Alas for Matt and the majority of real rookies in the group, the curtain probably fell on all to short careers just before 10:30 this morning when practice finished.  A few of them might find a home in USL if they are inclined to go looking for it, but the reality is that college degrees and the job hunt will probably start on Monday.  As the sessions wound down Mike chatted with his brother Matt – as we walked towards the exit.  “I wish I had gotten more time”.  He was talking about scrimmage time, but between being drafted on January 14th and probably being released in the next 24 hours it may be the the summation of his entire professional career.

It is a tough fact of professional sport and especially soccer in the USA.  The pyramid isn’t exactly deep or broad, beyond the USL level there is nothing.  How quickly a dream can come and go.  It was a sobering and saddening thought.  Of course we see this every year, the often anonymous faces come and go and you cannot help but think of them as having little chance but this year I knew just enough about one of them to wish that the status quo wasn’t what it is.

Cuts will be made before the team leaves in the morning.

As mentioned earlier the entire playing staff was divided into three teams that scrimmaged together.  It was fairly low pace stuff and unfortunately it the first two standout names of Peterson Joseph and Kevin Ellis who both picked up injuries.  Joseph is a diminutive, speedy, technically gifted player but I wonder about the lack of physicality he brings to the table within the rough and tumble of MLS. He has the build of an Olsen twin. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with him but he looked to have picked up a bit of a strain today after dancing through a defense like it wasn’t there and scoring.  I could not help but be impressed and then he pulled up.  Hopefully it does not hamper his efforts in Arizona too badly.  I can certainly see why he has been signed … but the Sunil Chhetri warning sign is blinking a bit. If you are going to be a minnow, you need to be exceptional to make it and I am not sure he really is.

Kevin Ellis went down in a crumpled writhing heap during the scrimmage after rolling an ankle.  He didn’t bare weight on it again during training and left ice packed and not under his own steam.  It looked to be a very painful injury and Ellis was visibly distressed for minutes after the fact. I would not be surprised at all to find out that he had X-Rays and MRIs this afternoon.  Hopefully it really is just a sprain. We’ll find out soon enough.

I finally had a chance to have a look at Konrad Warzycha playing following the knee injury that had kept him out of the team for the entirety of the 2011 season.  He has a bit more size to him than I remember and I found myself wishing Teal Bunbury was out there to compare him to.  His father was a hell of a player back in the day, if Konrad comes close he’ll be a good capture and he showed well today scoring a couple of goals, including a nice turn and shot.  He has decent control, a good touch and in a strange way reminds me of Zoltán Hercegfalvi – there is a brain involved in his play. There is some promise there, and he should not be overlooked while everybody is focusing on other new signings.

For notes on individual players … check out Down the Byline.

There wasn’t any real scrambling through the cheat sheets to figure out who players were. I referred to them once while trying who to figure out who the ‘Paul Bunyan-sized tank’ was training with the rest of the team … Lawrence Olum is a big man. Absent from training altogether was the beaming smile of Birahim Diop. The speculation from basically anybody was that we’ll never see him bang in unexpected doubles again in the future. I believe this also disqualifies us from winning the MLS Cup, I had just said this week if we ever do win it, Diop would score the winner so I guess we are out of luck. I think that we have probably seen the last of him.

Was that a premature and without concrete fact statement of opinion? Yes.

You are welcome.

So what about the new guys? Eh .. if they are still here in a few weeks I’ll actually watch them. In that secondary group was Kevin Ellis and “The Haitian Xavi” Peterson Joseph. I somehow doubt they will stay there, especially in the case of Ellis who doesn’t count towards the cap. We’ll see.

Early season drills are slow drills – last year at this time Peter Vermes confessed that he simply wanted to get the team through their drills at Arrowhead uninjured and everything about today’s practice suggested that this has not changed at all. That said, the division of personnel into the two camps has ensured that the senior ‘probably staying’ group were broadly familiar with each other (if not very) and that they also had experience running drills and practices – meaning that they could simply get on with working, rather than having to teach new guys what to do. This means we actually got to see some real drills taking place today, attacking from defense to forward positions with short sharp one touch passing from the center backs through midfield, down the flanks and culminating in shots on goal. It was fun to watch .. probably because I am starved but ..

Bobby Convey … looked good. If we lost a natural born finisher in Omar Bravo we have simply gained another on Convey who looks to have the same cool calm and collected manner in front of goal. He simply passed the ball into the net effortlessly whenever he was presented with the opportunity, and it was hard not to note his efficiency in light of some of Kamara’s booming efforts and Teal Bunbury’s play last night for the US Men’s National Team. I think he will have as much if not more impact as Bravo did and I am looking forward to seeing him in our lineup.

Michael Thomas was also an eye catching addition while being unspectacular – he simply looks to be another player with good control and technique who plays the game in a simple way. If my first impression is correct he will be a quality addition to the squad. It really is too early to judge these guys in terms of actual first team potential but you can spot a rotten egg a lot of the time and Thomas has some game about him.

Soony Saad isn’t new, but hell the boy can play. His finishing was everything Convey’s was with the addition of the ability to finish in the air. He has an unteachable, intangible knack of being in the right place at the right time that is going to be exciting. I would not be surprised at all if he snuck into the match day squad next year… if we simply need a guy that can put the ball in the back of the net when presented with an opportunity, then Saad can do that. Right now he is ahead of Bunbury for me in terms of potential.

The final real word goes to Michael Harrington who has clearly come into camp fired up. He looks slimmer than last year, and he was flat out sprinting at times – he is fast. He looks like his attitude is all about competing and proving a point which is good, because he needs to step up and prove himself to get back in the starting eleven.

Nagamura wore a beanie … indoors …. he has now claimed the skinny girl who is unreasonably cold on warm days prize from Craig Rocastle. I would not bank on him at all if I was stranded in Alaska or somewhere really cold like Florida.

There are two guys in camp shorter than Korede Aiyegbusi which is amazing. I didn’t know that made people that small without the word dwarfism being used. Lawrence Olum is going to use one for a toothbrush.

Scuttlebutt was that the pre-season games from Florida may be streamed live. Don’t hold me too it, if this sentence disappears you know it is happening.

More tomorrow … think my wife is about to shoot a baby out of her vagina, she is on the couch groaning and stuff.

It is very distracting.

I have no love for the New York Giants at all, but I have an ever growing hatred for the Green Bay Packers that is fueled by the actions of one individual, who lives right here in Kansas City. He detests the home town Chiefs and is of course a Packer fan. His belligerent, disrespectful and ungraceful attitude towards the Chiefs has gotten my back up to the point that it has made rooting for the Chiefs a lot easier to handle, and rooting against the Packers second nature. He is simply obnoxious and my dislike for him is now matched equally by my dislike for his team.

His actions have solidified everything I need to know about the Chiefs and my blossoming support for them, and have underscored the dislike I have harbored for the Packers. I doubt I will ever not want them to lose again. This is of course a fairly regular occurrence between sports fans, people will choose to root for a team because of a buddy that did, because their grandpa took them to games there, because a player they enjoyed was on the team. They will choose to vilify a team because they have lost to them a few too many times, because a quarterback is a bit too Christian or because a hateful little prick was a bit to much to handle after a while. It happens every single day, and by and large it is a healthy thing within a sport. A little hatred fuels rivalries and heated games, big crowds and TV coverage.

It got me thinking though, as soccer fans the trash talking between sets of fans is no problem at all, but as advocates of the sport who are looking to help the sport grow within a culture that is hostile to its very existence at times we cannot afford to be both militantly pro-soccer and anti-everything else at the same time. Of course we aren’t all exclusively soccer fans but there is a large element amongst us who if you mention the NFL will groan about it simply being a vehicle for advertising, or start rattling off humdrum statistics about there only being 12 minutes of real action in an hour long game that winds up taking three hours or more.

It is this kind of sentiment that will really make an NFL fan mad, and potentially hostile to soccer and it is the kind of thing some soccer fans will drop in conversation due to their enthusiasm to convert the uninitiated. We are not going to win fans over to the beautiful game but pointing out the flaws in the things they love no matter how glaring they may seem us. It was just a thought – a powerful one which will probably prevent me from crapping all over MISL in the future – I would hate to think that anything I said about MISL caused an Indoor soccer fan to think of Sporting Kansas City or MLS badly. As much as we are fans, we are also representatives of Sporting Kansas City, MLS and soccer and it is worth thinking about that. In a country where we do not have blanket coverage and networks queuing up to make soccer stories prime time news, word of mouth and the image we project of our game is the most prominent outreach tool we have.

That makes us a powerful marketing force … for good or for bad. How we use that power is up to us.

One of the things that defined the first two seasons with Peter Vermes managing Sporting Kansas City was the heavy emphasis on foreign players. The worm seemed to turn in the 2011 season as Kevin Ellis and Jon Kempin where signed as homegrown players, and Kansas City native Seth Sinovic joined old high school team mate Matt Besler in the first team. The word round the campfire tonight is that the ranks may soon be swelling as another hometown player returns to Kansas City.

Michael Thomas is the name, and attached to him is a shared history with Matt Besler, the two having played together at Notre Dame, no doubt the Olathe native also crossed paths with Seth Sinovic on the local scene. Thomas was drafted 19th overall by the San Jose Earthquakes in the 2010 MLS Superdraft, instead of joining San Diego he opted instead to travel to Sweden where he ultimately joined Halmstads BK before moving onto Ljungskile SK in the second tier of Swedish football. He finished the 2011 season with five goals and four assists from midfield. Thomas was contracted to Ljungskile through the 2011 season which concluded in October.

He certainly fits the profile, young with some experience, and uncommitted. Given the quality of the facilities in this highlights video that his European experiment might have been something of a disappointment. I am not sure what kind of rights San Jose may have to claim on Thomas, no doubt if he is headed to Kansas City that has already been resolved. Take it for what you will, this is unconfirmed but I would at the very least expect Thomas to be coming in on trial.

Thomas is represented by Libero Sports as is Matt Besler and Nick Cardenas.

Getting Seth back from Montreal cost the last great Wizard and Captain Davy Arnaud his home in Kansas City and the Impact an undisclosed amount of allocation money. This is good business, Sporting freed up over $250,000 under the salary cap, received a received an invaluable chunk of allocation money which can be used for paying down contracts, signing players and sweetening deals with other teams and ultimately retrieved a quality young player in place of one that is starting some would have you believe is getting old.

