So I’m making a good bit of progress on the next Area Guide — Southern California this time. Should be ready in a day or two. Hey, what’s this in the inbox?
But that’s just the journalist’s take. It’s the equivalent of an 89th-minute goal that forces us to tear up the stories our editors are expecting in five minutes. How does everyone else feel about it?
Oh dear. (Disclaimer: Ranting Soccer Dad is an NCSL parent.)
What does this mean?
1. Instead of four regional leagues, we’re about to have a lot of conferences. They’ve named eight so far, but that just covers the East Coast, the Southeast and Texas.
Will this format include more teams? Seems that way, but we’ll wait for clarification. In the current format, the Eastern Regional League has 16 teams in the Elite Division. The lower Premier and Championship divisions can theoretically take more teams but do not. The Midwest Regional League looks a bit bigger, as do the Southern Regional Premier League and the three-pronged Far West Regional League.
Through the current regional leagues, teams can qualify for the National League, which uses the hashtag #EarnYourPlace to establish its intent and perhaps throw some shade on the invitation-only DA and ECNL. And through the National League, teams can earn a place in the regional championships (an alternate path: State Cup) and then the National Championships.
Those pathways will continue. But will they be more crowded?
2. EDP, which currently has its top levels (out of many levels) in U.S. Club Soccer’s National Premier League, has apparently switched over to U.S. Youth Soccer. (I’m asking to have that point clarified.)
3. The press release mentions “newly formed club vs. club brackets may be offered.” That raises two questions. How, given the team-by-team #EarnYourPlace qualification for these leagues? And why, given the objections raised by … OK, maybe just me? See “Club-centric scheduling” on my “About the Area Guides/National Info” page.
4. With these leagues being more localized than the current league system, is the expectation that each team will enter only these leagues? In the current system, some teams play in both the U.S. Youth Soccer regional league and their “home” leagues.
Perhaps it’s unfair to think of these changes mostly in terms of the Turf Wars — U.S. Club Soccer vs. U.S. Youth Soccer in general, then the proxy war of the Development Academy (U.S. Soccer) vs. ECNL (U.S. Club Soccer) vs. traditional league/tournament play (U.S. Youth Soccer) at the elite level. But it’s really impossible to think about it otherwise.
So you may be asking: How does this affect me, especially if I don’t have a kid in the top 1-5% of youth soccer players who might be involved with these programs?
My tentative answer: We may be hitting a tipping point of trickle-down “elite” soccer.
Here’s how …
1. Clubs in your area scramble to get their top teams in the DA, ECNL or U.S. Youth Soccer conferences. (We’re already seeing this for the DA and ECNL; the current U.S. Youth setup is more complimentary.)
2. Clubs that don’t get into these programs (or want their B teams to be in something “elite”) scramble to form “elite” leagues, some of which are pretty good and some of which are demonstrably worse than the old traditional leagues’ top divisions. (Already seeing this, too, in some areas.)
3. Your traditional league needs to recruit more teams to fill the holes in their divisions. Suddenly your big local club has six travel teams in one age group. Suddenly your local “development” league consists of a couple of teams in one place and a couple more 100 miles away.
In short, we can sum it up with one word …
Chaos.
Whether your kids are in the top 5% or the middle 50%, you may find yourself in leagues that are unsettled, with clubs and teams coming and going. Maybe a new team comes in that blows out all its opponents 10-0 or loses all its games 10-0. Maybe a league that used to have all its games within a 45-minute drive now has its games scattered all over your state.
Or not. We just don’t know. So when you sign up your kid for a full year (because heaven forbid a club lets you sign up for one season at a time) of “travel” soccer, you have little idea what you’re getting into.
So it’d be nice if the powers that be would get together and explain to us why this is necessary.
The Ranting Soccer Dad Guide to Youth Soccer is underway. It includes a guide to national programs and, in progress, an area-by-area guide across the USA. Check out the Patreon page for full access and updates.
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?
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 …
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.
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:
Newbie starts asking why we don’t have an “open system.”
Newbie gets an overly hostile history lesson from people who are used to dealing with full-time Twitter trolls.
Newbie gets sympathy from the “pro/rel” long-timers.
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!
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.
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!
