1. the u.s. transfer window is not the same as the european transfer window. the u.s. is allowed to transfer players in even after the euro transfer window is closed. at least that's the way fifa allows it for mls. 2. any and everybody who was paying attention knew that the wps was going to try to sign the world's best players. if aulas didn't know that, he is a worse businessman than i thought. there are not that many top women players walking the earth. he had to know that the wps was coming after his players. 3. as we now know, they had no PRO contracts!! they were fair game. you can't be coy when competing to sign players. i know we all want people to be nice, but starting a soccer league is tough business. you have to be aggressive and quick without giving other teams time to ward you off. secrecy is a huge part of signing football players. communicating with the other teams before hand is just naive to the highest degree. like you said..., and you'd be right! among the envious, yes. and this was inevitable. they're signing players from other teams after all. it happens all the time in football. i'm sure they're making lots of friends too - even in europe. ...so he really understands, even tho he's hurting, exactly what the wps is attempting to do.
As I stated, the transfer windows are not the same, and no one is asking the US to change their window to match Europe's. But they left a lot of clubs in really bad positions thanks to their taking advantage of the situation. All they had to do was sign Abily and Bompastor a few weeks back. LA's and Washington's interest in those two is several months old, possibly longer. Of course he knew. Everyone knew. He probably expected to lose Abily (Bompastor was more of a surprise). But besides offering them more money, there was nothing he could have done. What pissed him off that the WPS waited until after Lyon lost all chance of replacing them, and furthermore, wouldn't even let the girls finish the season because they made it clear that their offers might not be around in three months time. That's what is upsetting him. Had things happened in a more rational manner, he wouldn't have minded having those two leave because it was bound to happen eventually. SECRECY? What secrecy? We all knew which clubs wanted to sign which players. That's the whole reason for the draft, isn't it? It's funny, but for all this business of soccer being a business, the WPS seems to be going to a whole lot of trouble to keep things fair...only amongst themselves, of course. Please. If the shoe was on the other foot, and clubs like OL and Arsenal were signing WPS players mid-season, people would be screaming bloody murder. I don't think you're getting what my point is. It's not the transfers that I (or Aulas for that matter) have issue with. It's the fact that they are acting with complete disregard for other leagues and organizations. Maybe that will pay off now, but in the long run? European women's football is changing as we speak. With richer clubs getting involved and putting their money into the game, pretty soon there will be Barcas, Real Madrids, and Atleticos joining the Arsenals, Chelseas, Lyons, and Bayerns. Their only handicap will be the overall strength of their league, but in time that too will change. And then what? What do you think will happen when the WPS will no longer have monopoly over the best players? And these European heavyweights have a lot of money. Even right now, Lyon are paying Lotta Schelin more than St. Louis could ever dream of paying her. Football presidents hold long grudges, and you can bet they will be more than happy to run rodshod over the WPS just as the WPS couldn't be bothered to care what wreckage they were leaving behind. The WPS is doing what is good for the WPS alone and doesn't care about women's football anywhere else. I don't see how they are helping on a global scale. I just don't understand why some people are upset at Aulas's reaction. Should he be happy for Abily and Bompastor? Should the Lyon website have put up a press release wishing them good luck? Perhaps he should encourage his other "drafted" players to pack up their bags also? He's at least speaking out. Whether or not he can back up his threats is a different matter. Clubs like Umea and Arsenal, who are also hurting, should be doing the same instead of quietly complaining about it behind the scenes but smiling for the camera. If the WPS isn't going to care about the clubs they run over, then in no way should those clubs make it easy for the WPS. And that is really what's going on in Lyon's case. They will lose in the end, but at least everyone knows that they don't condone what's happening.
I find it amusing that there is even this much discussion about a professional opportunity versus an amateur league. And I can't believe that it is not the first time a pro team trumped an amateur side for a player's services regardless of country, transfer windows and all. Compare apples to apples please, not apples to sour (Euro) grapes. He is not speaking out, he is whining. And why place all the blame on WPS? Why didn't the players sign earlier so they could be replaced? Why didn't he do a better job protecting his assets? Of course he knew it was coming, so sign replacements during the window if that is an issue. WPS is pushing the rest of the world right now and it only helps the woman's game and the women who play it worldwide. It is too bad it took those rude ignorant Americans (God bless us) to light a fire under the chauvenistic European soccer establishment, before this who even knew they cared?
