Look, boys, I don't know for sure but it appears that many of you do not have much real-world experience in the business world. Regardless of who you are, you don't get carte blanche to spend the boss's money. Or the stockholder's money. You get the boss's permission in principle to explore a major expenditure. Then you do all the legwork and run all the numbers and nail down exactly what it is you want, what it will cost to acquire and in what way the expenditure is justified. Then you sit down with the man and pitch the deal. He gives you an answer, maybe revises some numbers to suit himself, and then you go ahead with your plan. There is no line of work that I am aware of where the guys with the money say "Oh, just go ahead and spend a million, maybe two, maybe three, whatever you think is best. Let me know after you get done so I can be sure to write the check" Ain't how it works. I'm assuming that previously the Crew had the go-ahead - in principle - to explore an expensive foreign acquisition. Now that they have a target and know exactly what kind of money they're talking about, they have to go sell the deal to the man. This ain't complicated, kids. It's pretty much how everything works.
Understood. My problem is with Robert running around saying that we've offered a guy "X" while the GM and the head coach seem to be a chapter behind that. Just a little info from the top could clear a lot of this up.
I think just the simple fact that he is going to Dallas is a good sign. I would have loved to hear that Coach was headed to talk to the check writers last year. At least we know something is happening, or at the very least Papa Bloatmeister is trying to make something happen.
someone know who out two center backs are going to be now? O'Rourke and Ezra? O'Rourke and Marshall? O'Rourke and Iro? something tells me our back line is going to be the weak point of our 2008 squad
I was under the impression that O'Rourke was going to play left back, and we'd have Ezra and Marshall in the middle. Of course, if we go to just 3 in the back, then who the heck knows. So many thing are still up in the air: -how healthy is Marshall? -can Iro step right into MLS? -can O'Rourke really be converted to either a central defender or a left back?
I guess I agree, for the most part, but Sigi's comment had me scratching my head. The other part is if he had the go ahead for a specific price range and the deal is in the range, then you can go ahead and pull the trigger w/ a phone call or even less. There's a lot of room between carte blanche and having to run everything up the flagpole. Say, 2 months ago. Clark: Hi Sigi. Sigi: Clark, If we find the right guy, are you willing to spend for it? Clark: Well, depends on what you mean, spend? Sigi: Say around $500k for salary, and we might have to pay a transfer fee since the guy might be with another team. And I don't want to wait until summer and risk missing the playoffs again. Clark: OK. But bring it back when we are ready to make an offer. Sigi goes out, does the legwork, calls Clark, says we want to make an offer for a player, within those parameters. Clark OK's it. Done. Notice, no carte blanche, and Clark not making the personnel decisions. And no need to run down to Dallas and beg, either. It may just have been a bit of a lose comment on Sigi's part (or a poor choice of words), but this is something one would think Sigi would know long before he started looking at players, since he'd have to know what the boss would be willing to spend to know which type of players to look at. I don't like jeopardizing any deal while the coach has to run home to Clarkie and beg for the money. We've got to be able to utilize any number of a modern technological devices to get this type of thing done a bit faster. The in person pitch to the owner does help, but walking away from someone during negotiations to get permission can cause you to lose out to someone who already has the authority to make the deal. And it can also send a signal that you may be stalling for time to try to get another player, which might not go over well with your target player.
I didn't see where Warzycha said anything about what was offered. He said this; "Our offer is concrete. Zurawski is very interested in joining us because he wants to play in Euro 2008." Which could have absolutely nothing to do with the actual financial deal offered Zurawski. It could very well mean that it's concrete in that the Crew can offering him playing time. He also mentioned the ballpark transfer fee, which has nothing to do with what the team would offer the guy in salary. This all came from PV, who apperantly forgot how to read. Such as in this statement: "But the GM say "That's not accurate," McCullers said. "We've never had a discussion with our ownership group about a specific price range." Had nothing to do with the way PV used it. It was in response to a question about an agent's comment that the Crew couldn't offer a potential DP more then 500K. It had nothing to do with Zurawski.
Au contraire Bill. There are plenty of major league sports where there is carte blanche up to a certain point. Most baseball, football and NBA GM's have free reign on signing players unless an exception (i.e. signing Kobe or another big-name free agent comes along) requires breaking the bank (or you're the GM for the Yankees where Steinbrenner gets involved in everything including what you buy for lunch). I would think that McCullers has been given authority to spend up to X on a DP. My guess is that Sigi went to Dallas because they feel they want the player and it requires an amount over that X limit they got approved ahead of time.
Warzycha didn't say so, but I'm assuming that Zurawski would get DP money. We don't know what Warzycha offered, or what Zurawski or Celtic would settle for. But one would think that if a "concrete" offer was made, there was fixed monetary value placed on the salary offer to Zurawski and the Crew made an oral promise to complete the deal if a transfer fee in the stated range could be agreed upon with Celtic. That "Our offer is concrete" sound bite is in very wide circulation. Well maybe Warzycha's idea of a concrete offer is different than mine. Maybe something was lost in translation. Maybe what he meant was that the offer went over like a lead balloon.
You are 100% correct. The Crew has two problems in this area: an enormous penchant for secrecy (even when it seems grossly overplayed and/or unnecessary) and a really rotten PR operation which seems constitutionally incapable of passing along the simplest, most innocuous information to the people you would think they'd want to keep informed. They treat us like idiot children, and more and more people are beginning to resent it. In this case, as someone (or maybe several someones) suggested, we may be talking about two different players here. Maybe Zurawski (sp?) isn't a DP target, but just a high dollar deal of some kind. Maybe the DP that Sigi is talking to Wagner about is someone else. We just flat don't know. There's this mystery Romanian for example. Where does he fit into all of this? Bottom line, one new acquisition isn't going to solve our problems. We just lost maybe out best player, and let's look at the facts: We were lousy last year. Now we've just lost maybe the best player off that team (Gonzalez). So one new player, even a very good one, may only bring us - talentwise - back up to zero. I'm not nearly as good at math as a lot of you guys are, but I can handle it in this case: "bad team minus good player plus good player" leaves you pretty much right back where you started. Which, we all recall, was nowhere. With all due respect, we're talking apples and oranges here. First of all, it's impossible to generalize as you have. Each team is different. Some have very "hands on" owners who want to sign off on every utility infielder. Others have once-a-year look at the boooks owners. And everything in between. One thing, however, that IS consistent is that every GM/Coach (however player acquisitions are handled) is given a budget. And yes indeed, if a GM feels he wants to go over that budget by a factor of two, he bloody well IS going to have to run it by the ownership. Secondly, in soccer as in no other sport, a deal like this involves foreign currency exchange rates, international contracts, FIFA requirements, national teams considerations, a whole host of things you don't need to worry about if you're just picking up a free agrent backup point guard from the Suns. Finally, I look at it this way: if you're an average NFL team, you may have a player budget of $70 million. The fact that you may be picking up a cornerback for $500,000 or so is not a huge deal overall. But in this case, the Crew has a salary budget, set by the league, of $2.4 million. If you want to pick up a player whose compensation equals half again your total player budget, I'm thinking the ownership wants to discuss it with you.