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

greenwich village resident outlines a major league vision for manhattan’s pier 40

In just ten days, the brand new and beautiful Red Bull Arena will finally open to soccer fans with a sold-out exhibition between Red Bull New York and Brazil’s famed Santos football club. New Yorkers will hop on the PATH train and in about a half-hour arrive at the Harrison, NJ, based stadium without most of the problems of traveling to the Meadowlands, the previous home of RBNY and the now defunct Giants Stadium.

But for many who live East of the Hudson River, the biggest problems still remain. Will the best soccer stadium in the country be able to draw fans across the river? Can a building straighten out a mismanaged franchise with a history of failure? Will there be a honeymoon, and if so, how long will it last?

RBNY has its new home, but another structure’s future also places the city’s soccer future in the wind. Pier 40, one of the largest and most-used sports facilities in Manhattan, is in dire need of rehabilitation. Just as with RBNY, many plans have failed. But Greenwich Village resident Patrick Shields thinks he has the answer. An ambitious answer… Click HERE for the full story…

After hearing from a few people about the poor sound quality of the interviews on last week’s Waiting For Gaetjens podcast (sorry about that), I figured I’d transcribe the two interviews and post them here. I normally wouldn’t do this–I hate the whole, I write the same thing that I Twitter that I podcast that I Facebook, etc, etc, etc–but I think Hugo Salcedo in particular offers the most experienced knowledge of the movement of American youth players to Mexican club teams, while Goal.com’s Rene Leal, who spent time with Pachuca’s youth team, can shed light on the experience from a player’s perspective. And anyway, because no one actually heard what they said on the air, this is still new.

So how does the pipeline for players going from the U.S. to Mexico work? Will we see more movement? Will we see Americans without Mexican ancestry start heading south? Is this good for American soccer? Greg Lalas and I follow the path south to a system better prepared at present to accelerate the soccer education of American youth. Click HERE for the full story…

Did I just learn why the negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement are so contentious? Did I find out just how disrespected the Vietnam league is? Or did I discover that MLS doesn’t think he’s worth it? There is plenty to learn from the professional path taken by Lee Nguyen, but at present, all I have are questions.

Talking to Nguyen back in November of last year it seemed certain he would be playing in a MLS uniform in 2010. Once high school player of the year and college freshman of the year, as recently as last fall Arsenal had nice things to say about the 23-year-old Texan who played within the national team system at almost every level. He’s spent time at PSV Eindhoven, Randers FC, and HAGL in Vietnam. In an environment where nearly every talented young American player runs from MLS to foreign countries for better competition and compensation, here is a guy who wants to come back home. Done and done, right? So why am I waking him up at 6:45 AM in Vietnam—Lee thankfully awake from the half-day time change and jet lag before his new season starts at the end of the month? Click HERE for the full story…

book excerpt – one (every)man’s dream to own a pro soccer team

A native of Buffalo, NY, born to German immigrants, Ronald P. Maierhofer, 74, has been involved with soccer in the United States for eight decades. In 1942 his father started the first youth soccer league in Buffalo.  Ron and his brother signed amateur contracts with Toronto’s Belfast United of the Canadian Professional League when they were 16 years old (part of the contract was two cases of Molson Ale after each game). Ron was an All American player at Cornell and inducted in the school’s athletic hall of fame on the same night as Bruce Arena. He played for the LA Maccabees (signed for 7 cases of booze, and a bottle of Chivas Regal for every goal scored). He played for the US soccer team in the 1959-60 Pan American Olympic games (they placed third). Walter Bahr, he of the famous assist to Joe Gaetjens in the 1950 World Cup, recruited and coached three of Ron’s sons at Penn State (one son, Jeff, later played in the NASL). In 1970’s Texas he coached several of the first women to go on to UNC and help begin that eventual dynasty. He started the Cherry Creek Strikers, now the Colorado Storm, the 2nd biggest soccer club in Colorado. Tim Schutz, president of the biggest CO club, Rush, was coached by Ron as a youth.

That’s the short list. And all while having a serious, non-soccer business career on the side, which speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit that led Maierhofer in 1980 to be founding owner of Major Indoor Soccer League’s Denver Avalanche. His new book, No Money Down! How to Buy a Sports Franchise details his experience of buying and running the short-lived indoor franchise. Detailing how he financed the deal, hired staff, built the team, and marketed the franchise, the book is a peak into the past and proves at least in American soccer, that you don’t have to be a tycoon to follow your dream. Three decades later, it’s still true. “For a minor league franchise, any guy can own one,” Ron says. “That American dream is what the book is about, and it tells you how to make it a reality.” Click HERE for the full story…

I’ve asked Lyle Yorks for an interview several times to no avail. Agents aren’t known for talking to press and short of Scott Boras are famous for the low profiles they keep in the shadowy underbelly of professional sports. So when Michael Wheeler appeared on Twitter, giving up information not just on client movement but personal research on the game, it struck me as odd.

