Tag: u.s. soccer

pro soccer

Quick read of the longggggg U.S. Soccer reply in the NASL suit

Posted on by Beau Dure

U.S. Soccer deserves blame for many things. The organization is fundamentally arrogant and stubborn, and that may have played a role in the men’s national team’s failure to qualify for the World Cup — along with recent failures in the Olympics and a plateau or decline (depending on whose numbers you use) in youth soccer that threatens to undo decades of progress.

But are they really obliged to do any more than they already have for the NASL?

A few questions I’ll have as I go through this:

  • What does U.S. Soccer have to say about the 2015 Pro League Standards (PLS) proposal that the NASL seems to regard as the last straw?
  • How much info will U.S. Soccer spill about all the NASL’s missteps?
  • Does U.S. Soccer present a viable case that it can legally determine who’s a FIFA-sanctioned league under U.S. law (Stevens Act), and if not, are we headed toward U.S. Professional Soccer Armageddon (USPSA)?

Here we go …

SUMMARY

Literally the bullet points …

ussf-sum

INTRO, translated to English

“Look, what do you want from us? We created PLS in 1995, when the NASL was still as much a synonym of 70s excess as Pele and Mick Jagger stumbling out of Studio 54. Then you guys decided to revive the brand name in 2009, and we held your hand through endless turnover and a racketeering scandal that engulfed your biggest owner?

“And it’s not as if Don Garber and a bunch of MLS/SUM guys are sitting here revising the PLS to sabotage you. It’s an independent task force, and directors affiliated with pro leagues can’t vote on whether to change the standards or let you guys have your precious D2 status or your more precious (ha!) D1 status. You really want to tell us Goldman Sachs alum Carlos Cordeiro, Clinton administration alum Donna Shalala and WNBA/Big East exec Val Ackerman are conspiring against you?

“Oh, and they’ve based all their “showing of harm” on the declaration of an owner (NY Cosmos’ Rocco Commisso) who just joined this sinking ship a few months ago. Now they’re crying about how impossible life would be in D3, to which we offer three letters: USL.

“Your Honor, if you grant this, you’ve undermined our entire organization, and you should get ready to serve as the de facto decider of divisional structures for the foreseeable future because everyone’s just going to sue.”

INTRO, crux of the legal argument (verbatim)

The preliminary relief NASL seeks—an injunction requiring USSF to sanction it as a Division II league for 2018—conflicts with the ultimate relief NASL seeks: an order striking down the PLS altogether. Indeed, NASL asks this Court to order something that it argues violates the antitrust laws. And in doing so, it wants the Court to reengineer the core activity of a legitimate sports governing body—something the antitrust laws and abundant precedent do not permit.

INTRO, recurring grammatical error

The commas are not needed here …

ussf-commas

INTRO, new-ish stuff

ussf-new

ABOUT USSF GOVERNANCE

A bit of history we all know but is necessary for the legal record — World Cup in 1994, MLS in 1996, etc. Highlights:

  • Yes, USSF is willing to have multiple leagues in the same division. Just meet the standards.
  • Many references to Professor (Steven) Solomon, a governance expert at Berkeley who got his law degree from … Columbia! Is it hidden in the bylaws somewhere that everyone involved in U.S. Soccer must have passed through there at some point? My brother did a medical residency there — can he join the board?
  • The process for new PLS: The Task Force includes no reps from leagues or the USSF Board of Directors, the proposed revisions go out to all pro leagues (including NWSL, for the record) for comment, the revised revisions go to the Board, and the Board (with any pro league people recused) votes. Footnote: The NASL didn’t object to the “time zone” standard in 2014. When it (and other leagues) objected to the 2015 proposal, the task force withdrew it, and the Board never even voted. (I think the NASL reply may hammer at the claims of independence of this task force. If not — that would be a major omission.)

“HEY, YOU USED TO LIKE US!”

Parts F and G of the Statement of Facts run through the USSF/NASL relationship over the years. As stated:

  • 2011: The league nearly fell apart before it started, but the USSF kindly helped the NASL to its feet and gave it D2 status with a bunch of waivers, and CEO Aaron Davidson said he took the standards seriously.
  • 2012-15: The NASL still didn’t meet D2 standards, but the league assured us it was progressing, and nobody complained.
  • 2015-16: The NASL, still not meeting D2 standards, applied for D1 and started complaining about the standards. “In ensuing discussions,” the USSF asked pointed questions about Traffic Sports, which owned several teams and was the league’s marketing agency … until it pleaded guilty to racketeering in May 2015. NASL said it was dissociated from Traffic, so the USSF gave it another year as D2 in 2016.

Then USSF drops the bomb:

ussf-2016

The Task Force advised the Board not to grant the NASL a D2 sanction for 2017. The Board (again, minus recused members) gave it anyway.

The application for 2018: NASL had “at best” commitments from seven teams and no detailed plan for complying with the PLS.

MORE LEGAL ARGUMENTS

Roughly translated, but I think the two Legal Steves — Bank and Holroyd — can do a much better job dissecting this part:

  • Given the USL’s success as a D3 league, there’s no evidence of “irreparable harm” if the NASL plays D3.
  • There’s some hair-splitting about what a mandatory injunction can or cannot do.
  • There’s no conspiracy among USSF, MLS and SUM because:
    • Recusals on votes
    • The PLS existed waaaay before the NASL
    • “MLS’s participation in USSF does not evidence conspiracy as a matter of law.” (Several precedents cited)

“Put simply, unless the Court is willing to conclude that decisions made by the disinterested members of the USSF Board (directors such as Ms. Ackerman, Mr. Cordeiro, Ms. Shalala, and directors affiliated with youth soccer) are somehow part of a supposedly decades-long conspiracy aimed at driving the NASL out of business, there is no evidence of any unlawful agreement.”

  • A 1988 suit against NASCAR is cited as precedent that a lawsuit cannot “reengineer the core activity of a legitimate sports governing body.”
    • “Here, the NASL asks the Court to decide the right structure for professional soccer in the United States, and to reject the successful framework established by USSF decades ago.”

DEFENDING THE PLS

USSF argues that the standards are “pro-competitive” because they make sure leagues are credible.

Is it too easy to take a shot at the NASL griping that other major soccer leagues don’t have time-zone requirements, when it’s quite obvious that the countries in question have only one time zone? No, it’s not. USSF does just that. The time-zone standard is certainly ripe for debate — I see no reason for a second-division league to be national — but the NASL tossed the USSF lawyers a slow-pitch softball here.

Then comes an interesting argument: According to precedent (at least, USSF’s interpretation of that precedent), the plaintiff has the burden of proving that the PLS have an adverse effect on competition and that the same pro-competitive effect can be attained some other way.

(To which the counterargument would be “pro/rel,” and the counter-counterargument would be “you really think this is about pro/rel now?” and “that doesn’t address the USSF’s right or responsibility to set standards that could easily render pro/rel moot.”)

Oh, and Japan and Spain have minimum stadium-size requirements, so the NASL can’t say the USSF is unique.

