Urban on LA's Madness; Me on Split Season

Bill Urban wrote a solid item for USSoccerplayers.com wondering what the hell the Los Angeles Galaxy is thinking with their mid-summer scheduling overload. The piece is worth reading for the devilish details of that scheduling and and that only deepens the doubts that arose (sorry to quote myself, but I liked my phrasing; see fourth comment here) after the World Series of Football was announced.

Presuming a Galaxy player won't die in harness this season, Urban concludes his article by floating a concept that has always appealed to me: a split season, one with some summer month, or parts of two, taken off. I wrote up a big, informal proposal to that effect back when I worked on another blog. Even if I would now shrink my proposed mid-summer window, I still think it's a good idea to go this way, even if the mechanics might get tricky.

But, as Urban points out, is that any less tricky than chucking one friendly after another into the middle of the Major League Soccer season?

UPDATE: I'd be hugely remiss if I didn't link to the reflections posted by Laurie, the author of the Los Angeles Galaxy blog for The Offside. She makes a good point about raising the importance of raising the league's profile.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Jeff. Thanks for the link! I think it will be kind of interesting to watch how all this plays out in the next few years. And I'm thinking I agree with you on the split season, although I haven't had the time to wrap my brain around the details.

Btw,you may want to switch the link to my Galaxy blog to the one that actually talks about the Urban article. It currently links the post where I have steam coming out of my ears over MLSnet.:-)

Laurie

Anonymous said...

Jeff:

Thanks for the link; apologies for the ridiculously late acknowledgement. Came across it through DCenters and Laurie's Offside: LA Galaxy.

Split-season seems such a simple solution to the fixture congestion and baking July heat in some MLS cities.

Sadly, we'll probably never see it as simple solutions do not seem to be high on the list on Fifth Avenue...

Bill