The Aztexan

The Austin Aztex FC have announced a new partnership with Mexican Primera División (first division) team Club de Fútbol Monterrey. Monterrey is commonly known as Rayados, "the striped ones", due to their blue and white striped kit.

A summary of the alliance between the two clubs:

• Players: Aztex FC will scout Central & Southern Texas for talent for Monterrey, and be a feeder club for them. Aztex players may be loaned to Rayados, and Monterrey will provide up to 2 players to the Aztex


• Travel: Monterrey will come to Austin to play exhibition games, and the Aztex will be able to go to Monterrey for pre-season training. Also, an Austin-area youth team will be hosted by Monterrey for a week each year


• Knowledge: in addition to sharing "best practices", Rayados coaches will participate in Aztex summer soccer camps, and Aztex coaches will have the opportunity to go to Monterrey and "shadow" their coaches for a week each year

Aztex FC worked with Monterrey earlier this year, when they hosted a round of youth friendlies in Austin which included the Stoke City U18s, Rayados 92/93 and the Lonestars. It seems that event was a better basis for partnership than the exhibition game in June against Monterrey's other club, UANL Tigres. Though the tremendous turnout at that Aztex v. Tigres match — tickets were $30 & $35, remember &mdash demonstrated the value of such a partnership.

So, who is Monterrey? Here's the little bit I've learned so far. The 2008 "Apertura" season (one of 2 seasons played each year in the Mexican league) is currently in Liguilla (playoffs). The Rayados, however, didn't make it that far this season. Nor did they quality for Mexico's InterLiga, unfortunately, which will be played in Dallas, Houston & Los Angeles. The next season, Clausura 2009 will start Jan. 16.

Personally, I'm pretty excited about this partnership. Now Aztex players will have avenues not just to English soccer, via Stoke City, but also to Mexican football. And in addition to such direct benefits, as listed above, a deal like this is just cool. Being international is part of what makes soccer so interesting. Contrast a deal like this with the global connections of the Round Rock Express or the Austin Wranglers (hint: there aren't any, and there never will be).

It instantly creates the possibility for cross-team fandom: now I have a Mexican team to follow. And hopefully, some Rayados fans, whether in Monterrey or here in Austin, will feel the same way about the Aztex. Just take a look at the view from their stadium!

(Or for that matter, from that same blog, take a look at the view inside their stadium... ;-)

I hope it works out well for all involved, and stays vibrant. Aside from the annual Rio Grande Plate, FC Dallas' partnership with UANL Tigres doesn't seem to have amounted to all that much. Regardless, here's looking forward to lots of good cross-border excitement between the red striped ones and the blue striped ones!

Labels: Rayados, U-23, USL-1

• Chantico's Army ASG Scarves — ChanticosArmy.com
  

  Well, Army soldiers, we’re up to version 3 of the design, and we’re getting great feedback on the scarf. Additionally, we’ve managed to get enough order, so that the per unit cost will only be a maximum of $16/scarf.
  
  We’re looking to place the first order for the scarves on December 19th ... hurry and get your order in TODAY!!

  The scarf design discussions continue on the Aztex BigSoccer forum; speak now or forever hold your peace. The latest revision is looking great:
  
  Front:
  
  Back:
  
  
  For those of you wondering, "Scarves? In Texas?", they're for scarf walls, not for warmth.


• Aztex Announce USL-First Division Player Tryouts — AustinAztex.com

The Austin Aztex has announced tryout dates and locations for the team’s 2009 season in the USL-First Division. Due to an expected high turnout, the Aztex will hold two regional tryouts - the first in California in January followed by a second session back in Austin scheduled for February.

The California tryout will take place on January 10-11, 2009 at Oxnard College in Oxnard, California. The Austin tryout, which will allow Central Texas soccer players the first-ever opportunity to try and play professionally for the hometown team, will be held February 7-8, 2009 at St. Edward's University.



• USL League Meeting — The Aztex Blog
  

  We cannot publish the schedule just yet but should have permission from the League to release all the details in the next couple of weeks. What I can tell you is that we kick-off the new season at home and will feature on Fox Soccer Channel a minimum of 4 times during the summer!
  
  ...Finally, we hope to announce our new home for 2009 after the Thanksgiving holidays and to have Season Tickets on sale before Christmas.....they will make a great Christmas present for someone you love : )

I've been seeing a good deal of "USL vs. MLS" talk lately. Stuff like:

• "How does MLS get away with stealing USL's markets?"


• "If MLS is the top level league, why are they getting their butts kicked in the CONCACAF Champions League while USL teams are cruising through?"


• "How did a lowly USL-1 side like Charleston Battery almost knock off powerhouse DC United in the US Open Cup?"


