Apart from the crisis in St Louis and problems in Baltimore, we haven’t heard too much about the state of the league and its future in recent months. Yet we are past the midpoint of US Soccer’s tenure of running the league already. The important point for the future of soccer in America in MLS is this: can this season become a turning point towards sustainability at that level, under the direction of US Soccer?

Because, if there’s one thing second division North American teams haven’t been in the past two decades, it’s viable as ongoing operations. Longevity is a luxury. This is, from all standpoints — whether as a fan, a sponsor, an investor, a player, a coach or a staffer — a serious problem. As Brian Quarstad at Inside Minnesota Soccer (IMS) points out, 52 different teams have come and gone from the Division Two level of American soccer since 1995; this, of course, is without promotion or relegation. It’s simply a 75% fail-rate as businesses.

That level of failure is never going to be the way to fashion anything out of that level of soccer, whether our focus is on youth development or growing fanbases. All it does is disrupt the lives of the many involved.

The question is whether US Soccer’s involvement can change that pattern. When Sunil Gulati, President of US Soccer, answered questions about the announcement that the governing body would be running the league for one season back in January, he also made it clear they saw this as a chance to implement a new set of requirements on financial sustainability at that level:

We’ve got some very specific targets in our regulations and we intend to put in more of those. Whether they apply to financial stability, what staffing levels look like, etc. To give you an example, our regulations have minimum standards on size of stadiums, a full-time operation for P.R. Director and CEO and so on and so forth. We think we need to put some more meat behind those in order to make sure that the teams that are part of a Division 2, or Division 1 for that matter, meet a certain standard and most importantly can meet that standard year in and year out and improve. We can’t have this constant issue that bedevils a number of sports, that the offseason is spent primarily to make sure that you can come back the following season. That you’re looking for expansion teams not because it makes long-term sense to build the game and the league, but because you need an expansion fee. We had that issue 25 years ago in our league, and we want to make sure that we’re able to avoid that so that expansion is done in a systematic way. U.S. Soccer is not going to be the one deciding that, but if people coming in the door want to be part of Division 2, they need to understand that this is a long-term play and that there are going to be some significant investments early on and aren’t counting on expansion proceeds in a year or two to reduce capital costs. The philosophy we’ve discussed with the leaders of these teams seems to be in line with that. People understand that for us the most important thing is stability, growth is right after that. But you can’t have growth without stability.

Some criticised Gulati and US Soccer for not finding this focus on stability earlier; why had it taken the public embarrassment of two rival entities fighting over second division status for the governing body to realise that clubs needed enforced help on operating a business to avoid the failures that have historically bedeviled American soccer, aside from (just about) MLS?

At this point, though, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is if and how US Soccer is following through on implementing more stringent requirements on clubs to encourage stability at the second division level. And on this, Brian at IMS has an excellent series this week, Rethinking Division-2 Pro Soccer in North America, that’s well worth reading.

In it (with two of the four parts published so far), he argues for a better vetting process for clubs by the authorities, for running teams like viable small businesses (instead of gambling on future earning potential) and for reducing travel costs in this mammoth continent-sized market by regionalising the league.

On the first point, Brian talks to another Brian, Brian Remedi of US Soccer, who explains US Soccer has not been sitting on its hands since Gulati made his statement in January on the need for tighter regulation of clubs’ financial viability:

“We are doing something that the Federation has never done in great detail before,” said Remedi in a May interview with IMS when he met with the NSC  Stars, Minnesota’s new D2 team. “We are getting out and looking at the teams in Division 2. In years past we left it up to the league administrators to ensure their clubs were meeting minimum standards and that games were run appropriately. Because we are running the league now we want to get out and make the house calls.

“We are also looking under the hood from a marketing perspective, from a financial perspective, even from a ticketing perspective. Our goal is to ensure these teams are viable for the long term.

“It’s in our interest to make sure that there are division 2 markets that are going to be sustainable over the long haul. Not a short term 1-year or 2-year thing. We want these markets to be sustainable for long periods of time. So we are collecting information on the team and from the team and we will give some thought to that data and will be writing reports and giving it to our professional league task force who ultimately will make a recommendation to our board of directors. We assume that there will be at least one, two, possibly more entities applying for sanctioning for next year and we believe that the teams that will be part of that league will come out of the 12 teams that are in the USSF D-2 Pro League this year.”

The USSF has called a meeting for the second week in August and have invited all teams currently involved with the USSF D2 Pro League. At that time, US Soccer will release their new standards that all current or future D2 teams will have to comply with. Expect the federation to require the future sanctioning league to require a more costly bond for each and every team involved with the league. It’s also said that they will have higher standards for stadiums and a more stringent litmus test for teams that want to join the USSF second division of soccer.

There will be some concern that when crunch-time comes, US Soccer might be tempted to water down their requirements if they find few clubs are likely to actually meet them.  On the other hand, the fact that Gulati came out and made a pretty clear public statement about the need for tough and real requirements to be met, and the evidence that US Soccer is following up on this with the release of new standards next month, suggests this is something that the governing body is serious about for the long-term good of the sport. Let’s hope they follow through, and keep an eye on IMS for the rest of his excellent series.

Once a teammate of Pele’s with the New York Cosmos, Sono — and several brilliant contemporaries — never got the chance to play for their country because of the international sports boycott.

“I’m not being cocky,” he said in an interview Thursday. “We would have definitely won the World Cup.”

Well, perhaps. The world champion Argentines were pretty good in 1978. So were the Italians in 1982.

Nonetheless, Sono was part of a generation of South African stars who played abroad, primarily in the North American Soccer league, during the 1970s and ’80s. They included both white and black players — among them Steve Wegerle, Neill Roberts, Webster Lichaba and the heralded midfielder Ace Ntsoelengoe — who might have qualified for the 1982 World Cup.

“We could have made a big difference in the world,” Sono mused. “But we cannot be sad.”

Andrew Guest wrote a superb essay here a few months ago on this connection between the NASL and South African soccer, further explaining how these South African stars ended up in the NASL and why it offered an important opportunity for these players denied them elsewhere:

In the 60’s and 70’s, at a time where complicated politics (including the injustices of apartheid) and subtle prejudices made it rare for African players to feature in European leagues, the entrepreneurial spirit of the NASL offered that most American of ideals: opportunity.

