It was high time for a rebrand. The old ASN logo had nothing discernible about soccer and wasn’t really ours to begin with (a leftover from a bygone era, if you will). The new design, with its old school soccer ball and “electricity bolts” goes much further in communicating both soccer and “news-ness.” With its hints of throwback art deco design we also feel it emotes Americana. And of course the icon lends itself to T-shirt designs and the like. (If anybody has any experience with this type of thing and wants to partner with us on it, by all means contact us). Call it win, win, win. We have begun to roll out the new look selectively here and on a few team pages. Expect the transformation to be completed within a few weeks’ time.

Special thanks and all credit from a creative standpoint goes to JN Lybbert Design, who receive our highest recommendation for their work.

Update: We’ve had the logo engraved on T-shirts, sweatshirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, beer mugs and a few other things. Check out the online store.

Tom Hopper’s The Damned United is a fun British sports drama based on David Pearce’s novel of the same name. Starring Michael Sheen as Brian Clough, the film opens in select U.S. theaters today (it already ran in the U.K. and Ireland). It tells the story of Clough’s tumultuous 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974.

Or does it?

We can’t really be sure exactly what (or whose) story the film tells and therein lies the first problem. The novel upon which it is based is apparently fraught with inaccuracies–to the point that Clough’s family said it essentially created a purely fictional character from scratch and attached Brian Clough’s name to it. Johnny Giles, the “Irishman” from the film, even went as far as to successfully sue the publishers over how he was portrayed in the book.

Giles is largely spared in the film. Not so the other protagonists. Don Revie (played by Colm Meanie), Clough’s predecessor at Leeds United and his nemesis in the film, comes across as a scowling villain who encourages cheating and dirty play. Billy Bremner (Stephen Graham), the team’s Scottish captain and centerback, is a thug in Revie’s image who undermines Clough and all but leads a mutiny against him. Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent), the chairman of Derby County (Clough’s employer before he was hired by Leeds), a bottom line-obsessed businessman who refuses to give Clough the rope or respect he needs and forces his ouster.

Clough himself is portrayed as an arrogant, foul-mouthed bully with no respect for authority, a “my way or the highway” approach to coaching and a penchant for one-liners. Apparently, not all of these are all that far from the truth, according to some who remember Clough, though Clough’s family apparently took issue with the cursing bit. (They have in fact boycotted both the book and the film. No word on whether they passed up any of the royalties). The others? Who knows for sure, but it is somewhat telling that Revie, Bremner, Longson and Peter Taylor (Clough’s assistant) are dead and thus unable to claim libel. (As any journalism student knows, you cannot libel the dead).

Okay, so there are inaccuracies. Big deal. This is a movie after all. Hopefully we all know not to take these things at face value, even (especially?) when they are “based on true events.”

Unfortunately, the film has other issues as well. It lacks a coherent plot, for example. There is none of the traditional buildup, climax and denouement. The viewer feels as if he has tuned into a the middle of a series without having seen the first episodes. Just as he feels he is getting used to this reality, the film starts to jump around chronologically. A (somewhat) clearer picture eventually begins to emerge but again, there is no real narrative. This may work for British audiences familiar (many intimately) with Clough’s story and for continental viewers used to a plodding storyline, but in the U.S. it could spell trouble at the box office.

What we are left with is a film that captures a time (the late 1960s and early 70s) and place (Northern England) that was one of the sport’s golden ages. For U.S. soccer fans, who perhaps have not been following the game for very long, this is great stuff. Did these teams really play in rickety wooden stadiums packed into working-class neighborhoods, as Derby County do in the film? Did players really smoke and eat oranges at halftime? Were the matches really full-tilt battles fought (sometimes quite literally) on muddy, rain-soaked fields without proper drainage? Yes, yes and yes. English football really has come this far, this fast, going from little more than local bloodsport to corporate mainstream in less than a generation’s time. For U.S. audiences, this is hard to believe. Our professional athletes were millionaires with TV commercials and traveling entourages by 1974, Even then they plied their trade in massive stadiums with every modern amenity, as well as on live TV (something that didn’t come to Europe until the late 1980s). The Damned United brings to life an era that is part of living memory in Britain and Europe, but which hasn’t figured into the North American Zeitgeist since, well, before any of our lifetimes. For this reason, U.S. soccer fans need to see it. Everybody else can safely stay away.

‘The Beckham Experiment,’ the highly-anticipated book by Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl hit bookstores this week. It provides an in-depth look at David Beckham’s two-year stint with the LA Galaxy, recapping a tumultuous period for the player, his team and Major League Soccer.

