When the Columbus Crew won the 2008 MLS Supporters Shield (the award given to a club with the highest point total in the regular season) and subsequently their coach Sigi Schmid won the MLS Coach of the Year award, it eloquently summarized the very odd and unusual MLS season.

For starters, the Crew didn’t even make the play-offs in 2007 despite a very liberal – some may say ridiculously high number of teams, then eight out of thirteen – qualifying standard.

Second of all, in the off-season, the Crew made only minor modifications to their roster, with the only significant addition being a journeyman holding midfielder Brian Carroll, obtained via a trade from the expansion San Jose Earthquakes.

Third, given the dismal results in the two previous years, Sigi Schmid’s hold on the job appeared tenuous, as Columbus finished dead last in 2006 and his coaching acumen was constantly questioned by the whatever dwindling fan base the franchise retained.

Former Boca Juniors Legend Schelotto Leads the Crew

Instead, the Crew proved its critics wrong and stormed out of the gate, led on and arguably off the field by an Argentine Guillermo Barros Schelotto. The thirty five year old Boca Juniors legend, with a haircut harking all the way back to the British Invasion of the mid-60′s, became a general on the pitch, presiding and directing over the much younger Crew attackers, a pair of the 21-year old wingers Robbie Rogers and Eddie Gaven and a veteran center forward Alejandro Moreno. As the result, Columbus scored eleven more goals and improved its goal differential from minus-five to plus-fourteen.

But whereas pre-season expectations of the heartland team were tempered, the opposite was the case on both coasts.

Red Bulls Change Matadors

In New York, an experienced Colombian coach Juan Carlos Osorio, took over the New York Red Bulls squad that did make the play-offs in 2007 but was knocked out in the first round under the guidance of the recently fired USA national team coach Bruce Arena.

Living off his reputation earned at the 2002 World Cup, Arena was given a fat contract and virtually unlimited, by the American soccer measurements. funds to establish a power house deserving of its hometown in the capital of the world. Never the one to turn down lucrative donations, Arena spent close to $3 million to bring in two free agent stars, an ex Aston Villa and River Plate striker Juan Pablo Angel and a well-traveled ex Manchester City-Sunderland-Rangers-Wolfsburg-Leverkusen midfielder Claudio Reyna. In the league where an entire team was officially operating under a $2.3M budget, Angel and Reyna came under a special exception called the “Designated Player” provision, something colloquially known as the “Beckham Rule”. (Each MLS team was allotted one DP but could trade with another team for the additional second spot)

Armed with a higher payroll than any MLS team at that point, Arena was expected to dominate the league but only managed 43 points (the 2007 Supporter Shield winner DC United had 55 on a much smaller budget) and a plus-2 goal differential.

When the oft-injured Reyna proved to be a colossal bust, NYRB was knocked out of the play-offs by a much more cheaply assembled New England team, managed by an 1980′s Liverpool stalwart Steve Nicol. Under fire for his performance and for the waste of approximately $2.5M on his old University of Virginia player Reyna, Arena’s was the first head that rolled and, for a small compensation, Osorio was brought in from the Chicago Fire.

Juan Carlos leaped an opportunity twice in the span of six months, as he only came to the Fire from Colombia’s Millionarios half-way into 2007. In Chicago, his half-season reign was considered an achievement and New York jumped at a chance to recruit its former assistant.

Sexy Football but Same Results for LA Galaxy

The West Coast was similarly bristling with anticipation. As the MLS propaganda never got tired of saying, in 2007 the LA Galaxy and its owner Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) have indeed managed a major coup – they have signed the most famous footballer in the world, the Posh Boy himself, David Beckham. The only problem was that Becks arrived with a bum ankle and missed a number of crucial games in the final stretch of the 2007 campaign. He was available for the very last contest in Chicago but LA went down by a 1:0 score and the AEG forced out its coach Frank Yallop, who was himself brought in only a year earlier.

(The coaching carousel continued with Yallop going to the San Jose Earthquakes, opening for business that very month).

Under a bombastically fatuous General Manager (Director of Football) Alexi Lalas, another major coup was launched. Seeking “sexy football”, AEG has hired a former two-time World Player of the Year Dutchman Ruud Gullit. Beside once having been a truly great pro, Gullit has managed a number of European clubs such as Chelsea, Newcastle and Feyenoord and was fluent in English.

Given the glitz and the glamour of the two metropolitan giants, far less attention was being given to the 2007 finalist, the two far less glamorous but two very hardworking squads – Houston Dynamo and the New England Revolution.

Houston was returning most of his line-up, sans a temporarily departed Nate Jaqua (7 goals in 2007) while Revolution’s only name loss was a released veteran forward Pat Noonan.

Once the play on the pitch commenced, however, the expectations weren’t always met.

While Columbus, Chicago and New England got off to a good start in the East, New York tumbled out of the gate. Reyna reverted to his oft-injured self and Angel must have received the same contagion, coming down with all sorts of maladies. Osorio’s juggling of players and line-ups didn’t produce either and New York had a rough going in the spring of 2008. early injuries and the eventual $10M transfer of Josmer Altidore to Spain’s Villarreal was another shock to New York’s system.

In the West, Gullit’s Galaxy began to assert itself a few weeks into the season and became the most exciting team on the field. Unfortunately for LA, the excitement had good and bad components. Its offense was averaging an almost unheard-of three goals per game but its defense was nearly as porous.

Still, a couple of months in, LA was seen in first place, a drastic departure from its previous MLS annuals.

New York was languishing in the standings. Looking at it in their rear-view mirrors were the aforementioned Columbus, Chicago and New England.

Out with Gullit, in with Arena

Then something snapped in LA. Its offense continued to be scoring reasonably well, but its defense was proving to be incapable of stopping anyone. The team went on a long winless streak. Its players began to rumble about Gullit’s coaching methods and, finally, the damage became irreparable. Gullit was pushed out of the door and replaced by Bruce Arena. So high was the admiration of Arena’s by the AEG’s head Tim Leiweke that Leiweke gushed about the former US gaffer in the most glorious terms possible when appearing on the national telecast shortly after Gullit’s departure.