Learn the history, not just from one source. Read the books on my soccer bookshelf or anything else you can find.
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.
As part of the research for the Ranting Soccer Dad Guide to Youth Soccer, I’ve looked up where every current men’s or women’s national team player or recent call-up played youth soccer.
I started at Wikipedia but then verified every mention of past clubs (not complete, but all accurate!) using college and U.S. Soccer bios among other information. In some cases, I found more clubs on the bios and added them to the list.
Enjoy, and feel free to suggest anyone or any club that should be added.
ARIZONA
Danilo Acosta: Real Salt Lake AZ
Julie Ertz: Sereno SC, Arizona Arsenal (formerly Gilbert SC)
Justen Glad: Real Salt Lake AZ
Ashley Hatch: Legends FC (Calif.)
Brooks Lennon: Real Salt Lake AZ
Sydney Leroux: Sereno SC
—————————————————————-
CAL NORTH
Abby Dahlkemper: MVLA Avalanche
Tierna Davidson: De Anza Force
Lynden Gooch: Santa Cruz Breakers
Nick Lima: De Anza Force, San Jose Earthquakes
Megan Rapinoe: Elk Grove United
Lynn Williams: East Fresno Fusion, CVSA, Bullard Valley FC
Chris Wondolowski: Diablo Valley SC, Mustang
CAL SOUTH
(Historical: Nomads had Steve Cherundolo, Marcelo Balboa, Eric Wynalda, Paul Caligiuri, Frankie Hejduk, Shannon MacMillan, Jovan Kirovski)
Paul Arriola: LA Galaxy, Arsenal FC
Steve Birnbaum: Pateadores, Irvine Strikers
Joe Corona: Nomads
Marky Delgado: Chivas USA, Cosmos West, LAFC Chelsea, ISES Strikers, Arsenal FC
Benny Feilhaber: Irvine Strikers
Ashley Hatch: Legends FC (commuted from Arizona)
Hailie Mace: Eagles SC
Alex Morgan: Cypress Elite, AYSO
Michael Orozco: Irvine Strikers
Chris Pontius: Irvine Strikers
Christen Press: Slammers FC
Christian Ramirez: San Diego Surf, Pateadores, Irvine Strikers
Cristian Roldan: Union Independiente FC (also national high school player of the year)
Amy Rodriguez: Laguna Hills Eclipse, West Coast SC
Brandon Vincent: Real So Cal, Strikers FC, South Coast Bayern
Jorge Villafana: Chivas USA (joined after winning reality show)
Bobby Wood: Irvine Strikers (moved from Hawaii; then moved to Germany at age 14)
Gyasi Zardes: LA Galaxy
McCall Zerboni: SoCal Blues
—————————————————————
COLORADO
Jaelene Hinkle: Real Colorado
Lindsey Horan: Colorado Rush
Ethan Horvath: Real Colorado
Jaelin Howell: Real Colorado
Matt Polster: Colorado Rapids (anywhere in Nevada before that?)
Mallory Pugh: Real Colorado
Sophia Smith: Real Colorado
—————————————————————
CONNECTICUT
Alyssa Naeher: South Central Premier, Yankee United
—————————————————————
DC METRO
Bill Hamid: D.C. United, Premier AC (his father’s club — disclaimer: Ranting Soccer Dad’s son also has played for Premier AC)
Ian Harkes: D.C. United
Ali Krieger: Prince William
Midge Purce: Freestate, SAC, Bethesda, Potomac
C.J. Sapong: Prince William
Andi Sullivan: Bethesda, McLean
—————————————————————
FLORIDA
Jozy Altidore: Schulz Academy, Boca Raton Soccer Club
Alejandro Bedoya: Weston Fury
Morgan Brian: Ponte Vedra Storm (lived in Georgia and commuted)
Ashlyn Harris: Indialantic Force, Seminole Ice, South Brevard United, Palm Bay Rangers
Dax McCarty: Central Florida United
Graham Zusi: FC America (now GPS Orlando)
—————————————————————
GEORGIA
Joe Bendik: Cobb FC/SSA
Morgan Brian: Ponte Vedra Storm (Florida)
Jane Campbell: Concorde Fire, North Atlanta Soccer Academy
Sean Johnson: Atlanta Fire
Kekuta Manneh: Georgia Rush (joined Rush organization in Gambia; later moved to Texas)
A historical reminder here: Four years after Richard Nixon just demolished George McGovern 520-17 in the electoral vote, the USA elected a Democrat named Jimmy Carter.
