Slowly but surely, David Beckham is showing why MLS shelled out the big bucks to bring him to the US. In the days after his signing was announced, the Galaxy announced they had sold 5,000 season tickets. And when the Los Angeles team announced on Friday that they had signed a five-year jersey sponsorship deal with “nutritional products” manufacturer Herbalife, the $3.5 to $5 million quoted was due, in no small part, to a certain Mr. Beckham sporting the company’s name.

Since MLS decided this season to allow its teams to sign jersey sponsorship deals, four teams have done so. In their bids to secure corporate sponsorship, a pattern has emerged. Whether by choice or necessity, several MLS teams have reached deals with companies whose products and marketing strategies are not the most reputable.

Real Salt Lake was the first team to announce a jersey sponsorship deal, when they signed with XanGo. XanGo paid an estimated $4 to $5 million dollars to have Jeff Cunningham and the rest of the RSL team promote their brand.

Dave Checketts gets hooked up with some mangosteen juice

This raises the question: what exactly is XanGo? Well, according to its website Xango is

A delicious dietary supplement, XanGo Juice harnesses the nutritional power of the whole mangosteen fruit through a potent proprietary formula. Just one to three ounces each day unleashes a concentrated rush of xanthones, a vigorous family of phytonutrients. The best part: sensational flavor that’ll keep you coming back for more and more.

What XanGo is still seems a bit murky (Mangosteen? Xanthones? Phytonutrients?). But it is not the first slightly sketchy drink to find itself emblazoned on an MLS jersey.

That honor goes to Red Bull, whose logo has been seen on the jerseys of the team of the same name since it was taken over by the Austrian beverage company. Wooed by Red Bull company head Dietrich Mateschitz’s billions, the league changed the name of the franchise formerly known as the MetroStars and allowed Mateschitz to put his logo on the team’s uniforms before other teams were permitted to sign such corporate sponsorship deals.

The 2006 New York Red Bulls

So, what is Red Bull? Well, the official website is a bit murky, claiming only that “All ingredients used for Red Bull Energy Drink are synthetically produced. Most ingredients are produced by pharmaceutical companies. This guarantees highest quality.” A bit vague.

Wikipedia clarifies a bit (though not much for those without advanced degrees in chemistry), claiming Red Bull contains “Water, sucrose, glucose, acidifier sodium citrates, carbon dioxide, taurine (0.4%), glucuronolactone (0.24%), caffeine (0.03%), inositol, vitamins (niacin, pantothenic acid, B6, B12), flavourings, and colours (caramel, riboflavin).”

So, highest quality synthetic ingredients such as taurine, glucuronolactone, inositol? Thanks, but I’ll pass.

New LA Galaxy sponsor Herbalife is also not quite mainstream. Though it markets itself as a “premier nutrition and weight-management company” with “life-changing products,” every product it sells carries the disclaimer “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

Many of Herbalife’s products deal with weight control. One, called Snack Defense, claims to be

A scientific advancement in snacking control, Snack Defense … works all day to reduce the desire for sweets while it helps prevent the urge to snack between meals. Formulated with a blend of natural ingredients, including Gymnema sylvestre, a cutting-edge herb that targets the body’s response to sweets, plus chromium polynicotinate and Garcinia cambogia extract, Snack Defenseâ„¢ takes weight loss to a whole new level.

Gymnema sylvestre, chromium polynicotinate, Garcinia cambogia extract? Delicious!

(The one counterexample to MLS teams signing deals with producers of sketchy products is the expansion team Toronto FC. Their deal with the BMO, a bank, seems straightforward enough, even if Maurice Edu is a bit skeptical about their mascot.)

The ingredients of XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife products are enough to give me pause about those companies. But the sketchiness doesn’t end there.

All three companies have had their business practices questioned publicly. XanGo was issued a warning letter from the FDA telling the company to stop claiming health claims about its product, such as fighting depression, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Red Bull was banned from being sold in Canada until 2005 and a CBC investigation headlined Raging Bull found that “two people have reported serious adverse health reactions after consuming the Red Bull energy drink.”

According to a 2000 article in Salon, since its founding in the 1980s, Herbalife has “courted its share of regulatory nightmares. Some health experts questioned the effectiveness of the company’s nutritional supplements; Herbalife claimed to increase energy and cure a range of illnesses from venereal disease to bee stings.” Other have criticized Herbalife for being a pyramid scheme (see Dan Loney’s in-depth discussion), though a wildly successful one that made founder Mark Hughes over $400 million dollars by the time of his 2000 death by overdose (ironically, by anti-depressant pills: wasn’t there an Herbalife cure for what ailed him?).

