LA Galaxy are heading to Asia at the beginning of March for a tour that will include stops in Seoul and Shanghai.
Soccerphile.com had a chance to exchange a few e-mails with the owner of the California club -Alexei Lalas.
Lalas, who played 96 times for the US National Team, was, of course, the man behind the David Beckham transfer.
Is Asia important to LA Galaxy’s plans to become a seriously big club?
You can't be in business and ignore the Asia markets. Asia holds huge potential for clubs hoping to expand their brand and business. There is incredible interests in the sport, the teams and the players. Our hope is that when someone in places like Korea, Japan or China thinks about American soccer, they think about the Galaxy. Right now we have the unique opportunity to expose the Galaxy brand to million of potential fans and ultimately customers, and we're not going to waste it.
How can Galaxy maintain the same sort of profile when Beckham retires/leaves?
David is completely unique. His ability to produce on the field, create interest and and generate business off it, is hard to find.
We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But we're thinking of our next big move. We've set the bar pretty high with David but there will be other stars.
Can Beckham ever repay the investment made in him?
He already has. Some of it is quantifiable and some of it isn't. But there is definitely a method to any perceived madness when it comes to the amount we have invested.
You will play FC Seoul in March...
We're excited to come back to Seoul, Korea. The Galaxy played there in 2003 and it was a great experience on and off the field. It will be the first trip to Seoul of many of our players, including David Beckham, and they are looking forward to experiencing the wonderful football and culture of the country.
What about Beckham is different that the public’s preconceptions? What about him surprised you?
Apart from his family, soccer is really what he cares about the most. He understands the machine that swirls around him and he recognizes the responsibility that comes with it. Class player, class guy.
At first glance, the MLS has many similarities to the Korean league –same number of teams, similar attendances and no promotion/relegation. The last point is the subject of debate in Korea. How about the US? Can a league be strong without promotion and relegation?
There will not be promotion and relegation in MLS anytime soon. We are in sport that is still striving to succeed and our investors have enough to worry about without having to worry about their team not even playing in the highest division.
What is the next step for the MLS to continue its development?
Expansion and more stadiums. At some point we also are going to have to figure out a way to play mid-week games. Our TV rating must increase. I think all of this comes over time, but we need to be pushing at an accelerated rate in order to continue to attract business. We cannot continually rely on being the sport of tomorrow, eventually we have to transition into the sport of today.
What is one (or more) thing that you think the MLS could teach other leagues?
A realistic business plan and a willingness to stick to it are crucial. At times it's painful but it enables you to survive long enough to thrive.
There are few (if any) US players playing professionally in Asia? Is there a reason for this?
I don't think that the Asian leagues look at American players as quality.
LA Galaxy will take part in a pan-pacific tournament with J-League and A-League teams. What is the purpose of this and why those leagues?
It's a league initiative but I think it's wonderful to bring teams from all the regions together. The more integration and competition we can have the better for all league. We love playing against teams from other countries and leagues. It's a great way to advertise your sport a
The J-League started at around the same time as MLS and has become a real success story. Are there lessons that the MLS, or Galaxy, has learned from Japan?
It doesn't happen overnight and you can't build a league with old players looking for a vacation and a big paycheck.
LA Galaxy recently played in Australia and New Zealand – was that a successful trip?
Great trip. We had a wonderful time in both countries and we may return in the near future.
Are there any plans to forge links with any clubs in Asia?
We're always looking for potential partnerships with quality clubs around the world. It has to be the right club at the right time.
There is a large Asian, especially Korean, population in LA. Are there any plans to sign some Asian? Korean players?
Good Asian players are very expensive, but if there was the right player we'd definitely look to sign him. But we still haven't come across the right player.
Why did you appoint Ruud Gullit?
He has experience and he welcomes the pressure of being the coach of the LA Galaxy.
Do you get annoyed with European arrogance towards US football?
Because of our structure, MLS is the most competitive league in the world. It may not be the most beautiful or exciting, but it is the most competitive. There is horrible soccer being played all over the world, and much of it is coming from what many perceive to be the elite leagues of the world. There's no accounting for bad taste.
Copyright: John Duerden and Soccerphile.com
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Showing posts with label LA Galaxy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LA Galaxy. Show all posts
Friday, February 15, 2008
Thursday, November 8, 2007
"Sexy Football" Comes to MLS as Gullit Joins Galaxy
Just as AEG and the LA Galaxy's Beckham gambit seemed to have pulled a fast fade--5 matches, 1 goal, no playoffs, no cup--the MLS club got even "sexier" by announcing Ruud Gullit as new head coach.
Gullit will be introduced tomorrow (Fri., Nov. 9) as the replacement for Frank Yallop, who left at the end of this season to take the reins of the expansion San Jose franchise which begins league play next year.