In turn, the South Africans parlayed that opportunity, along with what would seem to be a healthy dose of the NASL’s entrepreneurial spirit, into South African teams that in many ways helped set the stage for hosting the 2010 World Cup.  Though there are many examples, and many stories to be told, for now I’ll focus on two of the most prominent: Kaizer Motaung’s journey from being the 1968 NASL Rookie of the Year with the Atlanta Chiefs to fashioning Johannesburg’s Kaizer Chiefs into South Africa’s most popular club, and Jomo Sono’s journey from understudy to Pele with the New York Cosmos to a long spell cultivating the most talented players in South Africa through his club Jomo Cosmos and intermittent role as coach of Bafana Bafana.  Both men are South African icons and their success is mostly a story of South African talent, spirit, and creativity—but America also seems to have offered each a small spark.

I highly recommend reading both pieces.

A few months ago, Peter Wilt posted an interview here with Jeff Cooper in which he described him as arguably “the most powerful man in soccer in the Midwest and one of the most influential in the country.”

Cooper is the lead man behind a unique endeavour in American soccer: a professional men’s club (AC St. Louis, part of the NASL in the USSF Division II which began play this year), a top flight women’s professional club (St. Louis Athletica, in Women’s Professional Soccer which began play last year) and an ambitious youth club, St. Louis Scott Gallagher, that amalgamated three of the area’s leading youth set-ups.

It seemed as if Cooper was putting together the perfect regional pyramid of soccer, from youth to the professional game in both genders.

But Cooper could not find the investment he needed to win an MLS franchise as well.

And now it appears that there is not enough investment to keep all this going: as reported today, it looks as if Athletica will be taken over by the league due to the team’s financial dire straits. “WPS and its Board continue to work closely with the appropriate parties on the matter related to St. Louis Athletica, including the possibility that the league will take over the team which would enable the Athletica to play the 2010 season in full.”

The men’s team seems to be in equal difficulties, a particularly awkward situation for Cooper as the Interim NASL Commissioner.

According to reports, Cooper’s investors, the brothers Heemal and Sanjeev Vaid from England, have pulled out, leaving the entire organisation in severe financial peril. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported yesterday that costs involved with St. Louis’ stadium have been one of the main issues facing the club’s finances:

A reliable source in St. Louis said that the money woes for AC and the Athletica stem, at least in part, from costs associated with operating the Anheuser-Busch Soccer Park, which Anheuser-Busch Inbev donated to Cooper’s group last summer. “The cost of the park is too much to allow funding for the teams,” the source said.

Three months ago, Cooper told Wilt on these pages that “Our model could be adopted to any market. It is scalable for larger or smaller markets. In time, every pro team in the US will become a real “club” with a youth program, academy, women’s team etc. It is the evolution of the game in this country.”

Cooper’s dream was grand and worthy.

But are there lessons to be learned here, if indeed AC St. Louis and/or St. Louis Athletica are taken over by their respective leagues? Would resources better have been devoted solely to the top flight women’s team, rather than trying to run a professional men’s team as well?  Is the evolution of the game not at the stage that such an ambitious set-up can be stable without an investor willing to lose millions a year for several years? Is it sensible for men’s and women’s professional teams to be part of the same club, and thus dependent on the financial viability of each other?

The current (2009-2010) Portland stadium

The future home of the Portland Timbers, which opened a final USL season Saturday in the midst of a remodel to ready it for MLS in 2011, has been hosting soccer games with various degrees of success for over 100 years.  But while we Portlanders can be proud of our soccer history, we also must be honest: the stadium itself has never really been a good place to watch a game.

Please don’t misunderstand.  There have been many glorious crowds, magnificent atmospheres, and bravura games in Portland.  On Saturday alone the place was packed with over 15,000 fans to watch a minor league match against the Rochester Rhinos in a stadium configured for baseball—a hearty Portland crowd significantly bigger than those that watched half of the MLS games that same night, and several thousand more than bothered to show up at New York’s sparkling new “soccer palace.”

Yet Portland’s building itself has always been more like Javier Zanetti than Lionel Messi, more Kasey Keller than Clint Dempsey – always there, always valuable, often intriguing, but never likely to steal the show.  I’ve heard several local fans of both soccer and baseball describe the stadium as feeling ‘soulless’ – which is reasonable as a description for the feeling of the structure itself.  The gently sloping seating areas, currently off-set in a way that makes a soccer crowd disturbingly asymmetrical, are cramped and crumbling.  The moldy grey cement walls that border much of the field look melancholy and cheap.  The surface has been slippery, ugly versions of artificial turf for over 40 years.  But saying that the structure feels ‘soulless’ is very different from saying it has no soul.

In fact, more than any other current MLS stadium (with the possible exception of RFK in Washington DC—which the league is desperate to vacate anyway) Portland’s future home will offer the league true American soccer history.  From a ‘Pacific Coast Championship’ contested by teams of immigrants at a 1905 World’s Fair, to the late 1970’s glory days of the NASL, to the rise of American support for US National Teams, to the vanguard of modern supporters’ culture, the Portland stadium has seen it all.  And now, if they can get the latest remodel right (a topic I may return to in future weeks), if they can actually make it a good place to watch the game, the Timbers MLS home has a chance to be a truly unique place for American soccer fans: a new stadium with meaningful history.

The Pre-Timbers Years

The Portland stadium set up for American football in 1959 (photo via Pete Wright at flickr)

The name of the stadium is as good a place to start as any: though currently known as PGE Park, Portland General Electric only bought ten years worth of naming rights in 2000.  Immediately prior to that it was known as “Civic Stadium,” though upon its founding in 1893 place was called “Multnomah Field” after the blue-blood Athletic Club (and, in turn, the county) that still borders the playing surface.  It also had a period after its first major upgrade in 1926 as “Multnomah Stadium” until being sold to the city in 1966 by the Multnomah Athletic Club (known colloquially as “The MAC”).  And now PGE’s naming rights are set to expire just in time for MLS to arrive—with little word as to what name might come next.

So for reasons of both historical flux and personal bitterness (due to having my jacked up PGE rates fund the types of exorbitant CEO buy-outs and Enron business practices that represent all that is wrong with the American economy), I’m going to just call it Portland’s stadium.  It has, after all, been the city’s primary site for sport and spectacle of all types for almost 120 years—and its coming incarnation will likely be a prominent face of the city for many years to come.

