The Beckham Effect

]In the first weeks after the Beckham contract was announced, a phrase that kept popping up was The Beckham Effect, by which writers and MLS types meant the anticipated wave of newfound interest amongst the great American unwashed about MLS, and the truckloads of tickets that would be sold in response to his signing. “Beckham Effect” was shorthand for “Ticketmaster machines overheating and Stuart Scott finally giving us a booyah”.

And reportedly, MLS teams have indeed had a brisk run at the ticket windows for games featuring the Gals, often bundled together with tickets to a couple other matches and labeled something clever like “Beckham Pack” (largely because “Extortion Pack” has such an ugly ring to it).

But in reality the most significant “Beckham Effect” has been the sea-change in the willingness of foreign players to consider, or even just mention that they might possibly consider coming to MLS. I’m not talking about their perception of MLS as a league - I doubt whether that has changed much, if at all - or about transparently self-serving comments from guys angling for more money from their present club.

But a year ago, no self-respecting foreign player would have wanted his name even casually connected with MLS. When everyone stopped laughing, they would have treated it as an admission that you were unable to compete “at the highest level” any more and were looking for a soft landing someplace.

Beckham changed all that. Now you’re not just running off stateside to a second-rate league to grab a few more paychecks and lie on the beach in semi-retired splendor like some latter day Lothar Matthäus. Now the narrative is that MLS is calling in great players from around the world to come to the US and help establish the beautiful game amongst the heathens. Hell it’s practically a DUTY to come join David Beckham in this project, kind of like Pope Pius the XXVII calling you to the cross to come redeem Jerusalem.

Becks has not only made it OK to come to (or consider coming to) MLS, he’s made it something to be proud of; an acknowledgement that you’re seen as the same caliber of player. THAT is “The Beckham Effect” and its’ full ramifications are yet to be realized.

I had been ruminating on this (note for San Josefans: that means “thinking about”) for a while, but it didn’t really come into focus for me until I saw http://www.people.co.uk/sport/footba...name_page.html this piece in The People . Notice the first line: they actually use the term “do a Beckham” and they use quotation marks when they do it. These players are not running to the US because their careers are winding down and they can’t compete any more. Rather, they are “doing a Beckham”.

- If you’re looking for another Beckham Effect, perhaps it’s in what happens to your career as soon as you sign with MLS: both Beckham and Blanco have been absolutely tearing it up on the pitch practically since the moment they put their names on the dotted line.

- Luis Bueno at the Press-Enterprise did a schedule comparison to try and figure out how many times Beckham might appear at the HDC. I thought a better question was which MLS GM’s are sweating bullets over whether mobs of irate customers are going to march on their offices with torches and pitchforks because they’re unable to deliver Becks in the flesh as promised when they were peddling those “Beckham Packs”.

Surprisingly, there are really only two teams that may need to worry a bit (Chivas is out of luck, which is a bit ironic, but I’m not counting them): The Rapids on August 26 and the Fire on Oct 21. In both cases, England has a match four days earlier and it would seem doubtful whether Beckham would be available. The August match is a friendly, which seems encouraging, but it’s against Germany in Wembley, which may alter the case. The October game is a Euro Quallie vs. Russia, which looks bad but it’s pretty late in the process and it’s possible that England will have a big enough lead in the group by then that he won’t be needed.

It appears that all the other MLS teams will get their “Beckham Game” as advertised.

Indispensible BigSoccer maven Sandon Mibut posted an interesting piece of research on http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=546527 all the age group-eligible players in MLS and how they’re doing so far this year. He does this stuff so we don’t have to.

Back in 2005, the last year of the Greg “Zippy the Pinhead” Andrulis era, the Crew won 11 games and it got him fired. In 2006, Sigi Schmid did a major rebuild, struggled with an absurd number of injuries and managed to win 8.

Now, in 2007, with a relatively healthy roster and after adding Schelotto, Moreno and Herron, winning a lottery for Robbie Rogers and getting Hejduk and Oughton back from injuries, they’ve won just one of their first eleven games. Extrapolated to a 30 game season, that puts them on pace to win three. That’s a frightening, record-setting level of suckitude eclipsing the worst teams in league history (even the 01 Mutiny, a team you frighten children with, won four).

The easy thing to conclude is that Sigi’s extra-large, steel-I-beam-reinforced seat is getting hot, but this is one of those cases where it’s hard to point to anything in particular that he’s doing wrong besides “not winning”. Now I’ll grant you that’s usually enough, and it may be so in this case, but except for not being able to find a solid replacement for Jon Busch in the goal, and maybe being a little thin on the back line (and who isn’t?) the Crew – while hardly a great, great team - is at the least a decent side that’s playing pretty well.

