Tag: mls

soccer

MLS has already lost the collective bargaining talks

Posted on by Beau Dure

Deal or no deal? At this point, it hardly matters. A players strike, which would surely be brief given the limited resources the union can bring to bear, will harm Major League Soccer less in the long term than the league’s failure to seize the moment.

MLS has been at the crossroads before, and the league has usually gone the right away. From near-death in 2001, the league rebuilt itself with surprising speed and strength. This country is never going to be easy for a soccer league — it competes domestically with four better-established team sports, and it competes globally with much better-established soccer leagues — but MLS has carved out a nice sturdy niche.

And even as the soccer-hating dinosaurs slowly die off, some people in this country will always be unreachable. Some fans will always be Eurosnobs, much in the same way that some people refuse to watch Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons because their cynicism won’t allow them to believe it could ever be as good as the old days. Some coaches will always insist MLS academies don’t mimic Germany’s or England’s or Bolivia’s to their satisfaction, and they’ll try to steer players away. Some people won’t be happy until the USA has a promotion/relegation pyramid like the one that took England 100 years to establish. You can’t please everyone, and trying to win over the crankiest people on Twitter is a fool’s errand.

Nor would a simple raise in salaries make MLS clubs the equal of Everton, let alone Manchester United. MLS could quintuple its salaries, and couch potatoes choosing between La Liga and MLS on TV may still opt for the former more often than not. There is no amount of reasonable spending that will build Barcelona in New England’s green and pleasant land.

But the league’s goal of being a “league of choice” for players and fans is still reasonable. MLS doesn’t have to be No. 1 — it just has to be worth seeing. Yet through its stubbornness in collective bargaining, the league is undermining its “league of choice” goals.

As former MLS player Bobby Warshaw put it: “The players will point out that there’s a strange contradiction here. The league talks about being a ‘destination league,’ both for players and for fans, yet they do nothing to make the league attractive for players, which would, ultimately, make it more attractive to fans.”

A league with no free agency and with bureaucratic restrictions on player rights will not be a “league of choice” for young players, many of whom are opting to go to Mexico, let alone Europe. It will not bring Herculez Gomez home from Mexico. It will not attract international players who are choosing between MLS and the Netherlands.

And the eagerness to play hardball with players sends a poor message to fans. How are fans supposed to believe the league is on the rise when it’s claiming poverty and insisting that the whole structure falls apart if an eight-year veteran is allowed to negotiate a pay raise or move to a city closer to his wife’s family?

The league’s stance is simply tone-deaf. No one believes that MLS will go broke if two teams bid up a veteran’s player to $200K when, thanks to the salary cap, that money simply comes from another player’s potential pay. No one understands why it’s OK to compete in every other sense — for Designated Players, in building youth academies, in worldwide scouting — but it’s not OK for teams to compete for a non-DP’s signature. The fan base is too sophisticated, and it no longer sees the need for MLS to take baby steps on player movement while it’s making bold investments in academies, stadiums and Steven Gerrard. And MLS has simply not made a plausible case for maintaining its grip on intraleague movement.

If MLS folded tomorrow, it would still deserve a ton of credit for building the game in the USA, just as we credit the decidedly non-traditional NASL of the 70s and 80s for stirring up some interest in the soccer-unfriendly country. What’s been done over the last two decades is remarkable. But that doesn’t mean the league can afford to stagnate. Over the years, it has evolved — allocations aren’t driven from the league office any more, clubs have more control, and the salary budget bends to include Designated Players. That evolution needs to keep going, and what the players are asking is far cheaper than the other investments the league is making.

I’m sometimes asked to write a sequel to Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer. At this point, that book would be Short-Term Thinking: How MLS Threw It All Away.

This offseason was the perfect time to demonstrate that MLS was stepping confidently into the modern soccer world, ready to compete for players and fans. That step forward would’ve required significant time to figure out how to move into free agency and perhaps toss out the vestiges of the league’s “allocation” system. They’ve run out of time to do it. MLS may eventually force its players back onto the field, but the league and its players will be poorer in the long run.

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soccer

U.S. Soccer Players union weighs in on MLS labor situation

Posted on by Beau Dure

And they’re totally pro-management! No, no — longtime union rep Mark Levinstein is absolutely behind the players’ push for free agency and oddly insistent that the minimum salary needs to jump to $100,000.

