Under Construction: Timbers coach Bobby Howe is looking for a few good men to play soccer at the former Civic Stadium.

by ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

Grit-gray clouds hang over a Salem school's playing field. Bursts of wind knife through 22 guys playing soccer at disorganized warp speed.

About as many men collect along the sideline, watching. A blond Joe College sports a sweatshirt bearing the logo of Manchester United, the world's most famous soccer team. A Hispanic guy wears warm-up gear issued by the Yakima Reds, a semi-pro outfit in Central Washington's apple country. A stocky specimen ambles along, the hem of a mullet straggling beneath his Oakland Raiders stocking cap.

On the field, errant shots fly and passes wander, the players displaying all the composure of methed-up debutantes. Why the nerves? Look no further than the Englishman dressed head to toe
in forest green.

If there's a soccer equivalent to the Mafia's made man, it's Bobby Howe. Howe played for West Ham United, a legendarily hardboiled London team, for 10 years. He coached Seattle's well-regarded minor-league squad for seven. For good measure, he edited the U.S. Soccer Federation's official guide for coaches.

Howe is now head coach of the Portland Timbers, PGE Park impresario Marshall Glickman's new pro team. The Timbers will be ready for their spring debut just as soon as they find some players to wear their evergreen-and-silver kit. Which explains why Howe is out in such inclement weather--and watching such ragged soccer--on a Saturday.

In fact, this Salem casting call is just one of the unusual directions the Timbers have gone in their effort to rekindle pro soccer in Portland.

The city's proud soccer heritage--strong support for the original, late-'70s Timbers, big turnouts for the U.S. national team and '99 Women's World Cup games--is undisputed. Yet the Timbers won't play in Major League Soccer, the putative American big league. Instead, the team will vie for honors in the A-League, a 21-team national minor league, one step below MLS.

And despite the local presence of two hefty sportswear companies, the new club will sport neither Nike's Swoosh nor Adidas' triple stripe. A relatively small British company will dress the Timbers, making the team the cornerstone of a new marketing push in the Northwest.

Casual observers of the city's sporting scene might be startled by the lack of local logos and MLS status, but neither may hurt the team's future.

Major League Soccer, despite its allure for hardcore fans, has a few problems, starting with $250 million hemorrhaged in five years. Then there's the high cost of joining MLS.

"My assumption going in was that we wanted MLS here," says Glickman. "I had a meeting with the guys who were running MLS at the time. And I like those guys, but I'll tell you, I walked out of that meeting rather taken aback that they looked at me with a straight face when they told me how much it would cost to join their club."

(While Glickman declined to name the figure MLS officials bandied, one of the league's most recent expansion franchises, the commercially moribund Miami Fusion, was reported to have cost around $30 million.)

MLS also operates under a restrictive, quasi-Soviet-style structure, in which the league itself decides which players teams get. The A-League, on the other hand, allows teams free rein in picking and paying players. In further contrast to MLS, the A-League also boasts some bona fide business success.

"Some people say Portland could be the Rochester of the West," says Howe, making a comparison Portland's civic leaders don't often invite. In soccer terms, though, it's a compliment.

The A-League Rochester Raging Rhinos' average draw of more than 11,000 fans a game is better than that of several MLS teams. As a result, Rochester is able to pay some top players more than they might make in MLS. In 1999, the Rhinos blasted four MLS teams in a row to win the U.S. Open Cup, a knockout tournament open to every pro team in the country.

Such coups have to please Umbro, the Manchester, England, soccer-gear company that owns a controlling stake in the A-League's parent organization. "I don't want to paint an overly rosy picture of the A-League," says Jim Kilmeade, head of Umbro's North American operations in New York. "But we do have franchises that are profitable. No other soccer league in America can say that."

The British company's ownership of the A-League gives it the inside track for nailing down deals with its grassroots, community-oriented teams, including the Timbers.

"If I were at Umbro, I'd be very aggressive in making sure that the majority of the teams in the league went with Umbro," says Jim Ellsworth, Nike's soccer sports marketing director. Nike sponsors two A-League teams, the Seattle Sounders and Minnesota Thunder, and Ellsworth says the Beaverton titan is likely to pursue contracts with individual Timbers players.

Kilmeade insists that Umbro didn't outbid either shoe titan to outfit the Timbers. Still, Glickman describes the arrangement as a six-figure deal that's the biggest Umbro's ever given an A-League team. Kilmeade acknowledges that Umbro's own marketing research indicates that Portland is one of its most important targets in North America. "We're trying
to rebuild our brand in the U.S.," says Kilmeade. "Portland is absolutely key to that effort."

In an unscientific way, the hundred or so players who turned out for the Timbers' two open tryouts back up assertions of Portland's soccer mystique. "Some soccer players think the streets of Portland are paved with gold," Howe notes.

Still, while he finds the interest heartening, Howe says the odds against finding diamonds in the deep, marginal rough of American soccer remain long. "We did open tryouts for seven years in Seattle, and in those seven years, we only found one player who worked out," he says. "But we had some people ride 10 hours on a bus from British Columbia just to be here. Anyone who's willing to do that is worth taking a look at."