MLS Needs To Address Its Problems of First Year

Lothar Osiander was standing in the visitors’ locker room at Spartan Stadium in San Jose surveying the scene.

“Ask me about the referee,” he said.

Those in the room were momentarily taken aback. Major League Soccer has rules about coaches and players criticizing referees. For coaches, it means a $5,000 fine.

Apparently, Osiander has money to burn.

“The referee, he’ll understand the game one day,” the Los Angeles Galaxy’s coach said. “Unfortunately, it won’t be in this lifetime.”

And that was after a Galaxy victory.

Across the way, in the San Jose locker room, Clash forward Eric Wynalda was even angrier.

“If anything drives me back to Europe, it will be the [MLS] officiating,” he fumed.

And so it goes as the league’s inaugural season winds down to its Oct. 20 championship game. If there is one thing that coaches and players league-wide agree on, it’s that MLS referees, with a few exceptions, are not good.

“Diabolical,” is Wynalda’s word for them.

But poor officiating is only one of a number of troubling issues the fledgling league has faced in its first year. Almost as disruptive is the way teams have repeatedly lost marquee players to international duty. Even during the playoffs.

On one recent weekend, no fewer than 10 of the league’s stars missed games because of World Cup ’98 qualifying commitments with the national teams of Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Galaxy lost Jorge Campos for eight regular-season games, Eduardo Hurtado for four, Mauricio Cienfuegos for three and Cobi Jones and Robin Fraser for two apiece. It’s one reason the team’s record plunged from 12-0 to 19-13 at the end of the regular season.

Imagine if the Dodgers were suddenly told that Mike Piazza or Hideo Nomo would be unavailable for a week during the division race, or if the Lakers were forced to be without Shaquille O’Neal for a quarter of their season. It seems ludicrous, but soccer is used to it. Worldwide, the club-versus-country squabbles are never-ending.

Because more than 50 national team players from 20 countries are on MLS rosters, there is no way the MLS schedule can avoid clashing with national team games.

“It’s expected,” Galaxy captain Dan Calichman said of losing players to the World Cup, the Olympics or to continental championships. “We all understand that, growing up in soccer. That’s what happens. It’s a compliment. We’re very glad to have national team players on our team . . . because when they do play for us, we’re better.”

The opposite is also true.

“Certainly, when we lose them, I don’t think we’re as good,” Calichman continued.

Take away the star players, and MLS coaches are left scrambling to fill the void.

“Campos is particularly difficult for us to lose,” Osiander said. “We play a different defensive system without him. So for me it’s always a worry. If he were a steady goalkeeper for us, we’d have a much better team. Our guys lose concentration, they lose confidence, when he isn’t there.

“With Cienfuegos, it’s the same because we lose a playmaker, the only one we have. Hurtado is a different story because sometimes we play better without him and sometimes better with him.”

The league situation will be slightly better next year because no players will be lost to the Olympics, but qualifying play for France ’98 will continue throughout the MLS season. FIFA rules require that players be released by their clubs five days before important national team matches.

The only solution would be for the league to do what its counterparts abroad do--that is, not schedule games in weeks when international matches are being played, but that, MLS leaders said, is not even an option because of the top players’ diverse nationalities.

The frequent absence of marquee players, along with the inconsistent refereeing, has added up to a downturn in attendance. The average attendance leaguewide fell from 33,821 in the first week of the season to 19,517 at the all-star break to an eventual 17,416 for the regular season.

Another statistic: The Galaxy averaged 34,107 for its first five games at the Rose Bowl, but only 14,688 for its final five home games.

“As far as attendance, it’s a huge drop,” Calichman said. “When Campos doesn’t show up, maybe the Mexican crowd won’t come. When Cienfuegos doesn’t show up, maybe the Salvadoran fans don’t come. But if we keep playing well, people are going to come anyway.”

Galaxy officials estimate that Campos and Cienfuegos each add 5,000 to a attendance every time they play.

Whether or not crowds increase during the playoffs, the refereeing issue remains MLS’ thorniest problem and cannot be solved so easily.

Doug Logan, the league’s commissioner, realizes that the officiating is not what it should be and promises corrective measures before next season.

“I think that if you went back and looked at tapes, the majority of games have been well officiated,” Logan said. “Are we satisfied with the level of officiating in the league today? The answer to that is no.