Then the argument turns to the “greater good” realm: “NASL screams about supposed harm to itself, but never explains how the PLS harm U.S. sports fans, who have enjoyed an unprecedented growth in the sport of soccer under USSF’s watchful eye.” Is that legally relevant?

BALANCE OF HARDSHIPS: This will hurt me more than it’ll hurt you

In short: “NASL seeks an order that would eviscerate USSF’s standing as the governing body for soccer and seriously harm its relationship with FIFA.”

And that’s the main document. Tune in tomorrow when I make it through the rest of the … whoa … let’s make it next month …

 

1
podcast, pro soccer, youth soccer

RSD15: The clogged youth-to-pro pipeline, with Brian Dunseth and Chris Keem

Posted on by Beau Dure

Was Nik Besagno a warning sign?

The top pick in the 2005 MLS Draft — ahead of Brad Guzan, Michael Parkhurst, Will John, Chris Rolfe, Bobby Boswell, Chris Wondolowski and Jeff Larentowicz — had a very short MLS career. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s when people started to wonder if the U17 residency in Bradenton was producing soft, coddled players.

Yes, the youth-to-pro pipeline is at the core of our national wailing and gnashing of teeth after the U.S. men failed to qualify for the World Cup. It’s a topic so big, we need two guests.

First up, player-turned-commentator Brian Dunseth talks about what happened in Trinidad (3:30), Olympic soccer and how much it hurt the men to miss out (5:00), losing players from youth soccer (9:40), the parental perspective when clubs start demanding your money (11:20), the importance of failure (17:00), whether players are too soft or coddled (20:15), MLS (27:15 and 33:10), coaching education (28:15), relegation from a player’s perspective (35:45), the Development Academy (39:45), and an easy solution to all of this (40:10). Then concussions (44:30).

Then it’s Chris Keem, a veteran youth soccer coach and administrator with experience in college and the NPSL as well, joins us around the 50-minute mark. We start out talking about turf wars and how they drive up prices in youth soccer, then move into dealing with the Development Academy when you’re running another youth club (53:45), addressing “pay to play” and how it works in other countries (58:00), getting a club’s coaches on the same page and poaching vs. development (1:04:30), what the NPSL was and what it wants to be (1:06:00), and why youth players may opt for other sports (1:17:30).

 

0
pro soccer

The best post-T&T pro-promotion/relegation argument

Posted on by Beau Dure

Predictably, Soccerocalypse has brought out the usual arguments from the promotion/relegation crowd:

  1. Youth development will be so much better!
  2. Players will be under constant pressure!

If anyone could turn their attention away from Twitter long enough to read something longer than 280 characters at a time, they would have seen this addressed in the pro/rel series — both pros (and alleged pros) and cons.

The short versions:

Youth development: European clubs that have good academies have them so they can sell players (and yes, solidarity payments/training compensation is a legitimate issue with legal potholes I can’t fully comprehend). Chelsea’s inability to develop a first-team player from within is legendary, just one example of a “broken” academy system in the birthplace of soccer.

MLS has actually made progress in youth development because its clubs know they can avoid the boom and bust of pro/rel. They feel confident spending millions to create what wasn’t there before. Then they have a pathway, via their oft-derided relationship with USL, to send promising 17-year-old players to the first team via the USL bridge.

And then MLS teams can play their youngsters because they know they’re not going to be relegated. That’s one reason why MLS has developed so many players who turn around and beat the USA in CONCACAF. (I have heard arguments that MLS needs to impose stricter limits on international players. Then I’ve heard arguments saying MLS needs to spend more on international players to raise the level so that any U.S. players who make that first team will be more appropriately challenged.)

Pressure: Yes, we know. Someone in a German locker room threw a shoe at Eric Wynalda.

shoe

First of all, the idea that you’re “playing for your job” at every training session in Europe but not in MLS is inflated. European clubs aren’t going to cut people mid-contract. You can lose a starting spot, sure, and then you can regain it the next week. That’s not unique. If you want to see job insecurity, watch the NFL, where a kicker can miss once or twice on Sunday and be unemployed on Monday.

Second: Bobby Warshaw tells a different story of playing for a relegation-threatened team. His teammates in Scandinavia all just wanted to wash their hands of it and be gone.

And it’s not as if pressure always makes diamonds. Sometimes, it makes dust. In this clip, Woody Harrelson is Trinidad and Tobago. Wesley Snipes is the USA.

The USA didn’t lose because the media and supporters are too nice to them. They played tense. Cautious. Trinidad and Tobago did not.

After Prince died, Saturday Night Live ran a tribute. Jimmy Fallon told a story of being at a party where he was on stage wondering if he could get Prince to come up and play. Then he saw the crowd parting and Prince basically floating to the stage. Prince came up to Fallon and gave him a look that said, “Yeah, I got this.”

That’s what the USA needed. Not overconfidence. But that sweet spot between confidence and complacency in which they say, “I got this.” Only Christian Pulisic, who’s too young to have been through the same CONCACAF wars (or relegation battles — see Altidore, Jozy) as his teammates, played with that attitude.

But let’s say there’s a benefit to playing in a league that’s more intense than MLS — though, if you were ever in a locker room with Taylor Twellman or Dom Kinnear after a game, you know things can get pretty intense. Why is Germany more intense than the USA? Why is Germany more intense than Scandinavia?

It’s because Germany has a deeper soccer culture.

Same reason Mexico and the big Euro leagues are more intense than MLS or Scandinavia. For all the progress made in the USA since Paul Caligiuri took a wild shot in Trinidad in 1989, this country is still a good bit behind everyone else. Youth soccer participation plateaued and then started dropping, and while a lot of those kids turn up wearing Messi or Rooney jerseys, a lot more never watch soccer on TV or in person.

So if you want to make a good argument for promotion/relegation, try this:

Pro/rel will help deepen the soccer culture in this country.

And I believe that. Most of what I’m saying here on pro/rel is the same stuff I’ve been saying for 15 years, no matter how much it’s been misrepresented by the PRZ on Twitter. But this is an argument that I can’t remember hearing before. Maybe some people made it, but it was drowned out in all the “PRO/REL WILL OBVIOUSLY MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER BUT MLS/SUM/USSF/STEVE BANNON ARE CONSPIRING TO KEEP THE NFL BIG” nonsense.

This is your argument. This is something you can present to people who have money on the table — not the Monopoly money Silva and company threw at MLS so they could create the narrative that MLS turned down a gazillion bucks to institute pro/rel now.

Is it enough? I don’t know. The other realities still exist. We have a Division I soccer league now where we didn’t in 1992, and it’s because people were enticed to invest in a scheme that reduced the risk from “might as well burn your money” to “there’s a small chance this might work.” If you’d told people in 1992 we’d have a soccer league that consistently drew 40,000 people in Atlanta and Seattle, people would’ve laughed at you. (Especially Atlanta. I grew up in Georgia, and I’m astounded.)

