Legal Fight Simply a Joke
The sooner the courts deal with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission’s misguided lawsuit against U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer, the better off the sport will be in Southern California.
Until the suit is resolved, the ludicrous situation occurring here this week will continue to be an issue.
On Saturday, MLS opens its seventh season with a game between the Galaxy and D.C. United at the Rose Bowl, a game that normally could be expected to draw a good crowd.
But on Tuesday night at the Coliseum, there was another game, one between two popular teams from the Mexican first division, Chivas of Guadalajara and UNAM Pumas of Mexico City.
The game, won by Pumas, 1-0, attracted an estimated 20,000 fans. Their money spent, it’s unlikely that many of those same fans will be at the Rose Bowl on Saturday evening.
So why were Chivas and Pumas playing in Los Angeles four days before the start of the MLS season? Why was the game even allowed to be played when it obviously will hurt the Galaxy’s attendance?
Because it’s a free country and promoters can put on any game they like, any time they like, if they think they can make a dollar.
In Los Angeles, even meaningless exhibitions such as Tuesday’s can be profitable. The demographics of the city mean that teams from Mexico and Central America invariably draw bigger crowds than MLS teams.
And MLS is powerless to do anything about it--unless, as the Coliseum Commission’s lawsuit claims, U.S. Soccer steps in and lends a hand.
In the United States, games involving foreign teams have to be sanctioned by U.S. Soccer, the national governing body for the sport. The federation usually just rubber-stamps such requests and takes its percentage of the gate.
Not so, says the Coliseum Commission. Its lawsuit claims that the federation has conspired to protect MLS teams at the expense of independent promoters.
The suit challenges the federation’s right to have any say over the staging of games and also challenges the fees U.S. Soccer charges for allowing them.
It’s not a lawsuit likely to be won. Despite its name, the Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act of 1978 clearly gives U.S. Soccer the right to govern the sport in this country on both the amateur and professional levels.
The suit is more of a nuisance, a desperate clutching at straws by a Coliseum Commission fearfully contemplating all the soccer business in Los Angeles disappearing down the Harbor Freeway to Carson, where the Anschutz Entertainment Group’s 27,000-seat soccer-specific stadium for the Galaxy will open next year.
The financial resources of AEG are enormous, compared to those of the independent promoters that the Coliseum deals with, and AEG will be able to showcase all kinds of top foreign teams without there being any conflict with MLS.
U.S. Soccer might reasonably have withheld approval for the Chivas-Pumas game simply because it did clash with the Galaxy’s MLS opener.
That’s not conspiracy, that’s common sense. U.S. Soccer’s mandate is to grow the game in this country, and it can do so only by fostering the development of an American league which, in turn, develops American players.
But with the lawsuit hanging over it, U.S. Soccer could not turn down the Chivas-Pumas match without hurting its own case in court.
So it approved it, just as it had approved a March 6 game in San Jose between Chivas and La Piedad that ended up attracting 18,259 spectators, thousands more than the MLS-champion Earthquakes averaged in the same Spartan Stadium last season.
Clearly, if U.S. Soccer allows such games to take place at the expense of MLS, there can be no conspiracy between the federation and the league.
The Coliseum Commission would be better off building bridges with U.S. Soccer, MLS and AEG than filing lawsuits. There are major games that can be brought to Los Angeles, games for which a 27,000-seat stadium will be woefully inadequate.
So where will they go? Right now, the Rose Bowl is a far more attractive option than the Coliseum.
