Digging Out, Catching Up, Looking Ahead

 

Much like the pitch at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on March 22—the date of our last post, yikes—we have been snowed under the past few weeks. We picked up some more responsibility at the day job, and had a few extra freelance jobs come in. All of which is good for us, but not so good for the BP, which got shunted out of the picture.

We’re back, late on a Friday, having cleared the desk of about 317 tasks, to play a little catch-up. Here’s a 30-second rundown of some of what we missed while we were away:

• The U.S. got a massive and historic point on the road at Estadio Azteca, tying mighty Mexico 0-0, a result which, combined with the win at Dick’s, righted the Good Ship Klinsmann. For now.

• The U.S.-Mexico border war did not go so well where MLS was concerned: Seattle and Los Angeles both suffered home losses in their first-leg matches in the semifinals of the CONCACAF Champions League.

• Seattle had its troubles in the league as well, suffering consecutive losses to undermanned San Jose and Real Salt Lake sides to stumble to an 0-3-1 record out of the gate, their worst start in franchise history. Then new striker Obafemi Martins left the team to seek treatment for a knee injury. Tough times in the Pacific Northwest, where expectations were running higher than the Space Needle this spring.

• The U.S. U-20s learned their draw for this summer’s U-20 World Cup in Turkey and it’s a killer: The young Yanks were grouped with France, Spain, and a yet-to-be-determined African nation. Good grief.

• Montreal got their fourth win to start the MLS campaign, edging New York 1-0 to become the surprise team of the young season before being blanked 2-0 by defending East champs Kansas City in a bit of a statement game on March 30. In the West, Dallas is the early leader, reeling off consecutive wins over Houston, Real Salt Lake, and New England.

That’s a start, and we’ll have more in the coming days, along with the latest BPFL recap later tonight. Next week, we’ll have some site news.

He’s Baaaack

Guatemalan striker Carlos Ruiz, who qualifies as one of the Top 5 villains in MLS history for his dive-y, cheap-shotting, continuously complaining style of play, is back in the league again for the first time since 2011.

DC United acquired the scrappy forward through the league’s allocation process—an acquisition mechanism for former MLSers who left for a transfer fee or U.S. internationals.

Apparently—and somewhat surprisingly given Ruiz’s MLS strike rate—multiple teams ahead of DC in the allocation order passed on the player.

Sure, Ruiz sometimes provokes opponents into rages in which they are prone to doing things like this*:

But he is a proven goalscorer who, at 33, probably has a good season or two left. It’s surprising that a bunch of teams would pass on him. In 2002, Ruiz scored 24 goals for LA and won the regular-season and MLS Cup MVP awards, leading the Galaxy to their first MLS championship. He is ninth all time on the MLS goalscoring list and during his last spell in the league, in 2011 with Philadelphia, he bagged six goals in 14 appearances before jumping to Mexican side Veracruz.

He also has an impressive 54 goals in 104 international appearances for Guatemala.

Should be interesting to see how he and his sometimes devious ways fit in with DC and their straight-shooting coach, Ben Olsen.

*We in no way condone Clark’s outrageous behavior in the above clip, but two thoughts on the incident: One, it’s the only time Clark has ever done something even remotely like that in his career, and we’d be willing to wager Ruiz did something fairly objectionable to provoke it. Two, notice how Ruiz grabs his head and starts rolling around in apparent agony—after the blow clearly struck him in the shoulder. El Pescadito, he’s a slippery one.

Sporting Kansas City and Livestrong Part Ways, with Both Sides Alleging Different Reasons, Neither of Which Is the One You’d Expect

Both Sporting Kansas City and the Livestrong charitable foundation made separate announcements this week saying that they’ve terminated their naming-rights agreement for the MLS club’s stadium in Kansas City, Kansas, less than two years after the deal was struck.

