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

If you’ve read TIAS for any length of time, you’ve seen a link to du Nord. About Bruce, it’s creator, you’ve heard me say something to the effect of ‘he’s the hardest working man in the online soccer community.’ You could also argue he is the most mysterious, in that besides that first name, you really have clue who he is. No personal page, very little editorializing. Who is that masked man behind the random titles that don’t seem to make any sense? Well, it’s time to break down that firewall and find out. Bruce McGuire sat down with me over one time zone to dish the scoop on how the website of the North became the one-stop shop to fill up on soccer. Join us after the jump…

Hey Bruce. How you doing?

I just bought my season tickets for my local team here, the Minnesota Thunder. So that’s always exciting.

Yeah, I’m waiting for the Red Bulls individual game tickets to come available. But they’re just offering season tickets and packages at this point… So before we get to du Nord, I’d love to just talk about you for a minute if that’s cool with you. I’ve done a few of these interviews that always turn more into a conversation than a true interview, and it never ceases to amaze me where people come from and go through to create a soccer fan. There’s more options, more variety I’ve found than with other sports which may have a more standard, more stereotypically American development. So take me back if you will.
At age 5, soccer wasn’t the wish Bruce had in mind.

I grew up in southern Minnesota, in Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic. My parents both grew up on farms, and I was just a normal, small town, Midwestern kid. We moved to Boca Raton, Florida, when I was 9. But we only lasted a year. We hated it, so we moved back. When we moved back there was a guy and his family that moved in beside us. The dad was German, and he and another guy started the first soccer club in our town. That was in 1972 or 3; I was about 11 at the time. I don’t think I had even heard of soccer before that day. We met him and he was like, ‘we have this team and you should come play for it.’ I played American football because I was pretty big, and I was good; never sat on the bench. And I played basketball, because that’s what you do. I don’t know why, but I just took to soccer immediately. I don’t know if I was any good, but once again, I got to play. You know I found some photographs the other day of me playing soccer as a little kid, dressed in soccer gear. Thinking back, I don’t think I even knew what it all was. But then the next year we got a professional team, the Minnesota Kicks. And that was pretty cool. Over the next 4-5 years, all the big name players came here, and lots of people went to the games. They played at this old stadium called the Met Stadium; it’s where the Vikings and Twins played. They would get 40,000 people at the games; I think they averaged 20,000 and were definitely one of the top draws in the league for years and years. It was a cool place to go. I’m not real sure why people here went to be honest. I talk to people older than me, and they talk about how the tailgate parties were completely insane. I have a vague recollection of people bringing in coolers to the games, which you don’t see anymore and might have been quite an enticement for the 20-somethings to go. So, I remember some wild people and all around insanity.

There’s actually a guy down in Texas, named Dave Brett, and he has a website where he collects old NASL tapes, and he’ll trade you if you have tapes. He has a really awesome collections going. He just sent me 3 DVD’s of games from here that I went to. There is one game with the Kicks playing the Cosmos with Pele in the summer of ‘76. I was at that game and remember it. The biggest one I remember: I think it was the summer of ‘78 or ’79, and the Kicks played the Cosmos again, in the playoffs, and [Minnesota] won 9-2. It just poured rain; one of those mid-summer mid-west thunderstorms. And you know, I think all of that stuff pretty much cements you as a fan. Going to all those big games and seeing all the best players come through town. It was very cool.

There was also a TV show that we would watch on PBS called Soccer Made In Germany. There was an announcer, a British guy named Toby Charles. It was an hour-long show, and they would pick one game from the past week in Germany and condense it down to an hour with English commentary. It was very cool. It’s one of those things that when I meet people my age, we bond over Soccer Made In Germany. It’s just one of those quirky shows only certain people watched, and if you are under a certain age, you probably never even heard of it. That’s where I learned to say things like Borussia Mönchengladbach.

So that gave me a good base, growing up in the seventies and going to all of those great games, but above all of that, was my love for music. So all through the 80’s I barely paid any attention to soccer. There was no reason to in America. There was nothing going on, the NASL folded, and music was thing. I wanted to be in the music business.