Granted, the situation had a few unique factors. Nixon threw it all away with Watergate. Carter was a Southern Baptist, making him a little more palatable to conservatives than more modern Democrats. But he had solid progressive credentials and eventually left his denomination for that reason. And the causes of the 60s radicals were certainly not dead.
The point for soccer people? Giving up after the election of Carlos Cordeiro is simply ridiculous.
The Chattanooga summit showed a healthy willingness to innovate, though I still have doubts about the lack of experienced people working with them. Why were so few traditional USASA clubs represented, for one thing?
And now we finally have some extended thoughts — once you battle your way through SI’s obnoxious autoplay video and pop-up ads — from a presidential candidate. Unsurprisingly, it’s Kyle Martino, the “change” candidate who showed more potential than most in bridging the gap between the conservative old guard and the “hey, I just discovered soccer two years ago, and now I know everything — America doesn’t have pro/rel because it’s stupid” contingent.
Martino gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how things went down, including a surprise change of opinion in the youth soccer establishment. But he isn’t griping. He understands why voters broke toward Cordeiro and sees potential in the new president.
And Martino puts the focus back where it really needs to be — youth soccer. He’s jumping into that arena himself, working with Street Soccer USA, where initiatives such as putting futsal goals on basketball courts are a natural fit.
Make no mistake — that’s where the rot lies in U.S. Soccer. It’s astounding to see exponential growth in the amount of soccer on TV and the level of fan interest while the participation level is stagnant or worse. We’re losing recreational players before they can become elite players. And we’re giving elite players a muddled pathway, with the Development Academy and the ECNL playing a giant game of Risk across North America.
U.S. Soccer took a laissez-faire attitude for decades. Then they stepped in with the Development Academy, competing with rather than bolstering programs that had been in place (and developed some damn good players), and a ridiculous birth-year age-group mandate that any veteran of youth soccer could’ve told them was a really bad idea. As Martino points out, these moves alienated and marginalized people who may not have been perfect but had valuable expertise and experience.
Seems like there’s a lesson in all that for the “change” movement as it focuses on the other aspects of change, from promotion/relegation to … promotion/relegation. Yeah, there’s not much else.
Bring the new ideas. Have good honest discussion about them. But don’t marginalize the people who have built things that work. Even the people who’ve built things that didn’t work have experience worth sharing. You learn more from failure than success.
Opportunities are still there. But an “us vs. them” mentality isn’t going to help. Gotta build some bridges if you want to get across the river.
(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.
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:
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?)
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?
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.
SCENE: A dimly lit room in Columbus Crew Stadium, January 2002
PARTICIPANTS:
Don Garber, Major League Soccer commissioner and former National Football League executive
Lamar Hunt, owner of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, founding owner in the American Football League and North American Soccer League, owner of two MLS teams: Columbus Crew and Kansas City Wizards, soon to be three (Dallas Burn)
Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, owner of MLS’ New England Revolution, recent owner of the San Jose Earthquakes
(participating via hologram) Philip Anschutz, owner of the Los Angeles Galaxy, Chicago Fire, Colorado Rapids, MetroStars, D.C. United and part of the San Jose Earthquakes
GARBER: Gentlemen, thank you for meeting here. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the supremacy of the greatest sport in the world, gridiron football.
ALL: Hike!
GARBER: Thank you. Now, as you know, we have the perfect opportunity to kill off soccer once and for all. The Sept. 11 attacks have really rattled the economy, and we project the Dow Jones will be in the 7,500 range by March 2003.
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Gooood … gooood …
KRAFT: Wow! Remember when it was over 10,000?
GARBER: Yes, thank you for continuing the exposition. So now is the time we strike.
HUNT: Yeah, well, what are you going to do this time? You already absorbed my football league and killed off the USFL.
KRAFT (laughing): Yeah, the USFL. Ha! That Trump guy will never amount to anything.
HUNT: And the NASL … (tears up) … we had Pele! And Beckenbauer! And George Best!