• "What role did MLS expansion plans play in the demise of the Atlanta Silverbacks?"

If you're looking for answers, you've come to the right place. I'm here to give the definitive solution to the real question that underlies all these:

How should these two American leagues relate to each other?

But first, let's step back and get some perspective. A good place to start is the fine 3-part series PotomacSoccerWire.com ran recently: Thriving in the shadows: The survival, and success, of the United Soccer Leagues. That short introduction includes links to all 3 parts, which are worth reading in full.

Part I: DC United exes find greener pastures in Vancouver

"I think players-wise, there should be more loaning back and forth," [Vancouver Whitecap Jay Nolly] said. "At the end of the season MLS should be looking [at USL] — the USL players have a lot more experience than going and getting a guy out of college. I almost think the USL should be more of a feeder system than a lot of the college system."

... Another common view is that USL players are typically just biding their time before an opportunity to move up to MLS presents itself. But Nolly and Moose offer a striking contrast to that idea as well: both men are happy with the Whitecaps and eager to help the club defend its championship in 2009.

So here are two seemingly contradictory statements: "MLS should be more interested in recruiting experienced USL players" on the one hand, and "some USL players are perfectly content to play at that level indefinitely" on the other. But that's not contradictory, that's perfect. There is (or could be) a path for advancement to higher league play, but there's also an acceptable and satisfying level for those who don't follow that path.

Part II: Season of success cues bullish outlook

"MLS clearly approaches [the Open Cup & Champions League play] differently — 'we'll get by one way or the other,'" adds [USL President Francisco] Marcos. "But guess what? The difference isn't enough for them to be able to take that attitude. We go to those games like our life depends on it — our reputation, our credibility depends on it. The results speak for themselves."

Those results have added lots of fuel to the "USL vs. MLS" fires. But some of the conclusions jumped to don't stand up to scrutiny.

For one, it's the nature of these kinds of competitions, especially the Open Cup, to result in upsets. Look at England's Carling Cup: as of the 5th round, 3 of the 8 teams left are from the 2nd division, and European superpower Chelsea was eliminated by Burnley in the most recent round. But does anyone argue that the Championship rivals the Premiership? Of course not.

Secondly, as in every league in the world, there are disparities between the teams that dominate year after year and those that always seem to languish further down the table. That is, just because the a league's best teams do well, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole league would be competitive at a higher level.

Part III: MLS expansion leaves United Soccer Leagues wary

"They have named five out of seven markets for possible expansion that are our markets, three of which are our clubs themselves," said USL President Francisco Marcos in an interview last week. "Are we flattered by that? Yes. But we can't eat flattery. Are we happy about it? Absolutely not. Can we do a whole lot about it? Not a lot."

..."There's other things that we're going to be demanding because we don't just want to become just simply the feeder, the testers of MLS grounds such as Rochester, which didn't happen. Montreal, which may happen. Vancouver, which may happen. Portland, which may very well happen," he noted. "Places that MLS would have never thought about if we weren't there."

I have a lot of respect for Marcos and all he's done for soccer in the U.S., but I'm afraid he comes off as a bit of a whiner in this piece. He hints that the USL may already be hip to my Grand Theory (coming up here in another thousand words or so), but I wish he wouldn't play the poor victim. Though what do I know? Maybe the USL is indeed the poor victim, and they've been majorly screwed by Major League Soccer. Either way, I couldn't agree more that it isn't fair for MLS to take advantage of USL's work.

Okay, that does it for PotomacSoccer.com's series. Our last exhibit is this piece by Mitch Howard on Major League Soccer Talk, USL Needs to Compete Directly against MLS.

The United Soccer Leagues has been a doormat to the MLS for too long. They have allowed MLS to walk all over them. MLS has taken multiple cities from the USL to put into their league and have not suffered any kind of legal troubles or image issues.

... History shows that the USL should compete directly against MLS. In both the history of football and basketball in the U.S., leagues have merged and absorbed each other.

Howard is taking the dramatic viewpoint here, casting MLS as the villain and USL tied to the tracks, feebly crying for help. Yet despite this difference in power, his proposed solution is a merger similar to those of the American Football League and the American Basketball Association.

The first argument (and the only one needed, really) against the head-to-head league idea is that FIFA prohibits it. FIFA countries are simply not allowed to have competing first division leagues. It's as true today as it was in 1967, when the NPSL and USA merged to become the NASL.

But even apart from that, the arguments against such a competition are legion. Soccer is an international sport, while American football and basketball aren't (and were even less in the 1960s). Once upon a time, those sports could get away with competing leagues, for a while at least. They could tweak the rules, snipe players from each other, etc., and it was all in a kind of U.S.-only vacuum. With our modern soccer leagues already dying to woo fans of "real" soccer abroad, such tactics are unthinkable.