According to Livestrong CFO Greg Lee, who spoke to Fox and ESPN, the decision was due to non-payment of funds by SKC, a detail he divulged while pretending not to divulge it:

“While we don’t talk about the specifics related to any of our partners, part of my role as the chief financial officer is to ensure compliance by our corporate partners. We strive to be great partners ourselves and expect the same from those we do business with. If a partner is struggling to meet the terms of our agreement, we do everything possible to reach a fair and reasonable compromise. If no compromise can be reached, as good stewards or our brand and mission, we have no choice but to bring that agreement to an end.”

On the other side of the dispute, Sporting Kansas City CEO Robb Heineman denied the club owed any money and expressed a disillusionment with the partnership:

“Our faith and trust in this partnership have been permanently damaged; therefore we are terminating our agreement with LIVESTRONG, effectively immediately. As a result of this decision, our stadium will now be referred to as Sporting Park. While we are ending this relationship, our support of the fight against cancer will endure. We look forward to introducing new initiatives to assist these efforts in Kansas City.”

In the entire exchange, there was only one, glancing reference to the yellow-shirted elephant in the room—the recent revelations about performance-enhancing drug use by Lance Armstrong, and the former cyclists’s own Oprah-administered confession. Here’s that reference, from Heineman:

“We are disappointed to learn Livestrong is deploying tactics designed to force us into an unacceptable arrangement, after months of good faith discussions in which we believed progress had been made. We were not expecting the foundation to treat a partner in this manner, especially given the tumultuous environment they have thrust us into over the past year—while we staunchly defended the mission of the foundation.”

That last “while we staunchly defended the mission of the foundation” has gotta hurt a little. But apparently, the timing is just coincidental. The dispute appears to be over money and the terms of the arrangement, and not the disgraced legacy of Armstrong.

But that can’t have helped, right?

Stuart Holden Is Back—“For Good this Time,” He Says

Stuart Holden, the Sisyphus of U.S. Soccer, has rolled the boulder to the top of the mountain yet again.

The 27-year-old midfielder returned to action yesterday, playing for Bolton’s first team for the first time since March 2011, when he suffered a gruesome knee injury after sliding into a challenge with Manchester United defender Jonny Evans.

Holden came on for the final 16 minutes of Bolton’s 2-0 win over Premier League side Sunderland in a third-round FA Cup replay. The victory put Bolton in the FA Cup fourth round for the fourth consecutive season, but for Wanderers manager Dougie Freedman, the sweetest part of the evening was seeing Holden take the field in the 74th minute. Here he is talking to BBC Radio Manchester:

“He’s a battler and a winner. When he came on the field, I was so delighted. He’s got a long way to go, but he knows that this club are fully behind him.”

Having a long way to go is nothing new for Holden, who’s battled a series of injuries so ill-timed and so frustrating they’d have put a lesser player in a rubber room.

In March 2005, having recently signed with Sunderland out of Clemson University, Holden was attacked on the street by a Newcastle fan for the offense of being a Sunderland player in public. The sucker punch left him with a fractured eye socket and sidelined him for two months. When he returned to training, he promptly injured his ankle, missed the rest of the season, and left England, his Sunderland foray over after just six months.

Following an increasingly successful stint with the Houston Dynamo of Major League Soccer, Holden returned to the Premier League in January 2010, signing with Bolton after a monthlong trial. He quickly won a starting spot on the team and started producing breakout performances.

He was called into the U.S. national team for a March 2010 friendly against the Netherlands, with an eye toward cracking the U.S. starting lineup for South Africa 2010. But a reckless challenge from Dutch midfielder Nigel de Jong in that game broke Holden’s leg and put him on the shelf for for six weeks. He worked his way back, and was named to the U.S. World Cup side, but without enough recovery time under his belt, he saw minimal playing time at the tournament.

No matter: Holden finished 2010 strong for Bolton, and was rated the best midfielder—scratch that, best player—of the first half of the Premier League season by Guardian readers.

The second half of the season was sailing along just as well, with Bolton in seventh place in the league (and in the FA Cup semifinals), when Holden collided with Evans, whose spikes left a gash in Holden’s knee that required 26 stitches to close. The blow also tore his anterior cruciate ligament and put Holden out of action for six months. Without him, Bolton finished the 2010-11 season in 14th place. He missed the final two months of the season, but Holden was still named Bolton’s Player of the Year.

