Long Range Goals
Posted on September 1, 2010 1:28 am
If Beau Dure had waited until today to release “Long Range Goals,” the last sentence would read “On August 30, 2010, it was announced that Adidas renewed their sponsorship with Major League Soccer, in a deal that will run through 2018 and is worth two hundred million – that’s right, two hundred god-damned million American god-damned dollars. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.”
Assuming the United States is chosen to host the World Cup in 2022, we can pretty much guarantee MLS another twelve years of life. I think today we finally passed the point where if Phil Anschutz sees the Galaxy stink up the HDC again and says “Screw this,” the league would fold.
It was fairly obvious before, but now it’s undeniable. In March 2014, barring a meteorite strike, Dalek invasion, or the Mayas being depressingly correct about their calendar dating rationale, MLS will start its nineteenth season. That will make MLS the longest running first division professional soccer league in American history. The doubters were wrong. The believers were right.
Beau Dure’s book, “Long Range Goals,” is the history of the league before Monday.
Having said all this, no one who gets very far into the book will conclude that MLS was destined for popularity, or that its leaders were necessarily canny visionaries. One might in fact conclude – Dure doesn’t – that decades of American soccer history, most specifically the NASL run and the slow, grinding rise of the US national team in the 1990′s, built a foundation of support for the sport that even a league as hell-bent on self-immolation as MLS could manage to eke out a precarious existence.
To paraphrase David Byrne, this is not my beautiful league. How did we get here? My God! What have we done?
The vast majority of the book takes place off the field, which makes sense – the vast majority of whether a league lives or dies is decided off the field. Beau doesn’t torture the reader with a lot of numbers, mostly because MLS would cheerfully have killed him rather than provide those figures. He also doesn’t lapse into business speak, being merely content to quote it for comedy purposes.
The action starts with a brutal conflict of interest – USSF President Alan I. Rothenberg deciding whether the APSL would get Division I status over two vapor leagues, one of which would eventually name its trophy after Alan I. Rothenberg. Had MLS flopped, the courtroom battles that would have followed would have made the Soccer Wars of the 1920′s seem downright chummy.
Dure has extensive interviews with personnel around at the time – most illuminatingly from Doug Logan, who doesn’t come across as that self-serving. (Although – yeah, sure, Doug Logan was a rules purist, and was helpless against abominations like the shootout and the countdown clock. That’s why they lasted four entire seasons.)
And he spends a lot more time on the infamous players’ lawsuit than he does on – well, on all the games the league has ever played, practically. (Although he does spend a page or two on a hilarious 6-4 Crew-Wizards game from 1996.) Which is understandable, because the lawsuit showed so much about what the league was facing. Mark Semioli’s presence in the book is indispensable here – not only for his insight in to the early days of the league, but because he’s the only one who will even half-heartedly defend that lawsuit. Dure gives him even more space than he gives to League One America’s Jim Paglia, but Semioli isn’t crazy. (Come to think of it, maybe the book should have had more Paglia.)
The target audience of this book can relive a lot of amusing anecdotes that didn’t necessarily risk the future of the sport, but were fairly aggravating at the time. Bet you haven’t thought of Paulina Rubio in a while.
And then there’s Sunil Gulati renewing Tab Ramos’ Metrostars contract, over the objections of the Metrostars. Boy, Sunil sure loves to renew contracts.
But if you want to read about League One America, buy his book. I’m not going to give it away for you.
The other really interesting part of the book is the end, where Beau details the challenges the league still faces. The quick list:
1. Getting everyone a stadium, specifically Houston, San Jose and DC United.
2. Finding its audience.
3. Finding a playoff system that doesn’t irritate more people than it attracts.
4. Avoiding labor stoppages.
5. Increasing talent.
6. Competing with other American sports.
7. Getting more money from broadcasters and sponsors.
I’m sure we’ll all have plenty of time to discuss all of those, but it’s worth it to read what Beau has to say. Even if you don’t agree with his conclusions – for example, MLS could go ten thousand years and not need a single table, and promotion and relegation doesn’t even deserve the cursory mention Beau gives it. But reasonable minds can differ.
In the end, Dure concludes that the league is doomed, and we’re all better off giving up and becoming baseball fans.
No, obviously, the league has achieved what Beau calls “the miracle of stability.” There are and will continue to be the little apocalypses that, if left unchecked, will mean the end of soccer in this country – at least, if you believe what you read. Hey, remember back in March, when we all thought there would be a labor stoppage and the league would undoubtedly fold as a result? Of course you don’t.
Do Amazon links still show up automagically on these blogs? Let’s find out.
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Long-Range-Goals-Success-League-Soccer/dp/1597975095/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283318626&sr=1-1"]Amazon.com: Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer (9781597975094): Beau Dure: Books[/ame]
Apparently so.
Oh, speaking of soccer history, it looks like we finally got Roger Allaway blogging!
love the Dr Who reference!
Most commentators haven’t treated the adidas renewal as the massively important milestone it is. This league is not that many years past survival mode. The stadiums and expansion of recent years mask that.
The milestones of this league are: founding – struggle – Chicago – contraction/AEG and Hunt owning almost the entire league – Garber – SUM + stadium movement gets serious – 2004 adidas 10-year sponsorship deal – Chivas + RSL expansion brings new owners – Adu – SJ relocation – Beckham + DP rule – 2008 start of expansion explosion, including SJ’s return + expansion teams raise attaendance bar – TV deal changes to where channels actually pay MLS for games [at this point the question was no longer survival, but how big, how fast]- 2010 CBA – this week’s adidas sponsorship renewal.
maybe 40 years. One thing I will not see in those years is a DC United stadium.