A flooded Multnomah Field in 1904 (photo via Pete Wright on flickr)

One of the main explanations for the stadium’s local prominence is its location in an old heart of town: just west of the downtown business district, just east of the moneyed West Hills, just south of a yuppified shopping/dining/drinking district, and just off a mass transit line, the original Multnomah Field was built on a site that the history of the Multnomah Athletic Club describes as having been a ‘natural amphitheater perfect for athletic use.’  That ‘natural amphitheater’ was created partially by Tanner Creek Gulch, a water source that also made possible a 1840’s tannery central to early Portland’s commerce, along with a series of ‘Chinese vegetable gardens and shanties.’  With the coming of the athletic field, however, Tanner Creek was gradually diverted underground—an old landscape feature that has created some modern challenges to construction work on the current re-model, along with local calls for the new stadium to tribute the ‘historic course of the creek.’ I’ve also heard some vague (and so far unsubstantiated) claims that the gulch is one reason the space would be hard to maintain as a grass playing surface—the natural drainage patterns are apparently more conducive to a bog garden than a football pitch.

Football was, nevertheless, among the original tenants of the field—though in the 1890’s the specific type of football to be played was still somewhat uncertain.  The “intercollegiate” rules for what would become ‘American football’ were still being negotiated on the East Coast, and amateur athletic clubs such as The MAC were prime sites for experimentation.  As such, according to The MAC’s history, when the first interested ‘football’ players gathered at Multnomah Field in the 1890’s the specific code they’d use was uncertain: one of their organizers had introduced ‘rugby and association football’ at a local academy, but others “insisted they play the new version.”  American football, including many college games played by the various state universities in Oregon, eventually did become a feature of the early decades of the Portland stadium—but it is interesting for a soccer fan to note that with a few twists of fate it could have been otherwise.

From The Oregonian, September 29th 1905

Soccer did not, however, disappear entirely.  In fact, thanks to a tip from eminent soccer historian Colin Jose, I learned that in 1905 Multnomah Field hosted what I’ll claim to be a precursor to the Cascadia Cup—a “Pacific Coast Championship” held in conjunction with the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (Portland’s version of a World’s Fair).  Invitations went out to teams from California, Washington, and British Columbia, and the Portland team prepared by playing teams of sailors from British ships cruising the Pacific coast; one report from the August 27^th 1905 Oregonian has the locals “defeating a team of sailors from the British ships Tottenham and Comeric by 6 to1.”  If it is true that history repeats itself, I like the sound of Portland defeats Tottenham 6 to 1.

Unfortunately, like too many Cascadia Cups, the actual Exposition tournament didn’t go well for Portland.  Only one of the invited teams actually showed up, from Ladysmith BC, and they soundly beat Portland to take the 1905 title.  As the September 29^th Oregonian reported “The Portlands were outplayed and outweighed, man for man, although they played a plucky game.”  The paper went on to describe the great ancestors of the Timbers Army: “The attendance?  At the busiest part of the game a careful computation of the occupants of the grandstand revealed 18 young men and one ‘yaller’ dog.  Whether this combination formed a hoodoo against the Portlands is not known.”  Damn that yaller dog.

The Portland stadium would host more soccer in coming decades, but prior to the arrival of the NASL Timbers in 1975 it was more known for its eclecticism: it hosted undistinguished US Presidents such as William H. Taft and Warren Harding, an artificial ski jump competition that delighted “40,000 cheering spectators” in 1953, an Elvis Presley concert that prompted a 1957 Oregonian headline of “Stadium Site of Bedlam,” and 22 years of greyhound racing that made for the stadium’s primary income from 1933-1955.  Even now, the stadium is a stop on the “Fasten Your Seat Belts—It’s Been a Bumpy Ride” bus tour of “Portland’s discriminatory past:” according to the Willamette Week, “In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku Klux Klan contingent west of the Rocky Mountains, with about 70,000 members and over 50 ‘klaverns’ (KKK chapters) statewide.  The KKK held rallies at Civic Stadium, now PGE Park, when voicing its opposition to ‘Koons, Kikes and Katholics.’” (According to some other sources, the focus for the Oregon KKK was mostly on being anti-Catholic—though I’m sure Oregon’s small African-American population wasn’t too popular either).

Plaques outside the current stadium's luxury boxes, with tributes to greyhound racing, Elvis, and the NASL

Greyhound racing was displaced as the stadium’s primary tenant in 1956 when Portland’s minor league baseball team moved from a demolished Vaughn Street Park, leading to a decision all soccer fans must rue: in 1969 the stadium achieved the dubious distinction of becoming “the first outdoor baseball facility to install artificial turf.”  And because I agree with most American soccer fans that artificial turf is a detriment to the game, I have a sad confession to make: in looking at many pictures of the stadium field through its early history I’ve yet to see one where the grass looked to have been playable.  In its grass days Multnomah Field was always a muddy, wood-chipped, patchy mess.  It was, and I fear always will be, a pitch conspired against by long rainy days, a busy schedule, a subterranean playing surface, and a previous identity as Tanner Creek Gulch.

The Post-Timbers Years

Despite its bastard turf, however, recent incarnations of Portland’s stadium have hosted some pretty good soccer.  In the NASL Timbers’ very first year, for example, they beat the Seattle Sounders in front of a 31,000 person home crowd—leading to a good old American style pitch invasion and a run to ‘Soccer Bowl 1975.’   With teams of primarily British imports including Clyde Best and Clive Charles, the first iteration of the Portland Timbers then averaged 20,000 in 1976 (its second year of existence), only falling below 10,000 during their final season in 1982 when the NASL was well into its fatal decline.  Their attendance figures were not the best in the league, but considering Portland’s relatively small population they are impressive enough to make a current MLS team like FC Dallas blush.

Portland was also chosen as the host for the 1977 Soccer Bowl – and though the Timbers failed to make the playoffs that season, the stadium turned out over 35,000 fans to watch the New York Cosmos defeat the Seattle Sounders 2-1 in what would be Pele’s last competitive game.  As Clive Gammon described it in Sports Illustrated: “It was a huge fiesta in the rain. The lucky ones sat in the stands and the rest on open benches, drying out a little when the sun fitfully appeared, and roaring their hearts out as if this were Munich on World Cup day, not a soaking Sabbath in Portland. All 35,548 of them were crammed into creaky old Civic Stadium that was built in the ’20s with greyhound racing in mind but which in the future may be recognized as the place where soccer in North America had its coming-of-age party.”

Sadly, however, claims of a ‘coming-of-age’ party for North American soccer were premature.  The NASL Timbers, along with much of the league, were gone by 1982—reincarnated briefly in 1989, and then in its current form in 2001.  So the stadium experienced another relative big-event soccer lull, albeit one interspersed with some significant appearances by US National Teams.