He returned to action in September 2011, but after playing 90 minutes against Aston Villa in the League Cup (and being named Man of the Match), he was ordered to undergo an arthroscopic follow-up procedure that would sideline him for six weeks. When that procedure revealed cartilage damage, the club announced that Holden would need further surgery and would have to miss six more months. Bolton, meanwhile, was relegated following the 2011-12 season—their first time below the top flight in 11 years.

So yesterday’s appearance—his first in 16 months—was a big deal, for Holden, for Bolton, and for the U.S. national team, which begins the final round of qualifying for Brazil 2014 next month.

All of the above are hoping that Holden’s tweet this morning—that he’s “back for good this time”—holds true.

 

 

 

Aaaannnnnddd—We’re Back!

Didja miss us? We had to put the Backpost on the backburner (actually, it was off the stove entirely) for a few weeks due to a combination of vacation, expanded day-job duties, and some other projects to be named later.

As you can see, we’ve tweaked a few things (and that’s still a work in progress, so please bear with us), and we’ve got a couple new elements in store for 2013. Please check back.

We’ve also got some stats from 2012: The BP was viewed about 73,000 times in 2012, by people from 176 countries. (That’s 27 fewer than than the total pool of nations that began qualification for Brazil 2014 two years ago, so we’ve got work to do.) We averaged roughly one post per business day in 2012, and the most popular posts in site history were those involving—you’ll never believe it—preposterously sexy Paraguayan superfan Larissa Riquelme.

You remember her, right?

No?

Allow us to refresh your memory:

She’s a live wire, that one. Paraguay needs to step it up in WC qualifying (they’re currently dead last in COMNEBOL; this is an emergency) just so the world gets to see her again at Brazil 2014.

Runners-up in the popular-post category involved Wayne Rooney, Oguchi Onyewu’s wife, and David Beckham’s MLS sojourn.

That’s all for now; we’ll be back shortly with a belated BP Fantasy League update, and then it’s onward with the semi-regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for reading.

Rafa Marquez May Not Be the Worst Signing In MLS History, But He’s In the Running

The New York Red Bulls officially cut ties with Mexican superstar Rafa Marquez today, ending the player’s stormy two-and-a-quarter seasons with the MLS club.

We wondered about Marquez’s apparent character issues when New York signed him back in August 2010, and sure enough, the ones we, and millions of U.S. fans, had witnessed were not an aberration. The guy has a raging chemical fire where his sense of judgment and perspective should be. We’ve seen it time and time again.

A brief review:

• 2002 World Cup: He head-butts and kicks Cobi Jones, leaving the U.S. midfielder flat on the ground and drawing a straight red.

• In a Feb 2009 World Cup qualifier in Columbus, Marquez went studs-up into U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard, drawing another red.

• Following New York’s 3-1 loss to Real Salt Lake in Sept 2011, Marquez—an eight-year veteran of Barcelona and the captain of Mexico’s national team—threw his less experienced teammates under the bus, saying he played as well as he could but, “I don’t have, unfortunately, [other] defenders on my level that can help me out.”

• He didn’t stop there, either. Asked about fellow center back Tim Ream, Marquez said, “Tim is still a young player with a lot to learn. He still has quite a lot to learn, and well, he has committed errors that are very infantile and cost us goals.” Coach Hans Backe suspended Marquez for one game for the outburst.

• Later that season, following a tense, 1-0 loss to Los Angeles in the first round of the MLS playoffs, Marquez chucked the game ball at Galaxy midfielder Landon Donovan, sparking a bench-clearing fracas and getting himself suspended for the crucial second leg. Which New York lost.

Here’s the clip:

• In an April 2012 game against San Jose, Marquez bear-hugged Earthquakes winger Shea Salinas on a corner kick and slammed him to the ground, breaking the midfielder’s clavicle and drawing a three-game suspension.

See it here:

• In the first leg of this season’s Eastern Conference semifinal against D.C., Marquez launched a halftime verbal assault on Backe after the coach replaced him with Roy Miller.

