Tag: nasl

pro soccer

How the USA can do promotion and relegation better than England

Posted on by Beau Dure

BEAU: Riccardo Silva offered MLS $4 billion for media rights if it would institute promotion/relegation? And people like Jeff Carlisle have already done the heavy lifting in reporting what did and didn’t happen? Great! Time to do a quick opinion piece.

BEAU’S CONSCIENCE: What are we, all clickbait now? You know that offer was just a PR stunt. MLS can’t negotiate its media rights for several years, by which both Silva’s team and David Beckham’s proposed team may literally be underwater thanks to climate change and everyone may be watching sports on AmazonTube. 

BEAU: Well aren’t WE Debbie Downer this morning! Come on — we’ve been saying for years that pro/rel talk is just an academic argument until people put their money where their mouths are. Now they are! It’s not just Silva — Peter Wilt is planning a Division 3 league that would evolve into the cornerstone of a pro/rel pyramid. The reasonable voices are winning.

BEAU’S CONSCIENCE: We’ve tried to be reasonable for years. We all know the drill: 

  1. Something “new” happens in the world of pro/rel.
  2. You write a blog post dissecting the nonsense arguments — MLS is conspiring to keep soccer smaller than the NFL, a lack of pro/rel is the only thing keeping the USA from dominating world soccer, etc. — and STILL suggest a way to ease into a pro/rel pyramid.
  3. No one pays attention except Twitter trolls whose lives are so pathetic that they try to goad you into pro/rel arguments months after the fact. And then newbies pop up lecturing you about “Economics 101,” as if you haven’t been following sports business since before these dudes were born.

You’re just trying to stir something up so people will notice your new podcast, you sellout. 

BEAU: You mean Ranting Soccer Dad? It just so happens we’ve booked a guest on promotion/relegation for Aug. 10. 

BEAU’S CONSCIENCE: Is it someone reasonable, at least?

BEAU: It’s a Twitter troll who keeps accusing me of being on the MLS payroll to keep down pro/rel even though it’s been about 15 years since I wrote the MLSNet fantasy column and I keep coming up with plans FOR pro/rel.

(silence)

BEAU: No, I’m kidding. Geez, lighten up! It’ll be a rare chance to have a *substantive discussion* with someone who is actually doing something to make pro/rel a reality.

BEAU’S CONSCIENCE: Fine. Whatever. And I suppose today you’re going to suggest a modification to your latest pro/rel plan that no one will discuss?

BEAU: Glad you asked! Here goes …

I still like my last plan, especially given the number of viable MLS expansion candidates at the moment. The executive summary:

  • Division 1: 16 teams, single table, no playoffs (see separate Cup competition), bottom three clubs relegated.
  • Division 2: Initially 14-16 teams in one table but eventually splitting into regions with minimal playoffs. Promotion to D1 but no forced relegation to D3, at least not based on a single season’s results. Clubs can always self-relegate if they can’t compete at D2 — this is an alternative to folding.
  • Division 3: The top tier of regional pyramids. D3 clubs must meet professional standards. D1/D2 reserve teams are eligible to play (as in Europe, you pseudo-purist know-nothings). No automatic promotion to D2, but clubs can apply to move up based on performance on and off the field.
  • Division 4: The highest a club can climb while still remaining amateur (which many clubs will opt to do). Some pro (or semi-pro) clubs as well.
  • Then each league can go lower as it sees fit, just as current amateur leagues have multiple tiers.

I believe I mentioned a Cup competition to replace MLS Cup. This will have 12 teams — eight from Division 1, three from Division 2, and the team from Division 3 that progressed the farthest in the Open Cup.

So why does the clickbait headline say we can do pro/rel better than England? Here’s why:

Until recently, England kept a strict barrier between “League” and “Non-League.” The Non-League clubs could apply to replace the last-place League club (92nd on the four-division English ladder), but they rarely were admitted. Now they’re a bit more fluid, with a fifth tier (formerly called the Conference, now called the National League just to confuse everyone) that’s professional-ish.

We can do it better by being more flexible in Division 3 (and to an extent in Division 2). As more clubs are able to move from amateur to professional, we can add more D3 regional leagues.

For decades, professional soccer in England was a zero-sum game. Add one club, and you had to subtract another.

Leaving Division 3 open-ended gives every club a chance to move into the professional ranks when they demonstrate that they’re ready to do so.

And THAT will help youth soccer, too. More professional clubs. More academies.

So we’ll talk about it in more detail on the Ranting Soccer Dad podcast, assuming my conscience doesn’t take revenge somehow for grabbing the third rail of U.S. soccer once again.

Also: I’m doing a survey. If you are a coach or general manager of a USL, NASL, NPSL, PDL, WPSL, UWS, UPSL or high-level USASA team and have not received a survey by the end of the day, please check with your communications manager (to whom I’m emailing the surveys). If that person didn’t receive one, let me know.

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soccer

Division 2 soccer: Just get on with it!

Posted on by Beau Dure

Two months ago, would anyone have bet on the former Carolina Railhawks landing an NWSL team before the men’s team got out of divisional limbo?

The news that the Western New York Flash will be moving to the Triangle (reported overnight by FourFourTwo, with follow-ups from local soccer-media veterans in Rochester and the Triangle) has shocked the women’s soccer world. Many of us are struggling for coherent responses. The NWSL has been stable through four seasons, adding two teams and moving/losing none. Now the defending champions, a holdover from previous WoSo leagues, have skipped town.

But it also puts some focus on the current turmoil in the lower divisions of men’s professional soccer, which has dragged on and on and on …

In fact, both ends of the Flash-to-Carolina move are still awaiting news on divisional sanctioning. The USL, which includes the Rochester Rhinos, seemed all but set to move up to the second division while the NASL, which includes NCFC (for now — they’re bidding for MLS expansion), was all but dead.

Thanks to the indomitable Peter Wilt, the NASL may no longer be dead. It also may no longer be the NASL, but something with six or seven or 20 teams may continue to occupy the second tier of the U.S. soccer’s pyramid next year.

Now that it’s January, it’s pretty clear whatever happens with D2 and D3 men’s soccer next year will be a stopgap. NASL 3.1 will need to follow through on those expansion plans if it wants to keep fending off the USL for D2 status, and I’m under no illusions that the USA will suddenly go to pro/rel in lower divisions, as much as I think the plans are getting more and more realistic.

And there are some legitimate issues that confuse things here — business models, league ownership groups, etc.

But the longer the divisional-sanctioning and NASL-Walking Dead sagas drag out, the absurd it looks.

Attendance isn’t the only measure of a soccer club’s health, but when you look at Kenn Tomasch’s diligently gathered attendance tables, it’s easy to spot the clubs that really ought to be playing each other at the D2 level:

  • FC Cincinnati (USL)
  • Sacramento Republic (USL)
  • Indy Eleven (NASL)
  • Louisville City (USL)
  • San Antonio FC (USL)
  • Tampa Bay Rowdies (leaving NASL for USL)
  • Ottawa Fury FC (leaving NASL for USL)
  • Miami FC (NASL, though wild spending may be an issue)
  • North Carolina FC (NASL, formerly Carolina Railhawks)
  • Oklahoma City Energy FC (USL)
  • Saint Louis FC (USL)

Add the San Francisco Deltas, the NASL expansion team, and that’s 12. Then pick from a few more possibilities:

  • Richmond Kickers (USL, two decades and counting, just made a facility deal to make roots even stronger but has had pragmatic approach counter to, say, the New York Cosmos)
  • New York Cosmos (NASL, with an apparent white knight bidding to save the team and perhaps with it the entire league)
  • Rochester Rhinos (USL, which once averaged more than 10,000 fans and now has its name on the stadium it has been sharing with the Flash)
  • Charleston Battery (USL — like the Rhinos and Kickers, a staple of lower-division soccer with a good place to play)

That’s 12-16 teams. That’s a viable league out of the gate, and it should attract more teams.