Gullit, 45, had been rumored as one of two finalists last week, along with former German national coach, Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann is a resident of Newport Beach, California, not far from Los Angeles. His name seems to be added to the list every time a high-profile coaching job comes up lately; earlier this year he was reportedly on the short list to coach the US Men's National Team through the next World Cup, but such a deal did not materialize.
Gullit, former European Footballer of the Year (1987), comes to Los Angeles with previous coaching experiences at Feyenoord, Newcastle, and Chelsea.
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Gullit will be introduced tomorrow (Fri., Nov. 9) as the replacement for Frank Yallop, who left at the end of this season to take the reins of the expansion San Jose franchise which begins league play next year.
Gullit, 45, had been rumored as one of two finalists last week, along with former German national coach, Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann is a resident of Newport Beach, California, not far from Los Angeles. His name seems to be added to the list every time a high-profile coaching job comes up lately; earlier this year he was reportedly on the short list to coach the US Men's National Team through the next World Cup, but such a deal did not materialize.
Gullit, former European Footballer of the Year (1987), comes to Los Angeles with previous coaching experiences at Feyenoord, Newcastle, and Chelsea.
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Beckham to LA Galaxy
Ex-England captain David Beckham will leave Real Madrid for the MLS when he joins LA Galaxy in August this year.
The deal
The 31 year-old player will earn £128m (US$250m) for a five-year contract. Equivalent to £50 a minute and make Beckham the highest-paid sports star in the US.
The contract provides for Beckham to share a part of profits made by his new team LA Galaxy possibly worth US$10 per year.
Beckham's annual salary with the Galaxy will be US$10m.
David Beckham's four main sponsors - Gillette, Motorola, Pepsi and Volkswagen bring in approximately US$25m a year.
David Beckham shirt sales total US$10m each year.
His share of the club profits: US$10m
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The deal
The 31 year-old player will earn £128m (US$250m) for a five-year contract. Equivalent to £50 a minute and make Beckham the highest-paid sports star in the US.
The contract provides for Beckham to share a part of profits made by his new team LA Galaxy possibly worth US$10 per year.
Beckham's annual salary with the Galaxy will be US$10m.
David Beckham's four main sponsors - Gillette, Motorola, Pepsi and Volkswagen bring in approximately US$25m a year.
David Beckham shirt sales total US$10m each year.
His share of the club profits: US$10m
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Monday, April 3, 2006
MLS 2006 – Sowing Another Seed of Hope
The U.S. domestic league kicked off its second decade yesterday with survival still the key and a sense of established security still elusive.
Everyone is Europe asks if and when football is going to grow in America and the answer is still the same: Give it time.
If crowds are the measure of success then MLS is either stagnant or stable, depending on how you look at it. Attendances have stayed at around 15,000 over the past decade although some clubs do better than others. The LA Galaxy drew a respectable 21,677 average last season and new arrivals Real Salt Lake were second on 18,037 and Chivas USA fourth with 17,080.
The league is certainly in better financial health than before having jettisoned its lowly-supported teams, moved into new stadia and signed a recent $150 million sponsorship deal with Adidas, and will still leap at any opportunity to cash in if European clubs want to sign its players.
Last year the league took the unprecedented step of revealing some salary figures, which made interesting reading. Top of the pile was LA’s Landon Donovan on $900,000 but at the other end Chicago's Gonzalo Segares took home a measly $11,700.
Teammate Chris Rolfe, who recently played striker for the US National Team, collected a paltry $16,500 while fellow US international Clint Dempsey, who scored against England last summer and got the winner in the US' recent win over Poland, earned a modest $57,875, some way behind their European colleagues and light years behind the stars of America’s major sports leagues.
The new season sees the first franchise move in the league's history with the San Jose Earthquakes, one of the league's top teams, moving from Northern California to Texas to become the Houston Dynamo.
The Earthquakes had been losing money hand over fist renting a stadium from San Jose State University, and MLS, which still controls the clubs centrally, was not prepared to sustain the losses for another season.
Houston, the nation's fourth largest city with a substantial Hispanic and football-loving population, was an obvious candidate for expansion. But the initial team name of Houston 1836, with its commemoration of Anglo-American victory, offended that very Latin community the league had angled to appeal to, so the name was swiftly and embarrassingly changed to the less offensive Dynamo.
This was par for the course for MLS, which had seen two teams vanish (Miami and Tampa Bay) as well as four name changes in its first ten years.
There have been several such 'seminal' moments since MLS was born in 1996, the question remaining how many of these scattered seeds will truly take root in the long term. At least the days of playing on Astroturf with American Football markings, 35 yard shoot out to settle drawn matches and jazzy stadium announcements during the game are over.