Well, the Houston stadium is a done deal, if all that work over on the site I saw this morning is any indication.
Great post Dan, especially pointing out that (1) the new addidas deal (Fact, I once had an argument with an editor over whether or not to capitalize the name of that company in a story. It eventually involved three copy editors and heated arguments (though not by my bemused self). The answer: Capitalize it, though with a commitment to look at the issue again later. Though it still sometimes is and sometimes isn’t. Want to know why the story didn’t get more play? There you go. Who needs the hassle?) and (2) Beau’s book are both more important stories than Bob Bradley getting renewed.
ATPDC, I think you should pray for Dan’s Dalek invasion, if not a Reaver one. Both seem more likely to happen than a DC Stadium. But hey, there’s always Baltimore, then you could change the name to BWI United! And we all know, thanks to Beau Dure, how much MLS loves rebranding!
If anyone cares, that 6-4 game in KC was my first MLS game. We came up from Mizzou, found reasons for being Crew fans (My mom is from Columbus, one guy had a friend there, one guy claimed to have played soccer with McBride at Buffalo Grove HS)
We spent the evening getting pelted with popcorn by the girl scouts behind us (rightfully so) and ended the night being the final shot of the ESPN feed (cause we had the “SportsCenter Next” poster)
“There is no chance (MLS) will survive. Absolutely no chance whatsoever.”
— Nye Lavalle, Sports Marketing Group, in The Sporting News, June 27, 1994
I love making that ********er eat it. Just love it.
Kenn, that is fabulous. You just made my millenium.
As far as MLS signing mistakes go, I’d take Paulina Rubio over Branco, Manny Motajo, Diego Serna or, say, Lothar of the Hill People anyday.
Just sayin’…..
Here’s the man’s Wikipedia entry, should anyone feel like amending it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nye_Lavalle
I still think Dan’s endorsement of this book is solely due to the cover having a pic of the HDC, what a homer!
To whit: “Sports predictions
Lavalle obtained prominence in the media, advertising and sports marketing industries for his prediction in 1989 [21] that figure skating and NASCAR would be the sports of the 1990s in the US. NASCAR indeed experienced major expansion during this era, building new tracks across the US outside of its traditional Southeastern base, and continues to be a major American sport today.
Soccer fans in America have particularly railed against Lavalle’s assessment of soccer in America and many were unhappy over Lavalle’s analysis on soccer in the US following the 1994 FIFA World Cup[22] The New York and LA Times quoted Lavalle as saying “for World Cup soccer worldwide, the World Cup gets a grade A; for staging of the World Cup in America, it gets a grade A. But for the future of soccer in America, the grade is incomplete. If you want a prediction, it seems like the term paper will be turned in and it will get a failing grade. To say that it will ever be on par with hockey or golf or even wrestling is way off the mark.”[23]
Major League Soccer, the primary professional soccer league in the US, has operated continuously since 1993 while experiencing slow, but steady growth. It remains behind the PGA Tour, WWE Wrestling, and the NHL in attendance, fan, television, and sponsor support.”
This needs numbers-based, fact-based amending.
bob bradley sucks.
And the thing is, he was saying what all those pundit and consultant types were thinking back then, he was just more blunt about it.
Honestly, one of these days I expect there will be some acknowledgement that, at least in a sports business sense, getting MLS off the ground and in position to grow the product in the midst of the Great Recession represents probably the most difficult challenge of the ‘modern era’ (ie post war).
Nye Lavalle comes across as a complete dumb*** in all of his predictions. Not because they are completely without merit, but because he takes what he writes as absolute, guaranteed fact.
He never bothers to analyze branching possibilities, but instead chooses one prediction and sticks with it even if it fails. Something tells me he wouldn’t backtrack on any of those predictions, either, even if time proves them to be incorrect.
You cannot tell me he didn’t write his own wikipedia page. You just cannot.
And Dan, himself, has not put much attention to the youth and depth development focus of the Adidas deal. It interferes with his assertion that Adidas is happy to throw piles of money at a league that “can’t beat Puerto Rico.”
I need to see the book, but if Beau is concerned about the appeal of the playoffs, that seems a concern that ignores recent trend. Hard core anti-MLSers will never accept playoffs. (And Dan generally lumps anyone who suggests tweaks to any MLS status-quo policy in with such people, which is why he gets twitchy at Beau even mentioning single table or pro-rel.) But attendance and ratings were up last year. And the old saw about “rewarding mediocrity” is countered by a) constrainsts against making the season any longer, even as the number of regular season participants grows, and b) RSL – they didn’t suck last year, they were just late bloomers, as their form this season shows.
NASCAR, sure. But figure skating? He must have made that prediction right after a Winter Olympics.
I’ve been waiting for so long for a book on MLS. Just placed my order on Amazon. Thanks Beau.
I think MLS will continue to grow slowly but surely. With Francises coming up in Portland , Vancouver, and Montreal the league is starting to gain some respectabiblty, Hopefully teams Like DC United, Houston, and K.C. will get there SSS stadium situation fixed up providing if have already. and Chivas and Dallas can leave there present locales. and go somewere were they can be appreciated.
Does anyone know when this is going to be released as a eBook?
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