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.

Restaurant sign in Nuremberg, Germany, during the 2006 World Cup.

Photo credit: bluerondo on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Big Story

The photo of David Beckham wearing a green and gold scarf applauding Manchester United supporters at Old Trafford is PR the leaders of the Glazer protest campaign couldn’t have scripted better.

Not surprisingly, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust followed up this morning with an email to their 100,000+ list smartly capitalising on the moment:

I’m sure you were watching the incredible moment last night when Beckham bathed in green and gold. It’s moments like this that justify all the collective effort we’ve been putting into this campaign. We are showing our strength. We are making a real difference.

Last night we welcomed a legend back to Old Trafford – now we need to capitalise on this moment and bring other United heroes into our fold.

We’ve just written a letter to Beckham, Cantona and all of the former United players which calls on them to join our campaign to reclaim United. As a show of support we want you to add your name to the letter too – we’ll then deliver it and the names of all of the people who have signed it, to the players and the media.

Together we can send a deafening call for change – will you co-sign our letter to the United greats now?

http://action.joinmust.org/heroes

This is our chance to reach out to the United players who built our club – who led from the front and defined United’s success over the past decades. But our club is in trouble – we need them to lead United again right here, right now.

The letter goes on to conclude that “Last night, Beckham united with the fans and led by example. Beckham has shown his true colours, now it’s up to us to show ours – we need to build on this moment and build on this chance for change.”

Again, this is a fine example of the professional nature of the protest campaign. The photo of Beckham from last night has been embedded into the header of the letter. One public moment and he’s now the figurehead of the campaign.

Beckham, though, might have received a phone call or two after the game, as he distanced himself from the political implication of the green and gold:

“I’m a Manchester United fan and when I saw the scarf I wanted to put it round my neck,” Beckham explained. “It’s the old colours of United but, to be honest, it’s not my business. I’m a United fan and I support the club. I always will, but it’s got nothing to do with me how it’s run. That’s all to do with other people. I just support the team. I will always support the team.”

It’s always a little sad to hear say someone say they support a team but that how it’s run is not their business, but it doesn’t really matter much what Beckham says about it after the fact. It’s always been about the imagery for Beckham, the iconic moments, and this lasting image is a moment worth a fortune to the protest movement whatever was actually whirring in Beckham’s brain when he put on the scarf.

“Change can and will happen – we just need to fight for it,” MUST’s email to 100,000 concludes. “Last night thousands of green and gold scarves were on show in Old Trafford. One rested on the shoulders of an icon.” And that’s worth a million to MUST.

Quick Hits

• If you can find it amidst perhaps the most ad-plastered news site I have ever seen, northjersey.com has a few interesting comments from New York Red Bulls managing director Eric Stover, including a proud claim that they might hit 8,000 season ticket holders by the end of the month. Which, I guess, is a big improvement (or he wouldn’t be happily bandying about the number), but means the Red Bulls still have enormous single game sales work to do to keep the 25,000 arena reasonably full each game. Still, improvement is improvement.
• In a more aesthetically pleasing and thoughtful piece about the state of soccer in the New York area, This Is American Soccer features an op-ed on a “last chance for MLS in Manhattan”: “RBNY has its new home, but another structure’s future also places the city’s soccer future in the wind. Pier 40, one of the largest and most-used sports facilities in Manhattan, is in dire need of rehabilitation. Just as with RBNY, many plans have failed. But Greenwich Village resident Patrick Shields thinks he has the answer.”
• Fake Sigi says “foreign investment in MLS has nothing to do with collective bargaining”. And I’m pretty sure he’s right.
• Speaking of the MLS labour dispute, Steven Goff reports that with a mediator now at the table, the owners and players “keep talking”.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Photo by menosultra on Flickr.

Photo by menosultra on Flickr.

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2009/12/04/the-two-key-moments-of-the-world-cup-draw-for-this-observer-presented-without-further-comment/feed/ 6 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2009/12/03/the-sweeper-how-to-win-a-world-cup-bid/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2009/12/03/the-sweeper-how-to-win-a-world-cup-bid/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:18:01 +0000 Tom Dunmore http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=5026

David Beckham, Ambassador to the World

Big Story
Winning the right to host the World Cup finals is about much more than the actual content of the bid, as we commented yesterday when examining the United States’ solid package.