The other side of this international coin is that the U.S., in both national team competitions and the club-level transfer market, would be held back by such domestic squabbling and rivalry.

Which brings us, at long last, to the big answer to the big question: 42. No, wait, that's a different story. This big answer is: admit to and formalize USL's role as the minor league.

First, the admitting. For all the giant-killing USL teams have done this year, and for all the markets that MLS has stolen or wants to steal after being built up by the USL, it's clear that the USL is the minor league. Exhibit A in this claim is the recent crumpling of the Atlanta Silverbacks USL-1 team, as previously discussed. This is simply not the kind of thing that happens in major leagues. Teams may have financial trouble sometimes, but when do they ever simply pack up their ball and go home? And this isn't an isolated incident. There's been steady turmoil in the USL for years: the Richmond Kickers dropping from USL-1 to USL-2 in 2005; the Virginia Beach Mariners folding after the 2006 season; the California Victory's one and only season in 2007.

Exhibit B: compare and contrast the league final games in USL-1 and MLS. As I wrote at the time, the meeting of the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Puerto Rico Islanders in the USL-1 final was quite an understated affair. I couldn't even find a way to follow the game live, and I was actively looking for it.

Meanwhile we have the MLS Cup game tomorrow. It may not be the Super Bowl or the World Series, but it will be on network TV (ABC), it's covered in mainstream media outlets like USA Today, and their national sponsor, Volkswagen, has produced VW Road to MLS Cup, a series of event-specific commercials (which are pretty funny, imho). At the very least, the league has a dedicated section of their website for the match.

So, USL is the minor league. But despite what the word "minor" might do to one's ego, there is not a single thing wrong with that. In fact, it's an essential role in the American soccer ecosystem. Without USL, there are a lot of players who wouldn't be able to play league ball (i.e., with crowds and fans and everything). Without USL, MLS would have only colleges to draw from for young soccer talent in this country. And most importantly to me personally: without USL, Austin would never have a pro soccer team.

The next step is to formalize this situation, and eliminate the unfairness and friction that exist today. Both leagues benefit from the existence of the other far more than they threaten each other. That needs to be acknowledged and agreed to more explicitly. There are lots of ways that this could work; here are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

• MLS should augment its reserve and youth systems with USL teams


• Even if MLS teams don't directly partner with USL teams, their reserves or youth should compete with them
  


• MLS and USL should promote each other's games. Most Aztex fans I know also support either Houston Dynamo or FC Dallas. Why on earth don't all three teams' marketing departments leverage that?


• There should be, as Marcos mentioned, fair compensation to USL when MLS expands into one of their cities. If MLS cherry-picks the USL's best markets and drives USL out of business, it's going to hurt them, too.


• Movement of players between the leagues, such as the DC players in the PotomacSoccer.com article or the Red Bulls acquiring Mac Kandji from the Silverbacks, should be as easy. (In fact, this could be a lucrative deal for USL by itself)

Whew, okay, this post got a lot longer than I thought it would (congratulations on making it this far). I better wrap it up; here comes my inspirational conclusion.

Despite the perennial naysayers and their circa-1985 anti-soccer jibes, soccer is here to stay. It's not yet on the same level as baseball or basketball, and there are missteps and mistakes sometimes, but it's not going to disappear in a puff of smoke, either. There's still a lot of unrealized potential in the American sport, both within our borders, and on the world stage. The sooner Major League Soccer and the United Soccer Leagues acknowledge the realities and start working in concert, the better for everyone.

Labels: deep thoughts, media, MLS, USL-1

The Silverbacks website says "Silverbacks Men Sit Out 2009 Season." But given what a struggle it is to build and keep momentum in the world of pro sports, I bet that this is the end of this USL-1 team in Atlanta. Imagine if they were to try to start back up again in 2010, how many fans they'd have lost, due to this "sitting out" season.

The Atlanta Silverbacks announced today that the Atlanta Silverbacks Men’s professional team will take the 2009 season off.

Due to the state of the economy and the potential of an MLS team coming to town, the men’s pro team has decided to sit the year out while the Silverbacks assess the landscape.

I'm fully in blogger commentary mode here (i.e., I know not of what I speak but I'm not letting that stop me). But I'll go on to claim that "the potential of an MLS team coming to town" is a red herring. As I say, I'm not in the loop on what bids have been made or are going to be made, but I haven't seen anywhere that Atlanta is at the top of anyone's MLS expansion list.

