For the New York Red Bulls, playing soccer at Giants Stadium in New Jersey must be pretty soul-destroying. At most games, the stadium’s vastness is underlined by the seemingly endless stretches of empty seats, as if the New York franchise of Major League Soccer is a warm-up act for some super group who won’t be mounting the stage for several hours yet.
Rare are those occasions when the Red Bulls players can look up at a stadium filled to capacity. On two of them, David Beckham and the Los Angeles Galaxy have been present for games that actually lived up to the hype. Beckham made his New York debut in 2007, in an extraordinary game marked by superb goals and abysmal defending that ended in a 5-4 Red Bulls victory. In 2008, he played in a more sober, yet engaging, 2-2 draw.
On Thursday night, Beckham returned to Giants Stadium. Only 20,000 spectators trickled in, causing the New York Daily News – hardly known for its fondness for the sport variously known here as futbol or football or soccer – to declare that Beckham had worn out his welcome in MLS.
You could argue that Beckham has become a convenient hate figure for those frustrated at the failure to bring American tastes into line with the rest of the world by converting “soccer” into “football”. At last night’s game, there were clusters of fans who barracked Beckham viciously every time he received the ball. At the same time, there were plenty of teenage girls still sufficiently charmed by Beckham’s celebrity to wear his Number 23 jersey.
The real problem for American soccer runs much deeper than Beckham’s Will-He-Stay-Or-Will-He-Go routine. Over and above the frisson of interest generated by Beckham’s spat with team-mate Landon Donovan, after the latter told a leading US sports writer that he was none too impressed by Goldenballs’s decision to jet off to AC Milan, few people in this country really care about the game. And Beckham knows that.
It’s always been tough to decide – perhaps because he himself can’t – whether David Beckham is a footballer first and a marketing device second. His disillusionment with MLS, which landed him on a fanfare $250 million deal, stems, I think, for the primacy of his footballing identity. He still has ambition. He wants to play for England in the 2010 World Cup. Fabio Capello has told him that to do so, he has to be playing his football in a league where he’ll be challenged – not one which, at its best, offers the standard of a mid-level English Championship game. Can he really be faulted for acknowledging that reality?
Beckham is not the only major name in the MLS. Chicago Fire has Brian McBride and Cuauhtemoc Blanco, Seattle has Kasey Keller and Freddie Ljungberg. The difference is that for those players, MLS is the vehicle to bring one’s career to an elegant close, not to revive it. That understanding even seems to guide Bob Bradley, the coach of the impressive US national team, whose player selections in the recent FIFA Confederations Cup were dominated by US nationals in European leagues, like Clint Dempsey, Jozy Altidore, Charlie Davies and Tim Howard.
Beckham, then, made an expensive mistake with MLS, no doubt fuelled by his personal vanity and his desire to leave an indelible mark upon a city where celebrity is the most precious of commodities. But a humid, empty Giants Stadium, its artificial turf still streaked by the yard markings of the American football played there in the winter, is a world away from a party at Tom Cruise’s mansion.
Watching Beckham on the field last night, you couldn’t help but wonder whether his secret wish was to fulfil the chant of some of those present, by electing to “f-ck off!” His performance, in a game which resulted in comfortable 3-1 victory for the Galaxy, was technically decent, if unmemorable. He was on the field for seventy minutes, playing some characteristically accurate long passes into the penalty area and taking the corner which led to a spectacular Landon Donovan goal. Unlike Donovan, though, he didn’t play spiritedly. And maybe that is because, when you’ve played for the likes of Real Madrid and Manchester United, it’s hard to feel challenged by a supremely awful team like the New York Red Bulls.
Therein lies the lesson for MLS stategists. Worry less about Beckham, more about how to boost the professional standard of a game which, in America, is played by many and watched by few. When young American players decide they’d rather stay in the MLS instead of venturing to the second divisions of France or Greece – when, in other words, Landon Donovan is the rule, not the exception – something truly meaningful will have occurred.
Written by Ben Cohen
