The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wahl

Author:Grant Wahl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307462459
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-29T10:00:00+00:00

Leaving aside 19’s shadow takeover, the fate of the Galaxy’s 2008 season would rest largely on the answer to one question: Was the decision to hire Ruud Gullit as the team’s coach a good one? Gullit’s accomplishments as a player were beyond reproach. A two-time World Player of the Year, the Dutchman known for his iconic dreadlocks led AC Milan to three Italian championships and two European Cups, teaming up with two countrymen (Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten) who also played alongside him on the Netherlands’ 1988 European Championship winners. Gullit was rightly considered one of the greatest midfielders of his generation, even if many of the Galaxy players had to go to YouTube to learn about their new coach’s playing career.

But Gullit’s record as a coach was decidedly more mixed. He had won the English FA Cup in 1996 as the player-coach at Chelsea, but he was fired the following season, despite Chelsea’s second-place position in the Premier League, owing to conflicts over potential player acquisitions with the club’s directors. Gullit lasted barely more than a year in his next job, at Newcastle United, where he clashed with club hero Alan Shearer, reached the 1999 FA Cup final (losing to Manchester United), and resigned just five games into his second season. He went on to become a popular television commentator in England, coining the term “sexy football” to describe his favored entertaining style, but Gullit had coached in only one season since 1999—a forgettable fourth-place finish at Holland’s Feyenoord in 2004-05 before he resigned there as well.

The positives of hiring Gullit were self-evident: He was a world-renowned name with a big personality who would have a commanding presence in the Galaxy locker room. If Frank Yallop’s weakness had been that he was too much in awe of Beckham, too hesitant to tell him he couldn’t play on consecutive days in London and Los Angeles, that shouldn’t have been a problem with Gullit. The hope also was that Gullit would light a fire under Landon Donovan and turn the Galaxy into a team that combined the tactical nous that Gullit had learned in Italy, the balls-out effort of his days in the English Premier League, and the sexy football associated with the Dutch attacking style.

But there were far more reasons that Gullit was a risky hire, reasons that were clear the moment he was chosen to take over the Galaxy. For one thing, big-name foreign coaches had always failed in MLS. There were no exceptions. The list was a convincing one: Carlos Alberto Parreira, Carlos Queiroz, Bora Milutinovic, Walter Zenga, Hans Westerhof. The few foreign-born coaches who had succeeded in MLS—Steve Nicol, Peter Nowak, Thomas Rongen, Juan Carlos Osorio—had already spent years in American soccer at levels below that of MLS head coach before they made the jump. Just because you were steeped in the culture of European or South American soccer didn’t mean you would have a clue when it came to the unique (and often frustrating) rules that governed the world of MLS.

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