The Mysterious Case of Barca Miami
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Thursday, 05 March 2009 12:30
A few weeks back, in this very space, I talked about to how it seemed to me that having a big foreign club like Barcelona become a member of MLS carried with it more problems than it was worth.

I was virtually alone in the sea of "...and having Barcelona in MLS will of course give the league a tremendous boost" happy talk from every soccer writer in the country.

Not one of these writers ever bothered to explain exactly what it was that having someone's farm club in our purportedly "Major" league did besides stamp "MINOR LEAGUE" across our collective forehead.

Everyone seemed to feel that these wonderful benefits were so self-evident, so glaringly obvious, that it wasn't necessary to spell them out. I pointed out that, among other things, a foreign outfit with no real vested interest in the long term success of MLS could pack up and leave any time a board of directors 5000 miles away decided they were tired of the thing.

For expressing this particular viewpoint I was roundly and furiously castigated by a goodly number of prospective Miami fans. These people explained to me sometimes using words that I'll wager they never use in front of their mothers, that such a thing was impossible.

Yet here we are on Day Two AB (after Barca Miami) and it looks a lot like Barcelona didn't even wait for the deal to go a little sour before bailing out; they bailed out before it ever even began.

What's even more interesting is that, as their recent non-partner Marcelo Claure is now explaining, Barca wasn't planning on being an equal partner or even a minority investor.

Rather, they intended all along to be a non-investor, limiting their involvement to "technical expertise, players, coaches, and professional services".

Claure was supposed to come up with the $40 million all by himself.

So Barca claiming that they didn't want to spend the money right now is a pretty hollow excuse. If all they had over here was some people, then whenever they felt the thing wasn't working out all it would have cost them to get out was a handful of plane tickets.

Surely they would have had other places to stick the two or three coaches involved, and the players would have been under contract to MLS, not them. Shoot, they could even skip out on their office space rent. Let's see some landlord try to collect on a broken lease suit in Spain.

The stadium lease?

It was being offered rent free. You don't even have to pack up a U-Haul at 3 a.m. and drive out of the lot with your lights off to beat that one. Just stop by and drop off the key.

If anyone was going to be in trouble on any of this it was going to be Claure.

Which brings me to an interview spotted by Soccerlens yesterday. It's a fascinating after-the-fact explanation offered by the guy who—incredibly, since it was going to be his money—seems to have been the last to know what was going on.

His main thesis? IT'S ALL DAVID BECKHAM'S FAULT. We should have guessed, right?

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