Besides, why would that possibility keep the USL-1 side from playing next year? The only reason I can think of is that they're losing money each season, and are afraid they'll be run out of town in the future, after they've become profitable. But we know for sure that MLS couldn't come to Atlanta until 2011 at the soonest (Seattle & Philadelphia announced for the next 2 years), so if that's the rationale, then their profitability outlook must be pretty bleak for several years out.

In any case, this can't be seen as anything but bad news for USL-1. Now, rather than remaining the same size next year when the Aztex join the league (effectively replacing Seattle), it will contract by one.

Labels: MLS, rivals, USL-1

• Aztex open new offices, unveil new logo — AustinAztex.com
  

  The ceremony concluded with the Aztex unveiling the team’s new logo/crest. The redesign was a collaborative effort intended to transition the organization from it first season in the PDL to the 2009 campaign, which will feature a full professional team competing in the USL-First Division against teams from around the nation including Miami, Portland, Montreal, and Atlanta.

  I like the logo a lot, though I am a little confused about the exact colors. The image on that page is considerably darker, almost maroon, compared to the copy I received by email from the team, which I can only call "bright red".
  Well, see for yourself:
  


• USL Soccer coming to Valley — KGBT.com
  

  After four decades of organized soccer, the Rio Grande Valley was awarded a professional soccer franchise by the United Soccer Leagues (USL).
  
  The historic RGV franchise will participate in the Premier Development League (PDL) of the USL in the 2009 season.



• Carling Cup: Stoke City 2-0 Rotherham — Stoke City FC

  City are into the Quarter Finals of the Carling Cup for the first time in almost 30-years after a comfortable 2-0 victory over League Two side Rotherham United.

  Stoke advance out of the fourth round along with Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers, Burnley (who upset Chelsea on PKs today), Derby County, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur & Watford. The exact match-ups for the fifth-round, to be played in December, will be drawn this Saturday, Nov. 15.

Labels: rivals, Stoke City, U-23

I realize that cooking up a headline about just about anything and how it relates to, or is affected by, Barack Obama's candidacy (and now presidency) is a cheap and easy way to grab attention. But I'll be honest with you. I think the Obama/soccer logo I made at Logobama.com is pretty slick, and I just couldn't resist the chance to use it again.

We start with ESPN Magazine's Austin Kelly: Is soccer the Barack Obama of sports?

The president-elect is supposedly a West Ham United fan, and he has a team in Kenya named after him, Obama F.C. (It's based in the town of Obama's Kenyan father.) . . . Obama is also a soccer dad, who took some time out of his campaign schedule to watch his daughter play and give her a few ball-handling pointers.

Another piece is one from The Guardian's Sportblog, by Steven Wells, a British writer living in Philadelphia: Soccer: the Barack Obama of sports. His is more of a rambling, slice-of-life description of a Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia as viewed through soccer-colored glasses, with a big dash of Mad Men thrown in.

The Republicans are at a loss. They keep punching the "real America", "small town", "psst, he's black" buttons but nothing happens. Because real America has moved on. They sip lattes on Main Street. They like to think they're colour-blind. And godamn it they've been chowing down on arugla in the Midwest for decades (only they called it "rocket", who knew?). And, of course, their kids all play soccer.

The guys in Mad Men, trapped in 1960, would never have used soccer in an advert. Modern-day Madison Avenue uses little else. You need a sport that's sharp, sexy, forward looking, futuristic, hip, happening and now? It's a total no-brainer. It's the Obama of sports.

Labels: media

No matter your political persuasion, how can you resist a blog post title like this? Would Obama's election make soccer a major league American sport? (via American Soccer News' Twitter feed).

It's an interesting piece on Joe Roth, the majority owner of next year's MLS expansion team, the Seattle Sounders. Here's an excerpt to first excite, then depress soccer fans deep in the heart of reddest Texas:

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," [Roth] told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Present company excepted, of course.

After some discussion of this intriguing intersection between national politics and soccer in America, the bulk of the article covers the novel ideas Roth is pursuing with the Sounders. These include giving fans a voice in naming the team, a system for season ticket-holders to "find their ideal seat selection based on their rooting behavior" and an American Idol-style player tryout show, complete with viewers voting online to pick a player to be signed by the team.

Not everyone thinks that Seattle's recent designated-player signing of Swedish star Freddie Ljundberg was a great idea — Goal.com has 5 reasons why it wasn't — but Roth's role is interesting:

Ljungberg was interested in the MLS, but said he wanted to play in Los Angeles or New York. So Roth made his pitch. . . Knowing that Ljungberg's agent also reps San Antonio Spurs star Tony Parker, he said, 'Talk to Tony. He wanted to play in New York or L.A., and he'll tell you that the best decision he ever made was going to San Antonio.' "

Labels: media, MLS