re-up with lyon... re-up with lyon... don't toy with my sensibilities kernel! hell hath no fury like a supporter scorned! as for the allocation question, i wonder if this whole stint at lyon thing isn't some cunning plan not to be allocated? to remain a free electron? i have no idea on any hows or whys, but it seems like an extremely reasonable suspicion to me.
Bite your tongue! This is America! Don't be surprised if they have a six-team playoff - it's the way we do things.
we're giddy already. there will be 500 people at her first practice. she is gonna feel the love and maybe never leave.
Which course leads back how little we know about the league. What happens in year two. There is no guarantee the 24 allocated players will remain the same in the second year. While I certainly dont expect a re-allocation (yikes!) there will be some sort of mechanism to move new players in. Would a free agent Pinoe be allocated in year two as she would certainly be in the 24. Would whoever (ie Thorns) who picks her up as a free agent this year retain any rights? Say Portland wanted to lock her up for three years as a free agent starting in June. That money would have to come out of the $200k budget not the very deep USSoccer pockets. I think they pretty much have to take the allocation risk and hope that France is an adventure, not a life style choice..
I don't know if it really has to be some great plan. She could always say she isn't interested in being allocated and they would move on to the next person in the pool. If she suddenly becomes available later in the season, whatever suitor would have to use their salary cap to pay her and that's not likely to be that much, especially late in the season. NWSL could limit her from entering the league this season if she passed up the allocation process. Lots of things could happen that no one has even thought through yet.
I dont see them punishing her because even half a season would make a fan impact. Also, it would encourgae her to stay in Europe. The cap money is so small that a plan would have to be in place at the beginning of the season to accommodate her unless they plan to terminate a contract to make room for her.
Megan was most often on the left side in college, and that's where she performed her magic againsts Brasil in the WC and against France in the Olympics. But she was actually a center attacking midfielder before her knee injuries and was very effective as both a ball winner and as a playmaker in her freshman year when Portland won the National Championship. She is just getting back to where she was.
Confirmed on http://www.footofeminin.fr/D1-Patrice-LAIR-confime-l-arrivee-de-Megan-RAPINOE-OL_a6055.html !!!
It can very well be. If I was a player I would prefare to know when, for whom and for how much I would play in 2013 and not siting around just waiting to see if and in that case where and on what conditions it would be a place for me in the US league. I think the league are starting to lose players due to uncertainity (on if, where and for what) not because they prefer to play in Europe or that the pay is better, and that is just stupid.
in the particular case of rapinoe there may be a bird in the hand factor, but the first thing i thought of was that she was using this stint in lyon was to prepare for the new league. at that time i thought there would be no overlap (what i heard from libby stout made me think the league was starting in the summer) but even now the conflict is minimal... and also still vague it seems. in any case, hard to imagine a better way to get into top form than 10 or 12 matches with the reigning world club champion and when the league does start she'll hit the ground running... better than players training at home now and whom afaik still don't know when and with where they are going to start camp.
I have to think (or maybe I am just hoping) that the contracted players at this time have an idea where they will be allocated to, for some it may be details such as housing; as for when, the season will likely start in mid April (preseason camps for WNT players after the Algarve) and end late summer (without spitting hairs about specific weeks); how much $ is probably the issue. I would also think that if there is still no agreement but the two parties are still talking lets say by March, they could agree to play under terms of the old contract, with the new contract retro. The players are going to get paid extra for the league, the different views on the subject can't be that great.
When a labor contract ends, there are 3 choices the sides can make: 1) owner locks out the employees, 2) employees stop working or 3) the two sides continue under the existing agreement until a new one is drawn up. Sometimes it takes years to get a new agreement and the workers continue "without a contract".
Considering the nature of the work, the employees r going to be extra cautious. Continuing under the old contract at least keeps their health insurance going I imagine. A lot of time labor negotiations r based on gut feelings. If the parties think they r going to get there, they r much more willing to compromise to do it. If one side or the other seems to be taking a hard line, their could be an action by one of the sides. As to what numbers they r looking for, im not really sure if the old contract included escalators for their pay. I believe the original tiers were $70 k, $50 K and $30 six years ago. A totally uneducated guess would be something like $100k, $75k and $50k this time.
i'll start by saying that there are two GREAT ideas behind this league : 1) getting it off the ground so quickly after the demise of WPS, and including some of those teams to increase that continuity factor. 2) the assistance from the different feds to keep the budgets livable. but it seems to me that all that is being pissed away even before the first game has been scheduled. take 1)...whether it's fact or opinion as concerns rapinoe in particular, the comments of many here that she or others may be lost due to shillyshallying is spot on. they know what the teams are, they needed to have the schedule cut and dried by now. it costs nothing and can be adjusted w/o scandalizing anyone, whereas an iffy "sometime around mid-april" (which is, after all TOMORROW!) is enolagaying their credibility already. i mean, when was the first noise about this league? june? that the first statement is mostly smoke and mirrors is business as usual... c'est bonne guerre as we say in french. but fed participation has been on the books since july. if they haven't hammered enough out to allocate players, or AT LEAST make a frigging schedule by now, they've lost many a march. as for 2)... i though the whole idea was to keep costs low. so i would expect the money from the feds to be part of and not in addition to existing emoluments. after all, they're getting something out of it too but that doesn't make them UNICEF. and now i read on the NWSL wiki page that the salary cap will be a relatively low $500,000? relative to what? to the suicidal $565,000 salary cap the WPS started with? sounds like déjà vu all over again to me yogi. mid-march will be fine for starting camp. but that means there's a lot to be settled before the end of february... more than what seems has been accomplished since june.
