Cohiba Don has his 20th.

Out of the blue partnership with New York Yankees – take THAT Wilpon creeps – and Manchester City (code name for “that Arab guy”) as the majority shareholder, forking over a reported $100 million entry fee.

Yankees president Randy Levine says his organization only joined the process “very, very recently”. Like, possibly, last Thursday.

And either they held the “auction” for the team in private or there really weren’t that many guys with $100 million after all. Go figure. Then again, I’m guessing that the group led by Chuck Blazer wasn’t a viable option after all.

They say they’ll start play in 2015 in an “interim” facility someplace or other but no specific place is mentioned.

In terms of a permanent home, the interesting thing is that they specifically say, when noting that MLS has been in discussions about FMCP in Queens, that “the club” (ie. NYCFC) will be taking over for the league in those negotiations. That would seem to suggest that they themselves will also be taking over the ownership and financing of the deal, since ManCity and the Yankees can’t negotiate with someone else’s money.

They allow, however, that other sites will be considered.

Up until now the plan was supposedly for MLS to build the place, lease it to a team and also operate it as a concert venue. It would seem that those plans have gone by the board.

The timing of the announcement is also notable. Maybe they figured it would get out anyway – recent reports had pretty much conceded the thing to the ManCity group – and figured they’d get the first swing in.

Part of it may be that as much as everyone tried to claim that “Manchester City” was a possible – or likely – owner, it was beginning to dawn on people that in fact “Manchester CIty” is really Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, a filthy rich Oil princeling. Opposition groups were beginning to get real traction with “Why are we raping our lovely cement bowl of slime pristine parkland to build a playpen for some rich Arab?”.

A partnership with the Yankees, however, will help make that one go away.

Or maybe they’re punching a hole in the Cosmos deal over in Elmont; a real team, in real New York and in a real top level pro league, with the Yankees as part of the ownership, has to make the State Development people wonder if buying into this Cosmos bunch makes any sense.

Here’s the release:

NEW YORK (May 21, 2013) – Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber announced today that a partnership of global sports powers, Manchester City Football Club and the New York Yankees, has acquired the League’s 20th expansion club. The new team will be named New York City Football Club (NYCFC) and expects to begin play in 2015.

“We proudly welcome two of the most prestigious professional global sports organizations to Major League Soccer,” said MLS Commissioner Don Garber . “This is a transformational development that will elevate the league to new heights in this country. The New York area is home to more than 19 million people, and we look forward to an intense crosstown rivalry between New York City Football Club and the New York Red Bulls that will captivate this great city.”

“New York is a legendary sports town, as well as a thriving global city with a rapidly expanding soccer fan-base,” said Ferran Soriano, CEO of Manchester City Football Club , who will oversee the process of filling top New York City FC leadership positions in the weeks to come. “We are thrilled to contribute to the energy and growth of New York City Soccer. In the Yankees, we have found the absolute best partner for developing a world-class sports organization and a winning team that will carry the New York City Football Club name with pride.”

Manchester City will be the majority owner of the new Club. As an investor, the Yankees will be an active member of the ownership group. The New York Yankees and Manchester City Football Club have an existing commercial relationship through Legends Hospitality, LLC, an international entertainment, hospitality and marketing organization. Yankee Stadium is pleased to be hosting Manchester City on Saturday, May 25 for a “friendly” match against Chelsea FC, giving New York area fans a rare opportunity to see two outstanding English Premier League clubs up close.

“We are pleased to be associated with this major move by MLS to increase its presence in the New York market and to enhance the opportunity for New York soccer fans to enjoy high-level play in their own city. We look forward to the opportunity to work with Manchester City to create something very special for the soccer fans of New York — and to bringing another terrific team to this city for all sports fans to enjoy,” said Hal Steinbrenner, managing general partner of the New York Yankees . “Randy Levine, president of the New York Yankees, will be the point person in leading the effort to launch and establish the team on behalf of the organization,” Mr. Steinbrenner added.

With millions of residents watching soccer every week and nearly two million people actively playing the game, the New York/New Jersey area is one of North America’s most vibrant and proud soccer communities. The region has filled stadiums for countless marquee soccer events including the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup, the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, three MLS All-Star Games and numerous international exhibition matches. NYCFC becomes the first MLS club whose home will be located within the five boroughs, joining the Red Bulls as the second MLS club in the metropolitan area.

“Soccer is one of the world’s most exciting and popular sports, and it should be played on the world’s biggest stage — in New York City,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “New Yorkers are the greatest sports fans in the world, and they will welcome a Major League Soccer franchise with the full-throated and loyal support they are famous for. Manchester City has a great reputation for both winning teams and serious community investment, and that will help them fit in well with the excellent leadership of New York City’s other professional sports teams. Increasingly, sports events and activities — from the NHL playoffs to the MLB All-Star game to the SuperBowl — are spurring economic growth, as our investments in new arenas and infrastructure are paying off.”

Future: A Home Field for NYC’s Newest Team

New York City FC is committed to seeking a new permanent stadium in New York. Until that time, the new team is arranging to play in an interim home beginning in its inaugural MLS season in 2015. Over the past year, MLS began discussions with the City of New York and other stakeholders about the possibility of constructing a new stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park (FMCP) in Queens. The Club’s new management will continue these discussions with local government officials, community residents and businesses, soccer leagues, and MLS. The Club will continue to review other potential sites as well.

“New York City FC will have a permanent home in the City in the great traditions of New York sports and world soccer — a home that must be a sports, commercial and civic success,” Soriano said. “But in considering any stadium site, we will listen first. This is what we have always done in Manchester and what we will do in New York. Only in this way, can the Club truly represent the City whose name it will carry.”

“City Soccer in the Community”: NYC FC’s Commitment to Youth Soccer in NYC

Manchester City is a leader among sports organizations in its charitable efforts, with one-sixth of its staff fully dedicated full-time to community outreach. Building on this tradition of community outreach, New York City FC will expand and enhance the grassroots youth soccer program “City Soccer in the Community,” which it has been running in New York since 2010. The program, now headquartered at PS 72 (Lexington Academy) in East Harlem, which boasts New York City’s only rooftop soccer field, provides quality soccer instruction and programming to thousands of children in 20 NYC public schools each year. New York City FC looks forward to expanding its community outreach to bring soccer to thousands of more kids throughout the five boroughs.

He tells Bob that he thinks the two of them have a lot in common. Redford pauses, looks him in the eye and says “I don’t think we have shit in common”.

That phrase came to mind late last summer after the brass at MLS and a NeoCosmos delegation led by President Seamus O’Brien met in New York to see if they could work out an amicable arrangement which would allow the Coz to join The United States of America’s First Division Professional Soccer League.

They almost immediately came to the conclusion that if possible they had even less in common than Redford and his erstwhile ally.

Because despite the title of “Commissioner” which Cohiba Don wears with justifiable pride he is, at its most basic, the CEO of a company called Major League Soccer L.L.C., and his portfolio consists of steering a mutually beneficial cooperative path for 19 equal partners and not, as most of his peers have it, riding herd on a collection of independent competitors.

The latter is of course exactly the kind of league O’Brien needs to be a part of, and it’s exactly what MLS is not now and will not be in the foreseeable future, if ever.

(Image from WrongSideofthePond)

So the relationship between the two sides, which many people assumed was like a cheap, sweaty, booze-fueled frat party romance, now looks a lot more like a strip poker game where no one is wearing underwear.

In this case – not unlike the morning after the aforementioned romp in someone else’s bunk bed – the loser may soon be walking home cold, shame-faced and rife with regret while the winner ends up dictating the course of professional soccer in New York and, possibly, the rest of the US as well.

Of course it’s entirely possible – maybe even likely – that both sides knew nothing would come of it and the whole thing was a kind of Kabuki theater staged for our benefit. Maybe they both just wanted to be able to say that they had tried.

The Don knows that in order to launch their nefarious campaign the NeoCosmos need the legitimacy of a first division league, but in order to join MLS you have to agree to be one of the many, an equal partner with 20 other guys. The league simply cannot allow one team to be run totally independently of the others.

Any other arrangement effectively ends the whole structure – legal and corporate – of Major League Soccer. It’s really that simple. How do they give the NeoCosmos a pass on the rules and not grant the same deal to, say, the Galaxy or the RedBulls or the Sounders when they come asking?

In short, MLS won’t ever give the CozPlay Boyz what they want, simply because they can’t.

As for the NeoCosmos, they figure that MLS needs their name and (supposed) glamor and can’t afford to let them go their own way since, if they succeed in establishing themselves as “America’s Global Team©” then NOT having them in MLS severely damages the league’s credibility. It would mean, among other things, that MLS Cup is a competition to see who the second best professional team in the US is.

As Shep Messing told a writer a couple weeks back, “MLS would be foolish to let the Cosmos get away” (to which I can only reply that it would be even more “foolish” to listen to a single word Shep Messing has to say about anything but that’s a topic for another day).

Which might be a problem if someone believed they could actually become “America’s Global Team©” as a member of the NASL. NeoCoz GM Eric Stover and O’Brien want everyone to believe this but there’s no way they even believe it themselves.

