Columbus Crew's Brian Bliss reveals details of new MLS reserve league

Columbus Crew technical director Brian Bliss spoke with me on Friday and opened up a bit about Major League Soccer’s new reserve league expected to emerge in 2011. Bliss became technical director of the Crew in 2008 after a 20-year career as player and coach in the U.S. and abroad. His credits include 33 caps and two goals as a defender with the U.S. Men’s National Team featuring in the 1988 Olympics and 1990 World Cup, five seasons with Carl Zeis Jena in the second division of the Bundesliga, and 50 MLS games 1996-1998, playing 31 of those games for the Crew.

LE: How will the new MLS reserve league affect rookies’ transition to the pro game?

Bliss: It will give them an opportunity to play in games - I don’t want to say that aren’t as meaningful, but the stakes aren’t as high. If you lose a reserve game or you make three mistakes in a reserve game and some of that ends up costing you the result it’s not as traumatic, although it should be noteworthy, it’s certainly not traumatic in terms of wins-losses and the coach retaining his job or maybe the player maintaining his status on the team. It should be viewed as more of a learning experience and you look to discover trends of a player rather than judging him based on one performance. So it’s going to be a good opportunity for players to play meaningful games, but not games that are going to be detrimental result-wise to anybody’s career.

LE: How is this reserve league going to be different than the former reserve league?

Bliss: Because of the way the rules are going to be written and the outline of the league is going to be written, all teams are going to have to take the reserve league seriously. In years previous, we had 12 or 14 teams in the league and we only had 50%-60% of the teams in the league taking the reserve league seriously and the other 30-40% looking at it at as an inconvenience. Now the way the rules are going to be written each team is going to be held accountable, they’re going to have to prescribe to the outlines that the league mandates and there’s no way you can’t take it seriously. Everybody will be on the same page, not only 50% or 60% of the teams.

LE: What’s in the structure that’s going to make the teams take it more seriously?

Bliss: First of all, the number of rostered players you can have will force the coach or the coaching staff or the organization to take it more seriously. You have a legitimate chance to compete and field a team every week in the reserve league when there’s a game because you should have the amount of bodies to participate. There were never enough bodies in your roster to compete.

We’re getting rid of guest players. In previous years you were allowed to sign Tom, Dick, and Harry in your local bar to fill out your roster on the weekend for a reserve game and that’s no longer going to be the case. You’re going to have to use players within your own system and you can use guest players but they have to be bona fide players who are making a living at the game of soccer. So a guest player has to be someone who has previously been a pro player who is maybe out of contract - it’s not going to be a retired player, it’s not going to be somebody from your front office who can’t play or somebody who played the game in college and now makes a living as a broadcaster – things like that - and that’s what was happening in the past to fill out rosters, that’s no longer going to be the case.

LE: Is there going to be anything at stake, a championship? Will there be spectators?

Bliss: I’m sure there will be spectators, but there will be no admission to these games price-wise. But there will be a financial reward to the team that wins it. There might be a playoff system at the end – although that’s day-to-day now within the ownership group whether there will be a playoff system, but there will be a determined champion for sure, there will be a financial reward. Although it might be minimal, there will be something at stake there.

LE: Will they play on the same day as the MLS team or on a Sunday? There were reports that the coaches were too tired to focus on a game the next morning.

Bliss: It’s going to be very similar. In previous years, the games were always played on Sundays. They can still be played on a Sunday if you choose, but it’s up to the teams when the schedule comes out to set their own schedule in terms of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or maybe even Wednesday. Transportation will be similar to last time and players will have to fly from here to DC if we’re playing them in a reserve game.

Most teams should have enough staff. If they don’t they’re going to have to hire an extra staff member to help coach the reserves on game day if it’s too much for a head coach, if he feels he’s spent. That’s why you have other paid staff on your club, to absorb that extra duty.

LE: Will some clubs be hiring a coach to manage the reserve team?

Bliss: We’ve already got enough staff to cover it, so we’re not one of the clubs that’s going to be hiring. There are some clubs that are short probably one coach if you add a reserve league and those teams are going to have to hire somebody, get one of the players to help out or hire somebody.

LE: The roster will increase to 30, is that right?

Bliss: You have flexibility there. You can do 28 or you can do 30, it’s your choice. I think most clubs will have to go with 30 because we went with 28 three years ago in the last year of the reserve league and it was proven that 28 wasn’t enough to do it. I think most teams are going to opt for 30, plus they're going to have the ability to take players from their academy U-18 teams and mix them into your reserve squad as well. Potentially, if you had two or three kids from your academy that you felt were good enough to participate at the reserve level you’d have 30, plus maybe two to three others.

LE: I understand academy kids can play the professional game as long as they don’t get paid.

BLISS: Correct.

LE: How is that going to fly with the paid players and the MLS Players Association?

Bliss: No, it’s not an issue because the sticking point was whether one player going to get paid and was one player not going to get paid. The NCAA has ruled that as long as a player has not entered a university system yet, he’s available to play with the pros, whether he gets paid or not. It shouldn’t be a factor because everywhere else in the world this is the way it’s done. Younger players who are not getting paid mix in with the pro players and that’s how you develop players. The system is no different here, it’s just that we’re a little bit behind the curve in terms of getting there.

LE: Real Salt Lake started their residential academy this summer. Does Columbus have something similar planned or is that not a priority at this point?

Bliss: Each market is different. In Salt Lake City they don’t have the talent pool of youth players to have their own local academy team that is competitive enough. So the answer to that is to coach whatever market and set up a residency program, theirs is outside of Phoenix, and run their system from there because the talent pool is greater to make a team that’s competitive. In our market here we have enough talent in Columbus and the State of Ohio that we don’t need to go outside. At the end of the day, if you have a residential setting I think it’s a plus, but I don’t think it’s a necessity in order to move forward with younger players. It’s a luxury if you can do it, it’s a nice thing, but it’s not a necessity.

LE: Is the salary cap going to be increased to accommodate the expanded roster?

Bliss: The salary cap will be increased per the CBA that was just negotiated, but the extra players added to the roster to accommodate the reserve league will not affect the salary cap. Those are separate. You still have a 20-man roster and those 20 players will go against the salary cap and your extra players so to speak, players 25-30 fall under a different category that doesn’t go against the cap. But you also can’t be paying these guys a $100,000, there’s a negotiated minimum salary and I’m not sure what that number is going to be, but it’s probably going to be somewhere between $30,000-$40,000. Those players will be paid but they won’t go against the cap.

LE: So the roster of 20 falls under the cap and final 25-30 are in the second group. Can you clarify the middle group?

Bliss: Twenty-24 will be very similar to what you have right now. You have some Generation adidas kids in there making whatever they’re making, you have some home-grown players from your own academy system that you may have signed and except for the Generation adidas players, most of them are $40,000 minimum salary guys. What I’m saying is the slots 25-30, not yet determined, could be below the minimum salary, but certainly won’t be what the old salaries were - $14,000, $16,000 or $18,000. They’re probably going to be in the low thirties.

LE: The biggest objective of the reserve league is to give academy players real minutes in the professional game and improve their transition, correct?

Bliss: Correct. Although not in a game environment where there are league points at stake. It’s the tempo of the game, the physicality of the game, the quickness of the game that all should be there – which are measuring sticks to put against your academy players in that environment.

We’re invested heavily at the youth level in our academies and we’re putting pretty good resources against some of these Generation adidas players, but right now they’re not getting on the field with the first team, they’re not getting games. There’s an old saying – no player gets better by only practicing – they need games.

Read more about development on US Soccer Players: The Role of the Technical Director and Technical Director: Player Development

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