And did you make it?

Well, here ya go. In 1979 I got my first job in a record store. Then I got another job at another record store. In college I got a job at a music distribution company, and then I got a job at a big record label, and then I worked my way up there, so, the next 18-19 years, that’s all I did.

Were you living in Minnesota all that time?

Yeah.

Were did you go to college?

University of Minnesota. But I dropped out and worked at Warner Brothers Records. I started there doing some marketing work and then moved over to what they call A&R, artist and repertoire. And basically, you’re going out and finding new artists, signing them to contracts. You’re going into studios and making records; you’re doing all the push inside your label to try and get them to push the band to the outside world.

Sounds like you got what you were after.

It was absolutely incredible, and I got to work with tons of incredibly great artists.

Give me a few highlights?

Probably my two biggest favorites to work with during that time were the Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine. They weren’t the most successful artists, but they were hugely influential with other musicians. They were the ones all the other guys wanted to see. We’d go to a festival and they would be really early on the bill, but everyone from every other band wanted to hang out with them. Those were my favorites. I mean, I worked with a lot of other artists who were a lot bigger like Jane’s Addiction and Green Day, but it was those other bands that were my true love.

Editors Note:
At this point Bruce and I talked about music for about 45 minutes. Kindred spirits came to mind. I won’t bore you with the details, assuming most of you would like to hear about the soccer stuff, but here’s a few highlights from our musical tour…

We both share a love for 50’s and 60’s bebop jazz – Coltrane, Monk, Ornette Coleman – as well as early Jamaican music beginning in the 50’s and going into the 70’s when Ska was giving way to Roots, Dub, Rocksteady and Reggae. Bruce found it through the Clash, while I mined the influences of a young Bob Marley. We gushed about artists Like Junior Murvin and Willy Williams. And we both have a fascination for Motown. As Bruce put it, “Motown records were recorded that same way [as the Jamaican music]. You know, eight amazing musicians stuffed into a tiny basement room with two microphones. The sound they (the Funk Brothers) got was stunning.”

Our musical discussion hinged on the enjoyment wrought from discovering new music, and taking what you find and using it to find more. And that’s when I was somehow able to bring the conversation back to soccer and to du Nord. It is obvious almost immediately for anyone who has read a du Nord post, that Bruce has a knack and a determination for finding every last bit of information. Just as he must have sat with a musician, trying to pull every bit of information from an instrument or album, he now sits with his computer, draining the internet of all its soccer worth. And again, just as with music, we, the consumers, are benefiting, getting inspired, and falling in love with the same thing, over and over again. Now back to the conversation, starting with Bruce’s reaction to my explaining this comparison…

That’s the most exciting thing I think about. This era that we’re in right now. Just being able to use the internet as this tool that we as Americans never had because we don’t have any [soccer] history. We don’t have any [soccer] knowledge. We didn’t grow up with this stuff in the newspaper and on TV every single day. I remember so distinctly, not more than 6-7 years ago when the internet really started to explode, and there were suddenly these resources for all of us. And all of us fans could find each other. That was probably the most exciting thing to me was to be able to go on and find a message board and suddenly there are all of these other people like me who live in America. And then you type in that you’re from Minneapolis and other people would respond, saying they lived there too.

It’s a huge boost for the soccer community specifically.

Yeah, not just the internet in general, but with soccer. In a lot of ways soccer is the sport of the internet. I think most of us could care less in a lot of ways if our daily paper ever writes about it. because when we are reading on-line the Press Telegraph from South Bay LA is as big a newspaper as the New York Times, because they are both on the internet. One doesn’t have more prestige than the other, because they both just have a URL and some guy writing about soccer. So it doesn’t matter who you are or what paper you’re from. If you have the passion and you write the story that’s good enough for all of us. It’s the great leveler of the playing field. We’re all in it together, but we found the secret society to be soccer fans in America, and it’s the internet.