The more substantiated rumors (not the Wikipedia page) say the salary cap will be $200k for the non-allocated players. If you follow the link in the Wiki reference, it takes you to a June 2012 article on Equalizer that says total budgets could be about $500k.
thank you. whereas a few years ago i never gave any credence to wikipedia, it has come so far since that i suppose i now give it too much.
guignol, you are right, the league should be making announcements, at least to give the 30 or so of us on BS something real to talk or complain about. Just because it has not told us on BS does not mean nothing is getting done. On the schedule, I said "start mid-April", adding with "without splitting hairs about specific weeks"; if it helps the Sky Blue site has "The season will begin in April and conclude in August/September." April's games will be weekends, and the later in April, the better IMO. I live in central NJ close to Rutgers where SkyBlue previously played and may again. I have gone to baseball games in Trenton, to the south, in mid April in winter coats; I once went to a club soccer game in Fort Dix, further south in NJ, in May in a winter coat. Boston could be colder and DC warmer in April. People are reserving tickets in Portland without worrying about the schedule, at least not yet. For your #2 which I think is in response to my comment: Now I don't know if it is from what I have read here or other blogs, or that I know the family of a WNT player, but my impression is that the WNT contracted players will get extra pay from USSF for playing in the league. If I am wrong, someone can correct me.
I'm not sure I would attribute too much to Rapinoe's playing in France in the early Spring. When she was in Portland before heading to the other side of the world, she seemed very committed to the new league. I would be shocked if she hadn't had significant conversations with Merritt Paulson (Thorns owner) and if they hadn't discussed the possibility of her spending the beginning of 2013 playing in France.
RUfan i had no intention to judge your post but the situation behind it... which i still think is very foggy. thank you for the heads up on the equalizer which is a big advance over what i knew so far. it in fact cuts my doubts in about half. for example i now see that allocation will be finished by the 16th, not a day too soon... but still not too late. but even if i see most of the teams have chosen (if not actually contracted for) their venues, all have named a head coach and have a crest, i still think there's a lot to be done, not much time left to do it right. by mid-feb they''ll need to have full staff 100% hired, rosters 80% set, practice fields bought or leased, venues not only announced but contracted for, uniforms already designed and being manufactured (they're not just going to go down to big 5 for them), scarves ditto, and a hundred other things i have no idea about. i'm sure some of these things, in some of the clubs, are well under way. but it's not a question of the league coming to BS to fill us all in. it's that of all the people here, at the equalizer, at lots of other sites, lots of motivated people looking under every rock are not getting the scoop. and after all they're not nazis making heavy water; they need all the exposure and hoopla they can get. i'm afraid there's just not that much they can tell us yet. i have become a big OL ladies' fan in the past few years; my interest in the NWSL is only peripheral, but that perhaps makes me a good litmus test for the level of communication. if i can't get a clue as to what the hell is going on how are the thousands of fans they'll need to have start buying tickets in a couple of months going to? sky blue saying april to aug/sept sounds pretty weak to me. a real schedule week by week sky blue@reign june 8th 2pm is a loooooooot more convincing. the portland thorns crest looks great! but the full uniform modelled by a real player would be better. these are things not just to do behind scenes but to let everyone know about, and in a big way. as cynical as i was about the WPS, with eyes much too big for their stomachs, a herd of bulls in a china shop bent on world domination, as much i think this model is healthy and a great thing for the women's game on the whole. so i hope that a month, or a bit more, let's say in 40 days and 40 nights* i will eat all these words. *right now the people behind the league have to plan their workload like this : a day lasts 24 hours, and what they can't get done in those... they work on at night!
The schedule means nothing to me as it's a balanced schedule except for one rivalry game. What is ridiculous is that teams are opening in April but as of January 7th still cant use their stars to sell season tickets. One of those teams has the FIFA POTY on it. Doesnt USSoccer think theyd like to be touting her presence at every home game starting today at 2 pm? The situation has been managed awfully.
I think the info is being managed very well. They're parceling it out strategically over time. Until today is over, there's no media point to providing new information. I'm looking for it to be coming out, bit by bit, as is strategic for purposes of building ticket sales. The fact that a few fanatic fans (I include myself in this) would like to have info sooner means very little in relation to non-fanatic team support.
Except that in a world where Twitter and Facebook dominate media distribution, the non-fanatics get their info from the fanatics. Social media is great for grassroots support generation, but it also means that any negative impressions get magnified and spread way more quickly and easily. I'd say 97+% of tweets about NWSL over the past week or two have been lamenting the dearth of info. Actually, that's way too high an estimate. 97+% of NWSL tweets are either about the dearth of info, or the fact that Rapinoe won't be with the league to begin with.