Sporting News

Innovative spirit puts MLS on front line of soccer’s evolution

There were 28 goals scored across nine MLS matches last weekend, producing an attractive 3.11 goals per game average. That healthy total easily could have been lower had not two teams, with their victories well in hand, decided to push for more.

On Saturday evening in Harrison, N.J., the New York Red Bulls led Toronto FC 3-1 thanks to an 88th-minute goal from Kenny Cooper. Hours later in Carson, Calif., Real Salt Lake was coasting to a 3-0 win over hapless Chivas USA.

Neither leader needed another goal to secure three points. The safe play would have been to knock the ball around or kick it toward the corners, bleed the clock and avoid injury. But players from both teams kept their eyes fixed on goal.

In the third minute of stoppage time at Red Bull Arena, Thierry Henry scored on a spectacular long-range one-timer that punctuated his player of the week performance.

Across the country at the Home Depot Center, RSL's Paulo Jr. finished a flowing 81st-minute move with a blast to the upper right corner of the Chivas net.

There were 27 MLS players credited with assists last weekend. None of them wore suits. But for the determination and effort that led to those two late highlight-reel goals, the MLS board of governors might be due a little credit.

In the spring, the league opted to change its first standings tiebreaker to one unfamiliar in the soccer world, which typically opts for either head-to-head record or goal differential. Starting this season, goals scored now will separate teams with an equal number of points. It's a method that celebrates offense, and with both the Red Bulls and Real Salt Lake locked in playoff races, it might prove the difference between a spot in the wild-card game and a bye into the quarterfinals.

"You're still balancing (the approach at game's end) with a number of other common sense factors," Salt Lake GM Garth Lagerwey said. "But is it in the back of your mind? Sure."

The new tiebreaker was one of several options discussed over the winter by the league's technical and competition committees, which present the board with suggestions on how to improve the league. They considered awarding no points for a 0-0 draw, for example.

Lagerwey, a former goalkeeper, sits on the technical committee.

The tiebreaker "is a well-intended attempt to try to generate fewer draws and more attacking soccer," he told Sporting News this week. "I think there's a growing commitment around the league to at least trying to play most of the time. I think we're refereeing the game a little tighter to allow more teams to play.

"Part of the goal-scoring tiebreaker is a recognition around the league that we need to have an attractive, entertaining product, and the way to do that is to play attacking soccer."

An innovative spirit

Long gone are days of the 35-yard shootout, the 10-minute overtime and the official scoreboard clock counting down from 90:00. They were 1990s gimmicks that appealed to few and which failed to grow the game. But the spirit that resulted in that silliness — the urge to innovate, question tradition and package the game for an American audience — remains alive among MLS executives.

In countries where professional soccer has more than a century's worth of roots, bad games, bad teams and bad seasons are just that. They don't reflect poorly on the league or the sport. Pro soccer in the U.S. and Canada enjoys no such leeway, and MLS hasn't been around long enough to earn that benefit of the doubt.

American sports fans will return in droves even if the World Series is cancelled or the NFL makes a mockery of its product by using junior college referees. But if the Columbus Crew and Colorado Rapids grind out a 0-0 draw, it's ammunition for the doubters.

Every game, every crowd and every signing reflects somehow on the league at large. MLS' reputation constantly is in play, and the league has the means and the will to do something about it.

"It starts with a lot of discussion at the board level that dictates what kind of league we want to be," MLS commissioner Don Garber told Sporting News recently. "What kind of behavior do we want to see out on our fields from our coaches and players? What style of play do we want? How do we want to ensure that our players are safe?

"Fans like goals. You can't argue with that. They also like quality soccer. So you want to promote attacking soccer, and at the same time you want to promote having a safe and attractive style. And the best way to address that starts with talking to our coaches and players, and if that talking to doesn't get the results we want we have to do it through discipline. It's a carrot and a stick."

To that end, MLS has adopted several unique, or at least uncommon, initiatives designed to shape and tweak the world's game into one that might sell better in its final frontier.

It's not difficult to figure out what appeals and what doesn't.

A quick spin on sports talk radio during the World Cup makes it clear. Diving, embellishment and time wasting are abhorred and even considered anti-American. Meanwhile, the accusation that soccer lacks sufficient scoring and the surging popularity of FC Barcelona's fluid, technical style of play gives the league every excuse and incentive to highlight and protect the attacking players it is able to sign.

Unimpeded by the competing interests of independent or adversarial clubs and the decades of sluggish tradition that might slow foreign leagues, MLS' nimble ability to shape the game is limited only by the sport's 17 laws and the knowledge that, as a citizen of the soccer world, it must ensure its players and clubs continue to play the world's game.

"Our board was consciously aware of some of the storylines that were unfolding last year and was concerned as to whether they were indicative of trends," MLS executive vice president Nelson Rodriguez told Sporting News. "We had this slew of 0-0 draws last year and earlier in the season injuries to well-known attacking players. That forced us to try to look at our game a little differently and recognize there are elements of the global game we would like to see accentuated in our league and other elements if not eliminated, greatly reduced."

National Soccer Hall of Famer Alexi Lalas, now an ESPN analyst who has been critical of the league's move to overrule referees with retroactive suspensions, nevertheless said MLS' effort to shape its product was "essential."

Lalas says the array of regional and ethnic cultures and influences that impact the game across two large countries "is both our greatest asset and one of our Achilles' heels." It needs a guiding hand and a common purpose.

"If there's any league in the world that's about the collective, it's Major League Soccer," Lalas said. "The leadership of MLS has a responsibility to try to steer people in the right direction. ... I don't want it to be a complete Wild West. There should be some guidelines, accepted practices, but within that I still believe you can maintain your individual personality."