For England, it’s been a torrid time of interminable controversy inside the bid administration, with the unseemly bickering between the Football Association, the Premier League and all the egos of England’s bloated football administration. The U.S., without the intense press coverage of the sport and with a much more streamlined (perhaps too much so!) national administration, is able to avoid most of this.

And so the Daily Mail plunges another knife into England’s faltering World Cup bid, though there’s something a little unsettling about the major complaint being that “Yet another sign of a wasted opportunity came in the bear hug with which FIFA president Sepp Blatter greeted former FA chief executive Brian Barwick at the Soccerex conference in  Johannesburg. Barwick, one of English football’s best networkers, was not even deemed worth a place among the bid’s 70-odd ambassadors.”

Yet England does have one endless route to good publicity: David Beckham. The Times falls for Beckham’s ambassadorial role for the bid hook, line and sinker, commenting that “The England midfielder has emerged as the figurehead of the 2018 campaign and he has already had made progress in his attempts to charm Fifa power brokers such as Sepp Blatter, the president, and vice-president Jack Warner.”

Suddenly, we are reminded that this whole World Cup bidding process — with the need to snuggle up to the likes of Warner and Blatter — isn’t such an edifying business after all. Can we ever imagine a future in which the world’s game (as FIFA likes to call it) isn’t directed by 24 old and corrupt cronies who need their egos petted at all times?

Worldwide News

• The Colorado Rapids’ traditionally dismal supporters’ section may get a boost, as the Colorado Rapids Supporters Association says that “After several years of deliberating and negotiations, I’m proud to say the supporters are finally where they want to be…behind a goal!” They also say that negotiations with the front office will be bringing further positive change. Another step in the right direction for MLS teams’ dealings with supporters. Let’s hope it’s not too little too late for Colorado.
• A curious defense of agents appears on the Guardian by Lawrence Donegan. There’s a good argument to be made that agents are necessary, but it needs to be put in the context that their consistently underhand and greedy practices have at times severely damaged the sport and thus they need to be kept under extremely tight leashes.  Surely they could do their job being paid a lot less than the £70.7m the Premier League spent in the past year. Yet Donegan’s defense is instead a blabbering and completely irrelevant rant about Simon Cowell’s role in the entertainment industry: “The X Factor producer and judge runs his own record company which, coincidentally, signs lots of acts that appear on the X Factor.” Who the hell cares? Football does not need to take its cues from the pop industry.
• Why did Manchester United pull out of their deal for Serbian youngster Adem Ljajic? The Guardian speculates on, but offers little evidence for, further fnancial problems stemming from the Glazers’ debt-laden takeover.
• There was a pretty extraordinary ending to the Copa Sudamericana final, as Ecuador’s Liga Deportiva Universitaria went down to nine men, lost 3-0 to Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and still hung for the title thanks to their 5-1 lead from the first leg.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

In many ways, the opposing sides in tonight’s 2009 MLS Cup final (8:30 PM EST) are representative of the two faces of MLS.

Seattle’s Qwest field will see Real Salt Lake, a team that stumbled into—and through—the playoffs with the lowest wage bill in the league and no designated player to speak of, a symbol of MLS’ egalitarian, singe-entity structure; face the LA Galaxy, MLS’ biggest spender with two of the league’s biggest names, one of them the world’s most famous person, an exorbitantly-paid designated player whom many in MLS credit for giving soccer a bigger profile in North America, for better or worse.

The differing nature of both sides—a small-but-stable underdog in Utah against a star-pushing, LA-based glamour-machine—were reflected in league chairman Don Garber’s cautiously optimistic state of the union speech and media Q & A.  Garber strongly defended the league’s growth in North America, referring to 2009 as a break-out year, and reiterated the need for MLS to connect with more North American soccer fans (Garber owned up in a recent interview with Grant Wahl that “There are still far more soccer fans in this country than there are MLS fans”).

But Garber added that expanding MLS, whether with more DPs or higher wages or more franchises, shouldn’t “negatively impact” the league’s stability, which, considering the TOA/USL-1 split which has seen the rebirth of the North American Soccer League, isn’t something to take lightly. It’s a fine balance to say the least, and it will certainly be reflected in on-going CBA talks in the next two months.

Meanwhile, predictably for the media, tonight’s final, and the MLS in general, is all about David Beckham and not a hell of a lot much more.  On why he’s been overall pretty good for American soccer here, pretty dire here, and dire-then-good here.