(Note to any NASL habitué who can’t wait to hop down to the comment section of this page and inform us all that a) NASL will end up replacing MLS as the US First Division, b) US Soccer will be forced to name NASL as a Co-First Division and/or c) MLS and NASL will end up effecting a merger: I can pretty much guarantee that this will subject you to mockery of the cruelest sort and I will not save your stupid ass. I’ll stand aside and let your intellectual betters carve you up like a cheap ham)

Put simply, a wildly successful NeoCosmos return could leave MLS playing second fiddle, something that a young league fighting for attention and legitimacy in the US (not to mention the world) sports market simply can’t afford. O’Brien most likely figures that in a few years Don Garber will come crawling on his hands and knees begging him to join his puny little outfit. He’ll play hard to get, making Don wash his car, clean out his gutters and service his ugly sister and then graciously accept. On his own terms.

It will be fascinating to see, in the coming years, which one of them played their cards right.

Anyway, the two sides “reached an impasse in negotiations” which as we’ve seen was not a particularly long journey, and the NeoCosmos almost immediately signed on with the minor league NASL v2, who were thrilled beyond words at the opportunity to be used like bus station hookers by O’Brien and his Saudi Oil backers.

The NASL thinks that having the NeoCoz join their league proves their relevance. I think it proves the exact opposite.

They’re undoubtedly excited by the prospect of having THE NEW YORK COSMOS!!! OMG!!!!! help them pack places like The Rowdie’s Al Lang Stadium in St. Pete (capacity 7,227) and Atlanta Silverbacks Park (5,000).

Which they very well might. In season one.

They’ll also get local media to wake up and notice that they exist for once; stuff like THIS will appear the first time the CozBoys come to town.

But not the second.

And it’s not because the NeoCosmos will be so utterly dominant that the locals won’t want to watch the ugly carnage. Looking at the players they’re signing up – Kory Veeder, anyone? – most NASL sides will somehow manage to survive the ordeal, and not by parking the bus and holding grimly on for 90 minutes. Won’t be necessary.

(NeoCoz Chief Apologist Eric Stover told a reporter the other day that the team they’re assembling is as good as any MLS team. He knows this because they’re picking up a lot of ex-MLS players. Or, put another way, he feels that the way to be better than an MLS team is to hire a bunch of players that MLS teams gave up on)

No, the problem is that people aren’t stupid, and after you’ve run some ads about THE NEW YORK COSMOS!!!! HISTORY!!!! TWICE IN A LIFETIME!!!!! accompanied by old photos of Pele and Giorgio, and people show up and sit in the seats, they’ll quickly realize that they’ve been had.

Instead of Der Kaiser and Carlos Roberto they’ll see a bunch of guys they never heard of. Mick won’t be there. Steve Rubell won’t be doing lines of coke in the Men’s room. Nobody will even be sporting a mullet or a porn stache or wearing embarrassingly short pants.

What they’ll see instead is a second division soccer match. Maybe even a good one, and there’s not a thing wrong with that. But if good, solid second division soccer was a big seller in the US, they wouldn’t need this circus to sell tickets and they wouldn’t be playing at Al Lang Field.

Of course the alternative scenario is that the Saudis pony up the money to bring in a bunch of long in the tooth foreign stars.

I call this The Washington Generals plan, where the existing NASL teams take turns getting chumped off in front of their home fans. Maybe they’ll do the “Bucket of Confetti” gag and the “Ball Hidden Under My Shirt” routine too. The kiddies will love it.

You’re telling me THAT’S what NASL fans are looking forward to? A season long circus show where the home team gets pantsed in front of a sellout crowd? Wowie-zowie, sounds like fun.

In fairness, there’s a third vision – extremely popular in some circles – whereby the other NASL sides, feeling pressure to try and compete with The New York Cosmos, spend a bunch of money they don’t have in order to sign expensive foreign players.

Call this “The Party Like It’s 1979″ scenario. If a league called the NASL spends itself into bankruptcy in an effort to keep pace with the New York Cosmos, “Twice in a Lifetime” will make an irresistible headline. I call dibs.

Which brings us to early this year when, in the wake of Major League Soccer’s rollout of the Flushing Meadows Corona Park proposal, the NeoCosmos got themselves a big media splash with an out-of-left field proposal for a $400 million soccer development of their own complete with restaurants, shops and the rest of the stuff that these proposals always include so that they can claim the project will add “50,000 jobs” and generate “$800 bazillion in taxes”.

It would be located on land owned by The New York State Economic Development Corporation (they took it over in lieu of back taxes a while ago) adjacent to the Belmont Park Thoroughbred track in Elmont NY, which is around ten miles from the Corona Park site and just outside the New York City line.

In other words, it’s on Long Island.

It’s the ultimate irony; if they somehow ended up with an MLS team there instead of in Queens, then there’d STILL be no Major League Soccer outfit in New York City.

They also released what is unquestionably the greatest piece of stadium porn in the history of the genre.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s well worth a look. On so many levels, it’s just wonderful:

Is that some great stuff or what?

It shows just how terrific it will be to show up and watch Pele and Chignaglia doing their magic as an overflow crowd has the time of their lives. Twice in a Lifetime!

Except of course that what it’s really purporting to show is soccer-savvy New Yorkers jam-packing a stadium to watch a NeoCosmos team made up of MLS rejects play second division rivals like the Virginia Slavecatchers or Minnesota United.

Not exactly the same cachet somehow.

While pimping a development project with utter nonsense is one thing – in fact it’s practically a requirement – actually believing this pile of hooey is something else altogether. Nobody spends a couple hundred million bucks on a 25,000 seat stadium to host NASL games.

I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it and, what’s more, the suits at NeoCosmos World Domination Central don’t believe it either.

(The fact that there seem to be a few people who DO actually believe this rot is somewhat troubling; as the saying goes: if you look around the poker table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, it’s you.)

For his part, O’Brien says that New York is a big place and there’s plenty of room for the RedBulls, the NeoCoz and NYC2, telling a reporter that “there are seven or eight teams in London” and we shouldn’t really quibble although by my count there are twice that if you include all of what we would call “minor league” sides, and since he himself will be President of a team which fits that description he can’t really quibble about me including Milwall, Brentford and Leyton Orient.

However accurate his number may or may not be, it’s beside the point; soccer clubs in London don’t have to compete with the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers or Islanders for attention and money. It’s not a situation that easily lends itself to a corollary as simple as his.

Of course, O’Brien has some other problems at the moment, the biggest one being that he’s somehow managed to make the soccer world’s International Top Ten Villains list as new Asian Confederation President Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa leads a review of World Sport Group’s billion dollar media and promotion contract.

The AFC Congress began last week with a WSB Charm Offensive that had O’Brien telling reporters “Me and my colleagues at WSG will assist AFC in any way we can to achieve our common goals. For 20 years, we’ve been through good and bad times and I believe that we will move forward even further in the future.”

Unfortunately, after the defeat of a number of proposals which would have prevented and/or severely limited the scope of the upcoming review of his company’s contract, the NeoCosmos President got up and, according to Reuters, “stormed out of the room”.

So a it stands now, the Neos are waiting to see if their proposal for the Elmont site will get the green light from the Development Commission. What the time frame might be, what criteria will be employed and who else is in the running are all mysteries at this point.

We do know that at least one other group submitted a proposal, but we don’t know who they are or if there are others. I spent six weeks going back and forth with the Commission’s “Press Office” – a dozen phones calls, twice that many emails and, after any number of promises to “get you the answers you need” I finally received the following which I will quote in it’s entirety despite the fact that it’s supposed to be confidential and thus I will be severing this unique and invaluable source of information forever:

“Told you I wouldn’t forget about you — answers to your questions, on background – from a spokesperson for ESD– below

We expect to make a decision in the coming months.”

Thanks for clearing that up.

So the bottom line is that we don’t know diddly about what’s going on or when we might hear something.

As I’ve said previously (and Eric Stover has since graciously confirmed in an interview with the New York Times) the NeoCosmos strategy, at least in public, is to win the US Open Cup and, by extension, the CONCACAF Championship and thereby lay claim to being the biggest, best and baddest outfit in the US.

To accomplish this however would mean, in the first case, being on a par with the Seattle Sounders and in the second with the better teams in Liga MX.

Which would be good news for them but pretty bad news for the rest of the NASL, AKA “The Generals”, but it will never happen. To guarantee those one-time results year after year is impossible and when they fail, then what?

Furthermore, the rest of the world is not stupid. They know what second division is. Likewise, they’ve heard of teams like the LA Galaxy, DC United, New York RedBulls and the Seattle Sounders.

They also know that winning a domestic federation cup is not the same thing as winning a first division professional league.

The NeoCoz can say whatever they want and their delusional flock of devotees can pretend that they believe it all they like but being in NASL long term is not a viable option for an outfit bent on being “America’s Global Brand”.

So what’s going to happen here? Damned if I know but if one thing is sure it’s that is all centers around the Game of Stadiums, which is looking more and more like the biggest game of chicken ever.

The possible outcomes are, in no particular order:

1) MLS gets its stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the NeoCosmos get turned down by New York State:

Call Pepe Pinton and ask him if he’d like the trophies back. Game over.

