Steve Davis' weekly column, drilling down on five hot topics in American soccer
1. Big night feel for Saturday’s MLS Cup final
To understand what Saturday night’s final could mean for Major League Soccer, let’s walk back for a moment to 2009.
Seattle was the scene for as the L.A. Galaxy-Real Salt Lake matchup unfolded at then-named Qwest Field. I was in the stadium tunnel as players, coaches and the suits from each side arrived for their day-before practice 24 hours prior to kickoff.
Outside the ground there was a real buzz in the city; the Sounders had joined MLS only that season but the flame had long burned for pro soccer throughout the Pacific Northwest. Which is why, back in the day of neutral site finals, league leaders selected Seattle to host their showcase event.
The teeming energy was a marked contrast to a year before, when Los Angeles hosted Columbus and New York in the 2008 MLS Cup final. It’s just too hard to make an impact in L.A., a huge planet all to its own, really, with wildly divergent interests. And without a home team to trumpet? Forget about it.
But in Seattle that year … now that was a scene, man. It was all about the downtown venue, the march to the match, the sincere excitement of a city that had waited for this moment, enthusiasm and conversation dented but not broken by the absence of its own beloved club.
I remember having a conversation down on the field that day with Dave Checketts, who owned RSL at the time. He and others recognized the moment, the palpable buzz and energy that was possible with MLS Cup … a peppy verve that’s just impossible to achieve in most neutral sites. Now here’s the kicker:
This was the birth of an idea, the MLS Cup where the notion of “home site finals” gained real traction, where league leaders put the concept on the table and begin turning it around for multi-angle examination. As Checketts mentioned it casually that day, it was the first I had heard serious conversations about it, something more than wild, “What if one day … ?”
The owners began to “get it,” that regularly duplicating the spirit coursing through Seattle was all about getting home teams involved.
Good ideas need time to percolate. Plus, there were logistical hurdles. And there was some institutional push-back, since neutral site finals had long been the MLS way. Plus, it was the NFL way, long an important guiding framework for pro soccer in our land. All of which is why this idea took another three years to implement. “Home team finals” that followed in Los Angeles, Kansas City and Columbus were fine, bearing out some of the potential league leaders saw back in 2009.
But Saturday’s final in Toronto – this one will bring it all home.
If you watched Toronto’s drama-packed second-leg clincher against Montreal, you saw a genuine “big event” heat framing the cold night. That was for a “semifinal,” and on a weeknight, no less.
Now imagine an actual final – on a Saturday night. This really has the potential to be a game-changer for MLS. Not a long touchdown pass, to use an American football analogy, but sometime more like a meaty 20-yard pickup – and those are important, too. To whatever degree, it could be a nice, incremental boost in broader appeal, which is always welcome for MLS. Even the weather is cooperating in a couple of ways.
Forecasts of snow flurries and temps in the 20s will add even more snap to the occasion. And with arctic blasts of nasty winds blanketing the east, more folks will stay in, hunker down and … maybe watch some sports.
What they’ll see is theater, energy, noise and a genuine tension that only an impassioned, invested home crowd can provide. Seattle and Toronto will be on the field, but count on “MLS” as the real winner Saturday in the big picture.
2. So long, Steven Lenhart
MLS needs villains. Of course it does.
It’s bigger than that even; pro sports need villains. Just look at wrestling – not even a sport, but the essential “good guy v. bad guy” construct has driven that wacky circus act for decades.
So, sure, there’s a place for guys like Steven Lenhart, the bushy head of mayhem who careened around the field for San Jose and Columbus for seven-plus seasons, scoring some goals and racking up scorn like few before or after him. Injuries took him out of the game for a couple of years, and his MLS departure became more or less official as San Jose just declined to exercise the option on his contract.
Quietly, it’s a nice step forward for the league, a chance to “move on from some bad, old days.”
This isn’t about the guy himself; I’ll leave the personal acrimony for others. It wasn’t Lenhart the person who got my goat. What some of us didn’t appreciate was what he represented: Lenhart was the walking, talking embodiment of a league that struggled with the tricky balance of skill and brute force, a league that often couldn’t control its bad actors.
Lenhart was half of the Earthquakes’ “Bash Brothers” tandem a few years ago – and he was the bigger wrecking ball. Recognizing that they could probably call a foul on the San Jose striker every time he was around the ball, referees too often “punted.” Too many times, exhausted by the futility of the effort, they just took a pass and let him get away with his mess. Which made for some seriously ugly, unskillful play, the kind of combat-soccer that MLS has rightly, mercifully, shed gradually.
Lenhart was just too much to deal with – the out-of-control kid that exasperated parents might finally just let loose in the restaurant because they are out of energy in attempts to control him.
Now MLS won’t need to deal with Lenhart. Hopefully they’ll get ahead in efforts to control the next mayhem maker.
3. Looks like the North American Soccer League is done
Sadly, now, when we all talk about the unfortunate NASL collapse, we’ll have to ask the question, “Which one?”
The “new” North American Soccer League looks to be the next headstone in the graveyard of U.S. professional soccer leagues. The demise of any pro league in our land is nothing to celebrate. Whether MLS saw the ambitious NASL as a competitor or not, nothing good comes from it.
On the other hand, there’s no reason to buy heavily into some of the dire warnings. Charles Boehm, a respected, veteran writer and one of the real thinkers among American soccer journalists, saidthis via Twitter: “If NASL is indeed doomed, it will - sooner or later - be missed in ways that we don't even fully comprehend yet. Speak no ill of the dying.”
He might be correct. And there is the sad factor of “jobs lost,” to consider. Plus, a few naysayers will be temporarily empowered by the league’s demise, especially in the cities affected.
