ARACE
It’d be like some amalgamation of “Major League” and “Dodgeball,” and they just might do it. The last team that Major League Soccer wants to see host the MLS Cup final just might beat the best team the league can buy. It’d be mind-blowing. But the machine won. Toronto FC beat the Crew 1-0 and won the Eastern Conference championship at BMO Field. It might have been the last game of import the Crew ever plays on behalf of the city that served as the league’s
cradle. The franchise appears headed to Austin in 2019, and its trip south is gaining steam.
Earlier in the day, MLS commissioner Don Garber addressed the Dealmakers in Sports conference, hosted by Sports Business Daily, in New York.
“In Columbus, we’ve been struggling in a wide variety of metrics that matter … and that’s been a problem for us for a long time.”
Garber says nothing for weeks on end, and then he says that, on the day the Crew plays in Toronto.
To steal a line from Charlie Pierce of
Esquire, MLS appears to be about three fedoras short of being the Gambino family. If you’re San Antonio, you have to be looking up the definition of racketeering right about now.
The league announced that Nashville, Sacramento, Cincinnati and Detroit are the finalists for two expansion franchises. The way it looks from this corner seat at Hendoc’s, Nashville and Sacramento get this year’s bids, the Midwest is cleared with a Crew move to Austin, and Cincinnati and Detroit get the nod next year.
Hence Garber’s (reiterated) message as a Dealmaker in Sports:
Columbus has “been struggling in a wide variety of metrics that matter.”
That is the essence of the rebranding. The metrics are what Garber says they are. Toronto’s $6 million man, Michael Bradley, toed that company line after the first leg of the conference final in Columbus last week.
Alexi Lalas managed to say the very same thing, with great emotion — and without using the word “metrics” (bravo!) — during the pregame show Wednesday night. What is real is what the company says it is. The truth is immaterial.
City representatives didn’t offer any concrete solutions? No, they offered three parcels of land, as it turns out, and the Schottenstein family offered a fourth. The problem is, the league defines a “concrete solution” as standing down, allowing a move to Austin and “bidding” for an expansion team it will have no prayer of acquiring.
Over these past six weeks, I’ve taken a postseason tour. It started at Land Grant Brewing, where Crew fans painted #SaveTheCrew signs out in the back garage, continued at Endeavor Brewing, where the #SaveTheCrew movement does its organizing, and ended at Hendoc’s, where the Hudson Street Hooligans sang “Forever, Columbus ’til I Die” when the final whistle sounded on what is probably the end of an era.
#SaveTheCrew organizer Morgan Hughes and the thousands who are committed to movement — many of whom bused to Toronto for the game — are not done yet, though. They like to say they haven’t even started yet. Massive doesn’t move.