2) Both the NeoCosmos and MLS get the go-ahead for their respective stadiums:

MLS wins again. First Division vs. Minor League is not a fair fight. In fact, it would be a shock if Sela Sport was crazy enough to go ahead and build a stadium with NYC2 ten miles away.

3) The NeoCosmos get their place, MLS gets turned down in Queens:

The only way MLS might be forced into making the best deal they can with the Neos. If there’s a big fancy soccer stadium smack next to New York, it’s going to be tough to explain why the team playing there isn’t in MLS.

4) Neither project is approved:

The NeoCosmos play nice little NASL games at Hofstra before increasingly smaller crowds who have figured out that Pele isn’t coming down the ramp and that losing to Minnesota United isn’t quite as glamorous as they expected it would be. Meanwhile, MLS simply ignores them.

I don’t know how it will turn out in the end, but two things seem clear:

First, if MLS gets FMCP it is a very big win that the NeoCosmos probably won’t be able to overcome. They’ll never have the kind of leverage they need to force MLS to cut a deal.

Secondly, MLS has the money and the staying power to wait this thing out no matter what happens with the stadiums. The NeoCosmos do not. They need a win, they need it now and they need to get credible in a hurry.

Pele is now 70 and just had a hip replaced. The value of a brand based on a bunch of sepia toned photos of guys in long hair and very short pants is not limitless. Eventually you’ve got to play the game.

They note that it was Blazer’s longtime habit to pay for anything and everything imaginable with his personal credit card. Huge sums worth of goods and services rendered to the confederation every year were paid for using Chuck’s personal Amex card. Other cards using the same account were given to CONCACAF employees to use for business expenses.

CONCACAF would make periodic payments to American Express to keep the account current and then, at the end of each year, Blazer would have the entire 12 months worth of charges printed up so that he could go through them line by line and separate out his personal bills from the CONCACAF ones. He’d then reimburse the confederation for any money he owed them by transferring that amount from the confederation’s “commissions payable” account.

So how much money, you might be asking, are we talking about here? The Committee says that:

“From 2004 to 2011, CONCACAF’s payments to American Express in connection with Blazer’s account totaled over $29.5 million, and the portion of these payments identified as Blazer’s personal expenses totaled over $3 million.”

Now for those of you who can’t get credit anyplace besides your local PayDay Advance place or Western Sky (FYI: $10,000 at 89% interest over 20 years is not really a good deal, even if that sweet Native American girl says otherwise; you’d be better off to borrow from the Mafia) and thus don’t instantly recognize the game here, the audit helpfully adds:

“(An employee) believed that the practice resulted from Blazer’s desire to accumulate American Express membership rewards points.”

Gosh, ya think?

Now I’ll happily defer to those among you with specific accounting and/or tax law expertise with regard to where this practice falls in the overall scheme of acceptable business practices. Let those among us who have never garnered airline travel miles from company-reimbursed business travel cast the first stone.

But at the very least this crosses the line somewhere south of inappropriate, and certainly well past cheesy.

(I would add in passing that for years now a certain gentleman who posts on BS has been telling – and telling and telling and telling – a story about how, when he briefly fetched coffee and dry cleaning for Chuck Blazer worked at the CONCACAF office in New York, that Blazer took a group of employees out to a strip joint one evening. The whole point of the tale, unfortunately, has little to do with bare bouncing boobies; rather, he breathlessly describes Blazer paying the tab with an “American Express Black” card belonging to CONCACAF.

The commission report would seem to cast serious doubt on this oft-told tale of skin and graft; not only would that have run counter to Blazer’s normal practices but, according to one witness, CONCACAF didn’t have any credit accounts back then.

Another Urban Myth debunked. Someone call Snopes.)

A couple of people wrote and asked me to explain just how Blazer can claim that CONCACAF owes him an additional $7,000,000.

For them, and anyone else who is curious, Chuck has told the confederation that he is currently owed:

a) $5.2 million in commissions for broadcast rights for 2013-2021 CONCACAF Gold Cups

b) $700,000 in commissions for CONCACAF’s expected share of the ticket revenues from the 2013 Gold Cup and,

c) $1.25 million in commissions for the authorization of teams from the CONCACAF region to participate in the South American Football Confederation’s Copa Libertadores.

In response to the commission’s request that he appear before them and answer a few, you know, questions and stuff, Blazer’s lawyer responded in writing that until his client gets every dime of that money he isn’t going to tell them a damned thing.

And since there’ll be snowdrifts on the hills of Hell long before CONCACAF gives Blazer another dime, it’s a pretty safe assumption that we won’t be hearing from him soon. Or ever.

The Integrity Committee also spends a good deal of time delving into the question of CONCACAF buying a two million dollar apartment at Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

As the green eyeshade guys somewhat caustically put it – accountants have such a remarkably poor sense of humor about this kind of thing – they “found no evidence of a business rationale for CONCACAF to own apartments at the Atlantis.”

It’s almost as if they don’t understand the value of taking a little time to recharge the old batteries.

There are a lot of odd things about this transaction, but essentially Blazer handing over a $910,000 downstroke towards a pair of apartments sporting a retail price of $4,550,000, with the cash coming from CONCACAF FAP funds.

FAP stands for Financial Assistance Program, a FIFA project designed “to motivate and empower the associations and confederations to organize development programs that meet their needs and strengthen football and its administration in the long term.”

Which would be a pretty outrageous use of the money except that after a year Blazer put the money back by transferring cash from the Confederation’s “commissions” account and, eventually, the purchase was pared down to just one apartment and transferred to a Bahamian holding company set up by Chuck Blazer.

In the comments thread from Monday, BigSoccer stalwarts Kejsare and Etienne_72772, who sounded like they knew what they were talking about – and you’ll get damned little of that kind of thing around here, Bucko – wrote that an actual contract wasn’t really necessary.

So I consulted with a very credible one-percenter corporate attorney who will be among the first people hung when the revolution comes despite his long dedication and devotion to every left wing cause imaginable, and here, minus some arrogant snark about how it’s like a contract law exam question, is his response:

“The law recognizes that a contract exists between the parties based on their behavior. So even though the written contract terminated by its terms, if the parties kept performing under the contract, a court will hold that the original contract between them remains in force and that both parties must abide by its terms. However, the contract can be terminated by either party at any time with or without a reason.”

In other words, as long as Jack Warner and the Executive Committee kept on treating Chuck Blazer like the General Secretary of CONCACAF (as they undeniably did) and Blazer kept performing the duties of that position (as he most certainly did) then the terms of the 1994 deal were still in force and legally enforceable.

“Pot, Meet Kettle”

Chuck Blazer, on the topic of the cash they were shoveling into the Center of Excellence, “acknowledged to another CONCACAF senior official that this funding provided for the COE was potentially misused, stating “[t]here are so many things that we could have done with the 10s of millions of dollars wasted there.”

You Can’t Just Leave it at That:

Blazer is quoted in the report as telling a CONCACAF associate: “Following our strange experience with Jack in the Bahamas, during the FIFA Congress and the Obama White House visit, it became clear that continuing with side by side units were unwise since his stability was clearly questionable by then.”

Wait. What? “The Obama White House Visit”??

What the hell happened? Did Jack suddenly start talking like a pirate? Ask if Obama would mind nuking Zurich for him? Inquire as to Michelle’s availability for a three way?

Finally, while I was busily trying to track what was going on down in Panama on Friday – if any of you have a spare life laying around, would you send it to me? Apparently I really don’t have one – I came across this photo of CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb addressing the Congress.

In his speech he castigated Blazer and announced that he would refuse to sit on the dais with him at the FIFA Congress in May.

This probably went over very well with the audience, but when I saw the picture the first thing I noticed was the guy sitting behind Webb’s right shoulder.

That’s CONMEBOL President Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay, a man who has gotten so rich from bribes and graft that when it came time for his representative to tell England what his vote would cost, according to Lord Triesman, he said that Leoz doesn’t really even want any more money and he’d appreciate it if England would give him a knighthood or name the FA Cup after him or something instead.

Leoz, a ripe old 85 years of age, has been President of CONMEBOL since 1986 and just last year they got so tired of re-electing the guy that they instead named him “President for Life”.

In this case though, his term of office came to an end yesterday when he resigned in anticipation of the release of the long-awaited ISL report which everyone knows will show that the Swiss courts found him guilty of acccepting $750,000 in cash and helping drag FIFA to the brink of bankruptcy.

Everybody has known for a long time that he, Richard Texiera of Brazil (who has fled his country to avoid going to jail and is now living in Miami) and former FIFA President Joao Havelange were named in the report as big old bribe takers. It’s common knowledge.

Webb knows it as well as anyone. But since – at the time – Leoz was still President of CONMEBOL, Our Man Jeff was more than happy to share a dais with the guy and would have been equally happy to do the same at the COngress in May.

Selective outrage. It’s the FIFA way.

Because none was necessary. Everybody knew she had stood by him as long as humanly possible – longer even – but in the end it simply became impossible to maintain the fantasy that Warner is anything but a crooked, venal sleaze.

And then there’s Chuck.

After marinating in the CONCACAF Auditor’s Report all weekend – the incomparable Beau Dure sent me the link almost immediately – it’s clear that while Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer were co-dependent partners in slime, for a long while now they have operated more or less independently.

