Mitchell: Crew can't afford to keep GBS next year

How are the KinderCare's in Argentina?

Of course they don't have to, because that's exactly what it says.

No, it doesn't say that at all. It says you don't have to protect them, it doesn't say they're excluded or automatically protected.

Are you serious? Do you possess any reading comprehension skills at all?

Those are two completely different rules worded two completely different ways!
- "Designated Players do not have to be protected"
- "Project 40/Generation adidas players who have not been graduated at the end of the 2007 season are automatically protected (teams do not have to use a protected slot on them)"

If you can't tell the difference between "do not have to be protected" and "are automatically protected" then you need to go back to school.

For Pete's sake, there's even a Designated Player listed in the available players for the expansion draft. I don't see how it could possibly be any more clear!

Designated Players do NOT get a free exemption in the expansion draft!

It would be hilarious if LA chose not to protect Golden Balls and he got selected to play up in Seattle next season. I know the league would never let this happen, but I wonder how it would negativly affect his endorsements.

You know, Seattle has so many "available seats" at their stadium, that it might not be a bad idea financially for them to draft Beckham. If they got Beckham and could sell an extra 10-20,000 season tickets, plus all the extra hot dogs, beers, and t-shirts, they could probably actually afford to pay Beckham his salary.

Of course, LA is not going to leave Beckham unprotected. But maybe Seattle should try to go after some other really big-name guy in January, like Ronaldinho, Henry, or whoever. Wait and see who's not working out with their new club and who might be available.

Which is more "bunk"

A coach who has worked in MLS for some 8 years who makes all the player decisions and has access to the actual cap and cap salary numbers, who states that signing a player to a new higher contract without the assistance of allocation money would be difficult on our cap.

or

A fan who has pieced together several links only a few of which have ever even been confirmed with the league, who admits he only is approximating the cap salary numbers, has no idea of the actual rules of the salary cap or what moves a player's cap number up or down; states that anyone should know the Crew have tons of cap space and the guy that actual has the number right in front of him is bunk.

Sorry if I don't find the guy with the actual information at hand to be more reliable here.

Here we go again. The guy knows Guille's every thought. Except last time we went through this, he was 100% wrong.

Here's the problem with the article. It's all based upon SPECULATION. I did not see a single quote in there. Whereas, when I asked McCullers about it, he told me that just last week, he asked Sigi if his heart was still in it, and Sigi said yes, and Mark said that was good enough for him.

So it really seems like Arace might be talking out of his ass, and not doing any footwork that proves his point. I don't even see any "anonymous" sources giving quotes to support his story. Just something Bill or any of us could have come up with on a conspiracy theory bender...

Is that true? I thought that EL MONO MARIO had been very straightforward with everything he's posted about Schelotto, helpfully translating things for us. I thought it was some other poster who lectured us about there's no way Schelotto's making what's been noted, contracts are written in pencil, etc.

That's typically how opinion pieces go. They aren't the same thing as reporting, and that's on purpose.

Arace didn't say anything about that. In fact, he said the opposite. He thinks the Crew should ink him, now, and give him a pay raise too, because he built the team, he's getting results with the team, and he's still got a fire in the belly.

This is the only controversial thing he said in an entire article about giving Sigi a raise and contract extension:

It's his opinion - again, the point of the article - that the Crew dragging it's feet on Sigi's contract and the new practice facility gives credence to the "conspiracy theorists" belief that the team is interested in moving. And that if that's the case, then the Crew doesn't care about it's fan base. So... sign the coach to a new deal and show the fans that you do care.

I don't necessarily agree with Arace that the Crew dragging it's feet on signing Sigi is anything other than cheap ownership. But it's a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of an opinion article. It's not worth getting all worked up about.

I can tell you that Mike was at the game Saturday, and was chatting with all kinds of people. Just because quotes or anonymous quotes don't appear in the paper, it doesn't mean he pulled a column out of his ass while sitting at his desk on Broad Street. He went to the stadium, talked to a bunch of people in person, synthesized all that he took in, and then formed his own opinion.

You may or may not agree with his opinion or with facets of his article, which is fine. But Mike has been coming to lots of Crew games lately and seems to be developing a genuine interest in the club. I, for one, think that's a great thing. As CBJ fans can attest, he's a gifted writer and a pretty sharp guy. The fact that he's becoming personally interested in the Crew, and is around the stadium most home games, asking a gazillion questions so he can become more knowledgeable about this team, league, and sport....I think it's a positive development.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that he's been at a lot of games and talks to players, coaches, and FO people when he's there.

