TUKWILA — With the season opener less than a week away, now is the time that Seattle Sounders coach Sigi Schmid might normally feel compelled to give a motivational speech to his team.
With so much uncertainty surrounding the start of Major League Soccer’s 20th season, however, rah-rah speeches will have to wait.
The Sounders returned home from two weeks of training in Tucson, Arizona to prepare for Sunday’s season opener against New England, but they took the field Tuesday morning knowing there is a real possibility that game won’t happen. The league’s previous collective bargaining agreement, which was negotiated just before the start of the 2010 season has expired, and players say they are prepared to strike if the league doesn’t make some concessions in a new labor deal, most notably some form of free agency, which currently doesn’t exist in MLS.
“I’m sure it’s on their minds,” Schmid said. “One thing that I’ve held back off as a coach is I don’t want to go in there and say, ‘All right, here we go, let’s go,’ and then all of a sudden it’s not ‘let’s go’ for a while. I want to wait until that all gets resolved. I think everybody will feel better from both sides, and hopefully it will (get resolved).”
While the league opener isn’t until Friday, resolution likely will come Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest, as players will be unwilling to travel to road games without a new deal in place. In the meantime, all the Sounders can do this week is practice as if the season will start on time.
“It’s in the back of everyone’s head, but the only thing we can control at this point is how we prepare for Sunday,” defender Zach Scott said. “We have no control over what happens in the board room. We have great leadership in there, and hopefully something gets done. For both sides, the best possible outcome is that the games go on.”
Players’s Union reps, including Seattle’s Brad Evans, have been in Washington D.C. negotiating with the league, and while negative reports were coming out of the nation’s capital early in the day, more positive news emerged Tuesday evening. According to the Washington Post’s Steven Goff, little progress was being made early Tuesday, with the league only offering free agency to players age 32 or older and with 10 years of service with one team, something that would apply to just one current player, Houston’s Brad Davis.
“It seems like [the owners] are giving up nothing of substance,” an anonymous source told Goff. “They have shot down all of the players’ proposals [on free agency]. It’s shocking. The owners are almost wanting a work stoppage.”
But later in the day, ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle was reporting more encouraging news, saying the two sides were “inching closer,” and that the current offer was free agency for players who are 28 or older with eight years of service, not necessarily with one team. Whether that is enough for players remains to be seen, but the two reports, coming a few hours apart, indicate that the sides are at least making progress.
Players say their focus is on getting ready for games, not a pending strike, though they do have to prepare for the worst, whether that means having money saved up or a plan for medical insurance.
“The only thing we’ve talked about is just making sure that our families are all right,” Scott said. “… The easy answer is, we can only control what we can control, but if it’s on the horizon, you’re thinking about bigger picture, thinking about, ‘OK, what do I do?’ People have families to support. Young guys have rent to pay. So yeah, obviously that’s hanging over everyone’s head. But it’s the best-case for both parties to get something done. No one wants the season to not start.”
While a possible work stoppage is the elephant in the room this week, players were able to ignore the distraction of a possible strike for at least a couple of hours Tuesday while preparing for a game they know might not happen.
“When you’re on the field training, you forget everything,” midfielder Gonzalo Pineda said. “Even if you are mad at your wife or something, you forget that. It’s just happiness and play around a little bit, and your forget everything else.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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