A few days ago on Metrofanatic, I speculated that by the end of the week, both protagonists in the offseason Amado-Alexi sideshow might be out of the organization. Denials are flying out of the O'Brien camp (which doesn't mean a whole lot to me), but things are still heating up on the Lalas-to-LA front. I really don't doubt that Big Red and Red Bull will very soon be parted; it only makes sense that Lalas hung around to see the home opener out, and with that done spent yesterday's day off packing his beach clothes. Board rumors of a FO shakeout make this scenario seem that much more likely. The real heavy lifting, or at least enough of it, is done. If RB plans on bringing in its own crew this season, now's the time to do it.

What next for us, then?
The Metrologist can't even begin to fathom the words "Nick" "Sakiewicz" and "return." Please, make yourself a drink or something while I go rinse my brain.

Do we have other names?
As it turns out, we do. One that's striking the fear of God in the hearts of Metro fans, pro- and anti- Red Bull alike.

















Gli mics sono delizioso.






We all need a little perspective.
The worst of all possible choices isn't Chinaglia, you see. Sure, he's an insufferable, deluded blowhard, dismissive of the organization and the league in general, who will kill this Red Bull experiment stone-dead. And with it, NYC-area pro soccer for another generation. But at least it will be a spectacular fiasco, the soccer-world manifestation of an elephant dosed up on a bucket of roofies, forced to pedal a dynamite-laden bicycle across a highwire four stories over a fireworks truck, while Our Sisters of Immaculate Agony perform an interpretive dance upon its back. If you've got to see it all go poof!, don't you want to see it go like that? Finally, finally MLS will have a certifiable-lunatic chairman/president figure of its own, something American soccer (and American sports in general, wretched province of so many "rational"- spit! - men) has long lacked. I'm not just talking eclectic, harmless, mid-table cute crazy, a la Dimitry Piterman. No no, there is a whole 'nother level to aspire to, a tinpot despot plane you only reach by exhibiting that special blend of swagger, malevolence, detachment from reality, spite, volatility, megalomania and just-plain-nutsiness that guys like Eurico Miranda and the late Jesus Gil y Gil had leaching out their pores.
Now, I'm not saying Giorgio Chinaglia is up to that standard just yet, people. But he's young, he's a comer, and he's got it. We need to grab him while we can, and allow him to develop it.









You're damn right he'll make them run on time.





Yes, under the guy who helped coax organizations like the Cosmos, Lazio and Champions World into crippling and/or unrecoverable nosedives, Metro area soccer will be dead within five years, and we'll all be heartbroken, emotionally shattered and pissed-off. But oh, what a ride, right into the mantle of the Earth!

What you really have to fear, what I really do fear, is the appointment of some comparatively colorless Mitteleuropean tactico-crat retread (perhaps one with a nice record to show for himself) who expects to build Metro and run Metro as if this were the Old World, the many idiosyncrasies and challenges of MLS and American soccer be damned.



We've been there.













We've been there again.











And that sucked. We know it just doesn't work. But does RB? Not if rumblings are to be believed. If they really are thinking of either of these options - and there's reason to think they very much are - it's the road to perdition for us anyway. So ask yourself; if you've got to watch the team actually shrivel up and perish, how do you want it to be - like Wile E Coyote, throwing an anvil off a cliff without ever paying attention to the rope looped around his leg, or like a pitiable, pallid, depressive salaryman, choking down a bottle full of Value-Rite sleeping pills and a fifth of Korski in a dank-smelling motel by the freeway?