The arguments:

Unlike the history in Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, or the NHL, in this case MLS has protection from any serious adverse financial consequences from the first introduction of free agency because of the existence of an MLS salary cap. The dire predictions from the MLS about free agency causing dramatically escalating team salaries make no sense when owners remain protected by the salary cap – free agency just means at some point in their career players will have some say in where they play, where they live, and where they raise their families.

That’s true.

Players will not have to threaten to play overseas to get fair financial treatment.

Yes … but … there will be losers among the players in a brave new world of free agency. And “overseas” is a vast term that includes everything from the Premier League to countries that aren’t renowned for paying players on time.

Of course, if you’re still touting the possibility of another antitrust suit against MLS, you’re probably thinking Levinstein shouldn’t have mentioned the whole “overseas” option.

But the takeaway here, once again, is the case MLS has not made: Why complain about players competing for slices of a limited pie?

Some media reports of the labor situation point to baseball and how quickly salaries escalated in the free agent era. That’s misleading. Baseball still has no salary cap. And baseball has convinced people to pay an awful lot of money to televise its games or eat hot dogs in their ballparks.

A $100K minimum salary would be an interesting bargaining point. At least then we’d be pretty sure all the players are making more than all the journalists. But we don’t know that the MLS union is actually asking for that. If they were — would it be just for the players who spend the whole season with the senior club? Or will we see squads full of USL players making $100K?

In any case — we still have no evidence that players are pushing for anything unreasonable. And that’s going to be a PR problem for MLS for the foreseeable future.

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soccer

A stadium for Indiana … and the NASL?

Posted on by Beau Dure

If all goes well, Indy Eleven will play in a soccer stadium with a unique canopy that somewhere between the Bird’s Nest in Beijing and, appropriately for a town known for auto racing, a tire with a fancy tread.

It’ll cost $82 million and will be paid off by a tax on tickets for the stadium. “If you don’t go, you don’t pay,” says the stadium site.

The FAQ at that site answers a few good questions, but a couple haven’t been addressed.

First, what happens if stadium ticket taxes DON’T cover the $82 million cost? The text of the bill doesn’t answer — in fact, if you read the bill, you don’t really get the impression that a stadium is being built at all. It’s all about the tax mechanism.

Second, what happens if the NASL really manages to expand to 24 or more teams and implements promotion/relegation? The site commits Indy Eleven to the NASL for now, while not explicitly ruling out an MLS move at some point. For all the talk of possibly going first division, either in MLS or in a post-apocalyptic world in which the NASL reigns supreme, suppose the team ends up in a third division?

Perhaps that’s an academic point. Maybe Indy Eleven, as one of the better-funded and best-run (as long as they have Peter Wilt) NASL clubs, will never be relegated. Or maybe the people making sure this stadium will be financially guaranteed should call the NASL leadership into town and make them state, bluster aside, what they really intend to do with their league.

You can’t help rooting for Indy Eleven. Indianapolis is a great sports city, home to the NCAA, USA Track and Field, and Andrew Luck. Wilt is one of the most beloved soccer executives in the business. The stadium looks fantastic.

And it’s a good time to ask the NASL what’s really going on. Will it spend itself silly trying to compete with MLS, or is that just a fans’ fantasy? Will it simply be a strong, well-rooted second division as the A-League so nearly was before declining in the 2000s?

Might be a good time to answer those questions once and for all. They’re going to be asked in a few other cities as well, particularly in cities where clubs may ask for actual public money rather than a ticket tax.

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MLS and free agency: Fatal brinksmanship?

Posted on by Beau Dure

You can’t take public statements too seriously during a difficult negotiation. It’s posturing time.

But the apparent stumbling block of real, honest-to-goodness free agency is a concern. And this quote from MLS president Mark Abbott, a tough negotiator and the architect of single entity, is a puzzler:

“Because we function in an international market and the clubs that we are competing against for players are not subject to our salary budget, to have free agency within the league doesn’t provide us with the certainty that the union says it does,” Abbott explained. “When the union says they can offer cost certainty under free agency, it’s not true because we have to compete against clubs all throughout the world.”

(From Brian Straus’ detailed look at the state of collective bargaining)

I cannot make heads or tails of this argument, mostly because free agency within MLS has nothing to do with the realities of the global labor market. If FC Dallas is bidding against Pachuca for a particular player, it hardly matters whether D.C. United is also bidding.