Of the US National Team appearances, perhaps the most significant men’s game came in 1997.  The US was in the midst of a sloppy qualifying campaign for the 1998 World Cup in France, and needed a pro-American venue for a crucial qualifier against Costa Rica.  With the help of Nike (headquartered in nearby Beaverton), the US Federation created an atmosphere that many have cited as an early crest of soccer enthusiasm for our own national team.  As Tim Crothers reported “The capacity crowd of 27,396 at Civic Stadium did muster plenty of enthusiasm, albeit somewhat orchestrated by a certain local sneaker company of national repute that, in its role as a sponsor of U.S. Soccer, passed out noisemakers and urged fans to wear white clothing as a sign of unity. This request was largely honored, resulting in a scene that could have passed for a convention of some bizarre tennis cult.”

Yet, however bizarre the scene, when Tab Ramos scored a late goal for a 1-0 victory that “virtually clinched” a World Cup spot Portland felt like the capital of the American game.  Even Big Soccer’s Dan Loney, with his entertaining tone of informed mockery, has cited the game in Portland as something close to a genuine highlight of American soccer fandom: “For a long time, Portland in September 1997 held that prize [of greatest moment in US fans’ soccer-watching lives].  There was a fan section!  We won!  It was a sellout!  Soccer was here to stay, and Portland was destined to get an MLS team!”

At the 2003 Women's World Cup (photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images, via sportsbusinessdaily.com)

While the MLS team obviously took a while longer to arrive, within a few years the Portland stadium did earn the inadvertent distinction of being one of the few places in the world to host games for consecutive FIFA World Cups—the 1999 and 2003 Women’s World Cup (with the US serving as an emergency fill-in for China in 2003 after a SARS outbreak).  In 1999 Portland only hosted group games, drawing decent crowds including over 20,000 for games such as the decidedly non-glamorous North Korea – Denmark clash (neither team advanced).  In 2003, with the stadium having been remodeled two years prior partially in a failed effort to make it more baseball friendly, Portland hosted a semifinal doubleheader with temporary stands and an imported grass surface.  In one of those games the US lost to Germany 3-0, a contest that symbolized both the waning on-field dominance of our women’s team and its nascent off-field potential: it drew huge local interest along with a sold out crowd—including a colleague of mine who gladly paid $500 dollars to a scalper for two tickets just to be able to say he was there.

The Present and the Future

A Willamette Week illustration of Timbers owner Merritt Paulson contemplating the stadium

In more recent years Portland has been enjoying its new version of the Timbers, and wrangling its way through a sometimes contentious debate about what having an MLS team will be worth.  Whether or not you like the team, the minor league version of the Timbers has offered an impressive example of how an American city can foster a large and passionate fan base for soccer—despite the team being in a minor league and playing in what is in current form is basically a bad baseball stadium.

And this, ultimately, is the rub.  All the meaningful soccer history embodied in the Portland stadium exists at odds with the fact that it has never really been a very good place to watch the game.  So yes soccer purists, the MLS version of the Timbers will have to share the stadium with some Portland State University football games, and yes it probably doesn’t make sense right now to put down a real grass playing surface.  But for the first time in its 100+ year history Portland is going to have a stadium designed primarily to cater to soccer.  And, hopefully, to make more history.

In that vein, it may be appropriate to return one last time to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, where Portland’s team captain explained his team’s failure to win the championship to an Oregonian journalist by noting: “I wish to say that I am not in the least discouraged at the showing made by our team.  On the contrary, I am proud of their work…I am confident that in a year or so, with the support of all admirers in Portland of association football, we shall be able to turn out a team that will be a credit to this city and carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.  We can do nothing without enthusiasm….”

And if by including the qualifier ‘a year or so’ the captain was allowing for the possibility it could take 106, then he might be right—with a new stadium and old history Portland may just yet “carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.”

The latest MLS stadium plans (from portlandonline.com)

Big Story

An offseason of controversy about the second division in American soccer brought lower league soccer here more attention than it had ever had before, until the governing US Soccer Federation (USSF) finally stepped-in and resolved the dispute between the NASL and the USL by agreeing to run the league for this year.

Things have been a lot quieter since, with the division returning to the shadows  ahead of kick-off this weekend. The NASL and the USL continue their respective pushes for attention, and it should not be forgotten that the USSF only found a temporary resolution for the 2010 season to allow play to go ahead this year. Behind the scenes, one hopes they are beavering away with both parties to figure out how the structure will work in 2011, but even distant rumblings of future plans aren’t yet surfacing. They do, at least, have a nice logo for the league.

But it seems the two parties, USL and NASL, are still not necessarily cooperating all that well. There appears to be no national television deal, with nothing worked out to continue the previous coverage of the USL on Fox Soccer Channel. Creatively, the USSF has secured a company called Ooyala (really?) to stream every game for free on each club’s website, so the governing body should be credited for that.

Overall, it’s a critical year in lower league soccer not just because of the controversy between the competing entities, but with two of the stronger Division II teams headed to MLS in 2011 (Portland and Vancouver), the role and purpose of a division two is still unclear. The NASL certainly has the most elite teams and the most ambition, but can it establish itself enough for USSF to jilt the USL and award it the rights to run the Division II league in 2011? What should the purpose of a second division actually be — developing players, or developing clubs with fanbases ready to move up to MLS?

Quick Hits

• It’s amazing how often articles about the crisis in Scottish football and proposals to restructure it appear, and here’s another good one from Ewan Murray.
• Turkey ramps up its bid for the 2016 Euros.
• Blog of the week: Must Read Soccer…is a must read. Seriously.

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

July of 1967, in Los Angeles. A crowd of just under 18,000 looks on as the first FIFA-sanctioned, nation-wide soccer championship in the United States is contested at the LA Memorial Coliseum. It’s a historic event, in the technical sense, but in the sweep of US sporting history, the match, and its participants, have been more or less forgotten. This is the birth of the professional game in the US and Canada. The league, the United Soccer Association, represents the first attempt at building a truly coast-to-coast, major soccer league. And they did it with borrowed teams.

On the day, the Los Angeles Wolves beat the Washington (DC) Whips 6-5, after extra time. The two teams had emerged as champions of their divisions, Western and Eastern respectively; outplaying teams in 10 other major US and Canadian cities. They truly were the best in America, and yet there was nothing American about them. The entire roster of the LA Wolves was identical to that of Wolverhampton Wanderers, Washington’s the same as that of Aberdeen FC of the Scottish First Division. To a man.

