Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Our Field of Dreams.


Last weekend’s 2-0 loss to Galaxy underlined that the San Jose Earthquakes 2011 season hasn’t quite turned out as we all had hoped.  Coming into this season everybody was expecting the Quakes team to make the playoffs: the fans came to the Great Deluge opener in an optimistic frame of mind after the 2010 playoffs, and the club had already printed a playoff ticket in our season ticket packs, the price of which would be refunded if we didn’t.  Now, the Quakes are mired in a twelve game winless streak, and the team is running out of games in which to achieve that goal.  The fans are disappointed and overwrought: some of us (not me you understand) are even starting to hear voices:  “Ease our pain”.


The fans’ support for the players remains as strong as ever.  Just couple of weeks ago, in the face of some questionable refereeing decisions, The Casbah supporters group stepped up with a raffle to pay the fines of Bobby Burling and Brad Ring.  However, recent surveys of the usual internet soccer sites indicates that support for the club’s financial game plan, and some of the coaching decisions are being increasingly questioned; some fans are becoming downright restless.  There is, however, one topic on which the fans, and their aching backs, are completely unified: the need for a new stadium - “If you build it, we will come”.

If the Earthquakes are to remain a financially viable MLS club, they’ll have to retain their fans, but many are losing patience as we close out the fourth season of Quakes 2.0 with no new stadium on the horizon.  In fact, all we have is a horizon – a big, gray, expanse of flat concrete horizon with sweeping views of Lowe’s and the In-N-Out Burger - and it’s been utterly dormant for the past six months.  From where I sit, I can see the club already has three of the four things we’ll need for a successful new stadium: a bunch of fans, a team and a design, the missing component being funding.

The Fans: Yes, I list the fans ahead of the team; it’s their participation that helped make San Jose soccer city USA after all.  Without the fan base, MLS would not have returned the team to San Jose in 2008 and the Quakes team already has two established supporters groups: the Casbah and the 1906 Ultras.  Over forty thousand vocal fans turned out for the New York Red Bulls game, and since most were wearing Earthquakes or Clash gear I have to assume they weren’t just there for the lavish post-game fireworks.  The fan base has now been proven at the relatively luxurious Stanford stadium, and perhaps the three consecutive sell outs at Buck Shaw since then is no coincidence.

The Team: The Quakes team has history – the first MLS game ever played was a 1-0 victory for the San Jose Clash over DC United in 1996.  The current team roster has local heroes in Wondolowski and Beitashour, wily veterans in Corrales and Convey, and a gaggle of promising youngsters.  I could get behind an inexperienced team if I thought that in a couple of years they would be settled and cohesive.  Wouldn’t it be fascinating to watch a talented team being assembled while we survey a new stadium rising from the ground?  It would be worth enduring these dry spells with the hope of successful seasons when the new stadium is inaugurated. 

The Design: The current stadium design has three sides, but I wish it were four – Stanford won me over to an enclosed stadium with its swirling atmospheric fan noise.  For the real dreamers among us, check out the Stadium Porn website (it’s not what you might think!) for a plethora of new football stadiums; it will implant huge ‘stadium-envy’ in your psyche.  At least the Quakes have already installed the Nutrilite Training Facility; the practice field has lush green turf, but in keeping with the immediate environment it has no facilities and is surrounded by a eight foot razor wire fence reminiscent of ‘Escape to Victory (I hear Lieutenant Burling has started a tunnel and should reach In-N-Out by Tuesday). 

The Funding: I wish I were extravagantly wealthy - and believe me if I were, the Nerd-O-Dome would already be built.  I’ve already posted my own wish list of stadium facilities should my California Mega Millions lottery numbers win...there’s that voice again: "If my numbers come up - I will build it", and I have an inexplicable urge to pull up some corn.   The current stadium cost estimates are $40-60M, conservative compared to the $200M for the fabulous lines of Livestrong Park, but seems to be in keeping with the small market frame of mind of the Earthquakes organization described by Robert Jonas earlier this week.  Pending my huge, but improbable, lottery win I often find myself pondering where I might find a spare couple of hundred million dollars.  If only we lived in a part of the country with some of the richest companies in the world who might sponsor such a stadium. 


But wait a minute…is this not Silicon Valley?  Doesn’t Apple have a bigger stash of cash ($75B) than the US Treasury?  The whole stadium would barely make a dent in their stash, and what can anyone possibly do with $75B that they couldn’t do with $74.8B?  I digress.  The stadium would be known as The Apple Core, The Big Apple, or if that’s a little to NY for our taste, The Bigger and Better Apple – heck, even The MacBuck Shaw (a nod to our heritage).  Alternatively we could consider Google:  the team would play in the Google-plex, and the fans would be androids (too nerdy?).  Then there’s Facebook or Twitter: the stadium would be catered by the Iz-It Hawaiian food truck, supplying hungry fans with their famous ‘Spammers’ spam musubi.  Finally: Yahooligans anyone?  Er, maybe not.

Clearly crazed by too much diet soda and cheesy Cheetos, I’m just throwing out some off-the-wall ideas to get the Quakes stadium built.  I’m writing as a fan whose (perhaps naive) priorities for building a new stadium are related to soccer and its diehard fans rather than bringing a hugely profitable real estate development deal to fruition.  If the Quakes pockets aren’t deep enough, then the fans would like them to open an additional wallet, and quickly.  In the short term, the continued and increasing interest in MLS will surely provide a return on immediate stadium investment, with profits generated by willing fans.  In the longer term, the success of the stadium will generate the momentum for the proposed real estate development, and the early investment will be paid back many times over. 