But if the pro/rel crowd is willing to drop the nonsense, along with the conspiracy talk and nonsensical legal actions, maybe there’s a chance to win the argument.

If I were elected USSF president (no, I’m not running — there’s a reason a lot of sane, qualified people from Peter Wilt to Julie Foudy aren’t interested), I’d do the following:

  1. Divisions 2 and 3 go pro/rel next year. I’m torn on whether the USL brand name should stay. The NASL brand name should not. It has a history of incompetence, and even the glory days of the late 70s were built on non-traditional glitzy Americanized soccer. Besides, given the existence of Mexico, the “North American” part of the brand name never rang true. Keep the clubs — to start, put the clubs on the soundest financial foundation in D2 and the others in D3.
  2. Division 4 becomes the top amateur division (semipro clubs are allowed to compete, but it’ll be mostly amateur, as these leagues are now) for the top tiers of the major amateur leagues — PDL, NPSL, UPSL, Cosmopolitan, GCPL, other USASA Elite Amateur Leagues. Clubs that finish in the top three of these leagues can apply for D3 status — for the foreseeable future, only a few clubs will do that. (At this point, I don’t think we can or should relegate clubs from pro D3 to amateur D4. If D3 gets too big, start a pro D4, more or less mimicking what England has recently done with its fifth tier.) Have a D4 national championship if it’s feasible, replacing some of the existing and sort of redundant national amateur cups.

Two reasons to this. First, it’ll make the lower divisions much more interesting.

And it just might demonstrate to the powers- and purseholders-that-be that there’s a benefit to expanding the pyramid and building a soccer culture.

Or, you know, just yell and scream and sue. That’s working so far, right? And competition between uncooperative leagues worked so well that we’re about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ASL, right?

 

4
pro soccer, youth soccer

Here’s what WON’T help U.S. Soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

snake-oil“That’s right, folks! Step right up and get your miracle elixir! Cures everything from chronic flatulence to an inability to qualify for the World Cup or Olympics from CONCACAF!”

Doesn’t work that way. The problems have deeper roots. A dash of snake oil isn’t going to make the U.S. men’s team (or women’s, which has some similar issues and some very different) magically better.

Among the pet programs that won’t make the USA follow France’s path from qualifying failure to World Cup champion in four years:

Ramping up “pressure”: Consider how Trinidad and Tobago played in their cozy, bumpy stadium with the soothing hum of generators or pumps or whatever created what little “atmosphere” existed last night. They were loose. They were having fun. Only Christian Pulisic, who’s too young to have been through the battles of his teammates, played with any flair to match what the home side brought to the marshland of Ato Boldon Stadium.

If anything, the U.S. players seemed too tightly wound. Michael Bradley, the captain, was raised in a family that lives for competitive pressure. Jozy Altidore has dealt with the wrath of the global soccer media in the midst of a relegation fight, and yet he was probably a lot better before all that, back in the 2009 Confederations Cup and World Cup qualifying that year.

Which brings us to this …

Promotion/relegation: I dealt with this in the pro/rel series. Pro/rel doesn’t magically turn every club into Barcelona. It doesn’t make clubs run awesome academies — in fact, you might end up with some major gaps as major cities’ clubs lose Division 1 status and have to cut funding.

And can we cut the nonsense that players in MLS clubs aren’t playing for their jobs? North America is littered with MLS washouts. (Some of whom turn around and score against the USA in CONCACAF play.)

Dismantling MLS: The league needs improvement, sure. But it’s worth noting that the goals that eliminated the USA — from Panama and Honduras — came from guys with plenty of MLS experience.

Costa Rica is going back to the World Cup. MLS players scored 11 of their 14 goals in the Hexagonal.

And the oft-derided MLS-USL partnership has created an alternate pathway to the oft-derided college game. Go to an MLS academy. If you’re ready to go pro at age 17 or 18 but not quite ready for the first team, play for the reserves in USL. Then up to MLS.

Clubs have made these investments because they’re financially secure. They feel confident that they’ll be in the top division for the foreseeable future. Any change to that structure needs to be made very carefully.

Let’s put it this way: If you dismantle MLS, you’re also dismantling most of the free academies that exist in this country. How is that supposed to help?

Having the “passion” to hurl rotten fruit at players when they return: Sure, let’s make the notion of being a professional and international soccer player less attractive in a country that has a ton of sports options. That’ll work.

Along those lines …

Telling people how to live their lives: Remember when everyone was telling Landon Donovan to abandon his family and move to Europe for our own satisfaction?

Two issues with that:

  1. That’s not going to inspire future athletes to devote themselves to soccer and international play.
  2. Couldn’t the U.S. men have used a Landon Donovan last night, no matter how many years he spent in MLS instead of the Bundesliga?

Hiring a savior: One guy isn’t going to turn around the men’s national team, let alone change the entire culture in this country. Jurgen Klinsmann had no idea how to change youth soccer other than the vague imposition of things he knew as a child in Germany.

The people working to change the culture are working at the U.S. Soccer Foundation (different from the federation) and other organizations trying to make the sport more accessible.

Turning the sport into a job for which only the elites may apply: Eastern Europe in the Cold War had a bunch of sports machines that culled the top sports talent at an early age and herded them into camps. Brazil and other countries thrive on street soccer. Which group has had more success?

Reading too much into one World Cup, either 2002 or 2018: Was Bruce Arena a genius in 2002? Somewhat, but it helped that Portugal collapsed and the ref didn’t notice John O’Brien’s handball against Mexico. Was he suddenly an idiot in 2018? Somewhat, but it helped that Panama scored a phantom goal and Honduras (and T&T) got a couple of flukes.

Wins amplify good decisions. Losses amplify bad ones.

* * * *

Here’s what WILL help:

“Incremental changes at multiple levels”:

Reducing the “travel” in travel soccer: Even if you have tons of scholarship money, explain to me how a kid with two working parents who don’t control their own schedule are going to get that kid to every practice and game all over a five-state region?

Related to that …

Ending the turf wars: We have an arms race. Club A is in the Development Academy, so Club B has to be in the ECNL. Then Club C has to travel to multiple showcases everywhere from Disney World to that massive soccerplex in Indiana that’s hosting everything these days.

Remembering that we’re still competing for players and fans: Quit telling 9-year-olds that the stuff they’re doing now will pay off when they’re 16-year-old pros. Quit pretending we can drive people out of the sport as children and expect them to be paying customers when they grow up.

If soccer was so deeply ingrained in the USA that we would put up with all this, fine. The truth is that we’re still fighting attitudes like this:

And that is a Democratic Congressman. His voters surely include a lot of immigrants and a lot of soccer fans. And yet he feels secure in bashing soccer. In 2017.

Education: I’ve had the chance to see more than 100 paid coaches at the U9-U12 level. Maybe 20 of them are people I’d be happy to have coaching my kids. Another 20 or so seemed OK. The rest are screamers, joystick coaches and assorted cretins.

I’ve also worked with about 100 parent coaches. Some of them are trying to learn what they can and apply what they’ve learned. Some can’t be bothered to do the two-hour online F license.

