Don Garber Speaks: Thoughts

Don Gar­ber as always has been con­duct­ing a major charm offen­sive as MLS Cup approaches. But as some­one who has watched the league since its incep­tion I’ve become numb or even totally immune to the league’s pro­pa­ganda. MLS the way I see it has prob­lems and has not deliv­ered the prod­uct promised to fans of foot­ball in North Amer­i­can upon its incep­tion. How­ever even I can be taken in by the Don at times and do find some of his sug­ges­tions for the future encour­ag­ing. Here are some thoughts:

Mon­treal with­draws from MLS expan­sion race

I fully expected this as Joey Saputo in the past has ques­tioned the $40 mil­lion expan­sion fee asked by MLS con­sid­er­ing his cur­rent USL side the Mon­treal Impact sells out its games and has advanced to the quar­ter­fi­nals of the CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League with­out spend­ing $40 mil­lion. This deci­sion leaves USL viable for the near future. I had pub­li­cally stated that USL can afford to lose mar­kets like Atlanta (which has now sus­pended oper­a­tions), Miami, Port­land and even Van­cou­ver. But the league would be in seri­ous jeop­ardy of col­laps­ing if it lost Mon­treal which is many ways is the anchor fran­chise of the league and has increased the league’s pres­tige by per­form­ing so well in the CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League. While MLS will still have two new teams in good mar­kets, the unstated goal of MLS to put USL out of busi­ness has failed for this round. USL’s expan­sion to Tampa and Phoenix should com­pletely erase any detri­men­tal affects of los­ing weak fran­chises in Miami and Atlanta. Port­land is a strong fran­chise in USL but with Mon­treal hang­ing around USL can absorb the blow of los­ing Port­land as well.

 No more reserve teams.

Again I don’t under­stand this deci­sion. I thought the reserve leagues were a major step for­ward for MLS a few years ago. I agree that expand­ing the senior ros­ter is crit­i­cal. How­ever with­out reserve team setups the league resem­bles more of a pro­fes­sional sports league in the US than a proper foot­balling league. It’s no won­der more and more young Amer­i­can play­ers are seek­ing careers in Europe or even in more remote foot­ball leagues. MLS is not com­mit­ted to player devel­op­ment in 2008 the way it was in 2001 or 2004.

Con­fer­ence play will continue

I’m happy with this deci­sion. The advo­cates of sin­gle table foot­ball do not seem to want to acknowl­edge the geo­graphic dif­fi­culty of pulling this off in the US. The USL keeps a sin­gle table which leads to some very ugly sched­ul­ing and incred­i­ble fix­ture con­ges­tion. Sched­ul­ing in a region as large as North Amer­ica must be based on geog­ra­phy and com­mon sense and not on the desires of fans of Euro­pean football.

 Play­offs will continue

This is a no brainer as the play­offs pro­vide the most excite­ment in what is an oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult foot­ball league to watch. How­ever, the tim­ing of the play­offs must be moved to not con­flict with a con­gested period on the Amer­i­can sport­ing cal­en­dar head on.

No deal on Dono­van yet

Con­trary to reports in the Ger­man press, Lan­don Dono­van has not been sold or loaned for­mally to FC Bay­ern yet. How­ever MLS must sell Dono­van, because he clearly is ready to move on and he among Amer­i­can foot­ballers of his gen­er­a­tion has stuck by MLS longer than any other player.