Well, you're obviously privy to information from OL that the rest of us aren't but I wonder what the whole story is. Like you said, LA's and Washington's interest in those two is several months old - a matter of public record. This isn't really a surprise from OL's point of view; it is a surprise to some of us because we had no idea of the non-professional nature of the players' ties with the club. How do we know that LA and Washington didn't sign them a few weeks ago? Look at how long it seemed to take for Kelly Smith's signing to be announced when it seemed a done deal weeks ago? Or at least that there was just some dotting of i's and crossing of t's that needed to be done. The WPS teams must be pretty anxious to get their roster put together - the season is just over month away! - why would they dawdle around just to step on toes over in Europe? I can only think that maybe the long delay in finalizing the US National Team's agreement with the WPS held up some of the teams and kept them from finalizing some of their deals. That, I can see, could somehow have had some repercussions, leading to some foot-dragging and hence Aulas' anger. That would be too bad but, hell, some stuff happens when you're starting up a whole new league. I also have to be skeptical because I've been following (though I'm a little ashamed to admit it) the David Beckham transfer saga with AC Milan. Brief impression - I don't believe any of that crap coming out from AC Milan. It's a big farce they play in the European news media. (Latest garbage: they don't plan on upping their low-ball offer. This is two days after feeding happy talk to the European news media how they think progress is being made - even within a matter of a few hours - on completing the transfer. Pure horse crap - what's their idea of progress? They studied the pattern in their espresso and read in it that the Galaxy President Tim Leiweke was suddenly going to wake up this morning and decide that, "Oh, the $3M that doesn't even cover loss of revenue from jersey sales - we don't care about that, of course you can have David and you guys can cash in on the extra jersey sales.")
Redcard, in response to one of your posts "pre-pre-editing", you are absolutely correct, WUSA failed. No dispute. And that failure had absolutely nothing to do with them stepping on OL's (or Arsenal's or anyone elses) toes, which seems to the point of this thread.
I keep editing my posts because A.) 80% of y'all seem to hate me anyway and B.) it's not fair for me as a mod to make an argument in such a heated debate. My point, even before that post, was this league isn't golden. Not yet, especially as they've yet to play a single match. They really can't afford to burn their bridges with some of these leagues and clubs. Yes, they've won in the short term, but long term they may have just hurt themselves. This isn't men's soccer. There's plenty of room for the league to rewrite the way things are done and handled.
agreed. and this economy is just about the worst time for a startup. but, and i defer to people who are in the know, i'm not sure how you avoid stepping on toes when you're signing other teams' players. and you can't start a women's soccer league worried about what's gonna happen when you fail. that will guarantee your failure. i'm not sure this thing will succeed. and if it doesn't, it will obviously make it well nigh impossible to try again - altho somebodyelse will in 5 or 10 years. but even tho i see why some euro teams are upset, i don't know that being nice is the required modus operandi when going up against your competition.
Keep sending those Gro Hammerseng and Jessica Landström photos in and 80% of us will keep loving you (well, 80% of the time). I don't even want to dwell on your interest in seeing the new league fail. It's odd, it's personal, it's idiosyncratic. I mean there's tons and tons of people that would like to see it fail and say "I told you so" but they don't like women's soccer or they don't like soccer in general or they just want to see all women's sport fail -- and of course that doesn't apply to you. Wha'cha gonna do? Worry about the Nordby fan with a bee in her bonnet or the hordes of others? We have a lot more fish to fry. Not necessarily bigger fish or better fish - just lots and lots more of 'em. Back to Olympique Lyonnais, I can understand M. Aulas frustration, especially if he saw winning the UEFA Cup as the key step to greater visibility for the sport in his country. Well, maybe somewhere down the road he'll get back at us. And then after that we can mend some bridges. Or maybe not, but really wha'cha gonna do? Europe has had a while to do something about it (a long time as a matter of fact) and they're still so far behind where the sport needs to be, where it should be, where the players desperately want it to be, and where at least the USA is trying to take it. I like some of those teams in Europe: Arsenal, Umeå, Malmø, Brøndby, now Olympique Lyonnais, but how many of them are there? Like one in each country. And we're talking about maybe 6 countries. Sweden's the best of them - at least they've had more than two teams with serious ambitions in the last decade. It isn't our fault that M. Aulas is the only one in France willing to walk the walk (while the others are still holed up behind the Maginot line...). It isn't our fault that we gave Marinette Pichon a place to play professional soccer and it isn't our fault that we're giving Sonia Bompastor and Camille Abily that chance as well. We're helping to set the bar for others and it's about time.
It always makes me chuckle when people claim credit for something they personally have played no part in. Like people who watch a match from the stands and say "we played well". Quite touching, really. If it wasn't for all the "us=>good" and "them=>bad" crap that comes with it, as many previous posts in this thread demonstrate impeccably.
