An email I just finished writing to a friend overseas.

Today Modern Football killed my team.


Just a note here, on a morning when fully-corporatized, "branded" modern soccer takes another big leap forward. It's an interesting case, not at all unpredictable to those paying attention to what goes on in the game, and yet still really disturbing when it happens to you and your team.

Since the league here started in 1995, I have been supporting the New York-based (New Jersey-based, in truth) team, the Metrostars. This was supposed to be the marquee franchise, the showpiece team of the new league - but without repeating the mistakes of the Cosmos, whose unchecked spending turned soccer into a brief fad but basically bankrupted the whole NASL. The New York area is full of soccer fans of all sorts, and there were great crowds at the start (the second game I went to, on a hot July Saturday in 1996, drew 53,000+) for a mediocre product; a lot of the casual fans kept coming for a time, but a long stretch of mismanagement, comical play, and all-around buffoonery drove them off. 1999 was the nadir; the German newspaper Bild called us "the worst team in the world" when Mattheus announced he was coming to us, and they weren't far off. There are far too many stories about 1999 to go into here; it was just one of those seasons in which we would have been relegated by the halfway point - if there was relegation in the US. There isn't - instead, teams are given a chance to get better; we did, but only to the level of mediocrity. Mediocrity doesn't really cut it in the NY market, and our original owners - the giant fiber optic corporation Metromedia (hence "Metrostars") bailed. We were picked up by AEG, another giant corporation which at one point owned 5 of the 10 MLS teams; AEG is run by a reclusive, Republican-fundamentalist billionaire (with a strange belief in soccer, apparently), and its business is entertainment - cinemas and concert facilities, generally. We needed a stadium in the worst way, playing in an 80,000 seat facility that makes even 20,000 crowds look tiny; AEG wanted a foothold in the NYC concert market. Devoting scant real resources to the team, AEG tried to coax the state of NJ into funding a new stadium (one we've been hearing about since 1996), and then finally, put some money into the deal themselves, after years of hold ups. As I write, no ground has yet been broken.

Last week I was passed along some hush-hush info, that AEG was about to sell the team for $30 million+ to Red Bull; Red Bull has already bought their hometown team, SV Salzburg, and renamed them "Red Bull Salzburg", changing the colors to Red Bull colors, and erasing 70 years of history at the stroke of a pen. Tens of thousands of petitions and numerous protests meant nothing to them then. Now the same thing was about to happen here. This is real important money to the league here, to soccer in the US, but especially to AEG. The news broke a couple days ago here, and this morning, it's being made official. After 10 years, there's no more "Metrostars". It is Red Bull New York - playing in NJ of course, first and foremost a branding effort for a can of sugar and caffeine. What a few hundred diehards, and several tens of thousands of casual fans, slowly built dies without a sound.

The experience of being a "Metros" supporter, perhaps more than that of any other team in the US, has long been thankless, heartbreaking, painful; only occasionally is there some glimmer of light. Today there is a group of somewhere between 200-400 real diehards, many of whom have been around since 1995; many, many have found better things to do with their time. Some look at this as a fresh start, with a "committed owner"; others are revolted by the thought of giving up what "tradition" there was, no matter how meager; still others refuse to be made into a branding tool. It's a truly complex situation. "Metrostars", after all, was born out of the corporate world as well, however the few fans that cared were able to gradually wrest some group meaning out of the word "Metro" (the de rigeur name), and even Metromedia never forced supporters into becoming fiber optic salesmen as they cheered. They were far too neglectful and clueless to be capable of that. Red Bull is anything but neglectful of their "brand".

Well, that's that. It's done. As a few hundred supporters who will get run over by the Red Bull New York train without a moment's hesitation, we're each considering whether to walk away entirely, sign on, or take some symbolic other option. As I mentioned above, this is not at all out of line with where the sport has been going - just the next big step. Modern football.


Michael