Dana Blankenhorn

Soccer’s America Problem

I’m an American soccer fan. But soccer has growing America problem.

European soccer is being knocked on its ass by American money. The English Premier League, powered by big TV contracts and American interest, now dominates all European leagues. The competitive balance that was the hallmark of European soccer is gone.

American owners are increasingly dominating the English game. Todd Boehly, who also controls the LA Dodgers, recently bought Chelsea, and is maintaining the free-spending ways of Roman Abramovich. Americans now own nearly half the league.

Then there’s MLS. The league has yet to realize its potential, but that potential is huge. Most clubs still play in 20,000 seat bandboxes. The ratings are garbage. But nearly all the clubs make a profit, thanks to strict revenue-sharing and salary caps. Apple is going to send a flood of money into the league starting this month. Sellouts are now common. My Atlanta United drew 47,000 fans per match last season, better than the average Premier League team.

We can afford soccer. Other countries can’t. Soccer is now America’s 4^th leading sport, ahead of hockey and right behind baseball. Soccer is growing, baseball is not.

The Tragedy of Herschel Walker

There are many tragic figures in the politics of 2022.

For me the most tragic is Herschel Walker.

Democrats don’t see it this way. More’s the pity. That’s because Walker represents the apotheosis of Jim Crow 2.0, a system of institutional racism that has been making its way across the south since I moved here in 1981.

It’s like this. Give blacks some places. Give them their own places, like Atlanta. Use thinly veiled racism to maintain white discipline and control in the suburbs. Use state policy to ghettoize the places with black majorities and encourage corruption. Meanwhile, take some with exploitable talent and raise them up. Coddle them, make them think they’re as good as white, so they become the new system’s avatars, black faces on a white system.

See, we’re not racist, look at X. Whose idiocy justifies the racists’ instincts.  

Retire Dan Garber

Soccer has a huge opportunity to become America’s favorite sport, as it is everywhere else.

But it won’t get there with the minor league business model of Major League Soccer (MLS) Commissioner Dan Garber.

Garber’s business model was crafted in the 1990s, when MLS feared failure. All teams are controlled by the league. The season runs from the spring to the fall, and ends in a series of play-offs, just like baseball.

The league has prospered, thanks to expansion fees. New owners pay hundreds of millions to join MLS, and this gets split among existing teams. This means teams can’t be relegated if they refuse to be competitive. It makes for lazy owners and bad soccer. It means the most important games are played when they don’t draw interest.

The answers are simple, but Garber won’t consider them. He needs to go.

Once he’s out of the way, MLS should buy the minor league United Soccer League. It can do this by selling its own interest in member teams. This will create a windfall that can fund a new structure.

A Simple Plan for Saving College Football

It’s Labor Day. Put down the tech, put down the markets, put down the politics and the media.

Let’s talk sport.

Specifically let’s talk about a game that’s dying before our eyes. College football.

Football is dying because of its cost. You need over 100 players, 10 coaches, training facilities. It’s impossible, except for the small number of teams that can fill huge stadiums and get on TV every week.

As with so many things today, there’s a simple solution to the problem. It starts by admitting that colleges don’t compete with professionals. The job of a college isn’t to build NFL rosters. It’s not to be a free minor league.

It’s not the job of a college to train anyone for an athletic career. Most sports recognize this. The best soccer players leave the academic environment in high school. The best basketball players are also being directed, increasingly, toward professional training.

The Close Season

Update: Atlanta United chose Frank de Boer as manager instead of Guillermo Barros Schelotto, who is heading to the LA Galaxy.

It has to do with playing style - de Boer's is closer to Tata's. President Darren Eales also decided that Atlanta can now recruit South America on the club's reputation, rather than the manager's. Time will tell how that works out.

The first thing de Boer must do is convince a big European club to pay Miguel Almiron starter's money in a transfer. Getting starter's money -- $15 million or more -- is a key to the whole project. We need to make a profit on turning starlets into stars. Do that often enough, build the league, and in time we'll be able to compete on salary against Europe, head-to-head.

Note that Zlatan is getting $7.5 million, which equates to a UK salary of nearly 147,000 UK Pounds a week, more than that league's top stars make, but less than many U.S. baseball shortstops make. 

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Let’s not talk about politics this week. It’s Christmas.

Let’s not talk about business, or technology, or global warming. Let’s talk about something fun and exciting.

Let’s talk about football.

The most important off-season in Atlanta sports history, the most important one in America’s soccer history, began December 8 with the sight of a sad coach losing a big game.

Unions and Management

Unions are, by their nature, conservative organizations.

Their aim is to protect members from change. Workers whose skills drive change, like computer programmers today, don’t need unions. Biology researchers don’t need unions.