I have a whole set of friends just for soccer, and they are all online. And there is more everyday from coast to coast. When I go to a soccer game in another city, I already have made plans to see people that I only know because of the internet and because of soccer. And man, that is the coolest thing. I love that feeling!

Is there a greater exclamation point on that because of your rural background?

Completely. Yeah. The fact that I got as far as I did in the music business at a big record company gives me all the confidence in the world to just go anywhere and talk to anybody. To me, everyone is the same. There is no more awe. There is no more, ‘wow that guy’s from the big city.’ It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve lived in Minneapolis since I was 18 and have been all over the world, and everyone is the same now. It’s really cool. And so, it gives me a lot of confidence when I’m doing my weblog to know that we’re all in this together; we’re all fans, and we’re all doing it for each other. It’s really exciting. It feeds back and forth like a loop. Like a feedback loop that keeps getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder and crazier and crazier.

And so where do you go from this realization, from the joy of using it, to then creating something yourself?

I don’t know. I always kind of did them. From the first time I was ever on the internet, I used to do basically a diary. You know a few of my friends read it, but I never really told anyone about it, but I would just write about whatever, which was mostly whatever music I was really into.

What format was that in, in terms of the technology?

Well, I had a record label. Even when I was at Warner Brothers, I had my own small record label. I would just put out some 45’s, CD’s, and cassette tapes and stuff, and my label was called Generator. And my brother and I wanted to have our own website. He’s a musician, and he writes and does all kinds of cool stuff too, and we just kind of wanted to have our own website for all of our friends to just post all of their information and write. We knew all sorts of people who did all kinds of things. And so we started a website called Kingwho. I named it after this director who did the first giant epic asian martial arts movies. His name was King Hu. I didn’t want to rip off his name, but I wanted to pay tribute, so I respelled Hu.

We just picked a generic name because we didn’t want it to be about anything specific, you know. My brother had his band and their music on there. I had my record label, but then myself and all these other friends of mine who were writers had all their personal journals or whatever you wanted to call them on there. We weren’t radicals or anything, but we were really having fun with it. So I just started writing a weblog, which back then wasn’t called that, but I would put a date on it, and I would write my thoughts, and few days later I would do it again and a few days later I would do it again. That was in the like ‘96, ‘97. So, its been ten years since I’ve been doing it.

Did du Nord spin-off from that?

It all kind of just took on its own thing, and then the actual Weblog thing started, which I guess its been about 5 years now, since that word was coined, and it exploded, and you had the few big companies who had the software, Typepad, Blogspot, that gave free hosting and templates just for people to do weblogs. So, I started one just because I wanted to try out the software and see what it was like. It wasn’t about soccer or anything. I remember the day I started it was the day after my dad’s mom died. She lived to be 101, and I just wanted to write a bunch of stuff about her. So I went to Blogspot, signed up, and away I went. I guess after about a year of doing it, I started writing more and more about soccer, but the people who were reading it, my friends, they’re not soccer fans. It’s kind of like I have different lives. Some of them were starting to give me shit, you know. ‘Why do you keep writing about soccer? I don’t care.’ One day it just dawned on me that, what the hell, why don’t I just start another one, and have it just be about soccer. And I had this name in mind. du Nord. I don’t know why. I just have this list of names in my head that I know I want to use for something. I know they will be appropriate for something I want to give a title to. du Nord comes from the Minnesota state motto, it’s French, ‘L’Etoile du Nord’, which means ‘star of the north’. And I just always thought du Nord was a great name for something in Minnesota. Basically it just means up north or from the north.

I don’t speak French, but I assumed that is what it meant, my suspicion, as you just pointed out, strengthened once I figured out you were in Minnesota, I think probably from you mentioning going to watch a game at a bar there in one of your posts.

Yeah, you know, its basically just the state motto. It wasn’t intended to have anything to do with soccer at all. I just like those cool sounding names for everything. Just like we used Kingwho, and a lot of other things I’ve done. None of them have any meaning really; I just like the sound of them.