The 1967 Washington Whips. Courtesy of www.nasljerseys.com.

As a matter of fact, the entire league was composed of imported European and South American clubs. All twelve USA franchises were wholesale imports, picking up extra playing time and paychecks during the traditional summer off-season. In addition to Wolves and Aberdeen, the others were

Shamrock Rovers (Ireland): Boston Rovers
Cagliari Calcio (Italy): Chicago Mustangs
Stoke City (England): Cleveland Stokers
Dundee Utd (Scotland): Dallas Tornado
Glentoran FC (N. Ireland): Detroit Cougars
Bangu AC (Brazil): Houston Stars
C.A. Cerro (Uruguay): NY Skyliners
ADO Den Haag (Netherlands): San Francisco Golden Gate Gales
Hibernian FC (Scotland): Toronto City
Sunderland AFC (England): Vancouver Royal Canadians

The league only contested one season before merging with rival National Professional Soccer League to form the NASL in 1968. But it seems an oddly (perhaps cynically) appropriate beginning for the Great American Soccer Experiment, this importing of whole teams from European and South American leagues, considering what became of the NASL, and the Dark Ages induced by its collapse.

Most fans of soccer in the US are familiar with the roots of the collapse of the NASL, but if you’re not, this 1984 Sports Illustrated article by Clive Gammon saw the writing on the wall as the league began what would be its last season. And yet, he must have been a lover of the game, for he closed on an optimistic, and prescient, note: “Soccer is too great a sport to be lost because of the antics of sports-illiterate owners and fast-buck seekers. Even if the NASL goes gurgling down tubes of its own making, soccer will surely come back for another life.” It did, of course, in the form of the (hopefully) more stable MLS, but it was a long dark winter for the sport between 1984 and now.

Among the Ashes

The collapse of the NASL didn’t mean a sudden disappearance of fans or players, of course, or even many of the clubs. Most of the game moved indoors, though, and not a few clubs simply vanished in the implosion. Those dedicated to the outdoor game were reduced to semi-pro status at best, and dozens of leagues sprang up across the country, changed names, and collapsed over the twelve years between the end of the NASL and the birth of MLS.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, a handful of teams created what was originally called the Western Alliance Challenge Series in 1985, the year after the collapse of the NASL – a sort of mini-league composed of four independent regional teams: FC Portland, FC Seattle, Victoria (British Columbia) Riptides, and what remained of the post-NASL San Jose Earthquakes.

This was the state of outdoor soccer across the country immediately after the NASL: small regional groups of small-budget teams competing for nothing more than pride.  Chief among them seem to have been the Lone Star Soccer Alliance in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas (featuring the worst club name I came across during this research: San Antonio XLR8), the Southwest Independent Soccer League, and on the East Coast, the third league in the history of the country to call itself the American Soccer League.

These leagues were not particularly stable, however, fluctuating constantly in membership and name, and none of them as wildly as the Southwest Independent Soccer League. Between 1986 when it was established as an indoor league and 1997, it went through 8 different names. While it was composed of multiple divisions, over 40 of its listed member teams only existed for one season (including worst name runner-up, Ohio Xoggz). Most of those single-season teams played only in 1994, the year the United States hosted with World Cup, apparently hoping for a groundswell of interest in the club sport. Still, by the time its own dust had settled, the SISL had transformed from a small regional league into the United Systems of Independent Soccer Leagues, or USISL, and had constructed the divisional pyramid of semi-pro and developmental leagues that still operates today as the basis of lower-league soccer in the United States and Canada.

Meanwhile, the Western Soccer Challenge Series had become the Western Soccer League in 1989 and fielded teams from Arizona to Edmonton. It’s opposite, the ASL, managed the miraculous: two full seasons without losing a franchise. In 1990, the two merged, forming the first nation-wide outdoor league since the NASL: the American Professional Soccer League. Indeed, come 1994, the league would present itself to the USSF as a candidate for the Division 1 professional league the Federation had promised to FIFA in exchange for hosting the World Cup. Despite being the only functioning league put forward, the APSL lost out to what would become MLS.

The league rebranded itself again, this time as the A-League, but it was in steep decline and in 1996, when most of the league’s best had jumped ship to MLS, it was practically dead in the water. Enter here the ascendant USISL to absorb the A-League, which was merged with the USISL Select division. The new joint venture retained the name A-League and operated as the 2^nd Division in the US and Canada for many years after, eventually being rebranded again as USL I – still here today, if barely. But none of these leagues could ever really lay claim to being truly Professional in the way the NASL had been, or that MLS would become. That honor laid elsewhere, in hockey arenas.

Bringing the Torch Inside

“Indoor soccer will be the game of the Eighties. Bet your cherries on it.”

- Charley Eckman

There’s a certain ironic truth to that quote, taken from a 1983 Sports Illustrated article on the Major Indoor Soccer League by Frank Deford.  I say ironic because indoor soccer was, certainly, a sport of the Eighties, but not since. Charley Eckman was a former NCAA and NBA referee and had coached the Fort Wayne Pistons of the nascent NBA in the mid-1950s. By the mid-Eighties, though, he was the color radio commentator for the MISL’s Baltimore Blast, and had become a vocal proponent of the indoor game.

And well he should have been, for the game seemed well positioned to move in on its competition indoor winter sports hockey and basketball, neither of which had hit its peak. Consider this – searches of the Sports Illustrated electronic archive returned 10 articles dedicated to the MISL throughout the 1980s. Not a lot, to be sure, but a search for articles related to the predominate interim outdoor leagues discussed above returns only a suggestion to search for something else. It’s telling not only as an excuse for the sparse information presented here regarding outdoor soccer in the 1980s, but as a reading of public sentiment regarding the sport altogether.

After the collapse of the NASL, SI saw nothing worthy of coverage in the domestic outdoor game. When youth teams were taken on group trips to see a pro match, it was likely the MISL they saw (there may even be a St. Louis Steamers pennant lost among the collected memorabilia of my childhood somewhere). The outdoor game had failed – that was a fact. Nevermind that that was due more to poor oversight than cultural disinterest, indoor soccer was in its ascendency and no one was looking back.

In 1975, the NASL had undertaken its first-ever indoor tournament. Divided into regional groups, 16 of the 20 teams participated in the group-to-elimination competition. The San Jose Earthquakes defeated the Tampa Bay Rowdies 8 to 5.  The tournament was staged again the following year, but with only 12 teams competing (the flagship New York Cosmos notably one of the abstaining teams). Tampa Bay was vindicated in the final, but the tournament was put on hiatus.