With the Galz slipped out of the first place by then, they were still very much in the play-off picture, had the season ended at that moment. Arena, of course, was expected to push for the top spot that the Galaxy only recently vacated. For that, he received additional reinforcement in the form of a 34-year old US international winger Eddie Lewis, who had spent the previous season with Derby County of the English Premiership.

Nonetheless, showing repeated ineptitude, Arena coached Galaxy to less than one point per game and, when the 2008 was over, the Galaxy was back to its usual last place, even losing the goal differential to the expansion San Jose.

As noted prior, San Jose’s coach was one Frank Yallop, a former man in charge of the Galaxy.

As, once upon a time, was Sigi Schmid.

Returning to the East Coast : for a while, Osorio’s job seemed in as much jeopardy as of his West Coast counterpart. In New York’s last match at Chicago, Juan Carlos’s club needed a win to insure itself of the last play-off spot in the East but instead his men were hammered 5:2 by the in-form Chicago Fire. Only a last day defeat of the DC United at the hands of the league leaders Columbus Crew pushed the Red Bulls into that last spot. Backing into the play-off didn’t stop calls for Osorio’s firing but he was given a euphemistic chance to prove himself again in the playoffs.

Playoff Contenders

Chicago, New England and Kansas City were three other East Conference contenders.

There were a few more surprises. With the Galaxy self-destruction, the fourth year franchise Real Salt Lake scored on the last minute of its last match and made the knock-out stage for the first time ever.

Without much drama, the two time defending MLS champion Houston topped the West in the points total.

Chivas USA, a team ravaged by injuries throughout the season, still managed to finish a respectable second.

The league was gearing for the MLS Cup and the LA Galaxy, by then having gotten rid of Lalas as well, was gearing for its never ending rebuilding.

Three coaches (Gullit, plus Colorado’s Fernando Clavijo and Dallas’s Steve Morrow) lost their jobs.

Landon Donovan won the scoring title.

Columbus’s Chad Marshall won the Defender of the Year.

Chicago’s Jon Busch won the same award for top Goalkeeper.

The MVP vote is to be announced later with Galaxy’s Landon Donovan, Fire’s Cuauhtémoc Blanco and Crew’s Guillermo Barros Schelotto the three finalists.

Also See:

The 2008 MLS Season Preview (Liviu Bird)

MLS, LA Galaxy and Ruud Gullit – A Very Long Way from ‘Sexy Football’ (Marco Pantanella)

Youth Football in the US (Dan Leo)

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Bruce Arena is a tired retread who ran out of ideas ages ago.

Bruce Arena is just the tonic the LA Galaxy needs to salvage its disastrous two and a half year run, during which it has managed to miss the play-offs in each year.

Or both, depending upon whom you ask.

Tim Leiweke, the President and the CEO of the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) surely hopes it’s the latter.

He has to. He must.

If he errs in this hire, Arena will only add to Leiweke’s already existing trifecta of abject failures. From another ex-US national team coach Steve Sampson to the two time MLS Cup winner Frank Yallop to the ex-World Player of the Year Ruud Gullit, the LA Galaxy coaching carousel has gone on with seemingly no rhyme or reason, with the exception of the reliance on a recognizable name.

But that’s par for the course for the AEG. When the conglomerate also owned the (New York/New Jersey) Metrostars, its major hire was from one of the other teams it owned, the Chicago Fire, where it poached an MLS Cup-winning (this doesn’t seem to be much of accomplishment now, does it?) coach Bob Bradley. Bradley was a local New Jersey chap with a presumably excellent reputation – he was a friend and an associate of none other than Bruce Arena himself.

Subsequently, Bradley proved to be a middling mediocrity and was dismissed after three years in charge.

Albert Einstein once wrote that the definition of stupidity was doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. Clearly, if name recognition is the only lasting premise of the AEG’s coaching search, Tim Leiweke has exceeded the aforementioned criteria for stupidity. (To his credit, Einstein also wrote that the difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has limits – attempts to reach Einstein to comment on the LA Galaxy coaching search are still ongoing.)

The practice does make some sense in this regard: when the true deep knowledge of one’s disciple is absent, it’s a common trend to rely on the opinion of the so-called experts, who of course are apt to point to the “usual suspects” if only to free themselves of the culpability for their actions.

Tim Leiweke, having at best a cursory knowledge of the game, has to depend on these experts to guide him. He has no ability to make a qualitative decision on his own. He can’t discern a cause of one’s success or the root of one’s failures. He can’t analyze whether a floundering attack is due to the lack of a midfield maestro or a penalty box scorer or whether a sieve-like defense is missing a stopper in the back four or a destroyer in front of them. He has to go by reputation and, worst of all, the American soccer press, who have never said a bad word about any American coach, Arena included.

But Bruce deserved to be scathed, if not for his excessively arrogant demeanor or a dismissive attitude toward his critics, then for his shortcomings as a head coach.

Let us not forget that he was in effect fired from his last two jobs – the US national coach in 2006 and the newly named New York Red Bulls a year later. His second and last World Cup campaign was an amalgam of poor player selection, poor in-game tactics and poor player management.

His major claim to fame was the 2002 US advance into the World Cup quarter-finals but, even in that, the US was helped on the last day of group play by the simultaneous Portuguese meltdown and the incredible determination of the South Koreans. Needing only a tie to advance, a magnificently talented Portugal lost its head, received several red cards and ended up losing to a hard-charging Guus Hiddink team, which had nothing to play for. The US, in full control of its destiny and only needing a tie against Poland, was blown out of the park 3:1 by the East Europeans.

The other part of Bruce’s padded resume were his MLS Cups with the DC United; that is undoubtedly one of the major factors in his appeal to AEG. But the four game MLS Cup contests in and of themselves are a poor indicator of one’s future success – ex-MLS Cup winners Bob Bradley, Bob Gansler, Sigi Schmid, Frank Yallop, Thomas Rongen and Bruce Arena himself have all been fired from their MLS jobs at some point of their careers. Furthermore, MLS has been markedly improving since its old amateurish days and Bruce is going to have to compete against the current MLS king Dom Kinnear (two consecutive MLS Cups with the Houston Dynamo), 2007 MLS Coach of the Year Preki (Chivas USA), an experienced Frank Yallop (San Jose Earthquakes) and resurgent Real Salt Lake and Colorado Rapids.