Each had their own wellspring of cash and they pumped them long and hard.

One of the primary charges leveled by the Commission is that they both failed in their fiduciary responsibility to oversee what the other guy was doing, but you get the impression that as much as anything else they were working very hard at not knowing. Not “failure of oversight” but “intentional NON-oversight”.

So since their actions were conducted with very little overlap – I’ve got my honey pot, you’ve got yours – we’ll look at them one at a time starting with Warner.

He’s the easier one, first of all because while the commission provided some fascinating details, the broad outline has long been known, and secondly because the documentary evidence has all gone missing.

Indeed, the commission admits they were operating blind in many cases because Warner had all the records in his CONCACAF offices, and when they asked him for them he claimed he didn’t know what they were talking about.

One of the rare moments of comic relief in the entire 150 pages of dry details comes when they note that new CONCACAF General Secretary Enrique Sanz testified that he visited Warner last September and at one point Jack took him over to the building which formerly housed his confederation offices.

Sanz noted that there were a bunch of people there “shredding documents”. Apparently Warner didn’t see any reason to call ahead and say “Ix-nay on the edding-shray while I’m showing this guy around”.

You can only laugh.

So about all that’s left is the Center of Excellence stuff, the basic outline of which, as I said, we’ve all known for years, but the details are instructive.

The cause of the problem – not that we’ll ever hear this addressed – is that in cases like this FIFA lets their local officials run everything. FIFA seemingly pays no attention, they just send checks.

So after buying up the land for the CoE under two companies that he owns (“Renraw” is my favorite) he then directed FIFA to start funneling the construction money into a particular bank account, which they proceeded to do.

Unfortunately, it was an account he owned personally.

So all other issues aside, the fact is that he personally bought the land and paid the construction costs out of his own bank account. Even the auditors concede that it’s gonna be tough to claim the place isn’t his, although now that he’s no longer a big wheel in the government it may get a bit easier. After all, fraud is still fraud.

We’ll see.

Most everything else – and they concede that there’s a lot more they can’t prove – is buried, shredded, burned, deep-sixed and otherwise beyond the reach of any prosecutor anywhere. Dead men tell no tales and shredded paperwork at the bottom of a landfill doesn’t say much either.

Except this:

During their Quixotic pursuit of World Cup 2022, Australia apparently took it into their heads that they could swing Jack Warner’s vote by tossing a little cash his way.

So they sent him over US$400,000 to pay for replacing the artificial turf at the CoE.

Conveniently, it went into the same personal account that everything else went through, and Jack appears to have simply pocketed it.

Upon hearing the news, the FFA demanded a sit down with CONCACAF and FIFA. They want the money back and they want an explanation.

Since I’m a big fan of the Aussies, let me see if I can help:

You tried to buy someone’s vote. He didn’t stay bought. The money is now gone. Quit being such a big girl’s blouse about it.

No charge.

Which brings us to the first American in history to serve on FIFA’s Executive Committee, Charles Gordon “Chuck” Blazer and, like the man himself, it’s hard to figure out.

The story is either wildly complicated or extremely simple, and it’s a long involved story or a short simple one, but in the end it boils down to two words:

Greed and sleaze.

Back in 1990, Jack Warner won a shock election over the incumbent Mexican – no one gave him much of a shot – largely because of the campaign management of USSF Vice President Chuck Blazer who was rewarded for his efforts by being named General Secretary.

CONCACAF was a two-mule outfit with US$140,000 in annual revenues whose offices consisted of some rented rooms in Guatemala with a few chairs and a folding table.

Interestingly though, there was never an actual personal contract with Blazer. Rather, CONCACAF signed a four year contract with a company called “Sportvertising New York” to perform the duties which a General Secretary is normally assigned.

Of course, Sportvertising New York had one employee: Chuck Blazer.

Four years later, they signed a new contract, this time with “Sportvertising Caymans”, for another four years. It was the last written agreement Blazer ever had with CONCACAF.

It was an almost entirely commission-based deal which even the auditors admit made sense at the time. CONCACAF had no sponsors, no meaningful tournament income, not much of anything at all coming in and certainly couldn’t afford to pay a competent professional manager the kind of money necessary.

So the deal was that Blazer would get 10% of whatever sponsorship and TV money he could bring in. Otherwise, he’d basically get nothing. It was a no-lose deal, particularly with a successful businessman like Chuck, who was doing OK anyway.

But as Blazer was more and more successful in attracting sponsorship and TV dollars into CONCACAF and as public interest in the game, particularly in the US, began to grow, that modest 10% which had been so reasonable began to swell into an unjustifiable sum of money.

So much so that in 1998, when the second deal expired, he and Warner were unable to come to terms on another contract. Thus, unbelievably, they just went on as before without any contractual agreement whatsoever.

From time to time one federation or another would start asking questions or someone on the Executive Committee would get huffy about seeing the details but Warner made it clear he wasn’t going to provide the information and in CONCACAF everybody knew better than to cross Jack.

Furthermore, Blazer’s payments were concealed in the financial reports under things like “commissions” and “fees” with no specification as to who was actually getting the money or why. Again, you didn’t ask a lot of questions.

So as income grew – from just over $1 million in 1991 to over $25 million in 2010 (over $35 million in 2009, a Gold Cup year) – and virtually all of it was sponsorship money, Blazer kept on collecting his 10%.

The records they had access to are incomplete, but for the years 1996 through 2011, the report notes that:

“…Blazer received more than $20.6 million in compensation from CONCACAF. Specifically, CONCACAF paid: (i)over $15.3 million to Blazer in commissions; (ii) over $4.4 million to Blazer in fees; and (iii) over $837,000 in rent expenses for apartments used by Blazer.”

Furthermore, as time went on, the definition of “sponsorships” and “tv rights” appears to have expanded to include – well, just about everything. The auditors say that:

“(S)ponsorship” revenues appear to have included match promotion proceeds from the sales of tournament match tickets, luxury suite rentals, parking, and venue concessions, amounts which clearly do not qualify as “sponsorship and TV rights fees.”

In fact, CONCACAF’s accounting records appear to show that Blazer simply accrued in the “commissions payable” account amounts equal to 10% of CONCACAF’s total proceeds from its agreements with InterForever and SUM, without separating out revenue that did not qualify as “sponsorship and TV rights fees” under the Sportvertising Contracts.”

It reached the point that when, in January of 2006, when FIFA sent CONCACAF $3,000,000 to pay for the new studios of the CONCACAF Broadcasting setup in Miami, Blazer duly paid himself $300,000 as his cut.

In 2011, after Warner resigned, the CONCACAF ExCo asked Blazer to provide them with copies of compensation agreements he had with Warner.

Blazer sent them an unsigned draft of the 1990 Sportvertising contract and a signed copy of the 1994 contract which had expired in 1998. When a member inquired as to just how much he anticipated that he would be paid that year, he replied that it would amount to “about $2 million”.

In fact it was over $5 million.

A month later, the ExCo informed him that they were planning on terminating his employment and told him not to pay himself any more money without their approval.

A couple weeks later, Blazer instructed BAC Bank in Florida to make a $1.4 million payment to Sportvertising Cayman “in payment of Gold Cup commissions”, a payment about which, the auditors drily note,

“Blazer appears to have had some concern regarding whether that transfer would be completed; he
replied “[y]ippee” to a confirmation email from Sportvertising Cayman’s bank.”

CONCACAF has since requested that Blazer return the money. He has refused.

In fact, he claims that CONCACAF still owes him, by his reckoning, something like $7,000,000, and he refused repeated requests from the commission for personal testimony and information, saying that he wouldn’t be speaking with them until he gets his money.

There’s a lot more ugly detail, much of it revolving around an incredible sense of entitlement to spend whatever he liked on whatever he wanted, regardless of how ridiculous: ever-expanding personal apartment space in Trump Towers, luxury condos in Miami, ostensibly for CONCACAF usage of course, along with a Hummer H2 for which the insurance certificate lists only Blazer and his girlfriend Mary Beth as drivers.

(The commission reports that CONCACAF has been trying to sell the Hummer but can’t find a buyer; no word on whether they’ve tried Craigslist)

There was even a deal for a couple super-high-end luxury villas in Bermuda for him and Jack, although Warner seems not to have been terribly interested and Blazer/s ended up being paid for not out of CONCACAF funds but out of monies Blazer listed as due and owing to him from “commissions and fees”

The details aren’t really as important as the sense you get that while Blazer isn’t the sort to have committed the typical Jack Warner style of open theft, what he did do was paper over his two-handed grabbing of everything he could get his hands on with the thin veneer a legitimacy that a long-ago-expired contract granted him.

The sleaze is endless. Whether it amounts to criminal behavior is another issue which will undoubtedly play out in the coming months, but it’s clear that Blazer has run out of luck.

Jeff Webb says that he will refuse to share the dais with Blazer next month when the ExCo assembles in Mauritius, which is notable in an organization which has regularly featured some of the worst crooks on Earth happily grinning and gripping for the cameras.

But in a larger sense he, and Sunil Gulati and everybody else have very little to be outraged about. Particularly when you consider that the ballroom in Panama was more than half-filled with guys who are fresh off of FIFA-mandated suspensions and/or reprimands for taking bribes from Mohammed bin Hammam.