Worldwide Stories

• But MLS isn’t all about soccer you know!  Twofootedtackle does a nice little piece on MLS W.O.R.K.S., you know, the organization with the comic sans hoarding signs.
• Jermain Defoe scored five goals today as Spurs destroyed Wigan 9-1; in doing so he tied Premier League record for goals scored in single match.  Watch all of them here.
• Bayern Munich manager Louis van Gaal has made Bayern Munich terrible, or so says this guy, and he didn’t do much to dispel WSC’s quaint theory by drawing Leverkusen 1-1 at home.
• Meanwhile, the DFB will do everything in its power to aid match-fixing investigators following a series of arrests this past week.
• Brisbane Roar’s Brazilian winger Henrique showed the world what a handball really looks like on Saturday.  Apparently there were some other shenanigans in the game as well.

Richard Whittall writes A More Splendid Life, and is live blogging the MLS Cup tonight with some other major MLS peeps if you want to come on by.

Big Story
MLS looks like it will kick off next season without its two biggest stars, David Beckham and Cuauhtemoc Blanco, with the former set for a return to Milan and the latter returning to Veracruz. Despite their lucrative rewards in MLS, both moves are driven by the two stars’ desires to participate in a swansong World Cup finals: you can say what you like about both Beckham and Blanco, but questioning their competitive desire to represent their countries would be absurd.

It’s likely both will return to MLS after South Africa. Beckham has said he intends to do so, and Blanco has an opt-out clause in his one-year deal with Veracruz to leave at any time, with the Fire continuing to negotiate with his agent. Blanco’s desire to play in Mexico during the offseason for longer than he did in 2008 and stay in shape for the World Cup (he fell terribly out of shape last offseason) has been known in Chicago for some time.

The question is how well MLS will handle this. After the public relations fiasco of Beckham’s protracted return to Europe last year, the loan deal this season seems to have been concluded with much more consideration on both sides. But with neither likely to play in MLS until July, will MLS still center their marketing around the two superstars?  For three years we have had an almost constant diet of Blanco and Beckham commercials and television schedules arranged around the two. How will the league move-on?

Worldwide News

• The shortlists for the men’s and women’s FIFA Player of the Year awards are out.
• Tottenham take on Arsenal tomorrow morning, and the Guardian looks at six of the best North London derbies. Not wishing to be outdone, The Times has five of the best North London derbies, but for some reason (and in not a particularly helpful fashion to Spurs) only since 2000. And a Spurs winger remembers a 4-4 draw with Arsenal – no, not the one last season, but one all of 51 years ago in his debut for the club.
• An odd story in China, as Beijing Guoan look to seal their first Chinese Super League title but face the prospect of fan rioting over ticket restrictions. Only 13,000 of the 60,000 seats in the stadium are being made available despite the club apparently having 15,000 season ticketholders, leading to 10,000 angry fans outside the stadium earlier this week. 6,000 police have been called in to keep order this weekend.
• The Wall Street Journal has been discovering soccer lately, which is nice, but this article on Manchester as a “city divided”, unique in its football rivalry worldwide, is a little sloppy. Apparently the author thinks Manchester City “lacks a glorious past”, which will be news to anyone who knows anything about football in Manchester before the arrival of Matt Busby: in the 1930s, with crowds often above 80,000, City won the league championship and the FA Cup while Man Utd were still yo-yoing between the first and second divisions. I suppose that’s ancient history, though the rivalry was more than the “no-contest” the author asserts until the 1960s, and a failure to even mention that United’s chief rivalry has been with Liverpool since is a little more unforgivable.

• In the comments yesterday, Alistair pointed out we had missed the news of Swedish legend Henrik Larsson retiring. You can see his emotional retirement speech here.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

This is not, though, a simple hatchet job, easy as that would have been to write instead. Wahl’s open-minded journalism has been the hallmark of his career at Sports Illustrated, including a notable cover-story interview with Beckham upon his arrival in America in 2007, and he gives all parties ample opportunity to explain themselves. The failure of the Beckham Experiment is one that essentially tells itself through their own words, with Wahl adding telling observations about why it failed — crucially — in the context of American soccer and MLS.