Arena’s first task would be to make the play-offs. At the moment of this writing, the Galaxy has 24 points after 20 matches, twelfth out of fourteen teams with only eight making the grade into the postseason. The standings in this parity devised league are tight and only a point separate Los Angeles from the last available spot.

Parity, including the team salary cap, works in Arena’s favor. A hot streak to end the season can easily take them to one of the top seeds.

What works against him is the curiously staffed Galaxy roster. Of the approximate $2.4M cap, three players (Donovan, Beckham and Ruiz) eat up half of the available amount. The remaining half is divided among the less-than-stellar supporting cast. Such disparity among the players quality was one of the major reasons for Gullit’s frustration with his plight. Beckham can bend it as well as anyone but he needs someone who doesn’t treat a soccer ball as if it were a live grenade.

A notoriously thin-skinned Dutchman also butted heads with Landon Donovan and the other Galaxy players. It’s hard to make an omelet without cracking some eggs, but the resistance of the players towards coaches tolerant of mediocrity was to be anticipated.

Arena is not as nearly as tactically adept as his predecessor but with similar delusions of grandeur.

He will now have to figure out tactical adjustments while dealing gingerly with the fragile egos of his stars.

And crossing David Beckham may be a lot more damaging to one’s career than calling Landon Donovan a few unprintables.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

The 2008 edition of the European Championships was an unbridled success. The quality of play, the desire to compete by the participants on the field and the enthusiasm of the crowd were all of the highest order.

A few weeks ago. as a preview to the Euros, an opposite type of soccer festival was touring the European playgrounds. Its style was apprehensive, the prevalent thought on the field was the avoidance of error and the joy that was evident during the best European games was largely missing.

If anyone happened to have caught a listless, dour and rather forgettable string of the performances by the United States team, the inferiority to the skill and class of the best European players was all too obvious. To an impartial observer, the US play was averse not only to mastery and exuberance but to any coherent plan and game tactics. The US National team played with the same ineptness that one often sees on the US youth level – bereft of tidy control of the ball, coordinated movement of men and ball and, most of all, purpose.

The players appeared shackled and restrained, robbed of the choices that they would otherwise be instructed to take by their European club coaches and managers. It’s as if a genie of soccer was bottled back up by an evil sorcerer.

That sorcerer’s name is Bob Bradley, also known the head coach of the US national soccer team.

Bob came to preside over his team in a very curious way.

He wasn’t the first choice for the job by the US Soccer Federation (USSF) and its president Sunil Gulati. In the summer of 2006, it was long presumed that the only legitimate candidate for this program was the recently available gaffer of the German team, an ex-international superstar striker Jürgen Klinsmann.

Klinsi, as he is known to the world wide football audience, had several built-in advantages over other available candidates – he was a permanent resident of the United States, making his home within twenty miles from the main training center of the US team, in a beautiful oceanside community of Huntington Beach, California. His English was nearly perfect – especially if one pitted it against a bewildering pile of words masquerading as Bob Bradley’s sentences – and his pedigree was deemed more than adequate.

Taking a heretofore floundering German team, a team that hadn’t progressed out of a group stage in the Euro 2004, to the semi-final match of the 2006 World Cup and a third place finish was considered a monumental improvement by the Germans themselves and Klinsmann’s subsequent resignation from Die Mannschaft presented almost an unbelievably lucky opportunity for the USSF to advance the game to the next plateau on both the domestic and the international levels.

Sunil Gulati, recently appointed as the president of the USSF, was certainly analytical enough to recognize a gift from the soccer gods when he saw one. Quickly, the pursuit of Klinsmann commenced.

While officially Jürgen was “taking time off to be with his family”, an approach was made to his representatives. By the fall of 2006, the action was heating up and the scuttlebutt emanating from the talks was promising. By all accounts, this was a marriage made in soccer heaven – the USSF was getting itself an international quality coach to replaced a fired (and, by 2006, hapless American) Bruce Arena and Klinsmann was getting a gig for which he barely had to leave his own house. The excitement was palpable. The fans, the media and the players involved were praising this development in unison. It seemed as if nothing could derail Klinsmann’s train of destiny as it steamed toward its anointed purpose of bringing the American soccer out of its uncouth wilderness.

Then, a loud thud.

A crash of hopes, dreams and aspirations.

A catastrophic defeat.

While the wedding invitations were being sent around with unbridled glee, Jürgen Klinsmann left the USSF at the altar.

The exact reasons for this abrupt end to courtship were never revealed to the public. The US soccer media was too timid to question the purported authority and Klinsmann himself wasn’t about to spill the beans either. The likely areas of disagreement however aren’t as difficult to find as the American media pretended. All one had to do was to cast an eye on Germany, where the erstwhile Klinsmann assistant – now promoted to the number one slot – Joachim Löw demanded and received a full control over the junior German teams that competed for the Schwarzrotgold. Gulati however reserved the right to appoint the national youth level coaches for himself while Klinsmann undoubtedly wanted a unified program.

The failure of the negotiations surely did not smell like victory for the USSF. With a winter camp – typically used to gather and test the off-season MLS players – rapidly approaching, the team desperately needed a coach but hiring one of quality on such a short notice was a daunting task.

And so Gulati punted and took an easy way out. Instead of expanding his search to include other renown candidates with a commensurate pedigree, Gulati panicked. The camp had to take place hell or high water. Offers went out to several interested parties, which was essentially anyone who was available to bail the the head negotiator out of the predicament that he placed himself in. At that moment, anyone with breath would have sufficed.

But there were plenty of strings attached to the proposal. Without the necessary vetting process, the job was qualified as interim with only a potential of becoming permanent, yet it had to be handled on a full time basis. To sweeten the pie, the candidate was guaranteed a U-20 coaching job, in case a superior candidate was found and hired meanwhile.

Unspoken came the third rule – whoever accepted the money and the corresponding responsibility still had to defer to not only the USSF but to MLS on a number of issues and this represented the greatest challenge to any outside candidate.

