April 17, 2007 GALAXY MAY GROW WITH ZIDANE Lalas admits interest in retired French star
By Andrea Canales, LA Soccer News Associate Editor
Alexi Lalas and the Galaxy would like to entice Zinedine Zidane out of retirement. Andrea Canales, LASoccerNews.com
Behind reports that executive Tim Leiweke has traveled to France, meeting with Zinedine Zidane personally to entice him to join Major League Soccer, Galaxy general manager Alexi Lalas was guarded in his statements.
“He is certainly a person of interest,” said Lalas of Zidane, though he would not confirm that any deal was imminent.
“This is all preliminary and to be honest, exploratory,” admitted Lalas.
It wasn’t entirely surprising that Leiweke would be the one to travel to France. As the administrator in charge of Anschutz Entertainment Group’s sports enterprises, he negotiated the bulk of the terms to bring David Beckham to the Galaxy, as well as Cuauhtemoc Blanco to the Chicago Fire.
What makes signing Zidane especially tricky is that Major League Soccer is run by a salary cap. Teams are allowed to exceed the salary cap for one designated player per team. That means the owner pays everything above a base $400,000 dollar salary for that player.
Beckham is also being compensated through a unique image rights deal that is expected to bring him millions. His actual salary has been reported to be as low as five million yearly, of which AEG would pay 4,600,000.
Though one superstar would seem to be enough for any MLS team, Lalas declared the Galaxy would be willing to take on Zidane.
“There’s not a team in the world that wouldn’t want a player like Zidane, ours included,” said Lalas.
Since the Galaxy have already used their designated player slot on David Beckham, the team would need to trade with another squad for theirs.
“We’ve had numerous discussions with different teams regarding DP slots, but they’re all very preliminary,” stated Lalas. “It remains to be seen when the appropriate time to trade for a DP slot would be.”
The only reason Donovan does not count as a designated player this year is that the league decreed that all the current players making more than $400,000 with teams were “grandfathered” to not count as a DP slot for one year, though they would still count against $300,000 of the salary cap.
Because the DP rule limits teams to two slots (the one that every team is given, and an extra one should they be able to trade for it), only the grandfathering of Donovan this year would make it possible to also add Zidane and Beckham.
Lalas was a little cagey while allowing that the fact was currently true.
“According to the rules as of today, we would only be allowed to have Landon Donovan and two other designated players for 2007.”
Though many have assumed that Donovan would be the Galaxy’s marquee player for the future, Lalas did not rule out a possible trade at some point.
“There is nobody that is untouchable on our team,” Lalas said. “It doesn’t matter what your name is, you have expectations that we need players to live up to and if you don’t then we make changes.”
One thing that did not surprise Lalas was that Zidane could possibly be interested in joining the Galaxy, despite the fact that twelve other MLS teams would no doubt be interested in his services.
“To be able to come to California and particularly Los Angeles to play soccer at the Home Depot Center for the Los Angeles Galaxy, in beautiful weather, in one of the greatest cities in the world, is incredibly enticing,” Lalas pointed out. “We certainly have an advantage over other markets in terms of what exists in Los Angeles in terms of as a culture and as a city.”
It might also be that Zidane would be glad to rejoin Beckham, his former Real Madrid teammate.
“You develop relationships with players, good and bad, throughout your entire career,” noted Lalas of that possibility. “I can’t speak on their relationship other than it seems positive on the field.”
With other teams in the league still deciding how to use their designated player slots, it could seem a little unfair that the Galaxy might be targeting such a collection of top players.
Others fear that the spending in MLS could start to spiral out of control as teams begin to compete more for players.
“The way we’ve gone about our business has enabled us to get to our 12th year of existence,” asserted Lalas. “We tried from day one to make sure that we didn’t repeat mistakes from the past and that we learned our lessons from the NASL. I don’t think that this is the start of a slippery slope. I believe that with the infrastructure and the competition among American players that we have right now, it’s a very different time than in the seventies.”
In fact, two of the teams picked to lead the league, DC United and the LA Galaxy, currently are the bottom dwellers of the table. Though Lalas wasn’t happy about his team’s current position, he maintained that the quality of MLS from top to bottom was more even than that of any other league in the world.
“We can argue about whether we have the best league in the world, but we can’t argue that we have the most competitive league in the world,” Lalas reasoned. “That means, with this parity and this competition, what separates a team is so small. In a sense, when a team is successful, it means that much more, because it’s not a situation where they went out and bought all the best players. Even with David Beckham, we’re going to win games and we’re going to lose games. That’s part of sports. Particularly, that’s true of MLS.”