So the message here should be clear:

Just get it done.

Whatever you have to do — give USL’s league owners a stake in D2 revenues, drop the twice-poisoned NASL name, keep the strangely alluring NASL name, pay lip service to promotion/relegation as the NASL has done for a few years … whatever.

Because if there’s one coherent lesson from U.S. soccer history, it’s this: Soccer Wars are not a good thing.

Someone needs to play peacemaker and dealmaker. The sooner, the better.

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soccer

The 2017 pyramid plan (and pro/rel myths)

Posted on by Beau Dure

In many ways, 2016 was the year the promotion/relegation movement grew up. The shifting landscape, with MLS pushing its expansion plans and the lower divisions getting a makeover, could make such a system more feasible. And some rational folks made a serious effort to wrest control of the movement from the conspiracy theorists and random hate-mongers who have dominated the discussion for too long, like so:

https://twitter.com/DanLoney36/status/813771705801998340

(I’m less skeptical than Dan, having had some decent conversations with some people this year. And yes, a few random dudes who seem to be into soccer more for the feeling of geek superiority than any actual enjoyment of the sport.)

We even have people who have decided concrete steps toward a traditional pyramid might be something other than just yelling at people like me who are nowhere near the decision-makers. Check tech entrepreneur/NPSL team owner Dennis Crowley or the UPSL, which intends to take pro/rel beyond local amateur leagues to a regional semi-pro league. And you can find a few earnest attempts to suggest modified pro/rel, at least as a transition to a more traditional approach down the road.

Of course, that’s not enough for the most zealous pro/rel advocates — or “pro/relouts,” in Steve Holroyd’s terms.

But I’ll offer up a guide for newbies, explaining why those people deserve no attention, a little later in this post.

What I’ll offer up here is an idea for, say, 2020. It includes promotion/relegation at several levels, eventually leading to a pyramid that’s at least as “open” as the one in the Netherlands.

First, let’s define some goals: 

  1. Stability. We don’t want to lose more clubs. We want clubs to have the confidence to build new facilities and invest in youth academies. We want fans to be assured their local club will be there in some form.
  2. Good competition with meaningful games. Exciting and demanding. Those are sometimes mutually exclusive, as anyone who’s ever watched a dour late-season slugfest between two relegation-threatened bus-parkers can attest. (Or a very tentative Cup final, which isn’t just an MLS thing.) But the good usually outweighs the bad.
  3. Fans’ dreams. One of the allures of pro/rel is the notion that a smaller club may one day work its way up the pyramid. The drawback in a lot of leagues around the world is that only a couple of clubs have a reasonable shot at the championship. Ideally, we’d let fans dream about both. (Yes, I know — Leicester City. A classic case of the exception proving the rule.)
  4. Simplicity. My previous attempts at this have been too complicated.

Now here’s an unusual premise, at least in terms of U.S. soccer history:

  1. Distinct “league” and “Cup” events. This gives us a chance to do some intradivisional matches in Cup play, mitigating risk by making it more likely that a “D2” club’s fans will still get a chance to see Giovinco, Morris, etc., in meaningful games.

THE PLAN

League structure:

Division 1: 16 teams, single-table, double round-robin.  League champion crowned in late May/early June (depending on World Cup, Copa America or Gold Cup timing). No playoffs. Bottom three relegated to Division 2.

Division 2: Initially 14-16 teams, mimicking Division 1, but might expand and break into regions — perhaps a 20- or 22-team league in which teams play each team in their region twice and every other team once. Then minimal playoffs — maybe two regional champions play for league title while two regional runners-up play for promotion place.

Divisions 3, 4, maybe 5: Regional pyramids. D1/D2 reserve teams are eligible to play. Structure can vary by region depending on travel needs, climate and other logistics. (Just see how often England has reconfigured leagues at D6-D10 level, and in that case, we’re talking about “travel” that U.S. workers would consider “commutes.”) Promotion and relegation is common, but Division 3 clubs must meet professional standards. Clubs that wish to remain amateur can still go as high as Division 4.

U.S. Open Cup structure:

The biggest change would be condensing much of it to the summer. Early rounds would be played during whatever major international tournament is going on. Late rounds would be played before college season starts, giving PDL and NPSL teams a chance to make runs. Condensing it may also drive up interest — the current Cup suffers from its long dormant periods between rounds.

MLS or U.S. Pro or Anschutz or Wilt or Garber … actually, let’s make it the Eddie Pope Cup:

First round overlaps with regular-season play in October/November. Two-leg aggregate until neutral-site warm-weather final on Dec. 24.

Twelve (12) qualifiers:

  • Top four teams from Division 1 get byes. (Side benefit: At least two of them will also be in CONCACAF play, so the byes will limit fixture congestion. A little.)
  • The next four teams from Division 1 qualify.
  • The top three teams from Division 2 (each of whom has also been promoted) also qualify.
  • The remaining spot goes to whichever professional team advanced the farthest in the Open Cup. (Clubs may opt to pass, in which case the spot goes to the next-best Open Cup team.)

The calendar

January: Winter break, secondary transfer window.

Early/mid-February: Friendlies in warm-weather venues.

March-May: D1 plays 15 league games. D2 roughly the same. D1/D2 champions crowned. Regional leagues play some league games and some Open Cup qualifying rounds.

June-July: International break and several Open Cup rounds. Also potential here for friendlies or mini-Cups within regions — maybe three D1/D2 clubs and the reigning champion of the nearest D3 region, for example.

July-August: Primary transfer window.

August: Open Cup final and start of D1/D2 league play.

August-November: D1 plays 15 league games along with any CONCACAF or early-round Pope Cup games.

December: Pope Cup semifinals and final.

The rules

Sounds almost like England, doesn’t it? The exceptions are that the League Cup analogue should draw a bit more attention, while the FA Cup analogue bows to the reality of amateur teams dependent on college players.

But we’re going to add a few policies that should ease the transition from the MLS single entity and mitigate risk.

  1. Salaries are limited by a “luxury tax” akin to baseball. This gives clubs the freedom to keep together a “superclub” but forces revenue-sharing so other clubs have a chance of keeping up.
  2. Division 1 and Division 2 clubs have shares in SUM.
  3. Clubs own their own trademarks. If a club is no longer capable of competing at the Division 2 level, it is permitted to self-relegate to Division 3.

So that’s the plan. Enjoy. Modify. Debate. It’s a trial balloon. And I plan to do some reporting in the next year to see how much of it is feasible.

THE REALITY CHECK

I like this plan. I really do.

But if it doesn’t come to pass, you know what I’m not going to do? I’m not going to accuse everyone who speaks up against it of being part of some shadowy conspiracy. I’m not going to hold my breath until my face turns blue or sneer at supporters of MLS clubs, Liga MX clubs or whomever.