MLS, due to the geographical and economic reality of the United States and its sports milieu, is a spring-to-fall league. The first matches take place beginning in April and end in late October for the regular season and in November for the play-offs. In the intervening six months, each team has to squeeze in thirty contests, on top of the US Cup, an All-Star off-week and a few international friendlies. Due to these requirement, a decision had been made by the MLS top brass to not to take weeks off for the international FIFA dates or even rescheduled the games between teams losing its top players to the international calendar.

Regardless of what one thinks of MLS, this rule had some solid logic behind it, as other options would have entailed the loss of stadia, good weather or revenues.

So, while the MLS scheduling conundrum could be taken as an unimportant tertiary story to the US National team, there’s a very important tie in between the league and the USSF – simply put, Don Garber, the MLS commissioner, sits on the board of the USSF and Sunil Gulati himself is also a president of the Kraft Soccer Properties, am organization behind one of the most successful MLS franchises, the New England Revolution.

This tangled web of interests directly impacted the fate of the US national squad.

The MLS powers expressed in no uncertain terms that an incoming head coach of the US national team had to defer to MLS when the conflicts between the club and the national team arose. Nowhere was this more evident than at the 2007 Copa America, where several MLS players were held back from participating in the tournament.

Clearly, such a coercive conduct would not be palatable to an international coach of note. One’s reputation is his record and his record depends on having players of his choosing but that’s precisely what an American coach doesn’t get to enjoy.

No wonder the negotiations with Klinsmann failed. It’s highly doubtful any established European or South American coach would accept a job under such conditions.

And so none did.

When the search for a competent coach proved fruitless, Bob Bradley had the interim tag removed and was signed to a long-term contract.

His qualification was having a middling won-loss record that hadn’t included a play-off win since the early part of the decade. On his pedigree, he was an average coach in a poorly respected league, whose top club is ranked a whopping 284th by the IFFHS.

But he was willing patsy for the Fed.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Ruud Gullit: ‘We can’t play sexy football at LA Galaxy’

“I can’t play sexy football with this team at the moment because we are not ready for this. There is a huge difference between the very good players and some of the average players.

They’re just rough diamonds and they don’t have the tactical vision. Some of them will make it, some will not, but all of the teams see the same young players because of the draft system, so my challenge is to develop them into something more than anybody else can achieve with them. That’s a tough challenge.”

From here, one needs more of a summary than an explanation.

So here’s a broad outline.

How does a kid in America learn to play soccer?

He can’t play much of a pick-up/street game with friends because there are no streets in America. There are suburbs. Street games are for basketball, often in a tough urban center or under a roof. Spaces for free soccer pitches have been long turned into parking lots. (People need room for their SUV’s)

But suburbia has its own limitations – it is spread out. One could perhaps bicycle from home to home but walking is usually frowned upon. Local schools usually bus their students in. When you’re on the bus, you ain’t walking. And you ain’t playing street soccer.

And, so with pick-up games eliminated, one looks to the organized game. That is run by a plethora of occasionally coordinated youth clubs. Clubs charge fees to play and that often negates a possibility of the poorer kids joining the club. Still, that isn’t the worst problem with these youth clubs. The worst and perhaps the only significant problem here is that coaches at these small clubs don’t know and don’t want to know the game. Teaching basic skills is considered anachronistic despite the fact that the club players have little previous experience. This “coaching” – and I am using the term loosely – involves dropping the ball on the (rented) grass field and telling the young players to have a good time running around. No tactical and technical training takes place. If the same principle applied to assembling an orchestra, a resulting cacophony would be put down by a riot police with water hoses and tear gas. Yet, what one sees on the soccer fields across America is precisely that type of cacophony that knowledgeable sport fans would fine nauseating.

Other clubs/coaches are motivated solely by winning. That’s what gets the parents to cough up that needed dough. But that leads to an unsophisticated game approach where a couple of the fastest kids keep chasing long ball, with the rest of their team mates aimlessly booting them up the pitch. Any desire to teach actual skills is put on the back burner because it doesn’t gel with the long ball and takes too much time where none is really available anyway.

There are exceptions to the rule, clearly. There are a few former European and South American pros employed by a few respected clubs who teach as good a game as their own teachers once did. Alas, with millions of youth soccer players in the US, the professionals only reach a minuscule portion of the American soccer universe. The rest of the prospects is idiotized and taught, to be blunt, garbage.

Even the Bradenton Academy in Florida – formed to develop the most elite US soccer athletes up to the U-17 World Cup – has suffered from inept coaching and a selection process that depended on the early bloomers who matured earlier than their peers and thus were physically dominant. Subsequently, those early bloomers’ star power proved to be short-lived. Freddy Adu, a poster child of all early bloomers, was deemed a future superstar at thirteen and is now firmly tucked away on the bench at Benfica. All 5’6″ of him.

But the above is only the tip of the iceberg.

The US soccer development system is governed by the United States Soccer Federation. The Federation itself consists of the representatives from both the various soccer groups – amateur, college and pros. All of these groups have opposing interests – youth clubs are more concerned with milking the well heeled parents for their kids’ membership fees. Colleges want free student-athletes, who are limited by its regulations not only to the compensation they could receive (none) but to the amount of hours they could spend practicing under supervision. Pros – MLS and USL – ideally want well trained 18-23 year old prospects but are unwilling and often unable to offer them a salary commensurable with the one they’d get in a business world with their college degrees.

NCAA soccer has another conundrum. It has different rules and not different in some insignificant unimportant miniscule way – it has unlimited number of substitutions. (though the re-entry in the same half is largely prohibited: 2007 NCAA Men’s and Women’s Soccer Rules and Interpretations )

That leads to a ping-pong type of action with a lot of running – the US soccer player is very fit – but not much skill on the ball. This doesn’t bother NCAA, as it looks at soccer in more recreational than competitive terms.

Which brings us to the pros.

MLS coaches are hired to win games. They are not hired to raise and educate 20-23 year old rookies. If it can be done concurrently, the best of them do what they can within a limited time allowed.