'A third eye'

Lalas' primary target, and the principle instrument of MLS' attempt to reshape the game, has been the five-man Disciplinary Committee, which reviews each match and metes out guidance and/or punishment at its discretion. Sporting News examined this unique body in depth in April, back when its retroactive rulings seemed more controversial. Toward the close of the 2012 regular season, the committee has become a more familiar fixture on the MLS landscape.

Peter Walton, the Englishman hired to run the Professional Referee Organization launched in March by MLS and the U.S. Soccer Federation, was raised in soccer's old world but said he has no problem with the committee's work.

"I'm concerned with what my officials do on the day," Walton, a former English Premier League referee, told Sporting News. "I have no real bias toward or against (the committee). They do what they need to do, and I understand why they're doing it.

"They're doing it so the product that's being shown is the product they want. It'll make the referee's job easier in the future if the players also know there's 'a third eye' watching their antics as well. It could work in our favor."

Walton has been in the U.S. less than a year and his work on creating and overseeing an independent body that will assign, assess and train professional referees is just beginning. But he already has learned that soccer's stewards must cater to the sporting tastes of the North American public.

"What we don't want is challenges that will hinder or harm quality, skilled players because that's who people pay to see," Walton said. "The sports I know in North America, there's always real physical contact. Ice hockey, NFL — real physical contact. So people have grown up and are used to seeing the opposition getting it on and hitting each other. In soccer, that's not the case and shouldn't be the case.

"There's physical contact, and that's the art of defending or even the art of attacking. But form a public perception, what we should be seeing, is the class players playing the beautiful game."

MLS continues to impose retroactive suspensions and fines for violent or reckless conduct — on or off the ball — and over time, it expects that a player's self interest will kick in before he makes a decision that might endanger an opponent. Meanwhile, the disciplinary committee has issued just one sanction for embellishment — to Seattle Sounders defender Leo Gonzalez — in the past six months. Its message is being heard.

That's not surprising. There is constant dialogue between the committee (via Rodriguez) and MLS coaches and general managers. Plays from every game are reviewed and discussed, and even if punishment isn't handed down the league still might contact a club to discuss the incident or issue a warning.

"It's transparent about all the players each week who are under review," Lagerwey said. "Often times, the point of the review is to be constructive. Maybe it doesn't rise to the level of a fine or suspension, but an action taken like this again might. We talk to the committee on a regular basis. Sometimes we relay the message to (coach Jason Kreis) and the guys.

"Sometimes, it's a point of emphasis across the whole team; other times, it's one-on-one. I've found the players will often self-correct if given the opportunity."

It's almost impossible to imagine such conversations and attention to detail going on in European or South American leagues. MLS has a different mission.

Improved officiating

Walton, Lagerwey and Rodriguez each said improved refereeing is a critical to making the game more open and appealing. That will take time, as Walton seeks to further educate the current crop of officials will creating the "churn" in the pool required to bring new talent to the fore.

They agree that if the game is called tighter and more consistently, players will know before they step on the field that cynical soccer won't be tolerated and dissent and confrontation will be reduced.

Walton also expressed an interest in seeing MLS adopt goal-line technology, which has been approved for trial by FIFA. Not only would it take an occasionally impossible, "black-and-white" decision out of his officials' hands — he insists a referee's most important job is to interpret the game's "gray area" — it would offer MLS an enormous publicity boost.

"I hope we jump on the bandwagon very soon," he said.

That sort of thinking is well received at MLS HQ.

Rodriguez said it is far too early to tell whether the league's increasingly proactive effort to promote a positive brand of soccer is bearing fruit. Coaches and players, first and foremost, are focused on winning the game they're in, and sometimes getting those three points isn't pretty.

There are a few promising signs. MLS is averaging 2.68 goals per game this season, its highest total since 2008 and second highest in the past seven years. Goals aren't everything, of course — the league averaged more than 3.2 per game during each of its first three seasons, and no one would argue that the quality of play back then was better than it is today. It is a nice trend, however, as are the 52 come-from-behind victories this year (second only to 1998) and a record 64 lead changes. Ties have dropped from 34.8 percent of all games in 2011 to 22.4 percent this season, the lowest figure since 2002.

The game is opening up, ever gradually, even when — like Saturday's matches outside New York and L.A. — it should be tightening up.

"It's about scoring goals," said Lalas, the former defender, when asked about the new tiebreaker and emphasis on offense. "It says, 'This game is about scoring goals, and if you do that you'll be rewarded.' To encourage people to try and score goals, especially in the modern game where defensive schemes have changed so much in the way (entire) teams defend, I think that's a good thing."

'Core values'

MLS' reluctance to make drastic changes to the way the sport is played around the world — it does want to beat these foreign clubs at their own game, after all — will limit how much impact it can have in the short term.

The idea is that the disciplinary focus, the improved refereeing and the promotion of attacking soccer eventually will enhance the product and quality of play alongside the increasing amount of money MLS clubs spend on talent. It will become a league that fans want to watch and that talented attackers want to play in.

And if those initiatives don't work, and if a team GM or league committee member comes up with something that might, it's a sure thing it will be discussed.

"We don't do anything for shock value," Rodriguez said. "We don't do anything just to be different. But we do have innovation as a core value. We define that as a willingness to challenge the status quo.

"From our perspective it's not only OK, it's smart to try to find the right balance between keeping the essence of the game pure but recognizing that our marketplace and our fan base may want or need something different."

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