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

party # 1

What are we at? Is this the 3rd, 4th, or 5th coming out party for Freddy Adu? Now before you start throwing darts, let me preface all of this with… Freddy is a fine player who didn’t ask for a first surprise party, much less however many have since followed. But that isn’t a conversation killer. Plenty of questions exist, most of them unanswerable by anyone, anything, except for maybe the feet of Freddy. And they aren’t talking very often.

While there are no answers, we have - from the intelligent commenters on this website, to any number of articles that have been making it rain since his hat-trick performance - plenty of questions.

The short list after the jump…
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From the series, The Dodo and Mauritius Island, Imaginary Encounters, 2004. Harri Kallio.

This post has taken me longer to put together than a lot of posts. And it’s just names on paper. And it’s exactly why I don’t do this stuff, almost ever. After the jump is my best 11, with just enough explanation to leave my words wavering in the wind. Get in your shots while the getting is good!
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The entertainment guide (how fitting?) at the Evening Standard is reporting, without direct quotes mind you, that David Beckham is having second thoughts about joining MLS after his recent recall to fame in Europe. Imagine that.

Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with this, but after a weekend where one of my alma maters’ got a coach to come back after he not only announced he was leaving, but signed a contract with another team, nothing is impossible.

I finally figured out why the general American public criticizes soccer for its lack of scoring: there is little else to get excited about. I’m talking about soccer not football. Someday, maybe the worst player from a MLS team’s starting eleven will be equal to the skill of the best today, but the MLS game on the whole is still a work in progress, where it is difficult to see a polished product - a team - from the individual pieces yet to be fit together. And if it’s not polished, how can we expect people to pay to watch it? You can see top level high school soccer for free, and on a beautiful Mother’s day Sunday in front of less than 8,000 fans at Giants Stadium the Red Bulls played Colorado’s Rapids, I would have rather watched MLK high school play. The passion, the beauty, the team if not the individual skill, would be there. It was not there for Red Bulls v. Rapids. Both names were a misnomer. Colorado was anything but rapid, and the Red Bulls had no wings.
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It’s a slow week. Searching on-line for Grant Wahl’s return to soccer only takes up so much time. What, the US might be a back up plan for 2010 World Cup? Surprise! Guevara has personal conduct issues? What? When did that story break? Wow, what an original best XI you came up with. It looks like the other 4,000 i saw. What’s that, Beckham is coming? Beckham is coming!

The MLS grind is beginning to take shape, and all the whispers, rumors, and innuendo are slowing as actual soccer takes presadence. Or not. American soccer fans are like New York Yankee fans: discuss amongst yourselves.

Can you tell I’m about to take a tangent? It’s just that I’ve never been that interested in the daily quote-factory that is most sports writing or the college humor that blogs feel is their only schtick. Nothing inherently wrong with it. Sell ads around the idea of guys getting their girlfriends to write a website name across their bare stomachs and then volunteering it up to said ad-sellers for free. Really, I’m not judging – not soccer anyway. any time a writer gets paid to cover soccer, an angel gets its wings. It’s just not me, so sometimes, you got to go where your heart is (at least until the New York Times hires me as their Red Bulls beat writer). Which is why I’d like to highlight an article in the Wall Street Journal from the weekend, which besides a passing mention of Mia Hamm, has nothing to do with soccer. One day, if soccer succeeds in this nation and girls begin scrawling MLS across their bellies, it might have a lot to do with soccer. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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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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