But most other people do, because without unions competing in the marketplace, without labor being as organized as capital, imbalances grow that can tear any society apart. That’s what is happening now. The imbalance of power, between labor and management, between workers and owners, is tearing the fabric of American society apart as we watch.

I’m often asked whether I’m liberal or conservative, left or right. I’ve been both. Mainly, I’m for balance. I’m for muddling through. I’m for open competition, and for maintaining competition after the capitalist game ends and most players lose. Only government can maintain that balance, when it’s supported by the people and their interests. Unions are one such interest.

To say, “I’m for the unions,” however, as many liberals do, isn’t an adequate answer. Because, as I said, unions are conservative. Give them power and they’ll slow progress. Union bosses can be corrupted, and can corrupt everything they touch, because like managers, like entrepreneurs, like government officials, and like writers, they’re human beings.

Sport and the New Political Divide

The political divide today is less the traditional left-right than nationalist-internationalist.

This was brewing before Trump. But it has become the new normal. It’s a fault line people are still willing to cross, because it’s new. We love our nation, but can we love another without betraying it?

My point today is that this fault line has appeared in every area of our lives. Not just in politics, but in economics. It has appeared in music and art. And it has appeared in sport.

I have described how it works in sports here in Atlanta, where the Atlanta United “football” team has taken intown’s love from the Atlanta Braves. They moved to Trumpistan, specifically suburban Cobb County, with its long history of racism aimed at the central city. The bridge on I-75 over the Chattahoochee to Cobb County is still named for Lester Maddox, for gosh sakes.

The Full Politicization of Sport

When politics gets me down, I take comfort in sport.

Sport can’t be political, can it?

Yes it can.

One of the biggest sports stories right now is the rise of Atlanta United , a new MLS soccer team. They have sold out Georgia Tech’s football stadium, and will do the same at the Atlanta Falcons’ palace when they move there this summer.

When I walk around my intown neighborhood these days I am greeted by dozens of Atlanta United banners, hung out of doorways and hanging on flagpoles in front of porches.

But turn on sports talk radio and you won’t hear a word about it. There the talk is of nothing but American football, and, given that it’s spring, of baseball.

There is no business excuse for not talking about the soccer team. There is only a political one.

The Atlanta Braves are the reason for this. The Braves are a baseball team. They started in Boston, as the Red Stockings, in 1876, and got their current name after a group of New York investors affiliated with Tammany Hall bought them over a century ago. They’re starting their season soon, although you can’t prove that from my neighbors.

Solving College Football

My old alma mater, Rice University, is playing for a conference title today, at home, against the Thundering Herd of (We Are) Marshall, as seen on a movie channel near you.

Didn't know? No one else does, either.

That's because Conference USA, where the Owls play these days, isn't considered a “major” conference. It's a “mid-major” conference, thus beneath contempt.

For the last several years, a host of schools have been moving between conferences, and among conferences, based on the size of their alumni, the power of their football teams, and the school's willingness to spend money in order to find a “better” home.

The system enriches only football coaches, and ex-football coaches. It's one of the biggest scams going. The players often get nothing (some get a decent education, if they apply themselves and the coach doesn't fire them for poor play), and the schools are also left destitute. Only a few dozen schools actually profit from football, and they plow the money into athletic facilities, enriching coaches in minor sports.

The system is broken. Time to fix it.

Football

The NCAA was created in 1906 because football was killing people. It was organized under the aegis of President Theodore Roosevelt because “plays” like the “flying wedge” were routinely resulting in the death of college students. He didn't want the game to become more important than human life.

The penalties imposed today on Penn State are in keeping with that mission, and while Pennsylvania is a northern state they will resonate most in the south. The last decade has seen an incredible football money chase, accelerating every year, and to say that any football program in the Southeastern Conference is subservient to its academic masters is a gross lie.

I hear it on sports talk stations all the time. What does President (Insert Name Here) know? How dare he criticize Coach (thus and so). Or when an honest coach with a losing record is fired, what's the message there? Just win, baby. And the boosters nod in sympathy.

Even in the wake of this press conference, ESPN “College Gamday” analyst Chris Fowler insisted that college athletics isn't “going backward,” that the money put into it will only go up. “It's going to be an uphill fight,” he added, but he seemed skeptical the fight will really be made. 

Coach Lou Holtz, by contrast, had it right. “College football is way too big. Coach's salaries are out of line.” But Holtz was never “just” a football coach. (Of course we thought that was true of Paterno.)

The people who wrap their lives around college football, who pore over lists of recruits like Kremlinologists, and who throw their hard-earned dollars into “seat licenses” and other gimmicks for ever-larger football palaces, they're the real enablers here. We created Joe Paterno. He never went into football expecting, or wanting to be, that guy. That he was seduced into becoming that guy tells you everything you need to know about the level of corruption, and temptation, in the sport.

It can get to anyone.