Chicago will also open the nation's fourth professional soccer-specific stadium when they kick off in June at their 20,000 capacity Bridgeview home. Because of construction delays the Fire will oddly play their first nine games away and then have nine in a row at home from late June to mid August.
Five of the league's twelve sides will be playing in their own football-only stadia, which is the key to maximizing revenue and keeping the league going. A further four have stadium plans in place so the days of 15,000 crowds drowning in 80,000 seat NFL bowls should soon be over.
The Kansas City Wizards, owned by Lamar Hunt, founder of NFL's Superbowl, remain in limbo with a number of takeover possibilities after the billionaire passed on building a modest stadium for his team.
The fans are always eager for more teams but given one expansion team (Miami Fusion) folded after four years, the league is extremely wary and has insisted that only clubs with proper external financial backing and concrete plans for an exclusive stadium will be considered. On this basis, MLS has confirmed that Toronto will join the league in 2007 while several American cities continue to inspire rumours.
The quality of MLS play did not blind us again in 2005 although the MLS All-Star team beat Premiership Fulham convincingly 4-1 at the start of the season, a game US fans will recall for some time.
Reigning champions LA Galaxy are still the team to beat with Landon Donovan their talisman and 1990 World Cup veteran Cobi Jones still on their books.
From the opposing coast the New England Revolution, coached by former Liverpool midfielder Steve Nicol and England striker Paul Mariner, are also expected to mount a stiff challenge although could lose upcoming star Clint Dempsey and striker Taylor Twellman following their World Cup duties for the United States in June.
The big news though has been the name change of the Metrostars to New York Red Bulls. The team that began life as the long-winded New York/New Jersey Metrostars ten years ago has never approached the popularity of the New York Cosmos and their 70,000+ crowds of the late 1970s but at least will have their own stadium to play in before long in Harrison, New Jersey.
European fans will predictably pour scorn on a corporate naming of a team but although it is a first for US major league sport it is not for football – Philips SV Eindhoven and Bayer Leverkusen are just two who got there first in Europe.
The team colours and future stadium name will reflect the famous energy drink and although the price for this 'sell-out', divided between major investor-operator AEG and MLS, has not been confirmed, it has certainly exceeded the $26million the same company bought the LA Galaxy for in 1998.
"This is a seminal moment in the history of this team and this league," general manager and former US soccer icon Alexi Lalas told the media. On that we are all agreed, but will the seed flower or wither is the unanswerable question on everyone's lips.
Lastly there is the matter of the month of June. While MLS is in full flow, the World Cup will be going on in Germany. MLS Commissioner Don Garber has accepted that sooner or later they will have to fit in with FIFA's international calendar but for the moment the show goes on during football’s biggest tournament.
In 2002 the US reached the quarter-finals but the knock on effect on domestic crowds was not noticeable even though the majority of its players had been in MLS, a statistic that will be true again this summer.
While MLS grows slowly but surely, unless the US wins the right to host the World Cup again, which probably will not be until 2018, the national team's exploits on the world stage provide the only source of optimism for football getting a kick across the pond.
There will be millions stateside watching the 2006 tournament, many of them so-called 'soccer snobs' who disdain the domestic version, but one can only hope that out there in America, a land that rates domestic competition above all others, there are those whose interest will be sparked by the World Cup and who will then come and give Major League Soccer the fans it needs, and increasingly deserves. Sean O'Conor
Eastern Conference
Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew
DC United
Kansas City Wizards
New England Revolution
New York Red Bulls
Western Conference
Chivas USA
Colorado Rapids
FC Dallas
Houston Dynamo
LA Galaxy
Real Salt Lake
cheap hotels in the usa
soccer tickets guaranteed
Everyone is Europe asks if and when football is going to grow in America and the answer is still the same: Give it time.
If crowds are the measure of success then MLS is either stagnant or stable, depending on how you look at it. Attendances have stayed at around 15,000 over the past decade although some clubs do better than others. The LA Galaxy drew a respectable 21,677 average last season and new arrivals Real Salt Lake were second on 18,037 and Chivas USA fourth with 17,080.
The league is certainly in better financial health than before having jettisoned its lowly-supported teams, moved into new stadia and signed a recent $150 million sponsorship deal with Adidas, and will still leap at any opportunity to cash in if European clubs want to sign its players.
Last year the league took the unprecedented step of revealing some salary figures, which made interesting reading. Top of the pile was LA’s Landon Donovan on $900,000 but at the other end Chicago's Gonzalo Segares took home a measly $11,700.
Teammate Chris Rolfe, who recently played striker for the US National Team, collected a paltry $16,500 while fellow US international Clint Dempsey, who scored against England last summer and got the winner in the US' recent win over Poland, earned a modest $57,875, some way behind their European colleagues and light years behind the stars of America’s major sports leagues.