There were tentative plans to launch a full-on indoor NASL league as a supplement to the regular season, but the NASL was beaten to the punch when, in December of 1978, the Major Indoor Soccer League opened its inaugural season. Pete Rose, baseball legend and part owner of the Cincinnati Kids franchise, kicked out the first ball, and the first professional indoor soccer league in the United States was underway – six-a-side, with hockey-style boards and all. Although there were only six teams that first year, the venture was a success, and the NASL quickly followed suit, fast tracking its own plans for an indoor league that began the following winter, though many of its stars – and some entire teams – declined to participate.

The NASL-Indoor may have featured incarnations of America’s topflight clubs, but it was really a doomed enterprise, formed as it was at the beginning of the end of the NASL. Teams began dropping out of the competition almost immediately, and as more and more teams folded completely, the NASL-Indoor dwindled to a paltry 7 teams in the winter of ’83-’84 – the last NASL competition, indoor or out, to be played. It didn’t help that, during its dying days, a few teams even jumped ship to MISL. Indeed, what had been the start-up rival league grew from it’s original 6 to 14 teams in the same time span, including former NASLers like Chicago Sting and Minnesota Kickers and even one season of the New York Cosmos in 84/85. Without the outdoor NASL, MISL was now the premier soccer league in the nation.

Over the next several years, attendances climbed to dizzy heights near 10,000 – more in places like St. Louis. ESPN broadcast as many as 18 games a season, and the league even had bonafide star players in Croat/Yugoslavian Steve Zungul and the Brazilian Tatu. And, in a pattern unsurprising in retrospect, soccer-ignorant businessmen clamored for the chance to throw their millions into the show.  Many a pundit (and hopeful investor) truly believed indoor soccer would be the version of the sport to capture the American market. Sports Illustrated writer JD Reed wrote 1980, “Magic or human pinball, the craze may be around for a while.” In many markets, the indoor teams were drawing far better crowds than their deceased and dying outdoor predecessors could.

Purists, of course, were mortified. This was not soccer, what with its hockey boards, multiple-point goal ranges, and penalty boxes. Ben Kerner, owner of the best-selling St. Louis Steamers told SI’s Drank DeFord, “All right, it’s not soccer. Call it something else. So what does it matter what you call it if the people enjoy it, heh? It’s better than being out on the street.” Former NASL goalkeeper Bob Rigby, playing in MISL in 1980 said, “Some crazy must have invented this sport. It’s a zoo, a circus. I can’t believe anybody takes it seriously, but they do.”

Many were stumped as to why, exactly, MISL seemed off to such a good start. If was, after all, a mere bastardization of a sport that was barely keeping its head above water. But it was, due in part perhaps to its own hype – which shouldn’t be under-estimated. Teams were introduced to a dazzling light show, emerging from clouds of theater fog to rousing disco tunes. Outrageous mascots (the Philadelphia Fever’s 8-foot-tall, electric-light-infused Socceroo, for example) threw trinkets and toys to the crowd. The players themselves were paraded and posterized in their leg-revealing short shorts. The spectacle was most certainly Of The Eighties, and it seemed to be working.

So much so, that in 1985 MISL got a rival start-up of its own, the American Indoor Soccer Association. The salary war that resulted saw the MISL shrink back to 7 (only after folding and re-establishing the Tacoma Stars franchise). By 1990, a certain equilibrium between the leagues seems to have emerged, as each competed with eight teams a piece.

In 1991 both teams rebranded, becoming the Major Soccer League and National Professional League, each having dropped the “indoor” qualifier from the name – perhaps an indicator of the primacy of the indoor version of the sport at the time. But, alas – and befitting the Sport of the Eighties – it was too late. MSL collapsed the following year as attendances drooped into the 6,000s. In 1993, however, the Continental Indoor Soccer League was born, which would stage its games in summer, and would come to include Mexican teams.

Since they played on opposite schedules, the CISL and NPSL were both able to grow in the run up to and immediately following USA ’94. The CISL folded two years on, though, unable to compete with the summer-schedule outdoor MLS. And while the NPSL carried on for several more years – and other leagues have since come and gone in an endless cycle – the birth of MLS was the writing on the wall for indoor soccer. All the predictions that indoor would be the version to sweep America proved hopelessly hopeful.

Sports writers, and the public in general, have displayed an amazing ability to forget the long and complex history of association football in the United States. And yet it seems they still sting from the lessons learned from the NASL and indoor soccer, hesitant to embrace the sport that has failed them so many times before. The future of soccer here is not guaranteed, of course, but as MLS nears its 15^th season, the current top-flight organization has learned its own valuable lessons, and continues cautiously apace. It leaves one hopeful that the future will prove more steady than the past, especially since I have never heard anyone call soccer the Game of Nineties, 2000s, or Teens.

Big Story
When it was announced this week that FC Edmonton had joined the NASL and would begin play in 2011, many presumed there was a connection between the club and the Vancouver Whitecaps. Not so, at least not at present.

In an interesting interview at Inside Minnesota Soccer, Edmonton’s general manager Mel Kowalchuk reveals a few interesting things:

• There’s no connection between the club and the Whitecaps: “We made Vancouver an offer for their franchise when they were going to MLS. That’s as far as it went. There was some discussion with Vancouver which depended on where MLS went as well as Division II soccer went — that we could perhaps have some sort of relationship. But that’s as far as it ever went! I don’t know where all this (talk of a Vancouver partnership) came from and it keeps surfacing. It’s actually kind of caught us off guard because that wasn’t the deal and it never was the deal.”
• It looks like, also against what had widely been presumed, the team will not be called the Drillers, as Edmonton’s previous NASL team was: “I run an indoor league and one of teams are the “Drillers”. I could get the name from them any time I wanted, but our interest in that name is very mild right now. We grabbed the FC Edmonton name so we could have a legal entity but we may just keep it.”

Read the rest of the piece for some tidbits about the club’s plans, including a youth academy with apparent links to an unnamed club in South America, and their ambition to build a new stadium. Ambitious stuff.

