Major League Shocker (Material Offered to National Press)

David Beckham moving to the MLS was huge news at the time. Looking back, I don't know why we were even bothered, but bothered we were because evidently I thought an article about it would be saleable. Looking at it all these years later I believe I must have offered it to a tabloid - there are so many exclamations marks and knowing "isn't American football shit" references, particularly the snarky list of rivals at the end. I wouldn't read this rubbish myself, so I know exactly why it wasn't picked up.

MAJOR LEAGUE SHOCKER

By Christopher Stanley

   David Beckham shocked the football world on Thursday by announcing that he would join US soccer team Los Angeles Galaxy at the end of the Spanish La Liga season. Most people think the Americans don’t like football, or soccer as they call it, and that Becks is driving the final nail into his footballing career.

  

But however his move turns out this summer, it might be useful to know the differences between American ‘soccer’ and good old ‘football.’

   There are only thirteen teams in the whole league, which is known as Major League Soccer (MLS for short). These consist of twelve North American teams and from this year, one Canadian side. When the MLS started in 1993, lots of teams were given nicknames because the Americans had little football tradition. Teams played under names like Dallas Burn, Kansas City Wiz and San Jose Clash, a lot different to our own United, City and Rovers! Los Angeles Galaxy have always been called that, and the name refers to Los Angeles being home to a ‘galaxy’ of stars in Hollywood.

   The MLS is split into two leagues, called the Western and Eastern Conference. LA Galaxy play in the Western. A season lasts thirty games, each team playing the others twice home and away. Then it gets a bit complicated. The last six games are made up by each team playing the other again, but because the Eastern Conference contains an extra team, the Western Conference teams play their closest rivals once more! Basically put, Becks’ team LA Galaxy get to play their “close” rivals CD Chivas USA at least six times!

   The object of US soccer is to be crowned champions by winning the MLS Cup. This isn’t as simple as it sounds, either. The Final only comes after a gruelling knock-out competition involving the top four teams in each Conference. There’s a further Final for the MLS Shield, contested between the winners of each Conference. Confused? You’re not alone. But most American are used to their sports being divided across the vast country, and the MLS see it as an attempt to attract casual fans to the sport. Just for the record, LA Galaxy were crowned MLS Cup Champions in 2002 and 2005, meaning they were the best team in the country, and Shield winners in 1998 and 2002, meaning they just won the contest between the two divisions.

   The way soccer is run in the US is also completely different to what the rest of the world is used to. Built along the lines of other American sports like basketball or baseball, all players are owned by a central organisation; in this case, the MLS. They are there to ensure all teams are treated fairly, and one way they encourage this is by having wages capped. In previous seasons it was against the rules to pay more than $20 million in wages to a squad. But from this season, as Becks arrives in the MLS, the wage cap has been smashed with the Englishman’s £128 million, five year contract.

   The emphasis for American football is on youth and nurturing home-grown players. They have a system known as the ‘draft,’ where the worst performing team in a season is allowed to have first pick of any players finishing college scholarships. The idea is that the worst teams get the chance to have the best players first, so they can improve. This seems a million miles away from the system of transfers we are used to, where you pay a transfer fee and whatever wages the player wants in order to move. With Beckham’s move to Los Angeles, there’s a possibility the league may develop along more European lines in future years.

   David Beckham will have to get used to playing in front of a lot less fans than at Old Trafford or Madrid’s Bernabeu. The Home Depot Center in Carson, California, will be his new home, and average attendance for the season just finished was just over 20,000. Contrast this to the 70,000-80,000 fans that he used to play in front of, and the MLS begins to look rather sedate.

   Becks is without doubt the biggest capture the MLS has ever seen. Generally, the league has been seen by Europe as inferior, and Europeans signing contracts to play there are just looking for a big pay-day before they retire. The MLS has seen World Cup winners Lothar Matthaus and Frenchman Youri Djorkaeff be successful but Beckham will be eager to be a big ambassador for American football. Already fans are excited at landing such a well-known figure.

   Beckham’s critics maintain that the move is simply to raise his family’s profile along with their bank balance, but it has been clear for a while that his football career had stagnated while at Real Madrid. It’s unlikely that he will play for England again after his move, let alone captain his country, but he will be keen to become an icon for the fledgling professional game.

The United States already has one footballing icon – Brandi Chastain. If it’s not a name you recognise, it just illustrates the footballing gulf between ourselves and America. For Chastain, who retired in 2004, scored the winning penalty in the Women’s World Cup Final in 1999. Chastain became a heroine when she whipped off her football shirt in triumph, revealing a sexy sports bra beneath. She posed nude for a men’s magazine after the event.

   In fact, the women’s game is big business in America compared with the UK. While our ladies receive little recognition, the women’s games are taken seriously by US sports fans. One pundit placed the reason as being the make up of sports on different continents. ‘Women don’t turn to American football once they reach college, so soccer retains their talent. With the men, some of the best soccer players turn to different sports once they reach college. So the women’s team is ahead of the men’s in terms of talent.’ Consequently, the ladies national soccer team is a giant of the game.

   That is the main problem for Beckham’s mission to bring soccer to the masses – competition. It’s a fact that while American children will play soccer for fitness and teamwork, they’re reluctant to commit to it seriously because it’s seen as ‘feminine’ and ‘continental.’ In contrast, American football, basketball and baseball are traditional working class sports for ‘real’ men.

   Added to this, there isn’t the high-scoring factor that you get in American sport. Basketball games frequently see teams share three hundred points. Most gridiron teams score over twenty points in a game. ----- once said that ‘American football is something you watch between hot dogs’ and for a lot of casual fans this is true. A frenetic game of football is simply too short to care about. Other countries have the same problem; one Australian I spoke to during last year’s World Cup complained of his own country’s league ‘It takes a day to get to another team and a day to get back. Who’s going to bother if it’s going to be a goalless draw?’

   The MLS has attempted to solve these problems by incorporating golden goals, penalty kicks and most controversially, “free” kick competitions for tied games. This involved a player having five seconds to dribble the ball from the halfway line to try and score. Happily, the idea that there couldn’t be a draw flopped and games are more traditional. But the die-hard ‘soccer’ fan is not impressed with the US league, with one frustrated spectator in Florida declaring ‘It’s been the MLS's problem from the beginning. They've tried to convert the American sports fan, but not the American soccer fan.’ With David Beckham’s arrival, they may convert a whole lot more.

(Those LA Galaxy rivals in full: Chicago Fire, Columbus Crew, DC United, Kansas City Wizards, New England Revolution, Red Bull New York, Toronto Fire (Eastern Conference); CD Chivas USA, Colorado Rapids, FC Dallas, Houston Dynamo, Real Salt Lake (Western Conference). The 2007 season begins in April.