I've written that Garber keeps his ideological cards close to his chest, but in fining DCU Prez
Kevin Payne $5000 today for calling a spade a spade—that the onfield product in MLS is not good
enough and won't draw in more fans until it is—means that the guy isn't hearing what needs to be
heard.
This is really not good, especially in light of the fact Payne didn't even mention bringing better
players with more money, everyone's favourite MLS bugbear.
Click to continue reading...
Let me present a very simplistic formulation. Let's assume that in order for MLS to receive higher
television revenues, it must draw in more supporters. Let it also be resolved that, for those fans
to show up at MLS games and commit wholesale to the league, the quality of the on-pitch product
must get better.
Click to continue reading...
There is a delicious sense of the absurd in the way Don Garber has gone about his MLS business in
the last few days, almost like a Steven Colbert satirizing the moronic "ideas" market of the
Blatter/Warner contingent in order to expose football's upper echelon time-wasters for what they
are.
First, we had Garber telling European clubs that MLS could be a model for wage sharing on the
continent, the equivalent of asking the Germans to slow down on the Autobahn or the French to
"clean up those unions so everything can run better in the country and there'd be less strikes and
stuff.
Click to continue reading...
Reading through the submissions these past two weeks, stories of waiting for years for a club to
arrive in your hometown a decade too late, seeing your club switch stadiums only for the supporter
culture to die off, wondering what Don Garber has up his sleeve regarding the league's growth in
the next five to ten to twenty years; you get the impression that, ultimately, the future of MLS is
out of our control.
Click to continue reading...
The first few comments I received when I kicked off this little experiment immediately went into
the relegation/promotion question. It goes without saying that structurally, R/P is a non-starter
for Major League Soccer; private investors spent a lot of time and money insuring the necessary
infrastructure had been put in place before securing their MLS club, with the agreement said club
would always play at the highest professional level.
Click to continue reading...
Colin Smith's (author of keepie-uppie.blogspot.com) email about the opportunity Toronto FC gave him
as an aspiring sports journalist speaks mostly for itself, so I've included it in full below. I
would only add that, while I'm proud of what I've done here on AMSL, I was struck reading Mark
Bowden's piece in the most recent Atlantic in which he describes newspaper columnists who sit at
their desk writing columns about whatever news lands on it instead of going out and finding the
story, "thumbsuckers.
Click to continue reading...
Running around a bit today, so here's a feel-good story. I hadn't read this comment in full when I
posted my story about De Ro scoring the golden goal; amazing how resonant it was north of the
border. Here's Duane Rollins in his own words:
That game hooked me. I was writing for a B.
Click to continue reading...
My view at the Valley, December 2006
Abu Zilif writes:
MLS made me a soccer fan. I stopped hating soccer because I got to experience the World
Cup while I was traveling in Germany, but without MLS I would have become one of those people who
follow the USMNT like they follow Michael Phelps every four years.
Click to continue reading...