Tee-hee! "Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures" (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke). Hell, we're even claiming Galaxy head clown Tim Leiweke as one of our own this week! But, on a related note, Buckingham Palace will not comment on its use of the imperial "we." (Tee-hee!)
Aulas' disingenious griping aside, the only way Euro women's football is going to move forward is if WPS/WUSA/USWNT drags it that way. WUSA's relative success drove clubs like Arsenal, OL, (and too few others) to see investing in women's soccer as a way to possibly make a buck down the line (these are businesses after all). OL's not investing in women's soccer because of their feminist ideals, after all. The only positive result in the long term for women's football development is the success of WPS. Rooting against it, or complaining when they sign players to much better deals than they can get under the table someplace is pretty stupid, IMNSHO, and certainly it's only arguing for keeping women's soccer in the most second class position possible. Hopefully someone (FIFA??? hahahaha) will come up with some dough so there can be a legitimate World Club Championship in women's soccer - one that would actually be a marquee event. Not that anyone expects French football to go along gracefully (and the FFF kicked its best men's player off the national team, so acting in its own best interest certainly isn't a strength), it's not in OL's short term best interest. But as a women's football fan, it certainly IS in everyone elses.
Would you like to define what you see as "Euro women's football"? You seem to be labouring under the misconception that Europe is a cohesive entity, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Just for the money then ? Even though it is entirely financed by the men's team ? Is this about Canton again ? Sure they kept him out, but then promptly won the World Cup.
You know, I bet that infamous, hard-line, evangelical homophobe Philip Anschutz is financing LA Sol for purely feminist reasons. Let's give him a big cheer for his progressive thinking!
Does anyone have access to the Abily and Bompastor employment contracts with OL? In fact, do they even have contracts? If they do, is there anything in the contracts that prevents them from simply quitting? If they are able to quit under their contracts, do they have to give notice? If so, how much notice? If they have contracts, do the contracts guarantee them employment for a period of time, or are they simply "at will" employees? It seems to me that before there can be a truly intelligent conversation about whether WPS did anything "wrong" by hiring them, one would have to know the answer to these questions.
Feminist ideals, I don't know. Feminine ideals - well, maybe we should ask redcard816 about that. Nordby, Stensland, Lotta-Legs Schelin... It's not about the bucks unless M. Aulas is thinking really, really long-term (and flying Schelin back and forth on a private jet for national team duty?) That was a careless statement by morris20 but also not a critical point to the discussion. The Maginot line, that's another story, however... (Worth knowing about and Wikipedia has a nice little article about it. Not sure if I can agree with Dandal though that the only problem with it was the British - that they failed to uphold their end of the bargain. Classic case of a general fighting the last war; at least a younger generation of French soldiers like Charles DeGaulle argued against reliance on it.)
I don't feel this question is asked in good faith, but . . . A bunch of women from Europe (Norway, Sweden, England, France, Germany, etc. - feel free to make a comprehensive list) played in the WUSA, had their "season in the sun" as full-time pros. As a direct result of their experience in the US, many different European countries were forced to upgrade their national team programs (or simply had their standards raised as these women returned to their teams with higher expectations and broader exposure to football at a high level), and clubs that aspired to being "world class" had to raise the ante to stay in the game. When WUSA folded, Umea, Arsenal, Pottsdam, etc. maintained some of those gains and some clubs continued to advance. But w/o a full-time pro league in women's soccer's top market, you get amateur teams like OL moving towards full-time professionalization, but with what some folks called "all deliberate speed" once upon a time (in other words, don't count on it). With WPS coming in as a full-time professional league, it raises the bar for any club in the world that wants to be considered "elite" - sports is all about the "arms race" in this sense. There's no necessity to consider Europe a "single entity" or whatever bologna you set up as a strawman, to see this is clearly the case (and clearly OL would rather not pay up, or at least wants to gripe about Americans before it does). And, not to belabor the obvious, but women's pro sports IS a business. Anschutz, Aulas, whomever is spending money with the idea that there is going to be a return on their investment (the popularity of MLS/WUSA doubleheaders in some markets probably didn't escape Anschutz's attention). To the extent they aren't, no pro team/league is going to last very long.
