Anyway, check it out if you use Google+. The first thing we’re asking is for some feedback on the proof of the cover for the forthcoming Very Best of Pitch Invasion book…

What we didn’t know until Scotzine pointed it out in the comments was that fans of Aberdeen’s opponents that day, Celtic, made exactly the same point with a banner of their own that read “It’s time to put fans before TV”.

It’s not exactly a new story that television has become the dominant force in scheduling games. The days of uniform Saturday 3pm kickoffs are, of course, numbered in Britain, and have been for some time.

Still, the growing disaffection with the last-minute schedule changes and difficulties on group travel that result from fan unfriendly kickoff times is certainly spreading. For once, Rangers fans agree with their Old Firm rivals, this month also holding up a “Fans Before TV” banner.

Moreover, as you can tell from the photo, that Aberdeen-Celtic semi-final was not exactly a packed house, with Scotzine noting “The stadium was far from full with around 20,000 seats left empty, a sizeable chunk in the Aberdeen end.”

In part, this seems to be because the 12.45pm kick-off time did not take into account train timetables: the earliest train to arrive from Aberdeen that day was at 12.20pm, giving fans barely enough time to scoot over to the stadium in time for kickoff.

It was also the second protest in a month for Celtic fans, who expressed their disapproval at a 6pm kickoff on a TUESDAY by tossing a dozen extra footballs onto the pitch right at kickoff for their April 12th game against Motherwell.

There will be many who will say: who cares. Television pays their money and makes their choice. But it could also be one factor contributing to a drastic fall in attendances across the Scottish Premier League this season.  Aberdeen’s crowds are down about 10% to 9,769 per game, leaving just four Scottish Premier League teams averaging above 10,000 for the season. League-wide, the average attendance is 13,783 for 2010-11, dipping from last season’s 13,915 and even worse, down from 15,537 in 2008-09.

Again, kick-off times are only one element of many challenges facing Scottish teams that aren’t named Rangers or Celtic. That said, what had once been a habit going back generations – going to games set on a predictable schedule – is now becoming a chore just to keep track of for fans.

Three recent emails from MUST to its e-membership, currently at 163,430 (unpaid) members, introduced BetFred’s partnership with MUST and hinted that Done was testing the waters before fully backing a takeover bid.

The first email to MUST members explained the new partnership:

MUST met with Fred a couple of weeks ago for a chat over a cup of tea and a tour of his headquarters. As you look around his office a large picture of Duncan Edwards  takes pride of place – it is obvious Manchester United runs through his veins. He loves the club and he wants to see the right ownership in the future – perhaps a Barcelona style model. We agree with him there.

We’ll be forwarding a special message from Fred to MUST members along with his thoughts on the Liverpool game and United generally so look out for that to follow shortly.

As a direct result of the meeting we’ve entered into a partnership with BetFred which, with your help, will generate the revenue MUST needs to fund our ambitious expansion plans. We’ll be ploughing every penny from the BetFred partnership into the development fund for our Million Member Project (currently 163,430 members) which is set to be launched in the New Year. Details to follow in the coming weeks.

The two key factors in creating this partnership are:

* A fun way for supporters to generate funds to develop our Million Member Project.
* The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United

This partnership with BetFred is a huge opportunity. We need to show Fred how much interest there is from members so we want to make him really sit up and take notice. Just by clicking through the link you can really help even if you don’t sign-up.

Some people aren’t interested in betting and that is fine. We don’t want to encourage members to bet who don’t wish to (or the Under 18s). However, for those who do enjoy a bet we’d urge you to switch to the MUST BetFred partnership. Fred is more than happy to pay out to United fans – almost as much as he likes taking money off Scousers.

The email hints that Fred is only just getting started – “The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United”. It’s clear months, perhaps years of groundwork went into establishing the partnership, of obvious mutual benefit.

An email then followed from Fred to MUST e-members with a number of betting tips. Not bad for Fred to have a direct line to 163,430 football-mad potential customers.

Now, I’m not a United fan, I’m just on their email list because I pay attention to this stuff. But it sure felt odd to get an email from a supporters’ organisation with extensive betting tips and essentially an encouragement to gamble, without having asked to receive that kind of correspondence.

Six days after that email, MUST dropped another message on their 163,000-odd e-members, now asking “Are you happy to receive messages relating to match previews along with the MUST BetFred partnership or would you prefer not to?

“We don’t want to annoy any of our members by sending them messages they don’t wish to receive so let us know by clicking link [1] below and simply ticking the “opt out” box on the survey if you don’t want to receive messages.”