The companies whose logos will be on the chests of David Beckham and fellow MLS players this season are not quite mainstream. But, then again, neither is MLS. It is a ten year-old league struggling to succeed on the field and on the balance sheet. Real Salt Lake is about as well as known to the general public as is XanGo, so in that sense, the teams and the sponsors are at an equal level in their respective fields. But as a fan who hopes to see MLS become a long-term success, I can only hope that XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife will be on teams’ uniforms only until they can find more reputable sponsors.

When Japan defeated China 3-1 to win the 2004 Asian Cup, then-China coach Foppe de Haan was fuming mad at Kuwaiti referee Saad Kameel. The Dutch coach accused the referee of erring in allowing all three of Japan’s goals and, in a symbolic protest, refused to accept his second place medal.

Japan celebrate their victory in a nearly empty Chinese stadium

But the real protests of the 2004 Asian Cup were far from symbolic.

Throughout the tournament, Chinese fans repeatedly booed the Japanese team, burned Japanese flags, and even at one point surrounded the Japanese team’s bus, which sped off in panic, momentarily leaving behind two terrified players.

After the final, the protests became all-out riots. Reuters reported that, “Trouble flared outside the stadium after the match, however, with police in riot gear battling to restore order among furious Chinese fans amid wailing sirens and flashing police lights. A bus carrying delegates was attacked, with bottles and garbage thrown, and police charged the crowd with batons and riot shields to clear a path.”

The BBC offered further details: “Fans burned Japanese flags, shouted obscenities and sang patriotic songs outside the stadium as more than 5,000 police lined the streets.”

Chinese fans make their anti-Japanese feelings known

Where had the anger come from that led to such passionate and violent protests? Sport is one thing, but vitriol like that seen at the 2004 Asian Cup did not come from performance on the pitch. The anger that the Chinese protesters exhibited stems largely from Japan’s occupation of China from the 1930s through World War II.

As Reuters reported, “Chinese harbour bitter resentment over Japan’s military invasion and brutal occupation of parts of the country from 1931 to 1945, when tens of millions died.” The Rape of Nanking, an infamous Japanese bombing and murder campaign that killed 300,000 Chinese, occurred during this time. In the past few years, mustard gas dump sites dating back to war have been discovered in northern China, not coincidentally the location of Japan’s opening round games.

Perhaps most infuriating to the Chinese, many in Japan refuse to acknowledge the wrongs their country committed in China. As Robert Marquand wrote in the Christian Science Monitor wrote at the time, “Unlike postwar Germany, postwar Japan was never able to face its brutal wartime record in Asia in any serious, self-reflective manner.” Some Japanese history textbooks used today don’t mention Japanese occupation of China. And then-Prime Minster Junichiro Koizumi’s visits (as well as those by others before and since) to the Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the remains of World War II Japanese war criminals, have been a constant source of anger for many Chinese.

Junichiro Koizumi visits the Yasukuni Shrine in 2001

But the protests are not just about atrocities committed over half a century ago. As China has risen to become a global economic and political power, it has challenged Japan’s regional supremacy. More than one commentator suggested that the anti-Japanese protests of 2004 were permitted or even encouraged by the Chinese government in order to unite its people against a common enemy. Again, Robert Marquand: “[Anti-Japanese sentiment] gets raised when there are tensions in the region, and also when Beijing is seeking to unify its domestic patriotic base.”

A Christian Science Monitor editorial opined that, “After years of trying to befriend China with huge loans, Japan has begun to realize that Beijing finds it useful to unify the Chinese behind the Communist Party by occasionally letting loose nationalist and historical resentments against Japan.” This nationalist and historical resentment was never more obvious than at the 2004 Asian Cup.

So, what is the solution to this problem? To do so it is necessary to define the problem, or, as I see it, the problems.The two main problems that the 2004 Asian Cup protests exposed were: 1) lingering animosity of many Chinese toward Japan over its conduct in the World War II, and 2) the Chinese government’s willingness to exploit anti-Japanese animosity for its own benefit (i.e. uniting its people).