So no, MLS can’t have “cost certainty” because it’s a global market. Globally, players are free agents, whether MLS likes it or not. MLS cannot control the market. And that’s a good thing. If the league could control the market, it might have lost when players filed suit in the league’s early days.

MLS won that suit because it claimed, correctly, that players had other options. The USA alone has other leagues — in those days, the A-League and indoor soccer; today, the NASL and USL. Mexico is raiding the USA these days. Then there’s Europe. Qatar. China. Australia. That’s why the idea of decertifying the union and suing again is a non-starter.

But it also means MLS has less leverage than the typical U.S. sport. The NFL gets away with all sorts of cruelty in its player contracts because players have almost no other options besides the Canadian Football League, which isn’t really comparable. The NBA and NHL have to spend enough on players to keep their status as the world’s top league in their respective sports. Major League Baseball had to bend to free agency to avoid antitrust problems, and cost-containment ideas haven’t gained much traction.

So the idea that MLS would risk a work stoppage to prevent free agency, when it’s already participating in a free-agent market globally, is horrifying and foolish. In a worst-case scenario, with MLS never conceding the point and players sticking together, you’d just see all the players going elsewhere. (Disclaimer: I have not reviewed the legalities of whether a striking player under contract can find another job. Someone with more legal expertise and no ties to either side in this negotiation will have to decide that.)

Even in MLS “wins” on this issue, it loses. From college graduates to mid-career veterans, players will be less inclined to sign with the league.

It’s also a matter of perception and confidence. When David Beckham signed his megamillion deal and other European stars followed, it was the sign of a confident league striding forward — a good step to entice broadcasters, sponsors and fans. That confidence is undermined when the league is going to such pains to prevent two of its teams from bidding Bobby Boswell or Brian Carroll’s salary up to $200,000.

Fans also are more demanding these days. Most people were willing to see some compromises to get the league up and running. Today, no one wants to see any vestiges of the days in which Sunil Gulati played hardball on salaries across the league. Clubs make their own personnel decisions — taken to the ludicrous extreme when Frank Lampard apparently signed with neither league nor club but some other completely different entity — and that’s the way fans like it. Players, too. Homegrown players are nudging draftees out of the spotlight on new talent, and that’s a big statement for club pride.

I’ve heard one mildly reasonable argument against free agency. The issue is that teams would end up paying more for their top players, excluding Designated Players, and would therefore have less to spend on the rest of the roster. Fringe veterans would be much more likely to end up in the NASL, which will be happy to snap up more Aaron Pitchkolans and Carlos Mendeses. The 15th-25th spots on the roster would get a little younger.

But that’s not the argument the league is making. And it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, anyway.

Does the league have some other super-secret reason for digging in its heels here? Or are some league officials just sentimentally attached to a system that, crucial as it was for the league’s first decade, is now outdated and redundant?

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Are UK taxpayers subsidizing poor spending habits in the Football League?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Yes.

on-level-termsWell, I think so. That’s the conclusion I reached after reading Chapter 7 of Ted Philipakos’ excellent forthcoming book, On Level Terms.

That might not be Philipakos’ conclusion. He’s an agent and an academic who clearly has a solid grasp of the 10 cases he discusses in the book, but he plays the role of dispassionate reporter here, passing no judgment but simply summarizing these complex cases in plain English — a difficult task he does well.

He starts with U.S. cases, leading off with the big one, Fraser v MLS — the players’ 1997 lawsuit against the then-new Major League Soccer. That suit is a full chapter in my book Long-Range Goals, and I was flattered that he cited me. But he adds valuable insight, especially in following the case through the Court of Appeals and diving headlong into the murky world of single-entity law.

Next up: two cases from the old NASL that might change some impressions of the good old days, one more antitrust-ish case and a concussion case still in progress.

The European cases are another interesting grab bag, ending with a TV-rights case I’d never heard of. As you’d expect, Philipakos has a good solid chapter on the Bosman case, which established greater player movement and wiped out a lot of restrictions on foreign players. That case made the Premier League the melting pot it is today, and the federation arguments made at the time sound positively quaint even though they weren’t made that long ago.

So what’s the deal with Chapter 7 and my clickbait headline?

The issue here is the Football Creditors Rule, which ensures clubs seeking protection from creditors must pay off their “football creditors” — players, clubs to which they owe transfer fees, etc. — in full. Other creditors — say, the UK tax agency known by the cumbersome name Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — might only get a few pennies.

