Official “Is Brad Friedel bad at his job?” Thread

Hey, so the team is off to it's worst start since 2001 (before Steve Nicol), but we are expecting over 50,000 for the friendly with Chelsea FC, so we're good, right?

 

For me it was Stade Brestois 29, relegated the year I lived there. They had no right being on the field with most of the Ligue 1 teams. But they are very competitive in Ligue 2, making some close runs at promotion. They kept getting the same size crowds in Ligue 2 as in Ligue 1.

Setting aside the league startup dynamics that have been accurately discussed, I honestly don’t understand why it can work in Europe but not here. The sport is BIG money in Europe. People invest in those teams, despite the risk. Newcastle didn’t just give up and let the team sink to the 4th division. They got themselves promoted back to the PL.

 

It is now, but was it when pro/rel was introduced? If Europe threw it all away and had to start from scratch today, I guarantee pro/rel would be gone.

If pro/rel was on the table back in 1995, Kraft and all the other original I/Os would have walked away, and there would be no MLS.

 

I think a league started with pro/rel would have attracted much less investment money and would have been much likelier to fail along the way - because the deepest-pocketed investors would have viewed it as too risky a plan to put a lot of money into.

In addition, expansion fees, which have been paying off operators big-time, would be a fraction of what they are now.

MLS nearly bit the dust in it's first decade - without some of those deep-pocketed investors, it would have. In a pro/rel situation, would they even be willing to help other franchises?

 

First, I accept that the founders of MLS did not want promotion/relegation. My comment that you quoted was in response to what I thought was a claim that owners would not invest if pro/rel existed. Plenty of owners in European leagues invest a lot, despite the risk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_and_relegation

I particularly like:
“When The Football League (now the English Football League) was founded in 1888, it was not intended to be a rival of The Football Association but rather the top competition within it. The new league was not universally accepted as England's top-calibre competition right away. To help win fans of clubs outside The Football League, its circuit was not closed; rather, a system was established in which the worst teams at the end of each season would need to win re-election against any clubs wishing to join.”

This presents a situation where they found the idea of pro/rel to be beneficial. I guess all things really are relative. I believe that if MLS continues with somewhat endless expansion, the league possibly will introduce Pro/Rel itself. At some point, 40 teams? 50? I believe they will have to create layers of some sort. Will they all agree that membership in those layers should be permanent?

 

To me, that's just implicit (essentially, "the buck stops here"). I don't need to hear him say it publicly and I think, if the players do, they are babies (and I'd bet that any of the foreign players would think so too).

 

A big difference is that when pro/rel leagues started, costs were pretty minimal in comparison. Any little town could throw up some kind of stadium and field a team. If it failed or got relegated, it wasn't huge losses (like it is now for teams relegated from top-levels).

Another big difference is that the distances in the US are HUGE compared to almost anywhere in Europe or Latin America. You hear foreign players site that all the time (Mancienne just mentioned it as the biggest surprise when coming over here). That inherently makes it more expensive.

Yes, we could have local/regional leagues - but that's essentially what we had pre and during the NASL era. And the fact is, while it survived, it never thrived. And NASL and MLS pretty much killed it. Leagues still exist, but their their potential is very, very dim.

 

Basing a 2019 pro-rel argument on how things started 130 years ago is like the urban planners who were worried about congestion were concerned that there would be so many horses on the streets and who would clean up their droppings.

The other difference is that soccer clubs are sports clubs, often with teams in multiple sports and community centers, etc. I knew a guy who played for Anderlecht's basketball team. The guy played at Bradley, who are a perennial NCAA low seed team, and he wasn't good enough to make it in the NBA. In US sports, teams are private property,something that rich guys own, and cam (and do) move to another city if they think they can make more money.

 

European/South American teams are owned by the state? They aren't private property? Rich guys don't own them?

Sticking to the 2019 pro-rel argument, it exists in 2019 (just not here) and rich people buy those teams and invest in them. The risk isn't so great that owners stop investing. I don't think the argument that a owner won't invests holds (I also don't think the Qataris, as one example, invested in PSG because they were focused on their women's team or their handball team, etc. To be fair, some Euro leagues have been reducing the number of teams subject to pro/rel in response to concerns about loss of investment.

The economics in play during the formation of every league were probably different. But, allowing history back into the discussion, I have to ask myself what distance has to do with it. When many of these leagues introduced pro/rel there was no such thing as commercial jet aircraft let alone relatively cheap tickets on them. How long were those trips from Marseille to Lille, Lyon to Rennes, Nice to Nantes back in the 1950s.

 

Your post should be taken out back and shot. It's a hodgepodge of alternate history and complete nonsense.

Most of the soccer shirts I see in Boston ain't MLS shirts. And if I go out tomorrow, the local pubs aren't going to have people gathered to watch MLS games. Soccer happened in the U.S. and not because of MLS. Soccer broke through in the U.S., largely not because of MLS. People are into the sport. They get how it works elsewhere, because elsewhere is what they primarily follow. We could switch any time we want and the most common fan reaction would be, "Hey, we've got a real league!"

Anyway, my point had nothing to do with that. It was about how Brad Friedel has job security because Bob Kraft doesn't have to care. Almost anywhere else in the world (Australia excepted) and he'd either be gone or sitting in the ejector seat.

 

More investors, more clubs, more localized, more fans. I was listening to a Bill Simmons podcast last fall and he was making a point about MLB that fans are becoming increasingly oblivious to the league outside of their team. So how do you make people care about a World Series when their team isn't in it or to care about the sport in general when they don't live all that close to a team?