The new season sees the first franchise move in the league's history with the San Jose Earthquakes, one of the league's top teams, moving from Northern California to Texas to become the Houston Dynamo.
The Earthquakes had been losing money hand over fist renting a stadium from San Jose State University, and MLS, which still controls the clubs centrally, was not prepared to sustain the losses for another season.
Houston, the nation's fourth largest city with a substantial Hispanic and football-loving population, was an obvious candidate for expansion. But the initial team name of Houston 1836, with its commemoration of Anglo-American victory, offended that very Latin community the league had angled to appeal to, so the name was swiftly and embarrassingly changed to the less offensive Dynamo.
This was par for the course for MLS, which had seen two teams vanish (Miami and Tampa Bay) as well as four name changes in its first ten years.
There have been several such 'seminal' moments since MLS was born in 1996, the question remaining how many of these scattered seeds will truly take root in the long term. At least the days of playing on Astroturf with American Football markings, 35 yard shoot out to settle drawn matches and jazzy stadium announcements during the game are over.
Chicago will also open the nation's fourth professional soccer-specific stadium when they kick off in June at their 20,000 capacity Bridgeview home. Because of construction delays the Fire will oddly play their first nine games away and then have nine in a row at home from late June to mid August.
Five of the league's twelve sides will be playing in their own football-only stadia, which is the key to maximizing revenue and keeping the league going. A further four have stadium plans in place so the days of 15,000 crowds drowning in 80,000 seat NFL bowls should soon be over.
The Kansas City Wizards, owned by Lamar Hunt, founder of NFL's Superbowl, remain in limbo with a number of takeover possibilities after the billionaire passed on building a modest stadium for his team.
The fans are always eager for more teams but given one expansion team (Miami Fusion) folded after four years, the league is extremely wary and has insisted that only clubs with proper external financial backing and concrete plans for an exclusive stadium will be considered. On this basis, MLS has confirmed that Toronto will join the league in 2007 while several American cities continue to inspire rumours.
The quality of MLS play did not blind us again in 2005 although the MLS All-Star team beat Premiership Fulham convincingly 4-1 at the start of the season, a game US fans will recall for some time.
Reigning champions LA Galaxy are still the team to beat with Landon Donovan their talisman and 1990 World Cup veteran Cobi Jones still on their books.
From the opposing coast the New England Revolution, coached by former Liverpool midfielder Steve Nicol and England striker Paul Mariner, are also expected to mount a stiff challenge although could lose upcoming star Clint Dempsey and striker Taylor Twellman following their World Cup duties for the United States in June.
The big news though has been the name change of the Metrostars to New York Red Bulls. The team that began life as the long-winded New York/New Jersey Metrostars ten years ago has never approached the popularity of the New York Cosmos and their 70,000+ crowds of the late 1970s but at least will have their own stadium to play in before long in Harrison, New Jersey.
European fans will predictably pour scorn on a corporate naming of a team but although it is a first for US major league sport it is not for football – Philips SV Eindhoven and Bayer Leverkusen are just two who got there first in Europe.
The team colours and future stadium name will reflect the famous energy drink and although the price for this 'sell-out', divided between major investor-operator AEG and MLS, has not been confirmed, it has certainly exceeded the $26million the same company bought the LA Galaxy for in 1998.
"This is a seminal moment in the history of this team and this league," general manager and former US soccer icon Alexi Lalas told the media. On that we are all agreed, but will the seed flower or wither is the unanswerable question on everyone's lips.
Lastly there is the matter of the month of June. While MLS is in full flow, the World Cup will be going on in Germany. MLS Commissioner Don Garber has accepted that sooner or later they will have to fit in with FIFA's international calendar but for the moment the show goes on during football’s biggest tournament.
In 2002 the US reached the quarter-finals but the knock on effect on domestic crowds was not noticeable even though the majority of its players had been in MLS, a statistic that will be true again this summer.
While MLS grows slowly but surely, unless the US wins the right to host the World Cup again, which probably will not be until 2018, the national team's exploits on the world stage provide the only source of optimism for football getting a kick across the pond.
There will be millions stateside watching the 2006 tournament, many of them so-called 'soccer snobs' who disdain the domestic version, but one can only hope that out there in America, a land that rates domestic competition above all others, there are those whose interest will be sparked by the World Cup and who will then come and give Major League Soccer the fans it needs, and increasingly deserves. Sean O'Conor
Eastern Conference
Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew
DC United
Kansas City Wizards
New England Revolution
New York Red Bulls
Western Conference
Chivas USA
Colorado Rapids
FC Dallas
Houston Dynamo
LA Galaxy
Real Salt Lake
cheap hotels in the usa
soccer tickets guaranteed
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