Seems fair — until you see how many clubs abuse it. “Sure, we’ll sign you to a multimillion-pound contract even though we don’t get EPL TV money and we only draw 8,000 fans per game. If we go broke, we’ll just go into administration and tell the rest of our creditors to shove it.”

So as I’m reading it, Football League clubs can still keep paying 90 percent of their revenues in player payroll, and if they can’t pay their taxes, that’s just too bad for the rest of the country’s taxpayers.

Am I wrong? And does anyone find that disturbing?

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MLS, the state of (abridged)

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s try to wrap up a tempestuous day in North American soccer …

The D.C. Council cast aside its mourning for Marion Barry long enough for a heated discussion and vote on (and, mercifully, in favor of) a D.C. United stadium deal. The NASL announced it will run the owner-deprived Atlanta Silverbacks next year. The W-League (North American version) lost another traditional power in Ottawa.

(Insert gratuitous photo of proposed United stadium here)

And MLS commissioner Don Garber held his annual State of the League press conference in yet another new format, this time relaxing in comfortable chairs in a TV studio with a roomful of journalists who just happened to be affiliated with MLS rights-holding organizations.

Fans at least had a roundabout way into the room. They could ask questions on social media while Amanda Vandervort, the meta-guru for social media in the U.S. soccer community, sorted through everything. That was a thankless job.

Even when things are going pretty well for a sports league, you’re always going to see a bit of snark floating around. Just imagine what Vandervort’s NFL analogue would have to see if Roger Goodell tried this format.

Garber also made the occasional gaffe or oddball statement. One was simply amusing: In explaining for the umpteenth year why MLS isn’t likely to go to a fall-through-spring European-style calendar, he described the temperature in a prospective MLS city as “minus zero.” I’m not sure what to call that. It’s not a double negative. Maybe a one-and-a-half negative?

The other was more worrying. He said, in an unexpected bit of candor that didn’t sit well with other glowing assessments, that the league isn’t performing financially as well as owners would hope.

That’s apparently not a gaffe per se, because he doubled down on it in talking later with the Associated Press.

From that story:

Garber said the teams and the league are losing more than $100 million combined as they invest in player acquisitions, stadiums and league infrastructure. And he said owners are making financial investments that they were not expecting to still be making at this point.

The possible reactions to that story — some reasonable, some not:

1. This is just posturing for the collective-bargaining talks with the union.

2. This is a conspiracy — there’s no way the league is actually losing that much.

3. This means little — they’re investing a lot of money now in facilities, academies and Designated Players, and while they’re in investment mode, they’re going to deposit a couple of $100 million expansion fees. If MLS wasn’t investing for the future, it would probably turn a profit. SOP for a growing business.

4. Oh crap — everything is collapsing.

5. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! MLS will soon collapse, and we can usher in a new era of American soccer!

I’m inclined to go with 1 and 3, maybe a bit of 2. It’s not unusual for a league commissioner to talk in glowing terms about the league’s prospects moving ahead for the benefit of fans and sponsors, then plead poverty when the players are asking for more money. That said, MLS surely doesn’t have the financial security of better-established leagues.

The root of a lot of MLS debate is that some people are sick of being patient. They didn’t imagine in 1996 that we would be nearly 20 years into this venture and our national team wouldn’t be significantly better. Or that the league would still trot out obscure, unusual policies to get players like Clint Dempsey and Jermaine Jones to the teams they want.

On one hand, we still have to be patient. While D.C. United, NYCFC and a couple of other teams are sorting out their stadium issues, this league is still in start-up mode on some fronts. (So, no, MLS isn’t ready to start promotion and relegation while its teams are still investing on the assumption of being first-division teams — but at least Garber said “not anytime soon” rather than “never,” right?)

On the other hand, it’s disappointing to hear the commissioner going into CBA talks pleading poverty and failing to reassure everyone that the league won’t have a work stoppage. Investing in academies and facilities (and USL teams) is great, but are we really going to go to the brink with current players and risk a work stoppage that would shatter the league’s credibility?

