Posted on 08/05/2003 2:55:00 AM PDT by KQQL
Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, speaking at a news conference in Carson yesterday, reiterated the league's intention to expand in the near future. No surprise there.
What's a major league surprise is where MLS might go.
San Diego.
Deputy City Manager Bruce Herring confirmed that MLS officials called him a few weeks ago to discuss the availability of Qualcomm Stadium, considering that the Padres are moving to a new home and MLS plays a spring-summer schedule.
"We're very interested," Herring said. "It would be such a good fit for the stadium and for the San Diego community."
It wouldn't be your ordinary MLS franchise. It likely would be owned and operated by Mexican giant Chivas of Guadalajara as sort of a Chivas North, ostensibly with a roster almost exclusively of players with Mexican heritage.
The 10-team MLS has been courting Chivas owner Jorge Vergara for several months, and yesterday Garber said the league is in "advance" discussions with him about an expansion franchise for 2005 and maybe as soon as 2004. Houston, which also has a large Mexican-American community, was considered the front-runner for a Vergara-owned expansion team, but several league sources said San Diego has emerged as possibly an even stronger candidate.
"We are looking at cities all over the country," is all Vergara, in Carson for today's MLS All-Star Game, would say yesterday.
MLS once considered San Diego the top U.S. market without a team and did not hide its desire to put one in Qualcomm Stadium as soon as the Padres left. But the downtown ballpark project stalled and MLS' interest waned, particularly after the league held its 1999 All-Star Game here and only about 15,000 showed up.
By the following summer, San Diego had practically vanished from the MLS radar. League officials had stopped listing San Diego as a potential expansion city, and Garber acknowledged that "it's certainly not the hot market it once was." Then the MLS contracted from 12 to 10 teams, and expansion was put off again.
Even this year, as talks with Vergara deepened, MLS continued to push Houston – persuading U.S. Soccer to stage a USA-Mexico friendly at Houston's Reliant Stadium in March and playing an exhibition there last month between Mexican club Santos Laguna and MLS' Kansas City Wizards.
So why the sudden interest in San Diego?
There are two theories.
One holds that Vergara, who also owns Deportivo Saprissa in Costa Rica and is finalizing negotiations for Spain's Atletico Madrid, prefers the San Diego market, given its proximity to the Mexican border and Hollywood, where he is producing several upcoming movies.
Another says San Diego is merely being used as a bargaining pawn to spur ahead the deal in Houston after talks lagged in recent weeks.
Either way, Herring said discussions with San Diego are in the early stages – "very preliminary and exploratory," he said.
One potential hurdle has already been cleared, however. In 1996 MLS held talks with Padres owner John Moores about investing in the league, then in its inaugural season, and from that the Padres quietly struck a deal with the city for the exclusive rights to put a pro soccer team in the Q.
In exchange for waiving revenue from the stadium's naming rights deal with Qualcomm, according to city documents obtained by the Union-Tribune, the Padres were granted "the sole option to lease from the city Qualcomm Stadium . . . for professional soccer" at fair market value.
Herring said he researched the clause after MLS called last month and determined "it has been superseded by subsequent agreements we've made with the Padres in recent years" – clearing the way for a different owner to bring pro soccer to the Q.
That owner could be Vergara, which would raise another hurdle.
Chivas traditionally fields Mexican-born players only, and club president Ivar Sisniega has said any Chivas operation in the States would adopt a similar philosophy.
"It would," Sisniega said, "be a team made up largely of Mexican or Hispanic players."
That could be a problem in a league that limits foreigners to three per team in an effort to develop American players. MLS could implement a "NAFTA" rule similar to the one in the Major Indoor Soccer League, wherein Canadian and Mexican players do not count against a team's foreign allotment. Another option would be to simply grant Chivas' MLS club a special dispensation to sign Mexican players.
The motive to bring Vergara and Chivas into the MLS family is twofold: his money, of course, and a renewed interest in cultivating the Hispanic market. Chivas is playing the MLS All-Stars today at 12:30 p.m. at The Home Depot Center in Carson, and MLS officials talk of this being just the start of closer relations with the Mexican league.
"There's no question that the community that embraces this sport the most and loves this sport the most is the Hispanic community," said Tim Leiweke, the president of Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns six of MLS' 10 teams. "This clearly has not been lost on us. We know the future, and what we have to do now is be a little smarter about designing this league so that we embrace that."
Huh !!.. EOE doesn't apply in San Diego................??
By the way, you'll note when you see the team that there are probably a number of white hispanic male team members who happen to be from Mexico. Which is not surprizing, considering that Mexico is populated partly by...white men descended from Spain. But...these white males hold a position in U.S. law above white anglo-saxons descended from northern Europe and Britain...because....because...I guess because Sandra Day O'Connor sez so. I can't find anywhere in the Constitution where it makes an exemption for the descendants of the Conquistadors. So I guess she put it there.
I guess that makes it all OK.
I have seen many soccer games in Europe. A guy scored once...some sort of foreigner in short pants and very long hair. God, it was exciting.
Can't wait until every town in Maine has its very own, all-hispanic team, so we, too can live La Vida Loca!
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!
Just damn.
If you want on the new list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Actually, I'm not quite sure about that, I had to take cover quickly, as some Englishmen were trying to shoot some Italians and bullets were flying everywhere.
But let's not be unfair. Not all soccer games are that dangerous. Usually it's just internationally travelling, drunken welfare recipients from socialist lands, kicking children, punching cops and fans, and throwing bottles of biodegradable fluids at each other, and then rioting through town.
In order to be Politically Correct, ought not the American players of this fascinating international sport wear helmets? Repeated soccer ball cranial injuries might lead to increased democrat registration among younger soccer players. Although the Democrat Party prefers voters who are already dead, this is a possibility.
Al Gore, who invented soccer, has not yet opined on this vital topic.
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