It becomes clear that the Experiment succeeded in its most base aim — it made money for all parties involved, after all — but the grander goal of exploding soccer in the U.S. based on the Beckham Brand was drowned in the misery of the Galaxy’s failures on the field, an inevitable side-effect of the meddling in MLS by Beckham’s agency, Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment group. A certain emptiness at the book’s core — we hear little from Fuller and mostly vapidity from Beckham — reflects the emptiness in the Experiment from the outset, and perhaps provides the explanation for its substantive failure.

This Is Entertainment

Some of the leadership involved in the Experiment take ample advantage of Wahl’s willingness to let them speak for themselves.  Our key cast of characters quoted at length are Tim Leiweke, CEO of Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) who own the Galaxy; Alexi Lalas, President of the Galaxy until 2008; and Landon Donovan, the Galaxy’s best player throughout the period whose disparaging comments about Beckham’s leadership failures have provided the perfect furor ahead of the book’s release today.

Lalas emerges, perhaps to all of our surprise, as the most sympathetic figure amongst them despite his many mistakes, not least for his rare willingness amongst the cast of characters leading the Experiment to shoulder some of the blame for its downfall (“I thoroughly regret letting the Galaxy be co-opted and letting outside influences infiltrate it and spread like a disease.”)  It seems, at the beginning, that Lalas is on the same page as everyone else involved: the key word in the names of the Experiment’s backers was Entertainment, after all, and that was Lalas’ long-held mantra as key to selling soccer in America.

No-one has ever been a bigger evangelist for soccer in America as Entertainment than Lalas. “That’s what I love about sports,” he told Wahl. “I love the criticism and the analysis and the rumor and the speculation and innuendo, not just about what the guy did on the field but what the guy did off the field. That’s personality. That’s excitement. That’s fuckin’ entertainment.”

Beckham came to America because Anschutz Entertainment Group and 19 Entertainment were closely tied together by a cluster-fuck of showbusiness connections: AEG’s concert business was the perfect vehicle for Simon Fuller’s group, as Leiweke said: “We have a long relationship with Simon because of our music business and American Idol. So Simon and I were sitting around talking about vision. Wouldn’t it be great one day with David? How would he do in America? It all started with that.” (Conveniently, of course, AEG would handle Victoria’s coming to America as well, in the Spice Girls reunion tour.)

But whilst Entertainment can be stage-managed and bought, success on the pitch cannot — ironically, especially in MLS. It might be a ‘mickey-mouse’ league to the British press who derided Beckham’s move to America, but it’s one with stringent rules protecting competitive balance that AEG (who should have known better) and 19 Entertainment (whose hubris is hardly surprising) failed to work successfully within, despite the rules being deliberately changed in the first place at the urging of Leiweke to allow the Experiment to take place (with the institution of the “Beckham-rule” to allow a team one signing over-and-above the salary cap).

The apotheosis of this, as Wahl tellingly reveals, comes with the recruitment of Ruud Gullit as Galaxy coach in 2008, at the behest of Beckham’s good friend Terry Byrne, a 19 Entertainment business associate and then Galaxy paid consultant, who played a Rasputin-role behind the scenes. It becomes evident that Lalas was against the disastrous hiring of Gullit, an old acquaintance of Byrne’s from his days as Chelsea’s kit manager. Byrne also manipulates the Galaxy into Beckham winning the captaincy even before he’d started a game for the team, embittering Landon Donovan as he was forced to give up the armband.

Wahl’s experience as a reporter on American soccer since the league’s inception is crucial here: much of the book is inevitably a pumped up magazine feature on the showbusiness focus of Beckham and associates, but the critical story unravels on the field and in the jumbled world of MLS’ maze of salary caps, roster limits and brutal scheduling. It’s here that the Experiment fails most vividly, and all involved are forced to remember this is a sport, and not mere Entertainment: Gullit was hired at 19 Entertainment’s behest with no regard to the long record of failure by high-profile foreign coaches to come to grips with MLS’ nuances, and he fails miserably himself.

As the Galaxy’s 2008 season collapses with a run of twelve games without a win, Beckham is unable to provide any leadership to a locker room caught in the vortex of Beckham’s fame and failure on the field, with a clueless Gullit tuning out until his firing, sexy football in Los Angeles a lost dream.

