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The New York Red Bulls‘ 2010 season will be the most important campaign for a single team in MLS history. The club has changed its name and colors but has remained a laughingstock, burning through 11 coaches in 14 years and stumbling its way into total irrelevance in the country’s most important market.
The opportunity to change that perception comes next spring, with the opening of the palatial Red Bull Arena in Harrison, NJ. Fans from both sides of the Hudson finally will have a decent place to catch a game. The question is whether or not there will be enough decent play to hold their interest. The Red Bulls have one more chance to stake a claim in New York. So with the stakes as high as possible, the club is staying true to its roots and following a proven recipe for failure.
On Monday afternoon, the Red Bulls announced the appointment of Erik Soler as sporting director and general manager. The name should be familiar to the many stateside devotees of Norwegian soccer. Soler, 49, played professionally in the 1980s for Lillestrom, Hamburg, Brann and Aarhus and was capped 39 times by his country. He stayed in soccer after retirement, enjoying a successful career as an agent, working as a TV commentator and then serving as part owner and chairman of Eliteserien club IK Start.
During his tenure at Start, the club finished second once but was relegated twice. It finished ninth in the first division this year. Soler’s hands-on familiarity with the American player is limited to Hunter Freeman and Clarence Goodson, both of whom play for the club. Otherwise, he has no experience with the well-known peculiarities of American player development (or lack thereof), the college system and the very unique rules that govern MLS player acquisition, roster composition and salaries.
Those unique features of the sport in the U.S. have bedeviled imports with resumes far more impressive than Soler’s. Several clubs have hired coaches (most of whom had player identification/acquisition responsibilites) who lacked experience with college drafts, salary caps and the like, and pretty much all of them crashed and burned. From Carlos Alberto Parreira to Hans Westerhof, from Ruud Gullit to the myriad foreign failures in the league’s inaugural season, smart soccer men have often been overwhelmed by the differences in American sports culture and the rules that keep MLS cheap and competitive.
Gullit’s famous rant after leaving the Galaxy in a shambles comes to mind. When expressing frustration over roster-size limits, he said, “This is an example of the things I am trying to adapt to. I’m not trying to change it yet. I’m trying to adapt to it. But in the end I’ll say, ‘You need to do things in a certain way because otherwise it’s not serious.’ Really, it’s ridiculous.”
Soler is now going to attempt to negotiate a series of booby traps that have claimed people who’ve done a whole lot more than run a club that got relegated in Norway. The Red Bulls certainly seem to think he has it in him. They’re risking just about everything on this appointment. “We are convinced that he has the leadership qualities and the experience in developing a soccer culture that is crucial to bringing our club to the level everybody here in New York and New Jersey expects,” Red Bull Global Soccer chief Dietmar Beiersdorfer said.
To be fair, New York hasn’t had much luck with American GMs. The flailings of Charlie Stillitano, Nick Sakiewicz, Alexi Lalas and Jeff Agoos are what put the club in this mess in the first place. But other teams around the league have found success with executives and coaches who either grew up in the system or spent some time getting familiar with it before taking charge. If Soler hires a foreign coach, then the blind will be leading the blind at Red Bull Arena. And even if he doesn’t, it’s hard to imagine a guy with his background sitting through college games or staying composed when dealing with salary cap issues, allocations, discovery players and supplemental drafts.
Perhaps Soler is a freak and this will all work out. But history suggests otherwise, and it’s fair to say that no MLS club has granted this much authority to someone with no experience in American soccer. For all of MLS’s accomplishments and progress over the past decade, the black hole that is the New York market continues to be a vexing problem. Just think where the league might be if the MetroStars/Red Bulls had been halfway decent and had captured the attention of the city’s fanbase, marketers and media. There have been so many opportunities lost.
Now it’s up to a man who doesn’t know his way around the American game to lead the Red Bulls out of the wilderness. The future of pro soccer in the country’s biggest city is on the line.
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Red Bulls’ Critical Year Starts With Curious Decision
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