Listen: Everyone’s talking and no one’s listening. Not just on Twitter. Also in Chicago, where the most basic questions about the Development Academy or anything else get brushed off and ridiculed.

The USA has a lot of smart people. Not just one, not just a small group. And as Steve Gans found on his “listening tour” before declaring his candidacy for the U.S. Soccer presidency, they’re not being heard.

Maybe we should all do a listening tour.

And then keep some perspective. No one died here. That’s happening in Puerto Rico, Las Vegas and California. We’re talking about a sport, one in which the better team doesn’t always win. The USA probably wasn’t one of the top eight teams in 2002, and they probably aren’t outside the top 32 right now.

Let’s not set up an East German-style sports machine. Let’s not take the fun out of this sport and assume good athletes are going to want to play anyway.

Embrace diversity — in all senses. Embrace accessibility. Calm down and think.

And then we can do the same thing next year when the women don’t qualify for France 2019.

0
podcast

RSD 14: The next U.S. Soccer president?

Posted on by Beau Dure

The problems in U.S. Soccer run deeper than the water that flooded Ato Boldon Stadium in Trinidad and Tobago before the U.S. men’s anemic performance and shocking exit from the World Cup on Tuesday night.

There’s an arrogance throughout the federation. There’s chaos in youth soccer, where the costs keep spiraling upward with no tangible results.

My guest on Ranting Soccer Dad: Episode 14 is out to change that. He’s Steven Gans, and he’s challenging Sunil Gulati for the presidency of U.S. Soccer. The election will be at the federation’s Annual General Meeting, Feb. 8-11 in Orlando.

He believes he can get better results from the country’s national teams. But he wants to devote a lot of effort at the bottom — youth soccer and the various volunteers he sees as being neglected and ignored today.

The interview took place Monday, when the U.S. men’s qualification campaign seemed to be in good shape.

2
women's soccer

Women in U.S. Soccer leadership

Posted on by Beau Dure

No, it’s not a blank post.

The Guardian recently posed the question of whether a woman could be elected U.S. Soccer president, focusing on one of the more likely candidates (we think) — Julie Foudy. The response from Foudy? “It’s not realistic.”

But it’s not because a good female candidate couldn’t win.

Foudy also says that most women are unable to even consider running for the position because it is an unpaid role with a high workload.

“How much work does Sunil do for a volunteer position?” Foudy says. “There’s no pay for the president so what woman who needs an income or is raising kids is going to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be able to volunteer 30 or 40 hours a week that take me away from family and my real job’. It’s not realistic. The position itself needs restructuring if you are going to get more women engaged in it.”

That might also explain why we don’t see many women heavily involved on the U.S. Soccer board. Here’s a quick history:

In the mid-2000s, U.S. Soccer followed the lead of other sports federations and reduced the size of its board from 40 to 15 voting members (plus two non-voting — the immediate past president and the CEO/Secretary General, the top paid USSF employee). The bylaw was approved in 2006, the same year Sunil Gulati was elected president for the first time. Let’s look at who has occupied each seat since then:

President, vice president: Sunil Gulati, Carlos Cordeiro. Gulati was unopposed in 2006, 2010 and 2014. Not in 2018. Cordeiro, formerly an independent director (we’ll get to it) won the vice presidency in 2016, ousting incumbent Mike Edwards (who replaced Gulati as VP in 2006). (Yeah, I’ve already written about this.)

In short — no women here as far back as I can trace.

Athlete representatives: Chris Ahrens, Carlos Bocanegra, Angela Hucles. USSF is required to give athletes at least 20 percent of the vote, which means three out of 15 in this case. There’s no official rule saying the reps must be one Paralympian, one MNT veteran and one WNT veteran, but that’s how it’s worked out since Jon McCullough joined the board in 2008. The 2012 Paralympic torch-bearer passed away in 2014, and Ahrens took his place on the board.

Linda Hamilton was on the board after the 2006 re-org. Her seat has since gone to Amanda Cromwell, Danielle Fotopoulos, Danielle Slaton, Cindy Parlow Cone and now Hucles.

Pro Council: Don Garber, Steve Malik. Bylaws say these seats are for the Pro Council chairperson and an elected rep. MLS commissioner Garber has been on the board for the whole century so far. WPS commissioner Tonya Antonucci had the other seat for a year or so. Malik, who runs North Carolina FC (and the NWSL finalist Courage), replaced USL CEO Alec Papadakis, who replaced another MLS/NWSL owner in Merritt Paulson.

So that’s one woman, briefly (bad timing for her departure).

Adult Council: Richard Moeller, John Motta. As on the Pro Council, these seats are for the chairperson and a rep. Motta defeated Gulati in a close race for vice president in 1998, but Gulati won a rematch in 2000. Motta is exploring a bid for the presidency. I can’t find any women who’ve held these seats since the 2006 re-org.

Youth Council: Jesse Harrell, Tim Turney. Also chairperson and a rep. Evelyn Gill was on the board for four years.

At-Large Representative: John Collins. The election process for this spot is insanely complicated. Read Bylaw 413, section 3. In any case, no women, at least since 2006.

Independent Directors: Donna Shalala, Val Ackerman. These positions were added to the board in the 2006 re-org. They’re officially elected, but in practical terms, the board seeks out people with some clout in the worlds of sports business, general business and politics. The board also has used these spots to find people other than white men — Cordeiro, Fabian Núñez, Shalala and Ackerman. Shalala recently made news as the alleged independent director who fell asleep during the presentation of Rocco Commisso on behalf of the NASL’s Division II sanctioning application, which Commisso thinks is an indication of the board’s prejudice but more likely an indication that Shalala might not be young enough to sit through an NASL presentation.

So as it stands now, is the best path for a woman to the USSF presidency might be through the independent director seats? Let’s compare it to the other pathway — through the various constituencies …

Adult Council (basically U.S. Adult Soccer): The one woman out of eight here is Shonna Schroedl, who has run for the Council’s elected spot on the board. (Note to self: Interview Shonna Schroedl.)

Youth Council: This is a little more complicated. Four organizations are represented — U.S. Youth Soccer, U.S. Club Soccer, AYSO and SAY Soccer. How many women are on their boards?

Pro Council: If the NWSL ever names a commissioner, maybe they’ll have some female representation?

Actually, the organization with the most women in leadership is the Organization Formerly Known As NSCAA. That would be United Soccer Coaches, where Amanda Vandervort just wrapped up a one-year term as president and Lynn Berling-Manuel is the CEO. Including the ex officio members such as Berling-Manuel, five of 11 board members are female.

U.S. Soccer also has committees and task forces that have a few women involved. The giant Appeals Committee includes Kate Markgraf (also one of two women on the Rules Committee), Shannon Boxx, Lauren Holiday, Lori Lindsey, Heather O’Reilly, Christie Rampone, Becky Sauerbrunn, Lindsay Tarpley and several more women. Siri Mullinix pops up on the small Credentials Committee. Gill, Schroedl and Lauren Gregg are on the Disability Soccer Committee. Mary Harvey is on the Life Member Task Force. Sandra Hunt is among the women on the Referee Committee. Finally, the Technical Committee is a 50-50 split that includes WNT coach Jill Ellis, April Heinrichs and Carin Gabarra.