We should be happy right? Logically yes, and if I don my cap of pragmatism the trade is good business but Davy Arnaud is never going to appear in a Sporting KC shirt again and that unsettles me. Jimmy Conrad and Jack Jewsbury left Kansas City last close season, and while Jewsbury was popular it was the departure of Conrad that got the wistful juices flowing. He was the face of the Kansas City Wizards, and Davy Arnaud stepped into his shoes, assuming the captaincy before Conrad was traded to Chivas USA and the mantle of the senior veteran leader in the eyes of fans and management alike.

My ‘relationship’ with Davy has been tumultuous affair. He was the standout player in my early days following the Wizards when they were still mired at Arrowhead, a fiercely passionate and busy player who had the ability to keep pushing and fighting when all those around him seemed to be deflated. To say that he was the heart and soul of the team might overstate things, but he was at times a seemingly tireless and unyielding piston who would drive the team onwards out of pure stubborn will to win. It wasn’t all grit however, Davy Arnaud could strike a ball, could make goals and finish them he was for me the finest player in a Wizards shirt and the first player on the team who I thought was worth remembering.

As a morphed from a casual occasional tourist into a fan and started writing this blog my stock in Davy dipped. An incident which I deemed to be spiteful, classless and vicious during a pre-season game had me wondering for many a month if I would ever like Davy again. It was a moment of hotheadedness that I held against him for what seemed like an eternity until I actually got to know him a bit. Little interactions here and there at training revealed Davy to be quite a captivating personality, fun, with an impish and cheeky sense of humor. He won me back in many ways and as he was named captain and the organization also began its own astonishing metamorphosis Davy became the man once again.

Everything was changing, Conrad was gone, Hartman, Jewsbury. With them Community America Ballpark, the Arrowhead days had one last nostalgic visit as we beat United, Conrad was dismissed and Davy Arnaud once more got a bit excited and tried to wrestle the referees arm down as if it would somehow reverse the red if it wasn’t in the air – it didn’t work, but we still won anyway and the Wizards got to be heroes for day. Good old Davy, always going at a million miles an hour even when he was standing still. I was amazed he stayed on the field.

That said my fondest memory of Davy will be sitting down on some bleacher seats at Community American Ballpark talking, just chatting. Callum Williams was with us, maybe Mike Kuhn and we sat around like regular guys joking around and telling stories about our school days. He turned out to be a great guy, fun, but also direct and sincere, fun and more charismatic than you’d imagine based on interviews. You could see why he was made captain in amongst the shrinking violets that fans would make candidates. He was a natural leader, at least that was my impression, and I don’t think I could doubt a word he said.

He was impressive.

And I’ll miss him … not just because he is a good guy but because I am so used to seeing him play in a Kansas City shirt that somehow it seems a bit less without him. How can it not? A game, one solitary game lasts for 90 minutes, Davy Arnaud has clocked over 20,000 minutes for us. 90 vs 21,607 .. it seems to defy logic. He has been as much as a servant during his decade here as anybody has been in the history of this team and up until the 2012 season his body of work will have been under the banners of the Kansas City franchise.

The guy that I wanted to do nothing but hug after the defeat to Houston, the guy who I dreamed about raising that MLS Cup. Its a cruel game we play and love, yet we all saw the end coming, maybe not so soon and maybe some of us that wished to have Seth Sinovic back now are thinking that maybe the price was too high. Time will tell, and Seth Sinovic seems to have much of the heart and fight that Davy does. That is a comforting thought, as is the idea that this is not a eulogy but a brief goodbye, Davy will no doubt be back in 2012 in an Impact shirt, I have little doubt that he will also be wearing a captains arm band and after he gives the Members Section a wave I am sure that once more he will do everything in his power to win. We may even boo him before the afternoon is out.

I like that idea … too many fans have written him off as over the hill or flagging. He is 31, a child of the 80s, and I think he has a few years to go before he really is staring retirement in the face. I am sure he will have a point to prove, and I would not bet a single cent against him doing so.

Not a single one.

Dear Seth,

1 … Brian Ching – Ha ha!! Montreal stuck it to Ching and Houston. He said he was retiring after this one, now we will see if he values his word over his career, or if he over played his hand entirely… doubt I’ll be laughing when they pick Seth, I hate expansion drafts …

I remember when we signed you. Almost immediately before we did we released Mike Jones who I liked, maybe not as a player because we hadn’t really known him but as a guy I’d spent some time with. I wasn’t really happy. It wasn’t personal, but I didn’t really want you here, I didn’t really care that you were from KC, and … I’d never heard of you. I’d had BBQ with Mike Jones. Sinovic who?

2 …Zarek Valentin …

How good could you have been? I mean seriously the heralded Stevie Nicol dropped you like about as deliberately as he would a cup of hot steam shit and piss if I handed him one. All for a player he then turned around and dumped. Forgive me if I was cynical, even more so when I had heard the Real Salt Lake took a look and sent you packing. Then you signed with us?

3 …Justin Mapp ….

You got your debut finally, on a tiny field, against a fifth string New England Revolution team in the US Open Cup. I am sure you remember. Many of us do, the 1,300 who stood in the soaking rain saw you working hard, hustling, actually impressing while so many of our lads were coasting. Did you have a point to prove or was that just the way you played the game?

4 …Bobby Burling ….

It turned out to be the latter. Which is why Seth Sinovic, is a name all Kansas City Soccer fans know today. It is why you were the value pick of the Expansion Draft. It was why we knew you were probably gone, and why we hoped you would not be. Unprotected as you were? What were we thinking right? But with eleven players to protect and more talent than that in the squad we were always risking somebody. Still by the time the 9th pick had come around, I didn’t think you’d be off – but then you were. 10th pick, Seth Sinovic, proving that it wasn’t just Sporting Kansas City fans that valued you but the Montreal Impact.

5 … Jeb Brovosky …. half way through and Seth is still not picked. Maybe he won’t go? He will.

24 games was all it took for you to become a favorite. 24 games of unrelenting effort, of ceaseless work and no shortage of skill and tenacity made you one of the few players on our team that never had off days. I respect you, I respect the no thrills brand of football you play, I respect that when 8 or 9 of our other guys are ball watching you are hustling down the flanks getting free, I respect that more often than not given a ball in the final third you’ll beat your man and put in a good cross and I loved that that never changed, and you earned every last cent of your playing time and your salary in the Sporting Blue.

6 … Collen Warner….

This simple efficiency and sadly, your low wage isn’t why your no longer a Sporting Kansas City player but don’t think for one second that we don’t appreciate you. 2011 was a memorable season, that helped turn this team from little into something to be hugely proud of and you played more than your part. 24 games for you … and 4 defeats. Not bad Seth .. not bad at all.

7 … Josh Gardner …..

Montreal beckons, its not so bad up there – better than playing in the Kansas City rec leagues. It is still Major League Soccer, even if its going to be cold enough at times that you might wish for a Kansas City winter. Of course we’ll see you again at Livestrong in an Impact shirt, but your still part of Kansas City and always will be, you were born here after all. You still represent us, and if you continue in Canada as you did this year we will continue to to watch follow and call you one of our own with regret that your no longer a ‘Wizard’, but the pride and knowledge that you still are one of us.

8 … Sanna Nyassi … Still not picked … nooo they won’t leave him will they?

9 … James Riley …. Wow! … he’s not going ….

10 … Seth Sinovic ….

That didn’t suck at all.

So long kid, and thanks, seriously thanks for everything.

James

Sporting Kansas City and the remainder of MLS released their protected player lists this afternoon in preparation for Wednesday’s Expansion Draft. There were no major surprises in the Sporting Kansas City lists however the process, unpopular with fans leaves a couple of fan favorites unprotected. Designated player Omar Bravo has been exposed, as has the ever popular Seth Sinovic and the guy he has kept on the bench Michael Harrington.

Will any of them be selected? The smart money is on Seth Sinovic being picked. The local lad come good after being released by New England Revolution earlier in the season arrived with most Sporting KC fans wondering who he was, and why we had signed him and quickly answered those questions becoming the starting left back at the expense of the out of form Harrington within a matter of weeks. What made Sinovic possibly the shrewdest bit of business this season in terms of trading makes him a commodity for any team building a squad. He is hard working, talented, has a fantastic work ethic, is still only 24 years old and he will only cost Montreal $42,000 a year while he is subject to his current contract. He is cheap.

Michael Harrington, plays the same position, is roughly the same age and at $136,000 a year against the cap offers less than Sinovic both in terms of value but also consistency. The simple efficiency of Sinovic when contrasted with the more flashy but less productive Harrington ultimately means that if the Montreal are shopping for serviceable left back then Sinovic represents the better target provided they believe he can play within their system. Harrington, at least in my mind is fairly safe.

This leaves Omar Bravo out there. If you had asked me a few weeks ago if Omar Bravo would be protected I would have said without a doubt yes. Maybe the expensive Davy Arnaud would be unprotected to make room, or Jimmy Nielsen or Julio Cesar. Goalscorers are a commodity, and beyond this Omar Bravo also captained whenever he started and Arnaud didn’t. He was in no way expendable, at least until we hit the playoffs. While he was injured he was also unhappy to be sidelined and there is a growing hint of friction as Bravos attempts to play off season soccer in Mexico appear to have been foiled by Sporting KC. We can speculate the the salary of well in excess of $1m a year (yes that is sourced), might be enough to scare off Montreal however if they are in the market for a DP Omar has proven he can get the job done in MLS but the question I want to ask is this: Did we leave him unprotected because we think Montreal won’t take him or did we leave him unprotected in the hope that they would? Either way it would not surprise me if he went, I don’t expect it at all but I would not rule it out entirely either.

Protected

Davy Arnaud, Matt Besler, Teal Bunbury, Julio Cesar, Aurelien Collin, Kevin Ellis (home grown), Roger Espinoza, Kei Kamara, Jon Kempin (home grown), Chance Myers, Jimmy Nielsen, CJ Sapong, and Graham Zusi.

Unprotected

Korede Aiyegbusi, Omar Bravo, Daneil Cyrus, Birahim Diop, Jeferson, Michael Harrington, Eric Kronberg, Scott Lorenz, Lawrence Olum, Peterson Joseph, Craig Rocastle, Soony Saad, Luke Sassano, Seth Sinovic, Milos Stojcev, Shavar Thomas, and Konrad Warzycha.

Who else is out there?

The Monteal Impact get ten picks on Wednesday, and we in many instances have decided we are destined to lose a player but Sporting Kansas City are not the only team letting some talent go. Young or old, expensive or cheap, there are some quality signings out there. Kosuke Kimura, Ned Grabavoy, Freddy Adu, and Julian de Guzman can’t hurt the interests of any new team. Older veterans like Brian Ching that can still play will be tempting. In this company Seth Sinovic, while an admirable performer does not necessarily appear so attractive. I don’t expect the Impact to pick for their roster entirely, if a player like Adu does not fit, he will have decent trade value and may get Montreal a piece or two that they do not currently posses. If they do go for trade able picks a player like Adu may command a couple of quality players.

