Time to Deliver the $22-Million Soccer Goods
For a man who has traveled more than a quarter-million miles and spent the better part of $22 million in the last year, Sunil Gulati sounds remarkably sane.
It has been Gulati’s task to acquire players for Major League Soccer.
The 40-something economist and MLS deputy commissioner has spent the last 12 months with a cellular phone in one hand and a stack of airline tickets in the other, scouring the globe for potential MLS stars, signing more than 200.
Today, with the league two months from moving off the drawing board and onto the playing field, most of those players will be drafted by the 10 MLS teams.
And, starting April 6 when the San Jose Clash plays host to the Washington D.C. United in the league opener, fans will begin to judge how well Gulati and his assistant, Ivan Gazidis, have done their job.
“I’m quite satisfied,” Gulati said Saturday, fielding calls that led to Sunday’s acquisition of Italian World Cup midfielder Roberto Donadoni from AC Milan and Monday’s assignment of Mauricio Cienfuegos of El Salvador and Eduardo “The Tank” Hurtado of Ecuador to the Los Angeles Galaxy. “We said we would get players from four or five sources. One was the U.S. national team player pool. We’ve gotten many national team players back from abroad.
“Second was some major international names. We’ve got [Mexico’s Jorge] Campos [with the Los Angeles Galaxy], [Bolivia’s Marco] Etcheverry, [Colombia’s Carlos] Valderrama, Donadoni.
“Three was international players from South America and Africa who would make the game exciting here. We’ve got a number of those, including two [Doctor Khumalo and Sean Bartlett] who started [Saturday] for South Africa when it won the African Nations Cup [in front of 80,000 in Johannesburg].
“We said we would be getting the best of the other American players. We’ve got seven of the 11 [1995] A-League all-stars. We’ve signed all the non-seniors on the U.S. Olympic team and my guess is that we will have 95%, if not 100%, of the Olympic team.
“So, in general, I’m pretty pleased. There are still more signings to come, in particular some more players from South America, but I’m pretty satisfied with where we are.”
The draft will be conducted from New York, the first eight rounds today and another eight on Wednesday.
The 10 teams have been assigned a draft order based in part on the perceived quality of players the league already has assigned to them and the time frame when those players will be available. MLS wants to maintain a competitive balance and believes some teams already have a slight edge.
As a result, the Columbus Crew has the first pick today, and D.C. United picks 10th. The Galaxy drafts fourth.
Gulati said completion of the draft will not mean the end of player acquisition. There is a collegiate draft still to come and a supplemental draft in March.
There may also be additional high-profile players signed.
“I think we’ll sign some more marquee players between now and [April 6], and a few will join after the start of the league,” Gulati said.
“Then we have Project MLS Brazil, where we’re bringing 20 to 25 young Brazilian players into a training camp [in Florida at the end of the month] to see if we can get a dozen Brazilians playing in the league.”
The group is expected to be made up of players in their early 20s who are either starting for or are reserves on professional teams in Brazil.
Originally, MLS had foreseen a league of 180 players, only 40 of them foreign. If the Brazilian experiment works, those numbers may need to be adjusted.
So too will the salary cap that MLS has imposed on its teams. Gulati said the $22 million he is reported to have had at his disposal for player acquisition is a ballpark figure and declined to say how much of it he has spent.
“Let’s just say we’ve got sufficient funds left to get some more of those marquee players,” he said.
Each team has a salary cap of $1.13 million, meaning that player salaries will range from, say, $40,000 or less to the $200,000 that U.S. striker Eric Wynalda reportedly will receive from San Jose.
Those comparatively low figures have caused some to wonder what the level of play will be like. A few months ago, U.S. midfielder Tab Ramos said he thought it would be equivalent to the Uruguayan or Bulgarian first divisions--certainly not up to the level of Italy, England, Spain or Germany.
“I don’t know what the Bulgarian first division is like, so I wouldn’t compare it to that,” Gulati said. “What we were shooting for early on was [to be comparable to] the Belgian or Dutch first divisions--after the top three teams. I think in terms of attendance we’ll be past that, and on the field I think we can be at that level.”
In a sport in which $22 million does not go far, Gulati has had to shop with care.
“We’ve shopped in specific places where we didn’t think [player prices] were out of line,” he said. “We haven’t been shopping very often in Germany and Italy [where a first-class player can cost $10 million or more]. We were looking for special situations and finding a number of [bargains].”
Another argument has been that the style of play favored by “name” players the league has signed, a good percentage of them Latin and African, and the style most comfortable to the league’s 10 mostly European coaches could cause conflict.
Gulati discounted that.
“I think we’ve got coaches who are smart enough to take advantage of the sorts of players that we have,” he said. “And I think they understand that having games that people will want to come back and see is extraordinarily important for their own well-being and the well-being of the sport.”
Alexi Lalas, the 1995 U.S. player of the year and the first American to play in Italy’s prestigious Serie A, is one of those returning to play for MLS, having signed with the New England Revolution.
He believes the league’s ratio of Americans to foreigners is correct and that fans will soon recognize the potential of young American players whose names might not be familiar.
“I feel that the talent’s out there,” he said. “The experience might not be there because they haven’t had the chance. I think what MLS is going to do is showcase that talent. In a very short amount of time I think we’re going to get to a level of play that’s competing with leagues around the world.
“You really have to look at the numbers. There’s 10 teams, there’s 18 players per team. Say 30 to 40 of those are foreigners. That means there’s 140 spots for American players.
“And I know that there’s 140 quality American players out there who can play an entertaining brand of soccer and who have the skills and the intelligence to do that. So I’m not worried.”
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Soccer Notes
Major League Soccer has made a number of recent players assignments, including Bolivian World Cup striker Marco “El Diablo” Etcheverry to Washington United, U.S. Olympic team midfielder Brian Maisonneuve of Indiana and former Uruguayan national team striker Adrian Paz to the Columbus Crew, and defender Martin Vasquez, a former Cal State Los Angeles and Mexican first division star, to the Tampa Bay Mutiny. Also assigned were Vitalis “Digital” Takawira, a forward on Zimbabwe’s national team, to the Kansas City Wiz, former U.S. national team midfielder Dominic Kinnear to the Colorado Rapids, and Washington “Secco” Rodriguez, 1995 player of the year in Uruguay, to the Dallas Burn. U.S. national team defender Marcelo Balboa was assigned to the Colorado Rapids on Monday.
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MLS Draft Order
1. Columbus Crew
2. Colorado Rapids
3. Dallas Burn
4. Los Angeles Galaxy
5. New England Revolution
6. Kansas City Wiz
7. Tampa Bay Mutiny
8. San Jose Clash
9. New York/New Jersey MetroStars
10. Washington D.C. United