Beckham was introduced by the Galaxy to much fanfare in 2007. The project was an experiment from the start and Wahl provides an inside view of some of the events that made it happen. How did the Beckham experiment fare? From a financial perspective, just fine. Record crowds flocked to Galaxy games (as long as Beckham was with the team, of course) and bought No. 23 Galaxy jerseys, resulting in a terrific monetary windfall for the team and the league. But from nearly every other perspective, the experiment was a disaster. The Galaxy were hopelessly mismanaged and ill-equipped to deal with a player (much less a “brand”) of Beckham’s star power. The team performed dismally on the field, failing to make the playoffs in both of Beckham’s seasons. More importantly, Beckham’s presence did not raise the profile of soccer in the U.S. Television ratings for MLS games remain downright microscopic (the Scrabble All-Star Championship had better ratings than Beckham’s MLS debut). Despite sell-out crowds in Toronto and Seattle (and next year, Philadelphia) average attendance at MLS games has trailed off. Mainstream media coverage is just as elusive as it was before Beckham, if not more so.

Of course, we do not need to read Wahl’s book to provide us this information. It is painfully obvious to anybody who follows the league. But ‘The Beckham Experiment’ tells us exactly where MLS went wrong. The book is not so much about Beckham or even the Galaxy, but about the preeminent professional soccer league in North America. In this, it appears to be the first of its kind. But what it tells us about the league should cause alarm bells at MLS headquarters.

MLS executives insisted that unlike its predecessor (the NASL) it was fully-equipped to handle Beckham and everything that came with him, figuratively and literally. Asked why the Beckham experiment would be more successful over the long term than Pele’s foray with the New York Cosmos, “the word you heard was infrastructure,” Wahl writes. But MLS, with its “single entity business model”, was so obsessed to not repeat the mistakes of its predecessor, that by the time of Beckham’s arrival it had essentially micromanaged itself into near oblivion. Infrastructure or not, the LA Galaxy simply did not have the resources to integrate Beckham. This was partly due to managerial dysfunction (Alexi Lalas and Tim Leiweke took turns feuding with Beckham’s management company and with each other), poor coaching (Frank Yallop and, more egregiously, Ruud Gullit) but largely due to league rules. With the most recognizable athlete on the planet in tow, the team was forced to fly coach and stay in crummy hotels. Due to a strict salary cap, it was not permitted to sign any players that might improve the squad. MLS’ refusal to honor FIFA international dates meant the Galaxy were without Beckham and Donovan (their two best players, by far) for key games.

The league’s salary cap also took its toll on team morale. With Beckham and Donovan earning seven-figures and most role players earning in the low fives, it created a culture that Wahl compares to a third world social economy (tiny upper class, sizeable lower class, no middle class to speak of). Many players with the Galaxy and elsewhere in MLS are essentially semi-pros, forced to hold down second jobs and keep roommates. Integrating them with the likes of David Beckham into a cohesive unit would likely be beyond the means of just about anybody, least of all Frank Yallop or Ruud Gullit (or Alexi Lalas).

Then there were other bush league aspects of MLS that may not have been the result of its salary cap but cast doubt on all the talk about infrastructure. When Beckham entered the league in 2007, five of MLS’ 13 teams had fake grass fields, a situation one member of the Galaxy compared to “Eric Clapton showing up and playing a Fisher Price guitar.” MLS officiating was–and still is–atrocious and quickly became the scapegoat for Beckham’s pent up frustrations. (Wahl recounts one particularly out-of-character episode from a game at RFK Stadium).

Worse, the Galaxy’s schedule was stretched to the breaking point by a myriad of exhibition games that were put on to showcase its biggest star and further pad its coffers. Without the adequate roster depth (due again to the salary cap) its players faced burnout or injury.

Further dooming the Beckham experiment was its namesake being recalled into the English national team by new coach Fabio Capello. Wahl does not mention this in the book, but the Galaxy signed Beckham believing his national team days to be behind him. The travel quickly became overbearing and by the end of the 2008 season, Beckham had let himself get out of shape.

No surprise then that Beckham soon began to seek an exit from MLS, though the Englishman also played a sizable role in The Experiment’s failure. Wahl recounts his by now well-publicized falling out with Donovan, but also shows Becks to be surprisingly tone deaf and ineffectual as a leader and captain. So much for being an ambassador of the sport.

For hardcore U.S. soccer fans, this stuff is catnip. But casual fans of the game, to say nothing of fans of Beckham the pop culture icon, will be disappointed with ‘The Beckham Experiment.’ For them, the book breaks no new ground, offering up at best a few footnotes to Beckham’s legend.