A final thought

I hate the expansion draft. The goal of any team is to field a competitive first team, and to have a depth behind it to supplement that starting eleven when players get injured, get called up for international duty or lose form. Doing so with the small salary caps we are dealing with requires more than just opening a check book, players needed to be scouted, brought in on the cheap, often developed, and once all the hard work is done teams are forced to give these guys up like it hasn’t cost them any effort or time to turn them into players that are desirable to whatever team happens to be next in line for a franchise.

I would much rather the expansion team get give a couple of million of extra allocation money for the first season and then enter the MLS market not poaching players because teams have no choice but to give them up, but to make offers, to wheel and deal and make things happen. That way if Michael Harrington or Seth Sinovic is wanted, Sporting could in theory turn around ask to see some cash, get something they can use rather than an empty roster spot that needs filling.

#MLSProtectedPlayerListsAreLate

I started it, it was Mike Kuhn’s idea (sort of) … but while MLS was dragging its feet prior to releasing the lists we got some Twitter sillyness going. (I think) that there is some funny stuff in here. http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23MLSProtectedPlayerListsAreLate

Ryan Smith burst back onto the Sporting Kansas City headlines as Sporting managed to trade him to Chivas USA for two picks in the 2012 Supplemental Draft. The deal for 1st and 3rd picks ended an year long saga with Smith during which time Smith fled back to England twice sighting family issues, the second time time just six appearances into the 2011 season having just regained fitness following surgery.

A couple of weeks ago Robb Heineman broached the topic of Smith as a conundrum that needed solving while he spoke to Mike from Downthebyline.com and I. “We need to figure out what to do with Smith” was the surprising line at the time and this was followed up with “he keeps calling and wants to come back”. Releasing him outright was not an option, this was stated more than once by Peter Vermes during the season however picking up two draft picks represents remarkably good value for a player who has a proven track record of not sticking anywhere he has played in his turbulent career. With the shortening of the MLS SuperDraft to two rounds, the picks acquired for Smith equate to an extra third and fifth round pick.

Late draft picks being what they are Chivas USA should also feel like they have done fairly well. Smith, as flawed as he may be has an abundance of talent and if they manage to tap into that and keep him happy he is a hell of an acquisition and certainly not a player that I want to see playing against Sporting Kansas City and LIVESTRONG Sporting Park any time soon. The trade is essentially a win-win that ends a difficult situation for Sporting and Smith and gives Sporting Kansas City the opportunity to evaluate a couple of extra players in pre-season or trade the draft picks for an established player on the fringes of his current situation.

The 2012 MLS Supplemental Draft will be held on January 17th.

Without waiting until the close-season was officially here Don Garber and MLS delivered the news that was not news at all today. Major League Soccer is moving to an unbalanced, conference focused schedule in 2012 – it seems to have unhinged a lot of people, Twitter has featured a rolling torrent of irate MLS fans it seems. I’m not sure why this this is such an emotive issue, especially in a nation where unbalanced schedules are the norm.

“But the rest of the world…” seems to be the counter argument from many people. It is ironic, given the scorn poured on the likes of Sporting Kansas City and Real Salt Lake in certain quarters for having “Europoser” names however this isn’t the rest of the World. It is the United States of America and MLS is still in its teenage years, its going to be a bit different from the leagues that are formed over 80 years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my balanced schedules. I like the idea that with 19 teams each team could play every other team home and away resulting in a 36 team regular season but that is about as much as I can imagine an MLS Regular Season schedule containing. Why? There are realities to running a professional soccer league in the USA that differ from the norm in England or Spain or Italy.

First and foremost – the damned geography. We have teams in places like Chicago, Toronto, and Colorado. These places tend to not be so warm in March and November, and early and late season attendances are not great, and historically haven’t been in other Midwestern cities. As much as we hate to admit it – when it gets cold and shitty outside, the casual soccer fans, the 60-70% of us that DO NOT go to every game do not show up. Stretching the length of the season to fit in extra games is really just not that much of an option, we don’t need a month or two of games with nobody showing up at either end of the season. It doesn’t serve the business of MLS very well.

If we cannot lengthen the season, then these games become midweek games. Throw in CONCACAF Champions League and USOC games, the odd money maker friendly, the FIFA International Dates MLS has finally started to honor and it gets to the point where there are simply too many games. Fixture congestion is an anathema to quality soccer. Tired players don’t play well, tired players get injured, and its all somewhat moot because the biggest hindrance to midweek soccer in the USA is once again the fans, who have proven for more than a decade and a half that they love soccer, but not enough to be tired on a Thursday at work to watch it. When the league focus is on improving the quality of the on field product actively cultivating an environment where fixture congestion is rampant would be counter productive to say the least especially when that quality also in itself drives ticket sales. Do so at times when fans don’t actually want games makes it doubly stupid.

Lengthening the season is out, and so is playing ever more games within it and so the alternative genuinely becomes does MLS stick with the balanced schedules of recent years or does it stop expanding? We all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon. What happens when we get to twenty one teams? Twenty two? Twenty five? Are we going to play a 48 game regular season? The unbalanced schedule might be unpopular in some quarters but it is also a reality if this league is going to expand and its better if MLS and MLS fans embrace that as a fact now rather than bemoaning what can and never will be if this league is going to continue to expand and prosper.

Who knows, maybe sometime in the distant future we’ll wind up with Eastern and Western conferences big enough to have balanced regular seasons within them, and wait for the big money East-West games in Cup and Playoff competitions until then we’ll just need to deal with it.

At stake today is a spot in the MLS Cup Final, a spot in next seasons CONCACAF Champions League, after an entire season we find ourselves 180 minutes from the glory of ‘winning it all’.  This is the biggest game in our history.  Bigger than the finals of the past, because from once the eyes of Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas are squarely focuses on the upstart team with the new name, the shiny stadium and the media attention.  While the team has always represented the city, for once the city is truly watching.

Will we make it?  Will we let them down? Will we get to travel to LA? Should I really have bought that plane ticket?  Will we get the Galaxy in the final? Beat Donovan and Beckham in the final on their own turf?  I will we be forced to watch the Houston Dynamo take our place? Watch them pathetically collapse and lose OUR trophy?

Will we win today?

We should.  We are the Eastern Conference Champions.  Over the course of 34 league games we drew with Houston at their place and crushed them 3-0 at ours, and they only managed two regular season wins on the road.  They are coming to our place, to LIVESTRONG Sporting Park, to play in front of our fans, our oh so loud fans in a stadium then resonates victory as much as it does style.  We are the favorites, we should be the victors and yet …

The Terror … what if?  What if their wily old veterans and their terribly good coach, the guy with the MLS Cups and the ability to setup a game plan for a single game almost unparalled in MLS manages to do so today?  What if Teal Bunbury has his lead boots on? Espinoza comes unhinged and gets the red card there is always potential for him to get?  What if Jimmy Nielsen comes wildly off his line and fails to get the ball?  What if they camp and defend and catch us with a counter in the 90th minute? What if it goes to penalty kicks …

The Terror.

It is what this game is all about.  Without the dreams of being in LA and hoisting a trophy, and getting to see a defeated David Beckham trading shirts with Matt Besler, the game winning scorer and defensive talisman, the goosebumps and sheer delirium of the victorious waiting for us … there is no counter punch, no doubt, no fear that this glorious journey of ours might come to a late but ultimately premature end.  It can’t end, it is too soon, not before I find myself a tearful snotty mess in LA hugging some random Sporting KC fan while Davy Arnaud or Omar Bravo hoist the trophy over their heads and announce to the world that Sporting Kansas City have won it all.  I want that, you want that … we need it, and yet without the possibility of defeat and the long winter that will follow, there can be no victory.

The Terror

As soon as my eyes opened this morning, my mind was on the game.  I forced myself to eat a breakfast that was too large and that I really had no appetite for.  I managed to burn myself on the wrist and it is throbbing like only a burn can, irritating, not quite painful but consistent and unrelenting.  The burn is my friend .. it is taking my mind off the knot in my stomach that a dozen cigarettes have failed to remove.  A distraction, yet I go to the game in an hour.  I’ll drink with my friends at LIVESTRONG one last time, celebrate or commiserate, hand shake, hug, and for the vast majority I’ll not see them until the season returns to Kansas City in March.

What a year huh?  What a fantastic and glorious path our boys have taken from the pits of the table to the brink of the Championship?  You couldn’t write it better … now its all about the cherry on top.

No matter what I am proud.  But it isn’t over yet … right?  ……

Enjoy the game.

One of the fundamental rules about understanding MLS is forgetting what you know about other leagues and other sports and accepting that MLS is unique. The game on the field may be the same as football around the world however once you get behind the scenes thing get very different.

For example, Manchester City were purchased by a billionaire a few years back, who having to win no matter the cost has allowed the Manchester City management to spend with impunity, bringing in world renowned talent no matter the cost. The rich ownership and strong revenue that Manchester City generate have a direct relationship to the quality of the team on the field. Similarly when Portsmouth ran into financial trouble a few years ago they were forced to essentially sell players (they never could afford to pay when they signed them) quickly to generate revenue to survive.

There are no limits to what clubs can spend in most leagues whether they can afford to do so or not.  And why should their be? Teams in leagues around the world are independent entities, businesses and they live or die by the business decisions they make as well as the players they put on the field. This is not the case in MLS, the structure here is designed to bring stability and financial control to the league and ensure that it survives as whole without the extremes that we see demonstrated by Manchester City, Portsmouth and throughout the world of football.

MLS as a whole is one business (in simple terms). Each of the teams that make up MLS are essentially franchises owned wholly by the league. Owners as they are commonly known are essentially granted the right to operate that franchises. The teams fundamentally do not belong to them, however the owners essentially become stakeholders in MLS. This unique approach to league setup puts all of the league owners in the pool with each other, and the business interests of one group are too an extent the business interests of everybody else. Because of this structure, and the focus of MLS towards stability and growth, and with one eye on the past failure of the NASL (North American Soccer League) the freedom of the franchise owners to do what they will with their teams is limited.

The initial and most fundamental part is financial control, owners are essentially operating an MLS business within their own designated territory. If they turn a profit it is theirs however a chunk of all ticket sales are kicked back to the League so that MLS has cash to operate. MLS uses this money to sign players for the teams, and pay their wages. All players are contracted to the league, not to the teams they play for. On top of this the league has a strict salary cap, so that teams cannot spend to excess – after all it is MLS paying the players not the teams.