The loud mouth lecturer was NYC_COSMOS. Easy for me to remember, cuz he gave me my first neg rep on the boards.

I just noticed yesterday that Arace voted in the MLS POTW poll which is conducted by The Soccer Reporters. (and which is the poll MLS uses)

The membership list has Mitchell but not him, and I don't know what if anything that means but somebody thinks he's a soccer reporter.

The more the merrier of course but if he wants to be taken at all seriously by Crew fans in general then he'll quit calling the team The Fighting Canaries.

I don't think it's anything to do with cheapness - the guy has a pretty crappy record with this team up until about three months ago.

Coming into this season I don't think that anyone thought retaining the guy was a no-brainer, not by a long shot.

He's now managed to get the team up the table a good ways and that's a positive development but again, if you recall the month of July it was questionable which way the team was headed.

Point is, we came out of the gate fast, but particularly after two seasons where they won fewer games than they did under the guy they fired for sucking, stacking up a handful of wins doesn't mean a whole lot.

The fact that the team started to stumble and then righed itself says a lot more about the situation, and that is a very recent event.

Bottom line, up until the last month or so, I don't think they were at all convinced that they even WANTED to keep him around, never mind how much he was going to cost.

(and honestly, if they hadn't managed to swing the Guille eal, or if Guille had refused to come back, exactly what kind of a coaching genius does anyone think he'd be looking like right about now?)

And if this team gets dumped out of the playoffs in the first round, a development that's hardly outside the realm of possibility, THEN how enthused is everyone going to be about him?

I think HSG - and Mark McCullers, who will have a good deal to say about it - really want to see how this season pans out before handing a guy a lenghty contract and a big raise It's not cheapness, it's being sensible.

Now it appears that Sigi may have some leverage to push HSG into making a deal now, and that's fine. It's all about timing, for sure.

But I think the plan all along was to wait until after the 2008 season.

I must be the only Crew fan that doesn't mind the Fighting Canaries nickname.

Sigi's first two seasons really need to be taken with a grain of salt. The first was with a team that he inherited from Nee and had to completely rebuild it from pretty much a pile of manure. Last season, we were dealt a Massive amount of injuries and the team was never able to from a consistant starting 11. Does anyone recall the number of different starting lineups we ran out there last season? I want to say we had something like 10 different starting lineups through the first 10 games.

Fair, and accurate.

But we do have owners who are notoriously cheap when it comes to coaching, even with their NFL team. It's not a huge leap for Arace to make to come to that assumption, looking at the whole body-of-work.

Fine by me. Arace feels differently, which is also so skin off my back. That's all I'm saying.

Not to mention winning the lottery for Rogers.

I know our goals have been coming from all over, and that's a testament to the heart the guys on this team have, but those times they're playing their best (and some damn good sexy football) is entirely a product of the Guille-Ale-Robbie triangle.

I kind of like it, too.

Perhaps Mike is referring to the dog rather than the bird... Pressa Canario

That's not a fire, that's a raging inferno! Have you seen the size of the belly needed to contain it!?

Normally I would agree with you but when he was hired, he set the expectations very high. He said that in this league there's no reason that a team couldn't go from last to first in ONE YEAR. It was his decision to gut the team. It was his team that didn't make the playoffs for two years after his original assessment. It's his team that's still inconsistent out there on the field and could as easily as clinching a playoff spot seems to be, they could also go on a 5 or 6 game winless streak. Our contenders in most seasons would be way back; now they're only 6 points behind with equal number of games to be played for each (and it would be 5 if Bobby hadn't pulled a completely revolutionary move by bringing in a forward for a defender to secure a tie against the F!re).

Sigi still hasn't convinced me as a fan that he's capable of putting results up there with the roster he has. I trust coaches like Kinnear, Yallop and Nichols more tactically than I do Sigi. Maybe he'll prove me wrong but I'm not sure that the playoffs won't bring another heavy dose of disappointment to our city.

Can't we just ignore the cap? It's a suggestion anyway. Right?

I'm a Fire fan, but I'm also a Boca and I love Guille in the league. Even though he singlehandedly led the comeback vs the fire on the 5th.

Who do you think you are, the Galaxy? C'mon now...

<censored for the kiddies>. Nor would I want to be...

You should hire Lalas as GM. Really.



I can't imagine there would be any difficulty in keeping GBS. You can always trade for allocation money and your roster isn't top heavy (like some teams I know ).

At worst, this seems like Columbus trying to plead poverty before going into negotiations with GBS about making him a DP.

And DP's do not get a special exemption in the expansion draft. We had to protect Beckham as part of our 11.

Thanks. The rules seem to read otherwise, however, but I do believe you.