There is a delicious sense of the absurd in the way Don Garber has gone about his MLS business in the last few days, almost like a Steven Colbert satirizing the moronic "ideas" market of the Blatter/Warner contingent in order to expose football's upper echelon time-wasters for what they are.
First, we had Garber telling European clubs that MLS could be a model for wage sharing on the continent, the equivalent of asking the Germans to slow down on the Autobahn or the French to "clean up those unions so everything can run better in the country and there'd be less strikes and stuff." For anyone who saw this as a serious recommendation and not as a sly knock on debt-plagued European clubs' historical condescension toward America, look again.
Then Garber responded to Blatter's typically ignorant call for MLS integration with the European calendar by all-but eliminating the possibility, unless "we...start thinking about roofed stadiums at some point." An obvious bluff, it was enough to send respected soccer-following newspapers like USA Today into a tizzy of half-arsed wheezings on Garber's throwaway half-sentence. Yet as Match Fit USA deftly points out, this was Garber's way of saying it would never happen (although I think it has more to do with scaring MLS fans out of supporting the idea with the prospect of a infrastructural and cultural step backward than anything else).
I caught a bit of this conniving flavour when Garber hinted back and forth on when exactly Montreal would get their MLS entry, but this week has made it clear: Garber is one clever, if not shifty, guy when it comes to giving quotes to the press.
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