But its greatest service is to MLS. The book demonstrates how, far from having the proper “infrastructure,” the league was unprepared and ill-equipped for his Beckness. It forged ahead anyway, because as Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz says in the book, “We need to do this for the league, because if we’re ever going to expand our ratings and our audience and get credibility in our country, we’re going to need star to break through.”

Wrong, and wrong. MLS doesn’t need a “star” like Beckham. It needs a quality product that the country’s existing base of soccer fans can take seriously. It has handcuffed its clubs, preventing them from building the type of professional environment the sport needs and deserves. Only if it removes the shackles and allows full professionalism to take hold, will it develop the credibility it so desperately seeks. Then and only then can a star like Beckham bring it to the next level. But that interim step is a big one. And the league needs to let it happen.

Surely, Don Garber and the other suits at MLS headquarters will read the book if they haven’t already. But will they get its message?

Not this again. We thought we had addressed these “soccer is un-American” myths last year. Apparently, like so many other unwanted rights of spring (slugs, weeds and pondscum, to name a few), the “soccer is un-American” talk simply resurfaces by its own accord each year.

This season, they have taken the form of one man, Stephen H. Webb, who appears to have the full backing of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, among other groups (more on that later). Webb’s “arguments” are so outlandish (the title is “Soccer is ruining America”), we originally thought they were a joke. Maybe they are. It certainly reads like satire. How else to describe something that starts with the sentence “Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it.”?

Unfortunately, Webb appears to be dead serious. The article first appeared on a site called First Things, which is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an organization that bills itself as “an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”

Which actually sounds like a satire as well. Except it isn’t. Just read some of the articles. Webb’s last post before the soccer piece was titled “The terrible, traumatic and intolerable name of Jesus Christ.”

We are not minimizing these (or indeed any) beliefs, except to point out that people who take them as seriously as Webb does are generally not known for their satirical wit. Webb’s Wikipedia page describes him as a “theologian and philosopher of religion.” He teaches religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., which proudly proclaims itself “one of the few remaining liberal arts colleges for men.” If somebody is capable of making a statement such as “it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America” with a straight face and meaning it, we suspect it would be an individual like Webb. Unless, of course, his entire persona is a satire as well. Stranger things have happened.

Yet the editorial is being taken seriously, even by those who aren’t taking it seriously. The Spectator, while saying that “doubtless much of it is meant in jest,” still insists Webb’s piece is emblematic of conservative Americans’ “weird obsession with soccer and its supposed cancerous impact on the moral well-being of the United States.” Manchester Evening News even ran a reaction, where they went to great lengths to defend the U.K. version of the sport and point out how it, being called “football” is different from what we refer to as soccer in this country. A soccer blogger, Unprofessional Foul, also took Webb seriously and went as far as to print a lengthy rebuttal.

We aren’t going there for two reasons:
1. Just in case Webb is joking and the whole thing is a satire meant to raise the ire of soccer fans who take themselves too seriously, in which case we would look like idiots for falling into the trap.
2. Webb’s “arguments,” when you get down to them, are just a rehashing of the very same stuff soccer haters have always used to villify the un-American-ness of the sport. Each of these (it’s not played with your hands, it’s foreign, it’s for girls, etc.) were dealt with in great detail in last year’s defense of soccer column. Read them there.

On the other hand, maybe we should just re-print the same piece every spring. Next year.

Yes, this again. Culture of Soccer had to go there. I don’t know why, especially seeing as they base their arguments on a book that came out 12 years ago. Actually, check that: they don’t really take a stand on this issue, choosing instead to just introduce these decade-old views and leave it to us to decide. Fair enough. So let’s decide then. Ready? Here goes:

There is absolutely nothing about soccer that is un-American. In fact, the sport is in many ways more American than games invented in the U.S. and considered quintessentially American, especially baseball. Yes, baseball. More on that in a minute. Let’s first look at some of these soccer-is-un-American myths, as presented by Culture of Soccer:

1. Soccer is un-American because unlike baseball, basketball and (American) football, it wasn’t invented in the U.S. First of all, I don’t know if anybody “invented” soccer per se. Yes, the rules of the modern game were codified in England, presumably by Englishmen. The Magna Carta was also written in England. Should we credit them with inventing individual freedom? Of course not! That’s an American invention! In all seriousness though, the concept of using parts of one’s body other than the arms to put a ball in a goal has been around for centuries and transcended various cultures. Look at the Mayan ball game, for example, a millenia-0ld game that is said to be the basis for all “ball and goal” team sports, according to The Cradelboard Teaching Project. Something that was invented by Mayans is the concept of the bouncing, rubber ball. Early versions of European ball games were played with a leather ball that didn’t bounce. A lot of fun that must have been.