One can presume that Fred’s unsolicited betting tips a few days earlier had provoked the ire of a fair few folks not expecting that signing up to support the Trust would result in receiving emails about gambling from BetFred.

It’s not surprising MUST has jumped into bed with Fred: he’s very rich, very influential and he’s from Salford, Greater Manchester, a hardcore United fan. He’s also the kind of man you’d want on your side with the Glazers: toughness, ambition and willingness to take risks have long defined his career, rising from absolutely nothing on the streets of Salford to preside over a gambling empire, Britain’s largest independent chain with 800+ shops. He began his rise as a 15-year old in 1959 running an illegal gambling ring, turning legit and making a fortune with a serious of aggressive acquisitions, and a heads-on, personality driven approach to branding his bookmaking shops.

Until last year, BetFred was United’s official bookmaker. Now, the Glazers will surely wonder what a Fred-backed MUST campaign could achieve, with his connections and aggressive approach to takeovers. At the same time, MUST must be careful not to abuse the trust they have earned from supporters, and think carefully about how they use their email list and promote gambling in general: the moral high ground is easy to fall off, after all.

In officially announcing next year’s season-ticket price increases Tuesday, Toronto FC owner Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment has clearly decided to hit the hard-core fans the hardest.

The all-singing, all-dancing denizens of BMO Field’s south section – whose pictures are being used by TFC in its season-ticket promotional material – face a 34-per-cent increase for next year, to $433 from $323. Those season tickets retailed for $200 in the team’s inaugural 2007 season.

[ . . ]

TFC’s season-ticket packages are certainly among the most expensive in MLS. While the Los Angeles Galaxy exceed TFC with a top-price season ticket of $3,750 for next season – in comparison to $1,999 at BMO – those prices are skewed slightly with David Beckham’s $6.5-million salary on their books. A more realistic comparison would be the Chicago Fire, whose top ticket to sit in the stands is $999, which comes with free parking and discounted concessions, as well as the option to pay for the ticket in instalments.

That last comparison to Chicago strikes close to the bone, as I’ve spent much of the past couple of months helping the Fire craft their 2011 season ticket drive in terms of its appeal to “hard-core fans” as defined above. The package we settled on with the Fire for Section 8 (the general admission, standing, singing, stupid crazy supporters’ areas in the north end of Toyota Park) is a phenomenal deal: $200 total cost for 20 games, discounted parking ($6 per game, halved from this year), 12 month payment plan, $25 deposit option, free Section 8 Chicago-designed gift, and more. It’s a very reasonable deal as we look to double the designated standing area in the north end of the stadium from two sections to four and double our number of supporters’ season tickets at the same time.

Meantime, the Toronto supporters lured to the south end of BMO Field with their $200 packages in 2007 are now facing a $433 (prices Canadian) cost for 2011, including the necessary “bonus” ticket to the 2010 MLS Cup final that almost certainly won’t feature Toronto (yeah, nor Chicago). That’s quite a bump in four seasons, especially given Toronto have yet to make the playoffs. It was also awfully convenient that the (deserved) scapegoat for that failure, Mo Johnston, was fired a week before season ticket renewal notices went out with that bump. The bump includes more games, but even then, a higher price per game.

Now, of course, those old laws of supply and demand are in play here. On the face of it, Chicago and Toronto might seem similar: we play in the same league, our stadiums have similar capacities, we both haven’t won anything since 2006. Chicago’s average crowd this year is 15,757, while Toronto’s is 20,665 – not a staggering difference.

Where there is a staggering difference, though, is in the number of season ticket holders each club has. Toronto has 16,000, and is expanding that base to 18,000 this year. Chicago has a little over 3,000, which is less than it had in 1998, its expansion year. Toronto, like many of the recent expansion clubs, kicked off with a huge season ticket holder base when it launched in 2007. That advantage reflected the massive changes to MLS in the near-decade between Chicago and Toronto’s expansion years, with an established league and a more mature adult soccer-loving demographic to sell to on a season ticket basis. That’s why both its top-end and low-end season tickets are being priced up now, while in Chicago, we’re working on that drive to give supporters more value and make them season ticket holders rather than single game attendees.

MLSE, Toronto FC’s owners, are not in this for charitable purposes, obviously. That they are squeezing a base that still has demand in it for more dollars is not exactly surprising. If that demand still exists, they’ll be happy, at least in the short term. And from a league-wide perspective, there should be some long-term concern about where these price rises will take us.