What this means is this:

If Bill Gates bought the San Jose Earthquakes and decided to turn them into a super team by outspending the rest of the league … he can’t. He would have the same $3.2m salary cap to spend as everybody. This means that the most commercially successful teams in MLS have no more cap space than the remainder of the league with a caveat. Teams which have the means to do so can spend extra money bringing in Designated Players. The first (approximate) $350k for these players is levied towards the salary cap and reduces the pool for the remainder of the squad. Anything above the MLS paid portion is privately financed, which is why the LA Galaxy can have a $6m a year player, and Sporting Kansas City can pay Omar Bravo over $1m a year. Each Designated Player takes a fairly large chunk of the salary cap meaning there is a trade off between the quantity of DPs a team can have long term and the quality of the squad behind them. The onus is therefor on finding a player or two at most who can really add to your squad without taking away your ability to have substantial depth in reserve. (We’ll cover DPs properly in another 101 — next week).

If a franchise is struggling, losing money like many do, they still have the same $3.2m to spend on players that everybody else does. This keeps teams at the lower end of the economic scale competitive and has allowed teams that suffer poor attendance or circumstances to remain floating while not having to worry about player wages. Before you sneer that was probably the Wizards from 1996 through 2010. Sporting Kansas City would not be here without these controls and the single entity.

Costs are firmly controlled in terms of playing staff, however individual owner-operator groups have a fairly free reign when it comes to other aspects of their team business. Soccer specific stadiums when constructed are seldom paid for by the owners, LIVESTRONG Sporting Park cost our ownership group here in Kansas City something in the region of $50m with the remaining approximate $150m tab being paid by sales taxes generated in and around the stadium and the Legends complex. As we have seen appropriate venues in good locations that are properly marketed and feature a product on the field will draw in crowds, and it is through high attendance and leveraging facilities like LIVESTRONG to host exhibition games, concerts, corporate sponsorship and through the sales of merchandise and concessions that the owners ultimately can make money. The stadium is not owned or operated by MLS, but Sporting Club.

The owners of Sporting Kansas City, if they play their cards right should start bringing in revenue from their journey into MLS now that LIVESTRONG Sporting Park is open however it is worth remembering that during the prior years of their journey from Arrowhead to LIVESTRONG via Community America Ballpark they were unlikely have done so. As more stadiums come online, as more television revenue is untapped and as soccer grows in the USA the single entity structure may eventually go away, but for the foreseeable future it is here to remain and it is fundamental to understanding how almost everything works in MLS.

For example, we currently have a playoff system that includes ten teams. While many fans have complained that having more than half the league play in the system cheapens it, the reality is that when teams are out of contention do not sell a lot of tickets. When a large percentage of ticket sales are kicked back to the league, and the owners are all essentially shareholders you can understand how a compromise between quality and quantity comes about.

The single entity affects everything from who manufactures the team kits, to the font that is used on the back of shirts, and even sponsor logos on the front of them have a mandated minimum sponsorship amount and involve a hefty kickback to MLS. At times it all seems a little like the Cosa Nostra have setup a structure to win territories and supply the Don and his allies with bundles of cash, however the reality is the MLS lost $350m in first 8 seasons and is only know starting to approach overall profitability. In the mean time the various owners have had to foot the bill.

The future is certainly looking bright, but it will be a long long time before the ultra-rich Arabs turn up and are able to assemble a world beater, if ever. The single entity structure will likely be here for as long as MLS is, accepting this fact and learning to think of all MLS teams being partners in one enterprise will help you understand MLS forevermore.

Next up …. Assembling a Squad …

A year later I considered amending the piece to account for yet another year, and deciding it would make it bloated and overly long decided to leave it be and discuss it here. The truth is as much has changed in the last 48 months, not so much with me and my aging old bones but my perception and relationship with the Wizards.

Roll the clock back to opening day of 2010 and we were playing DC United in the first home game of the season. We were at CAB and Peter Vermes was about to manage his first game as the “not temporary” manager of the team having opted to take on the job instead of seeking out a replacement. In a delicious twist of irony Curt Onalfo the prior manager had been hired by DC United, who had also picked up Adam Cristman, and the ever unpopular Kurt Morsink. They looked like a disaster waiting to happen, meanwhile I was filled with optimism for a Wizards season that included a vastly different roster. Ryan Smith, Stephane Auvray, Craig Rocastle, and Teal Bunbury were new exciting names and the team was looking like it might go somewhere.

The fan base as a whole was optimistic heading into a new season but pessimism wasn’t in short supply either. We’d failed to make the playoffs in 2009, made them in 2008 only to be dumped out by Columbus in the first round and there wasn’t much to cheer about in between. While CAB was an upgrade over Arrowhead in terms of atmosphere it still made us a laughing stock around the remainder of MLS.

Being a Wizards fan back then seemed like a chore in a way. We turned up in hope more than with any real optimism and despite trouncing DC United 4-0 that day, the sentiment of “they’ll let us down” wasn’t hard to find. If I could sum us up in one word it would have been downtrodden. I summed it up then by describing tailgating in an empty parking lot prior to the game:

“I feel at home with a beer in my hand and the poor sad bastards I stand with. I am one of them. A Wizards fan.”

Poor sad bastards? March 2010.

The funny thing was in many respects, the 2010 season without actually being good was one of the most monumental in the history of the team. We broke ground on LIVESTRONG Sporting Park in January, but there wasn’t enough of it by opening day to be truly exciting. We were still mired at CAB, it wasn’t until spring truly arrived and the wheels had started to come off the 2010 season that the stadium started to take real form and distract us from the horror show on the field. We finished the season strong but still managed to avoid the playoffs.

In November our name changed, our logo, our colors. The Kansas City Soccer Stadium became LIVESTRONG Sporting Park, and we were lumbered with a ten road trip to start the season. Even with the fresh start it seemed like we were hell bent on sabotaging the new season. We won the season opener vs Chivas then hobbled our way through the road trip. New name, same old Wizards.

LIVESTRONG finally opened and we blew our home opener, saving the party for the San Jose. That night remade the team for me, while the opener was a great night it was the San Jose game that made LSP home and the run that followed that night has taken us from nowhere in the Eastern Conference to the pinnacle of the division. Tonight (yeah I am late hitting publish), a win against San Jose will all but land us a playoff spot and it is fair to say that between now and then everything seems to have changed. The team has clicked, the stadium has remained full, the broader media market around Kansas City is taking notice. I see Sporting KC stickers on the backs of cars no matter where I drive in the metro and people contacting me and calling for tickets. I could not give them away last year.

For the first time in my brief history with this organization there isn’t a sliver of embarrassment around the edges. I am genuinely proud of how far this team has come in so short a space of time this, proud of the stadium for sure, but almost more proud of the way the fans within are reacting to it and learning to take part in a growing fan culture which is often mentioned in the same breath as Portland and Seattle by MLS pundits that used to consider the Wizards a blight on MLS in much the same way many fans view Chivas USA.

The ultimate indicator of change happened for me on Wednesday when we climbed to the peak of the Eastern Conference table. I renewed my season tickets in the Members Section the night before the game. It wasn’t so I could get a couple of poncy seats in the Victory Suite or so I could take advantage of it was because the very same people who refused free tickets from me in the past actually want season tickets in the members section next year. Winning over the English Ex-Pat community in Kansas City is a triumph, drilled home more than every by a friend of mine I jabbed at today when his beloved Everton lost.

“I’m in a good mood mate, Sporting Kansas City are heading for the playoffs! Never thought it possible but MLS is giving me a lot more pleasure than the Premier League these days…”

I think most of us can finally say the same about Sporting Kansas City.

Tonight the Columbus Crew and Houston managed a draw.  A great result for us in what I deem to now be the race for first spot.  It was the first of 34 games that will tell the story of the final few weeks of our season.  If we win out, or do well none of it means a thing … but are we really going to? A win on the road this weekend in Utah will be massive but can’t be demanded the way we can demand to win against Eastern Conference competition at home. We also finish the season at DC United who are my own personal outside dark horse and boogie men. They have a quality experienced squad and they look like they are just starting to click.

Either way here are the 33 fixtures that count. The final one is a bullshit friendly vs Chivas Not USA’s 8th string.  The table below is accurate after the games on 9/14/2011 — it contains a couple of extra columns.  Available Points is basically how many points a given team has to play for, Max points is the total achievable.  As you can see DC United are in a position to wind up near the top ‘simply’ by winning the games they have in hand.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The reality is we don’t get paid for this kind of gig, and essentially for me now this means less coverage. Burned out, I just needed to take a wee break and go to games and not think about what I was going to write or say but simply watch and become a fan again rather than a mock columnist pretending to be a journalist. It has been nice. No press passes, no mics, no cameras, none of it – just me and the game I love watching again. It has been fun … you can have too much of a good thing.

I’ve opted for the low thrills approach. Buy my gear, buy my tickets, go to games, watch games, swear at referees, go home, think about blogging, ignore it till I come up with something real to write …

… therein lies the rub. I literally have nothing much to say.

The team has no obvious weaknesses aside from depth. Kamara and Bravo are scoring and if they are not there are goals coming from many players, the midfield are dominating, creating and defending, the defense is solid, Jimmy Nielsen isn’t being peppered anymore and we have our stadium. We are in a position in the league standings where we should be gravely disappointed if we do not make the playoffs. All the moving parts are in place, the team has the capability to win the MLS Cup because they can beat anybody in MLS on their day … and they can lose to the fucking Richmond Kickers and trigger a period of rage and writers block in yours truly that can only be eclipsed by the poor hire of a pansy ass German as the USMNT coach. This does not want to go away … I need a silverware shaped cure.