KRAFT: Who?
HUNT: Really good player, though he didn’t play for the Cosmos. The NASL had a few of those.
GARBER: Yes, Lamar. I know. The NFL really came after you, and the NASL and NFL wound up in court. You don’t want to go down that road again, do you? Or do you no longer enjoy owning the Kansas City Chiefs?
HUNT: OK, OK. What do you have in mind?
GARBER: Well, we could just close MLS. We’ve made it look like a good effort, and no one would blame us if we simply gave up now. No one else is lining up to invest, and the A-League is just limping along.
KRAFT: I don’t know. I like the Montreal team. And Seattle, Portland and Vancouver look OK.
GARBER: Yeah, whatever. Anyway, if we folded MLS right now, it would probably be another decade or more before someone else tried again. I mean, the 2002 World Cup is in Japan and South Korea, and no one’s really trying to market it right now.
HUNT: The U.S. team stinks right now, anyway. Reyna and O’Brien are always hurt, and they’re actually trying out Tony Sanneh! Can you believe that? They may actually give some playing time to those kids Donovan and Beasley! (chortles)
GARBER: All true.
KRAFT: So, fold the league. Then sit back quietly and sabotage any effort down the road to start again, right?
GARBER: No. I have something far more complicated in mind …
(pause)
KRAFT: Why?
GARBER: Because this is far more … genius. (HA HA HA HA HA …)
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Gooood … gooood …
GARBER: Let’s form a marketing company, Soccer United Marketing. We’ll bundle MLS rights with the World Cup rights nobody wants right now. And I hear IMG wants out of the U.S. Soccer deal, so we’ll take that over, too.
HUNT: By golly, we’ll own everything!
GARBER: Right.
HUNT: So THEN we shut everything down?
GARBER: No, no. That’ll be too suspicious. We’ll invest more. We need to grow U.S. Soccer until it has a nine-figure reserve.
KRAFT (spits out prototype of new energy drink): Sorry about that. This energy drink is supposed to have the capacity to make quarterbacks play forever. We’re trying it out on that Brady kid. Anyway … U.S. Soccer? Are you kidding me? They barely have enough money to field national teams! They had a hiring freeze last year just so they could break even.
GARBER: I know. So we need to get that guy who used to work for us and now works for you.
KRAFT: Sunil Gulati?
GARBER: Exactly. He’s finally vice president. In 2006, let’s have him replace Dr. Bob as president.
KRAFT: I follow you now. So U.S. Soccer will be making a ton of money and MLS will be making a ton of money, even though we all know no one cares about this sport in this country.
GARBER: Now you get it.
HUNT: So then we can sell all our stuff?
GARBER: Well, you can sell two of your teams, Lamar. Make sure you sell the Columbus team to some guy who really wants to play in Texas.
HUNT: Ha! Good luck to THAT guy!
GARBER: Right. But we’re going to take that money and invest … even more.
KRAFT: In what?
GARBER: More stadiums, for one thing.
KRAFT: Awwwwww.
GARBER: OK, you don’t have to build one. But I see soccer stadiums popping up in Los Angeles …
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Gooood … gooood …
GARBER: And San Jose, and Dallas, and New Jersey, and Colorado, and Toronto …
KRAFT: Toronto?
GARBER: Yeah, we’ll get to that. And Chicago, and Kansas City, and Salt Lake City, and Philadelphia, and Houston, and Orlando …
HUNT: Whoa, whoa. How many teams are we talking about here?
GARBER: Oh, let’s say 20. Nah, 24. Maybe 28. Certainly no more than 32.
KRAFT: Well … I mean … I guess we can come up with all that. As long as you’re not asking us to make any more investments in anything else.
GARBER: Actually, I want every MLS club to have a youth academy program.
HUNT: Oh, so we could sell players for a profit?
GARBER: No, our lawyers and the people who will eventually form the MLS players union think solidarity pay and training compensation are illegal, so we’ll lose players to Germany without compensation.
(Suddenly, Miami Fusion owner Ken Horowitz bursts through the door …)
HOROWITZ: Guys! Guys! Are you serious? I heard what you’re saying. This is far too much money to spend! How are we supposed to do this?!
