Whitecaps ready for MLS after gruelling pre-season
The grind is over for the Vancouver Whitecaps. Well, until it isn't.
Their gruelling pre-season schedule came to an end Wednesday with a scoreless draw against USL side Orange County SC, after which the Caps hit the showers, and then the road to the airport for a flight back home.
“We worked a lot,” said head coach Vanni Sartini. “Yeah, we started Jan. 9 — so that's almost two months ago. We've been three weeks in Spain, we got back, we had the Champions Cup games against Tigres, and we came back here (to California).
“We played every three days (in Marbella). And then in the middle of that we had two very important games and we performed very well against Tigres. I think we did a massive amount of work. We are ready now to get back to Vancouver.”
The curtains are raised on the 2024 regular season in a little more than a week's time when the Caps host Charlotte FC at B.C. Place on March 2. After a day off on Thursday, and a long-awaited opportunity for Sartini to walk the seawall, training will resume, albeit at a much lower intensity.
“Every day is a learning moment, a learning day,” he said Wednesday. “The attitude of the guys has been actually really good. You could see today that the tiredness of the games of two days ago, the fact of the travel and everything ... and maybe in the head there was also the will to get back to Vancouver as soon as possible.”
With the pre-season winding down, the Caps are confident and ready for the new campaign to begin.
If only the same could be said for Major League Soccer.
North America's top tier kicked off its 2024 campaign on Wednesday night, with Inter Miami hosting Real Salt Lake, and the star-studded Herons winning 2-0. But it came under a shadow of a strike, a spat with the U.S. governing body, and bullying behaviour that threatened the longest-running soccer tournament in American history, and weirdly inconsistent messaging around the biggest, most marketable star in the world — one they've banked on elevating the entire league.
First, the strike. Wednesday's game was officiated by replacement referees, after the Professional Soccer Referees Association — the union that represents the officials who work MLS matches — saw its members locked out by the league after they voted overwhelmingly (95.8 per cent) to reject the new collective bargaining agreement put forth by MLS.
The officials are striking for better working conditions and higher pay, and the league seems unwilling to bend on these issues. During his pre-game interview on site in Miami, MLS commissioner Don Garber did his political best to sound exasperated and victimized.
As softball an interview as it was, the fact he had to address it before the showcase game was, frankly embarrassing. This was, after all, the first regular season home opener for Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba, the former Barcelona stars and poster boys for MLS. Or were we not supposed to mention them? Garber has us all confused.
“It's easy and somewhat lazy for reporters to just write about Messi — it's like writing about Taylor Swift,” Garber told Sports Business Journal. “There's so much more here that I think people need to recognize.”
Just don't check the MLS website and count the number of stories about Messi and company, since recognition seems to be heavily titled toward one player.
And then there's the money-motivated stance that's threatened the existence of the U.S. Open Cup, a 111-year-old tournament. The league decided last year it wasn't going to send any teams to the tournament, in direct conflict of the U.S. Soccer Federation's own rules, with the alternative of sending their MLS Next Pro teams instead.
Imagine if the Canadian MLS teams decided to poo-poo the Voyageurs Cup — we would have been deprived of those CPL Cupsets of 2019 and 2021 that ended up changing the trajectory of the entire Whitecaps organization. As embarrassing and painful as it was, it put the franchise on track to win the past two Canadian crowns, trophies that now sit in the club's lore.
MLS has since been dragged into putting up eight teams, at last count, to participate in the tournament, but continues to lament the schedule congestion it causes. Let's not forget that the schedule congestion is a direct result of the invention of the Leagues Cup, a money-making venture between Liga MX and MLS that is widely seen as a precursor to a North American-wide league.
So until the league is done waffling, you can find Sartini on the seawall.
“It's beautiful to see different places in the world,” he said Wednesday, “but there's no place like home.”