Jones, Galaxy Seem Ready to Part Ways

It became abundantly clear Monday that Cobi Jones and the Galaxy are headed in opposite directions. The final split, if it comes, could occur any day.

More than four months of negotiations between Major League Soccer and the U.S. national team forward have failed to achieve an agreement and it seems probable that Jones will leave the league and play abroad.

Or at least he will try to do so.

Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid said Monday that MLS had made Jones a firm contract offer but that Jones and his agent, Cory Clemetson, had decided “to pursue other options.”

Neither Jones nor Clemetson could be reached for comment.

At issue is not the $1-million-a-year contract that Jones talked about asking for last summer. Nor is the impasse due to any unhappiness Jones has with the Galaxy or with playing in Los Angeles, his hometown.

Instead, his indecision stems from ambition. At 29, the national team’s all-time appearance leader wants a chance to see if he can make it in Europe. France would be his country of preference, he has said, but England or Spain would suit him equally well.

Before MLS was launched in 1996, the former UCLA standout played briefly in England and in Brazil but did not make his mark with either club, Coventry City or Vasco da Gama.

The trouble now is that neither MLS nor the Galaxy can wait for him to make up his mind.

Schmid, in fact, based his selections in Monday’s MLS draft on the assumption that Jones would not be in a Galaxy uniform when the season begins April 7.

“My feeling at this time is that he doesn’t want to play for L.A.,” Schmid said.

“He might want to play for L.A. two weeks from now, or a month from now or two months from now, but with the draft coming up we weren’t in the position to hope that he was going to come back and draft accordingly and then find out that he was not going to come back.

“Cobi has an offer from MLS. It was his feeling that he needed to look into other options at this time. As a result, we have to look into other options at this time as well.”

Just what the Galaxy can do beyond drafting a handful of attacking players, as it did Monday, is problematic. The league, not the individual teams, owns all player contracts, so it will be MLS’s decision whether to allow Jones to walk.

On Monday, indications were that MLS would do just that.

“Because of our desire to keep Cobi in L.A., we kept working with it and kept pushing back the deadline [for him to sign with MLS],” Schmid said. “Eventually, it got to the point where we couldn’t push it back any further and they [Jones and Clemetson] still wanted more time. . . .

“So it’s disappointing to me because I really wanted Cobi to stay. That’s why we ended up being as flexible as we were with him.”

If Jones goes, what then?

With its international credibility at stake, the league wants to send the strongest possible Galaxy team to Spain this summer to compete in the second FIFA World Club Championship. It is more than likely, therefore, that MLS will allow the Galaxy to replace Jones with another high-profile player.

Among many possibilities are three national team forwards: Landon Donovan of the U.S., Carlos Ruiz of Guatemala and Ariel Graziani of Ecuador. All three are with other clubs, however, and might be difficult to pry loose.

Donovan, an 18-year-old from Redlands, is with Bayer Leverkusen in Germany, but has not broken into the starting lineup. He is under contract until 2003, but MLS might try to bring him home, especially with Donovan figuring increasingly in U.S. national team Coach Bruce Arena’s World Cup qualifying plans.

Bayer Leverkusen, according to some reports, would be willing to loan Donovan to MLS, but not to sell him.

“We really haven’t talked about that,” Schmid said. “I know there’s a lot of talk about Landon possibly coming back to the States, but there’s been nothing specific on that at all.”

Ruiz would be a popular addition among Los Angeles fans of Guatemalan heritage but might be unobtainable.

It seems unlikely that the Dallas Burn would allow Argentine-born Graziani to leave, but the Burn is a league-operated team, so the strings are pulled in New York, not Dallas.

“I don’t know if they’d trade us Graziani, but there are some options there,” Schmid said.