MLS Operating in a Vacuum

We want this league to suc­ceed. For the future of the sport it must not only sur­vive but thrive. How­ever, as the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onships heat up, Brazil is about to face Argentina in a crit­i­cal COMNEBOL qual­i­fier, the African nations spend over a month in World Cup qual­i­fy­ing, and the home nations of MLS begin qual­i­fy­ing next week­end, the league con­tin­ues to oper­ate each and every week­end as if noth­ing else is hap­pen­ing in the world of foot­ball, and as if noth­ing else mat­ters. Not only does MLS play through World Cup qual­i­fy­ing and the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onships, but it actu­ally increases its sched­ule dur­ing this period.

MLS claims this is due to the avail­abil­ity of sta­di­ums. But the real­ity is two fac­tors come into play: one is clear­ing the mid­week sched­ule for SUM pro­moted events includ­ing Superliga, and the sec­ond is the arro­gance of a league which has never fully inte­grated in the world foot­ball com­mu­nity and whose sched­ule has in many ways turns off the very fans and com­men­ta­tors the league needs on its side to thrive.

Ivan Gazidis, a soc­cer man is now the deputy com­mis­sioner of MLS. Gazidis under­stands world foot­ball and must know the league hurts its cred­i­bil­ity when matches take place at the very same time as a US National Team match. Some very recent examples:

• MLS had a match a year ago sched­uled to start while the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final was being played. That would be like the Ger­man Bun­desliga play­ing a match at the same start time as the Euro Finals.
• Four days later an MLS match was on ESPN 2 while the open­ing match of the US National Team’s Copa Amer­i­can cam­paign was rel­e­gated to GOL TV, and again the matches overlapped.
• A DC United-New Eng­land match was played last year at the very same start time as the US-Brazil friendly on a FIFA Friendly date.
• MLS Cup 2007 was held on a FIFA black­out week­end, and in fact the US played in South Africa and Coach Bob Bradley was not able to choose any play­ers from the Hous­ton Dynamo or New Eng­land Revolution.
• In the last week the league cham­pion Hous­ton Dynamo have had three sep­a­rate matches sched­uled on the dates of US friend­lies. In the case of the Eng­land match it was not a FIFA date so MLS can­not be faulted. But the cases of the Spain and Argentina matches make the sit­u­a­tion unac­cept­able. Why do the Dynamo have so many matches this time of year? Sim­ply because of Superliga next month. With Canada fac­ing World Cup qual­i­fy­ing the next two weeks, will Pat Onstad and Dewayne DeRossario be under pres­sure to play for the national team and then rush back to play for the Dyanmo or vise versa? This pres­sure has seem­ingly been applied to Amer­i­can play­ers as Frankie Hej­duk and Brad Guzan have both crossed over 25 time zones in the past ten days to bal­ance MLS and National Team com­mit­ments. What does this do to the human body, and to the very prod­ucts MLS mar­kets itself around?

This is only going to become a big­ger and big­ger prob­lem as we go for­ward. MLS wants to attract high cal­iber inter­na­tion­als, but if you are a player’s agent why would you send your client state­side if his club is going to have games sched­uled on the very same day as impor­tant inter­na­tional matches. More­over, how does MLS build any cred­i­bil­ity if as is the case the next two weeks games are sched­uled at the exact same time the US and Canada are play­ing do or die World Cup qualifiers?

We need to sup­port MLS, but it is dif­fi­cult to take the league com­pletely seri­ously until its sched­ul­ing prac­tices change. With the num­ber of inter­na­tion­als miss­ing, it was dif­fi­cult to dis­cern prop­erly in some cases between MLS matches and USL-1 matches this week­end. In some cases the USL-1 matches which I saw on broad­band were not only more enter­tain­ing but had a higher skill level. Already the defend­ers in USL-1 are on any given week bet­ter than the defend­ers in MLS: but this week the entire pack­age seemed bet­ter in USL-1 in many cases. Scham­bolic defend­ing is some­thing we’ve become accus­tomed to in MLS, but bad first touches and awful deci­sions on the ball while a sta­ple of any MLS match were exag­ger­ated this week­end with the num­ber of miss­ing play­ers.
Some Other Week­end Thoughts:

• I’ll admit MLS is not very high on my pri­or­ity list while qual­i­fy­ing and the Euros take place. How­ever an effort is still being made to watch and report on every match.
• Chivas USA played a good match in New Jer­sey Thurs­day night with Jesse Marsch once again show­ing the lead­er­ship a fairly young side needed to be competitive.
• Juan Pablo Angel scored a nice goal but whether or not he is really worth DP money is debat­able: here is a player not good enough to play for his national team in WC qual­i­fy­ing, who doesn’t draw any new fans to the sta­dium and sim­ply put isn’t scor­ing many goals any longer. That’s the risk of the DP rule: you give a player a long term con­tract when they only have one or maybe two good years left. Expect a sim­i­lar drop off from Gal­lardo, Lopez and Beck­ham in the near future.
• Colum­bus has now gone score­less in almost 400 min­utes and looks inept in the attack. What hap­pens going for­ward is anyone’s guess but the Crew have issues with rowdy fans, poor play and a city that seems by and large these days dis­in­ter­ested in the team. That’s a far­cry from the year Crew Sta­dium opened in 1999 when Colum­bus led the league in attendance.
• San Jose is sur­viv­ing with­out Kei Kamara and Ivan Guer­rero which speaks very highly of the depth Frank Yal­lop and John Doyle devel­oped for an expan­sion team. Hon­duras could be gen­er­ous and let Guer­rero come back to the Quakes given the 4–0 aggre­gate lead they hold on Puerto Rico in the CONCACAF qual­i­fier, but why should they indulge the league and its sched­ul­ing habits?
• Speak­ing of Puerto Rico, Marco Velez was sent off in the first leg against Hon­duras so he should be back with Toronto tonight for the match with the Dynamo.
• DC United is a dif­fer­ent team with Fred caus­ing trou­ble down the left side. Even more inter­est­ing was the move to place Fred in the mid­dle of the pitch and bring Marc Burch onto the left side after the send­ing off of Marcelo Gal­lardo. A very savvy tac­ti­cal move by Tom Soehn which really helped DC grab the 3 points.
• The Galaxy seem to be able to attack with the best even with­out Lan­don Dono­van. Alvaro Pires is prov­ing to be a smart buy and a crit­i­cal linkup player. Edson Bud­dle has had a renais­sance play­ing under Ruud Gul­lit which fur­ther proves my CSRN Amer­i­can Soc­cer Show co-host Dave Denholm’s point about Amer­i­can coach­ing: per­haps Greg Andrulis, Sigi Schmid, Bob Bradley and Mo John­ston had no clue how to use Bud­dle in a sys­tem when they had him on their squads.

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