Because I’m not one of the people — MLS club owners, sponsors, etc. — who has invested millions of dollars into the sport and is looking at the books while bearing responsibility not just for my own investment but for the livelihoods of employees and the credibility of the sport.

It’s really easy to spend other people’s money. It’s a little more difficult to risk your own. That’s why MLS is structured the way it is, and it’s why the NASL never got anywhere close to its goal of attracting so much investment that it would become a de facto top-flight league with so many clubs that it would simply have to do pro/rel.

The NASL had several years to build its sought-after fan base of U.S. soccer supporters hungry for an alternative to MLS. Those fans didn’t care that MLS had the “D1” tag and the NASL did not. And the NASL was free to find sponsors who believed in its model.

It failed.

A few clubs like Indy and Carolina (along with a handful of USL clubs) figured out how to fit their markets well, and one of my goals with the plan I’ve put forth is to give those clubs a clear path to follow Seattle, Portland, Montreal and other “promoted” clubs into Division 1 and all it entails.

Most people understand this reality. Some don’t — at least not yet. Some are beyond hope — they’re clinging to the age-old claim to hipster superiority for loving a sport that the people around them are too stupid to comprehend, like the tedious people we all knew in college who insisted R.E.M. recorded nothing worthwhile after Fables of the Reconstruction. (Coincidentally, Leaving New York just popped up on my Spotify shuffle. Beautiful song.)

But some people are well-intentioned. Some are newer to the conversation — younger, or perhaps new to the sport or to the USA.

And rather than repeat and rehash the myths that have long driven pro/rel talk in this country in 140-character bites on Twitter, I’m going to summarize them here. (Again.)

 

THE MYTHS

Lack of pro/rel is the only thing keeping us from overhauling England, Mexico, etc.

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? And no one directly says it that way. It’s generally more like “Why do you think Manchester United is more popular than Columbus?”

I can think of many reasons:

  1. History. The recovery from Munich.  Decades of brilliance under Busby and Ferguson.
  2. Three European championships.
  3. Twenty top-tier championships.
  4. Global brand-building. Their shirts are all over the world. They get money from that and from global television.
  5. Good players, many bought with the money they’ve accumulated from 1-4.
  6. The name “Nobby Stiles.”

It’s not because they were relegated in 1974.

But promotion and relegation make clubs better because they have to compete to avoid the drop!

It’s more incentive for the yo-yo clubs, sure. But even that has pros and cons. In MLS, a team playing out the string with no hope of making the playoffs (which rarely happens until the last month) can try out young players and give veterans one last shot to prove they should come back. In the EPL, you have Aston Villa last season and Swansea this year. Just wretched.

In any case, this assumption would be stronger if I saw the occasional Sunderland shirt. U.S. supporters love Liverpool, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Celtic and other clubs that aren’t going to get relegated unless they financially implode (Rangers). Those clubs are historical powers that are difficult to dislodge because they have the confidence to spend freely, knowing they ain’t dropping from the money leagues. (Which is actually why you sometimes hear calls for a two-tier Premier League to spread the TV money a little more broadly.)

I do enjoy the Eric Wynalda story about an angry player throwing a boot in a German locker room. Then again, I’ve seen a whiteboard with a freshly punched hole in it in an MLS locker room after an early-season game.

MLS, SUM and U.S. Soccer are conspiring to keep down promotion and relegation!

MLS was founded because FIFA demanded a legitimate First Division league as a condition for hosting the World Cup. Hosting the World Cup is an odd thing to do for a country that doesn’t want anything to threaten the NFL.

If they thought pro/rel was the best business model moving forward, they’d do it. They’ve yet to be convinced, despite all those years of … people yelling at journalists on Twitter. Gee, I thought that would’ve worked.

But they’re all NFL owners

Only a few, and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that Seattle’s partnership with the Seahawks has been a worse deal than Chicago’s partnership with nobody. And a lot of these owners just love sports. Stan Kroenke has ownership interest in MLS, the NBA, the NHL, the NLL, the NFL … and Arsenal. Lamar Hunt is in three Halls of Fame — soccer, American football and tennis.

Soccer United Marketing is … evil

Hey, the U.S. women’s soccer team has some questions about SUM as well. It’s an easy target. Its books are private, and there’s little question that the goal is to get a piece of the action of any soccer in the USA, televised and/or at U.S. venues.

That said, MLS would have collapsed in 2002 without it, and it has helped lure tons of new investors. And if you think U.S. pro soccer would’ve somehow been better off if MLS had gone under in 2002, I don’t think you’ll find many people who know the facts and agree with you. Soccer was a risky investment in the USA for a long time. Still is, to some extent.

SUM, like MLS itself, was designed to mitigate risk. That’s because everything that had come before it had died before it even had enough clubs to think about pro/rel.

You’re just a paid MLS shill 

A sample:

https://twitter.com/againstMLS/status/815249625934417920

https://twitter.com/againstMLS/status/815241130203815937

https://twitter.com/stevesharptonfc/status/815373967997353985

(I didn’t know I was supposed to finish my D license and then coach a U10 travel team as a prerequisite to writing.)

I’m not sure what else I can do to prove otherwise. Maybe I should take pictures of all my mail every day to show that there’s no paycheck from MLS or SUM? Shall I release my bank records?

I hardly even write about MLS any more. Since I left USA TODAY (where I was already writing far more about UFC than MLS) in 2010, my freelance work has been much more in women’s soccer than men’s. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It’s just that if ESPN emails and asks if you want to go to Germany for the Women’s World Cup, you’re not likely to say, “But I’ll miss three D.C. United games.”

My Twitter feed is diverse. I do much more unpaid shilling for curling and biathlon than I do for MLS. I haven’t counted tweets, but I probably tweeted more in the past three years about Liverpool than I have about any MLS club.

I haven’t been in an MLS pressbox or interviewed an MLS player in a couple of years, so you can’t even raise the “access” argument.

As for others — even TV personalities who are paid to talk about MLS don’t shut down controversy. Alexi Lalas loves debate. Eric Wynalda pushes the fall/spring schedule every chance he gets. Taylor Twellman spends about half of each game broadcast griping about the refs.

You may find a lot of people in journalism or just randomly on Twitter who happen to think soccer in the USA is better with MLS than it would be without it. It’s fair to say MLS isn’t paying all of them.

For the record — I wrote a few fantasy soccer columns for MLSNet (the forerunner of MLSSoccer.com) about 15 years ago. I believe they were run by MLB Advanced Media at the time, and that hasn’t stopped me from saying mean things about baseball. I also wrote a book on MLS history that probably would’ve sold a lot more if it had been more controversial. Maybe we’ll get pro/rel in my lifetime and I can write a sequel.

Or maybe the whole pro/rel controversy is good for my sales? So says a fellow soccer historian who has worked for the Cosmos:

(I love this tweet, David.) 

And here’s the funny thing: I’ve written many posts suggesting ways for pro/rel advocates to move forward and others suggesting actual transition plans (and so on).

U.S. journalists know nothing about the global game

Sports Illustrated and ESPN have gone global in a big way. Fox’s main analysts — Lalas, Wynalda, Brad Friedel — all played in major European leagues, so they just might know a little more than your typical pedantic youth soccer coach on Twitter.

Personally, I grew up with Soccer Made In Germany on PBS. Then I listened to shortwave radio and fussed with my antenna to see if Coventry City had managed to escape again — or I browsed the league tables in Soccer America.