And how “American” are those other sports anyway? Basketball was invented by a Canadian son of Scottish immigrants and our version of football is basically a derivative of rugby. There is even debate about whether baseball was even invented by (U.S.) Americans.
2. Soccer is not “offensive” enough to be American. With “offensive” I mean the American concept of “forward, forward, forward.” So says Frank Deford in this article, also quoted by Culture of Soccer. Okay, so where exactly is that concept in baseball? That game is about running around basepaths–not forward. All U.S. sports involve the concept of a strong defense. And what about there not being enough scoring in soccer? Some of the best baseball games are “pitchers duels,” where there is very little to no scoring and the action basically centers around two men: one guy throwing the ball, the other trying (and failing) to hit it. And this for three hours or more. At least soccer games are over in two hours.

3a. Soccer in the U.S. is only played by immigrants. Uh, isn’t basically everybody an immigrant in the U.S.? Or are baseball, football and basketball really limited to Native Americans?

3.b. Xenophobes use soccer to describe why some immigrants have not yet “become Americans.” So now we’re debating the wisdom of xenophobes? Xenophobes say a lot of things. How many of them are true? Are any?

4. Soccer is socialist: it’s too egalitarian and involves too much collaboration. Every team sport involves collaboration. That’s why they’re called team sports. Star players have every opportunity to make a difference in a game of soccer that they do in American sports. The one exception maybe is basketball, for purely mathematical reasons (five players in the game for each team). Football involves far more players than soccer; not only do you have offensive and defensive units, but different players are constantly being cycled in and out, often on each play. Soccer is limited to three substitutions per game, and once a player comes out he can’t go back in.

Besides, if soccer is socialist, then baseball and football are fascist: decision-making is rested in one individual (the pitcher in baseball, the quarterback in football). The team’s fortunes are dependent, for the most part, on that individual’s talent, guile, force of will and power of personality. And let’s not forget the role coaches play in those sports: they basically diagram and architect every play! The players on the field simply execute their game plan. Real American, that. In baseball, the players often don’t even make any decisions. What pitch to throw, whether to swing or bunt or take the pitch, whether to steal a base, where to position oneself defensively–those are all decided by the manager from the dugout. Soccer, on the other hand, is purely spontaneous from the run of play. All the coach does is decide who to put on the field. The rest is up to the players. Sounds pretty democratic to me!
5. Soccer is a girly sport. It may be true that more women play the sport in the U.S. than men (though I’m not sure of the actual statistic). Maybe that’s where this myth comes from. Or maybe because soccer is perceived as non-physical. But again, let’s look at baseball. Other than being able to throw the ball at a dude’s head (and then, in the American League at least, avoid retaliation by virtue of the DH rule) where exactly is the physicality in baseball? And basketball is technically a non-contact sport. In soccer, you are allowed far more contact with the ball-carrier than in basketball, where the rules state that any physical contact be whistled with a foul call. Okay, so soccer players aren’t a bunch of juiced-up meatheads who can bench press a million pounds. Instead they’re just slimmed-down meatheads who can run a million miles. Either way, these discussions of masculinity are subjective and better left to a really masculine magazine like GQ or Men’s Fitness or somebody else who cares about these things.
6. Americans are not good at soccer. I’m assuming they mean American men, as the women’s national team has won world championships and Olympic tournaments. Well, Americans haven’t done much recently in basketball on the world stage either. Or in baseball. Or hockey. OK, Canadian sport. But I don’t get how this makes the sport un-American either. Isn’t the American spirit to compete at something until we succeed, no matter the obstacles? I think so, and I’m American. What’s this cut-and-run talk? We aren’t good at it so why bother? And just look how far we’ve come in the past generation: In the 1980s, American soccer was literally a joke. Now, our national team is stacked with players from the best European leagues and we tied the eventual world champions in last summer’s (otherwise forgettable, from a U.S. perspective) World Cup. We’re not quite world class yet, but we’re not a joke either. And we’re improving: some of our best players are young and have yet to hit their prime.

Even Culture of Soccer thinks it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. becomes a world power in soccer. They don’t think that will make a difference, however, as even a world cup victory won’t convert many of the supposed soccer-haters in this country. I actually agree with them there. But for a different reason: by the time the U.S. wins a world cup, there won’t be anybody left in need of converting.