Another Globe and Mail article focuses a lot on a comparison of Toronto FC to Manchester United, whose top price season ticket in the stands is now lower than Toronto’s. Many Premier League fans will also remember the trick of including more games to justify higher prices, and of being priced out in the 1990s.

The Toronto club may be a world away from the 18-time English champions on the pitch, but it beats the Red Devils handily in average cost per game (based on a top-price ticket), with a match at BMO coming in at an average of $90.78 compared to $79 at Manchester’s Theatre of Dreams.

The focus on the highest season ticket price is perhaps less important in the long-run. Having a small number of very expensive seats doesn’t seem like a terrible thing to me. In terms of protecting stadium atmosphere, the most relevant number is surely the lowest season ticket price for the larger designated supporters’ areas (in MLS, where we still have such things as standing areas unlike the Premier League) — though obviously, it’s easier to justify higher prices in one section when there aren’t dirt cheap prices elsewhere.

Lowest priced season tickets at Premier League clubs like Manchester United remain exorbitantly higher than in MLS, even with Toronto’s latest rise to $433 CAN.  Manchester United’s lowest season ticket price is $829 CAN. At present pace, of course, Toronto FC will get there in just a few years. The numbers are heading towards pricing out anyone not earning six figure salaries in terms of what they could outlay for a season ticket, especially in a credit crunch era. That in turn will help kill the atmosphere in the supporters’ sections in Toronto, just as higher pricing across the board (along with the new all-seater stadia) did to England in the 1990s.

MLSE also seems to have handled all this rather pompously and presumptuously. Judging from the negative comments by supporters’ representatives in Canada, Toronto’s supporters groups were not well consulted ahead of the price rise (though I stand to be corrected on that, not knowing the inside story). If MLS wants to keep touting itself as a supporter-friendly league and basing its marketing on the atmosphere it has from that, it’ll need to be careful of alienating its hardcore fans. Toronto might have a season ticket waiting list now, but Manchester United used to as well. A little alienation goes a long way in killing demand, and all of a sudden, supply is plentiful.

Once again, we turn to Germany for a better comparison than the Premier League, where protests against hikes in the very reasonable prices that have given their stadia the reputation as the best to experience a game in across Europe are gathering pace. Hikes on the scale of Toronto’s for supporters’ area season ticket prices at the level of Manchester United’s are just unthinkable in the Bundesliga. Having fan-owned clubs (protected by the 50+1 rule) sure helps, of course.

Supporters in MLS now outside Toronto should watch closely at what happens at BMO Field.

It began last week, when Southampton’s Club Spokesman Jordan Sibley sent emails out in response to accreditation requests by photographers that read “Just so you are aware, this year, Southampton Football Club will be syndicating images from all home fixtures via a local agency.” An odd thing to say, as Southampton’s accreditation request form makes no mention of this, and a decision that would ban all other national, local and agency photographers from St. Mary’s.

The motivation for this appears to be part commercial (photos from a single handpicked agency could be guided to ensure they feature sponsors’ names more prominently, for example), and part petulance, as Roy Greenslade explains:

Local newspapers often bear the brunt of these kinds of ban when chairmen/managers/players take umbrage at critical coverage, whether it stems from the team’s performances, the coach’s talents or the state of the ground.

Sometimes, the two reasons are linked. Though Southampton’s ban appears to have a commercial motive, note what the club’s owner, Nicola Cortese, said a couple of months ago:

“Our fans and staff should be reassured that I will only make decisions affecting our future based on sound football and business thinking, and not on the whims of a local newspaper keen to maximise readership or pundits whose agendas are unclear.

“Furthermore, I will not respond to every piece of idle speculation. We have too much development work to do to waste time on such pursuits, and my time is dedicated to that work.

“As a local paper, I would have hoped that it would provide the local community with news, rather than gossip. However, I am not so naïve as to expect such speculation to stop.”

That barb was clearly aimed at the Daily Echo, which has probably been doing nothing more controversial than doing its job. From my earliest days in local journalism – when I reported regularly on three clubs – I discovered that no chairman or manager is ever happy with any coverage that isn’t slavishly supportive.

Southampton aren’t the first club to try something like this, with Newcastle banning reporters last season and Leeds’ in-house picture agency boycotted by the national press, who only printed photos of the club away from home.

But the good news is, Southampton’s decision has blown up in their face: the local agency in question, Digital South, have refused to participate in this attempt to suppress the freedom of their own profession. Despite a loss of potential income, Digital South’s boss Robin Jones took the principled stand, as he explained to the Sports Journalists’ Association:

“I disagreed with their stance on a total ban of photographers from any media source,” Jones told sportsjournalists.co.uk.