But most have taken to understand the system for what it can give them. In an annual MLS draft, the few players with skills – who may have come from the rare ex-pro schooled clubs or are simply uniquely gifted individuals – are picked early. The raw athletes are picked next. Then the coaches divide the team between the “piano players” (skill) and the “piano movers” (no skill, never heard of skill).

When a squad is short of the “piano players”, its management goes outside of the country and brings in the likes of Cuauhtemoc Blanco, Juan Pablo Angel, Marcelo Gallardo, Guillermo Barros Schelotto and David Beckham.

There’s never a shortage of the “piano movers” – American kids can indeed run all day long.

So how does an average American player learn the game?

By osmosis.

Occasionally by practice.

But mostly he never learns much and leaves the game as bereft of skill and knowledge as he came into the game with.

The luckiest ones get competent coaches with a European or South American background – Juan Carlos Osorio with New York, Ruud Gullit with the LA Galaxy, Preki with the Chivas USA. The most athletically talented of the lucky ones may even get interests of the European clubs and are given a chance to develop there.

The bulk of the MLS’ers, however, is out of luck.

It’ll stick around for a few years but eventually will have to go back and rely on their college degree to make a real living. Their pro years will be memories saved on their VCR’s.

PS. Some loyal followers of the American soccer are placing considerable amount of hope on the various non-profit youth academies that are being set up across the country. If one adopts a principle that something is better than nothing, then it’s a step in the right direction. But quantity is easier to define than quality and that leaves the only important variable – coaching – still up in the air. If these new and newly affiliated academies – rumored to number over sixty – feature the necessary “quality control”, then the up-and-coming American talent should see a noticeable improvement in tactical and technical knowledge. If, and this may end up being the case, it’s the old faces with new uniforms and barely reformulated slogans, the status quo will likely prevail.

NCAA is a drain and will remain so.

MLS keeps on improving but it must hire more coaches like Gullit and Osorio, who won’t stand for the same old football that has been an MLS staple since its inception. It may count half a dozen of coaches with similar ideas among its fourteen member base. But it needs one for every team pronto. It needed them before yesterday too.

Also See: Youth Development in the MLS: The Promise and the Problems.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Resident MLS expert Dan Leo takes – believe it or not – an optimistic look at the future of the MLS.

Saturday, March 29th marked the opening kick-off of the 13th MLS season (see Liviu’s review here), the United States’s and Canada’s top professional soccer (football) league.

As I had pointed in my previous pieces, the league isn’t considered a true “major” sports league in the US, if one only judges it from paid attendance and gross financial revenues (aka turnover).

Moreover, MLS has struggled mightily to attract a hard core soccer fan over its existence. If one were to make comparisons to the top world leagues, the overall quality of soccer just wasn’t there for the duration of its run. That in turn greatly affected the economic aspect of the sport.

Of course, it wouldn’t be American to give up on a dream. However few soccer fans may be in the US, those fans are loyal and vociferous. More importantly, they are growing bit by bit every year. Some are new converts, who have sampled what the league had to offer and stayed. Some are lurkers, who still prefer a Premiership or a Bundesliga but will watch MLS too because it is still soccer. Others still are brought in because of selected stars or because of having played soccer at an earlier age or because there was nothing else on TV.

And growth is good.

But how has MLS gone from there to here?

To say the least, it’s been a tumultuous road.

At first, the seeming attraction was to the US based soccer fans, who showed up in droves for the World Cup games that were held across North America in 1994.

But something went wrong. In colloquial terms, the MLS soccer sucked. Players recruited from the various semi-pro leagues and signed from the US colleges diluted a few quality internationals that made MLS their home. The initial appeal of home grown soccer began to wane and the disappointed crowds went home, rarely to return.

The 1998 World Cup was supposed to provide a moderate boost in prestige to the American soccer but that was a forlorn hope as well, as the US squad under Steve Sampson failed to even earn a point in France’98.

The league’s attendance continued to be iffy. The exact numbers of paying customers are unknown because the league was more concerned with the public perception of the sport rather than with the accounting accuracy. Suffice it to say, the league had continued to trudge along while losing untold millions for its owners/investors. In 2001, two its franchises with owners of moderate wealth decided to fold and MLS was left with ten teams. Other owners were likewise deserting the seemingly sinking ship.

What saved the league during those years were largely Phil Anschutz, (personal wealth $6.5 Billion, according to Forbes, 2006) who ended up owning and – purportedly independently – managing via his entertainment company AEG, the LA Galaxy, the New York Metrostars, the Chicago Fire, the DC United, Colorado Rapids and the San Jose Earthquakes and the late Lamar Hunt (personal wealth likewise in the billions), who owned three other teams Columbus Crew, Dallas Burn (now FC Dallas) and Kansas City Wizards. Another billionaire Robert Kraft owned the last franchise, the New England Patriots.

The MLS business model was then obviously a tremendous miscalculation and something else needed to be done.

The financial solution was almost incidental.

In 1999, the cavernous Ohio Stadium in Columbus, Ohio with its 102,000 seating capacity was undergoing renovations and the Columbus Crew was temporarily – or so was thought – left without a home. Lamar Hunt, never filled with trepidations of any kind, decided that the only prudent decision was to build an own stadium. And thus, with about $30M of own funds, the Columbus Crew stadium was erected.

The much smaller 22,000 seat stadium had several advantages over the giant Horseshoe – there was no rent to pay, there was no schedule to conflict with, there were no American football lines on the pitch, the playing surface could have been made of natural grass, the concessions, the merchandising and the parking revenues all went to the club and, since soccer didn’t draw huge crowds anyway, the limited capacity made the crowds appear cozy rather than isolated.

That fact didn’t go unnoticed by the league’s office. Quick analysis was made and a logical conclusion was reached – if every team had what was euphemistically known as a Soccer Specific Stadium (SSS), then even with limited crowds, each team could actually turn a small profit or, at the very worst, come close to breaking even.

That in turn led the league’s offices to pitch its teams as investment projects to the potential ownership groups – give us a soccer specific stadium and we’ll give you a team.

All that remained was for these ownership groups to use the enticement of the sport as a motivation for the local municipality to provide either the stadium or, at the very least, the needed infrastructure for its construction.