Captain Galaxy AWOL

Beckham’s fame has always depended on his appearance as an empty vessel that almost anyone could project their dreams, desires and damnations onto: England villain, England hero; pop culture whore, committed grafter on the pitch; adulterer, perfect family man. With a series of honest and penetrating interviews, Wahl shows that many of his Galaxy teammates, even those who earn a pittance of Beckham’s salary, liked him and felt no malice or envy towards him. The story of the unlikely struggling success story of his friend, gangly forward Alan Gordon, is almost worthy of a book in itself, and it’s clear that all of them wanted to get on with Beckham and saw his good side — but were ultimately unable to connect with him when they needed him.

As results go from bad-to-worse, the team is riven apart by Beckham’s disinterest in the league after the firing of Gullit by AEG in mid-season 2008, replaced by former U.S. coach Bruce Arena — in an attempt by Leiweke to reclaim control of the Galaxy from 19 Entertainment for AEG (“So we’re the owners, and maybe we needed to act like it. We’re acting like it now.”)

Beckham’s silence and poor play leads to Landon’s infamous withering comments to Wahl over “a lunch of lamb pizza and a peach salad” in Manhattan Beach, when he finally concludes that not only had Beckham failed as captain, but as a teammate as well. Landon might not have been brave in speaking to Wahl before Beckham, but the context of the story Wahl tells certainly shows why his frustration led him to do so, and how unapproachable Beckham had become.

Unwilling to compromise the integrity of the book by paying for exclusive access to Beckham, Wahl is left with his regular post-game press conferences to provide insight into Beckham as the Experiment unravels, so his failure to lead is never truly explained. One large part of the explanation, hinted at by Wahl, surely lies in Victoria Beckham’s role: her own ambitions in America focused on celebrity and her obvious refusal to lower herself to socialising with the poorly-paid Galaxy players and their families was mainly why Beckham was never able to go all the way in connecting with the likes of Gordon, his initial hopes for Sunday barbecues with his teammates left unfulfilled as he swirls instead in the Cruise-Holmes jetset.

That we do not hear the inside story of the Beckhams is hardly surprising, since the cocoon of the Beckham Brand has clearly isolated them from reality for many years. It was this extraction of Beckham from his hard-working roots by Victoria’s faux-glamour that Alex Ferguson spotted years ago and saw as his coming downfall, and ultimately, he was proved right. As the 2008 season collapses, Captain Galaxy lets himself be whisked around the world and fall out of shape instead of supporting his team to the utmost, flying to Beijing instead of backing his boys on the field, his production falling precipitously.

By the end of the book, all parties seem to have lost sight of the original stated goal of the Beckham Experiment: to take soccer to the next level in America. Instead, the final chapters document the sordid squabbling over the efforts of 19 Entertainment and Beckham to extricate himself from the Galaxy and sign for AC Milan, with AEG and MLS both seeking to extract every last dollar from him too. Again we are left with the empty words of Beckham’s public statements, claiming his desire to move was all about England — or was it instead that Brand Beckham was being damaged too badly by his competitive failure in the United States, and needed a soccer success story to sell it again?  (Wahl tellingly notes that Pepsi had dropped Beckham from their stable at the end of 2008)

It’s notable that we hear little from Simon Fuller after the few words at the start of the book. “The States is the last frontier in terms of soccer,” Fuller is quoted as saying on page 4, at the launch of the Beckham Experiment. “Everywhere else on earth, soccer is huge. It’s the sport. And while many people have tried before, no-one has seemed to have cracked America. . .Shoot for the stars, and if you don’t hit them, then it was fun trying. If you do hit them, then you’ve made history.”

What Fuller never understood was that it would take hard graft to succeed in MLS and make history. In this, there’s almost something comforting in the failure of the Experiment — while Leiweke or Fuller might not like it, surely, despite all its flaws, there’s a value to a league where success can’t just be bought and manipulated even by AEG and 19 Entertainment’s global showbusiness power.

Wahl again coaxes Lalas into making the pertinent point: “We created this SuperClub, and yet in MLS we’re not allowed to have the mechanisms that fuel and facilitate a SuperClub around the world. It would be wonderful to see what the Galaxy could do if all the restraints were taken away. Unfortunately, it might be good for the Galaxy, but it might not be good for the league or the sport.”

It’s long been my suspicion that Alexi Lalas is a genius cunningly disguised as a ginger goofball and sometime Hootie & the Blowfish opening act, and the Los Angeles Galaxy’s president and general manager today confirmed this when he acquired Carlos Ruiz to play alongside Landon Donovan and David Beckham.