“I voiced this opinion to the club and genuinely thought that the ban would not take place. It became clear to me on Thursday that this ban was indeed happening and so I rang the club to inform them of my decision to decline their offer.

“Basically, a ban on photographers is simply a bad idea,” said Jones, whose agency employs two photographers, including his son, Michael Jones, also an SJA member.

“We felt that we were between a rock and a hard place, because we are sure that another agency or photographer might come forward to do this work for Southampton. But it is not something we are prepared to do.”

Jones’ stance comes after a show of solidarity by the press against Southampton’s decision: the Society of Editors, the Sports Journalists’ Association and the Telegraph Media Group all supported a media black-out of all pictures supplied by Southampton if they restricted coverage to a single hand-picked agency. Southampton have put themselves in a tricky situation, as they will know have to either back down or find an agency willing to go against their peers, and that would likely be one with low quality standards to begin with.

That is the plan of the owners of the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit, purchased by a Canadian investment group with Greek roots last November for $583,000, with the stadium in the spotlight this week as host to AC Milan vs. Panathanaikos this Friday.

It’s certainly, as the ownership group’s Senior Soccer Advisor puts it to Josh Hakala, thinking outside the box:

To achieve a reasonable stadium size, the Apostolopoulos family plans to remove the dome and divide the stadium into three sections. At the stadium’s ground level, will be a concert hall and a multi-purpose arena, capable of hosting hockey, basketball, and other indoor sports.

Resting on top of those two indoor facilities, will be a roughly 30,000-seat soccer stadium with natural grass. The current upper deck will essentially act as a lower bowl for the outdoor stadium.

It’s difficult to imagine, but maybe this will help.

If you have a ticket in the front row of the upper deck, with this proposed layout, you could lean over the railing and get an autograph, or catch a player doing a “Lambeau Leap.”

“It’s thinking outside the box,” said Roger Faulkner, Triple Sports and Entertainment’s Senior Soccer Advisor. “When the Apostolopoulos family bought the Silverdome, they bought it because they are soccer people, passionate soccer people. They want to make the Silverdome a major player on the world stage.”

This would be a first in MLS’ relatively short history (the league played its inaugural season in 1996), where the owner is retrofitting a stadium to attract an expansion team.

So, on the one hand, Triple Sports and Entertainment got the Silverdome for a ridiculous knock-down price, meaning they have their own stadium, checking off a key box for MLS ownership. On the other hand, retrofitting it for MLS and the other events mentioned will surely run into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, in costs.

Roger Faulkner is an interesting character here, and a smart hire by the Apostolopoulos family as their key advisor — British-born, he has been promoting soccer in the United States and Detroit area since the 1960s, and was the general manager of the NASL’s Detroit Express from 1978 to 1980, the team playing at the 80,500 capacity Silverdome and featuring Trevor Francis and (on an overseas tour) George Best, though crowds never came close to filling the cavernous venue. Faulkner later was a key member of the Detroit World Cup Host Committee in 1994.

Faulkner most recently popped up here in 2008, as a part of the Michigan-based General Sports and Entertainment group who purchased Derby County in England, a club Faulkner had supported as a boy. Derby County are now partnered with a leading Michigan-based youth soccer club renamed the Derby County Wolves, who play in the elite US Soccer Development Academy. Derby County, meanwhile, seem to have been managed prudently by GSE, not achieving great success, but not flushing down the future for the present with the kind of fiscal indiscipline that has brought numerous English clubs to their knees in recent years.

In any case, it appears Faulkner’s main goal now will be to bring MLS to the Motor City: an ambitious plan, but one that will at least get some support from these guys.

This is because FIFA will not allow one confederation to host two consecutive World Cups, and China would be a shoo-in for 2026; with a European nation 99% certain to get the 2018 World Cup, that means 2022 will go to one of five bidders: Australia, South Korea, Japan, Qatar or the United States. And only the latter is not in the Asian Football Confederation alongside China, following Australia’s move on the pitch to Asia a few years ago.

Meanwhile, Simon Kuper’s dismissal of Qatar’s bid in the Financial Times this week prompted a swift response. Kuper wrote that “Qatar is spending oil money on lobbying. But few foreigners want a World Cup played in the desert, in indoor stadiums in 40-degree heat. Choosing Qatar would look a choice for money. That would make Fifa look tacky.”

