NASL needs to be public and transparent in how it deals with the fallout from Strikers-FCE match

Great leaders can find ways to turn crisis into opportunity.

The North American Soccer League has a mini-crisis on its hands at the moment. And, in the coming days, how the NASL handles the fallout from Sunday’s Fort Lauderdale Strikers/FC Edmonton match can either go a long way to building the credibility of the league or entrenching the image of North American soccer outside of MLS as rudderless.

NASL has made great strides over the last year. It will add three clubs in 2013 and two more in 2014. League commissioner Bill Peterson dealt with the Puerto Rico Islanders situation as well as he could, recently informing the financially troubled club that the waiting time was over, and that if it wanted to come back to the league it would now have to go through an expansion process.(CLICK HERE)

But the one area where NASL has got the media that follows it and, more importantly, its supporters, scratching their heads is discipline.

At the end of every week, MLS sends out a disciplinary report, explaining why certain players have been censured and why some have had their punishments reduced. There are video links to the plays in question. Reasons are given for the Disciplinary Committee’s decisions. In NASL, there is no public discussion of suspensions, at least not coming from the league offices in Florida. Case in point: In the first week of September, a fight became an ugly punctuation mark to the match between the San Antonio Scorpions and Minnesota United FC. The antagonist in this case: Canadian midfielder Kevin Harmse.

We finally heard that Harmse had been suspended six games. But that announcement came from his team, the San Antonio Scorpions, as part of a guilt-ridden admission that their player had crossed the line and had earned what he got. The league itself didn’t tell us that it had decided to suspend Harmse.

There have been other incidents that have been ignored or swept away; in September, a match between FC Edmonton and Atlanta saw the teams confront each other in front of their dressing rooms at halftime. That incident was fuelled by a spring season altercation between Atlanta’s Danny Barrera and FCE’s Albert Watson. Barrera came in late and drove his shoulder into Watson’s face, knocking out several of the Eddie defender’s teeth. The ref didn’t see it, didn’t penalize it. And, there was no supplementary discipline. So the memories of the incident festered and, as players do when they feel justice isn’t served, matters were settled when the teams next faced each other in a game filled with shoving matches, cards and a near-brawl.

But that was the past. And NASL can now point itself in the direction in which it needs to go. On Sunday, Strikers coach Gunter Kronsteiner and goalkeeper coach Ricardo Lopes were tossed from the game in the first half, after arguing the referee’s decision to allow Eddie Lance Laing to re-take a free kick. The re-take resulted in a goal.

The coaches came onto the field and, finally, members of the Edmonton Police Service were required to get them off the turf. Sub Walter Restrepo got a red card.

FCE general manager Rod Proudfoot said the league office OK’d a decision to allow the coaches to sit in the stands. The coaches were then caught on cameras trying to communicate with the bench, even though the league office said they were only allowed to sit there with the condition that they make no attempt to contact staff or players.

Eventually, on a Canadian national television broadcast, they were escorted out by police.

On Monday, there was no comment from NASL, other than a statement that when the decision is made about supplementary discipline, that the teams “relevant” to the case will be contacted. As in, there won’t be a public statement. Like the Harmse case, it will be up to the team to let their supporters know (or not know) about their coaches’ fates.

Instead, NASL could use this as a way to create a new level of transparency. Supporters and fans are “relevant” parties. They deserve to know why players aren’t playing or coaches aren’t coaching. They deserve to know how the league arrives at decisions. This isn’t proprietary information, here.

No matter which way the league goes, fans should learn how it arrived at its decision. This game was broadcast coast-to-coast across Canada; it was webcast in the U.S. It’s the most popular story in the history of this website. There is no sweeping the incident under the rug. If the league throws the book at the coaches, fans need to know why. If it decides to not add anything to the automatic one-game suspensions a sending-off should bring, the fans need to know why. And if the league decides the involvement of police was heavy-handed and that the coaches’ sendings-off should be rescinded, the fans need to know why.

I was on the Ultras Alive podcast (CLICK HERE) on Monday and I made my case. What I’d do if I was Peterson: I’d enforce the mandatory one-game suspension on each coach, and then add a game for the shenanigans that followed. Since they didn’t respect the ejection, since they made it obvious in the middle of the stands that they felt they were above the law, they should get another match each. I think a two-game suspension is fair — allowing the fact Kronsteiner is new to NASL and has no record of disciplinary issues. To be clear: Proudfoot said Sunday that the Eddies would consider asking for a forfeit (in response to a direct question I posed to him), not that the club would ask for a forfeit. And, when you talk to players and coaches, you really get the feeling that there’s a distaste for deciding games in boardrooms.

But, instead of admitting that the Fort Lauderdale-FC Edmonton kerfuffle is the biggest story in the league at the moment, the NASL keeps pushing next week’s Cosmos-Strikers rivalry game. Cosmos-Strikers history stories dominate the league’s website.

Instead, fans need to know if the Strikers’ coaches will be anywhere close to Lockhart Stadium for that match.

The best way for a league to deal with embarrassing or violent incidents is to admit that they happened and to deal with them fairly and in a transparent matter. Keeping quiet feels like denial. Even if the league is working behind the scenes, the perception is that it’s trying to pretend like Sunday was just another day in NASL.