The review previews next season's expansion team, the resurrected San Jose Earthquakes. They are owned by the Oakland A's. Gardner explains the A's success on a limited player payroll through their use of Sabremetrics. Will "sabremetrics" take the expansion team back to their former strength as the team now known as the MLS Champs two-years running: Houston Dynamo? We are looking forward to seeing the results played out over the next couple of seasons.
Triumph and disaster
Beckham's first season in MLS showed mixed results
Question: When is a fiasco not a fiasco? Well, the answer has to be, "when it's David Beckham." His much-ballyhooed, incredibly hyped arrival in the U.S. to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy managed to take in, simultaneously, both ends of Kipling's equation: both triumph and disaster.
On the positive side, Major League Soccer immediately gained a ton of much-needed publicity, air time, ink, gossip-column stuff and online chat. And however cynical one might feel about that, it's a very big deal for soccer to get itself into the headlines in the U.S.
It can, of course, be argued that it wasn't really the sport that was getting all this attention; it was the personal attractions of superstar Beckham and his show-business wife, Victoria, which attracted the news hounds. And, by and large, that would be true. But it hardly matters. Getting MLS talked about, especially when the talk involves lots of money, is the important thing.
MLS commissioner Don Garber exalted that the publicity was far beyond anything the league had dared to imagine. And it sold tickets, too. There was immediate demand for Galaxy season tickets, while the other 12 clubs found that their home games against L.A. were suddenly a hot item.
That heady, euphoric atmosphere ought to have been shattered by the fact that Beckham was hardly to be seen on the field. He arrived injured, was injured again, played in only seven games and scored one goal. Clubs that had sold huge amounts of tickets for their game against the Galaxy found that the star attraction was sitting on the bench.
The Galaxy didn't help matters by being a decidedly awful team. They failed to make the playoffs, and coach Frank Yallop -- clearly exasperated and worn down by the Beckham circus -- quit at the end of the season.
But even that turned into something of a success, for the Galaxy then brought in Ruud Gullit, and "sexy soccer" became the theme for next year's team. So it can be argued that 2007 should not be seen as a flop or even as a mildly damp squib. Rather, it was a dry run -- we now await the real arrival of Beckham, a fit Beckham, in '08.
There are clear signs that Beckhamania will mean the Galaxy adopt the role of a touring team, traveling overseas in the offseason (to Asia in particular) to play exhibition games for large fees.
The Galaxy's first such game -- in Australia against Sydney FC last month -- continued the good-news-bad-news theme. L.A. lost 5-3, and Beckham picked up another injury. But he did score a great free-kick goal, and the attendance was an amazing 80,295.
Gullit now has to learn the ins and outs of signing players under the MLS single-entity system -- it's not straightforward -- because the team is clearly inadequate.
Amid the frantic Beckham saga, some words of quiet sense came from MLS deputy commissioner Ivan Gazidis, who pointed out that "the real MLS story for 2007 was that MLS was importing players from South America who are very significant players in our league."
What Gazidis didn't say was that this represents a clear change of direction for the league which, for the past 12 years, has been much more oriented towards bringing in European players. The Latin American trend has been quickly successful -- Brazilian Luciano Emilio (D.C. United) was the league's top scorer with 20 goals, one ahead of Colombian Juan Pablo Ángel (New York Red Bulls).
The Latinos have also brought flair and excitement -- the arrival of Mexico's Cuauhtémoc Blanco with the Chicago Fire immediately brought out the colorful Mexican fans and transformed the team into a championship contender. Blanco's individual skills were honored when he won the goal of the year award.
Gazidis also mentioned that MLS is stepping up its study of youth development programs in other countries. "We have really been going around the world, and specifically to Argentina, Brazil and Mexico," he said. Again, the emphasis on Latin America is new, but long overdue.
The Latin theme has also been taken up -- again tardily -- by the U.S. Soccer Federation. President Sunil Gulati took an unprecedented step in appointing Wilmer Cabrera as coach of the national Under-17 team and head coach at the USSF's Bradenton (Fla.) Academy -- a full-time school for the country's best 15- and 16-year-olds. Cabrera, a former Colombian international who now resides in the U.S., becomes the first Hispanic to hold a head coaching position with any U.S. national team.
Returning to MLS, after a poor championship final in the past two years, MLS Cup 2007 was a reasonably exciting game. The finalists, as in '06, were the Houston Dynamo and the New England Revolution -- and the result was the same, a win for the Dynamo. The luckless Revs represent another example of triumph and disaster within MLS -- they have reached four of the last six finals and lost them all, while managing to score just two goals.
For the New York Red Bulls, there was only failure. Another poor season ended with the dismissal of coach Bruce Arena. But where the ex-national team boss was left looking for a new job, the other major coaching casualty, Yallop, moved smoothly a few hundred miles up California's coastline to take charge of the San Jose Earthquakes. This is a new team (the old Earthquakes, which Yallop had also coached, moved to Houston in '06 and became the Dynamo).
Yallop's task of assembling a new lineup (the Earthquakes bring the number of teams in MLS up to 14) started with the expansion draft. The draft provided him with a basis of experienced and moderately salaried players, after which he can set about adding a few stars including, no doubt, a highly-paid "designated player."
There is another aspect of special interest in the Earthquakes' signings. The new club is owned by the same group that operates the Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics. The A's have proved very successful over the past few seasons at maintaining a high level of success despite operating with a much lower budget than teams such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
This "cost-effectiveness" results from the policies of the A's general manager, Billy Beane, who has established a reputation for canny player deals on the basis, mainly, of specialized assessment of players' statistics. (The system is known as sabermetrics, from the acronym SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.) Beane's methods have proved highly successful -- in '06, for instance, the A's had the fifth-best record in baseball with only the 20th-highest payroll.
Beane has expressed great interest in soccer and is keen to see whether his methods can be applied to the sport. He will get his chance to find out with the Earthquakes. His methods tend to pay scant attention to the subjective judgments of scouts and coaches, and more to evidence of "objective" playing stats. Whether soccer stats -- a comparatively recent discipline -- lend themselves to that sort of reliable interpretation, or whether the whole system appeals to Yallop, remains to be seen.
As for a quick assessment of '07 -- maybe it was the year of Beckham after all, with more to come; or maybe it marked the year when, at long last, American soccer began to pay serious attention to its potentially huge Hispanic fan base.
Or could it be that '07 will be remembered as the year when Beane upset the traditional soccer methods of player assessment? Only kidding of course ... but remember that word: sabermetrics. Soccer fans, you have been warned.
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