Could Xolos v Seattle become a regular fixture? / Photo: Brandon Bleek
by Manly Stones
MLS officials thought they had found a new way to stem the tide of thumpings by Liga Mx in the CONCACAF Champions League.
After the humiliation of losing all four quarter finals to Liga Mx sides, MLS officials held an emergency meeting to address the lack of progress in improving playing standards.
Matters were thought to be improving after Montreal’s impressive run to last year’s CONCACAF Cup Final but the 0-4 whitewash in 2016 proved otherwise. LA Galaxy were thumped 4-0 on aggregate by Santos Laguna and overall the MLS clubs suffered a 15-5 aggregate loss with LA Galaxy failing to score and Sounders FC conceding 5 in two games.
Soon off the meeting agenda were two old themes, the impracticality of changing the CCL schedule just to suit MLS sides and the traditional resistance to any discussion on changing to the FIFA calendar. At that point new outside the box thinking, was called for.
The discussion then hit upon a new idea, new perhaps for soccer but ages old for the USA. If you can’t get the local talent to achieve a task, import people who can from Mexico. Thus the idea was born to take the concept of importing good Mexican players to its logical extent – inviting entire Mexican clubs to join MLS.
The first plan was to simply bribe the best sides to cross over to MLS in an audacious raid but that was regarded as too expensive and destined to failure. After all, why would giant clubs like Club America and Cruz Azul cross over into an easier league when they can win a bigger one? Any email with the initials MLS in the body apparently go straight to the junk folder at Chivas de Guadalajara.
So geography was the next determinant with Tijuana Xolos, Monterrey and Tigres the closest sides to the American border in the Primera Liga. The latter two were said by a source to have shown no interest but unsurprisingly there was a more positive reaction from Tijuana, a club already has close links with the United States.
There is a family vibe at Xolos games
Can Xolos become America’s Team?
A survey recently conducted estimated that over 1/3 of their fans travel regularly across from the USA to attend games at the Estadio Caliente and the General Manager Roberto Cornejo lives in San Diego.
The club has been making several attempts to increase media coverage in the USA even going so far as to appoint an English language media department led by Ivan Orozco who was born in the USA and says he barely speaks Spanish.
At Xolos home games, English is widely heard and dollars can be spent at all the concession stands inside and outside the stadium. The feel around the tailgate is more like an NFL family atmosphere than any idea Americans would have of a game in Central America.
Tijuana was regarded as a necessary acquisition for the plan and the bare minimum for it to proceed.
However, MLS officials were surprised when out of the blue another club showed interest.
FC Juárez compete in the town of Ciudad Juárez, and currently play their football in the Ascenso, Mexico’s Second Division. (Confusingly the Liga Segunda is below this division).
The club was only founded in 2015 and in June 7 of that year, it was officially announced that FC Juárez or los Bravos would play in Ascenso MX starting in the Apertura 2015 season. The club has therefore few traditional roots in the Mexican league structure. They play at the Estadio Olímpico Benito Juárez
Like Xolos, they are geographically very isolated from other Mexican sides but have close ties across the US border. Together with the areas surrounding Juarez and El Paso, the area forms the El Paso–Juárez<conurbation, the second largest bi-national metropolitan area along the Mexico/United States border. It is coincidentally second only to the San Diego–Tijuana
The plan has some major additional bonuses for Major League Soccer.
It launches MLS in both San Diego and El Paso, two large cities with no current top class soccer and a sizable market for it, but a market not quite economically sufficient to support an MLS side on the US side of the border alone.
Furthermore, there are instant rivalries with Tijuana forming a California derby of sorts with LA Galaxy, with talk of one of the derby games actually being played in San Diego. El Paso is just 675 miles from Houston and surprisingly even nearer to both Denver and Dallas. The border city is just 100 miles further from Denver than Salt Lake, current ‘local’ rivals of the Colorado Rapids.
The third advantage is that outreach into the Hispanic community. There were over 22 million crossings of the El Paso/Juarez four border points in 2008 and soccer would be a great way to further unite the communities. Additionally the economic quality of Juarez residents is very high. It is a highly literate city with 97.3% of people above 15 years old able to read and write, far higher than Texas itself, where outside the main cities, the place is full of yokels and rednecks who still point at planes.
There is already a footballing link, US U23 international Alonso Hernández was born in El Paso but plays for Juarez.
The move into MLS is not new however but the culmination of a long held dream come true for Juarez owners MountainStar Sports Group who as long ago as 2014, expressed their desire for an MLS team in El Paso.
In an article in BallPark Digest in 2014, it was revealed that MountainStar SG President Alan Ledford had met with MLS.
“The ownership group has had several very good meetings with MLS, including meeting on two occasions with Don Garber, the League’s commissioner. This is the first step in a very long process, and we will continue to pursue all avenues available to urge MLS to consider the El Paso region as a viable expansion market,” said Ledford at the time.