• The capper: In the second leg of that series, just minutes after New York gained a man advantage due to D.C. keeper Bill Hamid’s red card, Marquez gave it back, picking up his second yellow, for a reckless challenge on Chris Pontius. D.C. would go on to win the game 1-0 with an 88^th-minute goal.

Marquez finished each of his last two MLS seasons with red cards.

MLS Transfer and Silly Seasons Off with a Bang

Less than 24 hours after Los Angeles defender Omar Gonzalez finished dancing naked in celebration of the Galaxy’s 2012 MLS Cup triumph, reports of impending blockbuster MLS trades started filtering in. Not long after that, the first big transactions were confirmed, as Real Salt Lake, Portland, and New York completed significant deals ahead of the 2013 season.

More on those shortly, but first, here’s a list of foreign-based players who could be, are rumored to be, should be, or some guy’s cousin’s sister’s bartender said would be, coming to our bustling shores in 2013 (along with their age, position, nationality, current or most recent club, and level).

Buckle up, and take ’em all with a grain of salt:

Yossi Benayoun, 32, attacking midfielder Israel, Chelsea—on loan to West Ham, Premier League

Dexter Blackstock, 26, striker, Antigua and Barbuda, Nottingham Forest, Football League Championship (English second flight)

Fernando Cavenaghi, 29, striker, Argentina, Villareal, La Liga

Christian Eichner, left back, Germany, FC Cologne, Bundesliga2

Rio Ferdinand, 34, center back, England, Manchester United, Premier League

Maynor Figueroa, 29, defender, Honduras, Wigan Athletic, Premier League

Robbie Findley, 27, striker, United States, Nottingham Forest, Football League Championship

Brad Friedel, 41, goalkeeper, United States, Tottenham Hotspur, Premier League

Manuel Freidrich, 33 , center back, Germany, Bayer Leverkusen, Bundesliga

Clarence Goodson, 30, defender, United States, Brøndby, Superligaen (Danish top flight)

Atiba Hutchinson, 29, midfielder/defender, Canada, PSV Eindhoven, Eredivisie (Dutch top flight)

Jared Jeffrey, 22, midfielder, United States, Mainz 05, Bundesliga

Kaka, 30, midfielder, Brazil, Real Madrid, La Liga

Kevin McKenna, 32, center back, Canada, FC Cologne, Bundesliga

David Mendes da Silva, 30, defender, Netherlands, Red Bull Salzburg, Austrian Bundesliga

Rubin Okotie, 25, striker, Austria, Sturm Graz, Austrian Bundesliga

Martin Petrov, 33, winger, Bulgaria, Bolton, Football League Championship

Claudio Pizarro, 34, striker, Peru, Bayern Munich, Bundesliga

Frank Simek, 28, defender, United States, Carlisle, Football League One (English third flight)

Whew! And look for that list to grow in the coming weeks.

As for the deals that have already gone down, Real Salt Lake offloaded center back Jamison Olave, striker Fabian Espindola, and midfielder Will Johnson in a bold sweep to free up allocation money that they’ll likely use to lure a marquee forward for 2013.

Olave and Espindola went to New York and Johnson to Portland. All three were dealt in exchange for cash. Why New York would swoop for the declining Olave is a topic for another post, but for now, suffice to say that the 2010 MLS Defender of the Year will be 32 early next season, and has seen his minutes decline due to injury from 2,413 in 2010 to 2,128 in ’11 and 1,734 last year. Good luck with that, NY.

RSL also sent striker Justin Braun to Toronto FC for defender Aaron Maund, and Portland—which has installed new coach Caleb Porter from Akron—traded defender Kosuke Kimura to the Red Bulls for allocation money and the rights to homegrown player (and Akron Zip) Bryan Gallego.

The Timbers also traded lanky center back Eric Brunner to Houston for allocation money, and sent cash to Sporting Kansas City in exchange for outside back Michael Harrington.

All of these moves took place on Monday, a day the Colorado Rapids capped by trading an international roster spot to Vancouver for striker Atiba Harris.