It’s always helpful to remember things can change. So it was a nice coincidence that Vice Sports recently had a piece on a bit of U.S. soccer history — people chasing down collectibles from the glory days of the Major Indoor Soccer League. And that piece linked back to a Frank Deford piece from Sports Illustrated that offered a snapshot of the indoor and outdoor game circa 1983:

This season the NASL, which has atrophied to 12 franchises (from 24 in 1980) but still managed to lose that $25 million in 1982, permitted three of its franchises—Chicago, San Diego and Golden Bay—to field teams in the MISL as well. The toothpaste is out, and it’s never going back in the tube. Whenever the two leagues achieve some form of consolidation, it will be the NASL that must end up as the subsidiary partner. Already Samuels acknowledges that next year two or three more of his outdoor franchises will want to play indoors, too. Lee Stern, the owner of the Sting, which now plays in both leagues, says, “There’s no way pro soccer can survive anymore in this country without indoor soccer.” And Bob Bell, Stern’s counterpart with the San Diego Sockers, says, “I’m convinced now that indoor will be what makes soccer in the U.S.”

There is, however, no way of knowing yet whether indoor soccer can do what hockey failed to do—win national acceptance and network contracts and become America’s fourth major professional team sport. But for better or worse, it’s becoming clearer all the time that if soccer does succeed as a spectator sport in the U.S., it will be the indoor brand that will thrive.(*)

Sure, soccer fans these days may think of Deford as the curmudgeonly vestige of old-school anti-soccer cynicism. But this piece was written more than 30 years ago. And at the time, it certainly seemed like he had a point.(**)

About 15 years ago, reasonable people thought women’s soccer would outpace men’s soccer as a big-time sport in the USA. Then 13 years ago, MLS nearly died, struggling to turn the corner from its debt-ridden start as the recession kicked in.

So things can change rather quickly in soccer. In the time it took Landon Donovan to go from youth prodigy to retiree, we’ve seen European soccer go from the occasional ESPN/Fox Sports World curiosity to big-time U.S. programming. We’ve seen MLS expand to 20 teams while only losing three along the way, a record not many leagues can match in their first two decades. We now see kids walking around wearing Beckham, Messi, Rooney and Dempsey jerseys.

When I checked in about the Garber quote with someone at MLS, asking specifically whether fans should be worried, what I got back was, “Don’t worry — MLS isn’t going anywhere.” And yes, it’s unlikely that the whole thing would go belly-up. But it faces a challenge in terms of thriving in an ultracompetitive environment. The USA is one of the few countries in which soccer isn’t the dominant sport (Australia, Ireland, India, Pakistan, maybe China, Japan and Indonesia), and it’s one of the few leagues in the world in which its domestic fans are repeatedly badgered for supporting the league at all.

Fans cannot take MLS’s future success for granted. Nor can MLS take it for granted. With all the long-term investment in place, MLS isn’t exactly complacent, but it’s time to get creative — or in some cases to just take off the training wheels.

What about actual free agency? What about a nice pay raise for first-team players? How about replacing the muddy allocation system with a simpler revenue-sharing plan that makes teams pay into a general pool when they splash out on a big contract?

And why aren’t we closer to a CBA at this point, just 82 days before D.C. United is expected to field a team in the CONCACAF quarterfinals?

(Also in the State of the League roundtable, Rob Stone won fans and admirers by holding Garber’s feet to the fire on NYCFC and LAFC’s lack of concrete stadium plans, Garber wants to press onward to 24 teams but isn’t thinking of anything beyond that, the commissioner tossed out a neat idea for aligning the final meaningful games of the MLS regular season at the same time and getting the best ones on TV with NFL-style “flex” scheduling, and the 12-team playoff might not be happening after all. See RSL Soapbox for the rundown.)

Footnotes:

* – Indoor soccer has its own issues at the moment.

** – The whole story is a recommended read. It has some amusing anachronisms (hey, remember when SI and The New York Times set the sports agenda for the nation?), but some of the arguments over special treatment for American and Canadian players are still ongoing.

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Tripping back through soccer-chatting archives

Posted on by Beau Dure

Seems fitting that a new-ish soccer site would launch by paying tribute to the early days of online soccer-gabbing.

That’s exactly what Jason Davis, Trevor Hayward and a new site called Backheel did. And they were nice enough to include my thoughts, along with those of several others who were part of the wild roller-coaster of sharing soccer information and discussion on this newfangled thing called the Internet.

