Big Story

An MLS ownership group has finally spoken out about the possibility of a strike by the players. Tim Leiweke, long-time chief executive of Phil Anschutz’s AEG (who own the LA Galaxy and half of the Houston Dynamo), expressed amazed consternation that the league’s employees could be so ungrateful: “It would have been easy for us to quit over the last 10 years,” he said. “There were five different times we could have called it a day. But we didn’t. We fought through it.

“So for them [the players] to suddenly threaten that they’re going to shut it all down, I’m a little amazed at the lack of respect they show for the commitment that we all have made to get the league to where it’s at today.”

“So when I hear them talk about striking and shutting the league down, I’ve got to tell you, they’re going to lose us when they talk like that.

“We do this out of passion. If this were a business, we would have quit this 10 years ago.”

(The Womens Professional Soccer players recently left without a team to play for as AEG abandoned the LA Sol might find Leiweke’s comments rather ironic. But that’s another story.)

AEG aren’t fooling anyone by claiming they are in this for the passion and not the business, as if this entire soccer venture was a tax write-off for Uncle Phil Anschutz, who didn’t become America’s 37th richest man through benevolence.

Obviously, AEG’s passion for the sport over business demands doesn’t extend to building stadiums without stages to suit the other parts of their entertainment business.

As one senior AEG executive recently put it, “There’s an expectation that all our assets will be good enterprises and profitable. There’s no charity involved.”

Of course, there shouldn’t be. The Galaxy are sometimes said to be profitable, sometimes not. If Leiweke is right and soccer is not a business for AEG, the sport probably doesn’t have much future in the United States; relying on a billionaire’s ongoing passion is not the way forward. It needs to be a successful business, which is why owners aren’t relenting on the players’ demands anyway, why several stadiums have those stage ends, and why Soccer United Marketing exists. Those aren’t bad things, but they’re about more than just passion for the sport.

And true, a huge loss-leading investment by Anschutz and Lamar Hunt was absolutely crucial to the league’s survival in its early years; the question is, do today’s players owe AEG something for that?

The fact is, the players, like most workers, don’t have a whole lot of leverage here except for threatening not to work. Appealing to Phil Anschutz’s best nature with nicely written letters from their mothers probably isn’t going to cut it. AEG are a $1 billion business that has decades of experience in litigation, with Anschutz described by one businessman who actually won a case against AEG as a man “will cut your legs out from under you”, according to this 2006 LA Times piece:

Like many aggressive businessmen, Anschutz also has acquired his share of adversaries. His litigation record reveals a sharp-elbowed tycoon willing to pay to make disputes go away and to keep his public image intact.

During the last three decades Anschutz has paid cash settlements — all of them confidential — to companies that claimed they were denied their fair share of profits or were done in by deceptive business practices, according to interviews and courthouse documents in California, Colorado and Wyoming.

Among the settlements was a multimillion-dollar award to Mel Gibson, who alleged that the theater chain Anschutz controls cheated the actor’s distribution company out of revenue from the hit movie “The Passion of the Christ.”

George Ablah, 77, a real estate magnate and fellow native Kansan, prevailed in a legal tussle with Anschutz over a failed oil and gas partnership.

“He is very tough,” Ablah said of Anschutz. “He thinks he is God. If you question him in any way, he will cut your legs out from under you…. He is extremely lucky with those tactics. It has worked out very, very well for him.”

As Fake Sigi says today about Leiweke’s comments, “The owners look like they’re going to stand firm.”  There’s nothing wrong with that, but the players make their living out of this sport and have every right to treat it as a business and not make concessions based on AEG’s track record or passion for the sport, as Leiweke implies they should; it’s not a “passion” for the players, it’s their workplace. They might not be paupers, but an $80k median salary in a career that lasts a decade or so means they don’t have the luxury to take the long view in the same way as Phil Anschutz, sitting on $7.2 billion.

Quick Hits

• An interesting interview here with the Chester City fan running the Supporters’ Trust attempting to resurrect the team, explaining how they lost patience with ownership: “The final straw for many was the one-minute’s silence that was held for what was a “major benefactor” of the club, which, upon investigation, turned out to be the death of a drugs baron from Liverpool who had been assassinated by a South American mob. This was a person we were holding a respectful minute’s silence for?”
• Amusingly enough, FIFA actually has an “ethics chief”, who have written to 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidders and told them to play fair. Just like Sepp and Jack do, obviously.

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

Real Salt Lake, MLS Cup 2009 Champions. Photo by hobbes8calvin on Flickr.

