The Official 2024 San Jose Earthquakes related Blogs/Press thread

That's because it's the crux of the matter, of course.

 

If you feel it is so important you could subscribe and get the article.

 

It’s not that important. I expect its just more of the same “John Fisher continues to rip off San Jose soccer fans every year” stuff.

 

I wonder if an article like the one in the SF Chronicle matters to Garber or other league folks who care about the image of MLS. It's got to be embarrassing to see something like that in a relatively big newspaper. At least I frikin hope so.

 

Here is the SF Chronicle article:

As Earthquakes achieve soccer ignominy, is John Fisher just a multi-sport stumblebum?
By Scott Ostler,Sports Columnist

Dust off that trophy case, John Fisher, some more bling is headed your way.

Fisher’s San Jose Earthquakes have wrapped up Major League Soccer’s Wooden Spoon. They did it by losing 3-0 to Montreal last week.

“Do you know how hard it is to clinch the Wooden Spoon with three matches to go?” asked ESPN in its weekly power rankings comments.

I do not know how hard it is to do that, but I’m guessing the answer is “very, very.” To be clearly the worst at anything, and to be able to coast to that title as the season winds down, is impressive. And, for Quakes fans, depressive.

The Wooden Spoon is a dishonor bestowed each season since 2015 upon the team with the worst overall record in the 29-team MLS. The Quakes were 6-23-3 going into Saturday’s game, and had already given the Stephen Curry night-night, Wooden Spoon-wise, to the next-to-worst Chicago Fire FC (7-17-9).

An actual Wooden Spoon — not just the shame of earning it — started being given to the worst team in MLS in 2016. The Earthquakes have already won it twice; they also spooned themselves in 2018. They also earned the rights to claim the not-yet-existent Spoon once before that, as an expansion team in 2008, but they’ll have to live with that being a virtual Spoon.

It’s worth noting that those three epically bad Earthquakes seasons came under three different coaches and three different general managers. The only common thread is the team owner, John Fisher.

Right now, Fisher is on a roll. His Oakland Athletics were the worst team in baseball in 2023. Baseball’s not cool enough to have a Wooden Spoon. If it did, Fisher would have to get government infrastructure funding to expand his trophy case.

The Quakes and A’s are not a direct comparison. The A’s are scandalously, embarrassingly underfunded, ranking last in MLB payroll. The Quakes are not that lowball-ish, although they’re annually in the bottom third of league payroll.

The Quakes have simply not been well run or well cared for, over the long haul. They were great in 2012, an outlier season, but only once in the 12 seasons since have they finished in the top half of the Western Conference.

Let’s put it this way: Since Fisher bought the team (with Lew Wolff) in 2008, if mediocrity was a mountain, he would be Sir Edmund Hillary, struggling toward the summit during a blizzard.

“Fisher always seemed to send the message that the measure of success is mediocrity,” said Elliott Almond, a former Bay Area sportswriter who covered the Quakes. “Consider it a successful season if you reach the playoffs as the last qualifier. The edict never seemed to be to win the league and the MLS Cup — as much as the players, coaches, front office and everyone else on staff did everything they could to achieve that goal.


“The team didn’t invest in rosters the way the L.A. Galaxy, LAFC or Inter Miami has done. Instead, it stood pat and hoped some wunderkind would fall from the sky.”

Funny, one did. The Quakes’ academy, which develops young players, found and developed a good one, Cade Cowell. He broke in with the Quakes in 2020 at age 16 — sixteen! Last January the Quakes transferred (as in, traded) him to a team in the Mexican League for $4 million.

The Quakes’ payroll this year is $13.6 million, ranking No. 26 in the league, so it’s not like they used the Cowell windfall to go crazy.

“I don’t think the Quakes are mismanaged as badly as the A’s, but no one looks at that organization as being super ambitious,” ESPN soccer writer Jeff Carlisle told me. “People see Fisher and (Stan) Kroenke (owner of the Colorado Rapids) in the same light: They don’t really care.”

Caring is good. Being a smart owner, involved and invested (emotionally and financially) doesn’t guarantee success. Jerry Jones and Hal Steinbrenner don’t win rings every year. But there’s something about Fisher’s ownership style that doesn’t seem to lend itself to success.


You can’t say Fisher is a loser. He makes money. He bought the A’s for $180 million and they’re worth $1.2 billion, at least. Because he owns the A’s, he was able to buy half the Coliseum site for $85 million, then he sold it for $125 million.

