Your comments on today's story can be left here. Danke.

UPDATE: Guys, I'm swamped by emails and calls today, as I expected. So please give me a little slack in getting back to y'all and responding to posts here. I do appreciate it! -jht

Reposted from this weekend's MLS preview, 'cause I still don't get this and would like your feedback:

Fans all season long — heck, make that for all eleven seasons — have been griping about the mercurial decisions made by the referees and linesmen. This week, MLS’ disciplinary committee poured some kerosene on that fire with some strange and inequitable punishments for last weekend’s shenanigans.

New England fans recall that Shalrie Joseph had to sit out the critical second-leg match against Chicago for a phantom high elbow call against Chicago’s Ivan Guererro in the first leg. This week, for pointing that out, coach Steve Nicol got slapped with a $2000 fine for pointing out what a joke this was.

But hold on, it gets better.

Last week, Colorado’s Mike Petke karate-kicked FC Dallas keeper Dario Sala in the chest post-game after Sala punched his teammate, Hunter Freeman. Sala got a $3500 fine and was banned for six games, which is absolutely appropriate. Petke, however, got a $500 slap on the wrist.

In the same game. Pablo Mastroeni got a yellow card for an open-handed slap to Simo Valakari. This week, for the same exact transgression, Houston’s Ricardo Clark got fined $500. Chivas USA’ Juan Francisco Palencia, you may recall, got tossed for the same kind of stuff, but was not fined.

Don’t misread me: This isn’t about what Petke, Mastroeni or Clark did, it’s about an inequitable system. How is it that Joseph, who didn’t get a card that day from ref Tim Weyland on the play had to sit out a game, yet a guy who was the second man in on a brawl can suit up Sunday for the Rapids? Is it any wonder fans and players are frustrated?

If MLS really wants to do something about indiscipline, it can start by attacking the root of the problem, and that’s the refs. While the players have improved, the refs haven’t kept pace, and this needs to change.

The biggest slap in the face is Nicol’s fine. I know coaches are supposed to be good soldiers and “respect the game.” But when players are being disrespected by a seemingly arbitrary system, coaches and players have a duty to speak out.
 

You can read complete playoff coverage here, and join us both Tuesday and Friday for the regularly scheduled column as well as a breakdown of the weekend's upcoming action.

You may read it here, and leave comments below if you wish. Also, you can read about the "Beckham Question" below, or click through on the handy hotlink. Thanks for reading!

Our colleague and pal Grant Wahl posted an interesting argument this weekend arguing that MLS should sign David Beckham sooner rather than later. It’s a solid argument — go read it — and it's one that I'd agree with if the league is intent on signing the former England captain.

But I think signing Beckham in the first place is a mistake.

So many things these days in American soccer are treated as “true” despite little or no evidence. Some examples: The idea that youth soccer players and their parents will support a professional soccer franchise; that Jurgen Klinsmann would be a successful American coach; and that MLS needs a star like a David Beckham to really draw interest toward the league. Not one of the preceding statements is actually verifiable — they’re all opinions, not facts — and furthermore, at least one of them (the first) is demonstrably false. Yet all these things are treated by a majority of soccer fans as “truth.” That’s dangerous, because it obscures other options for the sport that might be more profitable.

Beckham is great example of this. He’s a nice guy and got true marketing clout. Based on past “big signings” such as Pele and Freddy Adu, I think it is safe to say signing Beckham to an MLS team would spur some public interest. The question is whether that short-term attention would stick with the sport and MLS for any period of time.

History shows that it won’t.

When big name players have been signed to American soccer teams in the past they have often — but not always — generated a flurry of media attention and, in the best cases, some real upticks at the box office to boot. Those sellouts for the Pele-Beckenbauer-Chinaglia era Cosmos were absolutely real. The problem is that when those stars left, attention waned dramatically. This is demonstrable: For many sports editors and media buyers the whole NASL era never existed.

This suggests that the attention gained from signing a star to an American soccer team benefits the star more than the league or the sport. It also highlights the obvious problem that the product surrounding that star isn’t enough to sustain fan interest on its own. Pele drew fans; soccer hasn’t.

