My question is why the other owners allowed Garber to award Dickface an expansion team for nothing which could have been sold for $ 350 million.
There may be a draft, but the conventional wisdom is that Columbus (and the other clubs who lost a player in the 2019 draft; we lost Argudo) won't take part. That's the way it worked last year, when clubs who lost a player to Cincinnati in 2018 were exempt.
Because he already owned one? This is kinda like the Buffalo Braves-Boston Celtic trade in the late 1970s. Our new owners actually bought an expansion team but then swapped the operating rights to He Who Shall Not Be Named for the operating rights to the Crew. Yeah, it's Calvin Ball-ish. But there's precedent.
That is certainly one way to look at it,and its obviously the way they want it viewed. But from another perspective, MLS LLC owned something - the right to start a new MLS team - which is currently selling for $350 million on the open market (and for which there is no shortage of interested prospective buyers) and gave it to Fatso in return for vacating the Columbus market, its still a giving away an extremely valuable property for not much.
I'll always be convinced that the expansion fee still wasn't worth the Modell Law forcing MLS to open their books. Whatever they had to do to make that lawsuit go away, they were going to do. Contrast that with the NFL, which has failed miserably with the STL relocation lawsuit against Kroenke so far.
Which the Haslam's bought. MLS lost nothing. The owners lost nothing. He Who Shall Not Be Named already owned operating rights to "a team" and a piece of SUM. They just swapped locations. Look, I dislike the guy as much as anyone. And I think MLS often plays Calvin Ball. But this was a reasonable deal. The Haslam's paid the same expansion fee FCC and Nashville did. No one was ripped off.
Is that the MLS narrative still, or is it your narrative? How could Austin not be an expansion team? Haslam and Edwards did not pay an expansion fee, they paid a fee for acquiring the rights to be the investor/operators for the existing MLS club Columbus Crew SC. We kept our team(most of the staff, players, stadium, name, history, etc.) Precourt moved his slimy ass to Austin. From the time we saved The Crew, until this moment, there is still not a team in Austin. How are they going to create a team without an expansion draft? Filling a roster by exclusively poaching players from other MLS teams, and teams from other leagues, is going to be difficult.
I am not questioning if Haslam/Edwards paid a fee to MLS for what MLS thought an MLS club was worth at the time. The question is which team is the expansion team. I would suggest that the investor/operator who had nothing in Austin when the deal was done, and still does not have any players, is the true expansion team. Haslam/Edwards paid a fee to buy into MLS as the new investor/operators of an existing MLS club.
If I'm being honest, what I said is the last I understood as once the Crew was saved, I didn't really delve into it (or I've just forgotten reading otherwise) any further.
Which is why, all due respect to the STC people - although their endless victory laps are wearing a bit thin - in the end it was Mike DeWine demonstrating that he intended to push the Modell Law as far as he needed to that was the principle force. STC kept the issue in the public eye but without Modell it wouldn't have mattered. * A personal, unrelated note: The blog piece I posted last week has vanished. No one can find it. I had another piece ready to go but I won't post unless I'm convinced Ed that it won't disappear as well. The admins can't find it. The site owner and his people haven't been able to figure it our either. Someone said though that its still there for them. If you wouldnt mind taking a second and checking to see
The BS Blog front page still has pieces from last year on it. But I don't see anything new from you, Bill.
Thats very interesting. Most people do not. But you and another mod do. The admins cant figure it out. Andy is having someone else look at it. Someone else says that BS is easy to hack and someone took it down but I dont have any idea whether thats true. I had a piece ready on Tuesday.but didnt post it because I dont know whats going on. But for those of you who may kindly be interested, a) Jack Warner spent 3 days in the hospital and is home now under quarantine. He says he felt a little ill, but not debilitated and now feels fine. b) FIFA gave T&T a Wednesday deadline to withdraw their suit and refer it back to the CAS. They did neither. yYesterday the council met and we dont know what they decided. Today is the FIFA co gress, but when they came to "expulsions and suspensions" on the agenda, Infantino announced that there was nothing to discuss and they moved on. The council meets again October 7
Bill I read your article and saw several of the Crew board regulars had posted comments. I don’t see the blog post now.
This is weird. Albeit small and an n=1, here’s what’s happening on my laptop. Before I log on, the blog that shows up is Scottish Football’s Civil War. But once I log on, Bill’s latest blog is there and readable. Bizarre... Edit: log off: Scottish Football; log back on: FIFA, Power, and Money.