- by Ted Westervelt, writing from Denver
- via soccerreform.us
Even if this last minute stay holds – and regardless of whether details like US Open Cup eligibility are ironed out – NASL is liable to find itself in front of the same executioner again in 2012 – minus the Montreal Impact, who will be well on their way to faux MLS promotion.
Publicly US Soccer frets that NASL may not meet their stringent new D2 requirements, including the $20 million net worth requirement that every majority owner must meet. In a league whose NFL connections are well documented, perhaps it is ironic that that Green Bay Packers couldn’t meet these new US Soccer standards for second division soccer clubs in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that MLS has already cherry picked the strongest teams and markets from NASL. Judging by their choice of name, it is hard to see how NASL would ever abandon first division aspirations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult see how the insubordinate D2 league stripped of its top teams serves any remaining purpose to our entitled first division or their clients on the board at US Soccer.
Yet, NASL serves a huge purpose to US soccer supporters: The league comes as close to exemplifying the spirit of limitless possibility that defines club soccer all over the world as any closed US league ever has.
Hopefully we are witnessing the first halting baby steps our federation is taking away from myopic servitude to of any one league, and towards the service every US soccer supporter, potential club investor, and player.
Perhaps we are just watching our federation delay the execution of one incarcerated league to serve the interests of another.
Perfectly Good Enemy
NASL is not a perfect soccer league. Operating within the confines of a tightly closed US Soccer pyramid, they are allowed no avenues to authentic promotion, and no safety valve of relegation. As is the case with every major American sports league, the league has more power than the teams within, allowing battles between leagues to play out in tawdry corporate telenovelas like the one in this blog entry. As has been the history of MLS, NASL ownership is concentrated in too few hands. It suffers from the same vast lack of interest that every US soccer league does, regardless of caste.
In short, NASL is as unstable as every closed soccer league in the United States since the nineteenth century.
For all the shortcomings endemic to our closed leagues, the NASL contains commodities in which US Soccer is in short supply: Functioning soccer clubs, real legacy and history. Despite a rising American tide of interest in club soccer since 1996, fully 75% of our lower divisions clubs have failed. While that is a step up from the 99% club failure rate our closed league system and paralyzed federation amassed between 1914 and 1996, both periods indict our system in that failure rate – not soccer itself.
Armed with permanent D1 sanction and a stacked USSF board, creative finance and tight team controls, MLS has been able to mask this inherent closed league soccer instability. Despite a US Soccer gift basket full of entitlements and authoritarian controls – including the ability to limit the quality of every club, and the power to sell first division sanctions to the highest bidder, instability continues to rear it’s ugly head. Look no further for evidence of MLS impermanence than a season schedule unreleased until the month before opening day.
Abhorrent single entity financial strategies may have allowed MLS to survive at an anorexic level of interest at a tightly controlled levels of play. The cost in of these policies hopes and aspirations of supporters and investors in our lower divisions can be measured via the club casualty rate. No second division soccer league in the world has ever thrived under the conditions foisted upon NASL by US Soccer and their bosses at MLS. It is no surprise to see our lower league clubs suffocate under them.
Many who oppose a transition to full promotion and relegation often point to Portsmouth and Leeds as omens of the horrible dangers the system presents to club owners.
Perhaps they should consider the fact that both clubs are still breathing.
Walking Talking Conflicts of Interest
As US Soccer threatens all of NASL with relegation and MLS utilizes pseudo promotion to keep their league afloat, both tell supporters that US club soccer remains too fragile for promotion and relegation. That is clumsy sentence to describe an even clumsier reality. If there are enough clubs in the US soccer pyramid to threaten entire leagues with relegation, and MLS is using faux promotion of the Sounders, Timbers, Whitecaps, and and the Impact to remain viable, don’t their arguments against the real thing begin to sound as empty as an executioners promise of a quick, painless death?
That is why it is so fantastic to see Don Garber and Sunil Gulati recognize their vast conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from an important vote in which the fate of a five US soccer clubs hangs in the balance. Hopefully it marks the beginning of a new trend. No country in the world can claim a higher club soccer failure rate than the US, and no two men have stood more strongly for a system in which clubs expire with such alarming regularity. Perhaps a river to deeper reforms flows through a federation in which both men drift away from their inherent conflicts of interest, and spill out the patio door of Soccer House in Chicago.
Last week, Hosni Mubarak insisted that Egypt would descend into chaos without him. This week he is gone, and the streets of Cairo are returning to normal. MLS would very much like all of us to believe that US club soccer would expire without their tight controls and authoritarian micromanagement. As Garber and Gulati continue to stand steadfast against real progress towards traditional open leagues and independent clubs that mark stable soccer pyramids all over the world, perhaps more supporters will recognize that they do so by sharing a trait with every authoritarian regime in the world: Maintaining the misperception of their indispensability.
At that point, perhaps more US supporters will conclude that soccer is more exceptional than the US domestic sports league model in which Don Garber and Sunil Gulati have it canned. After hearing their conclusions, perhaps our federation can bear it’s teeth for supporters in a much more substantial way than granting a twelve month stay of execution to a plucky, albeit flawed league trapped in the matrix of the US club soccer pyramid.
Fantasy? Maybe. In size and scope, much less pie in the sky than the one in which MLS adopts promotion, relegation and independent clubs all by themselves.
Despite any and all flaws in the decision making that led to an admittedly half-hearted, stopgap, and last second solution, this episode illustrates a defining characteristic of club soccer: Unlike the governing bodies of our domestic sports, soccer federations have teeth. They make decisions can break entire leagues. They are accountable directly to supporters.
Perhaps we should take advantage of that.