Quick Hits

• The future of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, previously based in New York state, has sort of been resolved: the facility in Oneonta will close, and some of the collections will go on permanent display at “other locations” around the country. Other archives will go to Wilmington, NC. Something of a blow to the heritage of the sport here, but a reasonable solution has been found for now by the trustees.
• Australia’s A-League is all-set for one hell of a game this weekend, as the Melbourne Victory head to Sydney just two points behind at the top of the table in the last round of action.  Around 2,000 Victory fans are expected to make the 1,000km trek to Sydney.
• Oh, Sepp Blatter. Discussing John Terry, he said: “Listen, this is a special approach in the Anglo-Saxon countries. If this had happened in let’s say Latin countries then I think he would have been applauded.”
• Notts County have been purchased for the grand sum of one pound. More on this later.

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

It’s interesting to note that they have no formal announced ties to the Vancouver Whitecaps — as had been presumed for some time, with the Whitecaps set to move to MLS in 2011 and having expressed interest in Edmonton. The team name has also not been announced as the Drillers, as had been expected (this was the name of Edmonton’s team in the original NASL), though that could change.

They will have a youth academy, and a management group with considerable experience in professional outdoor soccer (though it’s not entirely inspiring that the ownership group, the Fath brothers, were behind last year’s friendly between Everton and River Plate at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, a venture that reportedly lost over half a million while drawing an announced 15,800).

But since we’re on a crazy team logo kick lately….It’s worth pointing out the new Edmonton team will have a hell of a job besting the logos of either the Drillers or Edmonton’s most recent professional outdoor team, the Edmonton Aviators, who played one year in 2005 in the A-League, before dissolving when it turned out their business plan to attract five figure attendance numbers was a little over ambitious.

First, the Aviators. One hell of a logo, this.

And the classy Drillers of the original NASL (there have been further indoor incarnations since).

I couldn’t find logos from some of the other failed Edmonton professional outdoor teams, the Brickmen, Black Gold or Eagles. But I do know the burden is on FC Edmonton to come up with something better, at the least, than their peers in the NASL the NSC Minnesota Stars managed.

St. Louis based soccer executive Jeff Cooper

This week’s column is a Q & A with Jeff Cooper, one of the most fascinating leaders in American soccer.  Cooper, a St. Louis area attorney and businessman, plunged into professional soccer only a few years ago and in that short time has arguably emerged as the most powerful man in soccer in the Midwest and one of the most influential in the country.

Though he played soccer collegiately at DePauw University, until recently Cooper’s main focus was as Managing Partner of SimmonsCooper law firm in East Alton, Illinois.  The firm started as an asbestos litigation firm in 1999 and went on to diversify its caseload including cases involving asbestos and mesothelioma, business disputes, intellectual property and international affairs.

Cooper first came to prominence in the soccer world by leading a valiant, though ultimately failed effort to bring an MLS team, soccer stadium and real estate development to Collinsville, Illinois.

He did succeed in aggregating three of the top youth soccer clubs in metropolitan St. Louis – St. Louis Soccer Club, Scott Gallagher SC and Metro United SC and launching Saint Louis Athletica in Women’s Professional Soccer in 2009.  Most recently, a failed effort to purchase USL from Nike led to a prominent role in the creation of the new North American Soccer League that includes Cooper’s expansion Division 2 men’s team, AC Saint Louis that surprised people by signing a high profile technical staff and lured MLS star Steve Ralston back home to finish his career in St. Louis.

This Q & A seeks Cooper’s perspective on the many areas of soccer he’s become involved in over the last few years.

1. How did you come to be the President and Interim Commissioner of the NASL?  Could this be like Bud Selig’s “interim” commissioner position that lasted more than a decade?

Jeff Cooper: I was voted Interim Commissioner by the NASL Board, probably because I was the only guy in the room dumb enough to take on such a time-consuming, non-paying job!  I will only be in this position until our League office is built out and a real Commissioner joins us.

2. What lessons did you learn by going through the failed USL acquisition followed by the forced merger with USL1?

JC: I learned that I need to say “no comment” sometimes.

Jeff Cooper pulled together some of the top soccer clubs in St. Louis and joined them with pro men's and women's teams to create an integrated soccer club unseen anywhere else in the United States

3. Unlike most, if not all, other owners of pro soccer clubs, you are building a truly multi-dimensional business with pro men’s and women’s teams, an integrated youth club and shared facilities.  What are the keys to building a unified business vs. simply owning a series of related businesses?  Can your business model be replicated anywhere in the US or is there something unique about St. Louis that will allow it to succeed?

JC: The key is to make sure that you utilize all of the various economies of scale. An organization like ours thrives or dies on communication.

There are many unique things about St. Louis and its soccer culture, but we aren’t one of them. Our model could be adopted to any market. It is scalable for larger or smaller markets. In time, every pro team in the US will become a real “club” with a youth program, academy, women’s team etc. It is the evolution of the game in this country.

4. Your selection for head coach of AC St. Louis, Claude Anelka, has limited coaching experience and has failed badly in his first attempt in Scotland.  Why will he succeed in an unfamiliar environment?

JC: He may or may not succeed. Claude has a lot to prove here. Luckily, he will have Francisco Filho by his side. Francisco has developed some of the worlds top talent at Clairfontaine and Manchester United and we think he can do the same at AC St. Louis.

5. Is the NASL better off operating completely independent of MLS or are there benefits to work together on areas such as player development, marketing and sponsorship?

JC: The NASL should definitely be working with MLS in various capacities. There are huge benefits to the game if we work together on player development.  We get to compete on the field in the US Open Cup. Off the field, we should try to help the development of our nations top league in any way we can.

6. What lessons can be gleaned from the discontinuation of the LA Sol’s operation?  What changes need to be implemented by teams and the League to prevent other teams from failing?

JC: WPS now has 8 really solid owners who are committed to the long term vision of the league. The teams have already adjusted their business models from our experiences last year. I feel like our league is at it’s strongest right now.

Jeff Cooper's plans for a major real estate development anchored by an MLS team and stadium in Collinsville, Illinois ultimately fell short.

7. What more did your group need to show MLS to get a team?  What obstacles prevented you from meeting MLS’ standards?

JC: We needed more financial depth. It’s that simple.

8. Which side of the Mississippi would’ve been better to base an MLS team, the Illinois or Missouri side?  Would the benefits of the population and corporate centers on the Missouri side outweigh the benefits of being the Illinois side’s only pro sports team?

JC: Either side will work very well. As your question points out, there are great benefits to either. The proven model for a pro soccer team is to own your stadium at the smallest possible cost. So we are still looking at opportunities to grow our current stadium or move to a larger, lower-cost facility.