That prompted Qatar 2022 chief executive Hassan Al Thawadi to respond in a letter published in the FT:

“First, the Qatar 2022 bid committee, in co-operation with a talented team of local and international science, technology and environmental experts, has developed the capability to cool outdoor stadiums, training grounds, FIFA fan fests/fan zones and walkways from metro stations to venues.

“Players and fans will enjoy temperatures not exceeding 27°C, and all of this will be accomplished using carbon-neutral technology. These cooled outdoor stadiums will be in a concentrated area, allowing fans to see more than one match per day.

“Second, Qatar is a vibrant and dynamic economy, set to grow by up to 20 per cent this year according to some estimates. While petroleum and gas resources are a key part of our growth, they are by no means the only source of revenue.

“Thousands of foreign and domestic companies providing a variety of non-energy related goods and services are based here.

“Furthermore, Qatar’s bid is playing firmly within FIFA’s rules, which include full disclosure of fund disbursement and written notification prior to talking with any FIFA’s executive committee member.”

Kuper is probably right; Qatar’s bid would have been stronger as part of a regional bid, as Todd Reisz points out. Right now, the favourites are the global heavyweights: Russia for 2018, United States for 2022 and China for 2026, quite the superpower line-up.

Any rule or regulation that removes or tends to remove the power of money to make the difference in playing strength is a good rule.

So spoke Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman and a leading executive/owner in Major League Baseball at four clubs from the 1910s to the 1950s. He spoke the words above in May 1960 at a hearing in Congress as he looked to lead a loosening on Major League Baseball’s monopoly on talent, with the aim of launching a new entity, the Continental League. Rickey was concerned about the future of baseball, with the gap between rich and poor growing year-on-year: Trouble ahead, Trouble ahead, he warned. Rickey’s solution was to provide the poorer teams with more revenue, based on the premise that it takes two to tango: rich clubs needed to play poor clubs, and those clubs going out of existence or perennially feeding at the bottom of the tank did no-one any good in the long-run. As Rickey put it:

It has been reported that the American League club in New York City in 1959 realized a gross income of one million four hundred thousand dollars from radio and television. The Washington club in the same league took in approximately $125,000, yet the Washington club plays eleven games at Yankee Stadium. How can Washington ever expect to compete in the competitive market for player contracts where money is king?

Rickey’s solution was simple: the Continental League would pool two thirds of the television and radio revenue from every club and distribute it evenly amongst its clubs. Rickey aimed to set it up within the existing structure of Major League Baseball, at a time when each league had far more autonomy than today.

The Continental League never happened. Rickey’s ideas actually ended up having a huge influence on American sports, but not in baseball: his fundamental concern for the need for parity was adopted by the far-sighted leadership of first the American Football League under Lamar Hunt’s guidance, and then by the National Football League. In the coming decades, after the AFL had merged with it, the NFL eclipsed Major League Baseball as America’s game, whilst the latter continued to squabble over how to manage the gap between rich and poor.

The NFL was brought to this supremacy by Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who shortly after Branch Rickey’s congressional comments, led the league to a television deal that ensured a certain level of parity in income:  at the NFL’s annual owners’ meetings in 1961, Rozelle convinced the final holdout on his plan, the New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, to let the NFL sell the league’s television rights collectively and share the revenue. According to Michael MacCambridge’s outstanding history of the NFL America’s Game, Mara conceded that “We should all share, I guess. Or we’re going to lose some of the smaller teams down the line, and we’ve all stuck together.”

Rozelle later admired this acceptance by the bigger clubs’ owners of the need for a collective vision: “The big-city people — Halas, Reeves, the Maras — went along. If Green Bay lost its television money, they wouldn’t have a balanced league. It was an altruistic decision on their part.”

It was altruistic, but also pragmatic. In 1962, Rozelle negotiated the NFL’s first national television contract with CBS, $4,650,000 for two seasons. Rozelle and the NFL were accused of socialism: but this was smart business, and a smart way of viewing sport. “The whole thing was equalizing the competition on the field,” Rozelle said. “The sharing of income gave everyone the tools, the money, to compete equally. Now, some don’t. But management and coaching and so forth being the big difference — and players — they had the opportunity, at least, to compete equally.”

As MacCambridge puts it in America’s Game, this was a vision that would transform the future of American sports:

Much bluster would come later about owners as selfless or devoted to the good of the whole. But in this single case, the decision to share revenue equally — echoing the one that the AFL made at the behest of Hunt, and the one that the world of baseball ignored despite the entreaties of Veeck and Rickey — would become a model for American sports that would allow the game to rise from the Darwinian business model in which each club struggled for the last dollar, toward a system that made the primary competition the one on the field of play.