These days, we can just wake up and flip on the TV to watch the Premier League or the Bundesliga. If we have the right cable package, we can watch any live game from the Premier League or the Champions League. (Which is not as easy to do in a lot of other countries.)

We get the concept of promotion/relegation. We just have access to a lot of other facts that point out why it hasn’t happened … yet. (Well, it did a little in the late 90s with the USISL, and it’s part of many amateur leagues.)

There’s no reason the USA should be different from the rest of the world

But it is. Read whatever history book you like — Soccer in a Football World by the late, great Dave Wangerin is the gold standard, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism is also insightful, and a few other books have noted the cultural forces that held back soccer for generations.

The short version: The USA has always been a little insecure about a national identity. We still see it today in our fights over immigration, and those have deep roots. As Dave Chappelle once said (yes, I know I’ve cited this before): “I saw two Irish guys beating an Italian guy — these people are specific.”

So we invent new sports like basketball. Or we invent creation myths like Abner Doubleday’s “invention” of baseball. Anything to avoid doing things associated with the old country.

As someone who worked in journalism in the 1990s and had to fight for every bit of soccer coverage, I can tell you how ingrained that cultural antipathy really is.

It’s changing, yes. Millennials, generally (but not always) more enlightened about race and ethnicity, have embraced soccer. Kids at my sons’ schools wear plenty of Messi and EPL shirts.

But it has taken a long time. And when you’re evaluating decisions made in 1993 or 2002, you have to bear that in mind.

If we had pro/rel, tons of people would invest in small clubs

This happens on occasion overseas. A tycoon buys a favorite club (say, Hoffenheim) and climbs the ladder. Or a club like AFC Wimbledon replaces a club that moved elsewhere. But it’s not frequent (in part because sagas like Wimbledon-to-Milton Keynes are infrequent, at least outside of Mexico).

Besides, England barely had any clubs move from the fifth tier to the fourth for generations. The Netherlands has barely eased into pro/rel between the two pro divisions and the amateur ranks in the past decade.

Actually, if you want someone to take over your local club and move it up, the current U.S. system works pretty well for that. A lot of current MLS success stories were in lower divisions over the years. But at the same time, a lot of clubs have dropped from the professional ranks to go amateur. It’s cheaper. It’s less risk. They’re not interested in being “promoted” to a professional league in which their teams would be overmatched and they would play a longer schedule in which they couldn’t use college players.

If we can get new leadership at U.S. Soccer, we can make it happen

I’m looking into this. I’ve pored over thousands of pages of U.S. Soccer governance documents. I found nothing about pro/rel discussions and a whole lot about mundane issues like referee certifications.

Whatever you do, though, you can’t simply impose a system that immediately devalues investments that have been built up over the last 20 years. You have to come up with something that works for everyone, which is what I’ve tried to do above. Otherwise, you’re going to be in court for a very long time, and U.S. soccer history shows such battles don’t result in something better.

You also can’t sanction a league that has never been proposed. U.S. Soccer can’t make the NASL and USL play nicely together as is. They’re not in a position to make one relegate to the other. But perhaps, given the current turmoil in lower divisions, there’s an opportunity for the federation to take a leadership role and encourage clubs to come together and try something different.

THE GOOD NEWS

I think pro/rel is much closer to reality than it was 10 years ago. The soccer audience in this country has grown exponentially. MLS may soon have nearly 30 clubs with the infrastructure to play Division 1 soccer, and a handful of lower-division clubs may also be ready to make the leap. And the notion of having national “lower divisions” is proving less and less feasible — better to have regional pyramids.

So my plan is designed to get us partway there. If you think it’s too incremental, may I once again point you to the Netherlands and other countries that have only recently opened the pyramid in full (and even now have some limits and modifications)?

If I had all-encompassing power over soccer in the USA, I’d make my plan happen and then see how it goes. Maybe in a few years, we’d partially open the gate between Division 2 and Division 3, as they did in the Netherlands in the late 2000s. Maybe a few years after that, we could have the system England fully implemented in the last couple of decades.

But it doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen without a lot of capital that has to be raised with sound business plans. And it doesn’t happen by being obnoxious on social media. If it did, we’d surely have a nine-tier pyramid by now with hundreds of fully professional club, and the last I checked, we didn’t.

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soccer

Do U.S. Soccer’s divisional standards make any sense?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Or, to rephrase, are they necessary?

Northern Pitch, an essential soccer blog you should all add to Feedly or Twitter notifications or whatever you use to keep track of things, has a good take on The Broken Logic of USSF’s League Rules. The Northern Pitch folks are in Minnesota with one foot in the NASL and one in MLS, so they have a good perspective on such things.

So, of course, I feel compelled to be nit-picky …

First, the history.

In 2009-2010, the USL–at that time the 2nd division–experienced a schism: owners who wanted to spend more and up the level of the league broke off and formed what would become the NASL. USSF tried to make the two leagues play nice for 2010, but that didn’t last long.

I’d argue that USSF wasn’t trying to make them “play nice” as much as they were “trying to keep these clubs in existence.” Neither the NASL group or the USL group had a critical mass that could sustain a league. USSF, in what you might call a rare bit of common-sense intervention, banded them together for a special edition, one-time only D2 league.

Again, that’s nit-picky and not even all that relevant. The more important part of the history: USSF then unleashed a comprehensive set of standards designed to keep the riff-raff out of pro soccer so we wouldn’t have a revolving door of uncapitalized clubs coming and folding. (If you’re of a certain ilk, you might find such standards an important part of this complete conspiracy theory against promotion and relegation, but in reality, these standards have stabilized things. So well, in fact, that now people really think we can have promotion and relegation sometime soon. See, Alanis? Irony is everywhere.)

But the USSF has decided to upgrade these standards. And they’re run into some pushback, both illegitimate and legitimate.

The NASL has pushed back by unleashing sports lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, last seen in soccer circles drawing the ire of the court by trying to muddy everyone’s understanding of the English league structure, to fire off a nasty note. That’s a bit like bringing in Miley Cyrus to lend credibility to your jazz/prog fusion band — it ain’t gonna work, and it’s surely costing a lot of money.

The Northern Pitch argument is much stronger. Raising the population threshold for 75% of your league to metropolitan areas of 2 million would make a soccer league think twice about going to Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City or other places that easily support major sports teams already. (Charlotte, though, is over 2 million, according to Census estimates.)

And that’s where the USSF looks like it’s just being officious.

It’s not that USSF should ignore population size in its criteria — as one astute commenter points out, market shares are important for TV, and TV may be just as important to long-term league survival as the deep pockets upon which these criteria insist.

But 2 million? Really?

Here’s another argument from former NASL PR man Kartik Krishnaiyer: He asks why we need such divisional designations at all.

And perhaps we don’t. The trick, though, is that we need to apply some sort of criteria, and it’s only sensible to apply different standards to an MLS club than to the Wilmington Hammerheads. (I always use them as an example because I’m still in wonder over the continued existence of professional soccer in the town where I spent my first three years out of college.)

I frankly don’t care what divisional designation the NASL has, and like another astute commenter at Northern Pitch (wow, these guys are lucky), I don’t think the NASL suddenly takes off if the USSF calls it D1. MLS has a pretty big head start.