As we reach the end of this arduous season the fans could definitely use some light at the end of the players’ tunnel, as it were - it’s time to end this restless nightmare and build our own field of dreams.  “...they'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the lines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces.  Oh... people 
will come, Lew. People will most definitely come”.


Also appearing at CenterlineSoccer.com here.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Warren Barton Decoder.

The Lads
Early night tonight – I’ve got to get up for the opening weekend of the English Premier League at 6:30 AM.  I’ll brew the coffee (extra strong espresso), butter the toasted bread (just one shade lighter than charcoal) and tune into Fox Soccer Channel to watch Warren Barton and Christian Miles present their EPL preview show. 

I realize that it’s early in the season, and my ear still won’t be tuned in yet to decipher Barton’s cockney accent.  Typical of many of his ilk (English ex-player turned pundit) there will also be an almost complete lack of adverbs (“The lad’s done brilliant”) and any word that begins with an ‘h’ will have said letter dropped.  

Easing our way into the EPL season, here’s a handy guide to make sense of a few of the key words Barton will use throughout the opening show:

Bow                      Ball                       “Drogba needed to do a better job weave the bow”
Chew/See             Chelsea                “Chew sees ‘ome opener at the Bridge”
Done                     Did                      “The lad’s done brilliant”
Fervor                   Further                “(H)'olden should ‘ave been fervor down the field”
Fick                      Thick                    “'Lamps is really in the fick of it”
Fings                     Things                  “Fings aren't going well for the youngster”
Free                      Three                   “Free goals to nil in the season opener”
Frou                     Through                “A luvverly pass frou to the forward”     
Furred                  Third                     “That’s his furred shot on gow”            
Gow                     Goal                      “Another shot went wide of the gow”
Veer                      Their/They're        “Veer wide open on the back line”
Weave                  With                     “Wenger’s going weave a Four-Free-Free today”
Weaver                 Whether               “I dunno weaver he saw it”
Weld                     World                   “Vuvuzelas really spoiled the Weld Cup for me”

Just by listening for a few key words in the home opener, more complex constructions will quickly be mastered by the end of the month:
   “Chew see scored free times in veer ‘ome win; Lamps done brilliant, always in the fick
    of things, weave the bow in the back of the net twice”.

Now, if we could just get subtitles for Kenny Dalglish’s post-match press conferences...


Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Managing Expectations

I screwed up at work this week.  I screwed up badly.  I had limited resources and in the ensuing hustle to get my task done a couple of reagents were switched in the research samples I was preparing; the QC failed, and the data I got was meaningless.  I scrambled to schedule the repeat in a timely fashion, which kept my manager happy, and to my utmost relief no-one screamed “Fire that nerd!” 

I thought back to Saturday’s game against DC United, after which I heard “Fire Yallop”, “Yallop sucks” and “Hire Bradley”.  Given the fans’ proximity to the field, I had no doubt that Frank, the coaches and the players all heard the calls hurled in his direction after the 2-0 loss. Given the limited resources Yallop had available on Saturday, going into the DC game I wasn't expecting much from the team in terms of cohesiveness.  So when the team took a 2-0 loss, I accepted it much more easily than the late equalizers and meltdowns I’d seen earlier in the season.  My acceptance of this game’s result really came down to the team’s performance matching my pre-defined expectations.

So what are my expectations for the 2011 San Jose Earthquakes?  After my failure at work I found myself without any numbers to crunch, and worked my mad data analysis skills on another metric: MLS team salary. On the ESPN web site I found my data set: the list of average MLS team salaries.  I fired up the spreadsheet and sorted out the eighteen teams into the order of their average salary.  My working hypothesis was that teams’ performance (points) is directly related to their average salary ($).  Forgive me – Nerdy by name, nerdy by nature. 
Extremely dodgy statistical data.
Leading the pack are New York and LA, with their average salary skewed by the number of highly paid DPs on their squads, and both of these teams are well on their way to the playoffs – so far so good with my hypothesis.  Sorting the list based on salary (in blue) the Quakes would be expected to be the third worst team in the league: 16th of 18 teams.  In fact, if the teams are ranked by points obtained (08/02/2011; in pink) then the Quakes rank 13th out of the 18 teams – so they’re playing somewhat better than might be expected based on their salary.   

My “$$$=points” hypothesis really took a beating when I looked at the under- and over-performing MLS teams.  I can only imagine how unfulfilled the Chicago and Toronto fans must be feeling, paying their players the 3rd and 4th highest average wage, and yet only ranking 16th and 17th in points order.  FC Dallas and Colorado are by far the best value for money, and as MLS Champions I now feel compelled to do further research to discover how the Rapids achieve such success with an average salary budget only $5K more than that of the Quakes.  But isn’t that the nature of true research?  The scientist sets out on the quest for an answer, only to raise several more questions along the way.   

Dodgy salary statistics aside, going into the season everybody was expecting the Quakes team to make the playoffs: the fans came to the Great Deluge opener in an optimistic frame of mind after the 2010 playoffs, and the club had already printed a playoff ticket in our season ticket packs, the price of which would be refunded if we didn’t.  With the loss to DC our playoff chances diminished, and the team is running out of games to achieve that goal.  This week I heard the fans warming up their vocal chords to let the manager and the organization know that our expectations are not being met.