First and foremost, the Japanese must acknowledge their role in some of the most appalling events of the 20th century. The only thing more heinous than having brutally occupied and ruled China is the fact that many Japanese refuse to admit to having done so. A growing tide of nationalism in Japan makes this prospect unlikely, as recently elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is firmly in the nationalist camp, even supporting “revisionist history textbooks that teach students to take pride in their nation rather than focus on accounts of Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities.”

Bodies piled up after being killed during the Rape of Nanking

But China is not entirely without fault. Its control of nearly all media in the country meant that anti-Japanese issues raised in newspapers (such as the discovery of mustard gas) must be approved for publication by the government. That the 2004 Asian Cup protests were not shut down immediately suggests that the authoritarian Chinese government at least tacitly approved of them. The official China People’s Daily article headlined “Civility and reason: excitement likely for Chinese fans” sounded like the misleading propaganda it is when it said at the time, “There have been some overacting fans occasionally in major international games, who, however, are not what we want to copy.”

Ultimately, soccer tournaments should be about sports, not politics. Japan should apologize for past atrocities and China should responsibly discuss sensitive issues with its neighbor rather than encourage violent anti-Japanese protests. But both of these things should occur in discussions between politicians, far from the soccer field. Leaders in Japan and China would do well to listen to Chinese captain Li Weifeng, who said before the Asian Cup final, “Sport is the symbol of friendship so there are absolutely no political feelings or thoughts involved in our minds.”

Li Weifeng: Asian peacemaker?

Since writing about the long and shameful history of political violence on the soccer field, I’ve been keeping an eye out for current instances of this phenomenon. Sadly, such an incident took only a couple of weeks to occur. Not surprisingly, it took place in Iraq.

The suicide bombing that killed 18 boys as they played soccer in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi last Monday was sad enough on its own. At the same time, it illustrates how badly the American military is struggling to contain the violence in Iraq as the country spirals downward towards all-out civil war.

Children play soccer on a Fallujah field after a suicide bombing

On hearing reports of the suicide bombing, the US military went into news-spinning mode. Spokesmen said that there were two incidents that day in Ramadi and that one had been a controlled explosion near a soccer field in which there had been injuries but no deaths.

Only later in the week, with some reporting from the Washington Post, did it become clear that the soccer field attack had indeed occurred. The Post quoted local sheikh Raad Sabah al-Mukeilef, who was likely the intended target of the attack. Mukeilef said of the suicide bomber, “He came in a pickup. Instead of coming in my street, he did it in a small park for children.”

The sheikh also claimed that no members of the US military had responded to the incident. Despite this account, US military spokesman Mark Fox continued to contradict reality. “We ran this down,” said Rear Admiral Fox. “There was no second blast and there were not 18 children killed. The soccer field that was touted in the erroneous report was across the street from the structure that was in the controlled detonation.”

It is sad enough that the US military has so little awareness of, let alone control over, the violence in Iraq. It is even sadder that 18 children had to die playing soccer to make this clear.

Days after the suicide bombing that killed these young boys Ramadi was again the site of violence toward soccer players. The Guardian reports that Mohhamed Hamid and Mohammed Mishaan, both members of the local Ramadi Football Club, were killed on March 2. According to the website Iraq Slogger, both players were killed in the middle of a team practice.

Masked gunmen in Ramadi, west of Iraq, killed football players Mohammed Hamid, 27, and Mohammed Mish’an, 23, from the Ramadi Football Team in front of spectators and teammates while they were in a training session Friday. Three vehicles carrying a dozen gunmen entered the stadium and dragged the two players toward the cars, while people watched in fear. When the two players resisted, they were both shot execution-style, according to eyewitnesses and Ramadi police spokesman Major Tariq Yousif. The two players were accused of being supporters of the Anbar Salvation Council, a tribal group led by Sheikh Abdul Sattar Al-Rishawi, which is opposed to Al-Qaeda militants in the Anbar Governorate.

No word yet on whether the US military plans to deny this latest violence on Iraq’s soccer fields.

Update

NPR ran a great story which is an antidote the theme of violence being perpetrated on the soccer field. The story talks about a mixed Sunni / Shiite league in Baghdad that attempts to bring players from all backgrounds together. Many of the players specifically talked about the league being non-sectarian as a reason why they played in it. Unfortunately, it’s probably only a matter of time before those in Iraq who don’t want to see such unity attack the players in this league.