And what with the MLS combine and the Superduperdraft coming up in the next week, it’s a perfect time to pick the brain of the one agent–a relative newcomer to the business but not the sport–who would not only be willing to talk but hopefully have something more to say than the usual fair. Click HERE for the full story…

The treasure is not always what it seems. Didn’t Jack T. Colton teach us anything? It’s not a shiny, Tiffany-made cup. It’s not a three-day party of networking and one-night stands. It’s a moment where truth and disbelief bleed into the surreal. It’s a band on parade with a madcap leader out front. It’s the fans and all the swag they buy, creating a cohesive gang of support whereby the entire stadium is a supporters group. It’s the stadium with as many images of Sounders as Seahawks. It’s the Emerald City itself–the temporary end of the yellow brick road until there is proof that it can be extended. Seattle didn’t pave the way for American soccer, and stadium banners be damned it didn’t save MLS, but it steamrolled every obstacle so far in the adolescent league’s path (well, there is that one little munchkin about the turf).

So when the tears crept toward my eyes and memory transported me back to the banks of the Thames, I knew I found what I had been seeking. The sousaphones swirled around me like a tornado, the drums hammered me with their thunder.

Tap Tap Tap. Tap Tap Tap. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Click HERE for the full story…

QUICK PROGRAMMING NOTES:

TIAS, Du Nord, The Original Winger, Soccer By Ives, and The Offside Rules will be hosting a party Friday night 9pm in downtown Seattle at Kell’s Irish Pub (FYI - bar charges $5 cover, which is not going to us). It’s a true soccer bar I’m told, should be a good time. Won’t you join us?

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New Podcast Coming To iTunes: WaitingForGaetjens.com
Hear me butcher first and last names and attempt to make co-host Greg Lalas laugh as he tries to bring serious analysis to the world of American soccer. We’re looking towards a weekly schedule to begin after a special week of several run-up shows revolving around MLS Cup. Those few shows will also be downloadable at MLSnet.com. The plan is to pull in the best guests we can and keep it entertaining and informative. Please check it out–RSL GM Garth Lagerway joins us tomorrow–and let us know who you would like to see on the guest list. We’ll get it right next time.

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Now back to regularly scheduled programming already in progress…

I can’t remember the last time I put up a player interview on the site, but I’ve been fascinated with Lee Nguyen for awhile now. And then over a stretch of one month this fall the 23-year-old attacker went from Vietnam superstar to Arsenal trainee to FC Dallas off-season practice attendee. Curious, I went looking for some info, but found few answers. Here’s this kid living large over in Vietnam, cover of GQ, etc, etc. But we never hear much about him Stateside. We can’t begin to pronounce his Vietnamese club team and know nothing of his life in the far East, which is entirely different from every American soccer player, maybe in history.

On the phone the Texas native with Vietnamese roots sounds like his fellow Texan Clint Dempsey–that rough southern drawl lazy on the crackling cell phone satellites…

Click HERE for the full story…

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If there was ever a sheen on David Beckham for the American soccer fan with a Y chromosome, if he was initially given a pass, if anybody believed anything he said, well, that patina is gone. Beckham can still build urban soccer fields and set up summer camps and buy a MLS franchise, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

“Senator,” someone needs to tell him, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Not that it would do any good.

After the jump, we pick up the second half of my conversation with Grant Wahl, author of The Beckham Experiment, out now from Crown publishers. Read part one here. Click HERE for the full story…

Grant Wahl discusses his new book, The Beckham Experiment, out now from Crown

Why do book reviews have to be summaries of the book? I never got that. I understand it but don’t get it. I do get jacket blurbs, though. Those few sentences of praise on the back of a book–I’m always curious what names are there and what they say.

“Through the prismatic window of its most famous player, Wahl masterfully traces every intersection, follows every turn through the disjointed world of American soccer’s season on the brink… of what exactly is the lasting question.”

“There’s your jacket cover blurb” I wrote in sappy jest to Grant Wahl, when he asked my opinion of his book this past Spring. It was a joke—as if I’d be chosen over Foer, Deford, and other famous writers who praise the book on its back cover. But I have gotten to know Grant a bit over the four years I’ve been producing TIAS (Wahl was my first in-depth interview as I began to position TIAS as place where soccer journalism, not just the sport, was a topic of discussion). So after signing my life away, I was able to procure one of the first galley copies of the book back in May. And before the mainstream got its grubby hands on him, Grant talked his publisher into allowing him to speak to me before the deluge of requests. Click HERE for the full story…

Laugh about it, shout about it / When you’ve got to choose / Every way you look at it, you lose
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Lost in the whirlwind tour of South Africa and the Confederations Cup, which brought outlets from Harper’s to Deadspin to what seemed like every newspaper in the country out for a week-long soccer columning festival, was the demise of Brad Friedel’s once heralded (here at least) soccer academy in Ohio. So why does that matter?

In the last two weeks I’ve received emails asking why I didn’t write anything about the Confederations Cup or when I would. I’m still wondering, what really is there to say? Dan Loney did the best job I’ve seen of basically saying just that while pointing out the US MNT is not that good and doesn’t have any depth and doesn’t have the best coach they could. Too many of the rubberneckers came with, as Loney put it, “nonsense like winning games and getting good performances out of our players.” So where should the attention be going? Click HERE for the full story…