At heart, the NFL’s decision to approve a joint TV contract, whatever the intent, served to place a higher priority on an equality of opportunity for all competitors than on maximizing the revenue of any individual franchise.

Forty years later, soccer had learned this lesson from the NFL: the NASL collapsed amidst wild spending, the Cosmos’ fame not enough to keep the league alive, and Major League Soccer, guided by Lamar Hunt (with his experience in the AFL/NFL and NASL) had adopted the ultimate collective model by operating as a single-entity. All investors would be directly impacted by the financial success or failure of all other teams.

Still, in 1999, Major League Soccer was struggling. Attendance had declined for four straight years following the league’s 1996 inaugural season. Commissioner Doug Logan resigned before the playoffs. MLS’ key ownership groups, the Krafts and the Hunts, turned to a man who knew little about soccer to save the league, plucking from the NFL a 42 year-old executive called Don Garber. In the New York Times, Alan Rothenburg said upon his appointment that “I believe he has the potential to be the second coming of Pete Rozelle.”

Eleven years on, and Major League Soccer is convinced Garber is fulfilling that role, yesterday announcing his contract had been renewed for four more years at the princely sum of $3 million a year. Franchise values have soared, attendance is rising, television deals are improving, and different teams keep winning MLS Cup each year while a tight salary cap keeps a lid on spending.

Garber is a believer in Roselle’s focus on parity, and — in the lingo of his business — marketing the product of the league as a whole. Last week, in a Q&A with the Houston Chronicle, he reaffirmed this commitment:

Q: What kind of commissioner would you like your legacy to be? Would MLS commissioners like to be like former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who created a structure where everybody shares equally and there is more parity or like Major League Baseball with little parity.

A: I was fortunate enough in my early career in the NFL to work for Pete Rozelle and then to continue working for over a decade for Paul Tagliabue. And I believe the NFL is the most popular league in the world for a reason. And that’s that every fan knows at the beginning of the season that their team has a chance to go to the Super Bowl. And I believe that belief is an important quality for any league to be successful. Therefore I certainly subscribe more to the NFL’s approach to parity than I do perhaps to the structure of the English Premier League, where for the most part only a handful of clubs really have a chance of winning the league each year.

The question is, can MLS keep to that vision while revenues rise and the richer clubs itch to sign the world’s best players?

This Sunday at Toyota Park, we will see the latest star player to join MLS, Rafa Marquez. And we may well see, for the first time, five Designated Players (stars paid beyond the constraints of the salary cap) on the pitch at the same time: Nery Castillo and Freddie Llunjberg for the Fire, and Marquez, Thierry Henry and Juan Pablo Angel for the Red Bulls. As Steve Davis puts it: “the arms race is on. . .This could easily create a rich vs. not-so-rich divide – and I’m not sure that’s a great thing for the sport.”

Balancing MLS’ need for global stars to improve the quality of play and the league’s marketing efforts whilst maintaining the Rozelle mantra that every team’s fans must believe it has a chance to go to MLS Cup at the start of each season is Don Garber’s great challenge over the next four years. The introduction of the Designated Player rule, and its significant loosening this season (allowing the Red Bulls to acquire three multi-million dollar players, something only a handful of other teams could even conceive of doing), is not easy to square with Rickey’s maxim that guided Rozelle:

Any rule or regulation that removes or tends to remove the power of money to make the difference in playing strength is a good rule.

Everyone and their mother has an opinion on it: Bill Archer has a pretty harsh one, ridiculing the idea of the Cosmos fielding an “Independent All Star Team” that has apparently been mentioned, though it’s worth noting the NY Cosmos’ official site does not mention that at all. Instead, the focus is on making the Cosmos a key player in elite youth development and an announced effort to bring the Cosmos to MLS. Those two ambitions are where the real play is being made here.

It was actually on 28 August 2009 that we first noted the “The New York Cosmos are back!” and took a skeptical view of Paul Kemsley, the former Tottenham Hotspur director who procured the rights to the Cosmos brand and is now the Chairman of the club, using the same infamous photo of Kemsley with Pamela Anderson as Archer does. As we said at the time, Kemsley had earned a “reputation for overstretching himself” and has a troublesome history of lost investments in recent years.

But while Kemsley might appear to be a bit of a joke on the surface of it, what about the rest of the folks behind this venture?