“Are we satisfied with the level of skills and cohesiveness and play on the field? No. We’re not satisfied with a lot of things related to the way we present our games, but it’s our first season.”

Heinz Wolmerath is a referee assessor/observer for MLS who came to the United States from Germany in 1970 and was a referee for 16 years, including the glory years of the old North American Soccer League. “The quality of the referees is not the quality that we would see in the top games in Europe,” he said. “I suppose that’s normal because our referees are not exposed to top professional games.

“Obviously, the greatest deficit [of MLS’ pool of 45 game officials] is lack of experience. Also, they have not been trained properly. They had only one single, lousy clinic before the start of the league, and that was in Costa Mesa about one week before the start of the season. They had no chance to be trained at the highest level.

“Foul recognition is missing and general game control is missing. Discipline of benches, discipline of players. They are not able to control them because they don’t have the experience.”

If MLS had nothing but second-rate players and youngsters fresh out of college, the problem would not be so acute. But the league has managed to sign most of the U.S. national team’s players, such as Wynalda, who had been playing abroad, as well as about two dozen high-level international players.

There is no way that inexperienced referees can keep up with players of that caliber. They have never experienced their speed of play or the tricks they have picked up or their greater familiarity with the game.

When rookie referees make mistakes, veteran players are the angriest. The problem, if not solved, could cause some of them to leave.

Incorrect offside calls have been the source of as much controversy as anything this season.

Wynalda said, “It’s so frustrating to do what I’ve done my entire life and know that I’m doing it right and know that I’ve made a career and made all the money knowing how to work my way around those 18 inches that keep me onside [only to be called offside by an inexperienced linesman or referee].”

It doesn’t help that players such as Wynalda earn $175,000 a year or more from MLS while the referees get about $275 a game plus expenses.

Wynalda said some MLS referees even try to cover up their ineptitude.

“They’ll come up to me out there and say, ‘I’ll protect you [from clumsy or vicious defenders] if you just don’t make hand signals at me and don’t embarrass me in front of all these people,’ ” he said.

Wynalda, the U.S. national team’s all-time leading scorer with 25 goals, also pointed out that some players are taking advantage of poor refereeing by faking fouls.

“We’ve got to learn how to do it ourselves,” he said bitterly. “Every time I get the ball, I should just fall down.”

But even the outspoken Wynalda admits that there are some good MLS referees, adding, “Most of us have to realize that we have had the opportunity to go over to Europe and play at that different level and play internationally. These referees haven’t.”

Wolmerath said it all comes down to proper training and a commitment by the league and the U.S. Soccer Federation to improve the standard of its game officials.

“We have about 10 good referees and we have a whole bunch of referees who, if they are trained properly--and I mean relentlessly trained like the Europeans do and like some of the South American and Central American top nations do it, including Mexico--we would get those people up to par very, very fast,” he said.

The idea of MLS bringing in foreign referees next season is a hot topic that sparks instant debate among referees.

“At this point, together with many, many colleagues of mine, I am absolutely against it,” Wolmerath said. “If the league and the USSF doesn’t have the money to train our top officials, they should not look in Europe.

“The European referees, the Italians, the Germans and the English, are spoiled brats. They’ve been traveling first class, they’ve been eating and living first class. They’re getting up to $2,500 a game. They cost a lot of money. To bring them over would just cause bad blood and give us a bad situation.

“Getting people over to teach, getting people over to hold clinics, yes. Getting referees over, absolutely not.”

Besides, he continued, foreign referees are no guarantee of improvement.

“I saw in the European Championship officials who were absolutely not up to par,” Wolmerath said. “I saw in the Olympics officials who were absolutely not up to par.”

But Logan said MLS is contemplating importing game officials, among other changes.

“In all honesty, a great number of the referees and almost all of the linesman that we used this year had never refereed at this level,” he said. “There is a growth curve that we went on that at times resulted in inconsistent calls and bad calls affecting the flow and the tempo of the game that we’re not happy with.”

Logan said MLS is planning clinics and education in the off-season for its game officials.

“In addition, we are in the process of determining whether we can implement referee exchange programs with other leagues in other countries, much in the same way [that] we’ve done with players,” he said.