In CONCACAF, as in FIFA, it’s all a matter of degree and how much you have access to. Some people take envelopes stuffed with cash, some people buy Hummers and million dollar condos.

The only thing we can say for sure right now is that Chuck Blazer’s former plan to head up the ownership group for MLS NYC2 may have hit something of a roadblock.

The Mexican media is reportedly calling it the “Clásico personal” and I suppose we should be grateful that for once there’s no quibbling about the venue: Panama City is about as neutral as it gets.

Still, while today’s vote for North American representative on FIFA’s Executive Committee between MFF President Justino Compean and USSF President Sunil Gulati is wildly contentious and increasingly bitter it’s not particularly consequential. As a FIFA staffer once drily noted, the first question every new ExCo member asks, almost without exception, is “So, just how many World Cup tickets do I get?”.

It’s the greatest gig on Earth, with unimaginable perks, secret Swiss-based compensation and unlimited expenses, PLUS when you finally get replaced in cloud of recrimination, acrimony and indictment, a very generous lifetime pension which includes VIP treatment at every World Cup they can wheel you into.

In short, it will change one of the two men’s lives in incredibly wonderful ways – while business class is nice there’s a Gulfstream G550 waiting for the winner here – but it’s not likely to have much effect on the ridiculous mess at FIFA regardless of the result. That’s because, frankly, neither of these guys is going to rock the boat.

The word down in the former Canal Zone yesterday was that the race was “very tight” between the two, and no one can say for sure just how much influence Sepp Blatter and his hand-picked stooge CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb will try to exert over the result.

Gulati is probably Blatter’s first choice; he’s a FIFA insider who has quietly emerged as a key player in crucial policy areas like governance and reform and World Cup ticketing, while the 72 year old Compean is seen as a self-aggrandizing lightweight, which is not in any way considered a negative on the FIFA ExCo. Indeed, he’d blend right in.

The delegates are faced with a lesser-of-two-evils choice between someone closely identified with Chuck Blazer, the man who ratted out their man Jack Warner, and a guy who feels that since his nation is the biggest and best CONCACAF football power that they have a right to call the shots and everyone else should shut up.

And since it just wouldn’t be CONCACAF without comedy I give you this:

Sometime today the assembled delegates will vote to ask FIFA to accept five new full members who, as Webb puts it, “will be eligible to compete for the World Cup”.

They are: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin and Sint Maarten.

None of which are actual, you know, countries or anything. Three of them are “overseas territories” of France, and the last two represent an island divided by France and Holland which, taken together, is roughly the population of Lawrence Kansas.

One of them (French Guiana) is actually located in South America.

This will give the CFU five more votes for stuff like FIFA President – they’ll now have 30 – and each of them will immediately be eligible for $250,000 a year from FIFA which, in addition to the inevitable GOAL! grants, will go to pay another whole set of guys to shut up and do as they’re told.

Still, the worst part, the part that I just do not get, is this:

When the vote is held to determine who the North American representative to FIFA’s ExCo is held, all the “nations” of the CFU get to vote.

Ditto the next vote, which will determine the North American representative to the CONCACAF ExCo (between Gulati and a blithering incompetent imbecile from Canada). Montserrat, Anguilla and Jamaica have as much say in the matter as Mexico.

This system was put in place by Jack Warner as a way of keeping control over elections. As long as he had all those CFU votes in his pocket, there was no question of, say, the seven Central American countries sending him an ExCo member he didn’t approve of.

It’s ridiculous. Why do T&T and Guadeloupe have a say in who represents North America in Zurich? Can anyone explain this to me? Hell, the islands of the former Netherlands Antilles, taken as a block, can vote down a guy that Canada, the US and Mexico all want to have represent them.

Jeff Webb can talk all he wants about change and reform and banishing the bad old days but he’s shown s surprising lack of interest in, you know, actually changing how things work.

Because, just like his predecessor, he likes being able to decide who gets what.

The question today is just how much he and Sepp – “They laugh alike, they walk alike, At times they even talk alike — You can lose your mind” – are willing to get involved in today’s votes. Clearly, if they want, they can organize the CFU to vote for Kermit Gosnell or Kim Jong Un or anyone else.

We’ll find out in a few hours whether they’ve decided that it doesn’t make enough of a difference to risk pissing off one side or the other.

Of course the other item on tap today is the presentation to the assemblage of the long awaited “forensic audit” of CONCACAF affairs.

The Executive Committee reviewed it yesterday in a five hour meeting which left a lot of people stunned and shaken.

According to Reuters, delegates speaking anonymously told them “there were serious cases of financial malpractice detailed” with one of them saying simply:

“It’s bad, it’s very bad”.

One of the biggest issues is of course the broad-daylight heist of the $22 million CONCACAF Center of Excellence, and a recent article in the Trinidad Express makes it clear that there may be nothing they can do about it.

In an article entitled “The Great Deception” which is well worth your time, Camini Marajh gives a highly detailed explanation of just how Warner pulled it off. Prepare to need a shower.

All in all, a big day down in Panama City. Stay tuned for results as they are made available.

He’ll be stopping over in several countries as he makes his way to the sure-to-be exciting CONCACAF Congress in Panama later this week where he’s going to come face to face with the results of the corruption he not only ignored but encouraged in return for gaining and holding the personal power he craves:

Of course, everyone knows how to get Blatter to put your little corner of the world onto his itinerary: get your government to give him an award, the more ludicrously pompous and grandiose the better. FIFA used to maintain a page on their official website that proudly listed “80 90 100 such awards, virtually all of them stuff like “Grand Exalted Prince of Universal Peace” from someplace like Outer Mongolia or Fiji.

(For a good example of how ugly this can get, I highly recommend Andrew Jennings story on Blatter’s award from alleged human being Charles Taylor)

So the Dominican Republic had him stop by to graciously and humbly receive some gewgaw or other naming him one of the great humans of our time and he was only too pleased to accept.

Still, if Blatter wasn’t pretty much required to appear at Confederation Congresses he’d surely love to skip this one, which he will address right after they have spent a couple of days pretending to be appalled at the ugly disaster his hand-picked ally and closest friend created while he stood by and did nothing.

This is because the much-delayed auditor’s report on the financial affairs of CONCACAF over the last 20 years will finally be presented to the assembled federation Presidents, and it’s going to be sensational. It was promised to them for the meeting last December but there was apparently so much muck and goo to wade through that they needed more time.

Of course pretty much everybody there – from Jeff Webb on down to the delegate from the tiniest Caribbean flyspeck island – was in bed with Jack Warner every bit as much as Sepp Blatter ever was. They got and kept their lofty perches and licenses to steal “development money” by voting for Jack, doing what they were told and keeping their mouths shut.

For a peek into how the system worked, you can’t do better than this article from The Economist forwarded to us courtesy of BigSoccer legend SankaCofie, which shows that over the last ten years Anguilla (pop.15,000), to pick an example, sucked up US$1.15 million in “Development grants” in addition to their yearly $250,000 gift and every dime of it has vanished.

The same has happened with US$800,000 in Goal! money given to Guyana and Montserrat and, well, pretty much everybody else, and it’s well-accepted fact that the reason they were able to steal – there’s just no other word for it – all of that loot was because it was OK with Jack Warner. You stole, he stole, everybody stole and everybody was happy with it.

So it’s going to be pretty rich to watch as they all line up to express their outrage at Warner’s shenanigans before jetting back to the beach houses they bought with the cash he shoveled to them, although since they all secretly still love Jack and wish he was back in charge, expect to see them try and blame anything and everything on Chuck Blazer. He’s an American, he blew the whistle on their buddy and did I mention that he’s an American?

And at the head of the pyramid of thieves stood Sepp Blatter, who will doubtless join in the chorus of outrage when the assembled thieves discover that there was stealing going on in CONCACAF.

On top of all that is a new series published by the Trinidad Sunday Express authored by a brave young woman named Camini Marajh, who has somehow gotten her hands on the details down in T&T.

In clear, concise paragraphs stuffed with dates and amounts and details which leave no doubt as to their veracity, she shows how no less than $100 million – and possibly much more – flowed into the coffers of the Warner family while Jack’s accountant, who served the same function for the T&TFF and CFU, shamelessly doctored the books.

For the first time the citizens of T&T – and the wider Caribbean, where this is getting big play – are seeing not just “Warner is a crook” but “Warner stole X, Y and Z”.

In response, Warner angrily told the media earlier today that he is “incorruptible” and added:

“If I did not believe that I wouldn’t say it.”

This is partly in response to the news that T&T Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, acting on instructions from the Prime Minister, has written to Eric Holder asking him for information on the FBI’s probe of Jack Warner. Of course he can’t honestly believe that the US Dept. of Justice is going to tell Jack Warner’s allies one damned thing, but it’s a sign of how much heat they’re getting that he feels the need to go through the motions.

Now, into this whirling cauldron of corruption drops our own Sepp Blatter, whose has spent the last three years claiming that he is dedicated to cleaning up the mess at FIFA but whose phony crusade is beginning to look a little threadbare.