Americans don’t love soccer. No matter how many times MLS tosses around questionable figures (my favourite is the suggestion that the sport has 65 million potential fans in the USA) the sad truth is that drawing a consistent 15,000 fans a game to see professional soccer is extremely hard. One of the more depressing examples can be found on the East Coast, an area with arguably the richest and deepest soccer heritage in the USA. Consider that we’re in a post-Pele, post-youth soccer boom era, as well as a good 75 years along since the sport became entrenched in New England schools and colleges. A lot of folks play soccer in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York. Have the New England Revolution seen any benefit at all from this? The empty seats at Gillette suggest they haven’t.

Other leagues have been burned by the star phenomenon as well, with the NBA being the most glaring example. Twice in the league’s history, stars have generated tremendous interest in the game, only to see that interest dramatically fall off when those stars retired. In the 80s, the Los Angeles Lakers-Boston Celtics rivalry captured fans in large part due to fan interest in Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. In the 90s, Michael Jordan became a worldwide household name with the Chicago Bulls. In both cases, when the super-star retired, the NBA took a tremendous hit in terms of popularity. Recognizing this, the NBA in the post-Jordan era is attempting to focus fan interest on teams over individuals. The process has been painful and remains a work in progress.

And soccer doesn’t have the financial cushion the NBA has to absorb such lulls. MLS’ average paid attendance still lags behind all but the two worst baseball teams and doesn’t come close to the NBA or NHL in either average or total attendance (despite the fact that both basketball and hockey arenas are smaller). Let’s not even get into the NFL or NASCAR or the true #3 game in this nation, college sports.

But, as Wahl points out, “buzz” is important these days. The question then becomes: is the money spent on a player such as Beckham worth the amount of attention it will bring? Again, history suggests that it isn’t.

Oddly enough, the two biggest draws for modern soccer have been Pele (obvious) and Freddy Adu (not so obvious). The cost-to-benefit for those players has actually been pretty good, too — Pele arguably sold the sport in this country and Adu put fans in seats his first year and has remained a “name player” to the general public. Strictly talking about “juice,” Adu remains a better buy than Juan Francisco Palencia at Chivas. And at the risk of being a bit too frank, Pele and Adu are not even most recognizable American soccer names. Mia Hamm is, thanks to aggressive marketing by Gatorade and the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Note that even with an asset like that, women’s soccer couldn’t take off.

With Beckham’s price tag in the tens of millions of dollars, how much juice would MLS have to get to justify signing him? A lot. Buzz is ephemeral: What keeps folks coming back is the quality of play.

No amount of marketing can disguise the fact that MLS’ quality of play still lags far behind what Americans can now see — for far less money per game— on cable TV. What would improve MLS overnight would be spending "Beckham money" on the teams themselves and less on grand gestures. Doubling the salary cap of each team and spending $1 million each on ten good players from Argentina or Brazil would probably have a bigger impact on overall quality than spending $35 million on one man.

MLS has yet to convince sports fans that its games are worth caring about. Adding three quality players to each team would pay immediate dividends: Not only would the quality of play improve, but those players would help make the American players better. The one attribute American players bring to the table is a willingness to compete and to learn. Frankly, MLS has done them a disservice over the years by not surrounding them with first-class talents.

I realize this suggestion lacks buzz. It isn’t flashy. But signing a Beckham or a Ronaldo will most likely bring just two years of attention followed by a “been there, done that” reaction from mainstream American sports fans. Soccer fans forget that curious sports fans have come to see MLS games over the past decade, drawn by an Adu or a Donovan. They’ve found them wanting.

It would be better in the long run for everyone if MLS took their cash and signed some very good young players. That wouldn’t make all the papers, but it would build a league.

New column, on both, up now.

1) Why is it that this coming week, Canada, Mexico, ####mp;T, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama (among others in the CONCACAF region) will play matches on the international dates while the USA remains idle? It can’t be that the Fed doesn’t want to “disturb” a season in progress— after all, Mexico’s deep into their season too and it’s not like that’s ever stopped anyone anyway. Club have to release their players, so there can’t be any argumenst from the foreign clubs, either.

This is now the third international date that U.S. Soccer has missed since Bruce Arena’s departure, and with such dates becoming scarcer and scarcer, why aren’t the men taking advantage of the opportunity to get together. Arena constantly told all of us that coming into national team camps only made players better, and new USSF president Sunil Gulati says he wants the U.S. men to be able to take on the world. If you believe Gulati, then ask: Why isn’t the USA playing?