International soccer actually has an elegant solution for that - clubs everywhere. That gets fans involved in the endeavor as a whole, even if their stake in it is relatively modest. Maybe a fan in Des Moines doesn't pay a lot of attention beyond Ethanol SC, but at least they're paying attention to that.

Who cares? That was 24 years ago, and we now recognize MLS 1.0 was kind of tawdry and pathetic and not the way to do things moving forward. So what makes sense for today when you're trying to sell your league to people who have a world full of other leagues as a reference point? What's caught on is franchises that act as much like European clubs as possible, not franchises that ape the NFL.

Came across this shot of the march to Cincy's home opener:



That's not the American sports thing. That's people opting something wholly different.

 

It's all about the success criteria that stakeholders deem relevant.

 

Eurosnobs amongst us? The hell you say!

A lot of people in our area who have the "The MLS is crap" viewpoint equate the Revolution with "the MLS." But they wouldn't be saying that if they lived in 15 or so other cities in North America where the teams are serious entities, on par with their other pro sports teams.

So all we would have to do is adopt pro-rel and we'd have a "real" league? I'm intrigued, please tell me more...

Here, we are in 100% agreement. There never has been any urgency, any hand-wringing, any consequences or real despair if things don't go well. Friedel is here at least until the end of next year, no matter how bad things get. He needs time for the team to gel, right?

But the threat of relegation isn't what will make him a better coach, or make our players better. If the team sucks terribly, the bottom third of the team will be gone no matter what, the middle third will be on thin ice and the remaining players will probably still have jobs, but if the team brings in any new guys, those will be the ones to move on (high salaried guys) or be pushed down to the backup roles that they probably deserve, at least on a better team.

 

Half of the bottom third of the team is already gone - Empty Roster Slots.

I don't think anyone has linked relegation to better coaching in the short term. It is one possible consequence to Kraft-apathy that we wouldn't have to wait a literal lifetime to see kick in.

Otherwise it is an interesting, to me, part of life in other leagues. More interesting than "(almost) everyone makes the playoffs..." I wouldn't mind seeing it here too. I have no financial skin in the game.

 

Why should those cities have to endure the lamprey that is the Revs attached to them?

And Eurosnobs are just people that like soccer. There's more of them than MLS fans. And there will be for as long as MLS fancies itself a television league. If your model is to get people to watch soccer on television, then they're going to watch the better stuff.

Brad Friedel has, more than once (and in his most recent post-game press conference), noted how the lack of relegation significantly lowers the stakes in this league. Players have been making versions of that point since the inception of MLS. Having to fight for your spot is a consistent feature of the sport in other countries.

Threat of relegation would cut through the complacency you accurately describe in your first paragraph. Friedel would need to produce results.

 

I'd like to see every team in MLS make MLS Cup. IMO, it would increase interest in it if everyone was involved. Just treat the season and the Cup and two separate competitions.

 

I thought this was a thread about Brad Friedel as a coach?? Suprise, surprise a BS thread has gone a bit sideways!!

I like the point in the article that says, whatever 'MLS foundational' issues Brad talks to that make it hard to have motivated players, every other coach/team in the league deals with the same things. Soooo....if your team is doing worse then it isn't the foundational issues it's you. Brad needs to stop talking about the differences and start coaching what he has. If he can't then he's bad at his job and so far, he hasn't been able to and he has turned this team over quite a bit. So, Brad please stop whining and please start coaching. Glad to hear there is a DP in the pipeline.

 

There are many other teams in MLS playing hard every minute with the same "lack of pressure". What up with that?

 

...and I just now saw a Twellman tweet to that same effect...from this morning. (Maybe I read it earlier and subconsciously liked the point being made. LOL)

 

I do not care either way about pro-rel, but...

I think single entity makes things interesting. In other leagues around the world each owner is in it for themselves. If an owner does not do everything it can, a team might face relegation. I imagine that the owners in a league are like a pack of wolves. If a league had 18 teams and two had owners who did not care and did not spend, I imagine you would find 16 happy owners knowing that their odds of being safe were better and that those other two teams/owners would have little long term impact on the league.

How do most owners in other leagues make their soccer money? TV contracts? Jersey sales? League competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Libertadores)? Some other way? In MLS I would guess that the answer is expansion fees and possibly TV contracts via SUM. MLS owners should be keenly aware that expansion fees will not be there forever and they will need to rely on other methods for the big bucks very soon.

As I alluded to above, I wonder how active/engaged/big spending MLS owners view the less engaged, less active, lower spending owners? Especially if those lower spending owners are felt to be underachieving as compared to market potential? I am considering the Revs/Kraft in the second group.

I wonder how things would have been different if MLS single entity came about with 40 teams spending less money with built in pro-rel, but 100% profit sharing across both MLS 1 and MLS2?

I wonder what would make pro-rel palatable to current MLS owners? How could that possibly be sold to current owners? I would almost think a breakaway group would be more likely, but IMHO there are not nearly enough teams for that at this point (you would need 18 teams capable of stepping up, redefining business rules, and surviving in a new reality).

Lastly, I saw this yesterday:

Promotion and relegation would be a net-positive for the sport of soccer in the United States.

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I do hope that Friedel's message to Knighton and Penilla to be dropped from even the bench is received in the way he wants by the whole team.

 

yea he is

 

Good on Friedel for making dramatic changes that brought much better results.

 

Bad on Friedel for making drama that brought much worse results.