Bruce McGuire, the man behind the DuNord blog and its terrific daily news wrap, has long called soccer “the sport of the Internet.” And there’s no doubt the Internet gave soccer a huge boost. (I’ve covered two sports that thrived in new media — soccer and MMA. Coincidentally, Bruce is also a fan of both.)

The old North American Soccer mailing list was full of lively and occasionally pointed discussions. But it was also a clearinghouse for information you weren’t likely to get elsewhere. If you wanted a report on an A-League game, you weren’t likely to find one unless the local paper had (A) an interest in covering its local team and (B) a fully functional website. Thanks to NAS, you’d have one waiting in your inbox with a subject line like “NAS Carolina-Rochester (R) – another brawl breaks out.”

From there, people branched out. They formed independent news sites, trying to fill the void in coverage on events like the U.S. Open Cup. They flocked to BigSoccer, where a lot of us spent our Saturday mornings giving each other updates on European games with U.S. players. (Hey, Joe-Max is getting in the game for Everton!) Some of us working at smaller papers got jobs at bigger papers and started sneaking more and more soccer coverage onto the websites.

And this was itself a branch of rec.sport.soccer, which had compiled a simple and comprehensive archive of global results that’s still up on the web in its 1995-HTML glory.

We also had a wonderful sense of serendipity. Look at the topics covered on a typical day in 1995: A-League results and tables (including one in 3-1-0 format, which the league wasn’t using), analysis of the U.S. U-23 midfield, a rant on the USISL Boston Storm (with Preston Burpo!), a request to find a bar showing Copa America in Philly, Mexican coaching rumors, etc. Another day has discussion of the as-yet-unnamed New York/New Jersey and Washington MLS teams, the news that Preki had won the CISL’s MVP award, a look ahead to CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, a CISL recap (Dallas Sidekicks drew a league-record 16,427 fans), and this age-old complaint: “If MLS thinks they can sell soccer on artificial turf they are dreaming in technicolor!”

I might be overromanticizing the sense of community we had in those days. We were surely a fractious bunch. We argued about the direction MLS would take and what would happen to the A-League and other then-USL divisions.  But there was a sense that we were all in this together and that a rising tide would lift all boats.

And what I’m not overromanticizing is what a lifeline this was. I could go to Soccernet, which was literally a father-and-son operation at the outset, and check the latest standings in Europe. That, plus the still-indispensable Soccer America, gave me some sense of the context for the broadcast I would hear when I aimed my shortwave radio’s antenna out the window to listen to the BBC.

It’s easy to take everything for granted now. We wake up on the weekends, flip on the TV and listen to Rebecca Lowe hosting NBC’s uber-professional coverage of the Premier League. We have our pick of sites for live scores and lineups. We can dissect games in real time on Twitter. Feedly can scour all of our favorite news sources for the latest stories.

So that community has fractured a bit. Now the East Coasters all hate the smug Cascadians who think they invented soccer supporter culture. MLS isn’t progressing quickly enough for some tastes, and the arguments lead to accusations of self-interest rarely seen this side of the Koch brothers. Everyone thinks he’s the only person in the world who pays attention to the Open Cup and everyone else is out to silence it.

Such things come with progress. And that’s good. MLS would look quite ridiculous playing by the same allocation rules it had in 1996, not to mention the shootout. Lower-division soccer collapsed but is finding its roots again. And the world’s best players are on U.S. TVs almost as often as Spongebob.

The past was fun. The present and future are even better.

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The never-ending quest for youth soccer talent

Posted on by Beau Dure

Paul Tenorio of the Orlando Sentinel has a must-read piece for anyone interested in U.S. soccer development: Alianza soccer program exposes overlooked Latino youth to elite training opportunities.

The details are worth reading, but for purposes of continuing without plagiarism, here’s the gist of it: A program called Alianza de Futbol is finding young Hispanic players in the USA who may not have had an opportunity to play elite youth ball.

In reading it, I thought of two people who nearly fell through the cracks:

– Andy Najar. Coincidentally, Tenorio wrote about his high school team adjusting to losing him to D.C. United. After moving from Honduras to Alexandria, Va., he was “discovered” playing pickup soccer at school.

– Clint Dempsey. He played a lot of pickup soccer and only made it big in club soccer when his family started making the lengthy drives to get him to Dallas.

No, Dempsey isn’t Hispanic, as far as I know. So this isn’t simply a question of ethnicity.

