Mateo319: Another Dead Blogger

"Never met a man who doesn't owe somebody somethin''." - Sammy Hagar for Van Halen.

A big reason for the lack of activity on this blog lately (other than the holidays and suffering from exhaustion) is that I've been doing a lot of reading on the business of MLS and American professional sports in general - which, as many of you know, is not really something a person can catch up on in an afternoon.

What got me started was this article by my good friend Michael Lewis which dropped just before Christmas and relays an interview he had with Don Garber. On its surface...

Via The Offside, since 2004 Valencia has spent 185 million Euros in transfer fees for 26 players (not including 7 who came on a free transfer).

...

I must have missed this when I was in suspended animation at the start of December. But tell me how this is supposed to work:

with this:

So they're investing...

While doing some research for another topic, I came across this great interview of Alan Rothenberg in an edition of the Los Angeles Business Journal from last month. If you want to know about the business of soccer in North America since the war, you could do a lot worse than sit down for an hour and just listen to Rothenberg.

There's lots of good stuff in the interview, and I'm tempted to quote the whole thing. My favorite part is his anecdote about Jack Kent Cooke when he was a young lawyer who took a chance to work with the reputed hard-ass.

...