In this endeavor, the league was not acting out of order. Unlike most European nations, the US sports team owners never hesitated to dip into public coffers for a free-be. The negotiations were simple as a rule – a team owner approach the local mayor or board of supervisors and made a simple proposal, “Find us a stadium or we’re gone”.

The success of such tactics depended on each city. The Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders of the NFL managed to receive some money from various cities but never a fully funded stadium. Other teams (Baltimore-cum-Indianapolis Colts, Boston-cum-Milwaukee-cum-Atlanta Braves, Chicago-cum-St. Louis-cum-Arizona Cardinals, Cleveland Browns-cum-Baltimore Ravens and a bunch of NBA teams) called their locals’ bluff and, when rebuffed, loaded up their trucks and moved to another city.

And, since each of those teams had a lot of supporters of the voting age, mayors and other officials did their best to placate the unhappy sports minority.

The taxpayer money were spent left and right and one stadium went up right after another.

So when the MLS bigwigs conceived that “free stadium” idea, they were following a totally beaten path.

The only complication was the relative lack of popularity of soccer visavis the other sports. American football teams easily sell-out their arenas. Baseball teams may not sell out often but, with their 162 game schedule, a decent franchise exceeds 2,000,000 paying fans in seasonal attendance. That gave those leagues a strong financial and political clout.

By comparison, MLS was a red-headed stepchild. Its paying figured must have hovered around the 10,000 mark on average and many of its early matches were frequented by very small 6,000-8,000 crowds. Soccer was essentially a sport that no one paid attention to besides the diehard fanatics.

What MLS did have however was a few very powerful owners. It may have taken a few years but, in 2003, a Home Depot Center was built in the greater Los Angeles area to house the LA Galaxy and serve as a host for the winter based US national team training camp and matches. Then the Pizza Hut Park in suburban Dallas. Then the Toyota Park near Chicago. The the Dick’s Sporting Goods Park outside of Denver. Then the BMO Field for the expansion Toronto FC. And two more private/public stadiums, in Salt Lake and Utah, are underway.

The above improved the financial outlook of the league and brought in new groups of owners, as the old stalwarts AEG and HSG began to divest themselves of teams that no longer needed their support.

As the new MLS year begins, AEG and the Hunt Group only own two franchises each (LA and Houston and Columbus and Dallas respectively).

Along with new stadiums and new ownership groups came a lot of new money – the Red Bull energy drink maker from Austria, the Mexican based entrepreneur and the CD Chivas de Guadalajara and Saprissa owner Jose Vergara, a Colorado based billionaire and a part-Arsenal FC owner Stan Kroenke, et al.

New money brought in new players.

New players brought in new publicity.

New publicity brought in a real TV contract.

Which in turn helped bring more players into an MLS fold.

2008 may be a lucky thirteen after all.

It worked for Gerd Müller, you know.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

In my previous Soccerlens column, I touched on the quality of soccer/football in the top domestic US league called MLS (Major League Soccer). Clearly, the subject isn’t an entirely comfortable one for the fans of the league and most home grown American soccer fans do tend to follow it.

I follow it as well, sometimes with excitement, sometimes in bewilderment, occasionally in shame. While can provide glimpses of delightful football, it can also be the ugliest soccer on the planet.

But, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then what makes the American soccer such a frequently tepid affair? In this piece, I tend to touch on some contentious subjects that hopefully will stimulate further debate. I hope that I can be critical and fair without using the British tabloid dismissive of the 2007 LA Galaxy as a “pub team”.

Disclaimer One – These are generalities. There are indeed thumping shots, incisive passes and cheeky dribbles in the league. But an average player on an average day is what I am writing about.

Disclaimer Two – MLS is an extremely fast league, whose refereeing is usually very lax. That adds to the chaotic nature of the games. When faced against smaller, slower competitors with a lot more space on the pitch, MLS teams have been known to show reasonable brand of soccer. But this is about the MLS itself, not as it plays against other teams in various official and unofficial events.

And so, as it appears to a naked eye, these are some of the things that MLS teams don’t do as well as they should be done and as they are taught by the top tier European, African and South American teams.

Technical Skills

Ball Control

Perhaps the most obvious personal failure of a general American soccer upbringing is its lack of emphasis on the work with the ball. That produces an appalling quality from even the experienced MLS players in their 20′s. Instead of being able to settle or trap the ball with one’s foot, chest, thigh or head, the ball ricochets five to ten yards away from the player and leaves him with few options from that moment on.

Dribbling

One may well continue from above. Simply put, the US doesn’t produce any dribblers worth a farthing. The only exception is Chicago Fire’s Justin Mapp. Ask a US forward – forget about a fullback or a winger – to take his marker off the dribble or turn him around for a shot in a tight space and you will likely to get a blank stare in return. Forget Cristiano Ronaldo’s blazing runs. Forget Gerd Müller’s “turn inside four men in a phone booth”. Forget Raul’s sidewinders. When the US forward gets into a one-on-one situation, he will do one thing more than others – he will pass back.

“He’ll do what?”, a football fan will shriek in horror. Pass back? Without a dribble? Without taking a shot?

And this brings us to –

Shooting

Yes, another blank stare. The US players don’t shoot on goal. Maybe they can and choose not to. But they don’t. They – you guessed it – will pass back. In the 2006 World Cup, the US national team had three (!!!) shots on goal. Not in one half. Not in one match. In the entire tournament.

By comparison, I recall Louis Saha putting nine shots on goal all by himself in last year’s Manchester United Champions League match against FC Copenhagen. And that was before Alex Ferguson subbed him out of the game.

These statistics are not incidental. They are symptomatic of the US approach to the game.

Crossing

Virtually regardless whether off the run of play or set pieces, American players have an amazing difficulty delivering a precise cross to a desired spot with pace and accuracy. The ironic part of this shortcoming is that MLS has perhaps the best crosser in the world in David Beckham. The gap between his serves and that of an average MLS “specialist” is a gap between a hot-dog vendor and a four-star restaurant in Paris.

Tactical Nightmares

Faced with what would be considered incompetence by any European league higher than pub, the MLS coaches reacted appropriately – they dumbed down their game plans, so a player without a dribbling/shooting/passing/crossing ability would fit right in.

