The warning is ridiculous

Good morning everyone. As many of you did, I woke up to the joy of the interwebs buzzing about the fine and warnings sent out from MLS to Real Salt Lake about its hiring practices. It does certainly sound like the fine over the Cassar-Mellor debacle is justified. It’ll hurt us – we’re not exactly in the richest market in the country and 6 points from 9 matches is not helping jersey sales any – but we’ll get by. What confuses me is the warning. MLS issued a warning to RSL concerning their specific mentioning of New England’s Shalrie Joseph when talking about what sort of player they’d want to pick up.

Isn’t this how sports coaches and executives talk? There is no way that the NFL would have any problem with a coach saying that he wanted a stereotypical wide reciever, like a Cris Carter or Jerry Rice. Coaches talk all the time about the players they admire on other teams … I’m not sure anyone outside of the MLS headquarters knew there was a rule against that. Is it tampering with the transfer market to say Eddie Johnson has had a ridiculous two weeks and I wish we had him on our side?

Come on.

That being said, I can’t blame Coach Kreis for this. He was, until very recently, a player and team captain. Yes, his new coaching duties include hiring and that means knowing MLS hiring procedures, but RSL owner Dave Checketts should have had someone helping him out with that process … this is a front-office mistake, pure and simple. You can’t promote a player to a coaching job and expect him to know the fine print of league laws, especially if they include such bone-headed rules as not being able to discuss who you’d ideally love to have on your team. Write another check, Dave …

Too bad we lost the draft pick as well.

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Category: Team News

Tags: Dave Checketts, Jason Kreis, Obscure MLS rules, Real Salt Lake, RSL, Team News

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