Taking U.S. soccer establishment to task over venue selections

About Saturday’s U.S.-Panama clash: Will we see the same American center back combo as Bob Bradley’s boys clash with stubborn little ol’ Panama? Will fast Freddy Adu get into the 18? Will Tim Howard be a regular badass in goal, or a super badass? I don’t have answers to these vexing questions.

But I know this for darn sure:

The field at Raymond James Stadium will be far superior to that beleaguered little ragamuffin of a pitch the United States and Canada had to endure on Tuesday.

For more on the game itself check out my match preview at SI.com.

As for the recent fields on which U.S. men have been ask to play: Seriously? For the love of Carl the Groundskeeper, is our soccer establishment around here still in the third grade in venue selection? That field Tuesday in Detroit was a disaster! It looked like I do after a Vegas bender, scraggly, dehydrated, all beat up and damn close to death. The Washington Post’s Steven Goff said it looked like it had been in a knife fight. (Good one, dude!)

As far as selecting venues that require a temporary grass field to be laid over artificial turf or (worse, apparently) concrete, it’s high time that everyone just scratch that off the list of options.

It drags down the games. Even on the better fakey fields, balls don’t bounce right and roll too slowly. On the worst of them, there really is a player safety issue.

U.S. players and coaches, after years of playing nice, muffling their disdain and mostly just mumbling under their breath about it, are starting to speak out. And rightly so.

CONCACAF gets the blame for the Ford Field fiasco. Officials for the regional organizing body selected the venues. But they get some guidance from S.U.M., Major League Soccer’s marketing arm.

And U.S. Soccer selected the recent site for U.S.-Spain: Gillette Stadium. That’s an issue in itself. No venue has hosted more U.S. matches over the last 10 years, not even the Home Depot Center outside Los Angeles. And the team is based there!

The Kraft family counts Gillette Stadium among its holdings. U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati is also president of Kraft Soccer. See the conflict? The relationship is just too cozy; even if there’s nothing improper at work, appearances should dictate that U.S. soccer not make Foxborough the unofficial home of U.S. Soccer. Sorry, boys. You just gotta be better than that.

But there they were, two weeks ago, spending about $150,000 to lay yet another slow grass field over the artificial turf so they could get their Gillette fix. By the way, the justification for charging fans to see the final U.S. and Spain practices was that it costs quite a few Ben Franklins to attract a team of Spain’s quality. Fair enough.

But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be tacky and charge to watch a practice (“We’re talking about practice!” Preach it, Allen Iverson.) but then pony up big bucks to install a grass field, too.

Maybe there was a time when this was part of the deal. Perhaps it made more sense to play these matches inside big stadiums, with temporary grass fields installed where needed. Well, there was also a time when we were all wearing beepers. That time has damn sure come and gone.

There are plenty of suitable venues with proper grass fields. I do understand that securing facilities can be tricky; stadium availability, costs, coordinating team schedules, etc., can make for some tough calculus. That said, the market is what it is. At some point, it’s just business – and as the “clients” U.S. Soccer and CONCACAF have choices.

A major point to consider here is the important development of all these great soccer stadiums. Livestrong Sporting Park opened gloriously just last night, and that baby is a $200 million peach!

The U.S.-Canada match drew 28,000-plus. (That’s not a bad draw, by the way, for a U.S. match on a Tuesday night against a non-marquee opponent.) But the question is this: with several MLS venues now available that come close to accommodating that number, why go to Ford Field?  Red Bull Arena, a fantastic soccer facility not far east of Ford Field, holds 25,000.

The U.S. Soccer establishment needs to get it together on this one.