Part 2 of my Interview with Bruce McGuire continues here. McGuire is the creator and editor of Du Nord, who turned his passion to soccer after leaving the music industry. Read Part 1 here.
Part 2 of 2
LE: The U.S. has a really diverse fan culture, collectively a hard group to reach. What’s good about our soccer media and how can it improve?
McGuire: Part of the hard time is that the U.S. soccer media is so tiny. The people that are doing it are pretty damn fantastic, just about everybody is doing it for virtually no money. The teams in the second division in U.S. Soccer aren’t the greatest at their PR, they need to do a lot better job of being more inviting to the press. In general, all the teams need to do a much better job with their PR going out and exposing themselves more to media as much as possible instead of relying on the things that they’ve always counted on.
To me, the whole thing is all about relationships and that’s the real key. One of the things I did when I was in music that was my favorite thing to do was travel all around the country. I got to meet the person who ran the coolest record store in every city, the person who ran the coolest local fanzine and who ran the coolest local weekly paper, the person with the coolest radio show, the person who booked the coolest club. By that, I don’t mean elitist and hipster, I mean the person with the best taste and the ear to the ground and the most human and open. I got to meet all of them and built this amazing web of people all over the country, so any city I went to I would have this group of people that I could just tap straight into and talk about everything going on in their city, everything going on at Warner Brothers. It was fantastic. I would love to see a lot more of that than we have right now in soccer.
LE: So, why isn’t that happening? What does MLS have to do to connect more with the public?
McGuire: Some people try to control every single little thing. Let’s look at it this way. What was the biggest disaster in American soccer in the last 12 months?
LE: The Charlie Davies incident.
McGuire: Yeah, I guess so. But right after that, the biggest sh-t storm was Landon Donovan talking about David Beckham. That thing blew up like crazy. Grant Wahl didn’t have somebody sitting next to him with a microphone keeping him from getting the details, the inside words. No one accused Grant of making any of that up, it was all true. They got bent out of shape because it came out in public, but they meant every word of it. So what’s wrong with that? If that was the worst thing that happened, that was fantastic, it was incredible. Even if it was negative I don’t have any problem with it.
That was the start of Landon Donovan’s year where he made himself an international name. I was just reading the press down in Australia because the Galaxy booked an exhibition game there after the season ends and Donovan got equal billing with Beckham.
LE: So you think putting the controversy out there made him more human and accessible to the public?
McGuire: Yeah, but not only controversy, but honesty and truthfulness and openness. And personality. People actually speaking their mind. It’s huge. You get a little bit of that with twitter, but that’s already died down.
LE: It certainly resonated when Brian Ching tweeted, 'The ref is a cheat.'
McGuire: That was awesome. But has he sent another twitter message since? Probably not, unfortunately. … Now, you don’t get the true feelings from the players. It’s probably coming from a PR firm.
The reason why it happens is because from the top down it’s a very corporate structure no matter how they slice it. The people who are owners are huge, huge millionaires, if not billionaires and they all come from a corporate culture. Everyone who works for MLS wears suits and ties all the time in the public face and that pushes a corporate structure where you have to have control of everything because even though they’re not on the stock market and on quarterly earnings it’s still how everything works basically. I don’t know if they’ll ever loosen the reins enough, but if they loosen them a little bit, especially with their product, which is their players, it would be a great thing, fantastic. It really, really needs to happen.
What MLS could use is a huge controversy about their fans being too rowdy on TV. The ratings are a joke, so I say swear all you want and get it in the newspapers and let people go crazy. Let ESPN deal with the FCC.
LE: What are you trying to accomplish with your site?
McGuire: Number one, I’m a fan. I don’t want to be on the inside. At times I put a few toes on the inside, I’ve met enough people and we have a good time, but I want to stay out here as a fan as opposed to when I was in music and I was all in. One of the ways I learn when I turn my passion on something is I read - everything I can get my hands on. When I fell in love with Jamaican music in the late 80s, I bought books galore and read everything I could get my hands on and bought thousands and thousands of records and listened to them till I memorized them. So that’s what I was doing with soccer, I was reading everything in the English language from all over the world all the time. One day I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I just share this with everybody.’ Six and a half years now.
I don’t have goals. I don’t have future visions. I just do what I do and however it comes out is how it comes out. The few times in my life when I tried to conform to what I think is normal, I failed so miserably. So I’ve got my own way of doing things and sometimes it is the long road, the hard slog, but I don’t really mind because it’s pretty interesting and pretty fun and when you do come across other people out here in the wilderness, they’re pretty like-minded and pretty cool too.
LE: What are your favorite soccer books?
McGuire: I like the ones that tell crazy stories, like The Miracle of Castel del Sangro by Joe McGinniss. It’s awesome. He’s an American sports-travel-adventure writer who goes to the 1994 World Cup and meets Alexi Lalas and Lalas gets signed by an Italian team. He goes over there and flips out over Italy and Italian soccer and that same year a team climbs three leagues in two short seasons. He spends the next full year with this team on the inside and writes this completely insane book because it’s the wild west in Italy for soccer. He doesn’t know anything about it, he’s flying by the seat of his pants and by the end of the year he thinks he knows more than the manager. It’s fantastic.
Another one I loved was Simon Kuper’s book, Football Against the Enemy. While I didn’t think it was the best written book, I think he was a pretty young writer at the time, the stories are incredible and he travels around the world and tells stories from different parts of the world. I particularly like the one about the guy who grew up in East Germany and was a soccer fan and would try to go around and watch games and he’d be followed by the Stasi.
LE: Do you think the increase in designated players has improved the quality of officiating, which in turn has maybe improved the quality of play?
McGuire: I don’t really care about officiating. There’s things happening in every single game I’ve watched anywhere, including the World Cup - any game in any country in the world there’s a decision that’s controversial. I don’t see MLS as being any different. I don’t see the refs here being worse than they are in other places. If someone’s going to sit there and complain that they got beat because of one call the referee made, they’ve got to have their head examined. It’s a 90 minute game, no one call.
LE: Francisco Maturana said you can tell a man’s character by how he plays on the field. Do you think that true?
McGuire: One hundred percent. There is no difference. Their personality is exactly who they are on and off the field.
Read Part 1 of my interview with Bruce McGuire here.
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