You can identify with the player on the field. You can buy him a drink. He lives down the block from you and drives the same car as you. You can tell stories about how you played with a guy as a kid that played against a guy that dated the girlfriend of the guy that is playing left mid on the field. You can wear your team’s jersey to a Rep Yo City party. You weren’t born in Arsenaltown, were you?

One thing Warshaw omits: You can also see a lot of these players with your own eyes. You can go to games with great atmospheres, melding European and Latin American fan cultures with local American and Canadian twists. Soccer is a good TV sport but a great live sport, and you’re going to get more value out of an MLS game than out of a summer preseason game with AC Milan and Liverpool’s second teams sleepwalking in front of 60,000 people, many of them deluded into thinking they’re soccer fans.

It’s nonsense for a true soccer fan to ignore decent soccer in his or her backyard without a compelling reason to do so. If you live in Sunderland, then go see Sunderland. If you live in Cancun, then go see Atlante.

So congratulations to Warshaw for writing a powerful argument to root for the home league. And kudos to Deadspin for running it as a rebuttal to something the snarky sports blog had run earlier.

Now here’s the problem: MLS’s detractors … have a point. And the league is giving them ammunition as it heads into a very important year.

This is the last season of the league’s TV broadcast deals with ESPN, NBC and Univision. It’s also the last season of the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players.

And speaking of collective bargaining, the league is starting the season with replacement referees.

That looks bad. And it is bad. Finding quality referees is already a challenge in any league. Now we’re trotting out retirees to run around with some high-strung players anxious for their first game of the season.

And what kind of tone is the league setting for the collective bargaining ahead? After several years of remarkable growth in which the league’s team have broken open their wallets for big-name players, will MLS really risk a credibility-killing work stoppage to withhold money from the rank and file? Will it insist upon a complex system of allocations and re-entry drafts to avoid bidding wars over five-year MLS veterans while Drake is helping Toronto FC sign Jermain Defoe to a megabucks contract?

MLS is ready to take a step forward. To do that, it needs players. And referees. Now is not the time to play hardball and go backwards.

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International soccer games are overrated

Posted on by Beau Dure

From the laboratory that is European soccer comes another idea to spice up the game, this time adding another international tournament on top of World Cup qualifying and European qualifying.

The idea: Get rid of (most) friendlies and play even more endless round-robin tournaments, this time with promotion and relegation schemes like the Davis Cup.

At Pro Soccer Talk, Nicholas Mendoza raises a few issues — fewer opportunities for the USA to play European countries, fewer chances for new blood to be tested in friendlies, etc. All worthy objections.

I’ll add another: We don’t need more international soccer games. We need fewer.

International soccer games are supposed to be All-Star games. Making them the focus of one’s soccer career is inherently unfair to the players. Born in Northern Ireland or Liberia? Sorry, Mr. Best or Mr. Weah — you’re stuck with it. Good player who simply doesn’t fit the style or personality of your current national team coach? Have fun watching from your couch.

Club soccer is the real deal. Managers put together rosters regardless of nationality (work permit and visa rules permitting) and mold those teams accordingly.

The promotion/relegation scheme isn’t bad. Why not use that for World Cup qualification or maybe European qualifiers?

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An offbeat proposal for NWSL 2015

Posted on by Beau Dure

We can’t be too surprised by this report:

Equalizer Soccer – Documents: Canada to withhold players from NWSL before World Cup; Herdman stresses player health.

We can get a good laugh over John Herdman’s complaint about players getting too many games on artificial turf when they’ll be playing the Cup on the fake stuff (hopefully better fake stuff than in most NWSL facilities), but the fact is we’re looking at a difficult scheduling question here. The World Cup runs from June 6 to July 5. Women’s national teams are even more insistent than men’s national teams when it comes to getting their players together ahead of a major competition.

So are we looking at an NWSL season in which the national team players will miss half the games? Yes.

So what do we do about it?

Option 1: Just deal with it and play a season in which the best players aren’t around most of the time.

Option 2: Forget player loans, both incoming and outgoing. Extend the season into September and maybe October. Loans out to Australia or in from Europe won’t be practical any more, which will limit the player pool a bit, but the league could take a bit of a break for the Cup and still play a significant number of games.

Option 3: A split season. (I did say “offbeat,” didn’t I?) Here’s how it works:

First of all, with all apologies to the Algarve Cup, the league can’t put everything on hold so you get full representation from the USA in World Cup years. The NWSL season starts in early March. The first half of the season runs 8-9 weeks, with all the national team players on board. If the league is up to 10 teams in 2015, then that’s time to play each other team once.

The top team in the first half of the season is automatically seeded into the playoffs.

The second half, without the World Cup-bound players, is a new season of sorts. Once again, play 9-10 games over 8-9 weeks. And the top team in the second half is automatically seeded into the playoffs.

In mid-July, once everyone has taken a one-week breather from the Cup, we return to NWSL play. Two teams have qualified for the playoffs. The other eight try to qualify. Split into two four-team brackets — probably two-leg aggregate series, with the team with the best overall record hosting the second leg. (Even better: the Page playoff system I’ve long sought for MLS, giving significant advantages for top seeds while giving most teams at least one home game.)

The disadvantage for the top two teams is that they’ll be sitting idle while all this is going on. Why not spend that time having an international tournament? Invite the Champions League winner and Japanese champion for a four-team tournament.

So by August 10 or so, we would have four teams ready for the NWSL playoffs: The winner from each season, and the winner from each four-team bracket. Wrap it up by Sept. 1 so players can go out on offseason loans. And the USSF could still do its revenue-friendly “Victory Tour” from September to November in which they’ll examine the player pool for the Olym– … yeah, I nearly said that with a straight face. In reality, of course, they’ll send the Olympic players around to play easy friendlies and sign autographs. It’s easy for us to laugh, but it makes money from women’s soccer, and the sport can’t afford to pass that up.

Too complicated? Too whimsical? Too sensible to happen in real life? What do you think?

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Chivas USA: Farewell to a mistake

Posted on by Beau Dure

I was wrong.

When Chivas USA was announced as an MLS expansion team, I thought fans would greet it warmly. At home, they would draw solid crowds. On the road, the crowds would get a boost from the Chivas fans scattered across the country. That didn’t happen. As the years went by, it was clear that Chivas fans just focused on the original Chivas in Mexico, and other Mexican fans had no interest in cheering for a team wearing their rivals’ shirts.

And it was pretty clear that the young Mexican players who saw the field in that first Chivas USA season weren’t going to get it done against experienced MLS pros. The idea of a pipeline of talent between Guadalajara and Los Angeles never materialized.

The team did better when it eased away from the Chivas-lite motif. Bob Bradley and Preki coached the Americanized Chivas to winning records and playoff berths. Brad Guzan emerged as a top U.S. goalkeeping prospect. Scrappy American players led the way — Ante Razov, Sacha Kljestan, and Jesse Marsch among them. The youth academy was promising. A few Mexican players, especially veteran defender Claudio Suarez, added to a healthy mix of talent.

But the team decayed after 2009. When Jorge Vergara bought out his partners and decided to renew the focus on being a little bit of Guadalajara in Los Angeles, the end was near.

MLS has done the right thing here in taking over the team for a transitional year. If you insist on relating everything to English business models, pretend the team is in “administration.”

Cynics are already tearing down NYC FC, figuring its ties to Manchester City will spell doom for the same reasons Chivas USA failed. I doubt it. I think the mistakes can be easily avoided.

But I’ve been wrong before.

After team’s sale, Jorge Vergara admits “Chivas USA concept did not work out” | MLSsoccer.com.

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