If you’re looking for a respite from the De Rosario trade controversy, you’ve come to the right place. While Dwayne’s trade to the Red Bulls ate up all the blogosphere oxygen this past weekend, there was another bit of Toronto FC drama that went unnoticed: Aron Winter putting a stop on post-game media access to the TFC dressing room.
Jason de Vos broke the story by tweeting a photo of Winter’s letter to the media detailing how the locker room was a “sacred space” and assuring reporters that players would be available afterward in the gym. Soon after, several journos tweeted about how MLSE was breaking MLS rules on post-match locker-room access.
And they were absolutely right.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
According to the letter of the law, section 6.11.1 of the 2011 MLS Operations Manual dictates that “…the Team dressing rooms must be opened to the media no later than 10 minutes after a game,” and “any violations of these rules may result in fines” (via SBNation). So there’s no debate as to who’s in the right here as far as the rules are concerned.
Furthermore, as de Vos went on to point out, the abrupt letter was a poor PR move on the part of a beleaguered club struggling to maintain good relations with TFC fans, and now local media. Again, no argument there. It seemed as if Aron Winter made the call on his own and management complied with little debate (or investigation) over whether the policy violated MLS standard practice. In any case, Winter and Toronto FC should have handled this decision better.
I’m not going to argue that Toronto FC would suddenly become a world-beating team if the players had a few extra minutes to themselves post game. Nor will I use this post to debate the dubious worth of locker room player quotes in North American sportswriting (that’s for another post). However, I do want to speak to an interesting line in Winter’s press letter, about how part of his mandate was to create a “real football environment” at TFC. Obviously Winter considers an off-limits locker room part of said environment. This may sound like Euro Snob sophistry, especially considering all other North American leagues allow journalists access to locker rooms post game, but I think Winter indirectly touches on a major issue with Major League Soccer’s awkward relationship with North American sports culture.
Within that culture, the league is king. Organizations like the NBA, MLB and NFL guarantee a monopoly on elite talent within their respective sports, with their member clubs providing local consumer entry points. This is why you always hear about the NFL coming to a particular city, rather than a particular football team finally gaining entry to the NFL. This is also why American sports leagues embrace single-entity ownership, franchising, and uniform rules granting generous press access. It’s in the league’s general best interest to allow fans as much access to their product as possible.
By contrast, in European football clubs have all the power, with various leagues providing mere competitive scaffolding. For one, no one nation could ever guarantee to provide the elite soccer league, but individual clubs can certainly compete to be considered among the best in the world. European clubs are highly independent. In theory, your neighbourhood pub team can rise to the Premier League, and Manchester United can end up in the Blue Square Premier League. Managers have limitless power to spend whatever they can on players, and once in the top flight, club representatives decide together how TV rights moneys are to be distributed. For this reason, football fans tend to form passionate allegiances with clubs—who often participate in several domestic and international competitive formats each year—rather than leagues.
MLS however long ago sided with the American sports league approach and rejected non-single entity ownership, open market transfer spending, relegation/promotion, and limited media access. It did this in part to limit player wages via centralized spending, but also to avoid alienating American sports fans used to the franchise league system.
While challenging MLS’ distinctly American league structure will get you labeled a Europhile, there are a few problems worth pointing out. For example MLS, unlike the NHL or the NBA, can never claim a monopoly on elite talent within its sport. The league will never have the LeBron James or Sidney Crosby of soccer, just a LeBron James and Sidney Crosby of MLS. This is one reason why the league still struggles to develop a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing for its member clubs.
In recent years however, with the popular success of TFC and the Seattle Sounders, MLS tried going down the traditional Euro-style club allegiance route, focusing on fans singing together, waving flags and singing songs. Still, there is a sense of artifice in this approach. First, it’s much harder to for fans to naturally forge a strong emotional attachment to a franchise football club whose existence is wholly dependent on and integrated with single-entity MLS. Second, MLS clubs have simply not been around long enough to well up tears like the Yankees or the Montreal Canadiens (teams, by the way, that predate the leagues they currently play in). Toronto FC has done much to foster a strong fan base, it has yet to feel in many ways like a distinct football club.
I’m sure you’re asking yourself what this has to do with press access. Quite a lot, as it turns out. Aron Winter came in to recreate Toronto FC as an autonomous club, first with a distinct tactical approach and playing style with the much-touted 4-3-3 formation, but also by exerting a fair amount of control who gets to speak to the players and when. He’s trying to by-pass the built-in North American league model in order to create an aura of Euro-style independence at the club, to give TFC a sense of identity apart from the rest of the league.
In doing so, Winter is paddling upstream. Players are journeyman in MLS, changing shirts with ease every year. It’s hard to give them a sense of “what it means” to play for a five year-old franchise club as much “owned” in a sense by MLS as MLSE. And if the end result is winning the MLS Cup, one wonders if a "real football environment" is even necessary considering other clubs regularly win it without one. But Winter seems to be going after something bigger, something longer lasting, something you can't simply "brand" by adding a United or a Real to the team, or bringing in half time cheerleaders, or adding real grass. His attempt to do so has tellingly put him in conflict with the league itself, and his failure to make Toronto a "real" club will be as much MLS' as his own.