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.

Big Story
There’s been an awful lot of questionable rhetoric already spat out by the leading figures of both sides of the dispute between MLS and the players over their new labour agreement, and finally we have a journalist with the patience and ability to parse through it well: Kyle McCarthy has a must-read look at the claims made about MLS’s compliance (or not) with FIFA’s regulations on player contracts. McCarthy concludes that:

As these negotiations continue to unfold, the rhetoric will increase and intensify as both sides try to sway the purportedly neutral public to its cause. Garber’s statement – and Foose’s ridiculous contention about the World Cup chances, for that matter – merely represents the first in a series of arguments that will push that barrier to the limit. The key to weeding through the morass in search of firm ground ultimately rests in the ability to discern when the habitual stretching of the truth goes too far.

To be honest, looking through some of the technical language cited, it becomes obvious no side is going to easily win over public opinion, and the only ones looking to come out of this well are the lawyers: and many journalists need to have the patience of a McCarthy to offer a fair take.

Worldwide News

• Toronto FC’s hopes to finally have a permanent grass field worth playing on at BMO Field took a hit with news that the Canadian Football League’s gridiron team the Toronto Argonauts are looking to move to the city-owned stadium: TFC fans and bloggers are rightly up in arms, with Ben Knight commenting that the problem is (as ever with soccer in North America, even in a soccer friendly city like Toronto) getting local politicians to care. Knight, though, points out fans should not panic as the obstacles in the way of the move range from money (the Argos have none) to the considerable challenges the dimension and plans for BMO would create to host the CFL.
• Can sport really be used to kickstart a nation’s economy?  The BBC takes a long and fairly rosy-eyed view of Ghana’s hopes “to secure competition events and increase tourist inflows and business revenues to our cities and the country.”  Yet as ever, definitive proof of the long-term economic boosts these tournaments bring remains elusive.
• The Bundesliga is getting a lot of good publicity in the English-language press at the moment, with this long and excellent breakdown of why the league is the world’s most popular and fan-friendly in its stadia, and a shorter piece by Four Four Two on the rule that is the backbone of this: 50+1. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s weekly Bundesliga round-up has the usual excellent work by Raphael Honigstein, this week focusing on the new president of Bayern Munich and the behemoth he helped build.
• Oh, and there’s lots of stuff about Ireland, and Fifa, and the World Cup, but perhaps the best — just because of its sheer spite towards FIFA’s unaccountable elite — is Grahame Jones’ takedown of the FIFA executive committee in the LA Times: “A sport that enthralls the planet is being overseen by rogues and villains, each one more unsavory than the next and each one pocketing more undeserved wealth than anyone can imagine.mThe ineptness of the executive committee members — or more likely their indifference to public opinion — knows no bounds.”

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.

There are a few things that have been detrimental to the image of MLS this week, including Alexi Lalas’ face appearing every time I open the MLS homepage. High on my list would have been MLS moving the Fire’s away playoff game at New England to Sunday from Saturday, just two days after they had scheduled it for the original date in the first place. Apparently someone at MLS head office went to Walgreens and figured out what all the scary looking decorations they were selling were for.

I digress, but only because rarely do we see MLS worry about its image when it comes to accommodating supporters who already had travel plans for a game a few days away. Instead, it busies itself handing out an absurd fine to DC President Kevin Payne, who a few days ago made some petty but fairly truthful comments about the play of certain MLS teams to Soccer Insider:

You look at the way Real Salt Lake played when they came here [a 0-0 tie in May] and sat 10 guys behind the ball. You don’t have to do that. Sometimes that is the best way to get a result — if you don’t care about the product, if you don’t care about advertising your league. Long term, who wants to watch that?

Now, as we commented, Payne’s comments were a rather poor effort at covering his own backside for a team incapable of playing good football and winning this season. But certainly, even a hardcore MLS supporter and Direct Kick subscriber like myself has trouble finding the motivation to track down a San Jose-Colorado game in July even when my television is starved of the beautiful game.

A couple of days passed and MLS sent out a press release saying “Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber today fined D.C. United President Kevin Payne $5,000 for public comments deemed detrimental to the public image of the League.

I don’t particularly feel sorry for Payne being knocked down a peg, but it’s typical of MLS to waste time worrying about how the league appears instead of working on improving what it actually is.

Update: maybe it was worth MLS doing this, just to see Kevin Payne eat humble pie.

I deeply regret some of the comments I made in an interview published earlier this week. In trying to explain the, sometimes, unfair expectations on the Head Coach of D.C. United, I made critical comments of Colorado, New England, Real Salt Lake and the League. Those comments were unprofessional. I have great personal regards and professional respect for my colleagues at those organizations and for their ownership and fans. I have apologized to those teams and individuals privately and now do so publicly

Don Garber

The Big Story

Don Garber’s been all over the place on the anniversary of his ten years as MLS Commissioner. A particularly interesting in-depth interview is on Reuters Soccer Blog. Garber all but confirms Montreal as the next expansion team (“A very strong position yes.”), and comments that the recent spate of successful international tours is leading America to become “soccer nation.”