The first thing they did was to make sure that each MLS player could run. And run they can. They can run fast and they can run long. They do it so well, it took AC Milan’s Carlo Ancelotti well into second half to figure out what to do with a trifling Chicago Fire squad during a friendly several summers ago because Milan was getting overrun on pure speed.

But the dumbing down of American soccer has negative effects. Players who end up auditioning with European clubs are often ridiculed for their tactical naivete.

And this is why:

Passing

On the whole, MLS passes are short and lateral and, if long and vertical, they are often off target. Most MLS coaches loathe long passes. If you saw them land in the fifth row, you would too. But slow lateral safe passes don’t exactly make a European scout salivate.

Decision-making

When one’s second option on every play is to pass the ball backward, most of the daring factor has been taken out of an MLS game. Sometimes this gets comical results when a forward retrieves the ball in the deep offensive zone toward, only to stop and pass it forty yards back to one of his fullbacks … who then promptly turns around and passes it back to his own goalkeeper. With his team trailing by two goals late in the game.

Off-the-ball movement

It doesn’t exist. When a player has the ball, his team mates make an eye contact and wait for a pass. Whoever is open gets that pass. Naturally, the only person open for a pass is behind the play. A tic-tac-toe movement that copies Arsenal or Brazil is not something that an MLS coach ever saw and liked.

Transition game

You may see Tottenham or Everton go from a deep turnover near own penalty box to the other box in 8-10 seconds. A quick outlet pass from a defender to a midfielder that is followed by a long pass to a forward in space is virtually an unheard of practice in MLS. Often an MLS team will take half a minute to cross a half-field line … a top MLS team.

Switch of play

Another tactics that MLS teams simply don’t do. You often see players locked in a semi-circle make short passes into traffic while their teammate is open 40 yards away to no avail.

After reading all this, a reader may ask himself – but how do these guys score? I’ve seen the results on the Internet. MLS games don’t all end in scoreless draws.

And the simplest reply is that way too many MLS goals are scored off someone’s mistake. Often it’s mental – an inability to track a runner or to take a proper position. Sometimes, it’s physical – a bungled cross, a fumbled save, a typical garbage goal.

Of course, MLS is not all skill bereft. Its owners are importing an occasional quality player and nowadays some quality coaches. Better American players learn from these imports, be they Juan Pablo Angel, Guillermo Barros Schelotto or David Beckham. But the rank-n-file does not.

And the above factors often turn MLS into a gang that couldn’t shoot – or cross – straight.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Dan Leo takes an in-depth look at US Soccer, the problems it faces and what the future holds for soccer in America.

Soccer isn’t big in the US. It’s not a major sport. It’s not even a second tier sport. It’s below that.

The top American soccer league MLS draws the attendance numbers similar to small European nations, which makes it an insignificant presence on the American sports scene.
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Generous FIFA and Elo Ratings

FIFA has the US ranked at 28, while Elo has them at 29. Both are probably tad too generous, as the US national team plays far too many matches at home and against weak CONCACAF opposition. It rarely meets a quality international squad under a duress of sanctioned competition. The last time the US sent a squad – albeit of a B/C level - to an international event, it lost three straight games at Copa America with a 2-8 goal difference.

Major League Soccer is no great shakes either. In a recently completed Pan-Pacific tournament, the MLS champion Houston Dynamo was trounced 6:1 in the final by the Japanese Gamba Osaka club that was missing its top six Japanese players due to their national team commitment.
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Demand for Yanks Abroad

The worldwide demand for the American born and MLS bred players is lukewarm at best. Marginal USNT performers like Pat Noonan (Aalesund) and Clarence Goodson (IF Start) could only find employment with the smaller Norwegian clubs. A once promising starlet Eddie Johnson was sold for relatively low (reported as $2M) fee to the relegation battling Fulham. Other players left on a free and signed with third tier European teams.

Americans already in Europe don’t fare much better. Outside of a few exemplary performances by the US goalkeepers (Blackburn’s Brad Friedel and Everton’s Tim Howard), most Americans are employed by the dregs of the Premiership – Derby County, Fulham and Reading.

Not a single American field player can be found with clubs that survived the New Year in the two major UEFA competitions – the Champions League and UEFA Cup.

And yet, the overall hopes and reams of the US soccer can be qualified as optimistic.
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World Cup 1994 Opened the Gates

All one has to do is to look back to the year 1990. While the soccer (aka football) world was preoccupied with Maradona vs. Romario, Völler vs. Rijkjaard and Beckenbauer vs. Beenhakker duels in its quadrennial event, the US sent a team of amateurs, college students and part-timers to Italy. The US youngsters were clearly “just happy to be there” and promptly went out after losing three games in a row.

But the big change took place between that World Cup and the one held four years later in the US. For the 1994 competition, the US Soccer Federation hired an experienced Serbian coach Bora Milutinovic. Playing not to lose but hoping to win, Bora played an exceedingly cautious football and waited to capitalize on a lucky bounce. He was aided in his strategy by a motley crew of naturalized foreigners (Fernando Clavijo, Roy Wegerle), the newly discovered Yanks-by-blood (Earnie Stewart and Tom Dooley), a sprinkling of the European based professionals (John Harkes, Eric Wynalda, Tab Ramos) and a few recent US college graduates (Marcelo Balboa, Tony Meola, Cobi Jones, Alexi Lalas, Mike Sorber) to form a united, if not always coherent, group.

The bounces also went Yanks’ way, especially when the late Colombian defender Andres Escobar deflected an innocent looking John Harkes’ cross into his own net for the only US victory of the Cup.

It may have been ugly but the US qualified for the knock-out round where it ended up losing to a 10-man Brazil on a late goal by Bebeto.

Ugliness or not, the US was afflicted – albeit temporarily – by soccer fever.

It went away soon, as the US performances dropped off its 1994 high and its new home league showed a remarkably poor brand of soccer that brought few to the stadiums and too few to a nearby TV screen.

It took eight more years for the US soccer to begin feeling good about itself.

