AMERICA AT LARGE: For nearly a month it had been among the sporting world's worst-kept secrets, and was consequently of scant surprise when Major League Soccer (MLS) officially committed itself to infanticide this past Tuesday.
Although commissioner Don Garber did his best to put a happy face on what by any standard was an act of assisted death, the elimination of the struggling league's two Florida franchises hardly bodes well for the future of the sport in the US.
"This is not the end of MLS," insisted
Garber, the former NFL Europe official brought in two years ago to prop up the sagging fortunes of the American soccer league. "This is something we feel we need for a strong, new beginning. We will be a more viable league than we are today."
CBS Sportsline immediately launched a nationwide poll in response to the development. The most startling result of the vote wasn't that 29 per cent of the respondents bought Garber's argument that MLS would in the end be better off without the Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion, or even that 58 per cent concluded that the move probably presaged the eventual demise of MLS itself.
The most ominous development, from this viewpoint in any case, was that in the first 24 hours the poll was up and visible to virtually anyone switching on his or her computer, only 341 Americans bothered to vote at all, a figure which implicitly suggests that the other 271,990,449 probably don't care one way or the other.
The players belonging to the two eliminated franchises will become available to the 10 remaining teams in a dispersal draft conducted tomorrow, which means the likes of Colombian midfielder Carlos Valderrama and Senegalese striker Mamadou Diallo (Tampa Bay), along with the South African defender Ivan McKinley and Preki, the Yugoslavian-born US team midfielder (both of whom belonged to Miami) will be available to other clubs.
The front office and staff personnel of the two teams were also immediately terminated, but at least one of them didn't have to wait long to find work. Ray Hudson, the one-time Newcastle United product who had guided the Fusion to a first-place finish in the Eastern Division last summer, was hired as head coach by DC United just hours after MLS pulled the plug on his old team.
As MLS points toward its seventh season, imprecise estimates on its overall losses range from $250 million to $300 million, but one thing remains certain: not a single one of its member teams has made money.
The two eliminated teams were singled out for very different reasons.
In the case of Miami, Fusion owner Ken Horowitz had simply thrown in the towel after concluding that the south Florida market was incapable of supporting a team. (Despite its on-field gains and a $25 million renovation project at Fort Lauderdale's Lockhart Stadium, the Fusion never drew well.)
In the case of the Mutiny, a charter MLS member, it was an onerous lease situation at Raymond James Stadium (which the team shared with the NFL Buccaneers), combined with the league's failure to attract local ownership that led to the demise of the team.
Although Tampa had been a soccer hotbed since the days of the Rowdies in the early 1970s, the franchise had been operated by the league's other "investors", and while the evidence suggests that said investors are not averse to pouring their money down a sinkhole, they would apparently prefer that it be their own sinkhole and not somebody else's.
Attendance in Tampa Bay had declined in line with the team's on-field fortunes (they finished dead last in the MLC Central last year with a league-worst 4-21-2 record), but the club was reportedly being socked $50,000 per game from a stadium lease which offered no relief in the way of parking or concessions revenues. (Although the stadium itself is publicly owned, the Buccaneers' sweetheart deal gives them the first $2 million in ancillary revenues from non-football events there.)
Surely there is some irony in the fact that while it was the baseball owners who introduced the word "contraction" to America's sporting lexicon, it fell to the soccer owners to become the first to actually implement the practice.
"Many out there think this is the end of MLS. Nothing could be further from the truth," Garber bravely insisted in making Tuesday's announcement. "This is something we feel we need for a strong, new beginning. We will be a more viable league than we are today."
That depends. Some will point to a television deal extending through the 2006 season as proof of MLS' future viability, but even that arrangement doesn't hold up well under scrutiny.
In essence, MLS ponied up $60 million to purchase the television rights to this year's World Cup games, and then turned around and essentially gave them to ABC and ESPN in return for committing to long-term television exposure for the league.
But at least one at-this-point neutral party believes that Garber and the owners aren't necessarily speaking with forked tongue here. Brian O'Donovan, the Clonakilty native who helped midwife MLS back in 1996 and who served for five years as the New England Revolution's first general manager, was back in Ireland when this week's decision was taken.
"Obviously, contraction is something every league regrets," said O'Donovan from West
Cork yesterday. "New leagues are always going to be challenged, but I don't think this is as negative a development as it would appear on the surface.
"The way I view it, the most important aspect of this development isn't so much that the owners have eliminated two teams as the fact that they've committed themselves to playing another six seasons with the teams that remain."