His much-touted “Reform Process” lies in tatters, now apparently reduced to adding two more or less random women to the FIFA ExCo. Pretty much everything else that Marc Pieth and his committee recommended has been shot down, watered down or simply ignored. No Presidential and ExCo salary and expense account transparency. No background checks for Executives. No open elections. No, no, no.

Plus, now that it’s becoming increasingly apparent that he intends to run for a fifth term – which has sparked an open war with UEFA President Michel Platini – he really needs to look like he stands for something besides the status quo.

Not that he needs to actually DO something about it all. Nobody in FIFA wants that. He just has to LOOK like he’s fighting corruption.

With all due respect, I have a suggestion for him which will electrify the world’s sporting media, jazz up the fans and polish his credentials as an agent for change who is serious about corruption fighting:

When the CONCACAF meeting is over, he should hop into his Executive Jet and fly to Trinidad.

He may or may not get the so-called “Head of State” treatment that he demands – it’s hard to see them snubbing him but who knows – but it’s unlikely that Prime Minister Bissessar will drape “The Grand Order of Wonderful and Saintly Humans” award around his neck but no matter.

For once, that’s not what he’d be there for. Rather, he needs to grab a cab and say to the driver:

“The Center of Excellence, please.”

There on the curb outside the front door, in front of all the world media cameras that FIFA’s vast PR operation can wrangle, Sepp can look gravely Presidential as he says:

“This facility belongs to CONCACAF.

It was built with FIFA development money that I myself approved. It is no one’s personal property.

It belongs to the soccer players of the Caribbean. It exists for their benefit and it does not now, nor has it ever, belonged to Jack Warner.

If he claims otherwise he is a liar.

I have come here to reclaim the CONCACAF Center of Excellence for its rightful owners.

To that end, I am hereby demanding that Mr. Warner deliver the keys to this facility to CONCACAF President Jeff Webb and make no further false claims regarding its ownership.

If he does not comply within 24 hours I will instruct FIFA’s attorneys to move immediately against Mr. Warner and his assets anywhere and everywhere with the utmost vigor and urgency.

Furthermore, I’m here to announce that starting today FIFA is going to fully fund T&T football. Because of pending lawsuits we cannot currently send them cash, but any operational bills they present to my office will be paid immediately.

FIFA is worth nothing if it does not stand for the rights of football players everywhere, and nowhere more than in small countries where they can be easily bullied by petty tyrants and governments that close their eyes to corruption.

I will not allow Trinidadian and Caribbean football to be held hostage to Jack Warner for one more day.

If he feels I am wrong about who owns this place I invite him to call me and I will meet him anywhere on the island within the hour.

If not, I will assume that he has nothing to say.”

The world will be stunned.

Jack Warner will be humiliated.

Sepp Blatter will get another four years.

Well, OK, so there’s the downside.

–

These folks believe the answer is yes:

But is this, as some would have it, simply your typical, garden-variety NIMBYism of the sort which inevitably pops up 20 seconds after someone suggests building a stadium someplace, or is there more to it?

To be frank, unequivocal and forthright: maybe yes and maybe no.

But as the patrons, fans and customers of MLS, it’s important that we recognize whether the league we all know and love is behaving in a manner which disregards the voices of the less fortunate, heartlessly taking away from a powerless population’s quality of life in return for a few grubby dollars.

To understand what’s going on here, here’s a look at what the area looks like today:

At the top of the photo (we’ll call it north) stands CITI Field, home of the New York Mets. To the left of the stadium (west) is a large parking lot which, not coincidentally, is where Shea Stadium used to be. This area is called Willet’s West.

Across the street to the right of the stadium is an area – Willet’s East or, less formally, the Iron Triangle – occupied mostly by auto body and repair shops and the like. The Mets feel this is ugly urban blight which detracts from the serene beauty of their environs; others call it “steady local employment and a place for poor people to get their cars fixed” but we’ll come to that in a bit.

(It’s important to note that Willet’s East was never a part of Corona Park. Willet’s West was, however, until the Mets took it to build Shea.)

Directly to the south is the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center – also an alienated part of Corona Park – which is owned and operated by the USTA and home of the US Open Tennis Championships.

(The area between the two is the MTA rail yards)

South of that you see the axis created by two relics left over from the 1964 World’s Fair: on the left is the iconic Unisphere, that Earth globe thingie…

…and to the right is the area in question, a nine-or-so acre cement pond.

This was actually constructed for the 1939 World Fair and called The Lagoon of the Nations in which there was a water feature called the Fountain of the Planets.

In actuality it is what’s known in the civil engineering biz as a water cauldron, and was built as a flood control mechanism for the Flushing River, which is more than anyone of us wanted to know but what the hell.

In any case, the fountain feature (housed in that white structure in the middle of the thing) hasn’t worked for years and the cost to get it up and spraying again is too astronomical to even consider, and no one has for a long time. That issue is as dead as the fountain.

And lest you think this is just me trying to badmouth the thing, I give you local resident and park lover Victor Bravo, 47, a welder from Corona:

“There is nothing here. It’s a wasted space and this water stinks.”

And here is the proposed footprint of the Don Garber Soccer Complex at Flushing Meadows:

That said, it’s pretty easy for someone who hasn’t set foot in that park in many years and who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away to sit around looking at those pictures and then tell the people who live in the area that all they’re really losing is an ugly, smelly, sewage-and-trash-filled sump that they’d be better off without.

It’s their neighborhood, they live, work and play there and it’s more than a little arrogant of someone who lives and works, for example, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to grandly announce to them that they can do without it.

There’s more to the deal than that of course.

By law, MLS will have to “replace” the 13 acres they’ll be taking with 13 acres of parkland someplace else. There are several candidates, none of which adjoin the current park, which can be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on where it ends up being and how accessible it is.

The league will also commit to upgrading and maintaining (and in at least one case, replacing) the current public soccer fields which are heavily used by youth leagues, high schools and others and which are usually in deplorable condition.

(At times local referees have refused to work games on some of them due to safety concerns; a couple years ago the local referee association placed four or five of them off limits and forbade their officials to set foot on them.)

There are a lot more details of course, but overall you can boil the league’s case down to simply this:

The 54,667,000 square foot Corona Park will shrink to 54,100,720 square feet, and MLS will build the residents of Queens at least 566,280 square feet of new park space nearby.

Furthermore, as some residents are pointing out, this is in fact a net plus, since they’ll be replacing concrete and green slime with grass, trees and soccer fields.

For the other side of the argument – and an intro to the real problem here – here’s a map that’s part of the Dog and Pony show being put on by the suspiciously well-funded (I love the smell of Astroturf in the morning) “Fairness Coalition of Queens”:

Now I don’t want to say that they’re lying here but of the “stadium construction” section they’re laying at the feet of MLS only about 25% is actually part of the actual building. The balance would be rebuilt soccer fields, replanted trees and resodded grassy areas.

So not lying so much as…well, let’s say “overstating the truth”.

I do wish they had made a more honest representation though because it shows what, to me at least, is the crux of the problem, and it’s not MLS.

Rather, it’s the other guys, and to put that argument into focus I simply cannot do better than my new best pal Alfredo Centola, President of something called the Malba Gardens Civic association.

The first minute is crucial, as it sums up the argument quite nicely but the second minute is even better as it shows a bunch of guys playing soccer in the park on a field which could be charitably described as a mud pit.

And you have to promise not to laugh when Al initially has a bit of trouble tearing three sheets of paper in half – it’s not exactly a phone book – although he recovers nicely:

As Our Man Al explains, there are three proposals on the table:

CITI wants to rip out the businesses east of the stadium and build upscale restaurants and shops they feel are more befitting their status (some mouth noise was given to an agreement to build “affordable housing” there as well, but there are so many escape clauses that nobody actually believes it will happen) AND they want to put a bigassed shopping mall in the Willets West area now used for parking.

The NTC meanwhile, wants to expand a few things – to the tune of $500 million – build a new stadium and, in the process, rip out 400 mature trees in the heart of Queens.

All MLS wants to do is tear out a huge cement toilet bowl, build a stadium – a project which will involve, they say, no more than one single acre of existing grassy area – and then do millions of dollars of renovations to soccer fields and build an additional 13 acre park for the residents.

So guess who’s taking the heat?

Hypocritically, but not surprisingly, both the Tennis folks and the Wilpons have lined up staunchly against the MLS project. It seems to them that they’re already a fact, and all they’re looking for is small adjustments.

MLS is the outsider trying to horn in on their territory, despite the fact that both of them are squatting on Corona Park land which they have never gotten around to replacing, and never will.

The USTA says they’re concerned about “noise” from concerts and other events at an MLS stadium. This despite the fact that the league has stipulated that, to avoid adding to local traffic congestion, they won’t schedule matches during Mets games or the US Open. But the NTC courts are available for hourly rental, and they say the players would be “distracted” by the music.

But the CITI people are the real bastards at this point.

Despite having had extensive conversations with MLS and thus being very well aware that they intend to play nowhere except a soccer specific stadium, CITI is very publicly telling everyone that they’d be happy to just let NYC2 play at their place.

Local opponents have jumped on this – as they were supposed to; it was just too easy – and are now saying “See? They don’t need to build a new place; they can just use CITI Field. Problem solved.”