2) Do American soccer fans know that MLS Commissioner Don Garber’s annual salary now exceeds that of all but one MLS player? Yep. According to the SportsBusiness Journal, Don Garber’s new contract — which carries him through the 2010 World Cup has a base pay of $1.3m annually, with incentives that could take him above $2m a year.

The only player in MLS whose base pay comes close to that is the salary of Juan Francisco Palencia, who has a guaranteed base of $1,360,000 at Chivas USA (Figures according to those leaked by the MLSPA to the Washington Post earlier this year) Yep, your faves Landon Donovan ($900,000), Freddy Adu ($550,000), Clint Dempsey ($86.488) and Bill Gaudette ($11,700) don’t match the main man.

3) Speaking of cash, why is MLS so hesitant to sell players when it has good offers for them? In the past year, MLS has turned down $3m for Clint Dempsey from Charlton and $5 million for Eddie Johnson from Benfica (to say nothing of a reported $2m offer from English 2nd division side West Browich Albion). Now, Johnson is earning some $875,500 this season in KC, which works out to about $55K a game to date (or $437,750 a goal — not bad if you can get it), so a change of scenery wouldn’t necessarily put more cash in his pocket.

But Dempsey, who earns just about $6600 a game (all figures are arrived at by dividing salaries by games played to date) would stand to make a sizable chunk of cash if he moved — his cut of the transfer fee alone would be about 4 times what MLS pays him in a single season! Three seasons ago, there was another guy who wanted to leave the league badly, and his game suffered as his transfer saga dragged on. That guy was DaMarcus Beasley (who, shockingly, is now unhappy at PSV Eindhoven), and the club was the Chicago Fire. The situation hurt both the player and the club.

Dempsey is in the same boat, and the fact is that MLS will lose his services after the 2007 season anyway, so why not get cash for him now while an offer is on the table? And Johnson, who hasn’t been burning up the league either, can only see his stock go down the longer he remains in Kansas City. MLS likes to pretend that its players are widely sought after, and that they are, in the words of Garber, under-appreciated stars. Unfortunately, neither of these suppositions is correct. Dempsey is a great guy, but even he’d admit that he isn’t driving ticket sales to New England home games. That isn’t his fault — there isn’t a single player in the league who does. We disagree with Arena (who reportedly earns $1.4m at RBNY, in case you’re curious) on many things, but he is correct when he says the league was better a few years back when players such as Carlos Valderrama and Marco Etcheverry were on the rosters. Those guys were genuine world stars and the lack of men like them today points up MLS’ Achilles’ heel. This is a league that must compete against leagues at home and foreign leagues and teams on TV that are stocked with stars and do have the best talent — MLS just can’t keep pace no matter how hard the guys try.

From where we sit, the first step to solving this is fairly simple: Sell the guys who are in demand. Then use the money to help attract some folks that would improve the quality of the play on the field or provide leadership and teaching to a new generation of players.

 

UPDATED: Josh Wolff's proposed move to Derby from KC fell through after Wolff failed to get a work permit from the British government. While Wolff was on the World Cup team, he did not appear in 75% of their matches over the past 2 years, which is the common work permit standard for internaitonals. Wolff also does not have an EU tie or an EU passport.

Shalrie Joseph's $1m move to Celtic from New England was also nixed, but this time by MLS, which refused to sell him. 

4) As it happens, we had lunch with Dempsey a few weeks ago and one of the things that he said he finds so frustrating about the league as it stands right now is that teams play so many meaningless games. “I’d love to be in a league where every game matters,” Dempsey told us. This has been a fan complaint for some time; when players start talking about this, however, the suits should listen up. Why? Well, how can players — especially those folks earning $11,700 a season — be expected to give their all day in and day out if they feel every game doesn’t matter?

We’d like to offer a solution. With Toronto entering the league next season, creating an unbalanced league, MLS has a fine opportunity to jettison the conference structure and go to a single-table system. The rewards of this are obvious: If you award the league title to the overall point leader at the end of the year, every game means much more than if you’re just jockeying for one of eight playoff slots. Now, we know MLS loves the playoffs (we cannot figure out why, as they have been consistent flops in terms of attendance and attention, but whatever), so we think we have to keep them. And we would: Make the MLS Cup a League Cup to be competed for at the end of the regular season.

