The Aztexan

My, my. The drama we've had in the United Soccer Leagues in the last week is enough to support a new soap opera. Perhaps USLLive.com should branch out. Here's an episode guide, in case you're just catching up. It's a long story already, so get some popcorn and settle in.

First, we got the news that some outfit called "NuRock" had acquired United Soccer Leagues:

Rob Hoskins, Chairman of NuRock Soccer Holdings, commented, “Our vision for USL is to become the most competitive and profitable pyramid of soccer leagues in North America, while providing affordable family entertainment, and serving as the inspirational destination for professional and amateur youth soccer players in the U.S.”

Nike and Umbro will continue to support USL through a long-term sponsorship agreement naming Umbro as the official sponsor and exclusive supplier of match balls for USL’s professional and amateur leagues, including USL First Division, USL Second Division, Premier Development League and W-League. Nike Soccer will also serve as an exclusive sponsor for USL.

Well, that sounded nice enough. But it became immediately apparent that there was trouble with this deal. The blogs Major League Soccer Talk and Inside Minnesota Soccer were the first to provide some details:

We are aware that the sale to Nurock is a shock to many including some owners in the league. It’s widely known that Traffic FC along with a current USL-1 owners group made a bid for league but did not win that bid. However, that same owners group led by Aaron Davidson of Miami FC and Selby Wellman owner of the Carolina Railhawks, have been unhappy with Marcos and Executive VP of USL Tim Holt. We had been informed by multiple ownership sources, that Davidson and Wellman were working with another group who were in the due diligence stage after winning the bid from Nike. The other group who had reportedly won the bid was not either Nurock or Traffic.

They have since followed that breaking story with an in-depth 3-part history of events leading up to the current telenovela situation: "United Soccer Leagues at a Crossroads".

Part One: Building USL starts all the way back at the beginning, starring a former executive for the NASL's Tampa Bay Rowdies, Francisco Marcos.

Marcos founded the Southwest Indoor Soccer League (SISL) in 1986 which evolved into an outdoor league in 1989. Eventually, he created the first league that spanned North America since the old NASL. However, different from the NASL, this league created a pyramid system. This was something the Portuguese soccer executive understood from his connections to soccer in Europe. In time he built the league to include three levels of senior men’s play, the first national women’s league, (W-League) and the first competitive North American system of youth leagues (Super Y-League).

Part Two: The Struggle for Power covers Nike's purchase of the USL (via their purchase of league owner Umbro), last year's sudden team changes (the departure of the Atlanta Silverbacks and the "promotion" of the Cleveland City Stars), but most importantly, the formation of the Team Owners Association (TOA):

The TOA wanted a league that was team-owner controlled but were willing to negotiate with the league. The teams felt they needed more representation in the league office in decisions that directly affected the franchises.

The financial structure of the league was also in question by the team owners. They claimed the league did not share in the losses and held no accountability to the teams. The USL is structured in a way that teams pay a one-time franchise fee and then have yearly renewal fees. If a team was having financial trouble and would drop its franchise, the league would just repopulate and claim another franchise fee. Some owners were frustrated by this, as many USL teams lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The annual operating expense for an average USL-1 team is between $1.5 million to $2 million. The long distances between USL-1 cities does not help with the cost of airfare and its said that most teams will spend more on travel expenses for one game than they will make in revenue in a home game. The average break even point for most teams is a home attendance of about 5,000.

Part Three: Negotiations Break Down details the groups and circumstances involved in the league's just-announced sale. It would seem that the TOA were on the verge of the takeover they sought, only to have it snatched away at the last moment:

When the dust settled, and the winning bidder was announced internally, it was Jeff Cooper’s group.

Cooper, a successful lawyer from St Louis, had twice attempted to bring MLS to a city whose history in the sport is second to none in this nation. As the owner of the St Louis Athletica, and a board member of English Football League club Brentford, Cooper had made an impact even without MLS. Now, Cooper appeared to have bagged his biggest prize of all: a league that consisted of over 600 clubs, professionals, amateurs and youth.

The TOA began working with Cooper, who had outbid their own efforts and found him to be on the same wavelength. With radical changes about to be made to the league under Cooper’s direction, a closing on the deal that appeared imminent was suddenly off.

Instead, Nike who had formally recognized Cooper as the high bidder shifted gears and awarded NuRock control of USL. This move, which was done legally but without properly notifying many owners, created a further rift with USL’s Tampa based leadership, which could be irreparable.

Meanwhile, the TOA made its appearance on the scene. Their first press release was a little veiled, if only due to the PR-speak.

Following extensive negotiations with USISL, Inc., the parent company of the United Soccer Leagues (USL), to restructure the USL First Division (USL-1) into a league owned and controlled by its teams, the Team Owners Association (TOA) today announced that it has accelerated its pursuit of all league options for the 2010 season and beyond. The TOA, led by the Atlanta Silverbacks, Carolina RailHawks, Miami FC, Minnesota Thunder, Montreal Impact, St. Louis Soccer United, Tampa Bay Rowdies and Vancouver Whitecaps, reached this decision following the announcement by Nike, Inc., the parent company of USISL, Inc., that it had concluded the sale of USL to a third-party (NuRock Soccer Holdings) which does not own a team in USL-1.

"Accelerated its pursuit of all league options for the 2010 season"? What does that mean? BigSoccer blogger Bill Archer took a stab at parsing the press release, along with his own view of the situation:

I don't know much about this NuRock Soccer outfit, beyond what we all can read in the usual cookie cutter corporate-speak press release. Maybe they're great guys.

Personally I agree with the TOA: it's time USL became a real league, owned and operated by and for the teams themselves which is, by the way, exactly how FIFA says it should be done.