On Thursday, the Red Bulls traded attacker Sebastien Le Toux to Philadelphia—where he enjoyed a breakout season in 2010, producing 14 goals and 11 asssists—in exchange for allocation money and 22-year-old Costa Rican striker Josue Martinez.

Stay tuned, hot-stove season is only one week old.

Garber’s State of the League Address: Expansion, Beckham’s Buy-In Option, and Donovan’s Future

On Monday, five days before the 2012 MLS championship game, commissioner Don Garber gave his annual “state of the league” address, covering a wide range of topics in a 90-minute conference call with national media.

The Soccer Don discussed the imminent departure of David Beckham, and talked about how much different the league is now compared to when Golden Balls arrived in 2007. “We needed David Beckham in 2007 to help drive our credibility, to help grow our popularity,” the commish said. “We don’t need anything today to get us to the next level. It’s a wide variety of initiatives.”

When Beckham met the media under a cascade of glittery confetti at the Home Depot Center in July 2007, MLS had 13 teams, five soccer-specific stadiums and a threadbare TV deal.

Today, the league has 19 teams, 13 soccer-specific stadiums (with two more on the horizon) and broadcast agreements with ESPN, NBC, TSN and Univision. (Fox Soccer also televises CONCACAF Champions League games involving MLS sides).

The league set records for average attendance and number of sellouts this season, and surpassed the NHL and NBA in per-game attendance last season.

As for Garber’s “wide variety of initiatives,” some of the highlights:

On expansion, in New York:

“There’s a lot of work that needs to happen to finalize our agreement with New York City over our use of the land [in Queens] and our ability to lease that land to build a stadium. I do believe that we will resolve that shortly. I can’t put any timetable on that, but we are at the finish line.”

The league’s goal is to have a stadium and franchise in Queens ready to join the league by the 2016 season.

On expansion elsewhere:

We’ll continue to monitor what’s happening down there [with USL club Orlando City and its owner, Phil Rawlins] and I think at some point, if they’re able to finalize a stadium plan that makes sense, we’d be very interested in working with them on an MLS team.”

Garber also said MLS suitors Atlanta and Arthur Blank, owner of the NFL’s Falcons, would be taken seriously if they could sort out stadium possibilities, and the commish mentioned that a return to Miami would “make sense” at some point.

On Beckham’s franchise buy-in option:

“Anything’s a possibility other than his right to exercise that option in New York. So there is a possibility for him to work with the league office to find ways to transfer that option into an opportunity in LA. It’s way too premature to talk about that or even speculate about what that would look like. But that opportunity does exist if it meets the approval of the league. …David holds the option and the LA Galaxy would have to be part of that discussion.”

Beckham has a contractual option to buy an MLS franchise for a reported $25 million. The Montreal Impact joined the league in 2010 for $40 million.

On youth development:

“[The league] will continue to invest massive amounts of money” in player development, and “we’re working on ways to have a more comprehensive reserve league. Part of it could be a closer relationship with the second division [the NASL] and giving those players opportunities to get minutes. Part of it could be incentivizing our teams to provide playing opportunities for those players on their first team.”

MLS currently spends $20 million a year on player development, and the reserve league stages 10 games per season.

On Landon Donovan and his uncertain future:

“I hope to spend a little time with Landon. I don’t think anybody who loves this game and is connected to U.S. Soccer or Major League Soccer doesn’t fully appreciate what contributions Landon has made to our sport in this country. He’s arguably the best player in U.S. soccer history.

“He started as a teenager and has spent his entire life committed to the sport. I sympathize with what he is experiencing in trying to soul search and figure out what his future might hold, on and off the field.

“… He not only had to be a great player, but he also had to carry a lot of the promotional burden of growing the sport for a decade or more on his shoulders. He played during the day and had to promote it at night and that’s tiring.

“I hope he can continue to help grow the league and the sport here and I want to do everything I can personally to help him figure out a right way to be able to do that.”

In that same passage, Garber likened LD to Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Lionel Messi. He understands how important Donovan, the poster boy for U.S. Soccer, is to MLS.