(Lydia Wahlke, listed as a staff liaison on several of these committees, is a U.S. Soccer general counsel.)

Here’s the one that aggravates the Ranting Soccer Dad in me: The 12-member Task Force on Youth Issues has ONE woman — Hucles.

So would U.S. Soccer have some viable presidential candidates here? Perhaps.

Would it help to get more women involved on these task forces and then perhaps on the board? Definitely, and not just because that’ll increase the likelihood of having a female president one of these years.

1
pro soccer

NASL, U.S. Soccer cannot agree on court timeline

Posted on by Beau Dure

U.S. Soccer has responded to the NASL’s antitrust lawsuit — not a full-scale rebuttal of the charges, but a complaint about the NASL’s desire to get to court as quickly as possible.

The USSF response goes on to say:

  • USSF was served with the NASL complaint two days ago. (They underline it in the complaint.)
  • That complaint is really long — 71 pages, plus three declarations totaling 113 pages (Stefan Szymanski’s is 80)

NASL asked for this schedule, the USSF response says:

  • Oct. 4: USSF response to the suit
  • Oct. 11: NASL response to the response
  • Oct. 18: Hearing
  • Before all that: If USSF doesn’t agree to that schedule, then both parties should submit their proposed schedules by 10 a.m. Friday (Sept. 22, today). U.S. Soccer responded, “Dude, it’s Rosh Hashanah” (not in those specific words), and suggested Tuesday, Sept. 26.
  • And yet, USSF came up with a briefing schedule by Thursday night. NASL didn’t respond to USSF, says the response, instead sending a letter to the court.

Next up: USSF claims no decision is necessary by mid-October. Here’s another excerpt, with an amusing turn of phrase highlighted:

The next part: USSF points out that the sanctioning process usually doesn’t even begin until fall, with decisions in December. And this past year, Commisso bought the Cosmos from the scrap heap in January and managed to get the team on the field two months later.

(Yes, you could argue that such a timeline is less than ideal. Of course, USSF could also argue that they did the NASL a favor by saying “no” to Division II sanctioning in September rather than December.)

Next up: The “We can’t possibly do this in two weeks” argument.

Which leads to a paragraph that is incoherent and yet interesting.

Having played the “Hey, you guys used to be reasonable” card, USSF now plays the “If you wanted a speedy resolution, why’d you include 80 pages from Stefan Szymanski?” card:

I hope this case continues because I would really like to see declarations from the past and present members of these mysterious task forces. Many task forces and committees have reports in the Annual General Meeting report, in case you want to see what the Audit Committee or Open Cup Committee has been up to, but usually not the Professional League Task Force (which currently consists of U.S. Soccer staff, U.S. Soccer’s VP and a Paralympian from the Athletes Council) or the Professional League Standards Task Force (Lawyers R Us).

The proposed USSF timeline is basically an invitation for Jeffrey Kessler and company to skip Thanksgiving this year.

I’m no lawyer, but I think it’s safe to say the court isn’t going to buy a 13-day window there. My guess would be the USSF Opposition would be due before Nov. 17.

Exhibit A is Jeff Carlisle’s ESPN story about Commisso bringing the Cosmos back from the dead. Exhibit B is Brian Straus’ SI story on the same topic.

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women's soccer

Promotion/relegation propaganda/reality, Part 3: U.S. Soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

There’s no organization in the world quite like U.S. Soccer.

That’s not a compliment. That’s not an insult. It just … is.

U.S. Soccer is unique among major U.S. sports federations in that its mandate goes beyond organizing national teams and developmental programs. It’s responsible, by FIFA fiat, for regulating professional soccer competitions. (Or, in the case of the U.S. Open Cup, running those competitions outright.)

ussf-purpose

U.S. Soccer is unique among soccer federations in that the nation it serves is a massive economic power on a giant land mass in which soccer is not the most popular sport. The USA isn’t the only country that has its own indigenous offshoot of “football” that rivals or exceeds soccer in popularity — see Australia and, to a lesser extent, Ireland — but it’s the only one that has multiple team sports that garner more attention. As far as I know, it’s the only soccer federation in a country that has been openly hostile to the sport for generations.

And to my knowledge, it’s the only federation that was charged by FIFA with getting an honest-to-goodness professional league running in the 1990s. Every other major country already had one.

The most important election in U.S. Soccer to date was in the summer of 1990, when Alan Rothenberg unseated Werner Fricker. Rothenberg was under a bit of pressure to run. From 1994, here’s Steve Berkowitz, then of The Washington Post and later a demanding but fair editor who made some of my USA TODAY stories a lot better:

Rothenberg said FIFA officials, familiar with him because of his involvement with the 1984 Olympic soccer competition, initially contacted him about chairing the World Cup organizing committee. When he said he was interested in doing so, he was told that he also would have to become USSF president. He agreed, and lo and behold, Rothenberg unseated Fricker in August 1990.

And so Rothenberg went to work on getting FIFA’s cash cow, the World Cup, up to speed. He also had to fulfill U.S. Soccer’s other promise to FIFA, a pro soccer league. Rothenberg needed a plan, and so he went about hiring people — including economist Sunil Gulati and attorney Mark Abbott, on loan from Rothenberg’s law firm, Latham & Watkins.

Abbott sat with me for an interview when I was writing Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer (please note: I did not choose that subtitle). Here’s what he said about Rothenberg’s unusually sprawling role:

At that time, there were very stringent procedures that were put in place to ensure that although Alan was the head of the soccer federation and leading the effort to make a presentation with respect to the league, he had been recused from the decision-making system in U.S. Soccer. There was a big meeting in December 1993 where we made our presentations. Alan was not part of the Federation board in making that decision. Also, and I think this gets overlooked, FIFA in awarding the World Cup to the United States did so very expressly for the purpose of using it as a springboard for a professional league. That’s what he was supposed to be doing, using this event to help start the league.

Still, the federation’s board voted to decide which of three bids would be awarded Division I status. In addition to Rothenberg’s group, the existing Division II-ish APSL put in a bid, as did Jim Paglia on behalf of League One America, which would take the old NASL’s Americanization of soccer rules to new extremes. (Jim, I know you’re out there — if you still have the video of the test games, I’d love to see them.)

The vote wasn’t unanimous. The tally was 18 MLS, 5 APSL, 0 League One America.

More from my book (because I can’t find Hersh’s story online):

Veteran national-team defender and U.S. Soccer board member Desmond Armstrong, who cast a ballot for MLS in the Division I vote, said his decision was strictly on merit. “I don’t have any love lost for the federation,” Armstrong told the Chicago Tribune‘s Philip Hersh. … “It wasn’t a matter of playing favorites, but of getting the best proposal out there so we can have jobs. I voted for Alan’s plan because it had all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted.”

