Category: Soccer

Clint Dempsey!

by A.J. Coltrane

Clint Dempsey! And I couldn’t be happier about it! The Sounders inked the #1 or #1a USMT player for the rest of this season and three years beyond it.

Grant Wahl, on how the deal got done:

…He was up for coming back to MLS, but the only teams he was interested in playing for were Seattle, Los Angeles and Toronto. What’s more, Dempsey’s side was asking for a huge financial commitment: $40 million at first. According to a source with intimate knowledge of the deal, Seattle countered with a first offer of $30 million — $20 million of its own money and $10 million from the league — including the transfer fee to Tottenham.

Los Angeles and Toronto were also interested in ponying up for Dempsey, multiple sources said, but Toronto (which is working on its own Designated Player deals) accepted that it was better for the league if Dempsey were playing in a U.S. city. Moreover, Los Angeles is expected to announce soon that it has filled its maximum three DP slots with the extension of Omar González’s contract.

“I think it was important that [Dempsey] ended up … how do I say this politely? … not in Los Angeles,” said Roth. “Because from a perception standpoint it would make MLS look essentially like a one-team league when it came to important international players. The Red Bulls are probably in there as well. But if not us, who? We double the attendance of everybody else [in MLS]. We’re in the top 25 in the world in attendance. I had promised the team if there was an available star player we would get him, and I thought he was a perfect match for Seattle.”

From July 18 to July 20, Seattle’s owners put together their best possible offer, and with Durbin handling the negotiations a deal took shape that involved a total commitment of $33 million. The transfer fee for Tottenham would end up being $9 million, and Dempsey’s three-and-a-half year playing contract with Seattle would end up paying him a total of $24 million — or $6.86 million per year, breaking David Beckham’s MLS record salary of $6.5 million. (Keep in mind that Beckham also earned a percentage of ticket and jersey sales.)

Pretty awesome. Dempsey is my favorite U.S. player. He’s 30, so the Sounders get his late prime plus additional tread left on the tires. As of today, he’s the probably the best player in the league.

The Sounders offense is going to be scaaaarrrry! Dempsey and Eddie Johnson supported by Obafemi Martins, Lamar Neagle, Brad Evans, Mauro Rosales, Steve Zakuani, Osvaldo Alonzo… that’s a ton of talent.

I’ll say it again! Awesome!

The MLS Expands…Again

By Iron Chef Leftovers

I almost spit out my coffee when I saw that the MLS wants to expand again and add another team in the New York City area. Here is a quote from the ever delusional MLS Prez, Don Garber:

“This market has 19 million people in the region and is soccer hungry,” said MLS commissioner Don Garber. “With the Red Bulls here, we have the opportunity for a rival — a derby, if you will — that will break through the clutter of sports teams in this market and will work on the local, national and global levels.”

Ok, sure. The market has 19 million people but it has never really embraced the MLS. The team has averaged about 75% capacity over the 3 seasons they have occupied Red Bull Arena and their average of 18,804 per game there is only slightly higher than it was at Giants Stadium. Red Bull Arena sits right on 2 mass transit lines, has easy highway access, plenty of parking and is in the middle of an area that has a high immigrant population, which usually means more soccer support. The problem that the MLS has is that those people know what good soccer looks like and the MLS isn’t it. There is a reason why you don’t see the US National team playing home games in NY/NJ during the World Cup qualifying – it turns into a virtual home game for their opponent.

That being said, is the talent level in the MLS really that good that they can dilute it down further without compromising the “quality” of the product? I don’t think they can. The season is early, but the attendance is down league-wide this year – Only DC, Montreal, Dallas and Portland have seen any increase in attendance (well technically KC also, but their average has gone up 9 per game). Even the Sounders have seen a significant drop in attendance this year. Last year they drew 66,000 for a game against Portland. This year – just a shade over 40,000.

What this is all about is money and brand. The new NY club will be owned by the Steinbrenners (of NY Yankee fame) and Sheik Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (owner of Manchester City). Since both of these owners have very deep pockets and the MLS has very liberal rules about skirting the salary cap when it comes to foreign players, you can expect this team to be stocked with over-paid, past their prime players from Europe who have name recognition, a la David Beckham. That is not good for the long term success of the MLS and is exactly what brought down the NASL.

Considering that teams like Chivas, New England, Dallas and San Jose don’t draw well, the league might just be better served moving one of those teams to NY. Honestly, the league would probably be better served putting another team in Seattle over NY – right now, I believe the only cities that could support a second team attendance wise would be either Seattle or Portland.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Wembley

By Blaidd Drwg

I had given serious thought to doing a post on the NBA and Seattle or even the first active gay athlete in major professional sports in the US, but then I decided that, based on the happenings in the Champions League, that would be a more interesting post.