Garber’s answer about the position of USL below MLS was notable, and suggests the leagues are somewhat at a crossroads in their relationship. “I do believe that we can only all benefit from a strong minor league and a strong connection between it and the major league in this country,” Garber said. “I look forward to seeing how that progresses in the years ahead.”

It seems this could go two ways: the much-wanted desire for promotion-relegation between MLS and USL (unlikely given the price an MLS franchise costs) or the forging of a new relationship with the USL/PDL as a true development league for MLS. With the lack of a reserve league hurting MLS teams and the growth of MLS academies, some new kind of relationship could be of benefit — but would this would mean USL accepting a much more subordinate role than the league has now, in which it can often compete on an equal footing with MLS in cup competition.

Of course, USL fans will point out another of their teams knocked off an MLS team in the CONCACAF Champions League last night, but with Montreal set to become the latest strong USL club to be “promoted” to MLS, both leagues do need to forge a new relationship going forward to strengthen the structure below MLS nationwide for a true “Soccer Nation” to exist.

Worldwide

• The FA is trying to crackdown on pre-match controversy with a new edict banning managers from commenting on referees ahead of games — and the severity of injuries will also be taken into account when determining the length of a ban for a red card.
• Following up on yesterday’s note on the Argentine league, the F.A. there has suspended the league ahead of its scheduling opening match this month, due to an ongoing financial dispute.
• An interesting theory on the 2008 Champions League final penalty shootout is floated on 101 Great Goals, via the work of Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski’s new book Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained. Apparently, Chelsea had a carefully formulated gameplan based on statistical analysis to beat Van der Sar in the shootout, one that was not followed by Nicolas Anelka, who bottled it after a little gamesmanship by the Dutchman.  Looks like a book worth checking out.
• A nice story on Espanyol’s new stadium by Four Four Two, who look at the joy for a club opening a new home built by an owner who has been a long-time supporter of the club.
• There is continued dispute between the football authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). They’ve been fighting with Fifa for some time over the strict rules on random testing they want to put in place for all elite athletes, and the Football Association is, according to the Guardian, worried about “the potential burden of fighting litigation. The controversial new rules would require the pool players to register their availability for testing for one hour of every day under the “whereabouts” element of the Wada code.”

North America

• The fallout from the Twitter revolution in sports continues apace. This times it’s journalists who will have to watch their words at ESPN — a memo from ESPN headquarters yesterday cracked down on use by ESPN employees. The guidelines basically forbid any social network posting on anything related to sports.
• As we mentioned above, in CONCACAF’s premier tournament the Champions League, it was another disappointing night for MLS. Toronto FC went down to USL’s Puerto Rico Islanders, unable to score over 180 minutes of play. DC United did go through, but only on penalties against an El Salvadorean team they took far too lightly in the first leg.
• Finally, the Chicago Fire take on Tigres from Mexico in the SuperLiga final tonight, and I will of course be in attendance — and in fact, I’m far more excited about it than I thought I’d be at the start of the tournament, essentially North America’s version of the UEFA Cup. It’s been fashionable, and with some good reason, to deride SuperLiga this year — especially with poor attendances at MLS stadiums in the group stages. But it looks like a large crowd will be in attendance at Toyota Park for the final tonight, as the Fire take on an excellent Tigres side with $1 million on the line. Section 8 is sold-out, so it’s guaranteed to be loud.  Tune in on TeleFutura in the US and try to spot me going nuts.

For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow @pitchinvasion on Twitter. ESPN can’t censor us!

Today’s Talking Point

Shootouts after regular season ties seemed to have been confined to MLS’ bad-ideas-graveyard, but when an owner of a successful MLS expansion franchise wants to bring them back, you have to wonder what is going on his head. Real Salt Lake’s owner Dave Checketts was infused by the excitement of the penalty shootout that followed the draw in the All-Star game last week at his Rio Tinto stadium, and has been lobbying MLS Commissioner Don Garber and other owners to bring it back.

“If this doesn’t make a case for the shootout being brought back, I don’t know what does,” Checketts told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I said, ‘Look at the people staying, standing, screaming.’ It was a classic match-up of the two best Americans who have ever played that position, right here in our stadium. It was classic.” Classic! A moment we’ll never forget in a match that meant nothing!

Is it even worth either taking Checketts seriously or making fun of him?  His argument seems to be that shootouts haven’t hurt ice hockey (Checketts also owns the NHL’s St. Louis Blues), but a return to shootouts to end regular season ties would once again hurt MLS’ credibility with fans of, well, competitive soccer as it’s played worldwide — we’ve known for decades that shootouts are exciting in the moment, but that doesn’t mean such lotteries are something we should encourage, or we may as well start each game with one and skip the boring 90 minutes of actual football.