Here’s how it could work: All teams are eligible. Give the top four teams at season’s end a two-round bye. Make the 12th place team play the 13th place team for the wild-card berth. Then, have the fifth through 12th place team (or the wild-card slot) play in a home-home knockout total goals series. Five plays 12/WC, six plays eleven and so on. That leaves four teams, who then join the top four in what is a de facto quarterfinal round. Play a home-and-home series again with No. 1 playing the lowest seed alive and so forth, and you get four teams. A home-home semifinal leads into the MLS Cup. This forms a five-week playoff series, counting the wild card. Teams get bonuses for each round they get to, and the competition forms the third major trophy in the American case, next to the US Open Cup and the new League Championship.

It seems to make sense to us — what do you fans think?

After watching today's appallingly bad New England-Chicago game, this article in the California-based Daily Breeze seemed particularly relevant. I'll write more on this as part of the promised series on MLS, but some of this stuff — especially Alexi Lalas' insouciance towards his fellow players — is hard to ####.

England, of course, opened with a #### this weekend — Manchester United looks very good while L'Arsenal struggled against l'anti-jouers pour Aston Villa. Best performance outside of the Red Devils' demolition of sad Fulham? Perhaps Bolton, which looked very solid against a wasteful Tottenham.

More about South Africa’s struggle to get things ready for 2010.

Some days, this blog practically writes itself. Bruce Arena, on his way out the U.S. Soccer door, let loose a parting blast yesterday at his old bosses, saying the national team couldn’t compete at the highest level until 2018.

"Why did I say 2018?” said Arena at yesterday’s press conference where he was named technical director of MLS’s stragglers Red Bull NY. “Because I know that it's not going to happen in 2010, 2014. We have a long way to go. To get there, you've got to know where you are…We made progress in this World Cup. But we do not have players of the quality and experience of the teams in the group that ended up in the last eight.”

We remember Arena admitting some time ago that the USA had no players in the top 50; but even as recently as a week before the tournament, Area was telling Grant Wahl at SI that the USA could get past the Czechs and the Italians and that Americans could play anywhere. We also never heard Arena tamp down expectations after 2002 by noting (realistically) that the team had caught a few breaks and that the 2006 tournament would be a lot harder. Perhaps his ego wouldn’t allow this, but his comments now sound like sour grapes.

This is only partly true. Yes, the USA doesn’t have top-caliber players, but one thing the USA has been successful at is fielding a competitive team — and that’s where Arena’s prep, which had been so good before, flopped badly this time around. Now, anyone who watched the team this year knew something was off, but the intensive camps conducted with Stalinesque secrecy seemed to heighten, rather than solve it. Remember, even Mr. Nice, Claudio Reyna, opined that perhaps the guys were “overtrained.”

Maybe Arena is reacting to pundits such as Eric Wynalda and Marcelo Balboa, who opined prior to the Cup that this team could actually be a contender at the Cup. (No, we don’t know what meds they were on.) That said, we’re inclined to trust Wynalda’s parting shots at the coach given his closeness to the team "He can take a team to a certain level, but he has no idea where the next level is," said Wynalda, famously. “How much does he know about playing in Europe, other than having a hot dog and a beer in the stands?" Ouch.

All of this reminds us of another national team coach with huge ego problems. Yes, that would be Steve Sampson. Sampson, who it must be said was both far more gregarious and affable than Arena, used to hold court poolside and spout off about a game which, at that point, it was clear he didn’t know everything about. Sampson let the job go to his head and made the classic mistake of thinking a coach could more out of his players than was possible. When the team nose-dived in 1998, Sampson took it very, very badly — but his hurt was a personal one, and he kept it to himself.

Yes, in 2002 he finally admitted that he might have chosen a different roster but he never kicked the guys when they were down, no matter how hard his own team bashed him. (We recall Alexi Lalas and Wynalda were in on that bashing as well, BTW.) And, to give Sampson credit, he became the first — and only — American coach to head a national team overseas. No matter how much Galaxy fans dislike him (and we’re not suggesting he’s the world’s greatest coach, mind you) give the guy credit where it’s due.