The APSL grumbled a bit and for a short time was a legitimate competitor to MLS, signing quite a few players who were clearly good enough for the top tier but balked at the salary structure.

The next year (1994), Rothenberg ran for re-election. It got ugly, but he won.

The election was close in 1998. “Dr. Bob” Contiguglia defeated Larry Monaco 57.6% to 42.4%. Even closer was the race for executive VP, in which John Motta defeated … Sunil Gulati, then serving as MLS deputy commissioner. That was 372 (50.8%) to 361.

Maybe that was a rebuke of MLS officials gaining too much power in U.S. Soccer (though, note, this was before MLS hired Don Garber and well before MLS formed Soccer United Marketing). But such sentiment didn’t last long. U.S. Soccer then started staggering the terms of its top board members, and Gulati came back two years later to win the seat from Motta. And Gulati was able to point out in Fraser v MLS testimony that U.S. Soccer didn’t just rubber-stamp whatever MLS wanted.

Then Gulati succeeded Dr. Bob as U.S. Soccer president, and elections have come and gone with little fanfare or fire since then. The 2016 vice-presidential election was contested in gentlemanly fashion, with longtime independent director (board member) Carlos Cordeiro ousting Mike Edwards. Gulati hasn’t been opposed.

(This is an image of a Google search. Don’t click.)

gulati-votes

Wait, wait … you’re saying. What does this have to do with promotion and relegation?

Nothing. Because it wasn’t an issue.

We’re about the have the next biggest presidential election in USSF history. Is pro/rel an issue now? Or is it more about general arrogance and an unwillingness to push Major League Soccer to be more open, whether that means pro/rel or a looser salary cap? Or perhaps the historical view that the close ties between USSF, MLS and Soccer United Marketing that may have been necessary for survival in the mid-2000s are no longer necessary and perhaps harmful?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZKR67THaA0/?taken-by=prorelfc

Gulati has often been painted as ruthless — player testimony in Fraser v MLS certainly made him look like a tough negotiator, to put it nicely. In my experience, he’s a pragmatic idealist. He has devoted thousands of volunteer hours to making the sport succeed, and he has laudable intent (and action) on trying to diversify the typically homogeneous Federation. Whether he has handled every situation in his long tenures in various roles is up to everyone to decide.

Gans is pragmatic as well. He announced his candidacy only after going on a “listening tour” of various constituencies, and he’s concerned about youth soccer dysfunction and the decision-making that led the Fed to renew Jurgen Klinsmann’s contract and then fire him. As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, his take on pro/rel is cautious.

That’s not far from what Gulati said on pro/rel earlier this year:

“It’s not the rules of the game that people came in on,” Gulati said. “When you buy into a particular structure, that’s what you expect the rules to be. … But if the leagues or a league wants to engage, we’re happy to be support that.”

Lapointe is more prone to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. His approach to Twitter, to which he’s still relatively new, resembles another president in the United States:

He recently proposed promotion/relegation in women’s soccer and a U.S. Women’s Open Cup. The Twitter reaction was skeptical, to say the least:

NWSL supporters on a lively Facebook group said “let’s get the NWSL in order first” and “technically, we have national Cups for women, but no one enters.” The latter point was emphasized by none other than John Motta, the former USSF VP who is now president of the U.S. Adult Soccer Association.

And Motta is himself considering a run. So is Jerome de Bontin, the former president of French club Monaco and general manager of the New York Red Bulls who is now the chairman of the sprawling Rush Soccer youth organization (sadly, not named after Geddy, Neil and Alex — or Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny, though like Rush Soccer, they hail from Colorado).

So will any of these presidential candidates bring forth promotion and relegation?

It’s complicated.

Like the United States themselves, U.S. Soccer is a representative democracy. Not a dictatorship. The president must contend with the rest of the board, the general membership and perhaps even the U.S. courts.

And even Lapointe sees a need to phase into promotion and relegation, not just throw open the whole pyramid at once. That might not reassure the PRZ (Pro/Rel Zealots), who insist any incremental step suggested by me or Peter Wilt is simply doing the bidding of Evil MLS.

In any case, pro/rel may be the least of the next U.S. Soccer president’s concern. As mentioned many times in the past week or so, the NASL lawsuit calls into question U.S. Soccer’s legal authority to regulate professional soccer, and it’s not the first. But the bylaws clearly state U.S. Soccer’s firm belief that it can’t simply let someone else take over any aspect of the game.

ussf-autonomy

(Except, apparently, indoor soccer. The boarded version of the game is operating outside USSF right now. For a while, it was associated with an organization called the Federation Internacional de Futbol Rapido, whose acronym FIFRA was hilariously close to FIFA. And except, apparently, college and high school soccer, neither of which is governed by U.S. Soccer. But I digress …)

So the Federation, and its president, must walk some difficult political lines. Filip Bondy, a longtime soccer writer now contributing to Forbes, put it best when he described the presidency as “a job opening you might want to pass on.”

Summing up Bondy’s take — the president gets to:

  • Accept blame for national team downturns
  • Deal with men’s and women’s national team contract disputes and potential work stoppages
  • Deal with FIFA and other officials of potentially dubious credentials and ethics (to me, this might be the toughest — how long can you swim in the FIFA cesspool without starting to stink?)
  • Collect a salary of $0.

Oh, and you have to put up with the NASL and Stefan Szymanski. If you didn’t see my Twitter thread on Szymanski’s declaration in favor of the NASL tweaking U.S. Soccer, check it out. Allow some time.

And it’s not as if U.S. Soccer simply rubber-stamps everything the president wants. (Also in that link: Note that U.S. Soccer changed the way it runs election, asking candidates to declare in advance instead of just presenting themselves on the meeting floor, and it instituted term limits. If Gulati runs and wins re-election in 2018, he’s out in 2022.)

So who votes? Let’s see if we can sum up Bylaw 302:

  • State association reps, both youth and adult. Their votes are weighted by the number of people they represent. (In other words, New York East is going to have a more heavily weighted vote than Alaska.)
  • Athlete delegates. There’s usually only a few, but by U.S. law, their votes have to be weighted to count for 20 percent of the final tally.
  • Board members.
  • Past presidents.
  • Life members of U.S. Soccer (weighted so that they have no more than 12 total votes, which isn’t much)
  • Delegates from pro leagues, national associations, national affiliates, other affiliates, disabled service organizations, etc.
  • Adult Council and Youth Council administrative commissioners (I have no idea who this is)

Further weighting: The Youth, Adult and Professional Councils will all end up with equal votes.

Here’s how it broke down in 2015:

vote

You know what I don’t see in the bylaws? Is the election “first past the post” (top vote-getter is president, even without a majority) or a runoff system (top two hold a runoff)? In elections for the “at large” representative on the board (which is rarely of interest), the bylaws specify a runoff. I haven’t seen anything about a presidential race with more than two candidates.

And as I’ve been writing this, Eric Wynalda has jumped into the race. Maybe. His platform seems to be simple: Sunil Out. Yet even he suggests promotion/relegation needs to start in the lower divisions before going up to Division I.

