This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

Chicago Fire signed on a Mexican personality that also happens to play a little soccer and the general prognosis seems to be – here we go again – that Blanco will draw crowds in force to his games. It’s said of nearly all the recent Designated Player signings in one way or another: they put butts in the seats. So, ok, while Blanco might pull in a few of his countrymen - though even that looks suspect - and Beckham no doubt will draw some rubbernecking, are you buying it. Are you buying a ticket just to see Claudio Reyna play?
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The conversation began forty seconds into the game and never stopped. On a day when a pinstriped jersey was debuted across the street from the Yankees’ Legends Field, it made perfect sense that the oft-criticized super star, our best player, took center stage.
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“Ultimately, Beckham’s stint in MLS will only be a true asset to the league if, once he leaves, the divide between his compensation and that of his peers is not so stunningly wide. The longer he remains the great exception in terms of impressive pay, the longer other young MLS prospects will set their sights and hopes elsewhere.”

Something occurred to me while reading this quote from Andrea Canales’ column on MLS salaries. That which was put in place to save the league might now be destroying it.
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In the last post, I made a point that everything you need to know about the Beckham transfer you could gather from Good Morning America and their atrocious handling of breaking the news and filing one of the first interviews. I stand by that estimation, but I found something more in the coverage of the transfer: the malcontent the greater sports media has for soccer. Men attack the sport which not only are they unfamiliar with, but they do so with such zeal (and mediocre humor) that one can only conclude its a vendetta, and it is completely inexplicable. It’s as if they were kamikaze pilots, killing themselves to kill someone else. What’s the point?

You know, I’m fine with the fact that nearly everybody ignores soccer. Please, keep ignoring it. I’m fine with ESPN’s bourgeois coverage and gutter rat announcers (like MLS, Fox Soccer Channel slowly improves). I’m fine with all of it until soccer makes a splash in the baby pool, be it with a world cup or the signing David Beckham, and then every Tom, Dick, and Football comes out of the woodwork to shoot it down. What’s up with that?

Which reminds me. excuse me just this moment. SCREW SWIMMING!!! Yeah, those damn swimmers. You can’t even score a goal in swimming. You all just dream of water polo. Yeah. Take that Mark Spitz! Why don’t you just move to Australia where they worship your weird non-scoring sport? You will be nothing here! …but we’ll root for you every four years. USA! USA! USA!

Sound familiar? Slicing the soccer pie is similar to dividing Republicans and Democrats these days. There is very little common ground. Sometimes I think the polarization is the only thing they have in common, and the spin… oh the spin. In the right hands, any news is bad news when it comes to soccer.
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2006 was a big year for US soccer, but most have argued it’s more akin to infamy than fame. Respect has been a tough sell abroad, while MLS has still been a hard sell here, ten years after its inception. MLS is expanding without a known talent pool to fill the teams, while youth development is only beginning to provide results. In a sentence, 2006 has been a lot of talk and not a lot of action. That goes for the Stay Puft team we sent into Germany and the laurel-sitting brass of the USSF. When most would agree the environment is ripe for the picking, it seems the marketing and actionable qualities of our game are overlooked for pomp and circumstance. When looking back on the past year, the best thing I have learned, right here, right now, is that the gratitude is gone.

Now maybe we can get serious.
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Freddy Adu traded to Salt Lake. I was just about ready to copy and paste and prepare this story for Friday’s Barometer post, but then I read a quote toward the end from Steve Pastorino, Real Salt Lake’s general manager:

“Obviously, we enter this deal knowing what Freddy has said, and that Freddy was just over in England, but we also have had conversations with Freddy and his agent,” said Pastorino. “I’ll go as far as to say we expect Freddy will be on the field when we open up our new stadium in the summer of 2008. I think that’s a pretty good return on investment, provided that we get a couple of seasons out of him.”

Did his trip to Manchester change his mind? Does Elinger have that kind of sway on his former player? At first glance, this would seem just a halfway house on the way to Freddy’s freedom abroad, but Pastorino’s quote changes things a bit. Let the speculation begin.

You can read Andrea Canales’ full article here.

No one better defines the up-and-down life cycle of a professional athlete – or more importantly (and bumpier), that of an American footballer abroad – than DaMarcus Beasley: the name garners both praise and cynicism wherever I bring it up. Would a move to the English Premier League change any of that? We’re about to find out.
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up in arms over the MLS

While undoubtedly somewhere in here is a comparison to Victory, that Sly Stallone prison, soccer movie, I’ll let it slide to present cynical satire front and center. What do you say, let’s build up an American soccer league by imprisoning our best players on the North American continent. I am forced to use the word ‘league’ as a qualifier, because I can’t say simply American Soccer. This is not an American Soccer problem, this is an MLS problem, and quickly jumping to the top of my lengthy list of MLS problems I might add. Help me figure it out after the jump.
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“FC Barcelona could have blown out the Red Bulls?”
“If the game meant something, it would have been closer.”
“FCB is the puppet master. The Red Bulls are being toyed with. Look at the score. It is a blowout!”

Such is the standard argument for the FCB American tour. Other than standard, it is also fruitless, other than to exhibit the tired lives of those who fight this fight. I will not encourage it. What I will do is try to let images tell the story. Call it my scrap book for the weekend. Fall is approaching; kids head back to school. This is what I did on my summer vacation. A vacation is supposed to refresh. Today, I feel like a newborn, introduced to a world that is brand new. What I saw on Saturday, I have never seen before. For the last two nights, my last thought was a hope that I would see it again. Click HERE for the full story…

what’s missing from this photo?

It could have been the day I met Ronaldinho; Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Chinatown, New York; 3:30pm, Friday, August 10, 2006. What a day it could have been. Instead, rain. Lots of rain. What was previously looking like one hell of an afternoon – a brand new turf field; rug rats of various sizes making the most of Major Bloomberg’s so dubbed from now until eternity, FC Barcelona Day, a colorful crowd filling with anticipation with the arrival of their heroes – took a turn for the worst. Click HERE for the full story…