Arena, on the other hand, played an arrogant game over the last four years. Yesterday’s comments follow his trashing of his players after the first group game; his attempts to pin failure elsewhere (memorably on the ref in the Ghana game, a new low for American sportsmanship); and his constant bashing and needling of people he felt were inferior to his “great soccer mind.” (Our phrase, and, again: no, we were not among the needled as it happens.)

This leads us to come away thinking two things: The first is that Arena, psychologically, may simply be unable to deal with a high-profile failure. It’s fair to remind everyone that almost all of the Arena era took place well under the American sports media radar. One of the big surprises of Germany 2006 was discovering that a lot more had been paying attention than we thought. America’s failure was widely reported, squarely and with a depth of insight that would have been impossible even eight years ago.

The second is that we wonder what comments like this say to the Clint Dempseys, Oguchi Onyewus and Tim Howards of the world? We suspect these guys are livid today — and well they should be. No one should like being told there’s no immediate hope for the future. Arena had been famously good at giving his players a platform they could perform upon and defending them, without hyping them necessarily. What happened?

Of course, now Arena has to worry about MLS again, a league he has consistently (and sometimes correctly) slammed. Yet even in trying to avoid talking about this, Arena jabbed a meaty foot in his mouth. "I'm not going to worry about the league," Arena said. "I'm going to worry about the Red Bulls. When I was technical director of the national team that was my job. Now, this is my job."

Wait: Being technical director of the national team meant that his job was to… worry about MLS? Perhaps that’s why the 2006 national team crashed and burned — Arena should have paid more attention to the team itself.

In a nutshell: You love Mourinho and Liekoski, and we have letters from some surprising places — including one or two from former USMNT players.

We'll compile your comments and post the best this afternoon, so take a peek back.

The next U.S. coach?

I don't know if this was posted yet or not, but here it is:

NEW YORK CITY (July 18) -- MLS franchise Red Bull New York today announced that it had hired former U.S. men’s national team head coach Bruce Arena to take over as technical director and head coach. Arena replaces Mo Johnston, who was sacked by the club on June 26th.

Arena takes over an RBNY franchise that has historically underperformed. It is currently mired in last place in the Eastern Conference with a 3-6-8 record (17 points), making it the second-worst team in the league, just one point above Real Salt Lake.

Earlier this week, Arena, the winningest coach in American national team history with a 71-30-29 (.658) lifetime record, was told his contract with the USA would not be renewed.

It is unclear at press time whether or not Arena will continue to hold his post at U.S. Soccer (he is under contract until December 31, 2006) or whether his assistant, Glenn Myernick, will be given the reins temporarily while the U.S. Soccer Federation searches for a new coach.

Arena, who enjoyed a successful tenure at D.C. United, winning two MLS titles and one U.S. Open Cup alongside a CONCACAF Championship title on the way to compiling an 87-37-1 record, was deeply critical of the league during his eight-year stint as American head coach.

Most recently, following the USA’s exit this year from Germany in the 2006 World Cup, Arena drew strong criticism for saying: “The way for us to get our players to get better is: We do need to get more of our younger talented players in Europe. We need them in a year-round soccer environment. We need them playing in more intense games to help develop them mentally, as well as soccerwise.”

The remarks were seen as a slam on MLS, and drew an angry reaction from MLS commissioner Don Garber, who said: "I think it's ridiculous. If I were him I'd take a deep breath and think about what I say before I criticize anyone in American soccer.”

Arena later amended his remarks saying that he didn’t intend to blame his team’s performance on the league, but coming within the continuum of criticism that Arena has historically leveled at the league, few believed him.

A successful college coach at the University of Virginia, Arena went 295-58-32, in his college career, winning five NCAA championships.

Check out the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette's coverage of how minor-league and college teams inflate their attendance figures. Sound at all familiar?

A sampling of your letters: (And BTW: We’re now running at 159-9 IN FAVOR of what we wrote. Keep ’em coming, please.)

Longtime letterhack Pat Ward writes: “Evidently he is not on your Christmas card list. At the end of the day, your analysis was neither fair nor entirely accurate. He has left the sport and its fan base (in the US) bigger & better than he found them. The player pool is at least an order of magnitude larger now. Columbus Crew Stadium only seats 22,000+ so a pro-American sell out there can't accurately be compared to a sell-out 100,000+ Mexican-only crowd in LA. As you point out, there is now an expectation for success at home and abroad. Now we need to take it to the next level & win against quality teams in Europe and at the Azteca. Unfortunately he won't have the opportunity to try again.”