So I just started writing all of my soccer stuff there, and it just became more and more what I was reading and pulling together, and then the people I knew who were into soccer were reading it, and I would tell people occasionally in message boards that I would go to. Like the USL site with a Minnesota Thunder page. I was going there a lot and telling those people I was writing [du Nord], and I’d go to Big Soccer occasionally; I always loved it; that’s where I’ve met so many people. But I’ve never been a big poster on Big Soccer. So I was spreading the word a bit and collecting more and more news. People would write to me and say, ‘give me more. Yeah I love what you’re doing, just give me more of it.’ So I feel like I’m on a mission. I’ve always felt like I was on a mission to spread the word [about soccer], but du Nord has just taken on its own life. It’s almost become overwhelming at this point. It’s insane; I can’t stop; it’s like a drug.

That’s related to why I reached out to you. The first time I linked to your site from mine, I had people write me and thank me for pointing them in your direction. Which is kind of crazy to me. I didn’t do anything, but people find this goldmine and want to express the happiness. It’s great. so, uh, obviously, I’m a fan. And I thought you would be a great subject for these conversational interviews I do occasionly, because there is very little info about you on the site, and you don’t editorialize that much at all. It’s much more a true weblog under the original definition of linking to things rather than creating original content.

Well, thanks. It has gotten overwhelming.

Yet so, even with the popularity, you haven’t developed any advertising or sponsorships. It has to take up a lot of your time. I can only imagine you have had a lot of offers. Are you thinking of making this an occupation?

I have gotten a lot of offers. A lot of people ask if I want to move my weblog to their site, and we’ll pay you money. And they are awesome offers, and they’re flattering, but at this point I’ve decided, nah, I just want to do it for myself. Maybe at some point if the right deal is there, but I think its lessons I learned in the music industry. I saw so many bands take the first offer. And it was the stupidest thing they could ever do (laughing). I think you do what you love, and you do it for your own reason, and if you get to a point where you need help to take your message to a greater audience than you do the deal, but until then, what’s the point. I’m not going to do it for any other reason, and I’ve never cared about money my whole life, so why should I care now. But I have seriously thought, probably since the beginning of this year I’ve taken it more seriously, and I’ve been thinking about the advertising route and things like that. Part of me wonders how people will react, and part of me doesn’t really care, because I’m doing it for me, but part of me is like ‘I don’t know; there’s something kind of cool about this.’ So I don’t know. I’m totally open to other peoples ideas and thoughts and if the right idea is out there, I’ll do it. Absolutely.

You know, I’ve never really thought I notice online advertising. I’ve never clicked on an ad except by accident.

Yeah, (laughing) me neither. I use gmail and never see the ads.

In this blog medium, especially, when it is all free, I think good content is good content. If they like what you do, they’ll come back, whether or not its amateur or professional, in the financial sense.

I think I’m with you. And that’s why I’ve been thinking that it might be the time to consider this a full time job and make some money.

Do you still work in the music industry full time?

No, Total burnout. Too many bad things happening. Too much corporate America, It got ugly. It was awful. And people I knew were in a bad place, and I don’t know, I didn’t love it anymore. I wanted to have fun with the music, and too many other people wanted me to do too many other things, and I hated it…. But leaving it still hurt, because I loved it so much.

I work at the University of Minnesota in an office that gets professors to incorporate community service learning into their classrooms, and then we help the students go out into the community and volunteer at organizations. I work with pretty incredible people who know a hell of a lot about service learning and community involvement. It’s pretty cool. And I’m kind of like their backroom support. I help them with everything they need. One thing I help with is the website, www.servicelearning.umn.edu.

Under the name du Nord, how long have you been working on the site?

It will be two years in March. Not that long. But the amount of traffic I get and the amount of serious readers I have, and the amount of feedback I get over email has just exploded. Unbelievable. I think it’s because I’ve been consistent for almost two straight years of just pounding pounding and pounding away. The first thing that really, you know, when I first did it for maybe six months, it was just kind of at a level you know of a few dozen people everyday, like most weblogs are. And maybe around six months into it, Grant Wahl, who is awesome – if you write anything you have to say that I said that – the guy is awwwwwesome.

