Some Thoughts on owners

Last Wednesday I had tickets to two different soccer games. My own fault; I’d bought a pass to the Pilots Women versus Pepperdine earlier in the week, but then accepted a ticket to the Timbers play-in game from a friend whose wife couldn’t go.

Both Portland teams lost.

I chose the worse of the two, though; the epic beat-down rendered by Vancouver in the “Where’s Your Car Show 2: Electric Boogaloo” play-in/wildcard match.

I won’t pretend to be a better fan than I am; I left after the Timbers’ fourth concession. The game was over by then, and to stay felt like watching a good friend get ass-whipped in a fight they were tanking. I left feeling embarrassed, grim and kind of dirty.

As we now know, “grim and embarrassed” was pretty much a good description of what happened, both on the pitch and off it.

Which brings us back to something that’s been chasing both Portland soccer teams for a while now: owners.

I’ve written a bit about the owner situations, both the old – Peregrine Sports and it’s local face Merritt Paulson – and new, RAJ Sports and the Bhathals.

The old was…troubling.

Mostly because of individuals, most of whom we know of and many of whom are gone. But also because the Paulson/Peregrine “style” seems to be a sort of “good-enough”, sloppy, careless, frat-boy-grab-ass thing. Passing stuff like Mike Golub behaving like a fourteen-year-old, pulling kid-bully stuff out of his ass, like grabbing people’s lunches or hucking soccer balls at them. Letting Gavin and Paulson get off lying or evading responsibility. Hiring based on pal-ness or “loyalty” rather than integrity or skills.

Put in context that makes the shit Riley got away with look like a difference in scale, not in kind.

The Peregrine FO doesn’t seem to have changed their course, just trimmed their sails to the “don’t show the public your whole ass” winds. Word coming out of the Timbers roster this autumn suggests that the reindeer games continue in private. The likelihood that will affect what should be a pretty serious roster build this offseason seem fairly significant.

The reality is that Peregrine is 1) unlikely to change – Hank Paulson has shown no interest in the club, he’s well-liked by the MLS owners, and Merritt shows no evidence of concern – and 2) unlikely to respond any differently than they did to the end of the Gio years…meaning that I wouldn’t hang on in hopes of seeing dramatic improvements in the backline, f’rinstance.

The Timbers will be, as they have been for most of their MLS existence, a mid-table struggler or worse.

That’s where we’re gonna be, Timbers fans.

The Thorns..?

Hard to tell.

The slow progress of the sale – another bit of typical-Peregrine-lazy-ass-fuckery – put the Bhathals well behind the ownership power curve.

But…

LeBlanc should have been an easy early call. She was a Paulson squid-ink hire, a “feel-good” piece of 2013 intended to pacify fan ire. In her two years as Peregrine GM she had some roster hits but as many or more lazy, sloppy (see a pattern here..?) misses.

Instead she hung on until her unsuitability became unavoidable then, in RAJ fashion, was removed by getting kicked upstairs.

Norris? Another panic hire to settle the waters roiled by L’Affaire Mengisson. Nice guy, over-his-head-assistant-grade coach in the technical box. Kicked upstairs for…

Gale? Another assistant, whose failings were compounded by the RAJ mistake in tearing off the “interim” bandage too early.

The sum of these parts look to me like a C-Suite crew thoroughly out of their depth. They didn’t perform their due-diligence before coming in, then either chose to keep, or were talked into keeping, staff who were not good at their jobs.

I’m reading lots of angst about how the WNBA club and development deals mean the Bhathal’s collective eyes will be off the soccer ball to which my thought would be, when have they really been on it?

The RAJ tenure has so far been supremely meh, which is unsurprising since it appears the organization did little or no preparation for managing the club here. They’re the usual finance types, seeing soccer (or basketball, or baseball, all of which they have pieces of) as merely a part of their “asset portfolio”.

The idea that, just maybe, it might take some specific skills to successfully run a winning soccer club, seems somewhat opaque to RAJ.

And, like Peregrine, I don’t see any reason to suspect that will change dramatically.

My guess is that Gale will be quietly knifed once the playoff exit occurs.

The real “what-ifs” come then.

Can this outfit find a truly gifted GM? All you Parsons fans, remember! His days were in a pre-free-agent time and were paired with the savant of NWSL1.0, Gavin Wilkinson.

Could he be brilliant? Sure. Could he be a hot mess? Also sure. It’d be nice to search hard for someone with success in transfer leagues like those in Europe, though, before settling for the familiar name.

And then there’s the gaffer. Again…can the RAJ gang resist the so-far-unresisted habit of grabbing someone known, rather than taking a flier on someone ambitious?

I honestly don’t know. Owners, like weather, turf, and referees, are “you get what you get”. You don’t get a voice and your choice is support-the-club-or-don’t; there’s no middle ground. There’s no “I love my club but loathe my owner(s) so…”.

I don’t have to enjoy that.

But that’s where we are.