Agreeing and disagreeing with Ivan Gazidis

Part 1 -- Agreement:

Interestingly astute comments from Ivan Gazidis regarding the influx of South American talent being the story of MLS this year, rather than the league becoming Beckham League Soccer.

I find this very encouraging. Throwing US monies at aging international stars? We've seen that story and know how it ends. Investing in a wealth of talent in Central and South America is cheaper and has a more fundamental impact on the quality of play.

Let's be honest: while big name transfers will get MLS some play in certain media cycles, there is a core group of soccer-hungry, soccer-literate fans that MLS struggles to engage, primarily because the technical skill and quality of play is frequently poor. With properly researched scouting, MLS can have technically gifted South American players who you can feature in the league and improve that reputation, and do so with less investment and less risk.


Part 2 - Disagreement

As for Gazidis's comment:

"To me it represents a significant failure on our part that, outside of perhaps our goalkeepers, we really haven't produced a truly world class player," Gazidis said.

I think that is harsh at best. First, it depends heavily on your definition of "world class." For me, that means a player that could step into any side in the world--not always the first XI, but certainly into the first team. Have we created a field player in that class? I'd agree that we probably haven't--though I still believe Adu and Altidore may be the first in that category over the next 4-5 years as they grow into the prime of their careers.

Is that, however, a "significant failure" for a side that basically was an also-ran in international football as recently as 1990? While he had some faults, I always appreciated Bruce Arena's sufficiently long view on this sort of thing. It takes time to build world class athletes in any sport, and you can't totally ignore a sport for decades and then expect to have top class performers in a few years.

The success of DeMarcus Beasley, Clint Dempsey, Carlos Bocanegra and others is significant and shouldn't be ignored. An American playing top flight football in major European leagues no longer bears mentioning, as it did when Claudio Reyna was customarily called "Captain America" by EPL announcers because he was such a novelty.

It may take a long time to have world class players in the top flight leagues, but we are clearly taking steps in the right direction.