He is the best. He was the guy who I first felt the urge to reach out to and have one of these conversations with to share.

Yeah, it was great. I read it immediately. He’s the best. He is the absolute best in soccer in America. I love that guy. Anyway, he wrote a thing about weblogs and listed mine as one of his favorites. And it immediately tripled the readership. Which still wasn’t huge. It went from like 30 people a day to 70 people a day, but it was consistent group of people, and they were writing me and emailing me, and it just became this bigger community. Then there was few more mentions in a few other places, and by last spring it had grown to 200 or 300 people everyday.

And then I went to the world cup. And I didn’t write anything. You know, I went there to have a blast, I didn’t go there to cover it. I didn’t get hired as a professional to go over there and cover the world cup, I went over there hang out with my friends, and we partied. And we had a blast, except those awful U.S. games. Which just about killed me. When I came back, the readership had dipped down to about 100 to 200 or so a day, which I think some of which had to do with the fact that the mainstream press covered it so well that people weren’t reading the weblogs. They didn’t have to. But then somewhere in the fall, September, October, I don’t know what happened. I can’t pinpoint anything, but it started to build and since October, it’s been this constant straight uphill climb in readership. I average about 1000 people a day, and it seems like there’s no slowing down at all. In the last two or three weeks, I’ve set a new record in readership almost everyday. Obviously the biggest day was the day Beckham signed with the Galaxy. It was insanity, complete insanity. I’m surprised the internet didn’t have a seizure that day.

Do you remember the number?

I don’t know why I didn’t, but I didn’t keep the numbers, and I can’t remember, but I was blown away by how many people came to du Nord that day. Which is kind of weird, because as you can tell, I’ve been a little obsessed with the numbers recently. What’s exciting is that I would say about 80 percent of my hits are coming from bookmarks, which means it’s all coming from within the community. That’s incredible to me. the rest is about 15 percent hits from links on other weblogs, and 5 percent searches. Which is amazing. It’s all in the community. It’s wonderful.

Which goes back to the whole ‘sport of the internet’ idea, right?

Yeah, and it’s this growth that is blowing my mind. I’ve told people for years that soccer in America is like a glacier. It’s moving slow, and most people can’t see it, but there is no stopping it. And it’s going to destroy everything (laughing) in it’s path eventually. It might take 1000 years, but it’s going to do it. That’s how I’ve always felt about it, and you can really feel it now. I mean we’re on the glacier now, and it’s moving. There’s no doubt. The changes in our lifetimes in soccer in American – woo – look at all the people calling the Beckham signing the NASL all over again. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. It’s just the lamest, simplest, easiest excuse, comparing Beckham to Pele. Well first of all Beckham isn’t one-eighth the player Pele was, so give that one up. But number 2, he’s more popular than Pele ever was, and there’s twice as many people on earth as there was back then, only 30 years ago. When you add all these things up? There was no Americans playing in Europe back then, hell, there weren’t Americans playing in the NASL. And we’ve got these numbers I’m hearing about 10-20 million kids playing soccer in America; that wasn’t happening when Pele was here. I think we’re probably approaching 100 Americans playing abroad, and none of that was happening. Add in all the Americans in MLS and the USL and all the adults in all the rec leagues. It’s unbelievable. There’s nothing even close to compare David Beckham to Pele. It’s absurd that people mention it. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But I’m loving it. What do you think about it?

I don’t think it can really be a bad thing. I guess I just don’t see it as a make or break thing. He could injure himself in the first game and MLS would go on. They’ll be the bump in some ticket sales at his games in the short term, but MLS handled it all wrong. I wish they would have been a little more humble about it, instead of throwing up the ole’ Mission Accomplished Banner. I wish they would have just sit back and let it happen if it’s going to happen.

Right. But you knew they weren’t. because they did it the same way with Freddy Adu. So why not David Beckham? It’s the first thing I thought of when the news broke is that I hope they don’t treat this like the Freddy Adu story. But they did. MLS treated it almost exactly the same. And I thought they got shot in the foot a little with that, you know, with Freddy, because they hyped him too much. And even me, I get sucked into it, and I expect too much from Freddy. And I know better.

