The Great Zaganza strikes again
Posted on May 17, 2011 7:57 am
What did Garber mean? What do you mean, what did he mean? He didn’t mean anything!
Okay, this is probably because Major League Soccer Soccer’s archives are kept alongside the Ark of the Covenant, but still, it’s not totally impossible to find out what Garber actually said.
And what he said was gibberish:
It was a crappy metaphor. That’s it. He was trying to have it both ways. Seeing as how he hasn’t brought the subject up since.
And upon that mighty foundation we shall build MLS2. Because NFL2 and NBA2 and MLB2 and NHL2 are proven ratings winners.
Maybe I should put this on a macro until it sinks in, but the conference-and-playoff system isn’t simply better for American sports…although you’d think that would end the argument right there. It’s a better, fairer and more exciting system for fans. Nurturing local rivalries is a good enough reason for the current system – oh, but please, tell me all about how Seattle and Portland might have been interested in their game Saturday if MLS had promotion and relegation.
However, there are literally millions of other reasons – one for each dollar American sports don’t lose by punishing fans for the lousy performances of players, owners and coaches.
Remember when I wasted my life drawing up this theoretical table for a Football League converted to conferences? It’ll never happen, either, but at least fans would gain far more than they would lose.
Well, Bruce and Tha Dogg Pound didn’t call me out by name, although they might as well have. Bill, on the other hand, rang my doorbell and ran, leaving a flaming can of kerosene on the porch.
Well, I had a fantastic view of the whole sequence, so I can elaborate. First of all, we thought the big story of the evening would be Juan Pablo Angel coming out gangbusters. Maybe the criticism was getting to him, maybe being brutally upstages by Henry and Marquez the week before had something to do with it – but Angel was on a mission, and the Wizards (shut up) could do nothing about it. If Angel can contribute that intensity ninety minutes at a time…well, he’d still be a Red Bulls DP, I imagine.
Second, the context of the Beckham shot is interesting. We’ve noticed his rather enthusiastic fouling so far this season – there but for the grace of God goes an infinitely more famous Brian Mullan…no, make that an infinitely more famous Jonathan Leathers; no way the league suspends Beckham for nine games.
Well, Kansas City was the first team of the year to fight back…either that, or Roger Espinoza’s criminality is no respecter of persons. The tying penalty was made possible by Espinoza’s Marvel v. Capcom move in the penalty area…and although Scott Wolf of the Daily News wasn’t impressed by Beckham’s effort to that point, that’s the first time I’d seen him in a penalty area since MLS Cup 2009.
So when Davy Arnaud fouled Beckham twice in the waning moments of the game, pushing him down for emphasis – well, Beckham’s ironic smile lent itself to many interpretations.
What you didn’t see on the highlight, though, was maybe the second funniest moment of the year. Baldomero Toledo took out the spray paint, and sprayed a little circle around the ball.
You know – so Beckham wouldn’t cheat on his free kick.
We all saw Beckham’s response. His goal celebration, or lack thereof, was also perfect. He just turned and walked away, having given proof of his superiority.
Well, provided the ball isn’t moving. He still hasn’t contributed anything in the run of play, but it never crossed my mind that he’d be this effective, still, on dead balls. Beckham right now is tied for second in the league in assists – a little misleading, because Beckham’s team has played more games than anyone else (cf., the current goal-scoring leader). But that’s more production already than I thought the Galaxy would get out of him.
Not that I want him to take the rest of the year off. It’s a long season.
And it won’t always be this easy for Millonarios USA. While many are re-anointing the Galaxy as the MLS Cup favorites they were before MLS4RSL, the Galaxy are still bullying weaker teams and showing serious ineffectiveness against stronger ones. And even the MLS playoff system won’t allow the Galaxy to only play bad teams on the way to MLS Cup.
If you want to score four goals a game, by all means play expansion teams every week. Or play homeless teams – the last Kansas City team to barnstorm this much started Satchel Paige.
Of course, they get another box of cupcakes this week in…oh, really? At Red Bull Arena? Huh. Didn’t see that coming.