So to summarize the entirety of my Sporting KC thinking for this entire season:

- Auvray kinda blows
- Myers has his last Chance
- Besler needs to come big
- Cesar is shit and his head is tiny.
- Omar Bravo is going to be great
- Teal is a star all of a sudden?
- Sweet we beat Chivas USA
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- Who is this French dude from Wrexham and Portugal? Collin?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- God dang isn’t this trip over yet?
- Yes
- Ok the stadium ruled, the result sucked, that referee also drew air inwards at great velocity.
- Yeah baby, we beat the tectonic plate pressure build up and then rapid violent release team.
- Oh god its hot and I’m ignoring the game playing Sporting Trivia
- Oh god its hot and I’m ignoring the game playing Sporting Trivia
- Oh god its hot and I’m ignoring the game playing Sporting Trivia
- Oh god its hot I’m done with the trivia.
- Oh god its hot
- Oh god its hot
- Oh god its hot
- Oh god its hot gan doon the toon.
- Oh god its hot
- Teal Bunbury has been possessed by Herman Munster boots.
- Chance Myers is no longer Reserve Team Jesus but is walking on water for the first team.
- Auvray is shit and is gone
- Cesar is now THE shit despite his tiny head.
- Collin is so awesome he can wear speedo and be cool. He is cooler than Hasselhoff.
- SETH SINOVIC WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!! YOU ARE AWESOME WHILST MALNURISHED LOOKING!!
- Zusi says Power of Grayskull and gets super powers before games!! But just in his legs.
- FC Dallas and Seattle are stupid fat meanies.
- I think we will make the playoffs
- This weather is awesome, Beckham is still great, Landon Donovan looks like Leisure Suit Larry
- I am worried this team can’t cope under pressure.
- I am worried that we have a lack of players with playoff experience.
- DC United are a dark horse to corn hole us the hard way. Jody Foster and a pinball machine? Worse than that. We need to wrap this up before the last game before Charlie Davies dives us out of the playoffs or Eastern Conference title or De Rosario or god forbid Josh Wolff pops up and kicks us in the dangly bits in stoppage time.

I like the rest of you am basically sitting, and hoping that we make it and that if do that we don’t fold as soon as we play ‘a decent team’. Of course some things never change:

- Michael Harrington is working on his step over move.
- Diop is still smiling.
- Seattle are in the US Open Cup Final … and it is being played in Seattle instead of at …

As somebody somewhere on Twitter said just the electronic orgasm following Jürgen Klinsmann’s announcement as the new US Men’s National Team coach, the umlaut era of American Soccer has begun. The question is now, how do we gauge the success of our German head coach?

Premature yes but I think looking at the parameters of how you gauge success often help frame the debate about how or why somebody was hired. There are the obvious silverware, or progression to the late stage of a World Cup or similar standards but I think these tend to be simplistic. For example Sunil Gulati referred to the US World Cup campaign in 2012 as disappointing, perhaps because the US Men’s National Team bowed out to Ghana however I thought it was broadly successful given the talent available and the lack of depth on the bench for the Men’s team, did we really expect, or even more so demand that Bradley take a fairly average group of players to the pinnacle of the mountain or even to the Quarter Finals?

I am not sure that makes sense, no more so than dismissing a Ghanian team bristling with talent youth and now representing Lyon, Inter, Milan, Chelsea, Sunderland rather than the LA Galaxy, Fulham and Second division German and Turkish football.

You can make argument and counter argument which is why rather than looking at the nations involved it is often easier to look at the coaches and the talent available and in that light I look at Klinsmann’s record and can shrug. When presented with a wealth of riches and abundant talent he has failed to accomplish what was required and he has yet to be tested when that talent pool is best described as anemic and yet he is credited with the entire recreation German football in the wake of the 2006 World Cup in which he took a highly talented, highly experienced yet aging squad to the Semi Finals of a tournament hosted in Germany and then … lost and wound up finishing third.

Not bad?

1934 – Third Place
1954 – Champions
1958 – Fourth Place
1962 – Quarter Finals
1966 – Runners Up
1970 – Third Place
1974 – Champions
1978 – Died in the groups
1982 – Runners Up
1986 – Runners Up
1990 – Champions
1994 – Quarter Finals
1998 – Quarter Finals
2002 – Runners Up
2006 – Third Place
2010 – Third Place

That is Germany’s World Cup record. Forgive me for pointing out the obvious but Germany have always been a world power, they remain a world power and Klinsmann did not elevate them above the the average finishing position of 3rd to 4th that they have historically had. People still persist in pushing the idea that this was a triumph, sorry but Denmark turning up for the European Championships unfit because they did not qualify but were handed a spot when Yugoslavia were kicked out and going on to win the thing was a triumph of tactical management. Germany losing in a semi final on their own turf? Not so much.

I mean take any of the 1996 versions of Michael Ballack, Miroslav Klose, Jenns Lehmann, not to mention World Player of the Year nominee, and FIFA and UEFA Left Back of the year winning Phllip Lahm and see they are not automatic first team choices in basically any team in the world right now. There are few exceptions where it is close. The USA has never had that kind of talent, genuine world class players that could literally play anywhere. The current superstars of US football and deservedly so are Landon Donovan who with the exception of a successful mini-loan at Everton and a poor stint in Germany has plied his craft as a big fish in the small pond that is MLS and Clint Dempsey who as a forward has scored 33 goals in the Premier League in 150ish games since 2006. He is good player but right on a par with his team mate Bobby Zamora and neither of them are going to set the World on fire outside of fleeting moments.

Who is next on the pecking order? Will Charlie Davis make it back? Will Agudelo, Bunbury or Shea come good on a national level? After Clint and Landon the drop off is fairly dramatic with the exception of Tim Howard and Holden. The FIFA ranking of the US Mens team is 30th, and yet the USA won their World Cup Group in 2010 – at the expense of England, reached the final of the 2009 Confederations Cup final defeating a Spanish team that was so stocked in talent that it went on to win the 2010 World Cup and was ranked number one in the World by FIFA at the time. I don’t know about you but I think that since 2007 the USA have often punched well above their weight.

Klinsmann in the world of the sane would simply have to maintain this to be deemed successful however in the magnified and scrutinized role as the USMNT Manager Klinsmann will have no such luxury and in order to be heralded he will need to improve upon Bradley’s record which seems hard to accomplish given that in four years his two biggest assets in Donovan and Dempsey will be deep into their 30s and the obvious replacements have yet to show themselves.

Where does that leave us? Can the US win their group in 2014 in the World Cup? Even Qualify for the Confederations Cup in 2013? Can we compete with a Mexican side where the likes of Carlos Vela are better players than any starting forwards we currently have and Chicharito is being groomed to be a World Star? I don’t know … if we truly have been punching above out weight then the real burden for Klinsmann going forward will be the excessive expectation from a nation of soccer fans who seem to think they are better than they are, better than Ghana and their stacked roster and youth and who demand that the US Mens National team improve irrespective of the status of the talent pool.

Herein lies the rub, Jurgen Klinsmann has never improved anything. He got fired at Bayern Munich with a loaded table and a big budget and yet the advocates are looking to him as a messianic figure who will recreate US football at all levels and stimulate the kind of national production pipeline that has produced Ozil and co in Germany. Forgive me but Germany have always produced World Class players… with or without Mr Klinsmann and they all start out young. I fail to see how that translates to a US based system that is far less progressive and infinitely less developed, it is not a case of tweaking but creation that is needed here if the bright lights of tomorrow are to be a step above Teal Bunbury.

The production of genuine talent in Germany starts so much younger than it does in the states, and even if we can get the youth soccer portion right at some stage this ‘talent’ is still going to be handed off to stables of MLS coaches who have a mandate to win rather than foster the the talent for the future. The fractured, uncoordinated and combative world of US Soccer needs more than one man to help it rise to the level it could be, and it will require more time to accomplish than Klinsmann will be allowed by a nation who are less willing to fail than most. As it is if Klinsmann can pull off two moments as memorable, captivating, and important as the win against Spain in the Confederations Cup Semi Final and the win against Algeria in the World Cup then I’ll be marginally surprised, but if he manages to rebuild the entire soccer landscape then I’ll stop rubbing my eyes when I see flying pigs and find the end of the rainbow.

That that job needs undertaking is without a doubt, but entrusting it to a man with 14 matches of competitive International experience and 43 games in charge of Bayern Munich before they fired him seems like a stretch. That people have bought into this seems even more of a leap forward, so now we not only have the overblown idea of where the US stands in the ranks of US football to contend with but now also the idea that Klinsmann will somehow improve this situation. I don’t see it.

If only you could translate player success and fancy European accents into managerial success, as it is we all have is the talk and no evidence that he can walk the walk.

Screaming out for a caption contest isn’t it?

Stoppage Time #16 by The Full 90

A Richmond Kickers rant is coming, I just can’t lose the anger.

I grew up in the Pre-Sky TV era in England when the vast majority of games where not televised and avid football fans listened to the radio for their fix. It was the BBC most of us tuned into and standards were and remain high. The voices literally could paint a picture of the game over the airwaves, and they were good enough that you really did feel like you were not missing out by not seeing the games. Of course the radio culture in British football extended beyond weekday evenings and Saturday afternoon road games, thousands of fans would attend live games and listen to radio broadcasts of the game they were watching eagerly waiting news from other games that might affect them. Radio and the BBC were simply part of the game back home… and now it was coming here ..

Yeah I was happy, but the caution came with Callum’s age. Could he really live up to that standard at such at twenty one years old? It was time to meet this lad and have a chat with him and so I headed out to training after introducing myself on Twitter and found myself standing on the sidelines at Swope Park chatting very happily with a young man who I have quickly come to admire. After watching Sporting KC Juniors train it quickly became evident that he simply loved the game as much as anybody I had ever met. He also knows the game inside and out and was quickly able to put me in my place gently a couple of times early on taking me down a peg or two on my know it all scale.  I came away impressed.

Thinking back over those early meetings a few things stand out to this day. He didn’t then, and never has seemed like a twenty one year old guy. At least in terms of his working knowledge and his grasp of the game he is infinite more mature and on top of that he simply oozes drive.  A drive I rarely have seen in anybody.  For example one of the first times I met him he was speaking about wanting to ‘help make the Americans love this game’. That got my cynical little mind spinning a bit and I simply dismissed it as the folly of youth. My mistake was thinking this was outlandishly cocky or even naive.

One of the absolute worst aspects of being a fan of MLS is watching it on television. The commentary and in game discussion and analysis is ranges from the simple brilliance of Arlo White in Seattle to the tawdry awfulness of pretty well everybody else. If I as a fan of the game am reaching for the remote control to turn these guys down I can’t imagine that endless prattle appeals to the non-fan. All of a sudden Sporting Kansas City broadcasts on KSMO have a appealing and engaging presence accompanying the game.

After sweltering my way through the game yesterday I came home with my daughter and slowly rocked her to sleep while I watched the second half of the game. In the dying embers of the game Besler hoisted a desperate long ball forward, it was flicked on by Kamara, badly cleared by a defender and powered into the net off the head of Omar Bravo … it was a desperate last second goal and was accompanied with a simple BRAAAVOOOO call from Callum. One word captured the passion of the guy on the mic but also the importance of the goal and the mood within the stadium. Simple, effective brilliance that Ian Darke and Arlo White would have been proud of and that simply demands that I forget that Callum is merely 21 and English or anything else.  Callum has the rare ability to enhance a game by speaking rather than detracting from it and I am so thankful he is working for us.  He is simply the man for the job of that I have no doubt.