Freddy is just one, but there are going to be a few fun storylines to follow this year in MLS. And the national team for that matter.

Oh definitely. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. We’ve got the Gold Cup and the Copa Libertadores right next to each other in the middle of the MLS season. Forget about it. Add in the Superliga on top of that.

The schedule is getting better, but where do you see the quality of the game?

I might be deluded, but I think its getting better and better every year. And I have no problem with it. Do I think it’s the best? No, I’m not an idiot. You have the leagues in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, are all better. A couple of teams in Portugal, Holland, and Russia are better, and then you have Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Their leagues are better. But a few friends of mine were sitting around and we were talking about it. And I think that puts us at about the 11th best league in the world. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that after 11 years.

A little test of that theory went down in the Denmark game, what with the two squads almost all playing for domestic clubs.

And then what I would like to see is all the MLS players get on a plane and fly to Denmark and play a game three days later so that they were all jetlagged. I’d love to see that and would like to know what would happen. Which reminds me of this website that ranks all the world’s chess players. I thinks its called elo. Anyway, a couple of years ago, they started ranking the world soccer teams, and they do rankings every week based on international matches. When I looked at it the other day before the Denmark game, Denmark was ranked something like 8th in the world and the U.S. was ranked like 26. The highest the U.S. has ever been in the elo rankings was 11. That was last spring. They actually took a dive before the world cup when those tune-up matches didn’t exactly go great. I think they fell to like 15 before they went to Germany. And what was interesting was Italy, the Czech Republic, and Ghana were all ranked higher than them going into the world cup in these rankings. And sure enough it fell out almost exactly like they said it would.

Like a good Vegas line-maker.

Yeah, except they rank the world’s chess masters.

I like the idea of the home and home series as we’ve seen in some club tournaments, but for the national teams.

Flying to Europe kicks your ass. I’d like to see how they would do playing over there. Would it be 3-1 Denmark? Might be. I don’t know. But just the fact that we have all of these great kids right now in MLS. Look at the U20 team that just qualified. Over half that team are professionals. Blows my mind. It was only a few years ago, when Convey and Onyewu, Beasley and Donovan were on the team, and the only one we had even barely heard about was Donovan, and I mean vaguely Donovan. We had sure as hell never seen him play on TV, but when this team shows up, we’ve seen half the team play on TV, if not all of them. That’s how much things have changed in just a few short years. That’s all new for America. And the Panama and Guatemala teams they played. All of those players are on contract with their pro clubs. They’re crappy teams and they’re small, but that’s they’re whole life; they play soccer all day every day. And we’re just beginning to start that process with our youth teams.

It’s kind of like the Olympics in the 80’s when you had the amateur American athletes competing against the federally funded athletic factories coming out of the Communist Block. How can we expect to compete without putting in similar resources?

Right (laughing). But now we’ve learned, and the corporations are giving us money to go train all year round and things are starting to change, and oh my god are we in for a ride. I often think about how we have a shot at seeing the U.S. win a world cup in our lifetimes. But then I think about how many countries have ever won a cup. Sometimes I think it would almost have to be back here for us to even have a shot. And who knows when that will happen. I cant imagine they’ll move it from South Africa.

Yeah, don’t you love that rumor? They’re now saying that money has to be taken from building hospitals to build soccer stadiums. But I agree, I don’t see it happening. And part of me wants it to be there so I can go to South Africa.

Exactly. And then they are talking about the 2014 world cup going to South America, which it deserves to be, and it’s never been more than 3 cups away from Europe, so you would have to think 2018 is in Europe, which leaves 2022 is the next possible time it could come to America. That’s a long time. That’s fifteen years.

But It could be the amount of time we need, to build a cup winner?

It could be. That could be right on the mark, you’re right. Project 2010 is going to have to become project 2022. (laughing)

Epilogue

Thanks Bruce! for taking the time and spreading the love. Here’s to 2022!