Worldwide

• Chelsea’s Sporting Director Frank Arneson has defended youth development at the club. Four years into taking on the role, not a single first team players has come through, but Arneson claims the plan all along was to start producing players only in 2010.  “It was never the objective that I should be delivering two talents for the best team from 2007 on a yearly basis. I don’t know how that misunderstanding has surfaced. You don’t create talents at the assembly line. Patience is a virtue. In a top club like Chelsea you do not waltz into the team at the age of 18-19 years.” But as Chelsea look to splash the cash again on established stars, the route to the first team seems pretty jammed up.
• Meanwhile, at Arsenal, an academy player does look likely to waltz into the first team: Jack Wilshere, who has been with the club since 2001, has the pundits drooling after a strong pre-season. The hype machine is in danger of spinning out of control before the season has even begun on the 17-year old old who does look likely to make a splash in the Premier League — Wilshere is already touted as the next Paul Gascoigne, and as an outside shot for England’s 2010 World Cup squad.
• A curious tale in Brazil, as Nautica’s Vagner Silva “received his second yellow card for changing shorts during the match without permission from the referee,” according to 101 Great Goals.
• Fifa.com has its usual Monday review of the leagues we sometimes forget about, from Korea to Singapore.

North America

• What was in the water at the bottom of the Western Conference this weekend? On Saturday, the awful FC Dallas — fresh off of selling their best player, Kenny Cooper, to 1860 Munich — crushed the Kansas City Wizards 6-0, with Jeff Cunningham scoring four. Then on Sunday, Conference bottom-feeders San Jose destroyed the surging Seattle Sounders 4-0.
• Andy B’s weekly MLS attendance analysis is up on Big Soccer. For the season, the average is 15,412 leaguewide. There has been considerable talk about the falling numbers this year, but this number is still the third highest in league history at this point in the season, behind only last year and the inaugural year (same goes for median attendance, incidentally). Considering the state of the economy and that there are three more teams than just three years ago, the picture is actually pretty rosy when we can consider that the league is growing it’s aggregate numbers substantially while not hurting the averages. Philadelphia will continue this trend when the Union joins the league in 2010, with 9,000 season tickets sold already.
• There’s more and more expansion chatter about Montreal, and it seems only a matter of time before the Impact are “promoted” to MLS. A good move by Garber, but yet another blow for the USL — they will be losing their two strongest remaining franchises with Portland also headed to MLS in a couple of years.

Video of the Day

Hey! I saw this in person! The Red Stars defeated the LA Sol 3-1 at Toyota Park last night in front of almost 8,000 fans, who saw (according to Fifa in 2008) the top two women’s players in the world duke it out — LA’s Marta against Chicago’s Cristiane. Unfortunately, the game meant nothing in the standings, but the crowd and the quality of play made it a marquee moment for women’s soccer in Chicago. And Natalie Spilger had a couple of quality flip-throw-ins featured in the video — they are almost as effective as they are entertaining.

Yes, MLS fans’ dreams might be about to come true: Pitch Invasion has learned that the MLS Board of Governors are seriously considering a complete overhaul of the MLS playoff structure, that would both enliven the playoffs and ensure the regular season beomes a meaningful contest for first place with serious advantages gained for the post-season.

Here’s the new proposal:

• The top four teams in each conference would qualify for the playoffs, with the first stage now a round robin setup in two groups of four
• Each match in the group stage would be played at the home venue of the highest seeded team based on regular season performance — so the regular season winner would have three home games and no away games
• The top two from each group would qualify for the semi-finals
• Semi-finals would be one match, with again the highest seeded team from the regular season hosting
• The final would be hosted not at a neutral venue as in the past, but at the home of the highest seeded team

At a stroke, this ensures winning the Supporters Shield for the best regular season record would give a far greater advantage than the present convoluted set-up, which does not give any real home advantage at the first round two-legged stage. Winning the regular would mean the possibility of playing every playoff game at home, a huge reward on and off the field. Suddenly, every regular season match would really matter, and the final would be something to saviour with a partisan crowd.

Does this sound familiar? Perhaps MLS has been a sneaking a peak at WPS, which has an even more favourable set-up for the regular season winner, who advances directly to host the WPS final in the playoffs.

From what I understand, the proposal on the table is being taken extremely seriously. At worst, it’s good to know MLS is committed to finding a way to make the regular season matter more. Every regular season game should feel like it really counts, and this proposal would go a long way to ensuring that.

Is this the most successful year MLS has had since the inaugural season of 1996?
– Bruce Jagarosovich, Los Angeles

This is arguably the best year MLS has ever seen. The inaugural season was so much about buzz. This one is about very strong fundamentals. Our quality of players is perhaps as high as it’s ever been, and a number of our developmental players have become terrific players — Jozy Altidore is probably the best example of that.

Expansion continues to go strong. When you look at San Diego, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Miami and a second team in New York, just to name a few, there are more serious prospects for expansion than we have available teams. Our ownership group is as strong as it’s ever been and soccer-specific stadium development is going extremely well. Sponsorship is at an all-time high and we went past the 3 million mark in attendance for first time in league history. It’s an exciting time for MLS.

The whole interview is worth a read, and if you have any thoughts on the Commish’ views yourself, drop them here.