Whether Callum’s goal of switching America onto the beautiful game will happen remains to be seen but fans already engaged in watching Major League Soccer cannot fail to notice the quality of his work. With all the change of the last twelve months I cannot help feeling that the voice behind the mic wasn’t one of the best acquisitions made by Sporting Kansas City in 2011 and a quality addition to MLS as a whole.

And he is just going to get better.

It is coming to focus nicely for me as we trundle towards the exhibition game with Newcastle United. It is just twelve days away, during the busiest and most fixture congested month in our calendar – a calendar that is congested because our front office chose to send us on the never ending road trip to start the season so they could maximize the number of games we played in our shiny new stadium. This resulted in us playing far less games than most MLS teams during that period and July is the month where we are playing catchup.

Meanwhile on the field, after struggling mightily on the road, the team has turned itself around quite dramatically and we are eleven games into unbeaten run of games that has propelled us not only back into playoff contention but also into the Quarter Finals of the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup. We are 270 minutes of play away from the first Major League silverware this City has seen since September 22nd 2004. The squad is beaten all to hell – Bravo is now only just returning to form, Rocastle and Arnaud are off injured for at least a month, Sinovic is an injury concern and Ryan Smith is playing Nintendo in England.  There are games flying at us. Tomorrow we play Chivas USA, on Tuesday the Richmond Kickers in the USOC, then next Saturday a road trip to Houston, and four days later back for …. Newcastle United. Three days after Newcastle we play the hopeless Toronto FC and so the story goes.

Summary: We have a team of talented players, a deep squad and we looked a good bet to make a post season run this year. The Front Office decides that we are going to undermine this a bit so we are going to play as many games at our stadium as possible. Revenue generation vs Logistical nightmare? I get it, I understand it, but it was a decision made at the expense of the on field performance.  Then after our season schedule was released, knowing that July would be all fubar they drop the Newcastle United game right into the thick of the action, at the hottest time of the year further undermining the team.

I understand why as well. As angry as I am that a meaningless stupid exhibition game with as much relevance to the season as a scrimmage versus the Kansas City Brass I also understand why it is happening, we all do right? The Premier League is big news, bringing over Newcastle United splatters us all over papers, the media actually care about what happens in Kansas City for a day, new fans lured by a big name are exposed to our fantastic stadium and the team and decide to come back. Soccer United Marketing (SUM) organize these events because they are a cash cow and they help sell tickets and the league to fans of soccer who have yet to latch on to Sporting Kansas City or the lousy New England Revolution.  From a business stand point they are a knock out.

A good friend of mine right here in Kansas City who I met at the first ‘Beckham Game’ at Arrowhead along with a group of other ex-pats are now season ticket holders. After not ‘getting into MLS’ and laughing at the team at Arrowhead that day, and not coming to CAB more than once or twice before a year before last season … the Manchester United game and LIVESTRONG Sporting Park were enough to tip them over the edge.

One of these guys has purchased four West Stand season tickets, an investment in one season that exceeds many, many seasons as a ticket holder at the cheapest end of the scale and he is hooked. He has his Sporting Kansas City shirt and at the end of a recent game he said “he felt like a fan when he pulled it on”.  It is the growth we need.

These games represent an invaluable way to bring in new fans and produce a little much needed revenue in a league where the majority of teams do not make money.  I get that, but at the expense of the on field performance … again.

The primary conflict for me to digest is my desire to see the team do well on the field – not just competing for titles, but to win them versus the organization and the owners breaking even or making money long term. They deserve it, by god we would be screwed without them. OnGoal have my eternal gratitude, but this ‘game’ is about winning and when efforts to create revenue get in the way of our ability to compete within the league my blood pressure starts rising.

This morning on Twitter, Andy Edwards (@AndyEdSKC) asked a simple question:

“Real quick: who’s your #SportingKC MVP so far for 2011? Interpret “most valuable” in any way you like, just be sure to explain it.”

My short and simple answer was:

“CJ Sapong. We would simply have sunk out of trace without him stepping up and into that CF role. Nobody else can lead the line.”

My criteria for MVP is essentially “what player would we have struggled most without”, not necessarily who the best has been but who has been irreplaceable. Sapong is as close to that as we have and I know many of you agree. Strong arguments can be made for Collin, or Besler, or even Chance Myers or Graham Zusi.

My nightmare for the Newcastle game, beyond added burden of playing and the fatigue that comes with it is this. What if one of these guys get injured? With our squad spread as thin as it is in places, what if Collin picks up a fairly mundane three week thigh strain and Sapong tweaks a hamstring? We don’t have replacements for them that are playing at a satisfactory level right now.  With July being the softest month left in the calendar in terms of quality of opponents picking up points now is essential.  Newcastle only makes this harder.  Key injuries could ruin our season.

The injuries probably won’t happen, the fatigue certainly will and this is where the second conflict comes up. I think given everything that is going on right now that fielding the weakest team we possibly can would be a smart move. We don’t have any terrible players, but I am talking about Peter Vermes having the freedom to pick his starting eleven for the game after Newcastle United and simply benching them. Stick whoever isn’t playing on the field for a fun day out in the sun and leave the real games to the guys who have proven they are ready to really compete for true prizes in US Soccer like the MLS Cup and the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup.

I am not sure the general public and the front office will agree … I’d take it in a heart beat, after all, bringing a little Glory to Kansas City will also help with ticket sales, and isn’t that what we all want?

If you told me at the start of the season CJ Sapong would be the new wonder kid, that Seth Sinovic and Chance Myers would be playing well enough that I would not miss Harrington or Espinoza, that Stephane Auvray would be playing almost no part in the season and that Graham Zusi would not only break into the midfield but arguably be the best of the crop I might have actually laughed.

Had we lost on Wednesday though I doubt I would even have frowned for long. It is almost laughable that we got a point considering everything but regardless … I have found a happy image to focus on when times get rough. I’m sure I’ll test it in a bit as the season moves on but for now its stuck in my head and it makes me smile.

After the home opener that wasn’t, with all its splendor, and Lance Armstrong and Chad Ochocinco followed by a truly tragic game of football I was left feeling empty.  The Gold Cup came and went and I think its easy enough to say that it was also a disappointment in its own way with Clint Dempsey working so hard to keep the score at 1-0, and Landon Donovan playing poorly enough that he was relegated to the bench. I enjoyed the day but it wasn’t mine – I wasn’t vested, and even if I was the result wasn’t all it should have been.

The San Jose game on the other hand was the real deal. A tightly contested 1-0 win. It should have been the highlight and it was close but beyond that it felt like a true opener. The Cauldron, the Supporters Section made such a magnificent racket that at times their exuberance became infections and spread around the stadium to the traditionally quieter fans producing goose bumps and wide eyes as those around me started to realize just how amazing a stadium could sound when 19,000 people join in. It was astonishing, amazing to see the light bulbs go on and the frenzy of enthusiasm generated and a nice sample of things to come in the future.

It felt more like the Home Opener than any other game could. It was a win, with the wonderful stadium not just serving as a pretty back drop, but a functioning living, thriving organism that slowly came to life as the game unfolded. June 9th was for the TV, San Jose felt like it was more for the fans, by the fans. At least to me.

My happy image? Not there yet.

I sat and watched the stadium empty after the game, then wondered over to the Members Club to maybe grab a beer – I’d been a few minutes. As I approached I noticed some of the members section waving flags behind the Fox Soccer Channel’s broadcast team. Then I heard booming noise flying out of the club itself as hundreds of voices joined in unison celebrated in a way that I had not heard since the days of my youth in the stadium I talk to much about.

I wondered in, stood on the bridge over the top and watched, listened and grinned as the fans did their best to drown out the live TV broadcast. It was an amazing show, and for minutes I watched feeling slightly sad that I wasn’t in the middle of it all but glad that had still seen it.

The Cauldron, made up of many people, and many voices was one, united and prouder than I had ever seen them. It was as if 15 years and tension was literally pouring out after it should have but didn’t at the June 9th opener. We had our win, at our home, and the party? Only just beginning.

I stepped away from my vantage point and wondered down the stairs into the Members Club. There I recognized Ben. A face you may well know, a former Cauldron Capo from the Arrowhead days. A guy I barely know. I’m going to guess he is late 20s early 30s but he looked like he was about five years old at that moment, like all his Christmases had come at once. Eyes twinkling, an almost stunned speechless look complimented with a disbelieving childish goofy grin spread wide across his face.

God damn if he wasn’t the happiest looking son of a bitch I have seen in many a year.

I’d guess if he could have summed up that evening in one word it would be something like “Special”, and it was. We may not have the trophies, and might not be flying high in the table but these will be remembered as halcyon days by those that bound to this club who have experienced them. Special times and at worst just the beginning of a bright future.

If there is a bump in the road I have Ben the man child to keep me company and pick me up. I just can’t get him out of my head.

He looked just how I felt.

I don’t want to lose that for a while.

It breaks my heart to see that an eleven year old stadium is already extremely outdated and the fan base is begging for a replacement, but it’s true. The bare-bones Columbus stadium may be the granddaddy of all of the soccer specific stadiums in the league, in fact, there may not even be a top professional major soccer league in this country without it, but the time has come that the US needs to move on.

I have never seen a game at Crew Stadium, US or MLS, but have seen it plenty on TV. It’s flawed in so many ways. North end is the recently added and dreaded stage, which is an all you can eat seating section I believe, who cares, it looks awful. South end has the open concrete area leading to the pregame tailgate section with far from action seats right below the scoreboard. The place was once beautiful but other stadiums have blown it out of the water with what can be done. The less US games there, the better.

Now, for the replacement, LIVESTRONG Sporting Park is currently the best stadium in the MLS, biased hands down best. While it has a few flaws dealing mostly with chant logistics for games, it’s otherwise brilliant and loud. Let’s look at the reasons of why this place is the best for the US squad.

- Location, Location, Location. We are the heartland, we are in the middle of the country. You can fly here for on the cheap, get a cheap rental car, get a cheap hotel, the works. Lots of US fans in the Pacific Northwest will make the easy flight down here, the location makes travel easier from the west coast.

- American Outlaws. The biggest US supporter’s group is headquartered a little less than 200 miles from LSP. Look at the chapters list and see who all is within driving distance of the stadium. Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus(gut check), Dallas/Ft. Worth, Denver, Des Moines, Indy, Hometown boys of AO Kansas City, Milwaukee, Twin Cities, Nashville, South Dakota and St. Louis. These boys bring it, loud and proud through the whole game. We are the most logistical choice out of any other city in the country now.

