Can we have trundle for the Bees?
Printable View
Can we have trundle for the Bees?
I watched a totally different World Cup than everybody else apparently, because offensively, Beckham was generating all the good opportunities for England on that side of the field, with Rooney hurt or being a moron and Gerrard underperforming offensively. It wasn't Beckham's fault that Crouch sucked and couldn't do anything with his crosses despite being the biggest guy on the field. So Beckham's not an all around superstar anymore, maybe he never was, but on a team filled with superstars like Gerrard, Lampard, Terry, and Rooney he proved to me that he's still one of, if not THE best crosser and free-kick taker I've seen. That said, what he has to work with in the MLS will be worse than Peter Crouch, so who knows.
And there should be no question that Beckham should take a 5-year $250 million deal. It's just business.
The questionable side of the deal is from MLS's standpoint. The deal is actually only about $10 million a year in guaranteed contract, with the rest consisting of apparel, endoresements, and revenue sharing with the Galaxy. But even that is a huge number. The salary cap is $2 million for each team, and that is financed from the ownership pool (there are only like three or four owners of all the MLS teams and they decided to pool their resources, negotiate collectively, and share costs and revenues). The "Beckham Exception" put in place recently allows teams to sing up to two players for over the cap as long as they finance the salaries themselves. Now, that's fine, except for the factor that (as I understand it) only two teams have operated at a net profit for one season over the entire history of the MLS (Dallas and DC last year I believe). And this was when Beckham's salary next year would have been the equivalent of over 5 teams' combined salaries in previous seasons.
So basically, this is a huge gamble. The league can barely afford Beckham, but they're banking on his celebrity to make the league popular so that revenues skyrocket I guess. It might work for the short term, but there are a lot of issues. If you allow the Galaxy to sign Beckham, then don't you have to allow Chicago or New York or New England or DC to sign, say, Ronaldo to a huge contract to stay relevant (that is, these teams won't be happy if the only games being broadcast and news being reported for the next five years concerns the Galaxy)? Even if the league can afford one salary the size of Beckham's, it almost certainly can't afford ten, or probably even five. But that's exactly what the old North American Soccer League tried when Pele signed with the Cosmos in the 70s, and it bankrupted the league by the mid-80s.
Furthermore, while Beckham is the right guy purely as a celebrity to get lucrative sponsorships and media deals, IMO soccer in the US is still approaching its popularity issue all wrong. A stat I read in an article concerning the league placed the household income of the average family with an MLS fan at $150,000 a year!!! Basically, "United States soccer" is a sport for rich suburbanites. The entire youth developmental system in the US plays to that. What they're missing is that there are 50 million latinos in this country, and 50 million other minorities, a majority living in the big cities. Furthermore, all one has to do is walk through Flushing Meadows park in NY on a summer or spring weekend and you can see a thousand people playing pickup soccer or participating in a "neighborhood" league. But if they have a team to root for, it's Cruz Azul or Atlas, or maybe Boca Juniors, or some team over in Europe with their favorite player(s). Hence, the World Cup roster reflects the current popularity of "United States soccer": most grew up in the suburbs or small cities and attended soccer academies and/or private or public schools in wealthy towns that had a good soccer program.
It sounds racist and classist, but it's impossible for *all* of your players with the most potential to come from priveleged, or at least semi-priveleged, backgrounds. If half your country's pool of athletes are minorities and/or live in major cities, your national team should reflect that a lot more. If the powers-that-be want soccer to be truly popular in the US, they need a good national team backed up by a good pro league over the course of generations, and that eventually means getting at least some of the athletes from the cities to turn away from basketball and/or football and play soccer instead.
I know Khano Smith, he's pretty good. But we just lost our best player on the Revolution, Dempsey, to Europe. He was the best player on our national team in the world cup too. The sad part is Arena didn't want to play him, and he didn't start. The only reason he played was because he ended up scoring a goal when he was a late sub, and he dared not bench him after that. This is the politics I speak of.
And don't feel so bad, even when just taking an enlarged map of the US, rhode island can't fit it's intials inside itself
THE JACKEL
I would go to one of Beckham's games, but Christiano Ronaldo is way better. :)