(If you stayed around until the end of Al’s video above, he makes this very point.)

This is a particularly dirty shot but I’m told it’s the kind of knife-in-the-back that the Wilpons are famous for.

If The Don was a vengeful sort he’d start reminding people every chance he gets that the Mets promised to replace the parkland the took when they built their stadium and have never done so while MLS is fully prepared to do that very thing.

He then might point out that since CITI plans on building a shopping mall on the Willets West lot it’s clear that they don’t need that land for parking any more, in which case they should return it to the good people of Queens. Don could even offer to sow some grass and plant some trees.

As for the tennis jerks, your average hourly court renter isn’t Rafa Nadal and a few tunes wafting over the trees won’t really upset his equilibrium. Although if the USTA has their way, there’ll of course be a lot fewer trees.

And perhaps Don could point out that since MLS is going to be building and maintaining soccer fields for the common folk of Queens, when can we expect the USTA to provide a similar number of tennis courts for public use?

Finally, Al brings up a comparison that’s compelling and easy, but no less false:

The Central Park corollary.

“They’d never let anyone build a stadium in the jewel of Manhattan” they say, and they’d also never let it decay into the kind of condition which we now have at Corona.

Yes but.

First of all, Central Park was very much on it’s way to ruin a couple decades ago. The park’s neighbors – yes, rich people and even richer corporations to be sure – donated huge sums of money and started a foundation, to which the city ceded to entire park.

So not only does New York not maintain the place – there are some small exceptions – but at it’s base they really don’t control it either and unless they want to condemn some part or other and take it back by eminent domain they couldn’t let someone build on it even if they wanted to.

Others say the city really should do more to maintain Corona; fix the fountain, sod the soccer fields and clean up the place.

Well, as it happens they did spend millions of dollars a couple years ago on the Unisphere and got that fountain up and running again. But public money is tight right now and nobody expects to have the kind of dough it would take to overhaul and maintain FMCP anytime soon.

The MLS project is the kind of public/private partnership that can save the place, or at least parts of it. Maybe if the USTA and the Wilpons had taken the kind of responsibility that MLS proposes to accept, to being a partner with the locals going forward, then maybe the whole thing would be a moot point anyway.

Are there some serious concerns? Absolutely.

Parking is a big one. Fans attending events at the MLS facility will be instructed to park at CITI, but it’s a hefty hike from over there. The league says they’ll run shuttle buses, which will help of course but the neighbors believe it’s likely that they’ll first soak up all the on street parking for several blocks in every direction which will among other things, make using the park impossible anyway.

Mostly though, this is a case of a bunch of people who don’t have much – money, political muscle or influence downtown – feeling like they’re being ignored.

To their credit, the league has spent a good deal of time and effort sending canvassers out into the streets and shops, talking to people, answering their questions and trying to allay their fears.

But it’s the $1.7 million they spent last year on “lobbyists” which gets the most attention.

(Note: “lobbying” is not a synonym for “bribery involving hookers and coke”)

If and when this deal happens – and the guess here is that it will – it’s going to be up to all of us, MLS fans across the fruited plain, to watch and make damned sure that the league keeps it’s promises to the people of Queens.

If that happens, I’m betting that ten years out we’ll be a much more popular neighbor than the stuffed shirts at the USTA and those lowlife creeps at CITI.

Upon his arrival in Honduras, FMF President Justino Compean cheerily offered the locals the Fickle Finger of Fate.

Dirty Tackle has a video which I would link to if I was writing about the incident.

Compean, a candidate for the FIFA Executive Committee spot being vacated in May by American Chuck Blazer who, it should be noted, has never been photographed flipping off Central Americans, later said that his gesture was “misinterpreted” and that the reason he was waving it at a bunch of Honduran fans who were booing him was because he “had a hurt finger”.

No, seriously. He really said that.

A somewhat related story I’ll not be exploring concerns the universal awarding of “Man of the Match” accolades for the performance Omar Gonzalez turned in against El Tri on Tuesday.

I would beg to disagree; while he was indeed a revelation in the center of the defense, and clearly the best defender on the field I would nevertheless give the nod to Damarcus Beasley.

No, he wasn’t perfect and yes, Gonzalez made a bigger contribution to the end result, but I have searched my memory and cannot recall a game where a single player wassubjected to as much constant and obviously premeditated physical abuse in the course of one single match.

Every time down the field he was kicked, hit, knocked down, shoved, punched, elbowed, grabbed, whacked, folded, spindled and mutilated. Apparently the Mexis – Aquino in particular – felt that Run DMB was some variety of Piñata that they were supposed to bust open so the kiddies could enjoy the sweet treats inside.

And time after time Beasley got up, shook it off and limped back up the field.

“Player” of the Match? Gonzalez for sure. “Man” of the match? DMB, all day long.

“The Dutch Edition of Goal.com” (who knew) informs us that “Jermaine Jones zou zijn loopbaan het liefst voortzetten in de Verenigde Staten” and who can argue?

Certainly not me, which is why I won’t be writing about it. Particularly since the quote above translates: “Jermaine Jones would prefer to continue his career in the United States”.

If I was, however, I’d ask why it is that a team in Canada is pondering whether they should be picking up an American national team player who wants to play in the United States of America’s Professional First Division.

I’m reminded of the absurdity of the Brian McBride deal. Here was an American soccer hero coming home to bask in the applause of his countrymen in the twilight of his career and the system dictated that he was the property of an outfit in another country, from which he had to be ransomed like a hostage captured by Barbary pirates.

Yet when someone like Patrice Bernier decides to come play over here, Montreal gets to pick him up for the asking. They didn’t have to send Chivas a first rounder and some money to move up in the allocation rankings.

Did I miss it when we made Julian DeGuzman go through the allocation process so that the Fire could have a whack at him?

I mean, OK, if we have to let Canada into MLS out of pity over their pathetic third world status, fine. I can be generous to the less fortunate. Really.

But why on Earth, I would ask, do we have to let them pick over the guys from the US National side who want to come over here and cash in on their status? “Hi, I’m US National Team Star Jermaine Jones, and when I want to kick back after beating Mexico 2-0 there’s nothing like glazed donuts and Labatts, eh?”.

Can’t we just stipulate that Canadian national teamers are the exclusive province of our Frozen Brothers to the North, and US team members should go to US cities?

And I really, really, really don’t want to waste time pointing out yet again that the attendants at the Home don’t have to take Paul Gardner’s computer away; they could just disconnect it from the internet.

That way he could sit there happily pounding out utter rubbish day after day without polluting the soccersphere.

But before they do, maybe someone could point out to Grandpa that the average temperature in Commerce City Colorado on March 22 is 54 degrees and if in fact Sunil Gualti put the game there in anticipation of a blizzard then he’s an incompetent boob who got incredibly lucky and instead of selling retro shirts and yearbooks to raise money for the Federation he should just grab a few $20 bills out of petty cash and go buy some lottery tickets.

Now in truth I might normally be tempted, as a followup to last week’s not-to-be-missed installment of “As Jack Warner Turns”, to offer up a link to the Reuter’s story which confirms, based on “US law enforcement sources” that Daryan Warner is an officially designated “cooperating witness” in the criminal probe aimed at his father.

I would, that is, except that even aside from the fact that I fingered Daryan as a hide-saving stoolie in my previous article, the Reuters piece is a confused pile of rubbish in which the writer thinks that “offshore account” is a synonym for “criminal activity”.

For example, he breathlessly reports that the CFU made payments to “an offshore account”, apparently without noticing that in fact “CFU” stands for Caribbean Football Union which, by definition IS “offshore”. All of it. Every single bit. They made payments to “offshore accounts” every day of the week, and still do.

The problem is that there are two hard-and-fast yet dead wrong “certainties” which every European article on the subject of FIFA corruption takes for granted:

One is that Mohammad bin Hammam was brought down by clever maneuvering at the hands of Sepp Blatter, in an effort to get himself re-elected. This theory – which every single football journalist in Europe treats as an article of faith – ignores the very basic fact that Blatter had nothing to do with Warner and bin Hammam conspiring to pass out envelopes of money in order to procure votes which, by definition, would have served to defeat Blatter himself.

Furthermore, it was Mo Binny’s own decision to pull out of the race two days before the vote. No one declared him ineligible or demanded that he withdraw, he did it of his own volition and then, immediately after the vote, started claiming that Sepp had “forced him off the ballot”.

The second thing they’re all sure of is that Chuck Blazer is deeply involved in all of this, a fact which the evidence does not support. Aside from the fact that apparently Jack Warner paid him some money (in an entirely open and above board transaction with a broad paper trail and not, as is Warner’s normal modus operendi, in a big sack filled with US currency) drawn on a CFU account and which was deposited into a bank in the Caribbean – which, since The Big Guy has both a home and a sports marketing business located there, makes perfect sense – we know of nothing whatsoever that he stands accused of.

As I’ve said many times previously, I’m not saying Blazer is as pure as the driven snow, only that repeating “offshore account” over and over like an agitated Macaw does not in and of itself prove a damned thing.