- The Sound. If you haven’t heard it yet, the stadium gets a tad bit loud. Designed to hold the noise in and oh does it ever. During the game, attempt to turn to the guy next to you and say something. 9 times out of 10, he will not hear a single word. You want the Mexicans to come in and fear the home crowd, this is your place.

- I dream of a stadium full of Americans. If you were there last night, it was a bit one sided on the crowd side. There was a small group of Panamanians in the front of 134 plus a handful of Canadian supporters here and there, but that was it. The extremely limited availability to the Mexican or whoever else’s supporters would make the home field advantage extreme. 20,000 people chanting USA over and over again would make me smile and make the opponent tremble.

I think it really hit me in the Member’s Club after the win, when the drums were pounding and the crowd was singing. Looking up, I saw a friend dancing on the table. I saw strangers hugging each other and celebrating as if they’d known each other their whole lives. My first cap was wonderful and I was hearing from others that this is the perfect venue for these games in the future. So how about it Sunil, how about you give LIVESTRONG Sporting Park and the Kansas City area another game or 100 for us to stand, sing, support, love, everything in honor of our national team? Because, trust me on this, if you bring a big World Cup Qualifier here, we’ll do all of what I said and more.

Calvin Lasister is and has been a recognizable and enthusiastic supporter (and fan) of Sporting Kansas City for some time. He has been writing and posting some pretty good stuff on Facebook …. yes … Facebook … so I thought I would offer him a spot to simply reach more people here.

We talk promotion and relegation, expansion, rewarding teams that perform better financially, revenue sharing, single entities and …. more …

What do you think?

It has been a frustrating process in many ways. Asking Cosmos fan’s for pointed focused questions that I can really pin the Don down with yielded some real crap. I switched to Atlanta and didn’t fair much better. Finally I resorted to Twitter which really was a last resort and the inevitable happened. A discussion about having a single table first, which was quickly and gracefully dispatched as never happening. Next up was promotion and relegation which slowly ebbed away but didn’t die and finally devolved into “but the EPL don’t do it that way” type statements regarding what MLS is doing wrong.

I could care less what the EPL is doing. Grab a coffee, settle in, we are going to talk about how England formed its leagues and how they become the model for the world … this is going to take a while.

In the late 19th century the rules of the game where codified. It wasn’t a quick or easy task and it resulted in a split between the two largest factions of ‘Football’ and resulted in a split between those that use their hands (Rugby Football) and Association Football. Prior to this towns and cities, different school and regions had different rules for the game ranging from all out brawling to Sheffield Code football which was similar but not the same as soccer is today. Once the rules of the game had been written and it really started to catch on in Britain it also started to spread.

Instructions for making footballs and the printed rules of the game where ordered by ex-patriot Brits and Anglophiles overseas and aristocratic and upper class sporting clubs started to play the game, often complete with half time cups of tea and British fashions. The reason for its adoption world wide was two fold, the game that we all love was the game that we all love. Simple to learn, captivating to watch, cheap to play – this much is simple. The second reason, that resulted in the spread globally was that Britain was the predominant global power and not only was the game transported overseas by the British traveling to and from colonies but it was also adopted by the elite in many nations (colonies or otherwise) as yet another way to be like and emulate the English.

Understanding this gives you a big clue as to why adoption in the New World was not big.

If the codification and written rules for Association Football had not happened and had Rugby not split along Amateur and Professional lines the game may have floundered and died, and if Britain was not the power it was at the time the game never would have been transported so far and wide.

More than two decades after the Football Association was formed a league was finally born. Prior to this time teams played in a hap hazard fashion, touring internationally, playing games against opponents they chose and with no national champions, just the FA Cup as a unifying tournament. Some teams would play dozens and dozens of games more than others. Crowds were big, and players poorly paid if at all and so the incentive was for owners to cash in was big. At the other end of the spectrum fixtures were often canceled, teams didn’t always turn up and basically it was a mess. In essence formation of a rigid schedule was created to guarantee a minimum number of games for teams and to impose a little order.

The English 1st Division and the Football League where born out of the need to make order out of chaos.

The 2nd Division was born when the Football League absorbed a rival league, the Football Alliance. It wasn’t that they league simply expanded as more teams wanted to join, it merged with the Football Alliance and with it created a second class of team plucking the three biggest teams into the first division and keeping the remainder in the new Division Two, this was simply because there were too many teams to have one division. Automatic relegation and promotion didn’t happen immediately, first there was a playoff of sorts between the lowly teams in the first division to see which actually dropped. This was nixed when teams worked together to achieve a desirable result to keep them both in the top flight. Automatic relegation and promotion was born out what was essentially match fixing and assimilation of other bodies in 1898. Again as the game spread people emulated the English model for organizing England’s game and just like that … the order of things around the globe was set.

The history lesson, if you can call compressing fifty plus years of Football into a few short paragraphs anything but folly is this: When you see the amount of mimicry, nonsense, timing, imperialism and ultimately fashion and emulation that lead to the spread and organization of the game you get an idea about basically how these things were not planned, how there was no strategy or real business model and how pure coincidence and circumstance lead to our game we play today.

That isn’t so with MLS. This isn’t England and it also isn’t the 19th century, it is the 21st century and the realities are that while the game has flourished many of us still look towards the English and now World Wide model of how to setup a league as if it was manifestly genius or born our of hundreds of years of evolution. It wasn’t. Between the formation of the first division and the second was a paltry four years and it has been the model used ever since.

The delicious irony in all this is that the decision to form the English Football League was very possibly influenced in terms of form by the formation of similar structures in American Football at the college level in the proceeding years. Chew on that one for a while.

The need to simply emulate this structure with MLS, a century after the English First Division was born is thin. It really doesn’t make sense in the economic climate of the 21st century. We have competing forces these days, whereas the English game was created and hugely popular during the industrial revolution as working men finally got the time off work to play, these days we have television, and radio, and the internet and million other ways to fill our time. None of these things existed in Victorian England. We are a much more complex and engaged set of beings.

We have entertainment every day, in our cars and in our living rooms. In the modern world we need spectacle, and in America this manifested itself in the merger of the AFL and the NFL and the creation of the Superbowl in the 1960s. It expanded the size and coverage of the NFL. It is hauntingly similar to the merger between the Football League and Football Alliance with the exception that in 1966 relegating the AFL to secondary lower league status would not have been tolerable in a nation reborn after the Second World War as a global power on the back of the American Dream saying “Sorry, you simply cannot compete until you get promoted” would have resulted in the AFL ceasing to exist at worst or being deemed minor league at best. It would have been a raw deal for the AFL and the merger simply would never have happened dividing revenue between the NFL and the AFL until one or both of them floundered.

Instead we got a broader league where all teams can compete for the Super Bowl and where there is widespread interest in the vast majority of teams competing rather than interest in a select few at the top of the pyramid. This is in start contrast to the English and system where at the bottom end of the scale teams are run on a shoe string and stadium sizes of under 6000 are not uncommon and while the formation can not be undone it is doubtful that if the league was founded in 1996 it would have taken a similar form. I’d suggest that the model used by the NFL would be closer to the mark for two reasons – everybody wants a shot a being a winner, and nobody is going to start a club which is doomed to obscurity at the time of formation. There is simply no way 98 Premier League and League teams would spring into existence with an agreement to allow just the top 20 to have the lions share of the pie. There is no way it would have happened under a rational business plan and these is born out now in England and across professional soccer world wide where second tier teams struggle to survive.

I am pleased to see that our league structure hasn’t simply adopted the format of Queen Victoria’s England because it ‘that is the way it should be’ but is looking to find a league structure that works for the United States of America. One that the NFL evolved to because it made business sense, and one that Major League Baseball itself adopted as it expanded rapidly thought the back half of the 20th century and went on to mimic the NFL by creating divisions within its two major conferences … in 1994.

The NFL and MLB have not come to their current form through anything but rational business and the size and scale of these business cannot be understated. Calling for MLS to snub their noses at a proven model for North America and its unique market and geography for a model conceived because of graft and the absorption of the Football Alliance in the Old World more than a century after the fact seems nonsensical to me.

I am not saying the NFL and MLB are perfect by any means. I like my schedules balanced, I want to know that at the end of the day the winners of the Supporters Shield have had the same strength of schedule as their rivals but with MLS expanding again in 2012 and with more teams being added down the line this simply isn’t going to happen for a while. Neither is promotion and relegation for the simple undeniable fact that owners will not pay MLS expansion fees for second division teams and will be hesitant to invest in First Division teams knowing they may be relegated.

MLS doesn’t have much choice but to be as attractive a proposition to investors as possible, especially while the league as a whole has yet to reach profitability. We will have to live with unbalanced, uneven schedules for a while but I am hoping that my dream for American Soccer comes to fruition before I am pushing up daisies.

When I imagine what MLS will be in the future I can conceive of a league made up of of 36 teams total. I’m talking decades here so lets not fight about markets and TV deals. This pool of 36 teams would be divided into Eastern and Western Conferences. They would play a balanced schedule throughout the regular season within their conference. The winner of each would be deemed Eastern or Western conference champions. The top four teams from each conference would advance into playoffs for the MLS Cup. It would include rare and titanic matchups. MLS can live without the forced New York Red Bulls vs LA Galaxy game being pushed down our throats, but if they met in the playoffs it’d actually mean they where great and worthy of the attention. Finally a cup competition, even the USOC would provide inter conference play.

It seems to me to be the most logical organization of soccer in America. It gives me the balance I want, it keeps all teams in contention for silverware without dooming them to years in the wilderness. It is my hope, and yes it would be unique in the world of soccer but I think given the economic hardships suffered by so many teams world wide and in my beloved home land of England where once mighty champions are often threatened with liquidation once relegated or doomed to the lower leagues where it can take decades or lifetimes to climb back into the top flight it simply makes sense.

If I were Don Garber this would be my long term plan. The goal. Of course before it could ever happen MLS would need to expand beyond simple league expansion and become profitable and there are a million reasons people could throw up for hating this idea, but I’ll stand firm by the facts of how divisional hierarchies are created and state the simple opinion that one day, if MLS follows a similar approach to the one I outlined it may become the model that soccer around the world starts to follow and not another clone of England from a time when Benjamin Harrison was the President of the United States.

Notes
——-

If you do not want/like/appreciate my cliff notes version of English and World Soccer history check out The Ball is Round. It really is an amazing book.

