I wait, not with breathless anticipation, but mild curiosity for the clock to strike five today. That will mark the supposed deadline for the supposed application process to become Major League Soccer's supposed 17th and 18th franchises (you need to be put a "supposed" before most things MLS does. A Keatsian enterprise, their rules are writ on water, and Dubuque or Waterbury could waltz in with a billionaire next week and waltz out with a team.)

With Philly and Seattle already onboard for the next couple seasons, and up to 8 cities vying for the next two spots, expansion has become the MLS geek's white-hot topic.
More Canadian teams!
No more Canadian teams!
------ is a Soccer City, which deserves a team above all others!
Etc.

It's a bit tiresome once you've heard the arguments the first thirty times, and completely, totally ineffectual on top of that. As Bill Archer notes in the Bigsoccer blogs.

As for me, over the next couple hours I'll be waiting to see if pro club soccer - in its charmingly hinky MLS form - has a shot at returning to the NYC area after a five-year absence, likely in the form of a new club run by the NY Mets.

I would like that.

IF it's the picture of best-practices among MLS organizations; avoiding the missteps of teams past and present, taking full advantage of where it is - one of the greatest soccer areas in the world.
IF it's an organization with symbolism and integrity of its own, not just a means to cross-promote a baseball team, a foreign team, or some crappy product.
IF it aims to represent the city and the area in some meaningful, inclusive way.
And IF the soda ad in NJ hasn't already run its course by then.

I've been an MLS fan, observer and critic to varying degrees over the past 13 years, a decade of that spent supporting the late, not-so-great Metros. It was a open-top bus tour of hell in a handbasket. Yet it was great fun, shared with some great people, and I cherish a lot of memories from that time.

A few years back, I was anxious to seize some of the fame and fortune that comes with academically-inclined niche sports blogging. I was also enamored with how a team so dysfunctional, forgotten and pathetically misshapen could still be funny, galvanizing and occasionally meaningful. I started The Metrologist. Impeccable sense of timing I had there. Within months the taurine takeover had occurred. With the hijacking of the name and identity, all the shaky, make-believe pretense of it being a "club" was obliterated. And then my little baby blog became the strangest of all creatures - a fan blog whose constant underlying assertion was that my team had to lose, had to fail, had to collapse for it to be saved. That was my stance.

It still is. It just isn't very much fun to write about, not for very long, anyway.

Thus the Metrologist, sadly, has gone by the wayside. The lack of posts in a year should have told you that. I've got one more superbly self-indulgent yet useful and informative M'gist effort left in me, and I'll take care of that in the coming days.

Also diminished, my appetite for dissertating on the message boards. Having said my piece too many times, having grown enough wisdom and lost the time to skirmish around and around and around with people speaking a fundamentally different language, I stay out of the mire now. Mostly. There isn't much else for me to say now besides this; RB out, or NYC2 in. Whichever comes first. That's where you'll find me. And here, of course. Where I find it hard to keep my mouth shut.

So we wait, curious but not exactly hopeful. Because what happens next, and what happens in the years to come, is going to be mostly out of our hands. Why get agitated? Either we get a couple more months of waiting, wondering and reading the tea leaves before another deadline day, or we go back to our regularly scheduled program of not caring much what the hell happens in the world of MLS. Along with most of the area and most of the country. There isn't much in between. In the meantime we hold on to what money we're lucky to have now, spend it on teams and entities that, however imperfect, take seriously the idea that as soccer clubs they mean culture, locality, membership and tradition.

In the meantime, here's just a couple of my favorite Metrologist posts, and my post here, written shortly after MLS swapped the likes of its diehards for a joking experiment.

Labels: Metro, MLS, NYC2, soccer