Hubris Part II

A day after amaz­ing achieve­ments for USL-1 sides in CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League action Major League Soc­cer con­tin­ued its pat­tern of show­ing that they don’t get it by reject­ing New York’s $200,000 bid for Macoumba Kandji accord­ing to Ives Galar­cep of Soc­cer by Ives. The appar­ent stum­bling block: MLS does not believe any player in USL could pos­si­bly be worth $200,000. Even after see­ing the Puerto Rico Islanders, a USL side accom­plish a feat that no MLS team has been able to in eight tries (get­ting a result against one of the big two Costa Rican clubs in Cen­tral Amer­ica)  Major League Soc­cer will not allow one of its fran­chises to spend trans­fer money on a player from the sec­ond divi­sion in its own coun­try. Can you imag­ine if the Pre­mier League for­bade its clubs from buy­ing play­ers from Cham­pi­onship clubs?  Or how about Serie A not buy­ing from Serie B? The pol­icy would rightly be ripped and quite frankly the gap between USL-1 and MLS is much smaller than between the Pre­mier League and Cham­pi­onship. It’s no small won­der why so many fans domes­tic and abroad view the MLS not only a poor foot­balling league but more impor­tantly as a some­what strange and shady business.

The Hubris in MLS HQ is a sub­ject I’ve been explor­ing the Superliga deba­cle. This inci­dent how­ever even sur­prises some­one like me who tends to think the worst pos­si­ble of the league. How­ever, I must state I sup­port MLS and hope they shape up rather than per­ma­nently lose a gen­er­a­tion of foot­ball fans in this nation.

The fact is back in the day USL-1 (then the A-League) and MLS used to have a work­ing part­ner­ship. Now they com­pete. USL is obvi­ously an infe­rior league but its not as wide a gap as typ­i­cally you have between first and sec­ond divi­sions. MLS seems deter­mined to kill USL, while at the same time not allow­ing its fran­chises to grow. I’ve actu­ally spo­ken off the record to a few play­ers who have been in both leagues and while they acknowl­edge MLS is the top league some pre­fer play­ing in USL and actu­ally sign­ing with a team and not being sub­ject to the con­stant rear­rang­ing of the deck chairs that occurs in MLS since player con­tracts are owned by the league and not by cer­tain clubs.

What MLS needs to do is learn from USL’s suc­cess in cer­tain mar­kets and also under­stand why USL sides tend to per­form well rel­a­tive to their tal­ent level in knock out com­pe­ti­tions like the Open Cup and now the CONCACAF CL. USL-1 sides typ­i­cally get play­ers that are MLS rejects not because they weren’t good enough to play but because they fell in the salary range of 30k-50k where cap space becomes tight. Many USL-1 play­ers are actu­ally bet­ter than the low end MLS play­ers. In other cases it is eas­ier for foriegn play­ers, par­tic­u­larly from the Caribbean and Africa to sign with USL-1 and USL-2 sides. Often times the for­eign play­ers that end up in USL have a bet­ter long term out­look than the over­payed and over the hill type for­eign play­ers MLS likes to sign. Mac Kandji is an exam­ple of this type of for­eign player.

For a league in the last year who has signed for­eign play­ers such a Franco Neil, Math­ias Cor­doba, Franco Car­ra­cio, Celes­tine Bab­yaro, Abel Xavier, Lau­rent Robert and oth­ers based on rep­u­ta­tion not on their abil­ity to excel in the unique foot­balling cli­mate of the United States, the deci­sion of MLS to reject a trans­fer fee for Kandji shows that once again MLS oper­ates in a vac­uum with regards to the world of foot­ball and deserves all of the scorn it has right­fully earned.