Growing up, my local newspaper (the Dayton Daily News) barely acknowledged the existence of soccer. It seemed the only thing that could get the sport into the newspaper was a riot in a foreign country, preferably involving deaths. I know that the Dayton Daily News is not the only paper to take such an approach to soccer coverage. With this emphasis on a few negative incidents, it is perhaps little surprise that many non-soccer fans in the US come to see the sport as “violent.”

This impression stands in marked contrast to the incredible number of soccer games which go off each day without violence. Given the number of games played on any given day and the relative number of violent incidents, I suspect that soccer may be, statistically speaking, one of the least violent sports in the world.

OK, maybe tennis has soccer beat.

Or so I thought until news came from the just completed Australian Open of violence between ethnic Serbian and Croatian fans there. A small number of fans from these two communities who clashed during the 1990s in the Balkans recently rekindled their fight in Melbourne.

Reading the reports of violence surrounding the Australian Open, I caught myself wondering, “What’s the matter with those tennis fans?” But I quickly realized that I had fallen into the same trap set by the Dayton Daily News for its readers. Just as the Dayton Daily News only covered soccer when there were riots surrounding games, leading its readers to assume that soccer was a violent game, so too can such reports from the Australian Open lead readers, like me, to jump to conclusions about the nature of tennis.

The real issue that lead to this recent violence is, of course, anything but tennis. Rackets and fuzzy green balls were only peripheral to the events that led up to the violence. Anyone with even a minimal knowledge of recent history knows the degree of animosity that the 1990s Balkan wars created in people on all sides of the conflict. The fighting at the Australian Open occurred as a result of the unresolved anger that came from the war that led to Croatia’s ultimate independence from then-Yugoslavia (later to become Serbia). It may have occurred at a tennis match, but the fighting was not about tennis; it was about a history of hatred between two ethnic groups that flared up years after and thousands of miles from its genesis.

Soccer was, sadly, sucked into the “tennis riots” as well. Reports indicate that the rioters were wearing soccer jerseys. And the reports also say that riots between ethnic Serbs and Croats in Australia have occurred in the past at soccer matches.

It is sad when violence becomes intertwined with sports. But given the popularity of sports, it is perhaps not surprising that violence often finds a way to rear its ugly face near games. However, jumping to the conclusion (as I did) that tennis, that most patrician of sports, is inherently violent shows just how silly a similar characterization of soccer would be. Yet coverage of violence that surrounds sports often ignores this larger context.

Violence occurs far too often around sports and it deserves to be condemned. However, it behooves us all to remember that sports are not the reason for the violence, but instead merely the innocent bystander who happens to be close by when violence occurs.

I don’t think I can remember the last time a soccer story was on the front page of most major American online news sources. So it was quite a surprise to see a story related to MLS’s LA Galaxy splashed across the home pages of New York Times, CNN, ABC News and other high-profile news sites. What was not a surprise was that the player generating this press coverage is the world player with perhaps the highest profile in the world: David Beckham.

In addition to Beckham’s name recognition even among non-soccer fans in this country, what surely brought much of the press coverage was the size of the salary the new Galaxy recruit signed. 250 million dollars is quite a chunk of change, to be sure. But the contract’s details are slightly more complicated than has been let on. This post on MLS Underground quotes from a Wall Street Journal article which says that Beckham’s actual salary is closer to $10 million per year, with the Spice Boy also pocketing half of the Galaxy’s jersey sales profits as well as a cut of ticket sales. Beckham will also be getting close to $20 million in endorsements. Altogether, this may add up to $50 million a year over 5 years, pushing the total to $250 million. (Ives Galarcep is similarly skeptical about the $250 million figure.)

But the real question is not whether Beckham will become simply rich or uber-rich; it’s whether his arrival will benefit MLS specifically and American soccer in general. I have spoken with many friends and fellow soccer fans in the past couple of days and they are not convinced he will be a good thing for American soccer.

But I disagree: I think Beckham’s arrival will push MLS and American soccer to new heights and take them closer to world-class status. Here’s why.

Sports are, lest we forget, a business. A large part of business is brand awareness and this is built by media exposure. In its 10 years of existence MLS has struggled to establish itself in the minds of the American public. Until this past season, it had to pay to have its games broadcast, as opposed to leagues like the NFL and NBA that sell their rights for multi-million dollar figures. MLS has been known to soccer people, but has struggled to push outside of this small circle of fans.

I am sure that surveys about familiarity with MLS taken January 10 (the day before Becks was signed) would be far lower than those taken today. MLS has scored an incredible coup in getting its name into major media (I am convinced that quoting the $250 million figure was intended to cause sensation in the press, despite it being simply a projection of Beckham’s future earnings).