Counter arguments regarding FIFA really only revolve around the maximum number of games that can and should be played by teams. The recommendations are already flouted by the Premier League who have two more teams than FIFA really want them to have and completely shat upon by the Championship and lower leagues.

I do love watching promotion and relegation battles however for fans of the relegated and those that miss out on promotion the impact is immense and the economic impact almost unmeasurable. As players leave, fans attend less the impact is wholesale and I believe in the model I outline teams that have poor seasons would still be able to build upwards rather than being hammered to the floor by relegation especially if MLS was still seeking some semblance of parity.

Where would the players come from? There will be a half a billion of us in a decade or two. I am sure we can find the personnel. In order for expansion to continue the game will need to start making an impact anyway, this is a reality and I would hope (pray) that in a few decades it will be popular and lucrative enough that it is a viable alternative to more popular sports rather than a last resort or a place for second class athletes once Football has picked off the cream of the crop.

I guess I am in public service mode today.

There has been a lot of people asking about parking plans for LIVESTRONG, using my super secret inside sources (asking on Twitter) I have managed to obtain a PDF of the plan which should cover us until the official site has one online. This thing is pretty large at 2mb, so please save if if you download it rather than reloading it. This is the season ticket holder parking plan. Depending on what directions fans with no season tickets come in, they’ll be directed to Lots H or I, or some lots in/around the Legends.

Download.

Once the official stuff is posted online I’ll be yanking this post offline and removing the PDF, I’m passing this along rather than a custodian of it and plans can change with time. Seeking out the official source is always a smart move when it comes to logistics.

Firstly, it was the most hot and miserable I have ever been at a sporting event anywhere in the world ever.  It was the only game in which I started to question if my health was at risk as we brave few (maybe 50) baked half to death before the game even reached half time, and it was a HOME GAME.  Community America Ballpark was booked and we could not find a place to play the game in Kansas City.  It is a situation that will never, ever happen to us again barring some amazing circumstance… yes, we played a home game in St Louis.

Secondly, I met many fine people that day, many who I now count as friends and who I look forward to seeing.  It was that miserable trip to St Louis that broke the ice with some many of the ‘hard core’ within the fan base and those bastards sucked me right into to their blinkered little world.  One of the people I met that day was a guy called Brice Christman who I not only consider a friend but also an amazing photographer and a really generous character with a humble soul.  He dropped a panoramic picture of LIVESTRONG Sporting Park (the reason why we will never play a home game in St Louis again) on Facebook a couple of days back, I asked if I could use it, he stitched together three more.

These four shots are Brice’s – I think they are truly outstanding and wanted to share them with you.  They are not marked up with copyright signatures, and are around 2000 pixels in width.  it literally is a gift from him to us.

Clicking on the thumbnails should give you amazing views of the stadium.

A view of the west side of the stadium from the east.

Looking west again with the north end members section (The Cauldron) to the right.

From the north west corner looking out towards the south end and the huge screen.

And finally a view of the popular east side from the center of the west.

In a recent online chat with friends hosted by the Kansas City Star Robb Heineman responded to question from fans regarding the potential of changing coaches due to the current poor form by saying:

“We’ve set pretty clear expectations for the team, which is making the playoffs and competing in the playoffs, and if those expectations aren’t met, there will be consequences.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what consequences meant within that context and at the time it provided me with a little crumb of comfort. A coaching change was not imminent which I thought would be a disaster but also any change made would be based on the final outcome for the season rather than a prediction of where it might be based on the toughest start to a season ever undertaken by an MLS team.

This weekend Sporting Kansas City lost to Seattle in the 92nd minute of a game in which we had matched them in every aspect of the game for the entirety of the game. Despite the gutting defeat, and a free header in the box to rub salt into the wounds the performance served to raise the confidence I had in this team to get out of its funk. It was also the first time this season that the team has managed to field a full strength lineup. It apparently had a similar effect on Peter Vermes and the players who appeared to be in good spirits.

I had expected a somewhat frustrated Peter Vermes, maybe a man who was feeling the pressure of a public declaration that he was not untouchable by the very same people who chose to start the season with such a preposterous run of away games so they could cash in on the stadium. Vermes was anything but, he declared that despite the result that the performance had been the best of the season to date echoing my sentiments on the recent Stoppage Time podcast.

Of course the cynical might say that this is exactly what a man in his position should say given the pressure he is under however Vermes didn’t strike me as a guy that was playing the game of saying the right things to the media using stock phrases and trite one liners. He was expansive, and confident and I genuinly believe that he is entirely confident that wins are coming, but moreover certain that they are coming soon. It was palpable, with his first team finally fully available and fit things look to be coming together and Vermes and the players simply seem to be ready to rock and roll.

They not only want wins but they believe in them.

I believe in it as well as Peter Vermes.  Enough so that rather than Heineman laying down a gauntlet in front of fans, I now wish he’d gone the other way, acknowledged that he had dumped the team and Vermes in a hole and said firmly that Peter Vermes would have the full length of this season and deep into 2012 to prove himself. It may simply have been some popularism on his part but Heineman has been candid with fans and I believe “consequences” are still looming for Peter Vermes if he fails to make the playoffs.

Madness right? I know some of you will howl at me but at least you will be able to say I said it before anybody else had. The reasoning is simple. First is another Robb Heineman statement from the day Curt Onalfo was fired. August 3rd 2009.

“We are committed to developing high-performance and consistency around our club.”

Consistency isn’t created by 10 game road trips. It isn’t created by us hiring a third manager in the space of three season either. Peter Vermes has been in the job for a whopping 22 months, he picked up the scraps of Onalfo’s final season, rebuilt most of the squad in 2010. I’d suggest that to really be able to measure his work we need a little restraint from the the owners if we happen to fail to make the playoffs.

Worthy of note in all this is a little touted fact that was posted up on BigSoccer’s Sporting Kansas City forum. The Eastern Conference has played 47 road games combined this season and have a cumulative 4 road wins. We have one quarter of all the road wins. Breaking this down into points per game (as we have played far more road games than any of the other Eastern Conference teams this is the only way to really compare) places us at 5th out of 9 teams. Squarely middle of the pack, an average performance in the most difficult of circumstances.

Considering it is the East we are genuinely competing against, and only via the Eastern Conference that we will gain a playoff birth the fact that these teams still need to come and visit us at LIVESTRONG Sporting Park is encouraging.  It is not just a matter of us winning those home games but also inflicting losses on our opponents and judging by us by the quality of the performance we put in with our preferred lineup on the field for the first time this season I not only have confidence that we can turn it around but confidence that Peter Vermes actually does know what he is doing.

Did you listen? As always let me know what you think.

For those of you looking to subscribe or for access to future editions of Stoppage Time you can do so via iTunes or you can check out the Stoppage Time Posterous Page.

I am certainly not dreaming about the MLS Cup or US Open Cup landing on our doorstep any time soon and it is hard to believe that the playoffs are still possible given where we are now in the table. Seven games, one win and one draw. Four lousy points and wretched defending. Confusing team selections and a reliance on a tactical plan that failed us in 2010 seem to make things as hopeless as they have been in recent memory.

Is it all doom and gloom though? Are we really ready to throw in the towel on the season and declare a thirty four game season dead after a measly seven games? Not me. I have channeled all my vim and anger, frustration and malice into several posts along the ”Fire Vermes’ lines recently and I get about two thirds of the way through and realize that is not what I want to happen at all.

Does that make me happy with where we are now? Not at all.

We have four points from seven games, four from twenty one. No matter which way you dress this pig of a season up it isn’t pretty but if you look at the first seven road games of 2010 we had …. four points from seven games … four from twenty one. One win and one draw. The most damning part of this for Vermes may well be the lack of improvement over last year in terms of the record but we are no worse than we were in road games at this time last year and last year we almost made the playoffs.

It is easier to get to the post season with the expanded 2011 playoff format.

We barely lost out last season and this team has more talent, I am convinced of it. The midfield we ran last year was Arnaud, Rocastle and Auvray – Rocastle being the notable recent absentee isn’t going to change us from a winner to a loser on his own but with Kamara, Bunbury, Harrington, Espinoza, Neilsen and co sticking around the only fundamental changes have been to central defense and via the acquisition of Omar Bravo. Now I think Cesar is a bum, the quintessential overpaid mercenary journeyman that MLS has been famous for and the kind of signing that would not have been out of place in 1996. Aurellien Collin on the other hand looks like the real deal.

Bravo is the man. He has got so much talent and so much class that he can’t fail to make a difference at a time when Teal Bunbury is struggling and CJ Sapong has been yanked for Zusi while we wait Ryan Smith return. We are a week or two away from having a full strength starting lineup for the first time this season.

We can get back in contention. We can still challenge for the playoffs.

We still have 80% of the season remaining.

So what needs to happen?

Well first this wretched road trip does need to finish and it will soon enough. If anybody ever thought in any season that the team would qualify for the playoffs on the back of their amazing away form then they are sadly mistaken. MLS is all about home form for all but the very best of teams, and yes the away points count the same but for a large number of teams they are almost bonus points.

We need a decent run of stability in the lineup. We really could use a break on the injuries and the suspensions.

And what of Peter Vermes?

I don’t want to root against him. It means starting again. It means another rebuild. It means another guy bringing in new players while struggling to deal with the legacy of the other guys personnel. It means the season has been irretrievably lost which it hasn’t been.

Short of us signing Harry Redknapp I am not sure who else could come here and make an immediate impact. Instead we would probably get somebody unproven and hell after Onalfo and Vermes as debutant managers I am not sure I want to deal with this again. I don’t want to see Sporting hop from one bad situation to another because of a knee jerk reaction to the longest road stint any team has ever had in my memory.

We all knew this was going to be tough coming in and almost everybody said we needed 10-12 points to have a shot. Mike Kuhn yelled himself silly telling us all this was going to be a train wreck yet the organization wanted the games in the new stadium and now we are paying for it. I find it next to impossible justifying firing Vermes when we have set him up to fail in such dramatic fashion.

On June 9^th all the excuses go away however. 3-4 games into our extended home run should reveal all there is to know about the true extent of this squad and managers problems but for now we just need to get the team home.

We do look like crap, I’ll not deny it, but our first road win last season was the game in Columbus in late July. There really isn’t much difference between this year and last. Slow start and all.

Now where are those little red shoes …..

Once more into the breech, and once more into a tiny room to record a Podcast with Charles Gooch of the Kansas City Star.  It is not ‘my’ Podcast, but I do enjoy taking part in it.   You can grab a copy from iTunes or Posterous

Stay tuned, I am still writing – it is the finishing part I am struggling with.  Sporting Kansas City are confusing …… in so many ways.