The key figures are Carl Johnson, the CEO and Terry Byrne, the Director of Soccer (I really should make my job title “Director of Soccer for Pitch Invasion”, shouldn’t I?). The latter name you’ll recognise if you’ve been paying attention to David Beckham in recent years: in Grant Wahl’s excellent The Beckham Experiment, his backroom influence on the Galaxy earns him a few pages of infamy answering the question “Who was Terry Byrne?” and explains his rise “from cabdriver to David Beckham’s best friend.”

Byrne played a key role in the establishment of the David Beckham Academy in California a few years ago. Similarly, a crucial part of the Cosmos’ revival announcement was that the club will be fielding U-12 to U-18 teams, and will be a part of the high quality US Soccer Development Academy set-up, by virtue of their partnership with BW Gottschee, a long-time youth soccer club in Queens. Due to this partnership, Gottschee announced they were now making their Academy free (something most elite academies nationwide are currently having to consider doing to attract the top talent, in competition with MLS clubs’ numerous free academies). This year, Gottschee finished bottom of the “Liberty” division of the US Soccer Development Academy at U-16 level, and third out of six at U-18 level. Their status in the US Soccer Development Academy system and long track record of stability is extremely important here.

This is because Byrne and Beckham’s ambition to make it big in US youth development failed in LA: The David Beckham Academy in Calfornia closed its doors this year February. But despite its failure, this effort (along with everything else that went into The Beckham Experiment) tied Byrne to a very, very important figure in American soccer who will be one of the key players if the Cosmos are to join MLS: Tim Leiweke, President and CEO of AEG, owners of the Galaxy and at one point half of MLS’ teams. In The Beckham Experiment, Leiweke says “I started with Terry on this whole thing a long time ago. And Terry’s been my partner since day one, someone I loved.” Leiweke is, very importantly, currently the Chairman of MLS’ Board of Governors.

Still, Byrne’s connection to Leiweke has had its ups and downs due to his tight relationship with Beckham, a friendship with serious roots for both Englishmen. Byrne earned David Beckham’s undying affections by being there to cradle him at his most traumatic moment: following his red card against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, with the rest of the England bench ignoring him, Byrne (England’s masseur) was there for him in the locker room when no-one else was. Shortly after, Byrne got his first “Director of Soccer” gig with Watford, not long after leaving that to become Beckham’s full-time personal manager, and ending up as a paid consultant to the Galaxy following Beckham’s move to MLS in 2007, becoming the genius behind the disastrous hiring of Ruud Gullit as the foreign superstar coach Leiweke believed the Galaxy needed — and creating a curious situation, with Beckham’s best mate and business associate (through Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, Beckham’s agency) Byrne pulling the strings at the Galaxy.

The experiment proved to be a disaster, and in August 2008, Gullit was ousted and Byrne was booted from his role as a Galaxy consultant, with 19 Entertainment effectively put in their place by AEG. Bruce Arena was brought in as Galaxy General Manager, with Leiweke fuming at the fumbling that had taken place. As Grant Wahl put it, Leiweke’s message to 19 Entertainment and Byrne was: You had your chance, and you screwed it up. Now I’m taking my team back. Leiewke told Wahl: “I think what David and his people will tell you is they’re probably not a huge fan of mine based on Bruce. I didn’t ask them. . . are they happy with me? No. Now Simon Fuller and I have a very strong personal friendship. Terry Byrne and I had a friendship. I think we still do, but am I real popular with them as it relates to us owning this team and the decisions we have made [recently]? Absolutely not.”

Over the last year, since the publication of Wahl’s book, there’s been a lot of fence mending by everyone embarrassed by The Beckham Experiment. Leiweke and Byrne and Fuller and Beckham are probably best buds again. And the Cosmos are obviously the vehicle Byrne wants to control and prove he can make it in American soccer with, from youth development to MLS. Beckham’s name is not yet officially attached to the Cosmos, but many have already noted he has the option to purchase an MLS franchise once his playing career ends. The question, is how much faith does he have in Byrne given past failures: what does that hug in 1998 still buy Byrne?

If we dig into the various connections Byrne can call on through Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment, we find a very interesting one, if only for historical irony: Ed Bleier is the Chairman of CKX, Inc., one of the world’s top “entertainment content” companies and owner since 2005 of Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. 80 year-old Bleier previously spent 34 years working for Warner (rising to become its president in 1986), the company that founded and owned the original New York Cosmos under Warner president Steve Ross, an investment Bleier worked closely on for Warner.