Pat brings up a couple of points that other writers — whether they agreed with us or not — did, the first implying that we have something personal against Bruce.

In fact: While I cannot speak for any other members of the Trecker family — who as far as I know, never interacted with Bruce at all — both I (Jamie) and Jerry liked Bruce quite a bit.. We got along with him fine, and found him to be witty and smart. In fact, there are a LOT of folks in the soccer biz who we happen to like on a personal level. Liking someone (or not) has nothing to do with our take on their performance, and Pat unintentionally brings up one of the toughest parts of this job. Fact is, most of the folks in soccer are nice. That makes it tough, sometimes, to have to be honest in our assessments.

But, back to Arena: This was in contrast to a lot of our colleagues who despised him from day one, to be honest. and not without good reason. Arena never suffered fools gladly but he made the mistake of trying to humiliate people who asked serious questions as well if they somehow didn’t fit into his storyline.

Now, Pat wrote back and said “It's interesting that his image to the public was blunt, but fair. From the tone & content of your articles, he sounds more like he was an arrogant #### who didn't build partnerships and good will - but, as you put it, pissed all over everyone in American soccer. Obviously there is another side to this guy we (the public) never really saw.”

We think this is dead on. Arena cowed a lot of folks who were NOT regular “soccer writers” by humiliating them in press conferences over their lack of knowledge about the sport. However, this tactic backfired because you can’t do this to big-name writers, who have egos of their own and are liable to do things like do research and check facts before forming opinions. As a result, we think, yes, the next coach of the U.S. team is liable to have to spend a LOT of time building bridges.

Ron Oliver writes: “I agree with most of your article except for the fact that there are no good prospects coming up through the ranks. The problem is that youth soccer is corrupt. ODP teams throughout the country are chosen only from the biggest clubs that the coaches have an affiliation with. This leaves many strong young players out in the dark. Youth soccer recently has become more about how much money can I make rather than how much knowledge and understanding can I impart in my players. Many families cannot afford soccer with this attitude. MLS does nothing to help.”

(Coach) Dave Kaufmann writes: “A sense of USSF history of the last twenty years and the lack of a U.S. professional development method has to be taken into to consideration as well. All the Boras, Klinsmanns, Perreiras, etc. can not prepare a U S team to compete if we do not have the players. Our culture encourages our young to think beyond soccer, and get a degree to meet the real challenges of life. With the few exceptions of dedicated athletes like Lance Armstrong, there is no professional carrot at the end of the rainbow for our players in the US. As a USSF coach my heartful thanks to Bruce.”

Frank Dal Santo wrote: “You hit the nail on the head. We have a weak league, play in a weak FIFA conference, don’t have a consistent source of talent, and no easy way to get our few good players abroad with consistency. Is it possible to change this? Look at Australia. They had what should have been our World Cup in 2006. The major difference? Coaching. From your editorial its obvious you already get the picture. Sadly, you may be the only one who does.”

John O’ Toole wrote: “Great articles on the situation with the management of the national team. My perspective is that Arena was a poor coach and the soccer community in the US (but not all) were under the illusion that there was a “U.S. way” to play the game that was founded on the backs of the QF run in Korea. This was clearly rejected in Germany, but the signs have been there for many years. Now the management of the US team is at a crossroads - bring in a coach who will play to the strengths of the current crop of players or who will try to mold them into a more continental team. The task however may be impossible due to the fundamental issues with the game in the US. I see three:
1) A distinctly British influence on the game that is pre-Premership era (this from a Paddy who grew up watching English club football). My point here is that the British influence in coaching, etc. at the grass roots level is too much focused on Route 1 football rather than building the skills of players. This is also playing out in the Premiership where there are few English managers who are coaching at the biggest clubs and those who are are playing the traditional game with limited success.
2) Where are the Hispanic-Americans? My kids’ teams have NO hsipanics on them but they are playing on the fields (where they are allowed) the most creative football. The US team in 10 years should be at least 70% hispanic. Look at France and other countries with the percentage of non-native (right wing term) players. Currently football in America is for white middle-class people (I guess I am in this) and their kids. This is fine but I see no effort to reach out to the Hispanic community in their communities.
3) Setting the bar high or “attitude.” My example here is college soccer - all parents and players dream to get the free pass to a college education. Quite frankly it is clever but useless in developing real talent. This attitude needs to be changed all the way down the line. We need to inspire in kids that the dream is to play for the top clubs and to aggressively place our best talent in the traditional soccer development structure so they can learn. MLS right now is too weak.”