So will any of this bring about pro/rel? I don’t know. How’s Trump doing on draining the swamp? Or building the wall? Or ending Obamacare while making sure everyone has access to health insurance?

president

Overthrowing a dictator is a fairly simple process. Overhauling a democratic organization is much more difficult.

 

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pro soccer

A complete fact/reality check of the NASL lawsuit (abridged)

Posted on by Beau Dure

Apologies to Reduced Shakespeare Company for the headline.

let-it-rot
“In the midst of all this public bickering, Let It Rot was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit.”

I went line-by-line through the NASL lawsuit and was intending to come back to anything that has yet to be covered in the Pro League Standards (story with PDF / standards sans PDF). After 3,000 words, I realized I was repeating myself. Or nit-picking. (In paragraph 16, the suit refers to “USFF,” and I quipped that this had nothing to do with U.S. Futsal.)

Let’s just hit the generalities:

This is a direct challenge of U.S. Soccer’s power to regulate pro soccer.

Paragraph 4: “The USSF is a private organization and has no legal authority to confer immunity from competition to anyone.”

This is where we’ll find some of the interesting questions. Around the world, of course, the national federation governs the game in that nation, and that’s not disputed. You could argue that the FA has unfairly promoted the Premier League at the expense of other leagues, and I wonder if any lawyers in England have ever considered challenging the EPL’s money-making machine as a repression of “sporting merit.”

In the USA, the legal authority for U.S. Soccer comes from the Stevens Act, which poses some problems …

And, both implicitly and explicitly, the suit challenges FIFA.

Paragraph 57: “FIFA is a private international body that has assumed the role of organizing men’s and women’s soccer on a global basis. Its rules and regulations are privately derived and formulated, and do not have any governmental source of authority over professional soccer in the U.S.”

That’s a necessary challenge because FIFA expects the national federation to govern soccer in its country. In fact, it demanded that U.S. Soccer get moving on a Division I league as part of the deal to host World Cup 1994.

(In other words, if MLS didn’t exist, you might not have had a chance to see the World Cup, though I suppose only those of us over 30 — at least — actually had that chance. I wonder how this lawsuit will affect the next U.S. bid.)

I wonder if it’s theoretically impossible to meet Stevens Act and FIFA’s expectations at the same time.

lovejoy

Everything U.S. Soccer did to try to stabilize the lower divisions over the past 10 years is now being touted as “anticompetitive.”

d2Here’s one reading of the U.S. Soccer’s decision to step into the rift within the USL, then operating in Division II and Division III: The Federation wanted to buy time for the two factions — neither of which had attained critical mass — to either work things out or solidify their own interests. So it agreed to take over and run an ad hoc Division II league for one year, during which the teams that would become the NASL managed to get their ships in relative order. The Federation also wrote stringent Division II standards that the NASL teams — but not the USL teams — could meet, all in the interest of trying to make sure teams wouldn’t fold midseason any more. (Yes, I hear you, disgruntled St. Louis Athletica fans.)

(And let’s be clear: The USL isn’t blameless here. The USL’s centralized model is the stumbling block to any possible merger between it and the NASL, NISA, NPSL, etc., and that is looking more and more like a liability at this point.)

Here’s the NASL lawsuit’s reading, repeated several times in the suit: The league was all set to go Division II and then Division I, but U.S. Soccer was in the way.

And the process of granting waivers to the Standards is deemed suspicious, even though that kept the NASL going at Division II for a few years.

Everything is part of a conspiracy.

The word “conspiracy” appears 31 times in the document.

We’ve heard these arguments for years. MLS and the USSF want to monopolize soccer in the United States. I can’t imagine a country in which that’s not the case. Granted, you can get into the top tier through promotion/relegation in other countries, but the system is still set up so that you need vast amounts of capital to do so.

The USL, which got the same provisional Division II status as the NASL this year, is considered part of the conspiracy because it’s not interested in challenging MLS and cooperates with it, allowing MLS reserve teams to compete therein. But USL-MLS relations weren’t always so great, and the NASL was close to lining up the same partnership before abruptly backing away.

The NASL seems convinced MLS was terrified of it.

Paragraph 10: “Driven in part by “concern[s] that the new NASL … would import players from South America and in essence become the anti-M.L.S. by allowing teams to sign players without worrying about a salary cap or a single-entity setup,” (citing a 2010 Bleacher Report piece) and thereby create a more attractive product for fans, the USSF has conspired with MLS and other USSF members to block the NASL from effectively competing with MLS.

As with a lot of things in Jeffrey Kessler’s lawsuits against U.S. Soccer, such as the time his side tried to convince the court that the “Premier League” and “First Division” were both “Division I” leagues in England, this is a more persuasive argument if you assume no one with any soccer knowledge will enter the courtroom. USSF lawyers will undoubtedly respond that MLS has signed plenty of players from South America and loosened its salary cap so that teams like Toronto can spend like the Sept. 23 Doomsday prediction is accurate.

Twice, the suit touts the NASL’s Open Cup record vs. MLS teams. But it’s a bit selective, spanning only the years 2012-14. THAT is when the NASL had a 42 percent win record against MLS, as claimed in the suit. And it doesn’t mention that the NASL has not yet had a team make the semifinals, much less win it. Most of those wins were against MLS reserves in the early rounds.

Also difficult to explain away from an NASL perspective: The USL, playing at a lower division, didn’t seem to have any problem staying competitive with the higher-tier NASL. If the USL could be competitive as a third-division league, why is Division II status so important to the NASL?

The NASL believes the Professional League Standards are unfair.

I’ve questioned the divisional standards before. I don’t think a Division II league, for example, should be forced to operate in three time zones. Division I? Probably.

The suit adds a fun twist on the time-zone requirement, pointing out that top leagues in England, Germany, Spain, France and Italy have no such requirement. A look at a map should explain why.

Also, the suit complains that the USA’s standard of needing 15,000 seats in every Division I stadium would mean England’s Premier League is out of compliance. Bournemouth’s inability to renovate its stadium has far-reaching consequences, doesn’t it?

But it’s not as if the NASL is close to this requirement. Its median stadium capacity is 10,000.

Other countries have standards, too. In Germany, if you want to be in the top two tiers, you need a youth academy with a jacuzzi. To reach “Step 1” (the fifth division) in England, you have to be able to separate home and visiting fans in your ground.

Still, the suit raises a few legitimate objections. Why are Division I clubs required to have a “principal owner” with an Individual Net Worth of at least $40 million, when there’s a separate requirement for an ownership group to have a combined net worth of $70 million (to which the NASL apparently does not object) and a $1 million performance bond each season? Why did a 2015 proposal to raise the standards further — itself an ill-timed idea — propose that a Division I league must have 75% of its teams in metro areas of more than 2 million people, of which there are barely 30 in the USA?

Who made the Professional League Standards so stringent in the first place?