It was Warner who, as Gavin Newsham puts it in his book about the original New York Cosmos rise and fall Once In A Lifetime, had a “relentless drive to publicise the team”, and it was Bleier who was chairman of the NASL’s Television Committee and warned against the NASL’s television deal with ABC signed in 1979 that saw nine league games telecast per year from 1979-1981, believing more imagination needed to be used in how the content of the sport was presented, wanting a highlights show that would have “standings, players, saves, goals, player of the week to build all the intrinsics of the sport and only put the Championship game on television. I got outvoted.” Within five years of the deal, the NASL was dead despite ratings on ABC that MLS would kill for. The Cosmos played their final game in 1985, a year after Warner had pulled the plug on the growing losses and handed the club to Giorgio Chinaglia and Peppe Pinton, who became the self-appointed “curator”of the Cosmos brand until Kemsley came along.

And that’s how we ended up with the latter standing next to Sunil Gulati (President of US Soccer), Kemsley and Pele yesterday. Which is kind of funny, as just three years ago, it was a frustrated Pinton saying that “I don’t think they [MLS] have good leadership to be honest with you. They don’t come from the world of soccer. They have no clue. It’s sad what they do in the league office … not just the league office, the headquarters of the [U.S. Soccer] federation too.”

But, hey, that old conflict is nothing a little slick Cosmos marketing can’t fix to get the club the buzz needed for investors to fund it for MLS (and to build the key missing element in all this, an MLS ready stadium). So take a look at the CEO of the new Cosmos, Carl Johnson:  the founder of a very successful marketing company Anomaly, named in 2008 as #24 in the “World’s Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company magazine, the only creative agency on the list:

Instead of claiming to reinvent advertising, Anomaly shirks the ad categorization altogether. In 2004, DeLand set out with four former colleagues from Chiat\Day and Wieden+Kennedy to build a new kind of company: part branding firm, part design shop, part innovation think tank, part VC firm. Anomaly has created a model that attacks the fundamental flaws of the agency machine. Most ad agencies still earn their paychecks from time sheets and media spend, which means they’re motivated to be inefficient and to produce ideas that are wedded to expensive media. Anomaly takes a different approach, negotiating upfront either a predetermined fee or, better yet, royalties or an equity stake in a product. So when a client comes in with an advertising problem, Anomoly addresses it more broadly as a business issue, analyzing everything from design to product development. “They have a talent that goes beyond your typical artist or creative,” says Brian Kelley, president of Coca-Cola’s Still Beverages, a client. “It’s an eclectic group of people who think about driving every piece of your business.”

In thinking about their own business, the partners recognized that as branding experts, they could just as well create original products too. “We would rather invent the next VitaminWater than do the ads for VitaminWater,” says partner Carl Johnson. So while half of Anomaly’s business is doing client work, the other half is building brands from scratch. “What we’re really doing is generating profit from clients, then reinvesting in a venture fund for our intellectual properties,” Johnson says.

Anomaly’s Sand Hill Road–meets–Madison Avenue approach isn’t yet ubiquitous — or dominant — but it is showing results. Profitable in its first year of business, the New York–based agency has doubled its revenue every year since. In 2007, Anomaly brought in nearly $20 million, with new clients including Converse and Bluetooth-headset maker Jawbone.

The thinking is obvious: Pele is the star power, Byrne does the soccer development and develops elite players that can be sold for bagloads of money down the line (and brings in Beckham), the same thinking that everyone has right now about tapping into the huge US youth soccer market for future profit. The Cosmos brand has the shit marketed out of it by Carl Johnson and his savvy associates: the Cosmos also hired Dan Cherry from Anomaly as their Executive Director of Marketing (how many youth soccer clubs do you know that have two of the leading creative executives in the world on their staff? Someone does have some money in the Cosmos here, if we consider that they’re also investing a fair bit in making the Gottschee Academy free to play in). Kemsley, who appears to have a talent at getting people to throw money at his ventures, gets the big investors lined up behind the Cosmos to get them back into MLS, presumably leveraging Byrne’s connections to the likes of Beckham, Fuller and (wishfully for the historical symmetry) Ed Bleier. The Academy breeds players for the MLS team and they’re then turned around and sold for a lot of money. Hey presto!

I’m not saying Kemsley and Byrne don’t have a questionable track record and there’s a huge question mark about the club’s MLS ambitions given the need for serious investment and a stadium. But at the same time, there’s a plan in here that makes some sense from a business perspective: the upside here may well make a big enough fish bite.