Anyway, LA-KC was only interesting to Galaxy fans and other sadists. I suppose at some point we should take a serious look at what Cascadia means for the league.
Oh, and the United States Soccer Federation has formed a national team for female players. I wonder if it’ll catch on.
(Should I bother to explain the title reference? Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series featured an astrologer of a major newspaper who wrote his column specifically to annoy Dirk. “The paper’s circulation had dropped by nearly a twelfth since he had taken over doing the horoscope, and only Dirk and The Great Zaganza knew why.”
(So when I see nationwide writers produce something that annoys me so much that it could have had no other purpose BUT to irritate me and me personally…I think the Great Zaganza.)
Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul was much better that the first Dirk Gently book… How can you go wrong with Norse gods…?
Seriously though, I must have missed out: when did the spray paint action become official for MLS? I loved watching it in the Mexican leagues. Made for much quicker restarts.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo"]YouTube – Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions[/ame]
That’s gold, Loney.
Great post, overall. I didn’t like the cockiness of Becks turning and walking away after the free kick, but I could see his point. He’s still one of the greatest players to ever play the game, and he feels that he deserves better than Davy Arnaud hacking at him.
That’s funny.
Mr. Garber needs to stop dropping “pro/rel” whenever he can. WTF does simulating pro/rel have to do with rewarding the regular season champion, Commish? Promoting them to La Liga? Or rewarding them with relegation to the prosperous NASL?
“However, there are literally millions of other reasons – one for each dollar American sports don’t lose by punishing fans for the lousy performances of players, owners and coaches.”
Tell that to the fans in Tampa and Miami, and potentially Columbus and DC if the rumors end up being true. With pro/rel, fans don’t lose their teams. The “American” way is for the teams to move to the market that offers them the most (See Colts, Browns, Cardinals, Rams for references). Just because its been done that way, doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.
No, they just lose the league quality which makes the team worth watching in the first place. Oh, the diehards will keep coming out. That’s when you learn just how few diehards there actually are.
And what makes you think relegation would prevent a team from moving?
Two divisions. 16 teams each. Division 1, top 6-8 teams make MLS Cup playoffs. Bottom three teams “relegated” to Division 2. Division 2, top 2 teams make MLS Cup playoffs and get promoted. Teams 3-10 make Division 2 playoffs, winner gets promoted. Only way it could ever work, and it’s kind of a stupid idea.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m in the minority of BigSoccer people, but I kinda like the league the way it is. I’m happy with what they’re doing.
Let’s go, MLS.
Vamonos, MLS.
Allons-y MLS. (Gotta do that once Montreal comes into the league.)
I’m simulating not understanding where we practically “called you out,” Dan Loney. We love us some Loney–and we always let Bill leave the proverbial (and sometimes literal) poop bombs on your porch (though Brett has to ring the doorbell, because Bill and I don’t run much anymore–we’re old).
So the debate is on…
Is Garber full of gibberish?
Or is he a keen, calculated animal, who never says anything without a reason?
Or both?
What the heck does “we could simulate promotion/relegation” mean? The #1 team gets promoted to a higher plane of existence? They get to play in their own league next year?
Relegating DC United would save them. Interesting theory.
If the Crew move or fold – I guess “Move the Crew!” is the new “Move the Rapids!” which was the new “Move the Wizards!” which was the new “Move the Burn!” on until the dawn of time – it will not be…and this is important…because the team finished in last place. I’m not sure if the Crew have ever finished in last place, but they didn’t last year and won’t this year. To say that promotion and relegation would save the Crew is delightfully disingenuous.
So I guess the fact that LD has 7 in 8 games is directly tied to the fact that his team has played 12?
Thx,
Jay!
It’s probably true, though. DC would be moving because they can’t find a venue suitable to the ambitions of an MLS team, in terms of revenue and expenditure, for a team that wants to draw 20,000. But if the ambitions were scaled back to a league with much smaller budgets, where much lower salaries make lower attendances surivivable, there are generally facilities like that around all over the place.
