End of history in New York
So, less than one week since news broke that Dieter Mateschitz was interested in adding another down-at-heel football club to his portfolio of sporting interests, New York MetroStars are no more. Jim Bowen really wasn’t kidding all those years ago when he said ‘you can’t beat a bit of Bully’.
In the sixty minutes following yesterday’s statement, online references to ‘MetroStars’ were extinguished right before disbelieving fans’ eyes. On both the club’s official site and mlsnet.com, the name ‘MetroStars’ was replaced retrospectively with ‘Red Bull New York’ throughout news archives, tables and results.
In addition, the club’s official site, metrostars.com instantly became newyorkredbulls.com, throwing further confusion into the mix for bewildered fans who are still unsure as to exactly what their club is called, or just what further surprises Red Bull have in store for them in future weeks and months.
On metrofanatic.com there are over 50 threads addressing a variety of concerns, and the lack of a cohesive collective response to the sale is indicative of the helplessness of their situation. Some fans see this as a new dawn for a club which has failed since its conception, while others believe that Red Bull will allow them to continue to support the team while displaying MetroStars paraphernalia. Recent history, I’m afraid, is not on their side on that one.
That this has happened in America should not be dismissed without the consideration that the notion of shirt sponsorship is largely alien to US sport. If anything, it’s intriguing that this sale has been allowed to proceed in this form at all, given the 10 years of federal growth of the MLS, a league where player contracts and ‘commercial partnerships’ are held by the league, not by the clubs.
Nevertheless, Red Bull continue to extend their sporting empire, including two F1 teams and the principle football teams of both its home town of Salzburg and one of the most famous cities on the planet. In doing so, their actions represent a brutal form of homogenisation and an appalling abduction of a public’s individuality for reasons no more complex than shifting as many silver tins as possible.