And I hate to argue with Peter Wilt, who’s a big fan of the folklore of competing sports leagues in other U.S. sports, but I’m not sure I see the NASL being able to offer anything to distinguish itself from MLS. The ABA, AFL and so forth offered up different rules. Can’t do that in the NASL — not without alienating the “everything must be just like Europe!” fan base it apparently covets.

To me, the NASL’s best bet is either (A) start its own pro/rel pyramid and force the issue, as I’ve said a million times before, or (B) just focus on bringing quality soccer to markets MLS isn’t in. (Yes, I still miss my days as the one-man supporters section at Carolina Dynamo A-League games.)

Nor do I find it particularly unfair that the USSF is raising the standards. That’s because I simply don’t know of another federation that is under the obligation to smooth the path for a second D1 league. If I go to England and say I want to form another league system — and I’ll even open it to promotion/relegation through as many tiers as we can, based on how many clubs sign up with me — could I sue the FA if they put up any hurdles to me calling my leagues “Division 1, Division 2, Division 3”?

Now that would confuse the jury from the old MLS lawsuit, wouldn’t it?

 

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Yet another promotion/relegation idea you’ll all ignore

Posted on by Beau Dure

Imagine there’s no NASL. Imagine there’s no USL. The brand names and any baggage associated with them are gone.

Instead, you have the U.S. Pro League. (OK, I’m not good at coming up with names, but I think it should be something generic, and “the Football League” is taken. Maybe just get the sponsor’s name: “The Bud League” or something like that.)

This would be the league that fills the USA’s D2 and D3 designations.

And yes, it would have promotion/relegation.

With caveats. The MLS reserve teams would stay in D3, which would be largely regional. But the top D3 teams could move up to D2, and the bottom D2 teams would drop.

Here’s what we accomplish with this system:

  1. We have a clearly defined top level of play below MLS for clubs that aren’t quite ready for MLS but maybe a little too big to consider “LA Galaxy II” a rival.
  2. That top level of play is defined by how well a club is doing at that period in time. The 1999 Rochester Rhinos would clearly be in that top level. The 2015 Rochester Rhinos might not. (Or maybe they would — they’re leading their USL division at the moment.) If my beloved Wilmington Hammerheads put together a good run, they get to run with the relatively big dogs.
  3. We get a chance to experiment with pro/rel at the highest level possible before we consider doing with MLS, which has, it bears repeating, invested hundreds of billions of dollars to jump-start professional soccer in this country. (I took out the “hundreds of.” Not sure it would add up to that much. But I think 10 figures is safe. MLS had lost $250 million at one point — lost, not just spent — and it’s still investing at a loss today.)

After a couple of years of this system, perhaps we ease into some pro/rel with MLS. I’d suggest doing it the same way England did for years — not with full-fledged pro/rel but with elections.

A few things I’d suggest:

  1. U.S. Pro League clubs have the option of declaring themselves promotion candidates. That would mean, over a two- or three-year period, they have to meet certain criteria for Division 1.
  2. MLS can put certain underperforming clubs (“underperforming” in many senses — financial, lack of academy development, etc.) on notice that they risk being voted out.
  3. When you have a year in which a promotion candidate is in the top three of USPL and an underperforming club is in the bottom three of MLS, you have an election. Could have multiple clubs involved in a given year.

So this way, you’re not simply tossing down a club that’s having a bad year and decided to experiment with young players and new tactics in its last few games. A relegated club will be one that clearly deserves it. A promoted club, conversely, will be up to MLS standards.

Eventually, perhaps, you move into simpler pro/rel — three up, three down. But then you’d do what I think the Premier League desperately needs to do, forming a second tier of the top league so that the drop is not so perilous.

That said, maybe we make the drop “not so perilous” in the first place by offering up a good revenue stream — shares in Soccer United Marketing. An MLS promotion candidate would be expected to buy a share in SUM, which would entitle it to the revenue it produces whether the club is promoted on not.

This isn’t the first pro/rel idea I’ve suggested, and no, I’m not really sure why I do it. We’ve established there’s no pleasing the contingent within the pro/rel advocacy subset that defines itself has smarter or hipper than thou. If we suddenly re-created the German league structure in the USA, they’d probably become rugby fans.

But it’s fun to kick around ideas every once in a while. Have fun with this one.

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NASL pushes lawyer Jeffrey Kessler into another rematch/mismatch vs. MLS

Posted on by Beau Dure

The first time lawyer Jeffrey Kessler tangled with Major League Soccer in court, it didn’t go so well.

From my book, Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer, and the account of the players’ antitrust lawsuit against the league:

The players left themselves open for withering cross-examination when making another point about Europe. Dodd was the first of several to claim that England’s Premier League and First Division were both Division I leagues. Anyone who follows soccer, much less a U.S. Soccer or MLS lawyer, can easily refute that argument by pointing out that teams are relegated from the Premier League to the lower division. … In cross-examination, Kessler grilled Gulati on England’s leagues to such an extent that MLS lawyers cried foul. “They questioned me very aggressively on what, as it turned out, was completely misinformation and ended up, in front of the jury, having to apologize to me for having no basis for what he was saying,” Gulati says. “That was pretty important.”

Don’t want to take my word for it? Read Paul Gardner’s withering take on the lawsuit and the absurdities its legal team tried to put forth. Check the transcripts to see the contortions goalkeeper Mark Dodd went through to avoid saying England only had had one Division I league. Then see what happened when Kessler had Sunil Gulati (there in his capacity as a former MLS executive) on the stand:

              MR. KESSLER:  Okay.
 3     Q   Mr. Gulati, you don't recall now -- because we're going
 4     to get it up because we have it on Livenote, fortunately --
 5     you don't recall testifying with Mr. Cardozo that you
 6     testified that the First Division changed its name to the
 7     Premier League and that the Second Division changed its name
 8     to Division I?
 9              You don't recall that testimony maybe 25, 30
10     minutes ago?
11     A   No.  It's now different than what you just said 30
12     seconds ago.  What I said was the First Division became the
13     Premier League, that most of those teams became part of the
14     Premier League.
15     Q   Listen to my question, please, Mr. Gulati.
16              Do you recall testifying maybe 25 or 30 minutes
17     ago -- I think the jury recalls -- that the First Division
18     changed its name to the Premier League and the Second
19     Division changed its name to the First Division?
20              Do you recall saying that with Mr. Cardozo?
21     A   I don't know if those are the exact words, but something
22     like that, yes.
23     Q   Okay.
24              And now tell the jury, is it a lie or is it true
25     that they changed their names?

                                                                        2198
                                  - GULATI -

 1     A   They became -- they became -- they changed their name,
 2     but they became the First Division.  Most of the teams, as I
 3     also said 25 minutes ago, became part of the First Division.
 4     Q   Okay.
 5              Did they change their names?  Just focus on that.
 6     A   I believe the answer is yes.
 7     Q   Okay.  You think that's yes.  Let's focus on what
 8     happened.
 9              Before there was a Premier League, there was
10     something called the First Division, right?
11     A   That's correct.
12     Q   Okay.
13              And then there were about 32 teams in the First
14     Division, right?
15     A   I don't know the number that were there, but there
16     was -- there was a number of teams in the Premier League.
17     Q   And at that moment, all of those teams you would
18     call First Division?
19              There was no Premier League, right?  That was the
20     highest division?
21     A   All of the teams that were in that division were part of
22     the First Division, yes.
23     Q   And those teams were some of the best teams in the world
24     at that time, right, before the Premier League?
25     A   Some of them, yes.