You look at the one time a team in the English setup has moved in the modern era, and for modern reasons–Wimbledon to Milton Keynes, because they couldn’t compete in their venue and MK was a ‘better market’–the Wimbledon fans more or less proved that point by building what appears to be a sustainable club in a smaller venue at a lower tier.
Yes, this is also, in a different sense, true. In EuropaLand, you expect that the teams that are regular relegation battlers are also the ones with weakest revenue picture. Here, at the moment, not so much.
That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Crew aren’t just as financially viable at a lower level. (Maybe more.) To look at the dispersion of fans on a typical match day, they must have the highest ratio of hardcores to casuals/middlecore fans of any team in the league.
Yeah, I never put much meaning into that “simulated pro-rel” line. It was just an overdrawn comparison.
And talk of struggling/contracted/abandoned markets in such a comparison is also overdrawn, as Stan suggests.
The early commercial success of the retro-branding of the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, who play in exactly the same spot as the ignored Miami FC, which plays in exactly the same spot as the Miami Fusion mls entry which drew little more than their Strikers successors and less than their Strikers predecessors, points to the complexity of the overall picture.
It’s hard to see pro/rel being some sort of magic bullet.
I think it is the latter.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-voTtPx6WNE"]YouTube – Wake Forest Soccer Champs Julian Valentin Pt 1[/ame]
On the other hand, the mortality rate among teams who allegedly have less overhead is truly frightening. So much so, in fact, that I think relegation=death sentence is a fairly safe conclusion.
Among the many reasons MLS2 is a shockingly poor idea is that it keeps travel and accommodation costs constant. This is less of an issue in European leagues, much more of one here. “Oh, you’re in the second division now? We’ll give you a break on hotel and plane expenses, then.”
Which teams that have less overhead and that have a high mortality rate are you referring to?
In the words of Muhammad, peace be upon him – are you ********ing kidding me?
That was from 2009. One full season ago. It’s a rare year when the second division doesn’t fold as many teams in a season as MLS has in sixteen years. A relegated DC United might as well call themselves California Victory East.
Naturally that was just the setup for the point, which was that you’re trying to make a claim about promotion and relegation while drawing your evidence solely from where it doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, reality. The premise is that DC United’s stadium woes and Columbus’ attendance issues would be solved by playing in crappier stadiums against worse competition with roughly equivalent travel costs. “But they could go back up to where they were, and that will generate fan interest!” is pleading so special, it has its own Olympics, if you catch my drift.
The difference between your claim and mine is that mine works somewhere, where yours has been tried nowhere. But the weird part is you’re far more confident in your entirely imaginary scenario I am in mine or that either of us is entitled to be.
I do know that most of the people who argue for promotion and relegation are total douchebags about it. What I don’t know is why that would justify a counterargument that’s such deliberate fraud.
Also, you’re taking a system that is survivable in 180 countries and claiming it won’t work in one. Maybe you need a new perspective on the term ‘special pleading’, because I’m proud to be an American and all, but you’re making us sound awfully freaking special.
Well, no Dallas fans are still following this conversation, because one of them by now would have certainly pointed out that Dragon Stadium, all by itself, nearly killed off the Dallas Burn. I’m sure taking away MLS rivals and replacing them with the A-League teams that were around at the time would have finished the job.
As far as my system having been tried nowhere – the NFL probably makes more money than your 180 crappy little leagues combined. Throw in MLB, NHL, NBA and college sports, and the idea that the conference system has not been tried is a tiny bit hilarious. Tried nowhere? Do you have one of those Soviet-era maps that depict the US as a big white empty space, or something?
Seriously, what you’re saying is completely mystifying. If I had genuinely made up the conference system, I’d have copyrighted it. I’m simply saying that the most financially successful, fairest and fan-friendly system of competition should not be taken away from MLS.
Ideally, that system should be applied to those other backward-ass 180 countries once they discover fire, but at least we should stop saying MLS should commit suicide to please a bunch of closed-minded, ignorant foreigners and their domestic Fifth Column.
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