By Andrew Hazelton (Former Afusionado President) – Let’s assume that today coach Darryl Shore puts the hammer down and is able to transform this team into championship caliber. The Strikers play beautiful attractive soccer, their offense scores golazo afer golazo, the defense becomes an impenetrable curtain, and the Strikers play out the season undefeated culminating in a NASL championship. The home fans are delirious and fill Lockhart Stadium to capacity. The entire media is abuzz and there is a parade down Las Olas and up the Strip commemorated by tens of thousands of screaming and raucous fans. Even a few cars are torched and flipped over after the game, a true sign that a major team has won a championship in the USA.
This is all highly implausible, of course. In fact we know this is even one of those dreams that is completely impossible, much like my fantasy of one day meeting Shakira or J-LO (or even better both at the same time!) in a night club and living happily forever ever after, or even happily for one night in the African safari suite at the Miami Airport Executive Motel.
But why is this so? Well one reason is that winning the NASL championship is meaningless to anybody, even to the teams involved. Obviously it’s nice and better than losing but at the end of the day the championship is completely meaningless because it is already an end, and there is no place to go from there but to return to NASL or whatever the league du jour is next year.
We all know that in every soccer playing nation in the world at the moment one wins a championship in any league or any competition there is always another larger challenge facing you. Because our game is the only one that allows any club or nation affiliated with FIFA to dream big and to one day become a true World Champion which is the true end. Even if your team is playing in the local beer league, as long as it’s affiliated it can move from that beer league to the city amateur league and then to the regional lower division semi professional league and then to the lower runged national professional leagues and year by year, step by step, can eventually play on the world’s largest stages. Wigan Athletic in England and Ipatinga of Minas Gerais, Brazil are fine examples of amateur clubs that through perseverance and dedication over years went from the lowest levels to the highest levels of the game in their countries.
This happens all across the world, except in the USA of course. In the country that supposedly perfected capitalism and meritocracy, all of our sports (basketball, baseball, football, hockey, etc.) are socialist and closed and elitist and do not allow for true competition. The US Soccer Federation, due to its incompetence, non understanding of the game and hopefully one day to its everlasting shame, has been unwilling to preside over the professional game, instead allowing the game to be managed by a virtual monopoly of billionaires who have as a central priority the development of the game as an entertainment venture rather than placing the priority as creating word class soccer teams and instead abrogating their responsibility of creating professional players to non professional entities such as the USA university system and youth soccer programs.
The reality is that professional clubs should create professional players. Universities should create scholar athletes and youth soccer programs should create youth soccer players. To each its own responsibility and they don’t mix well. And it is the dysfunctionality of the league system, allowed by an irresponsible Fed – that is the root cause of the lack of professional player development.
Fortunately it is neither too late nor too complicated to solve the problem and of course I have the solution which I will be more than happy to publish at a later date. But it requires a willing Fed that truly wants to develop the professional game. Don’t hold your breath on that one. But until then, even if the Strikers win the NASL championship there are no guarantees on next year. There is no “there” there. We don’t even know if the league will have the same name or whether Traffic will want to continue to fund at a loss not only a club in Ft. Lauderdale but also a league named NASL or A-League, or USL, or whatever alphabet soup is in vogue that some focus group liked on that particular day.
If today winning the division 2 championship would automatically place a team in division 1, how would the dynamic of Lockhart Stadium (and every other minor league stadium in the country from sea to shining sea on game day) change? I believe attendance would increase immediately as there would be purpose to the games, and excitement for what could be. The fans, media, and club administration would be emotionally invested. There would be electricity in the air and a feeling of purpose among all involved.
Instead we are treated to the possibility of being “allowed” into MLS based on whatever marketing trend they feel important enough to merit our inclusion, forced to beg like a homeless man on a street corner, while MLS uses TV ratings, or “Q” factors (whatever those are) or the disposition of a willing billionaire whom they deign to be worthy of their inner sanctum for them to give us a thumb’s up or down, like the Roman Emperor at the Coliseum.
Unfortunately the last consideration MLS and the Fed care about are results on the field of play as criteria for our top league system. And until that is the over riding criteria for a team to be admitted into a top division the professional game in this country is doomed to mediocrity.