(GARBER scowls, then presses a button that summons his minions)
GARBER: Terminate the Miami franchise.
HOROWITZ: What? Noooooooooo!
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM:
HUNT: Oh my. You fellas aren’t playin’ around. So we’re at least going to kill off the lower divisions, right?
GARBER: Not exactly. They’re going to fall apart in 2009.
HUNT: Oh good.
GARBER: And then we’ll bail them out and operate a second-division league for a season while they figure out how to proceed in two rival leagues.
HUNT: OK, I’m lost.
GARBER: No worries, Lamar. We’ll name the U.S. Open Cup trophy after you.
HUNT: Cool!
KRAFT: Now I’m hearing women are also playing soccer. How will we stop that?
GARBER: Glad you asked. We’re going to argue incessantly with this new WUSA league until it falls apart.
KRAFT: Sounds good.
GARBER: Five years will pass before they start another league. We’ll be friendly with that league but won’t do much to help, and it’ll eventually fall apart as well.
HUNT: I like it! So we don’t look like the bad guys, but we’ll really keep it from growing.
GARBER: And then Gulati will form a new league with U.S. Soccer funding.
(Silence)
GARBER: Oh,, and after big success in one location, we’ll urge more MLS clubs to operate women’s teams as well.
(Silence)
GARBER: Does anyone here want to end up like Horowitz?
HUNT: No, no … we’re in … right?
KRAFT: Yeah, I should make enough money from the Patriots winning several Super Bowls to …
(HUNT laughs.)
KRAFT: Just you wait, Lamar. We have an engineering program in place to make Tom Brady and Bill Belichick cyborgs. And when that fails, we’ll underinflate the footballs.
GARBER: Guys, let’s stay on track here.
KRAFT: OK, sorry. So how long does Gulati stay in charge of U.S. Soccer?
GARBER: Twelve years ought to do it. In that time, they’ll hire Jurgen Klinsmann to run the men’s team and offer up a bunch of incoherent thoughts on the youth game.
HUNT: I like it! That’ll confuse everyone.
GARBER: Exactly. And he’ll leave the program in such a shambles that not even Bruce Arena can salvage their 2018 qualifying campaign.
KRAFT: I wouldn’t think Bruce Arena would be able to …
GARBER: Whatever — that’s not important right now. So then, we’ll have a contested election in U.S. Soccer.
(Laughter all the way around)
GARBER: No, really.
HUNT: But we’ll basically just install the next president, right?
GARBER: Here’s how it’ll work. We’ll take this young executive working for Soccer United Marketing, Kathy Carter. She’ll jump into the election right when Sunil Gulati drops out.
KRAFT: Great! So she’ll win?
GARBER: No. Because the plan all along will be to get Carlos Cordeiro elected.
(Silence)
HUNT: Who?
KRAFT: Oh, I just found him by searching at Yahoo, the world’s dominant search engine. He works at Goldman Sachs or something.
HUNT: So let’s recap. By February 2018, MLS will have 20-something teams …
GARBER: … averaging more than 20,000 fans per game. Sure, some of that will be tickets sold, and you’ll have a lot of no-shows, just as we have in every other league, but we’ll have massive crowds in Seattle and Atlanta, along with second clubs in New York and Los Angeles …
HUNT: OK. And U.S. Soccer will finally be poised to make the reforms in youth soccer that we’ve needed for decades.
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Goood … goo …
GARBER: Can we switch that thing off yet?
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Who owns half the league?
GARBER: You’re right — I’m sorry, sir.
HUNT: And we’ll keep every other soccer league off the airwaves.
GARBER: Oh, no — forgot to mention that. Spanish-language channels will continue to broadcast Mexican league games that regularly get three to four times the ratings our broadcasts get. And NBC will take Premier League rights away from the Fox Sports World folks and put most games on the air for free, all with impeccable production values. Fox will have the Champions League and the Bundesliga.
HUNT: So it’ll be easier to watch the Premier League here than it is in England. But we get a cut of all that?
GARBER: Well, no. We’ll be competing with it.
HUNT: OK. So we’ll have a healthy domestic league spending a ton of money of facilities and youth soccer, we’ll have better leagues beating us in the ratings …
GARBER: Correct.