You know, you keep flogging this point. You know fine well that the private jet was for Källström . But it does raise another point about what many of the top European clubs have been trying to offer players in lieu of hard cash: a well-organised set-up with income on the side from football-related work, plus service in areas that other clubs can't offer. Stensland was cleaning the club house for extra cash in Norway; I doubt she's doing that at Lyon. As to no professional club lasting long if investors aren't getting a financial return: that might be true for some investors. It might be especially true of investors in the WPS, where you have a cartel operating to maximise potential profits (or minimise potential losses, depending on how you want to see it). In other leagues, I might go as far as to suggest that financiers aren't necessarily after the cash profits as much as the reflected glory/good will. I can't see billionaire Kent Widding Persson (main sponsor of LdB in the Swedish league) getting much of a real cash return on the 3 million SEK per year he pumps into the team, regardless of whether he's trying to strengthen his brand or just being a philanthropist.
one of the anomalies, some would say problems, of professional sport in france is that it is governed under by-laws for non-profit organizations because of the antiquated idea that sport is not a business, or at least is more than a business. aulas IS a businessman, a very successful one, but he was also a top level handball player, and a lifelong OL fan. he's in it for sport's sake and is out to make the club as glorious as he can. he knows in today's world that takes money, but as far as making money, he's got better ways! in france everyone has a contract. no one's going to have access to these unless both parties agree, as they're confidential, but these women certainly have contrats à durée indéterminée. the notice an employee must give depends upon a general labor agreement for their sector called the convention collective and varies from one to two months. i think hostility is being read into some posts that isn't there, certainly never was in mine. i see both sides, and on the official OL forum am defending camille and sonia who are being accused of greed when in fact they're not looking for (nor getting) more money than they do now; all they want is more competition. upon reflection, i feel that the WPS might be very good for women's football... in france! that will depend on the success of these two women, but above all on the perennity of the league. look at basketball: it's growing by leaps and bounds here, and the motor behind that growth, what fuels the dreams, is the NBA. if the WPS can do the same for little girls who presently think of girls' sport as being track & field, tennis, swimming, fencing, judo... basically anything except soccer it will be fantastic. but for that the league will have to still be here 20 years from now. otherwise, the effects will be disastrous globally. once bitten twice shy as they say. but twice bitten... it will be very difficult to ever get a pro league going anywhere if this one fails. i think M20 is referring to trezeguet. whether he is our best player is a matter of opinion, but his presence in the changing room would do the team no good if he was platoche and zizou rolled into one. as for cantona, he was on canal football club last night... it was embarrassing. he's never been the brightest flare in the terraces but it seems to be getting worse!
I certainly read a great deal of hostility into a number of posts (and a few rants) in this thread regarding WPS having a lack of respect for other leagues, "running over" some teams, not playing nice, not making friends, etc, although yours are not among them guignol.
Just as I read a great deal of hostility from some posters about European women's football, Aulas, Lyon, the FFF, and an unnamed French player that is either Cantona or Trezeguet. Besides, I don't why you are surprised at the unfriendliness of some posters (including myself) when there are irrelevant comments like Morris20's in the thread. As I stated many times before, I have never had a problem with the transfer itself, and I know why the girls wanted to leave. I just don't like how it was done. In any case, I support Lyon, not the WPS. Of course my feelings and loyalties will lie with my team. Of course I'm going to be angry when my club is taken advantage of. The purpose of this thread is to express both points of view, isn't it? I realize that some feel the WPS is being targeted for extra criticism, but on my part, I am attempting to explain how the WPS appears to me, an organization that doesn't seem to care about saying please and thank you. Hence my frustration on why the WPS waited until after Lyon's transfer season ended to offer Abily and Bompastor contracts. I'm an American girl and grew up playing soccer here, so I appreciate what the WPS is trying to achieve. But I also value good will and yes, playing nice. Taking advantage of someone in a weaker position than you is always a good business decision, but at the end of the day, it's simply exploitation. Maybe it's naive of me, but I had hopes that the WPS would be different from the money-making monstrosity that has morphed men's football. I don't want the WPS to become the women's EPL (of which I'm not a fan of either). And that's really all I'm trying to say.
I understand your points and yes, these boards would be rather meaningless if we all agreed, wouldn't they? Please, keep the opinions coming! I am not sure I agree with your categorization of of WPS as being in a stronger position, nor that of taking advantage of weaker teams, but do respect your right to take that position. Without knowing all the inside info such as when contracts were offered, what caused the delay beyond the European transfer window, etc I am not sure what we can advise would have been a better way to have handled the situation. Since we are discussing a 7 team league that hasn't yet played a single game (thanks to RD816 for succintly pointing that out ) and looking at the numbers being shown (Marta's reported deal notwithstanding) I am not presently too concerned about WPS becoming much of a monstrosity in the near future. I will be thrilled if they survive for multiple seasons!