But many are concerned that MLS has overpaid for a player who is past 30 and has never been as good as his hype. This concern makes sense if one considers Beckham’s arrival in purely sporting terms. Clearly, though, he was signed as much for his name recognition and potential to earn MLS money as for his soccer skills. LA Galaxy jerseys may not be seen much outside of LA, but Don Garber and co. are hoping they will soon be seen around the world. They have reason to think this may be the case.

In the summer of 2003, a certain David Beckham signed for Real Madrid in a 17.8 million pound (roughly 35 million dollars) deal. This was considered exorbitant even then, when Beckham was in his prime as a player. But Real Madrid bought the player as a soccer player and as a way to boost their brand. Los Merengues used Beckham’s popularity to boost their replica jersey sales and overtook Manchester United (not coincedentally, Beckham’s former team) as the richest club in the world. Beckham clearly can have an effect on the bottom line, and the Galaxy will hope to replicate Madrid’s success in this area.

But what about Beckham’s role on the field? He is a marketing juggernaut but he wouldn’t have risen to prominence if he weren’t a half-decent player as well. Some worry that Beckham is coming to MLS simply to earn money and won’t put any effort into his playing. I doubt it. I’ve never been a huge Beckham fan, but no one has ever questioned his work ethic. Unlike other aging Europeans who have come to MLS, I can’t see Beckham “pulling a Matthaus” and half-assing it on the field in order to experience life in the US. I take Beckham at his word when he says he wants to help build American soccer. A large part of doing this will be how he performs on the field, and I am sure he will give his all.

Another concern voiced in the wake of Beckham’s signing is that he will be too good for MLS. While there is concern that he may dominate the league (Ives Galarcep points out that he will go up against MLS left backs, who are, for the most part, weak), soccer is very much a team sport and Beckham is not the type of player to completely take over a game (a point Stefan Fatsis made recently on NPR).

Comparisons between Pele coming to the NASL in the 70s and Beckham coming to MLS have popped up, with some worrying that American soccer is again relying on aging stars to achieve success. I think theses comparisons are incorrect. One of the reasons the NASL went bust is that it never developed American players. Developing young Americans has been one of MLS’s largest successes (it should be noted that Clint Dempsey signed with England’s Fulham one day before the Beckham announcement in a deal worth a record 4 million dollars). Beckham will step into a league in which he will undoubtedly be a star, but he will have to work hard to achieve success. MLS may not be Spain’s La Liga or England’s Premier League, but it is a good, solid league.

In the end, I think Beckham’s arrival will boost MLS because it will boost the awareness of soccer in this country. With more people aware of the game, I think MLS can make the jump from a minor sport to one of the “big four” (can we remove hockey from that group yet?). Concerns about Beckham’s desire to work hard on the field are unfounded as he has shown throughout his career. And having a star such as Beckham on the field will raise the level of MLS players and hopefully encourage the future stars of American soccer to take up the game.

As for Posh Spice … not everyone is as excited about her arrival as the paparazzi to whom she’ll undoubtedly give new work.

Adboards around the English Premier League this year are sporting a new sponsor: Think Israel. After seeing this for the first, I wondered what it could be referring to. Okay, I’m thinking Israel, but what should I be thinking about Israel? Well, it turns out this is no crazy scheme to encourage deep reflection on the Jewish nation; instead, it is part of a campaign to encourage tourism to Israel. This realization comes by way of the public radio program Marketplace, which today ran a story on the larger marketing program of which these adboards are a part.

Who exactly are the marketers trying to reach with their message? Well, given that part of their scheme involves placing adboards in Premier League stadiums, it’s clear that they are going for males. The scantily clad women who front the Think Israel website make it clear of these gender-specific intentions. Sex sells, and even the Holy Land can be hawked using it, apparently.

But will this scheme work? Are bare-chested Newcastle fans going to be convinced to leave St. James’ Park and hop on the next plane to Tel Aviv for a romp in the Mediterranean? I doubt it. I just can’t imagine this scheme working. The idea that people would have more favorable opinions about a country after seeing advertisements for it is ludicrous. Constant images of conflict and occupation of Palestinian land in the media speak more strongly than any slick marketing campaign.

Budweiser, Nike, and even the Borat movie will use the Premier League’s worldwide visibility to improve their image, but I doubt whether Israel can do the same.

Very nice … I like.