HUNT: … and people will still hate us because the Soccer United Marketing deal just smells funny.
GARBER: You’ve got it.
KRAFT: But people will appreciate our work in youth soccer, right?
GARBER: No, we’re actually going to make a mess of that. You see, most MLS clubs will have free academies. Then other youth clubs will try to maintain their stature even as the travel and facility requirements get more costly. By that time, the economy will have recovered …
HUNT: Under Republican leadership?
GARBER: No, actually, an African-American Democrat named Barack Hussein Obama.
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: But I’ll have built a conservative media empire around the Examiner brand!
GARBER: Yeah, let’s not go there. Anyway, the economy will be better, and tons of rich families will pay good money for their kids to get their butts kicked in our Development Academy.
HUNT: Yikes. But at least recreational soccer will be OK.
GARBER: Nope. After decades of indifference, we’re going to tell people to reorganize every soccer league in the country … or else …
HUNT: Seems like the rec organizations would just quit U.S. Soccer.
GARBER: Ummmmm … OK, we haven’t projected that yet. Let me get back to you on that.
KRAFT: So, in short, soccer itself will be in great shape. We’ll have people wearing jerseys, making Nike, adidas and whoever else happy, and people can watch soccer all weekend if they want. MLS and U.S. Soccer will be in great shape financially, but everyone will hate us.
GARBER: That’s right.
KRAFT: And then, finally, we’ll have investors who turn up around … let’s say, 2016 and 2017 … who think they know everything about soccer and want to tell us what to do, and they’ll actually have support from big-name soccer people, even though none of these folks have even read anything on U.S. soccer history, much less lived it as Lamar has.
GARBER: Yes.
KRAFT: And they’ll sue us when they don’t get their way?
GARBER: Yes.
HUNT: And all this will kill off soccer in the USA?
GARBER: Yes. What little remains will be controlled by us, the people with NFL ties.
KRAFT: Looks like you’ve thought of everything.
GARBER: Not yet. We’ll be threatened in the 2020s by Ultimate.
KRAFT: Yeah, let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.
GARBER: Thanks. Meeting adjourned.
ANSCHUTZ HOLOGRAM: Gooooood … goo- … hey, is this thing still on?
Disclaimer: This is obviously fiction. Aside from the formation of SUM and a couple of other things that actually happened. And Tom Brady’s probably a cyborg.
I get asked that question quite a bit. It’s not really my goal. It’s an unintended consequence.
I do ask provocative questions. But unlike cable “news” outlets that use fear to keep you tuning in (or keep you voting out of paranoia), my goal is to push the discussion forward. Sometimes I do a good job. Sometimes I aggravate people. Sometimes both.
(NSFW language alert here …)
The quality of my questions and my suggestions for pushing the conversation forward is for others to judge. But it’s safe to say I think about these things a lot. And now that I’m launching a new project designed to give parents the information they need to make better decisions, it’s time to re-examine everything. Again. Do I want to continue arguing with people on Twitter? Is now the best time to publish material that gives me reactions like this?
Commisso: Oh Beau Dure, you're the guy who writes all the stupid things on Twitter?
My skin is pretty thick. I paid my dues in local journalism, where people who hate your news organization will tell you to your face or over the phone while you’re trying to work. At my first newspaper, I dealt with callers who accused our sports staff of being alumni of one particular local high school (none of the five of us went to high school within 100 miles), callers who said it was just like the liberal media not to send a reporter to the middle-school lacrosse game, a caller who was pissed that I wouldn’t drive out to his farm and deliver a missing paper, and a cross-country coach who apparently just walked right into the newsroom past our alleged security and started yelling at me because I was the only person in the sports department at that hour. I can deal with a septuagenarian New Yorker who doesn’t like his thinly researched opinion questioned — at least until he’s elected president.
And I grew up believing in old-school journalism. Just the facts, maybe with some lively but impartial observations.
I got a wakeup call in 1994. Polls showed voters were getting their information from opinionated media, specifically talk radio in those pre-Internet-on-my-phone days, and they still believed — erroneously — that the country was still in recession. No matter how you feel about the Republican wave in that year’s midterms, you have to admit — that ain’t good. So I started to think telling the truth required a bit more force and persuasion than we were using.