                                                                        2199
                                  - GULATI -

 1     Q   Okay.
 2              And then what happened is some of those teams left
 3     the First Division and formed a whole new organization
 4     called the Premier League; isn't that correct?
 5     A   Some of those teams became part of the Premier League,
 6     that's right.
 7     Q   And there was no changing of names.
 8              Some of the teams left the First Division, and they
 9     became a different league, about 16 of the 32, right?
10     A   I don't remember if it was 16, but, yes.
11     Q   Okay.
12              And the 16 teams who a moment before the Premier
13     League were First Division, they didn't change their name?
14              They stayed the First Division, right?
15     A   They -- the bigger and better teams, in most cases,
16     became the Premier team.
17     Q   Okay.
18     A   Not a --
19     Q   You have to --
20                   MR. CARDOZO:  Wait a minute.
21                   MR. KESSLER:  Objection.  It's not responsive
22     your Honor.
23                   THE COURT:  Go ahead.
24     A   Became the Premier Division.  The other teams became
25     what continued or changed their name or however you want to

                                                                        2200
                                  - GULATI -

 1     characterize it, part of First Division in this reformatted
 2     league.
 3     Q   Okay.  I'll try to ask the question very slowly.
 4              The teams who stayed in the First Division, about
 5     half that league, that league didn't change its name.
 6              It stayed the First Division, right?
 7     A   I don't know if it was -- I mean, some of these teams
 8     became part of the Premier League.  Some of them were part
 9     of the First Division.
10     Q   The league never changed its name.  No league ever
11     changed its name in England, right?
12     A   We had a league that started that became the Premier
13     League.
14     Q   Mr. Gulati, you believe that the First Division League
15     changed its name to the Premier League?
16              That's what you believe?
17     A   No, that a lot of the teams, as I said earlier, became
18     part of the Premier League.
19     Q   Okay.
20              And no league ever changed its name, correct?
21     A   No, that's -- we've had a number of leagues in the
22     English league that have changed their league name by having
23     a sponsor affiliated with it and so on.
24              And this -- let me finish.
25              In this characterization, I'm not sure if they

                                                                        2201
                                  - GULATI -

 1     changed when those 12 or 14 or 16 teams were left or not, in
 2     that framework that you've just outlined the question.
 3     Q   Right.
 4              And, in fact, the Second Division in England never
 5     changed its name to the First Division, right?
 6              The league?
 7     A   You characterize it that way, that's correct.
 8     Q   Thank you.
 9              What happened was there was a First Division League
10     of 32 teams.  Sixteen of them became a new league called the
11     Premier League, and the other 16 teams, which were
12     still first division, called themselves still the First
13     Division, right?
14              There's nothing complicated about that?

Got a headache yet? I’m not even sure what point Kessler is trying to make other than trying to play gotcha with Gulati over the existential question of whether the Premier League used to be the First Division and the First Division used to be the Second Division. Good thing this was done before we had the Premier League, the Championship and League One — which is the third division in England but the first division in France. I don’t know if Kessler was trying to baffle the jury into thinking England really had two equal “first divisions” or possibly laying the groundwork for the Chewbacca defense.

So the next morning, MLS’s legal team called Kessler to account for badgering Gulati over a point on which Gulati was clearly correct. That led to this amusing exchange.

16    Q   Mr. Gulati, there was a point yesterday that we 
17    discussed in your examination which I'd like to give you a 
18    chance to clear up because I want to make sure that I didn't 
19    say something that I misspoke about something, and that has 
20    to do with the naming of the Premier League.
21             Is there something you learned about that that 
22    you'd like to tell the jury or explain?
23    A   I learned that what I had said to Mr. Cardozo yesterday 
24    was correct, that virtually all of your comments about how 
25    the Premier League was formed and the number of teams and 

page 2227

 1    the renaming were all, in fact, absolutely incorrect.
 2    Q   Okay.
 3             The Premier League did rechange its name?  That's 
 4    what you learned?
 5    A   And that the first division had been previously the 
 6    second division and so on.
 7             So everything I said to Mr. Cardozo was correct.
 8    Q   Okay?
 9    A   And all of the questions and issues that you raised at 
10    the end of the day were, in fact, wrong.
11    Q   Okay.  Mr. Gulati if, that's true, I want to apologize 
12    to you because we got a little sidetracked on the Premier 
13    League and I want the jury to get every fact exactly 
14    correct, okay?

So now Kessler is back, ready to argue the meaning of “first division” again, this time on behalf of the NASL, a league that has been making the argument that divisional status just doesn’t matter:

And he also sees space for multiple leagues: “I think there’s room for us to be successful and MLS to be successful and maybe others to be successful. Trying to copy from England or Europe is going to be a little short-sighted.”

Yet Peterson isn’t interested in hearing the MLS is “first division” and the NASL is “second division,” though that’s the official status U.S. Soccer has conferred upon them.

“There should be a system in this country where every community can put its team into the pyramid and one day be at the top of the pyramid,” Peterson said. “I’m not sure what divisional status means without promotion and relegation.”

I’m not either, and I’m not really sure why USSF is bothering to change the D1 criteria. Then again, I’ve never understood why the D2 criteria are so onerous, particularly in terms of having a single person with a whole lot of money running a club. I get that they’re trying to avoid having clubs go all Saint Louis Athletica on us. But beyond that, I’m not sure the rules have ever been explained. (Yes, I’m pursuing an explanation.)

I’m also not sure why the NASL is interested in fighting what’s sure to be a losing battle over an issue that they’ve already said isn’t important.

If the NASL puts forth a good product, that speaks for itself. And if they override their own current reluctance to set up a pro/rel pyramid with the NPSL, then maybe they can create an alternative that forces MLS to take notice.

Or we could just re-fight the Soccer Wars and let everything fall apart, right?

The NASL may have a legitimate grievance here and there. Perhaps the league does need more representation within USSF. But I don’t see why they’re dredging up the lawyer who tried and failed to muddy the waters on Division I in the past.

If you’re hoping to see the NASL rise up and succeed in a way that forces (or encourages) MLS to open up a bit more, you might be disappointed in this move. From here, it looks like a step backward, all the way to 2000, when the Rhinos just beat MLS on the field where it mattered.

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The NASL, NPSL, and why there’s no pleasing pro/rel advocates

Posted on by Beau Dure

If you read all my tweets and replies on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’ve eased up a bit on ignoring the crowd that pushes for promotion and relegation in U.S. soccer. It’s intentional. I think we’re starting to see some ideas that go beyond shouting anti-MLS slogans. And given the scarcity of MLS content I’m writing these days, it’s almost like tripping down Memory Lane, like going back to a high school reunion and chatting amiably with the guy who was a total jerk and bully the whole time.

Wait a minute. Scratch that. That guy still doesn’t get it. Hope he gags on the hors d’oeuvres.

And that’s kind of how it is in the pro/rel world. Today’s conversation was a perfect demonstration.

Start with this intriguing story:

https://twitter.com/Rborba23/status/631482183895674882

So the NPSL, the mostly amateur league that shares unofficial fourth division status with the PDL and recently drew more than 18,000 fans for its final in Chattanooga, would work something out with the NASL, which has long (well, at least in Bill Peterson’s tenure) made noises about wanting promotion/relegation in U.S. soccer.

