WAHL: US Soccer Foundation sues Fed over naming dispute

C'mon, Dave. Gulati and Blazer were self-admittedly very good friends and did a lot of business together. You really don't see any smoke here or with Blazer's dealing with SUM?

 

superdave,

will you address this:

you think that posters are ignorant about potential poor management at USSF? You think there's no smoke in the opaque relationship between MLS/SUM/USSF? There's nothing there at all?

I thought your point was,"Show me the video of a smoking gun" a la President Trump and Saudi Arabia but perhaps it's more than that and you think that there's no basis for anyone to question USSF/SUM/MLS for anything.

 

???

C'mon man, step back a bit. If someone had made the argument from the outset that "Chuck Blazer was corrupt for CONCACAF 25 years ago. . . therefore Ed Foster Simeon is correct about an IP dispute with Carlos Cordeiro now" would immediately have struck you as nutty had it been made at the outset.

You've been a bit manipulated/boxed yourself into making it piecemeal by trying ex post facto to validate a gut reaction you had to a dispute we know next to nothing about so far.

 

Stan,

Respectfully, I don’t understand what youre saying here. What dispute are we talking about?

I think that blazer is simply one of a lot of issues over an extended period of time that lead me to worry about USSF and to no longer give the benefit of the doubt (which I normally do).

 

The IP dispute in the first post.

 

I am in the camp that we don't know the entire story, but I still don't think it was a good look from the USSF to not get out ahead of this story and provide their justification. they may even have a good legal reason for doing this, but they will undoubtedly lose the public relations battle given the ill-will that has brewed since we failed to qualify.

 

I'll drink to that!

 

I don't think many people would be surprised to learn that the Fed isn't really all that good at PR.

If you look at the way they handled public relations around the Berhalter hiring, the coaching search, the presidential election, the USMNT's failure, the pay gap issue of men and women that came up last year, the issue of kneeling during the anthem, the Klinsmann firing... well, pretty much anything in the past few years (or decade, or two decades, or friggin' ever), it's quite obvious that the USSF really, really doesn't have a knack for it.

And as a non-business organization built on an insular culture of informal relations and weak professionalism, with no direct competitors and few outspoken media critics, mostly not subject to outside oversight - it would make sense that they feel little pressure or motivation to prioritize PR.

 

If the government appoints an ambassador who the government should have known was corrupt, would you blame the government, or would you say he was a UN official?

 

And for that, at least, I am grateful. I always prefer direct, unfiltered information from a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, but we rarely get it. The problem here relates to @superdave 's original complaint. The USSF's failure to comment has yielded a one sided argument. On the surface it looks like a swaggering USSF is toying with a meek Foundation. But we haven't heard the other side of the argument yet because the USSF refuses to address it.

I'll try to keep an open mind, but USSF's failure to respond and it's arrogant past means fans are going to side with the little guy.

 

Fair enough.

How did Blazer get the CONCACAF gig?

 

That's a fair point. I can reconstruct an argument for USSF, but I'd be making some educated guesses.

--

That said, and with the appropriate caveats that I'm a total outsider to both these organizations--well, this is the internet, so I'll take a stab: some years ago I was having a debate with a veteran poster on the Foundation and its activity level. I was taking the 'pro' case and he the 'con.' In poking around the internet, you can find the Foundation's tax records, as well as a periodic Better Business Bureau review of non-profits. The BBB has a checklist of things it looks at with non-profits, and when they did a review of the Foundation, it passed all the checks--except one. They pinged the Foundation on not spending enough of its total assets.

This was essentially the argument the guy I was debating with was making--the Foundation simply wasn't active enough. My 'pro' case was that the Foundation was not spending a lot of money because it was not taking in a lot of money on an annual basis--it was created with money from the 1994 World Cup, which was a one-time windfall. In the years after that, the Foundation was good at growing its assets, but this was due to investment income and not fundraising.

And part of the idea in those years was to 'keep soccer alive' in case MLS failed (there was still a strong memory of when the sport almost went dark except for the indoor game after the NASL folded). At the time we were having this debate, we weren't that far from the time when this was still a realistic possibility. In that light, I argued, we should have been looking at the Foundation more like a University endowment or a rich family's estate than like a typical nonprofit corporation.

Much has changed since that time. MLS isn't going anywhere, and beyond that, the sport has undertaken great growth in the last ~10 years. Perhaps the argument is that in light of the completely different environment for the game, the charitable arm of American soccer should be much more aggressive than they were in let's say 2003.

You could see how a new Fed president would look around for opportunities to demonstrate his value by saying 'what could we do better?' Maybe he thinks that they could start over and get much more assertive in fundraising, which is the lifeblood of most non-profits. If so, now is the best time to do it, with a virtually guaranteed windfall coming in 2026 and plenty of lead time to figure out how to get it right.

Also, here is the logo for the US Soccer Foundation:

And here's what it used to look like:


It's pretty clear that some time around when the Fed changed their logo, the Foundation changed theirs too, and other than keeping the ball and swooshy lines from the old logos, they clearly changed it in line with how the Fed had. This could help the Fed's argument that the Foundation is benefiting by the association that the Fed wants to end.

 

How strong a case does the Fed have here? I'm not even close to an expert in trademark law, but it seems to me that the Foundation is probably screwed. Does it help the Foundation that the two organizations worked in close association for 25 years without the Fed previously claiming trademark infringement?

Maybe they could argue that "United States Soccer" is a term that's general and broad enough that it can't be claimed as a trademark?