(We miss you, Susan. The annual training sessions at the Duke student paper are named in her memory.)
A few years later, I was finishing up grad school at Duke, balancing academic work with my job. On my 29th birthday, I turned in an independent study on the history of objectivity in journalism. The quick summary: Objectivity is generally driven by business practices. In the 1800s, partisan scandal sheets dueled for attention — media historian Mitchell Stephens described them as summaries of info from the mail fleshed out with “musings, conjectures and diatribes.” That approach drew readers but maybe not advertisers — see today’s boycotts of Breitbart advertisers. Then telegraphs offered astounding opportunities to transmit news from place to place, but the start-up costs were immense, and “wire” services needed to sell their news to everyone, regardless of partisan politics. Hence the proud tradition of the reliable, if occasionally bland, Associated Press.
No matter how well-intended, a singular approach has flaws. African-American journalists rose up in the late 19th century (maybe before — the example I found in my research was that of Ida Wells, and by sheer coincidence, The New York Times posted an obituary of her yesterday) to challenge the reporting of white journalists who clearly didn’t understand the perspective of the African-American community. Then journalists challenged their own work when they realized Sen. Joseph McCarthy was taking advantage of their system of getting “both sides” of a story — and, in many cases, leading with whichever “side” spoke most recently. Edward R. Murrow — a proud son of Greensboro, where I was working when I started grad school — was the forerunner of a modern fact-checker, firmly dismantling McCarthy’s wild claims with the cold, hard truth. (Yes, he’s the subject of Good Night and Good Luck.)
But Murrow wasn’t just wildly slinging mud, and there are still a few aspects of “objectivity” that are important. From my paper:
The common thread in these definitions (of objectivity) is that facts, not opinions, are given prominence.
Part of the distinction, also a big part of my paper, is the difference between skepticism and cynicism. Let Thomas Friedman explain:
Nathaniel intuitively understood that there was a difference between skepticism and cynicism. This is a lesson a lot of us have forgotten. Skepticism is about asking questions, being dubious, being wary, not being gullible. Cynicism is about already having the answers — or thinking you do — about a person or an event. The skeptic says, “I don’t think that’s true; I’m going to check it out.” The cynic says: “I know that’s not true. It couldn’t be. I’m going to slam him.” There is a fine line between the two, but it’s a line Nathaniel always respected.
So by this point, I was firmly on the side of skepticism.
A year later, I finished that graduate degree with a thesis — still available online in a format showing off the height of JavaScript circa 2000 — about the way new media is changing journalists’ jobs. The conclusion: We’re all doomed. I was right.
But there is a certain amount of freedom in story-telling these days. The Daily Show, John Oliver and even The Onion are able to tell the truth in ways traditional journalists envy. In John Oliver’s case in particular, his show does as much research as any documentary-maker, then presents that info with a bit of humor for easy digestion.
You may argue that Oliver’s takes are one-sided. But while being fair is still important if you want your work to be taken seriously, being balanced leads to problems. It may be a coincidence that “both sides” is abbreviated “b.s.,” but it’s so apt. On everything from climate change to vaccination to evolution to gun laws’ effectiveness to whether promotion/relegation is the only factor that differentiates the USA from other countries, one side has thoroughly vetted facts on its side and the other does not. (They’re not always the same “side.” People are complicated.)
What does this have to do with me, my Twitter arguments and Ranting Soccer Dad? Glad you asked.
I left USA TODAY — which, like the Associated Press, was purposefully bland so it would appeal to the widest possible variety of business travelers who got it in their hotels and airports — in 2010. I liked a lot of the work I was doing, but I was spending too much time in the office or on the road doing too many jobs. I had kids. If I hadn’t left, I might still be Ranting, but I wouldn’t be much of a Soccer Dad. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to sign up to coach except as an occasional assistant who would miss a few games to sit at a desk or cover a UFC card.
So when I left, I gained a bit of freedom. I still don’t campaign for political candidates –the only time we’ve allowed ourselves a yard sign was for a nonpartisan school board race — and I didn’t push myself full-bore into “musings, conjectures and diatribes.” But I could at least be a bit more argumentative than typical USA TODAY content.
I became, in short, aggressively objective.