And Dempsey’s story may be more emblematic of the basic problem with U.S. youth development: This is a really, really big country. You’re not likely to have elite clubs everywhere. The next great soccer player could be in North Dakota, his or her parents drawn northward by the energy boom. He or she could be busing tables in New Mexico. Or in the inner city, geographically close to large clubs but financially and socially miles away. They could even be in a comfortable suburb but unable to make the time commitment to a major travel club because both parents are working and can’t drive them all over creation to practice and play 3-5 days/nights a week.

It’s not as if U.S. Soccer isn’t making an effort to find them. From Tenorio’s story:

The Alianza showcases are similar to the larger scale efforts of U.S. soccer to reach some of the same communities. U.S. soccer stages several hundred free “training centers” per year in cities across the country to identify players outside of its academy structure.

That’s good. It’ll never be enough.

And that’s one reason why I think soccer people need to pay a bit more attention to high school soccer. Not everyone can make the time and money commitment to play club soccer. High school soccer just extends the time a student spends on school grounds, which is actually a good thing for parents who are often scrambling to get kids home in mid-afternoon.

Another factor in scouting youth: As much as we don’t like to admit it, good athletes can sometimes pick up soccer skills in a hurry. I see kids in my U11 rec league who are new to soccer but have quickly progressed past players who have been in “travel” since they were 9. Some of those kids will play travel; some won’t. But we may see them at tryouts for the high school team.

And you see it among older players. When I took my E license class, one of the other students was a young Hispanic guy who drew attention with a 40-yard blast off a crossbar and his ability to leap for a header and snap his body like a salmon twisting in midair. Did he play in college? Sort of. He played basketball.

Stereotyping, as a lot of well-intentioned but arrogant coaches and pundits so often do, doesn’t help the search for talent. (No, coach — your inner-city program, as nice as it may be, is not the sole force pushing a revolution in the U.S. talent pool.) The next great player could be kicking around on a dirt field in the exurbs. Or playing basketball. So the pool has to be vast, broad and diverse — and not just along ethnic lines.

Where does this leave the Development Academy, which comes off as a bureaucratic ogre in Tenorio’s piece on Alianza? As much as Jurgen Klinsmann and company may try, it will never, ever be the only path to elite soccer.

As long as we remember that, the Academy will be fine. Just remember to keep those players humble so they don’t freak out when some kid from the streets of Nacogdoches, Alexandria or Rogers (Arkansas, home of the player in Tenorio’s lead) turns out to be their equal in the talent pool.

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My retirement from the soccer culture wars

Posted on by Beau Dure

The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates is alleged to have said in Plato’s telling of the story. Shortly thereafter, Socrates said his last words: “I drank what?”

If you prefer more modern fare, picture Jules at the diner near the end of Pulp Fiction. “I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.”

I had a couple of moments like that yesterday. It all started innocently enough — a well-intentioned but ill-advised campaign from a few soccer media types (not including me) to tweet roughly the same thing about the MLS playoffs fed the conspiracy theories in certain quarters of Twitter that all reporters who cover MLS are the soccer equivalent of pro wrestling broadcasters. We’re part of the “show,” in certain circles.

Of course, that conversation spread to well-trod pathways of discussion. And as I mentioned in my latest dispatches from the soccer culture wars, we’ve seen evolution at play among the culture warriors. We have reasonable strains and unreasonable strains.

Yesterday’s conversations brought out some reasonable people. It also brought out some of the most virulent people in the conversation. Like Ebola, they aren’t particularly contagious, but they’re intent on wreaking as much damage as possible.

So when I found myself patiently explaining to someone that the USA does indeed have a considerable number of journalists who cover MLS for outlets other then MLSSoccer.com, I asked myself: “I drank what?” I’m not sure what sort of conversation I can really have with someone who deals in such absolutes (insert “Sith lord” joke here) that all journalists who cover MLS are part of the league structure, and England has only “independent” media.

Oh … right. Those guys. Or those who pay for interviews.

Anyway, after talking offline with a couple of people yesterday, I no longer think such conversations are necessary.

Were they ever necessary, or at least productive? Years ago, perhaps. And recently, I had started to think we needed to talk about these things because the culture wars were seeping off Twitter and into the mainstream of sorts. The New York Times and the NASL have taken a few fringe elements seriously. The soccer mag Howler is doing a piece on He Who Shall Not Be Named (a well-known Twitter persona who asks journalists questions along the lines of “When did you stop kicking your dog?”). So these discussions are getting into the public forum. And a basic function of journalism, one that’s being forgotten these days, into keep inserting facts into the public forum and to challenge incorrect information. It’s why PolitiFact is such an important news outlet.

