The Dempsey Rule

Good morning.

Some big news today, it looks like the Revs are finally about to utilize the Designated Player rule. They have called Dusan Petkovic back for training. First of all, it solves the problem with Heaps being out for a little while now, we do need a defender who is going to be able to handle big offenses such as Red Bull and Houston. He is a very good and experienced Serbian national-teamer...kind of. He had played in twelve games for Serbia before a World Cup call up, and his dad runs the team. Oh, did I mention that is dad runs the team? Apparently, he took himself out injured, and dad didn't take him off the squad and he ended up being an unused sub in a loss to Ivory Coast. He is very experienced; at the age of thirty-three he has some seasons under his belt. I actually trust Steve Nicol, as a former defender he knows what he wants to see out of his back three, and as this will probably happen Petkovic must still be good and he must be a performer. It will be interesting to see how this all works out for he boys in blue.

In other news, Ann Killion of the San Jose Mercury News is of the opinion that the MLS is going to need much more than Beckham to be big in this country. While I agree with the title I don't agree with most of her article itself. It would be foolish to think that within a year or so of Becks' arrival to the league, soccer would have better TV ratings than baseball or football. Foolish. These are the established sports in our country, entrenched so firmly in our culture that we use expressions derived from each sport ("on the five-yard line," "hit it out of the park") in different situations, and most of us know exactly what they all mean. It would be hard for football to make itself big just because of one good player, if it was only 13 years old. I guess I fall into that category of "true MLS believers" that Ms. Killion was talking about.

The truth of the matter is, no sport is as likely to happen in this country as soccer. Hockey's only real problem with getting a lot of play and attention was the fact that not too many people play it, and it can only be played recreationally in one season of the year. In many cases, youth clubs have neither the facilities nor the money for gear that the sport requires and so it slowly died off because it was hard to get people to play. And even then there was the Wayne Gretzky and the Patrick Roy period where everything that hockey touched was golden and it was genuinely an American sport. It was a short lived period in American history.

When Pele came here thirty years ago, he came to a country without soccer. Nobody really played it, and not too many people knew about or cared about the sport back then. It was only really the people who loved European soccer that really talked about and admired the game, but there weren't too many of those. The NASL was mostly one man's experiment of how to fill a stadium with supporters of a sport that they have never seen, and that experiment has become wildly successful and it is the cornerstone of American soccer today.

Eighteen million people play the sport in this country. It is by far and away the largest of all of the youth sports programs in the country, and among the kids of my generation, the twenty-somethings, it is a sport we relate to more than any other sport because almost all of us played it at some point. And we could play it, it isn't football (where you have to be a feat of human engineering) or baseball (where the needle is god), but it was a simple, beautiful sport played by normal people. It is that fact, along with many others, that has allowed soccer to thrive among the future leaders and TV viewers of America, and it is that fact which will pump up the MLS.

Again, it isn't realistic to assume that MLS will be the country's most watched league by the next World Cup, although it is reasonably safe to assume that most of the strength of the U.S. team will come from MLS players. This league won't die like NASL. When NASL went down there was a high attendance at Cosmos games and a very low attendance for other teams' games, with the biggest exception being the Seattle Sounders. Nowadays, each of the leagues thirteen teams has an average of fourteen-thousand fans in the seats for each game, a figure that has stayed steady since the league's inception even though no player is allowed to get paid over a million dollars. Now that the league has established itself it will keep American talent on this shore and more and more Europeans will come over, and over time people will see the beauty of the sport. This season has the highest TV rating of all seasons past, too, which is heartening.

Anyways, I'm waffling. DAMN YOU FC DALLAS!! Denilson sure would have been nice...

Have a good one.