Unfortunately, like I said, every single solitary journalist in Europe is sure it does, which is why I won’t bother with their stuff. Most of us live in CONCACAF countries and know a whole lot more about all of this than your garden-variety European football scribe hoping to toss a bunch of unrelated facts up in the air and hope no one notices that it’s not particularly related.

I will however, spare a few words for the demise of Fox Soccer Channel which will become, starting September, something called FXX, an “entertainment channel”.

File this one under “victim of their own success”, for rather than being about the failure of soccer in North America, it’s rather about how big it’s becoming.

Time was that you had to call up and fight and moan and write letters demanding that “your local cable supplier” begin offering an obscure channel called Fox Sports World, which carried – glory of glories! – real, actual soccer.

I saw Max Bretos doing the anchor duties on ESPN Sportscenter the other day. He’s come a long ways from the days when he sat in a small studio and did voiceovers for European football feeds. Good on him.

FSW, which also carried the wonderful Aussie Rules Football and other strange and exotic beasts which it could pick up on the cheap, was a marvel for those of us who were used to waiting weeks for the always-late SoccerAmerica to arrive with the scores of games which were played three weeks previous.

Gradually they picked up more soccer and less peculiar guys down under in disturbing clothes and Fox Soccer was born. The big guys, the networks with the power and the money couldn’t have cared less.

But as we all know, with NBC now outbidding everyone for the English Premier League as well as MLS, and beIN/Al Jazeera picking up most everything else, all Fox was left with was some UEFA Champions League games and some other odds and ends.

Most Fox owned matches will migrate to the new Fox Sports One channel, coming soon to a cable outlet near you.

It’s a sign of progress, and increasing popularity. Soccer in the US has simply outgrown a niche outlet for a painfully small group of addicted geeks, and it’s cause for celebration.

Still, maybe we can all find time to raise a glass to what was.

the result of the match played on 22 March stands and is considered as valid.

Rather than telling them that they need to put on their Big Boy Pants and just accept the result, however, FIFA says that the reason they refuse to get involved is because:

FIFA has examined the content of the letter and, taking into consideration article 14, paragraph 4 of the 2014 FIFA World Cup regulations, has confirmed that the conditions established in the regulations for an official protest have not been met by the Costa Rica FA.

The referenced paragraph has become well known over the last couple of days, but let’s review anyway:

Protests regarding the state of the pitch, its surroundings, markings or
accessory items (e.g. goals,flagposts or footballs) shall be made in writing to
the referee before the start of the match by the head of delegation of the team
lodging the protest. If the pitch’s playing surface becomes unplayable during
a match, the captain of the protesting team shall immediately lodge a protest
with the referee in the presence of the captain of the opposing team. The
protests shall be confirmed in writing to the FIFA general secretariat during the
preliminary competition and during the final competition by the head of the
team delegation no later than two hours after the match

We’ve all been assuming that each of the conditions was met. FIFA says this is not the case, and since we’re all reasonably certain that the Chinese Fire Drill at around minute 55 was the oft-mentioned Captain’s get-together, maybe we can speculate that the Head of Delegation didn’t find himself a fax machine and shoot off a letter to Jerome Valcke in Zurich quickly enough.

HOWEVER, one has to add that it’s pretty rich of FIFA to refer to the “2014 FIFA World Cup regulations” since, as we’ve since learned, they don’t seem to carry much water.

This seems to be the appropriate place for me to offer a sincere personal apology to the USSF for taking them around the barn a few times while beating them like a rented mule with regard to not knowing the rules.

Apparently, the mere fact that FIFA spends many years, hundreds of man hours and millions of dollars assembling and publishing the “Official Rules” doesn’t mean they can’t change them at a whim after a given tournament has begun and keep it a closely guarded secret.

To give them their due, however badly – corruptly, fraudulently, criminally – FIFA handles their financial matters, this kind of technical stuff is where they shine. It’s the one thing they do well, and they know full well that their overall technical competence gives them cover for the open theft, graft and greed.

Nonetheless, the appropriate parties at USSF did in fact know what the rule book stated, and when it became an issue, spoke with the Match Commissioner who was apparently the only person in the building who knew about the super-secret rule change.

Left unexplained today is why FIFA elected to change that particular rule at a late date, who was it who wanted it changed and why.

But as with Sepp Blatter’s salary, we’ll probably never know.

(Ian Darke seemed to have the right idea but everybody seemed to want to argue with him)

Of course that would require being familiar with FIFA’s competition rules and boring stuff like that, something which is apparently beneath their dignity and would take time away from making dinner reservations and texting their friends about how drunk they are.

So for our great good friends from Soccer House, in case they’re ever again required to, you know, actually KNOW something about soccer competitions, here’s the dealeo:

Up until the whistle is blown to start play, the CONCACAF representative on site, AKA The Commissioner (and did you know that they have an actual formal training program in Zurich which you have to take in order to qualify for the job?) has the authority to pull the plug on the match. The decision is his alone.

However, AFTER play has begun the sole authority in terms of whether the conditions are acceptable is the referee. It’s his pitch and he answers to no one, which is as it should be.

In any case, what’s the commissioner going to do while play is going on – leave his comfy box, trot down to the touchline, yell “Yoo hoo, Mr. Referee guy!” and order him to blow his whistle?

Furthermore, while everyone was full of admiration and respect for referee Joel Aguilar for holding an impromptu conference around minute 55 and asking for everyone’s input on whether to keep going, that’s apparently not what happened.

Reportedly, all he did was suspend play for a few moments so that a couple of the lines could be shoveled.

(I admit it did appear to me that, based on his gestures seen from the vantage point of my Barcalounger 2000 miles away, Aguilar was ordering everyone to the locker rooms and they talked him out of it. Again, this is a point that someone on the sideline, instead of huddling in a loge with a cup of hot coffee next to the Nike rep could have cleared up on the spot.)

In any case, it was unfortunate and forgivable that nobody doing the broadcast had any idea what the procedure would be if the match was called. They’re just talking heads.

What’s not at all forgivable is that USSF apparently didn’t know either.

In another of the seemingly unending list of reasons why Twitter should not be used as an official, semi-official or even ad hoc outlet for information, I give you the fed, mid-game last night:

U.S. Soccer ‏@ussoccer 15m
Note: If the game were to be stopped/postponed, it would be resumed with the same score and at the same minute.

Well, that’s nice. USSF spends a few million bucks hiring toadies to fetch coffee and pound out Tweets but didn’t think to ask anybody to bother learning the rules, which are available to all and sundry online at this location.

Perhaps in the future instead of calling it “Regulations: 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil” they instead titled it “How to get one of those nicer offices at the end of the hall” someone at USSF would actually have read it.

For their benefit, the relevant paragraph is found on page 28 in the section headed “Preliminary Competitions” (ie. Qualifiers):

7. If a match is interrupted before the completion of normal playing time or
extra time because of extreme weather or for reasons outside the control of
the host association, a full-length replay lasting 90 minutes shall be arranged
for the following day, thus avoiding considerable extra expense for the visiting
association

Now it’s nice that the “Match Commissioner” hasn’t read the damned thing either and therefore figured that he could make it all up as he went along, but who really expects CONCACAF to send someone who actually has a clue?

(Up until recently, one of the key CONCACAF Game Delegates was Jason Sylvester, who is one of the two people Jack Warner “delegated” to hand out envelopes full of US $100 bills to FIFA voters.

Guys like Sylvester aren’t hired due to their integrity, professionalism and attention to detail; they get and keep the job due to blind loyalty to whoever is in charge.)

It’s simply inexcusable that out of the horde of Federation employees who got free travel, tickets and fine dining on the cuff in Denver, not one of them knew the rules.

And the final joke was when, sometime around minute 80, the boys with the mikes announced that “the commissioner” had decided that the game would not be stopped. It should have been a punchline instead of being treated like an official decision.

All of that aside – Sunil Gulati answers to no man, now that he doesn’t have to call Jack Warner every morning and ask permission to go to the can – news reports this morning have a “furious” Costa Rica Federation screaming bloody murder:

Coach Jorge Luis Pinto said the game “was an embarrassment to football, disrespectful to the game” and that the “legal conditions” for playing the match were not met.

Midfielder Cristian Bolanos, who plays for FC Copenhagen, told reporters:

“Honestly, it was robbery, a disgrace, I’ve never played a game in these conditions.

“You couldn’t see the ball … if we had played without snow, we would have won, I am sure”

Which sounds unfortunately like sour grapes; if they had won, I doubt very much if his reaction would have been the same.

Be that as it may, an unnamed “Costa Rican Federation official” told reporters in the locker room that they would be filing an official appeal with FIFA on Saturday morning while the teams were still in town and available for a rematch.

I wish him luck, but he’s not going to have any. The game wisely confers the responsibility for these things onto their man on the field, the guy with the whistle.

If he, standing there with the snow falling on his head like everybody else, felt it was safe to continue, nobody in Zurich is going to over rule him.

Bottom line, it snowed on everybody. Dempsey scored a sort of flukey ricochet one could even call a junkball if one was so inclined (I myself am not, but feel free) but the main reason he was able to do it was because three Costa Rica defenders chased the ball and left him wide open.

That wasn’t the weather, it was simply a bad mistake on their part. Old man Winter had nothing to do with it.