But so much of the discussion in the soccer culture wars has little to do with the actual issues at hand. We’ve discussed pro/rel to death. We all talk about single entity, but I’m not sure anyone understands it other than MLS executive Mark Abbott.

Much of it is just character assassination. It’s not fun to leave such things unchecked so that someone just joining the discussion on Twitter hears and, at least initially, believes that mainstream reporters are all puppets of Don Garber. But what’s the point in talking with someone who refuses to listen to things I know, first-hand, to be true?

https://twitter.com/duretalk/status/528213669696782336

Some people, often but not always young, have legitimate questions about how MLS came to be the way it is and why it’s staying that way for the foreseeable future. For them, conversations about promotion/relegation, single entity and other idiosyncrasies are new. Unfortunately, some of them find and fall under the influence of the fringe elements online. Some of them resist such lunacy, and they’re actually fun to talk to.

But Twitter, along with many open discussion forums, just isn’t a good venue for that conversation. As I’ve said a few times, the well has been poisoned.

I personally don’t need to be involved in it, for the following reasons:

1. I’ve said everything I know. It’s either in my book, Long-Range Goals, or on my blog.

2. I’m not even doing much on MLS these days. I spent much of 2013 working on a book about the Washington Spirit. I’ve written about various topics for OZY, a general-interest site I’d recommend checking out even if I didn’t write for them. And I’m working on a book on youth soccer.

3. For all the Twitter hoopla, we’re getting no closer to fundamental changes in how professional soccer operates in the USA and Canada.

If the NASL chooses to seek out the tinfoil fan base with a few encouraging words about pro/rel and some sort of MLS ankle-biting, that’s their decision. NASL’s gonna NASL. Those issues aside, the NASL has some terrific talent from the playing field to the club offices, and all I can do is wish them well. And maybe point out that the good crowds at Indy are probably there not because they’re making a grand statement about soccer business models but because (A) they like soccer and (B) Peter Wilt knows how to run a soccer team.

Within U.S. soccer circles, very little has changed. We’ve had umpteen new MLS owners in the past decade, and still Don Garber, speaking on behalf of the owners that hired him, says an absolute “no” to promotion/relegation. MLS is going to try to improve by investing in youth soccer to increasing degrees and trying to attract better and better players.

So if you’re looking for one legitimate issue of conversation that isn’t just idle talk, it would be the upcoming CBA talks. The salary cap will go up, but how much? Will players get more freedom, perhaps full-fledged free agency? Will the allocation system, already far removed from the days of centralized planning from the league office, drop out of existence? Those are interesting topics, and you may find me talking about them here or on Twitter.

But promotion/relegation, which I’ve already steered away from? The evils of MLS? Corporate manipulation of the now-sprawling and diverse U.S. soccer media?

Yeah. I’m done. I’ve had that moment of clarity or examined my life or whichever reference you prefer. And I’m not drinking the hemlock or the Kool-Aid or anything else.

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soccer

The annual request to change the MLS playoff format

Posted on by Beau Dure

This is how the MLS playoffs should be. Home teams listed first.

ROUND 1

East
#1 D.C. United – #2 New England
#3 Columbus – #4 New York, loser eliminated

West
#1 Seattle – #2 Los Angeles
#3 Salt Lake – #4 Dallas, loser eliminated

ROUND 2

East
D.C. United-New England loser vs. Columbus-New York winner

West
Seattle-Los Angeles loser vs. Salt Lake-Dallas winner

SEMIFINALS

East
D.C. United-New England winner vs. Round 2 winner

West
Seattle-Los Angeles winner vs. Round 2 winner

FINAL

East winner vs. West winner (or vice versa)

—

It’s called the Page playoff system (or a slight variant thereof). Every seed gets a unique reward. The top two teams in each conference get a second chance if they lose their first game. The first-place team gets to host that game. The second-place team hosts the next game. The winner of their game hosts the semifinal. The third-place team hosts its first game.

Cool, isn’t it?

You could mix it up a bit if you like. Maybe the losers switch conferences so no team plays another one twice.

I’ve been pushing it for years. Not stopping now.

 

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