With the Quakes, Fisher and Wolff used the promise of building a soccer stadium with their own money as leverage to get San Jose to rezone huge parcels of land owned by the two, turning those parcels into roaring revenue streams.

Fisher is not a sports owner who dabbles in real estate, he’s a real estate wheeler-dealer who has cleverly used his sports teams as a springboard to sweet real estate deals. Nothing wrong with that, it’s smart business. The San Francisco Giants, San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors all do that.

However, when you use your team as a rocket to real estate riches but don’t bother to put the same effort into your ballclub, you do a disservice to the fans to whom, by unwritten social compact, you have promised a competitive team.

The Quakes under Fisher started out as an expansion team, tried to shortcut the development process, and fell into never-ending scramble mode.


“San Jose never developed the foundation, and it has been impossible, it seems, to catch up,” Almond said. “This season shows that they are further and further behind.”

Other than the owner, the Quakes, bless their hearts, are paddling as hard as they can. And now they’ve got a second Wooden Spoon to help with the paddling.

Reach Scott Ostler: sostler@sfchronicle.com; X: @scottostler

 

Our local papers - the SJ MN in particular, have trashed the Quakes and the league for many years. So it's nothing new. Especially around early to mid-2000's, the MN basically painted MLS to be a mickey mouse league.

 

Yeah, the SF Chronicle is a rag.

 

Imagine how distorted your worldview would be if all you knew about Cade Cowell came from Scott Ostler and the SF Chronicle.

 

True, but if all you knew about the Quakes came from this one article, you would not be misled.

 

Probably a contrarian view (and most of you are wrong ), but I hold Chris Leitch more accountable for the current sorry state of the team than I do Fish. We’ve spent enough money to be competitive. He got a $7M transfer (though arguably he “earned” about $4M of that). He had his coach pick. He’s hired guys to help him on the technical side - Woly, Cremanzidis, etc. Third year of his reign and while we had a bump of legitimacy last year, this year we’re historically bad. Maybe he gets a partial mulligan for the Almeyda transition year but it’s been 2 last place conference finishes out of 3 and this year we were historically bad. There have been a few good signings but many poor ones, and we continue to lose prospects from our academy.

 

There might be a lot of truth in that, but a better organization wouldn't put up with it. This comment from the article comes to mind: “Fisher always seemed to send the message that the measure of success is mediocrity,”

OTOH, what explains all the other bad seasons with other GMs?

 

We've only had 3 GM's. Doyle was an MLS 1.0 hire. Jesse was a good guy but with an overly "euro" bent and someone who didn't really respect MLS. CL is an organization guy who had done well in various aspects of the club but so far has done poorly as GM.

Every year there are teams with similar or even smaller amounts of resources than the Quakes who do well in the league. I don't think any of those GM choices were the result of "not caring" or "shooting for mediocrity". There were reasons for each: continuity with previous successful regimes of the club, "let's go euro", and "let's promote the high-functioning organization guy". None have worked out but not for lack of trying or for lack of any rationale for why they might work. No one is saying that making the Quakes a successful club is an easy job for a GM. But it's doable if we find a good one.

 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/ostler/article/earthquakes-achieve-ignominy-john-fisher-19815835.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2ZjaHJvbmljbGUuY29tL3Nwb3J0cy9vc3RsZXIvYXJ0aWNsZS9lYXJ0aHF1YWtlcy1hY2hpZXZlLWlnbm9taW55LWpvaG4tZmlzaGVyLTE5ODE1ODM1LnBocA==&time=MTcyODQwODIzMTQzMQ==&rid=YWE0Zjk0ZjItYTJlNy00M2Q5LTlkNGMtMzBhOGY4NWYzMWM4&sharecount=MA==

Oh, didn’t scroll all the way down and see that someone copied and pasted the article, violating copyright (Shame, shame).

 

We’re bad, Dottie!

Things you SHOULDN’T understand!!!

 

Rodrigues is unarguably our best and worst defender (although Yarborough gives him some competition for the latter). One can only guess how pyrrhic this award is for a team on the cusp of breaking a defensive record of futility. BTW - I prefer Marie as a wing.

 

This is pathetic. Giving out awards when you're by far the worst team in the league. Nothing like a pat in the back & giving out awards when you lose....just like when we were kids, it's a participation trophy! Woohoo!

 

Espinoza is a no-brainer

 

JT didn’t participate in game action to earn his Bedard award.

 

Well good to see this is moving forward-ish, even if at glacial pace.

 

Shea and Emi