Will Bayern Munich be celebrating in Wembley Stadium at the end of the month? Only time will tell. Photo Credit: espn.com
Will Bayern Munich be celebrating in Wembley Stadium at the end of the month? Only time will tell.
Photo Credit: espn.com

If you are not familiar with the Champions League, it is basically the World Series of European Club soccer. Each season, the top teams from all of the major leagues go through several rounds of games until one team is left standing and is crowned champions. This year, the semi-finals ended up with 2 Germany vs. Spain matchups with Bayern Munich squaring off versus Barcelona and Dortmund squaring off against Real Madrid.

If you follow European soccer at all, you know that Bayern, Barca and Real are considered to be 3 of the absolute best in the world. If you had asked me at the start of the semis who would advance, I would have put my money on Bayern and Real. It is a good thing that I did not.

Dortmund did not have the world’s toughest (or smoothest) path to the semis, although they did manage to make it through the group stage besting both Ajax and Manchester City. They knocked off Shakhtar Donetsk in the round of 16 and barely got by Malaga in the quarter finals with 2 goals after the 90 minute mark in the second leg of their bout. If they would not have scored the second goal, Malaga would have advanced to the semis instead. Malaga and Shakhtar are both good teams, but not elite, so the expectation was going to be that Real would destroy Dortmund.

A funny thing happened on the way to the finals. In the first leg of Dortmund-Real series, Dortmund lit up an overmatched Real team to the tune of 4-1 with all 4 goals coming from one player – Robert Lewandowski. Real did not roll over and play dead in the second leg, scoring 2 goals in the last 10 minutes to take a 2-0 lead. Dortmund survived a furious onslaught at the end of the game and did not give up any more goals (a 3-0 Real win would have put them through to the finals) to advance to the finals.

Bayern, on the other hand, is on fire. They crushed Juventus in the quarter finals 4-0 aggregate and then utterly destroyed Barca 7(!)-0 aggregate in the semis. Keep in mind that Barca is the team with Lionel Messi, the goal scoring machine who is considered to be the best player on the planet right now. To beat the best club in Italy AND the best club in Spain is difficult at best. To destroy and dominate those two teams is virtually impossible.

If I were a betting man on the finals, how would I bet? Bayern has a 2-0-1 record against Dortmund this season and is 20 points up on them in the Bundesliga with 3 games to go. They do have one more game to play head-to-head on Saturday, but I suspect that Bayern won’t be playing most of their regular players. Bayern is on fire and going to be a heavy favorite on May 25th at Wembley Stadium and that is probably who I would put my money on. But a funny thing happened on the road to Wembley…

Attacking the Zone

By Blaidd Drwg

I have seen goalies play up late in the game to try to give their teams an advantage on the attack when they are behind, but this is brilliant.

The scene is set in the offensive end of the field and the attacking team’s goalie (the one in the yellow jersey) is near the attacking goal. What happens next is a brilliant way to recover.

The full story can be found here.

Brazil Preparing For World Cup

by A.J. Coltrane

From Sports Illustrated:

Prostitutes in one of Brazil’s biggest cities are beginning to sign up for free English classes ahead of this year’s Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup.

Cida Vieira, president of the Association of Prostitutes in the city of Belo Horizonte, said Tuesday that 20 have already signed up for the courses and she expects at least 300 of the group’s 4,000 members to follow suit. The association is organizing the classes and seeking volunteer teachers.

…and the part that I found amusing:

“I don’t think we will have problems persuading English teachers to provide services for free,” she said. “We already have several volunteer psychologists and doctors helping us.”

How about that?! I guess you could say that English speaking soccer fans will be in good hands during the World Cup!

FIFA, the MLS and Popularity

By Blaidd Drwg with AJ Coltrane

Recently, MLS president Don Garber responded to FIFA president Sepp Baltter’s criticism of the MLS. Basically, Blatter was critical of the MLS for not promoting soccer enough in the US. I can understand where the comments come from – the United States is a rich market that FIFA would love to get millions of dollars in revenue from and it hasn’t been able to since soccer is arguably the 5th most popular professional sport here, behind football, basketball, baseball and hockey.

While I am no fan of Blatter, he has a point. A few reasons why:

  • The U.S. initially dropped the ball on getting a league going – it took 2 years after the 1994 World Cup for the MLS to start play and they lost any momentum that might have been gained to increase popularity. The US has a large immigrant population that is a ready base for soccer fandom, and by waiting, these people went right back to watching the club teams from their respective countries and didn’t give the MLS much thought on its inception.

 

  • The league did very little to bring in names that most Americans recognized, even from their own national team. Most of the players from that 1994 World Cup team went back to Europe to play club soccer, leaving the league essentially with secondary national team players and college kids. Couple that with a strict salary cap and this contributed to some pretty lousy soccer.