Easier said than done, of course. The NPSL uses mostly young amateur players, many of them in college. So most of their teams are bound by NCAA restrictions on how they can assemble their teams, maintaining amateur status, and wrapping up the season early so kids can dash back to their college teams for preseason. Then you add U.S. Soccer’s onerous second-division standards (one owner has to have $20 million, which has always struck me as absurd), and you can see a few hurdles.

But if you really want to see promotion/relegation make the transition from “hot-button Internet cult shoutfest issue” to “something that might actually happen,” you’d think this would be good news. And so, consistent with what I’ve said earlier about the best path to pro/rel being a strong NASL forcing a merger, I said the following:

I even went back and dug up my own pro/rel plan:

And so we all joined hands, sang a few songs of praise, and talked about the details of what a future U.S. pro landscape might look like.

Oh, wait. No, we didn’t.

One hint of the problem was a tweet that came in just as I was writing mine:

And indeed, the man who has devoted the last 6-8 years of his life tweeting about pro/rel fantasies was not happy with a proposal to actually talk about actually doing it.

(That said, the NASL tossed cold water on this idea itself:)

But to be fair, he has long insisted that leagues shouldn’t go it alone, and that the federation should drive it. I don’t see why, personally, but he is indeed consistent.

And so is the vitriol I received from elsewhere:

When I have my midlife crisis and form a Husker Du cover band, I might call it “Antiquated Zealotry.”

https://twitter.com/American_red13/status/631487748260646912

(And yes, I made a typo. At this point, I was tweeting about as quickly as I could type. That’s not good.)

https://twitter.com/TheSoccerDcn/status/631488195440607237

So he’s not reading what I’m tweeting, he surely didn’t notice that the last substantial piece I wrote about MLS was ripping the league for its stance in collective bargaining, and yet he feels he can sum up my opinions. OK.

Yeah, he clearly skipped my proposal on Brazilian-style state leagues. And my tweet on the NASL/NPSL thing.

I get all this flack from the pro/rel crowd for a few reasons. First, I’ve pointed out a few inconvenient truths on the matter:

1. Soccer was an ignored and often despised sport in this country through much of the 20th century, giving the rest of the world a bit of a head start. Read Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism or the definitive U.S. soccer history Soccer in a Football World for the full story. 

2. The people willing to take the risk to do professional soccer at a strong but sustainable level had to appeal to investors by minimizing risk (I wrote a book that mentions all this, a bit), hence the “single entity” system and cost containment.

3. More investors have bought into MLS with the implicit understanding that they are buying into the USA’s first-division league.

4. Many investors have bought into lower-division leagues with the implicit understanding that they’re aren’t going to jump up to a Division I or Division II budget if they win too many games.

5. Promotion/relegation would be cool, but it’s not necessary. Barcelona isn’t Barcelona because they fear relegation. They fear losing the championship to Real Madrid. As they should. Real Madrid is the club of the old corrupt monarchy. But that’s another rant.

And so on — see all the previous posts.

Second, I have actually engaged with a lot of these people and continue to do so even as most journalists — you might say the saner, more intelligent journalists — have cut off contact.

(I once had someone tell me I should take it as a compliment that these folks go after me instead of Big Name Journalist X because they find me a lot smarter and better than Big Name Journalist X. I’m really not. I just have bad compulsive behavior, as illustrated here:)

But let’s get back to today’s conversation, summing up as follows:

Me: “Hey, neat promotion/relegation idea.”

Them: “Shut up, you MLSbot antiquated zealot turnip walnut.”

The underlying lesson from this conversation:

There is no pleasing the promotion/relegation zealots.

You might say it’s just me, and no matter how many schemes I put forward, no matter how many times I say I really could see the NASL building up with a pyramid that forces a merger with MLS down the road, they won’t listen.

But no. It’s not just me.

These are the people who have to be different. They have to feel superior. They’re the ones who saw R.E.M. have hit songs and make real videos and smirked, “They’ve sold out.” They’re the ones who only like the U.K. version of The Office — not that they’ve ever seen any of the U.S. episodes past Season 1.

Their greatest fear is that someone will do exactly what they want. Because then they’d have to find another cause.

Like Jason Street when he was paralyzed or Tim Riggins when he finished school, they would lose their identity.

And that identity is more important to them than the cause itself.

They know we aren’t likely to see MLS integrated into a promotion/relegation system for all the reason I’ve listed above and more. So they’re safe.

And that’s why, even as we see occasional glimmers of reason in the national pro/rel discussion, we’re a long, long way from any of this being taken seriously.

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soccer

Fuzzy memories of soccer’s good (ironically) old days

Posted on by Beau Dure

You may not have noticed this, but I’m old. I’m not yet in the AARP, but by the standards of modern journalism, I’m a fossil. (How ironic in an age of long life expectancy that our media keep getting younger.)

Today, I wound up in a fun Twitter conversation about soccer journalism, and we wound up winding back to the days in which the U.S. soccer media barely existed. We also had scant access to the U.K. soccer media, so we weren’t able to keep up with the tabloids’ totally fictional transfer rumors or the pundits’ Cro-Magnon dismissals of women’s soccer. (Gee, what a shame.)

But we had a few lifelines. If you grew up in the 70s, you watched Soccer Made In Germany and learned terms like “equalizer” and “relegation” from Toby Charles:

I was vaguely aware that the USA had its own league, the NASL, but I never watched it. I don’t think I was a Eurosnob. I think it was a function of my father controlling the TV and watching a lot of PBS. He also was a biochemist who had traveled quite a bit and had a casual appreciation for the Bundesliga. Or maybe he just liked to say “Bundesliga” in his Virginia/Georgia drawl.

In any case, the bulk of my exposure to the NASL was Soccer Made In Germany‘s report on Franz Beckenbauer signing with the Cosmos. A couple of years later, the Atlanta Chiefs were reborn, and I read game reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Never made it to a game, though.

I also learned about the World Cup. When I realized I would be away at summer camp (where we did occasionally play soccer with oddly shaped cube-shaped goals), I asked my mom to cut the World Cup scores out of the paper and mail them to me every day. I dutifully kept group standings in a notepad at my bunk.

Five years later, I was in college, where I had the opportunity to heckle Tony Meola (belated apologies, Tony, but we did these things at Duke), marvel at Mia Hamm, and recoil in horror at the dirty play of Tab Ramos’ N.C. State teammates. I had also discovered Soccer America, which carried standings and scores from leagues all over the world.

Then I was back in the wilderness, rarely getting a chance to catch a glimpse of soccer beyond some assignments to cover high school games. The 1994 World Cup was a welcome relief. After that, a lot of us asked the same question: “Now what?”

Home Team Sports, now a Comcast Sports Net affiliate, provided another lifeline, picking up an hourlong Premier League highlight show. Tony Yeboah quickly became my favorite player, with the last two goals on this reel etched in my memory:

I also occasionally listened to shortwave radio. But at the time, it was kind of random. I knew if I tuned into the BBC on Saturdays, I might hear something soccer-related.

By 1995, I’d discovered the Internet and the North American Soccer mailing list, to which I paid tribute last fall. We argued about the direction Major League Soccer was going as it prepared to launch, and we shared information about any soccer we were able to see — APSL games, USISL games, colleges, broadcast info and so forth. Then I found the wonderful rec.sport.soccer archive site, which looks exactly the same today, and Soccernet, which doesn’t. Thanks to them, I knew what I was watching on ESPN’s weekly games, and I knew when to search for the BBC on my shortwave to hear Coventry City escape relegation once again. (This was 1997, when the Young Player of the Year was a Manchester United lad with swept-up hair named David Beckham.)