“The ownership group is committed to furthering its pursuit and purchase of a Major League Soccer team for El Paso and the region, but strong and consistent support from the community as well as from El Paso’s public officials and the business leadership is critical to this endeavor.”
The bid has civic support that would put Miami to shame. In the same article, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser added:
“I have had several meetings with members of the ownership group and made it clear that they have my support, as long as the process is transparent and inclusive.
“As a city, we can show Major League Soccer that we will bring unique attributes to the League and can compete very effectively, both geographically and economically, with anybody. In my view, we would be a great market for MLS. I think our community will get engaged in this process and MLS will know that we mean business.”
Although Garber had apparently forgotten all about El Paso’s interest, believing that there already too many teams not near enough Manhattan, the approach from Juarez prompted his assistant Dave Shortsleeves to reopen the file.
San Diego Mayor Faulconer dons his Xolos shirt as the Tijuana club seeks to increase its footprint across the border
San Diego Union Tribune
The plan to announce both additions was well underway with assurances being sought in San Diego too about civic and corporate support.
San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer had already done several press events with the Xolos and is said to regard the Tijuana club as a regional team encompassing San Diego, telling the San Diego Union Tribune in 2015:
“We are not two separate cities. We are one region, and the Xolos are the team of the region.”
He tried on his new red jersey for the cameras at that press conference in San Diego. In addition to that, the vacuum that would be created by the San Diego Chargers taking their astronaut rugby team to LA created a vacuum that the Xolos thought they could fill.
Having been assured of civic and corporate support for both concepts, the idea was set to be announced in late 2016. It has long been a desire of MLS to gain the attention of the Hispanic community and the deal with Univision to show games on Friday nights has cemented that progress. The twin move was set to finally complete the task of bringing the attention of Mexican-Americans to MLS in the most audacious way.
Then trouble loomed from an unexpected source. Donald Trump’s campaign for US Presidency was initially seen as a joke by most people, even the devout Republicans at MLS HQ.
Major League Soccer officials, like the rest of America, was under the impression that if you say enough stupid stuff, people will eventually think you are an idiot, a concept known at MLS as ‘the Klinsmann rule‘.
Donald Trump’s campaign has belied that assumption and now he seems set to become the President of the United States and it seems no-one, or at least no man, can stop him. That mattered little to MLS until one of Trump’s campaign promises set the alarm bells ringing.
Trump promised to build a massive wall between the USA and Mexico which would make it impossible for MLS sides and their fans to travel into Tijuana or Juarez on a regular basis, and even harder for those clubs to play away games.
MLS was also worried that Muslim fans would have trouble regaining entry to the USA given Trump’s other promise to stop all Muslims immigrating to the USA. That would have been a PR nightmare for the league and would pose difficulties with New York City’s Saudi ownership who, like all Saudi billionaires, care really really deeply about the plight of poorer Muslims across the world.
Given how PC MLS can be, it was not easy to get a response from them. Others were more forthcoming.
“Trump is an idiot and his moronic plan would really screw over the Xolos,” said Tijuana club GM Cornejo speaking on condition of publicity.
“We try so hard to be nice to everybody down here and foster racial harmony, then this jackass comes along. Better the devil you know than the fruitbat you don’t know,” he added mystically while seemingly putting his cigar out on a laminated membership card with a picture of an elephant.
The Trump campaign issued this PR photo to dispel rumors about his small hands.
MLS officials did try to contact Trump’s campaign secretly to verify if exceptions would be made for soccer fixtures under his Presidency.
To their surprise, the candidate and mogul replied in an email which said:
“I am the best at soccer. Soccer players love me. I have better hair than Don Garber.
“Jurgen Klinsmann loves me. He wants Donald Trump to coach Germany. Then Germany would win the World Cup. Germans also love me. Except Angela Merkel. Only the Germans would vote for a face like that.
“I can play all positions at soccer. Except goalkeeper. Because I have tiny hands. But I am not obsessed by it,” he clarified.
In exasperation, MLS officials tried to get clarification on one small point from Trump, replying in a terse email asking merely “are you completely insane?”
Another Trump aide later replied:
“Possibly we could exempt you but it might take a bit of arm twisting. We are the best arm twisters. Ask that Breitbart woman.”
Garber and MLS’s Canadian President Mark ‘the Mountie’ Abbott are now nervously awaiting the outcome of the US election to see if all America has gone bonkers or it is just the Republican Party. This also proves that Canadians can actually be presidents which is good news for Ted Cruz and his brother Tom.
Meanwhile in Tijuana, they are prepared to be patient:
“It’s not like LA Galaxy are getting any better,” Cornejo mused. “Their average age will soon be higher than the Golden Girls. We can wait as long as it takes Steve Gerrard to make a box-to-box sprint.”
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