 

  • There is no relegation system. The league won’t improve if there is no incentive to get better. You drop the bottom two teams every year and bring up the top 2 from the 1st Division and you will improve the league in a hurry.

Garber points to the league’s success based with the following:

The league has set attendance records in the past six years, as the average has increased from 15,504 in 2006 to 17,872 in 2011 and a record 18,807 in 2012.

That is a 21% increasing in attendance. Sound good, huh? Well, it is technically true, but not quite the way that Garber wants it to be. Between 2006 and 2008, the league’s average attendance increased from 15,504 to 16,460, or about 6%. Nothing spectacular, but not horrible either, about 2% annually. Then, in 2009, the league opened up an outpost in Seattle. With the Sounders drawing 30,000+ a game, the league attendance jumped 14% between 2009 and 20012. If you take the Sounders out of the equation, league attendance between 2008 and 2012 jumped just 6%. That is incredibly slow annualized growth for the league (around 1.5%) when you take out the rabid Sounders fans.

The other comment I took issue with that Garber made:

“If he were to come to a game — whether it be in Seattle, Portland, Toronto, LA, Philadelphia, New York or any of our MLS markets — I think he would be very pleasantly surprised to see the passion that exists in our fan base and the high level of soccer IQ that exists in our fan base,” Garber told mlssoccer.com.

The passion is a bit overstated. Yes, Seattle has turned out to be a fantastic soccer market and there are plenty of people here who are causal fans. The same situation exists to an extent in Vancouver and Portland. Outside of that, unless you are actually attending games in many of the other markets, the fan base is almost non-existent. I can tell you from the time that I have spent in NY, Boston, LA, SF and Toronto, soccer is an afterthought in those cities. Heck, in Boston, I would be willing to bet that MLS soccer ranks below college sports in terms of popularity. So, Mr. Garber, if you want to impress FIFA, take them to a game in Seattle. If you want them to think they are right about their comments, take them to a game anywhere else.

Coltrane, the Sounders supporter he is, has a different take on this:

My take on it is that the FIFA president was talking out of his ass. I feel that the MLS commissioner has a much better grasp of his marketplace than the FIFA president does. If I were the MLS commissioner, I would have been “surprised” too. Soccer growth in the US is not going to happen overnight, or even over the 20ish years that the MLS has had so far. Establishing the sport will take another generation or two — when I was growing up all the dads/coaches would just roll the ball out there because none of them had played. It’s now getting to the point where dads who played are bringing sons to games to share the game they love (and coaching the kids) – just like baseball or some of the other “established” sports. I got the feeling from the FIFA president quote that he felt that his “beautiful game” was just going to roll into the US and take over the sporting landscape, and he was shocked that it hasn’t happened yet, which is ridiculous.

The Sounder’s Eddie Johnson Scores Two For The US

by A.J. Coltrane

There was a lot of surprised reaction last week when Jozy Alitodore was left off of the US squad for the two upcoming World Cup qualifiers. To quote Wahl:

Coach Jurgen Klinsmann left forward Jozy Altidore off his squad for the U.S.’s two important upcoming World Cup qualifiers, a decision that may well be the most surprising of Klinsmann’s 14-month tenure.

It’s true that Altidore has not had a standout year for the U.S., providing no goals and one assist in two starts and four substitute appearances. With Hérculez Gómez and Clint Dempsey expected to start up top in Friday’s qualifier at Antigua and Barbuda, it would not have been surprising to see Altidore come off the bench as a second-half sub. But for Altidore to be omitted entirely from the 24-man squad is a shock. (Pure forwards Gómez, Eddie Johnson and Alan Gordon are on the roster instead.)

After all, Altidore, 22, is tied for the Dutch league lead in goals with eight for AZ Alkmaar, including a terrific slaloming strike Sept. 30. The World Cup 2010 veteran has also played in a team-leading 17 straight World Cup qualifiers for the U.S. and brings big-game experience to the table. Under Klinsmann, the U.S. has scored more than one goal just three times in the coach’s 18 games, which makes you wonder why he would leave the U.S.’ most prolific European-based goal-scorer at the moment off the squad.

It worked out. Eddie Johnson scored two goals to lead the US against Antigua and Barbuda:

In his first game back with the U.S. national team, Johnson scored twice Friday night, including the winning goal in second-half injury time, lifting the United States to the verge of advancing in World Cup qualifying with a nervous 2-1 victory over Antigua and Barbuda.

If the Americans draw with Guatemala on Tuesday night in Kansas City, Kan., they will move into the final round of CONCACAF qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The U.S. has 10 points and so does Guatemala after a 2-1 win over Jamaica.