All in all, though, it’s a fairly rosy picture for the league. Apart from TV ratings (which need to be goosed), and problems with Chivas USA (stagnant team, overshadowed by the Galaxy), Toronto (no continuity and no postseason play in six years as a franchise), New England (need a proper stadium) and D.C. (ditto), the news is all good.

Beckham Announces MLS Cup 2012 Will Be His Last Game for Los Angeles

As you’re undoubtedly aware by now, LA Galaxy midfielder and global icon David Beckham has announced that next Saturday’s MLS Cup final at the Home Depot Center will be his last game with Los Angeles and in Major League Soccer.

He has not yet revealed what his next move will be, but he did say that he is not retiring from the game, and that he would like to take on “one last challenge” before hanging up his boots for good. The speculation as to where that challenge will be has begun in earnest.

So his MLS career will end on Dec 1, 2012, in the exact same place that it began on July 13, 2007. Nice symmetry there.

The rest of his time in MLS wasn’t quite so balanced, but on the whole he provided most of what he came to the league to provide. He got off to a rocky start, with injuries, apparent disinterest, more injuries, some hostilities with the public, and some squabbles with Landon Donovan in the midst of a struggling Galaxy side. But once Bruce Arena got the team in order, and results started to improve, the Beckham Era started to take on some shine.

The team made it to the 2009 MLS Cup final, losing on penalties to a rising Real Salt Lake side (Beckham made his penalty; Donovan missed his); they won the Supporters’ Shield the following season as the team with the best regular-season record, and they won the championship in 2011, clipping Houston 1-0 in the final, with Beckham and Donovan hooking up on the winning goal. And of course they’ve made it back to the 2012 MLS Cup final, where they’ll meet Houston again. That’s four conference finals, three championship games, and a shot at two titles in six seasons. Not bad at all.

(Click here for some more stats on the Beckham Era.)

He also did this:

And this, which was fun:

Success arrived off the field, too: Beckham boosted attendance wherever he went, his name sold gazillions of dollars in merchandise (that’s the official league figure), and he boosted the profile and credibility of MLS worldwide, opening the door for players like Tim Cahill and Thierry Henry to follow him here. That’s all to the long-term good of the league.

Over all, the Beckham Era was a pretty resounding success, early friction aside. And the timing of his decision was a perfect piece of PR/showmanship: It gives the league a great hook to market the MLS Cup with, as well as a potential exclamation point on the end of Beckham’s MLS career, if LA win the title again. As Houston coach Dominic Kinnear said, the league owes him a big thank-you.

He may be gone soon, but he won’t be soon forgotten.

And he won’t be gone long: Beckham said he intends to return as an MLS owner in the near future.

We’re Back: And We Got Off Easy from Hurricane Sandy

Many, many people in the Tri-State Area dismissed the dire forecasts about Hurricane Sandy as just so much hype, or gambled that the storm’s course would spare them.

They won’t be doing that again.

Sandy delivered everything the cable-news weathermen said it would, and more—including this incredible explosion at a Con Edison power plant on East 14th Street in Manhattan:

That little conflagration helped knock out power in most of Manhattan below 36th Street (get your South of Power—or SoPa—T-shirts here; proceeds go to Sandy relief), and the storm wreaked all sorts of other damage in the five boroughs, most seriously in Staten Island, and low-lying areas like Breezy Point, Queens, where a hurricane-induced fire burned some 80 homes to the ground.

The subways were out of service (and largely flooded, even Uptown) all week, and gas and water shortages cropped up in the days following the storm.

And New Jersey had it even worse.

Not good times.

We had some massive trees come down in our neighborhood but few other problems. Schools and our office were shut down for a week, but we never lost power at home and we don’t keep a car in the city so we didn’t have to deal with the 15-block-long gas lines in our area this past week.

All in all, we experienced nothing like our friends and colleagues in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey.

If you want to help them but don’t live in the area (or even if you do), why not go here and buy one of these:

All proceeds go to Hurricane Sandy relief via the American Red Cross. Go ahead and make a few clicks to order one—you get a cool shirt and do a good deed; it’s a win-win.

We’ll be back with the soccer stuff shortly.