In many cases, I’ve challenged facts and analysis of my own affinity group or “side.” The best example is in women’s soccer, where I’d love to be able to tell you everything the women’s national team said in contract negotiations was correct and fair, but it wasn’t. I’ve had my run-ins with some women’s soccer players, all of whom I respect but none of whom get a free pass to mislead and demean anyone else just because they’re heroes to a lot of people.
So now that I’m doing a project that I want to appeal to parents (and players and coaches and everyone else) of all opinions and all backgrounds, am I going to imitate the Associated Press or USA TODAY of old and shy away from being adversarial?
Well … some. It’s not quite in my nature to close up entirely.
Besides, I’m writing/podcasting about youth soccer. Youth soccer has an awful lot of b.s. Therefore, if I turn off my b.s. detector, I’m not doing my job.
I’ll try to avoid repeating the more ridiculous arguments on Twitter. If you offer up some fact-addled point about promotion/relegation or anything else that demonstrates a lack of knowledge of U.S. soccer history, I’m going to refer you to my soccer bookshelf or possibly my previous writing on pro/rel. (I may one day summarize it in an FAQ.) If you have something new to add to any of these topics, great, but I might ask you to do so on my blog rather than exchange 280-character bites. (Or I might invite you to my podcast.)
I’m also through dealing with accusations and assumptions. Someone recently told me I should check out an NWSL game, so I sent her a link to Enduring Spirit, my NWSL book. (I didn’t hear back.) And we should certainly be well past the notion of assuming the “others” on Twitter must be paid by MLS or George Soros or anyone else. (Yes, I wrote some fantasy soccer columns for the previous management of MLSNet back in the Dark Ages. I wrote fewer columns than Eric Wynalda. Go call him a “shill.” I’d pay to see that — I mean, I’d be interested in seeing that.)
And if you must resort to petty insults, please remember: I’m not a wanna-be. I’m a has-been. And now I’m doing something else that I hope will be constructive and productive and something that makes us a better soccer nation. And better parents. And better people.
So if you want to know what “side” I’m on, the answer is simple. Yours. Speak up. Let me know what’s going on in your soccer community, and I’ll put it all together for us all to share.
If you came here from my Soccer America piece, skip ahead to the 25-minute mark. Or maybe go back to the beginning of this conversation around the 18-minute mark to hear Foudy talk about pay-to-play and the chase for results. Or back to 13:20 to hear the entire youth soccer discussion.
Today’s guest has an impossible task: Make me feel better about youth soccer, and soccer in general, and youth sports in general … maybe just life in general. But she’s faced tougher tasks. She’s Julie Foudy, Hall of Fame soccer player and ESPN journalist.
After I make an announcement and then rant about curling commentary, the interview starts around the 13:20 mark with a discussion of what’s good about youth soccer, whether soccer can have the same supportive atmosphere of extreme sports (20:30), the lack of women in coaching (26:20), her experiences as a soccer parent (31:20) and then U.S. Soccer politics, including the role of the Athletes’ Council (40:10). She also talks a bit about the U.S. women’s team heading into the SheBelieves Cup (51:10).
The Total Soccer Show guys raised a good question on their podcast from Feb. 22: Why doesn’t the USA have a “B” team?
This was specifically in the context of the men’s team, but it’s a good question for the women’s program as well. And though we could’ve asked this question any time, it’s especially relevant now.
A couple of reasons:
As the TSS folks point out, the men have this little problem of not qualifying for Olympics. A “B” team would surely be mostly Under-23s with the occasional overage player. The U23s would get more experience playing together, and if they make it, they’ll be used to playing with the occasional overage player as well. (The men’s Olympic tournament really is a strange thing, isn’t it? I’ve covered an Olympic final with Messi involved, and I have virtually no memory of it except that it was like sitting in a convection oven. The Birds Nest really might be better for the Winter Olympics than it was for the Summer Olympics.)
FIFA might be cutting back on its youth tournaments, leaving a big gap between U18 or U19 and the senior team.
The CONCACAF Nations League will leave fewer international dates for friendlies that would usually be a good opportunity to give younger players a shot.
So, yes, having B teams would make a lot of sense, for the USA and for most other countries.
Duresport.com 