Steve Orozlan: “Bruce Arena advanced soccer in the US--plain and simple. Give him his due for what he has accomplished instead of piling on the man. Could anyone have done better in the eight years that he was at the helm? Who would have and where was he? Also let's be fair and put matters in context: the US failed to win the Gold medal in Olympics Basketball and can't win the World Baseball Classic; two of the sports that matter here, that are played at an international level and that have the talent pool. Talent, not our coaching is what is lacking in USA Soccer.”

Finally, Joshua Hess wrote: “Who was it that trumpeted the success of 2002? Who were the parties responsible for creating ridiculous expectations for an American team in the 2006 World Cup? You can even go back to the first game in 2002 against Portugal and say that the US was fortunate to win, the way Portugal came back in that game… Over the last several months I have seen so many articles written about our men's team discussing quarterfinals, semifinals or even those ridiculous FIFA rankings. I always hoped that the journalists covering the team here would try to provide the calm and reasoned assessments of the teams progress and ability over the last few years but to be honest I don't recall a large amount of it, cautiously positive with an eye on the huge misconception that we dominated in 2002. I find it frustrating that only after the team doesn't qualify for the 2nd round of the World Cup do people start remembering what really happened in 2002.”

Hey, it’s the media’s fault! What? Hess is right? A bunch of folks at publications such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today and other mainstream papers wrote silly puff pieces in the run up to the Cup? Now why would they do that? Here at Fox we wrote that the team would be lucky to get a single point. (We also mentioned the 2002 finish in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, but who’s counting?) Huh. Yes, Joshua: You’re dead right about that; some folks were downright irresponsible.

Other comments included some people who took issue with our statement that the USA drew better in 1998 than it does today. One, James Westbrook, sent in a chart seeking to disprove this. It was thoughtful and well-researched so, we’re looking again over our numbers again today. We’re pretty confident in our statement, yet, that said, if we are incorrect, we will write a clarification and credit Westbrook’s diligent math. (Which, BTW, also shows a drop in attendance, albeit smaller.)

Finally, some folks wrote in and said that the drop in attendance is due to the USA’s shifting of games from “hostile” arenas (such as L.A., Washington and New York… man, and here we thought Fox News took the coastal thing a bit far…) to smaller venues in Columbus and “Gillette” (?!) where the U.S.A. could have “home-field advantage.”

As you should gather, we don’t buy this for a second. Let’s put aside the argument that somehow Hispanics don’t support the USA team. (Try telling that to Li, BTW; she’s the most Puerto Rican Puerto Rican we know and she’s always draped in U.S. team gear, much to our chagrin.) This logic supposes that somehow those Hispanic dollars don’t count, or, more insidiously, that these folks are “stealing seats” away from happy Anglos who would show up if only they could get in and not sit next to the brown folks.

Bull. The fact is that the number of folks who follow the team has increased — but that is a reflection more of the growth of the Net and multi-channel satellite and cable — while the actual butts-in-seats count has declined. People come to some of these games and clearly don’t like what they see. Others come and decide it isn’t as good as what they can see on TV from other countries. And still others can’t get to the games because they’ve been moved out of major soccer areas under the rubric of giving the USA some home-field advantage. Some of this has to do with the chosen opponents. You don’t get to choose your WCQs, but you DO get to choose who to play in friendlies. England? A good draw in Chicago, right? But Canada? Guatemala? Jamaica? Laughable! And who chooses these games? Arena did — wasn’t he the technical director?

The bottom line here is that moving the games to smaller stadiums has contributed, sure — but the USA can’t sell out these smaller grounds either! They’ve gone from not selling out an 80,000 seat stadium to not selling out a 30,000 stadium! Folks, open your eyes here.

To be fair, this is a SOCCER problem, not just a USAMNT problem. Take a look at stagnant old MLS and the USAWNT as well.