As long as the interests of a third party are involved - be it an individual, a public corporation or a private partnership - then stuff like long term development and the good of the game are going to take a back seat to the bottom line. USL1 isn't a chain of muffler shops or fast food joints and it can't be run as if it was.

In the midst of the airing of all this dirty laundry, the league continued to press ahead. The new owners were already restructuring the league offices:

United Soccer Leagues announced Monday the restructuring of its executive management team following last week’s acquisition of USL by NuRock Soccer Holdings from Nike. NuRock’s Rob Hoskins will serve as Chairman with Alec Papadakis being named CEO. USL’s Tim Holt has been named President of the organization with founder Francisco Marcos transitioning to the position of President Emeritus and Senior Director of International Development.

... As Senior Director of International Development, Marcos will expand his recent efforts in the area of international relationships and partnerships as his primary role with the organization, utilizing his European background and residency as well as his numerous relationships with soccer leaders around the world to aid USL in its objectives to foster meaningful relationships between USL, its clubs and players with foreign clubs and organizations.

Back on the TOA side of the story, Montreal Impact president Joey Saputo didn't wait long to start spelling out exactly what the TOA has in mind:

Saputo said the teams, which include the Vancouver Whitecaps, can still reach agreement with NuRock to have more say in league operations, but if not, they are prepared to play a full schedule in 2010 in their own league.

..."We have no say on the type of owners coming in," he said. "No disrespect to (some) other owners, but they don't belong in this league. But we have no say. We find out at the last minute that teams are coming in, like the Cleveland Stars. It makes no sense. We want control of our destiny."

...He said starting a new league would cost about the same, as the teams are already in place [and that] other clubs are prepared to join a new league so it would have between eight and 12 clubs.

..."The league exists because of the teams, not because of the league," he added. "I think we have the power. We are united and finally, we've decided to take this strategy of looking at other options."

So there you have it. The TOA damn sure is threatening a breakaway league, no two ways about it. But then suddenly, news is out from the league that Ontario's Ottawa Fury want to move up from PDL to USL-1:

"Our application for a USL franchise, at this point in time, ensures that soccer specific elements will be incorporated into the stadium design to optimize the experience for soccer fans and players," said Jeff Hunt, an OSEG [Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group] partner.

Don't bother searching that story for the year the Fury would join the league; it's not in there. The Canadian Press story on Joey Saputo linked above, however, puts it at "likely 2012". Not even MLS is looking that far down the expansion road.

The TOA isn't wasting any time getting their word out. Next up was an interview with TOA spokesman and Railhawks owner Selby Wellman. In addition to saying that the non-TOA teams (including Austin, but neglecting to mention Puerto Rico) "[are] still with us and part of our group wanting to move the league forward", Wellman also made these statements:

So the [existing] league office, basically, is an administrative operation. Just keeping up with 710 teams, registration and all those kinds of things they do. They move paper. They’re not like most league offices where you have marketing people, public relations people who can promote your league, who can go out and get national sponsorships, who can go out and seek new owners and get franchises and things like that. They don’t have the skills and the resources to do that. That’s what we’re trying to fix. And if we had been successful at buying the whole league, that was what we were going to do. We were going to restructure the league office into a marketing organization, not just an administrative operation.

...It’s pretty frustrating as an owner, I can tell you this, to put a lot of money, which we’ve done, into our team, and have the attendance to be pretty much not acceptable to us, related to the perception of us being just minor league soccer. Then all of a sudden, you know, I bring New England [Revolution, of MLS] and whoever here, and my crowds will quadruple on me. So what that tells you is that we’re in the market here in Carolina. And by the way, my fellow owners around the league have experienced the same thing. We know we have markets, we know we’re good soccer markets, all right, and we know we play really strong professional soccer. So we’ve got to promote it. And the league has to do that, the league office, that’s a league office’s function.

...I would expect somewhere in the next 30 days or so they’ll start coming out to us, wanting us to recommit to play in 2010 in USL. If they don’t come to the table with us having the ability to control our league, we won’t play with them.

There you have it. It boils down to the same statement heard in heated playground fights the world over: "I'm gonna take my ball and go home!"

I hadn't seen anything specifically from or about the Aztex in all this, so I emailed owner Phil Rawlins for a comment. His reply makes it clear that the team's position is not on the TOA side:

The TOA does NOT represent all the USL-1 team owners, far from it, there are several teams and owners that have chosen not to participate in that group and Austin is one of those. For the most part the "shouting-match" that is now taking place through the media is a distraction from the important work of running a successful team in the League.

I welcome the change of ownership at USL and believe the new owners can bring business savvy and a passion for soccer that can help invigorate the League. I hope that all parties involved in these discussions will give the new owners a chance to prove themselves and share their plans before pre-judging them.

So that's it, the story so far. Volleys will surely continue from both sides. Personally, the fact that this civil war has exploded out into public is embarrassing. The members of this league, in this sport, in this country, at this time, can hardly afford to waste any time or energy on this kind of infighting. It's also attracting the entirely wrong kind of media attention. Somebody here is too greedy for money and/or power — honestly, they probably all are, but someone is outdoing everyone else — and they're jeopardizing the future of this essential component of American soccer.

Here's my bottom line. I'm a soccer fan, I want to watch soccer matches. Thanks to the Aztex, I've had that for 2 years now, without having to road-trip 4 hours to Pizza Hut Park. If this whole ruckus winds up interfering with that in any substantial way, I'll personally hunt down everyone involved and key their car. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch the Aztex-Whitecaps game on USLLive.com.

Labels: deep thoughts, The League, USL-1