Dropping those three together in a petri dish is likely to propel the LA Galaxy into the upper-stratosphere of Inter Continental Global Domination Superstar Mega Clubs, and even more amazingly, Lalas has achieved this all entirely within the strictures of MLS’ salary cap — remember, it applies equally to ALL teams, even Global Domination Superstar Mega Clubs — with enough space left over that he could resign lethal striker Alan Gordon (43 apps, 7 goals) too!

Those of you who pay little attention to what we like to call Major League Soccer over here may be unaware of Ruiz’s touching charm. Despite Wikipedia’s gross slur that he is a “diver with an ill temper [citation needed]” — no kidding, citation needed! — he is sure to be the perfect birthing partner for Landon Donovan’s sister.

Curiously, the otherwise reliable Offside blog once claimed that Ruiz was “as close as it comes to a true MLS villain. At least that is the case for many fans who have watched the talented Guatemalan forward push, pull and scratch his way to 81 goals scored in 137 games.” What? Do they have him mixed up with the baseball player called Carlos Ruiz or something?

Ruiz is going to the right place in order to be shielded from such bizarre, vitriolic abuse. David Beckham, as that touching Adidas commercial with the cute little drawings always reminds us seven hundred times per MLS ESPN broadcast, is a man also once horrifically victimized for the mere act of kicking someone and getting sent-off in the World Cup.

Ruiz will sympathize as only last summer he was kicked by Ricardo Clark in an act many described as “completely unprovoked” and “not just desserts whatsoever”.

Lalas knows Ruiz’s scars can be lovingly healed in L.A. by the motherly bosom of Posh Spice, and Ruiz will surely enjoy spending his days with Landon leafing through copies of Men’s Vogue.

Donovan, after all, is a man with a heart so big that when asked which “Person you admire the most?” he was either unable to comprehend the singular form, or, more likely, could not brutally tear apart his siblings and answered “My brother and sister.”

One suspects, though, that if asked today he’d say “Alexi Lalas and Carlos Ruiz.”

Photo credit: moacirdsp

Major League Soccer (USA), the J.League (Japan) and the Hyundai A-League (Australia) today announced an unprecedented and innovative partnership in the creation of a new international soccer tournament to be hosted in Honolulu, Hawaii: the Pan-Pacific Championship (PPC), which will crown the top club from the Asian and North American soccer confederations. [. . .]

The four teams to participate in the 2008 tournament are: reigning MLS Cup champion Houston Dynamo and Haleiwa, Hawaii native Brian Ching; the Yamazaki Nabisco Cup Champion Gamba Osaka, with 19-year-old Japanese sensation Michihiro Yasuda and J.League star Yasuhito Endo; the 2007 SuperLiga finalists Los Angeles Galaxy, whose international roster includes English superstar David Beckham and perennial MLS all-star Landon Donovan; and a club to qualify from the Hyundai A-League Final Series, which concludes in February 2008 ahead of the Pan-Pacific Championship.

Now, I’m not against exhibition tournaments in general. If Beckham can fill stadia across the world for reasons that remain somewhat obscure to my footballing brain, no-one can blame the Galaxy for whoring themselves endlessly. It’s what football teams do nowadays. Or at least, we shouldn’t blame them particularly.

But do they have to pretend this is about “crown[ing] the top club from the Asian and North American soccer confederations”? The Galaxy finished third from bottom in MLS this season. The teams that qualify should be the MLS Cup champions (Houston, as is happening) and the Supporters’ Shield regular season champions (DC United, who are probably glad they don’t have yet another tournament to plan for).

Even Galaxy fans have had enough. Over at The Offside, Laurie lays into the front office for continuing to attempt to become a “superclub” by their actions off the field rather than on it.

Is it the sole goal of MLS to make the Galaxy the most hated/criticized/laughed at team in the league because of the special treatment they receive? That seems to be the case. It’s getting embarrassing to be a fan. And if they don’t start performing, it will be humiliating, too.

Of course, it’s doubtful the “Pan-Pacific Championship” would even be happening without Beckham’s draw in Asia. So, one could conclude anything that raises MLS profile is beneficial, and Beckham does that. On the other hand, raising its profile as what is the question.