The New York Times’ Goal blog chimes in on Real Salt Lake’s penalty shootout victory over the Los Angeles Galaxy last night, noting that RSL won only two games in the final two months of the season and finishing the season with a losing record, becoming the fourth team to finish the season below .500 and win the MLS Cup.

To crown as champion such a poor performer is either a Cinderella story, an act of sporting absurdity or just MLS being North American. Take your pick.

But belittling RSL because of the format is a little unfair. Real Salt Lake, an obviously talented team, came out in the playoffs and beat (without home advantage) the top two teams in the East and the top team in the West by regular season record. Those four games are not meaningless by any means.

One wonders, though, if last night’s result might be the last that we see of its kind: as the league’s expansion continues, it’s obviously going to much more difficult to be mediocre in the regular season and still scrape into the playoffs, a welcome development. Soon enough, we’ll be at 20 teams and only 8 will make it to the playoffs (presumably).

MLS Commissioner Don Garber’s discussion of a potential change to the playoff format (which chimes with what we posted MLS had on the table here four months ago) at the Supporters Summit in Seattle suggested further advantages would be given for regular season performance, including the higher seeded team hosting the final (MLS’ main dilemma is presumably the possible embarrassment of, say, New England ending up hosting it in front of 8,000).

As for the final in general, an overall television rating of 0.9 is a good sign, beating last year’s 0.8 despite the transition from ABC to ESPN. Criticism of the artificial turf is justified enough, but getting 46,000 out to a final did give it the feel of a big event.

As for the state of MLS in general? The season-end report-cards are appearing, with some fair criticism of the treatment of players by Eric Wynalda and an unforgiving analysis of the league in general on US Soccer Players (a site funded by the US National Soccer Team Players Association): “This season hasn’t done anymore than the ones that preceded it to push this League forward as a product,” J Hutcherson writes.

While J is correct to say that Garber pointing to a few success stories doesn’t mean the failures should be ignored (and Garber was critical of the league in some areas in his address at the MLS Cup), this supposed counter-argument ignores that even just a few success stories are a huge selling point for the league, and that MLS has continued to expand while more or less maintaining its average attendance in a horrible economic environment, doing so with a much more diverse ownership group than a few years ago.

Off the field, it’s crunch time as the players and the league sit down to finalise the new collective bargaining agreement and the league figures out its potentially revamped playoff plans for 2010. The final on the field, at least, was an entertaining end to the season, even for this observer still full of sour grapes. It’s going to be an interesting next twelve months for the league, so roll on 2010.

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.

Shane Supple

Why are we always so shocked when professional footballers quit the game for a similar reason many other people quit their jobs?  Shane Supple was the latest to “shock” the football world with his decision to quit Ipswich Town at the age of 22 to pursue another career, rumoured to be in catering. Supple explained to the club’s official site his reasoning:

It’s obviously a big decision but I feel that playing professional football is not something I want to continue doing as a career. There is no one reason why I have made my decision, there are a number of factors but deep down my heart is not in the game anymore and I’m not going to go into work every day trying to convince myself that it is so it’s the right time for me to walk away.

“I suppose you could say that I have fallen out of love with the game and when then happens I’ve always said to myself that I wouldn’t hang around. All I wanted to do when I was younger was play in the Premier League but as you grow up you realise that there are other things in life and to be honest, the game is not what I thought it was.

His manager Roy Keane said he respected the decision, and that it was not a snap choice: Supple had been considering quitting football for “a year or two” and he had only “persevered for other people.”

Of course, we are shocked by such decisions because we can’t imagine someone turning down being paid to play what we spend an awful lot of our time and money just to watch.

Ty Harden

There was similar bemusement last year in American soccer when Ty Harden quit the LA Galaxy to finish his degree and do volunteer work in Africa. “It was a long and hard decision,” he told Kristian Dyer. “I knew that I wanted to go back to school and get my degree,” Harden continued. “But I also wanted to do more with my life than simply kick a ball.”

Harden has since returned to MLS, but his broader perspective remains in tact. “Soccer had become a burden,” Harden explained after his return. “I needed to get away from it. It just felt like I was missing out on things.”

One has to respect that rather than taking the pay cheque and pretending to care, the likes of Harden and Supple take the honest decision to walk away from the sport.

One wonders if Supple will return to the game like Harden some day, having removed the burden of feeling he was bound to satisfy other people’s dreams as a professional footballer, and might be able to enjoy playing instead after a renewed lease of life outside its insular culture.

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