Johnson connected on headers in the 20th minute and then in the dying moments in his first game for the U.S. team in two years. He was added to the squad by coach Jurgen Klinsmann, ostensibly replacing the disappointing Jozy Altidore, and the move paid off.

“It’s good to be back in the mix,” Johnson said. “Going into this game the coach has a ton of confidence in me to put me wide out on the wing.”

“We have a world class coach who played at the highest level. He knows the game.”

And the correct quotes after the game.

Johnson was something of a speculative pickup by the Sounders prior to the season. He’s now 5th in the league in scoring, ahead of even Fredy Montero (7th). Their production has contributed to the Sounders +17 goal differential, good for 2nd in MLS. The team is advancing to the playoffs.

Everything else aside, he’s a huge upgrade from Nate Jacqua and he’s been really fun to watch.

 

——-

That last link is an excellent read. Here’s something I didn’t know:  Of Johnson’s 14 goals, 9 have come off of headers.

The Election Is Near!

by A.J. Coltrane

No, not that one. To quote SI’s Grant Wahl:

What are your thoughts on how the Sounders are handling the vote to retain or fire GM Adrian Hanauer?
— Matt Koppelman

I love it. The lowdown: On Oct. 7, Seattle season ticket holders will begin voting yay or nay in a vote of confidence on Hanauer. If he gets less than 50 percent support, Hanauer is out as GM. If he gets more than 50 percent, he stays. It’s the first vote of its kind in U.S. sports, and the idea came from the team’s part owner, the comedian Drew Carey.

“I was doing a show for the Travel Channel on the Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry,” Carey told me last year. “In the Barcelona museum I talked to a guard, and he said there was an election coming up. Every four years they have an election for the president of the club. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’d like to see George Steinbrenner do that. I would love to bring that to the U.S.'”

When Carey first met Joe Roth, now Seattle’s principal owner, “All we did was talk soccer the whole lunch,” said Carey, who ended up signing on with him to invest in a new MLS team in Seattle. “I spent the whole time telling him about fans voting their president out. … The fans will do the dirty work for you. I always gave the Detroit Lions as an example: Matt Millen. He was there so long and made so many bad picks, but the Lions’ owners didn’t care. In my system with the Sounders, the fans could have fired Matt Millen.

“Joe bought into it, and we worked out the system. The vote is every four years. If the fans want to, they can get 20 percent of the members to sign a petition, and then they can have the vote any year they want.”

Granted, the stakes of the upcoming vote aren’t as high as they could be for Hanauer, who would remain as a part-owner of the Sounders even if he’s tossed out as the general manager. Then again, I expect Hanauer will receive a vote of confidence: Seattle has been a tremendous success story in terms of fan interest and on-field success, especially in winning three U.S. Open Cups from 2009-11. The next big hurdle is for the Sounders to win their first MLS playoff series.

As for the four-year term – it’s on the short end of reasonable for soccer, since highly drafted players should be close to performing with the “big club” soon after their acquisition. If franchises were to try something like this in baseball it would require a six or seven year term — it takes the cumulative effects of multiple drafts and trades over a period of years to determine if the GM is competent or not. (However, if M’s fans could have fired Bavasi after four years it would have avoided some of the worst of the damage to the player base. And it would have been blindingly obvious it was time for him to go.)

The real danger here, of course, is that most sports “fans” are by definition… maybe not clueless, but definitely “underinformed” and generally not the most rational bunch of folks, at least with respect to their favorite teams. I think this is especially true with sports where there are few quantifiable and publicly available statistics. Such as soccer.

This will be the first vote on the Sounders GM position, and letting the inmates run the asylum rarely works out well. With as successful as the Sounders have been, I hope that nothing interesting happens and that Hanauer easily wins re-election. We’ll see.

60,000 Free Haircuts

by A.J. Coltrane

Quoting the Sounders program:  “For the third-straight year Sounders FC broke the MLS attendance record in 2011, averaging 38,496 per MLS home match. Seattle has sold out 60-straight MLS regular season and playoff matches.”

It goes on to point out that the Sounders 2012 attendance (39,527) would rank them 7th in the English Premier League, right behind Chelsea.

The Sounders sold 60,905 tickets to the latest LA Galaxy game. The Sounders scored four goals that day, which meant free haircuts for everybody.

Beats the heck out of the old Sonics “Chalupa” promotion — If the Sonics scored 119 points then the fans would win a buy-one-get-0ne-free Chalupa. People would still chant “Chalupa, Chalupa, Chalupa”, when the game was a blowout but the Sonics were close to 119 points. Then the stadium would erupt when the Sonics got there.

People are easy to please. Though I’m happier with the free haircut.