9. The Seattle Sounders only drew 2,000 to 4,000 per game during their final USL1 years yet exploded to 30,000 per game in their first MLS year. Does that give you any trepidation starting a Division 2 team in a major league market?  How do you market a minor league team to a city that is used to major league sports teams?

JC: AC St. Louis will be the biggest soccer team in St. Louis regardless of which league it plays. I think there were a huge number of issues with how the old USL marketed it’s teams. We plan on doing a much better job of helping teams gain greater attention in each market.

On a side note, I will say that I love to watch what is happening in Seattle. It shows how the game is growing in the US. However, I hope we don’t hold cities like Portland to the same standard going forward or there may be an inappropriate sense of disappointment.

10. Is the “St. Louis as a soccer hotbed” notion a myth associated with the history of the sport’s support there or is St. Louis truly still ahead of the rest of the Midwest, and nation, in soccer interest and development?

JC: Per capita, St. Louis still produces more elite level players than any market. This year, with the debut of AC STL, the fans here will have to prove or disprove the notion of being a soccer hotbed.

11. What interests do you currently have in English professional soccer. Is it too mature a market to have significant upside economically or are there still bargains to be found? (Cooper formerly sat on England’s League One Brentford FC Board of Directors.)

JC: I don’t have any current business interest in English soccer.  And to directly answer the question, there are no more bargains in English soccer.  Even the clubs that can be bought for £1 have millions in debt.  There is so much heavily-financed competition at the lower levels that it is nearly impossible to get promoted as a regular well-run club. The economics are completely out of whack. We have already seen a number of teams go into administration and we will unfortunately see many, many more do so over the next 12-24 months.

Big Story
The resolution to the deadlock over second division plans for 2010 in North America is of course analysed all over the place: over 100 journalists and bloggers joined the US Soccer teleconference yesterday afternoon. You can read the full transcript from US Soccer here. Now the dust has settled, and the USL and the NASL have been forced into a compromise for 2010 by US Soccer, the key question is what this means for the long-term, something Gulati mentioned several times. As he said:

Our goal is to have a stable, professional soccer environment in the U.S. I think we’ve been able to accomplish that with MLS over the last 14 years, and with the exception of one year, there has been a steady growth of the teams in terms of interest. We want to make sure that we can accomplish that through all of our other professional leagues, which are different from youth soccer or amateur soccer. In the next few months we’ll be laying out some regulations, rules and standards. We’ll put a little more substance into it about what a second division should look like. Everyone has agreed that that’s important and we’ll be working on that. For us, the most important thing here is long-term stability. What we think we’ve achieved today is a short-term solution for the 2010 season, but we want to work with a number of people and all the teams to find a long-term solution so we don’t have teams changing back and forth between divisions. We’re extremely excited about this agreement and certainly about 2010 overall for the sport in the U.S.

And again, towards the end of the call, answering a question “On how the USSF will measure benchmarks to determine a team’s success or viability and whether there will be quantitative measurements teams will have to demonstrate to continue to participate”:

Yes, we’ve got some very specific targets in our regulations and we intend to put in more of those. Whether they apply to financial stability, what staffing levels look like, etc. To give you an example, our regulations have minimum standards on size of stadiums, a full-time operation for P.R. Director and CEO and so on and so forth. We think we need to put some more meat behind those in order to make sure that the teams that are part of a Division 2, or Division 1 for that matter, meet a certain standard and most importantly can meet that standard year in and year out and improve. We can’t have this constant issue that bedevils a number of sports, that the offseason is spent primarily to make sure that you can come back the following season. That you’re looking for expansion teams not because it makes long-term sense to build the game and the league, but because you need an expansion fee. We had that issue 25 years ago in our league, and we want to make sure that we’re able to avoid that so that expansion is done in a systematic way. U.S. Soccer is not going to be the one deciding that, but if people coming in the door want to be part of Division 2, they need to understand that this is a long-term play and that there are going to be some significant investments early on and aren’t counting on expansion proceeds in a year or two to reduce capital costs. The philosophy we’ve discussed with the leaders of these teams seems to be in line with that. People understand that for us the most important thing is stability, growth is right after that. But you can’t have growth without stability.”

Many, including Rochester beat reporter Jeff DiVeronica, are taking this as a elbow in the ribs to the operation of USL over the past decade or so, which has seen teams coming and going at a rather rapid pace:

To me, those were all shots at how the USL has done business. To a degree, I agree with him, but as this season unfolds I’m sure Gulati will find out how difficult it can be to run a minor-league soccer operation. For as long as I’ve covered the A-League/USL, which goes back to 1996, America’s second division was the red-headed stepchild. At best, it was an afterthought. The USSF concentrated on MLS and building up the U.S. national team programs. It needed to. Now, it sounds as if Gulati realizes some attention to the second division must be paid to help with player development.

So while most of the focus has been on the short-term solution for 2010, it seems as if US Soccer hopes to leverage this crisis (and the useful fact there is competing demand to operate a Division II league) into a broader plan to give lower division soccer purpose beyond an expanded footprint for the sport. Gulati, asked of the purpose of a Division 2 league in the U.S., finally concluded that “In the absence of a promotion and relegation system, it’s hard to exactly pinpoint an answer to that question.”  Gulati mentioned there had been discussions with MLS already on how the pyramid knits together, especially in terms of player development, and in the year ahead we should really expect to see US Soccer, MLS, the USL and NASL pinpoint answers to that question so we are not in the same mess going forward, and the purpose and structure of lower league soccer is clear enough to all.

Worldwide News

• The credit crunch and tighter finances in Scotland are having one interesting effect: clubs are much less willing to go through the expensive business of hiring and firing managers willy-nilly, leading to much greater stability, according to Alex Smith, chairman of the Scottish League Managers’ Association: ‘”Stability has been forced on clubs. It hasn’t kept bad managers in jobs, but it has given good ones a bit of leeway – for example, younger guys who are trying to build something, maybe creating sensible youth structures and who shouldn’t lose their livelihood because the first team loses four or five games.”  Meanwhile, Away from the Numbers has an interesting update on the financial woes at East Fife.
• Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis has said he does not expect a takeover bid from either Stan Kroenke or Alisher Usmanov to come anytime soon.
• Minnesota’s new professional soccer team, to play in the USL conference of the new Division II league, is not formally connected to the now defunct Thunder, though clearly has some informal ties. Du nord has all the details in an excellent post.
• A proposed U.S.-Mexico friendly has fallen through over a row about television rights.

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