Hat tip to BigSoccer’s Knave, who pointed out that some of the owners who split from the USL to form the NASL in the first place were pushing for tougher standards in 2010. Are any of those owners still involved?

On Jason Davis’ SiriusXM show today, Steven Bank noted that some “anticompetitive” standards may actually be procompetitive because they help clubs stay in business, which would be a change from lower divisions of the past.

But this is a recurring argument in the suit. There’s no other reason for the standards to be the way they are except to keep the NASL down. I’m not sure history backs up that claim.

Hey, what about promotion/relegation?

Paragraph 11: U.S. Soccer doesn’t do pro/rel, so there.

Paragraph 12: NASL seeks to strike down all rules on divisions.

It’s a mixed message.

Paragraph 69 repeats the dubious claim that the FIFA statutes require divisional assignment primarily on sporting merit. We’ve covered this.

Antitrust depends on defining a market that is being claimed as exclusive territory by the defendant. What’s the market here?

Steven Bank addressed this issue this afternoon on Jason Davis’ SiriusXM show:

Steve Holroyd’s response:

Why do I know so many legal people?

The suit (Paragraph 35) actually says U.S. Soccer is restraining competition in the USA AND Canada, which may come as a surprise to the people launching a new league in Canada.

Is U.S. Soccer’s structure inherently flawed?

MLS has 57.1% of the votes on the Pro Council, which means it can pretty much select the two representatives to the U.S. Soccer Board. (Though one of them now is actually Steve Malik of North Carolina FC, which is in the NASL (and NWSL) but perhaps not totally down with what’s happened this week, reports Neil Morris.)

Is that just the natural order of things, though? How many federations have multiple organizations like this? Even in U.S. Soccer, the Adult Council has one organization — the USASA, whose president, John Motta, will announce within 30 days whether he’s running for the U.S. Soccer presidency. (Breaking news, I suppose, but it’s been discussed on Twitter.)

Is U.S. Soccer obligated to have more than one Division I soccer league?

No one else does, unless you count the oddball Indian Super League, which is a weird cross between a league and a tournament.

If so, is U.S. Soccer obligated to make that second league the NASL?

In Paragraph 198, U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati is quoted as saying in 2007 that he figured we would have two Division I leagues in a few years.

Let’s assume for sake of argument this isn’t ripped out of context (I haven’t had a chance to check). That would mean Gulati — and apparently U.S. Soccer, since the suit alleges he and his conspirators have near-omnipotent power over it — have no objection to having a second D1 league.

So why the objection to the NASL?

Is it because the league muddled through under the guidance of since-disgraced Traffic Sports, among other troubles pointed out in an excellent overview by Soccer America’s Paul Kennedy?

Is it because the NASL brand name harkens back to the days of a popular but ill-managed league that broke every rule it could find?

Is it because the league is down to eight existing teams, some of which have their eye on the door?

Is it because, as Kartik Krishnaiyer points out in a piece that doesn’t spare the Federation, the NASL “dug its own grave“?

Or is it because U.S. Soccer has come to realize a second Division I league would muddy the waters, poison relationships with sponsors and broadcasters and result in a replay of the “Soccer Wars” that killed the American Soccer League after its 1920s heyday?

 

 

 

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ranting soccer dad, soccer

An analysis of the ramifications of the NASL’s antitrust suit

Posted on by Beau Dure

You know that scene in Airplane that’s always cut from the TV broadcast? When Ted Striker says something’s going to hit the fan, the camera cuts to the airport office, and said something does indeed hit the fan?

Yeah. That’s my analysis of the ramifications of the NASL’s antitrust suit. But, because this is how we roll, we’re going to dig deeper.

The lawsuit might not be a bad thing. From the youth soccer mandates to the national team ticket prices, the U.S. soccer (lowercase) community has one major complaint against U.S. Soccer (uppercase):

The Federation has become unspeakably arrogant. 

So this is a shot across the bow of U.S. Soccer, and perhaps it’s well-deserved. Maybe this will force the Federation to take a good hard look at the state of the lower divisions, listen to the people involved and take more of an enlightened leadership role. It’s certainly an ominous sign that at least three of the four current members (and the two USSF staff liaisons) of the Professional League Standards Task Force are lawyers — one of them an attorney for the Federation from 2001 to 2009.

That said … are the people filing this suit really the people who should be leading the revolution?

The NASL (see Part 2 of my pro/rel series, which will resume this week) has always been an oddball. It revived the brand name of a dead league that still holds unofficial world records for rule changes and Bugs Bunny appearances, then posited itself as the paragon of traditional soccer. Among the many ironies at play here — the old NASL never bothered with the U.S. Open Cup, which the current NASL touts as proof of its competitiveness:

I’d like to see a breakdown of that 42%. In any case, the Open Cup semifinals (for that matter, most of the quarterfinals) tend to proceed without NASL involvement.

The last two sentences here are classic Jeffrey Kessler, the lawyer who has been wildly successful in every manner of sports litigation except soccer. (See my entry from when the NASL first floated the antitrust warning two years ago.) They may seem convincing to people who don’t know the U.S. soccer landscape. They’re easily refuted by those who do.

And those who do tend to point out inconvenient facts like this:

And here’s a final concern: Court cases have generally been very, very bad for soccer. The MLS players lawsuit (again, Kessler involved) drained a lot of resources from a developing league that could’ve been used to put the league on firmer ground, and it was hardly the first time …

Steve also made the point that league-vs.-league competition has been good in many U.S. sports. But it hasn’t been so good in U.S. soccer. Indoor soccer never recovered from the alphabet soup of the 1990s — though it’s still hanging in there (and might take off if someone added an ambitious team like, say, the Cosmos?). The “Soccer Wars” of the late 1920s threw a wrench into the progress of the American Soccer League.

All that said, U.S. Soccer surely could’ve stopped all this. Look back on the Professional League Standards helpfully published by Neil Morris, whose digging on lower-division soccer is invaluable. (Try PDF from Neil’s old site or non-PDF from Kenn Tomasch.) They’re a little overboard. It’s one thing to make sure teams don’t pop up and blow away like dandelion seeds. It’s another to say you can have multiple Division 2 leagues and then make it nearly impossible for two leagues to meet the standards.

To remain in Division 2, the NASL is supposed to have 12 teams. (Someone, probably Neil, pointed out that a Division 1 women’s league has to have at least 10 teams by year four, which means the NWSL currently has no margin for error.) They’re all supposed to have an owner (at least 35% of the club) with an individual net worth of at least $20 million. They have to be in the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones.

Why? What’s the harm in having a second division that’s 10 teams in the East and Central? Or eight teams in the Pacific? Why one principal owner with at least $20 million to throw around?

Yes, you can get waivers. Expect Kessler to paint those waivers as purely arbitrary. And he may have a point.

In short: This whole mess really could’ve been avoided. Maybe it’s unrealistic to relaunch the NASL and the Cosmos with pretenses of glory. Maybe it’s unrealistic for the Federation to try to solve the problem with implausible standards.

Maybe everyone involved deserves to be involved.

 

 

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