Of course, I also set my VCR while I was at work so I could come home and watch this:

(Note the MLS logo that the Clash had to paint over.)

Meanwhile, back in the world of non-broadcast media, a few of us were fighting to get coverage for this long-derided sport. In 1999, at a wire service, I pitched coverage of the Women’s World Cup. A contemporary of mine said, “What?” I explained. He laughed, “We don’t even care about MEN’S soccer in this country!”

(Same guy called Duke a school for Ivy League rejects. No idea how I made it through a year of working there without resorting to violence.)

I moved on to USA TODAY, which had a history of legitimate soccer coverage. But as space in the paper shrank, soccer coverage was the first thing to go. Online, I was sneaking bits of coverage onto the site however I could.

In my day (no, you can’t get through this without reading that phrase), there was no such thing as a “soccer journalist.” Steven Goff had other duties at The Washington Post. Online, the Post’s site featured editor Alex Johnson’s World of Soccer column. Grant Wahl mixed soccer and college basketball at Sports Illustrated. Jeff Bradley was more or less the voice of soccer at ESPN’s site, though he was busy with other beats.

Nothing in this story should be surprising. But I find it’s often forgotten. We wake up Saturday mornings and flip on the TV to hear Rebecca Lowe introducing the first of three EPL games, and we forget how far we’ve come.

It’s too easy for today’s Twitterati to think soccer journalism in the USA started with MLS. (Some in the Twitter world actually think all soccer journalists in the USA are employees of MLS, which will surely make local newspapers, SI and a bunch of newly flourishing websites wonder why they’re paying all these people.)

Some of us grew up on the world’s game and followed it any way we could. We watched the Bundesliga and the Premier League, then went out to see USISL games with 30-minute stop-action countdown clocks and a “shootout” on the seventh team foul.

That’s the way it was and … well, I wouldn’t say we liked it better than today’s 24/7 soccer landscape. But it’s an experience we’ll never forget, and it helps us appreciate what we’re seeing today.

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Brazilian style (leagues) in the USA?

Posted on by Beau Dure

The United States is, in addition to all the things mentioned in my soccer culture post, a nation of tinkerers. We want to fix things or improve them.

That’s not to say Europe is bereft of innovation — they’ve certainly done a better job of, say, integrating alternative power sources.  But when it comes to sports, we’re far more likely to take things that already work and rethink them. The NFL changes rules more often than I shop for shoes. Wake up an NHL fan who was cryogenically frozen in 2002, and he or she might not make sense of the standings.

In soccer, we’ve often been a laboratory — sometimes with FIFA’s assistance or insistence, sometimes not. Shootouts. Bonus points. For old-time USL/USISL fans, the blue card.

These days, all our ideas veer toward the more traditional. Shootouts are gone. Overtime is gone. As much as I would love to see what League One America rules look like in action, it’s not going to happen. We debate single table and single entity, and we even the occasional promotion/relegation idea that’s nearly workable. (It just needs some way to even things out between clubs that made megamillion investments and those who would play their way in. I’m not a big fan of giant expansion fees, either, but you do have to consider that we’re trying to build the same infrastructure in 20 years that has been built in other countries — where soccer is the dominant sport — over a century or more.)

So here’s an idea borrowed from Brazil with a bit of a twist to solve a couple of uniquely North American problems …

Regional leagues running part of the year.

In Brazil, clubs play in state leagues for the first few months of the year before shifting to national competition. The state pyramids and the national pyramid are mostly separate — a team could theoretically be in the first division nationally and a lower division in its state league. (I can’t find a current example, though.)

The climate in the USA and Canada won’t let us play year-round as they do in Brazil. A regional league in the spring and national leagues (MLS, NASL, USL) in the summer and fall won’t leave enough time.

But we have an interesting window for regional leagues — the international break that we currently aren’t taking in MLS.

This year, CONCACAF’s Gold Cup runs through most of July. National teams will assemble a couple of weeks before that, so figure on about a five-week window. MLS will muddle through without its CONCACAF internationals. In other years, we have the World Cup or the upcoming pan-American Copa America. (Yes, I know the winter Qatar World Cup will mess everything up, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

During that stretch, suppose we suspended the national leagues and played regional leagues?

And yes, I’m talking about leagues with promotion/relegation. Why not? These leagues wouldn’t affect the structure of MLS. A club with a 5,000-seat stadium that couldn’t play in MLS could still compete with MLS clubs in a short regional league system.

So we solve several problems:

1. MLS finally gets a full international break.

2. Players who aren’t on international duty get to keep playing.

3. Stadiums still get meaningful games, and not just the one-offs of the Open Cup. (Incidentally, this is the year an NASL club wins the Open Cup. MLS teams will be weakened for the fifth round and quarterfinals, and it’s clear the NASL really wants that trophy.)

4. Lower-division teams get to test themselves against the big pro clubs, albeit weakened versions of those clubs. They should be able to sell a few tickets for those games, too.

5. “Summer league” teams in the PDL and NPSL get more interesting competition.

6. Pro/rel fans get to see pro/rel leagues. Maybe it’ll open the door for national pro/rel down the road, maybe not.

Five weeks doesn’t give us a lot of time, so we’re probably talking about four teams playing a double round-robin or maybe seven teams playing a single round-robin.

A couple of sample leagues with the initial divisional setup (based mostly on last year’s standings, so I haven’t verified to see if all these clubs … you know … still exist):

TEXAS/OKLAHOMA LEAGUE

Division 1: Dallas (MLS), Houston (MLS), San Antonio (NASL), Oklahoma City (USL)

Division 2: Austin (PDL), Laredo (PDL), Tulsa (NPSL), Oklahoma City (NPSL)

Division 3: Corinthians San Antonio (NPSL), Dallas City (NPSL), Midland/Odessa (PDL), Houston Dutch Lions (PDL)

Division 4: NTX Rayados (USASA), Liverpool Warriors (NPSL), Fort Worth (NPSL), Houston Regals SCA (NPSL)

CASCADIA LEAGUE

Division 1: Portland (MLS), Seattle (MLS), Vancouver (MLS), Edmonton (NASL)

Division 2: Kitsap (PDL), Victoria (PDL), Washington (PDL), Tacoma (NPSL)

Division 3: North Sound (PDL), Spartans (NPSL), Khalsa (PCSL), USASA team

MID-ATLANTIC LEAGUE

Division 1: D.C. United (MLS), Philadelphia (MLS), Carolina (NASL), Richmond (USL)

Division 2: Harrisburg (USL), Baltimore (PDL), Reading (PDL), Carolina (PDL)

Division 3: King’s Warriors (PDL), Gate City (NPSL), Virginia Beach (NPSL), Maryland Bays (USASA)

I’m not sure about including reserve teams here, given the already-weakened senior squads. If they play, I’d limit them to Division 3 or lower.

Within a couple of years, maybe we’d see some amateur teams establish themselves in D2. Maybe an MLS coach will be grousing about relegation to D2, and we’ll all yell at that guy to win a few games and get back up.

Maybe it’s a crazy idea. But if there’s a negative other than giving up a couple of MLS games when the teams are missing their internationals, I don’t see it.

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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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