They’re just not winning.

If you have any idea what the problem is, call GM Mark McCullers at 1-800-Desperation.

I can’t believe I’m the only one who noticed - or maybe I’m imagining things - but on Thursday night’s ESPN game they showed Don Garber standing there holding some banner and his little facial hair thingie was gone. That always made him look a little like a chimpanzee and if he had the good sense to shave it off, then he’s finally done something I agree with. I’ll miss being able to refer to him as Cheetah, but overall it’s probably a good thing.

Back in 1996 we all assumed that by this point in the evolution of MLS the USA would be providing homegrown players to fill the skill positions that we originally had to import overseas players to fill. Yet here we are in 2007 with all the teams in a mad scramble for foreign talent. Team after team has either already brought in a new foreign player or two or is rumored to be hot on the trail of this or that guy overseas.

And if you look at who’s hot right now – guys like Mendes, Gonzalez, Toja and Angel – it’s easy to understand. We’re 11 years into this thing and the only way anybody can play decent attractive soccer is by bringing in guys from overseas. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

On the other hand, at least one team has done a great job coming up with good American players: the New England Revolution. Their first round picks from 2002 through 2005 – Twellman, Noonan, Dempsey and Parkhurst – have proven nothing short of brilliant. If MLS had draft do-overs, three of those four would likely be taken #1 (sorry Freddy), and Noonan might make it four-for-four if he hadn’t struggled so much with injuries.

In a league where drafting is usually pretty much a crap shoot, that’s a hell of a record.

And speaking of Michael Parkhurst, next time you see him play, notice how few fouls he commits. To play in that spot and only have been whistled twice so far this season is ridiculous – Danny O’Rourke commits more fouls than that during the national anthem.

MLS teams tend to be risk-averse, but are quick to adapt anything which worked for someone else, so Tom Soehn’s recent success with DC (and in case you haven’t noticed, or have noticed and are trying desperately to ignore it, United is absolutely kicking ass at the moment) might be good news for guys like Paul Mariner, Bob Warzycha, John Murphy, and maybe even Martin Vasquez who have held the clipboard for years but who have been passed over whenever a top spot came open.

With Soehn’s success, maybe other teams will be more willing to take a chance on an experienced assistant who has paid his dues. If you had to bet, you’d say that at least one of them will turn out to be a top notch head coach and the GM who hires him will end up looking really smart. Seems like a better bet than giving Thomas Rongen or Bob Gansler another go at it.

Finally, the Continuing Saga of RealSaltLakehas taken an ugly turn for the worse:

In case you missed it, when a few people in the stands peacefully waved Tibetan and
Taiwanese flags during the Chinese national team’s appearance against RSL at Rice-
Eccles the Chinese threatened to walk out unless they were ejected. Real meekly complied.

(Bonji posted http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showp...06&postcount=6 a very helpful link to all you could want to know about the incident and the issues involved.)

For a bunch of supposedly smart guys, this was incredibly dumb. Leaving aside the fact that they landed themselves in an embarrassing free-speech kerfuffle, they missed a golden opportunity to make themselves look good. Consider:

Suppose that, instead of kowtowing to Chinese threats, they had said “Sorry pal, this is America. We don’t do stuff like that”, not only would it have been the right thing to do (now there’s a radical thought) it would have left the Chicoms with a tough decision: they could either a) walk out and create an ugly international incident with attendant publicity about the Tibet issue that they sure don’t want or b) shut up and play.

Chinese official: “We demand that you have those running dog lackeys of the plutocratic imperialist warmongering capitalist oppressors ejected immediately!”

Real Official: “I’m not 100% in love with your tone right now.”

Either way, RSL would have looked like heroes, standing up for freedom of speech in a publicly owned venue, and refusing to be intimidated by the officials of a repressive thugocracy. PR doesn’t get any better than that, and it wouldn’t have cost them a nickel.

It was a win-win situation that they managed to turn into an egg-on-my-face incident which has alienated at least some of the people they badly need on their side right now: their fans.

And the hits just keep on coming: prk166 http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=554146 posted a blog link to yet another tale of RSL malfeasance, and like the juvenile delinquent who graduates from shoplifting to armed robbery, they’re stepping up into the big time. Apparently pissing off Don Garber and groveling for the Chinese was just the warm-up act - now they’ve decided that FIFA rules are for chumps too.

Unless they have two guys named Willis Forko, then it’s going to be hard to explain why they told his country he was unavailable to them due to injury, but didn’t put him on the league injured list and then sent him out to play 90 minutes.

This raises a number of questions, certainly, but the one I’d most like an answer to is: did they really think nobody would notice?

Get out the checkbook Dave, this one’s gonna cost you.