In 2002, this time under an American born coach Bruce Arena, the US made it all the way to the Quarter-Finals. While it again needed prodigious quantities of luck – in the last group stage game, the already qualified South Korea defeated a much more talented Portuguese squad - it also benefited from a much improved roster of pros. Brad Friedel by then was ably performing in the nets for Blackburn while Kasey Keller did likewise for Real Vallecano. Tony Sanneh, Claudio Reyna, John O’Brien, Earnie Stewart, Frankie Hejduk, Gregg Berhalter, Eddie Lewis, David Regis, Joe-Max Moore had various degrees of success along the European battlefront. Even some MLS based players (Landon Donovan, Brian McBride) had a cup of coffee in Europe and weren’t intimidated by the big stage.

Since then, Arena’s tactical shortcomings led to a poor US showing at the 2006 WC and the less can be said about Arena’s successor Bob Bradley, the better.
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Subtle Yet Positive Improvement

However, the general state of the US soccer has shown subtle improvement in many areas.

More and more Yanks depart for Europe and establish a bridgehead for other Americans. At this point, over 20 American players are found in top ten European leagues with many youngsters recruited for the pros straight out of high school. The MLS quality, while uneven, has slowly improved over the years and allowed it to be very competitive visavis its nearest and biggest rival, Mexico. The recent infusion of foreign talent, on the pitch and on the bench alike, can only bode well for the league’s future.

The national team managed to eke out a win in the 2007 Gold Cup, and will head to South Africa in 2009 as the CONCACAF representative. The team may lack the tactical nuance of the top world nations but it’s athletic and hard working. Give it another Bora and another knock-out round World Cup appearance can’t be ruled out.

Now where does one go to find another Bora? There surely has to be one available.

P.S. Below is my list of American players based in Europe that have been either capped in the recent past or stand a good chance to get capped in the near future. Just note that any of these lists are by nature incomplete and presumptive.
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Goalkeepers:

Tim Howard (Everton)
Kasey Keller (Fulham)
Marcus Hahnemann (Reading)

Two recent arrivals – QPR’s Matt Pickens and Valerenga’s Troy Perkins – may be candidates for the job as well. The reigning MLS GK of the Year Brad Guzan‘s transfer to Aston Villa was canceled in late January due to his inability to obtain the work permit but he looks to be headed back to Villa in the summer anyway.
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Defenders:

Steve Cherundolo (Hannover 96)
Oguchi Onyewu (Standard Liege)
Carlos Bocanegra (Fulham)
Heath Pearce (Hansa Rostock)
Jay Demerit (Watford)
Cory Gibbs (Charlton)
Jon Spector (West Ham)
Danny Califf (Aalborg)
Clarence Goodson (IF Start)
Frank Simek (Sheffield Wednesday)
Eddie Lewis (Derby County)

The great unknown here is Neven Subotic, a rising star of Mainz 05 in Germany’s second Bundesliga. The 19 year old had played for the US U-17 team but is also eligible for Bosnia and Serbia due to his birth in the former Yugoslavia.
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Midfielders:

Michael Bradley (Heerenveen)
Benny Feilhaber (Derby County)
DaMarcus Beasley (Rangers)
Bobby Convey (Reading)
Sal Zizzo (Hannover 96)
Lee Nguyen (Randers)
Josh Wolff (TSV 1860)
Jeremiah White (Aarhus)
Freddy Adu (Benfica),
Clint Dempsey (Fulham)
Danny Szetela (Brescia)
Bryan Arquez (Hertha Berlin).

Eddie Lewis has also played in left midfield for the US.
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Forwards:

Eddie Johnson (Fulham)
Pat Noonan (Aalesund)
Charlie Davies (Hammarby)
Nate Jaqua (Altach)

Josmer “Jozy” Altidore, the 18 year old star striker of the New York Red Bull, was rumored to be almost sold to Reading during the January transfer window but the deal hit the snag at the last moment. Jozy, as he is called in the US, will likely go in 2008 or 2009 at the latest.

It’s not difficult to see where the US is most bereft and where it’s most affluent.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

This article is a submission for the Soccerlens Football Writing Competition; to participate, please read the details here.

This article was first published at World Football Commentaries.

Recently, David Beckham disclosed that he may return to Europe after the MLS season is over. Some in the media, both mainstream and soccer-specific, have criticized this potential move.

It actually makes a lot of sense for Becks.

Here are a few reasons why:

• He rests between early September and January. That’s 4 months and is far longer than a regular European player receives.
• He then arrives to Tottenham, Fulham, Newcastle, ManCity, Aston Villa by the middle of December, has Christmas with the family, and trains with his new club for a few weeks. Then he is ready to go after the New Year when the Premiership is loaded with fixtures and all clubs need depth.
• If England is through to the Euro 08, he returns to the US for about six weeks, then goes back to England for their training camp. ESPN has the broadcasting rights, and they can promote it massively.
• He then returns to the US as an MLS registered player without having to wait for the summer transfer window to open whenever England is knocked out (i.e., the group stage).

For MLS:

It gets the “relevance/acceptance” factor – the guy can still play on a high level. It uses his BPL play as promotion for the 2008 season, and then still gets to use him once the season begins.

For ESPN/2:

Should England make it to European finals, the network will have a Beckham based Euro bonanza. It may even send Dave O’Brien over there to make sure the word Beckham is pronounced every two minutes on the dot. Plus, it will enjoy the renewed hype upon his return (hopefully, with his ankles intact) to the US.

For England:

Steve McLaren actually gets to train someone with a crossing ability to find the heads of Peter Crouch and Michael Owen. The Beckhamania takes away the attention away from Steve’s rather dubious coaching ability and tenuous hold on his job. Plus, if England fails to achieve Euro glory, there’s a convenient fall guy.

For His English Club:

Whichever English team lands him – a lot of £££’s. Is that not enough? Okay, here’s some more – £££££.

For Next Coach of the Galaxy:

Now he’ll only have to find nine more players (GK Joe Cannon is solid) to field a competitive LA Galaxy squad for 2008.

So, this is basically a win-win-win-win-win-win situation.

Where do I sign up?

This article is a submission for the Soccerlens Football Writing Competition; to participate, please read the details here.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News