Sports’ great builders have all been men of the game.
The pioneers of baseball and football were first and foremost sportsmen.
Baseball had the Dodgers’ Walter O’Malley and Giants’ Horace Stoneham, who led the move to California in the late ’50s.
When you think of pro football, you think of coaches like Chicago’s George Halas and Cleveland’s Paul Brown and owners like Pittsburgh’s Rooney family and the Giants’ Maras.
Soccer is the same.
Real Madrid, which celebrated its 100th anniversary March 6, is arguably the greatest club in the history of the sport.
Santiago Bernabeu, who built Real Madrid into Europe’s top team in the 1950s, was so powerful that he was called a state within a state, but he was a man of modest means who lived with his wife in a tiny Madrid apartment and drove his own car.
The Don Santiagos of the sports world are gone.
Fiorentino Perez, elected Real Madrid president in 2000, is one of Spain’s leading industrialists. Asked recently why he had so little to do with Real’s on-the-field affairs, he responded, “Real’s socios didn’t elect me president for my passion. They chose me for my organization.”
Major League Soccer’s great challenge is to find a permanent niche in an age when money and organization count more than passion.
Phil Anschutz, the subject of Senior Editor Ridge Mahoney’s lead story, certainly has the money – he is said to have lost $10 billion in the last year but is still the 54th wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes – and he surely has assembled the organization. AEG has one of the most talented group of sports executives in the country.
It’s great that MLS has Anschutz’s fortune on its side, but its ultimate success or failure will depend on his commitment.
Everyone around Anschutz speaks glowingly of his passion, but it’s a tad unsettling, then, that American soccer must depend on the passion of a man who will never speak publicly on the subject.