But quite honestly, the NASL didn’t have a big enough footprint, nor large enough imprint nationally for its departure to make much of a mark. More to the point, professional soccer has survived much worse than this, and won’t suffer terribly in this instance.
Important to remember here is a lesson I picked up long, long ago: Never conflate “success of soccer” in this country with the success or failure of any single pro soccer league.
There are just too many people in this land who love the game. Perhaps they don’t love MLS. But they do love the national team. Or international soccer. Or women’s soccer. Or La Liga, or LigaMX, or the Premier League or whatever.
Soccer is fine. It’s the building, nurturing and sustaining of soccer leagues that is so difficult. (Actually, building new leagues in any sport is tough.)
Oh, FYI: if the United States does not qualify for the 2018 World Cup … guess what? Even that will not have soccer collapsing in on itself here. It would sting, for sure, but the game would most certainly survive that, too.
4. A good start in Atlanta – but don’t get a big head, guys!
Good things seem to be happening with Atlanta United, where lessons learned from past expansion teams (and from the league at large) seem absorbed and properly heeded. Paul Tenorio (full disclosure: he’s a colleague of mine on a site where my writing also appears) lays out the case pretty wellin this piece from FourFourTwo.
Going young and “mid-level” on a DP attacker signing is smart, although the reported $8.5 million transfer price for Paraguayan international Miguel Almirón looks a little steep. The club also with young with another DP signing, Argentine winger Hector Villalba. Both players are 22 years old.
Hiring Tata Martino, a real name in global soccer, certainly shows ambition. And the club clearly has kicked up a fuss in the city; more than 22,000 season tickets are already on the books.
So, things seem to be on the right track – but this an official “Don’t get carried away” warning. And it’s also a heads-up to anyone around the Georgia club: start believing your own press clippings and things will almost certainly go off track.
First, the facts: over the last dozen years, 11 expansion teams have launched in Major League Soccer. Only one (Seattle in 2009) made the playoffs in its expansion season. One! Expansion clubs average just above 8.5 wins in their first season. (Adjusted for today’s slightly longer seasons, we’ll call it 9.5.) Either way, 2016 playoff teams averaged almost 13.5 wins. So you see the math at work here.
The real trouble dwells in the toxicity of bloated expectations. This particular little devil seems to get all of them!
Adrian Heath, for instance, did himself no favors by warning that Orlando City, in its expansion season in 2015, was a threat to win MLS Cup. Not just to make the playoffs, but to win the whole banana!
North of there about the same time, it was the suits (rather than the manager) setting the bar way too high at NYCFC. They pretty much demanded that Jason Kreis make the playoffs the first year because … well, because they were NYCFC! That’s just hubris at work.
When teams aren’t realistic about expectations, decisions get made accordingly. So it’s not the ambition, per se, that gets teams into trouble; rather, it’s the personnel decisions (on the roster, and on who gets the minutes) that reflect those unrealistic expectations. In other words, they make decisions for the moment rather than the long-term good.
Atlanta United has a pair of promising 22-year-old attackers, and probably a couple of other roster cornerstones still to come. That’s great! Let them learn the league, sort out playing on artificial turf and get over the physical drag of so much summer travel. Then maybe they can challenge for playoffs in 2018.
Demand post-season play in 2017 and, well, they’ll be doing something they haven’t so far – repeating mistakes rather than learning from them.
5. The Little Five
5a. Adding to that item above about enthusiasm teeming through Toronto: What says “buzz and energy” like this story, where tickets for the match sold out in three minutes? Only 9,000 seats were actually put on sale (27,000 were spoken for by season ticket holders, etc.), but three minutes! That’s an important story.
5b. I could live 1,000 years and not understand the debate of “Saturday or Sunday?” for MLS Cup final. First, it’s mostly about which network is showing the game (Fox this year, plus UniMas and TSN in Canada) and what else they offer in sports programming. But fans debating the other part – “Go up against important college football games on Saturday, or go up against the king daddy of all U.S. sports, NFL football on Sundays?” – seems silly to me. Yes, lots of people watch college football, but the audience is scattered regionally, whereas NFL ratings are generally strong everywhere. Competing against college football might be difficult, but competing against NFL is pretty much impossible.
5c. Going into 2016, center back was a position of some concern for FC Dallas. Matt Hedges was rock-solid, of course, but options behind him looked thin. Converted fullback Zach Loyd was the other starter. Behind him, Walker Zimmerman had potential but hadn’t done the business over a long stretch. Besides, he was kicking tires on overseas interest last winter. Today? Following Hedges new deal, just announced Tuesday, plus Zimmerman’s 2016 emergence, FCD’s future at center back looks as good as any other MLS club’s. Club stability at that position looks night-and-day different from one year ago.
5d. Major League Soccer’s cruelest day is ahead (and league leaders, along with players union reps, really need to fix it). Clubs’ “protected” lists are released a day after the MLS Cup, giving Atlanta and Minnesota 48 hours to prep for theDec. 13 Expansion Draft. So, 24 hours after players lift the trophy (or experience the sadness of not doing so) a bunch of them find out they aren’t among the “protected” set and might be moving on.
5e. Possible solution: as a reward for making the league final, exempt MLS Cup finalists from the expansion draft. Or, as we’re always seeking ways to maximize regular season significance, exempt MLS Cup finalists and conference winners. Rules of next week’s expansion draft are here.
Steve Davis has covered Major League Soccer since is first kick in 1996. He writes on-line for FourFourTwo and co-hosts the weekly radio show/podcast ESPN Soccer Today on 103.3 FM in Dallas. Davis is also the radio play-by-play voice for FC Dallas on 100.7 FM.