Barcelona’s Steamroller Might Find Roadblock In The MLS

Barcelona must be feeling preetttty good about themselves right now. They’re steamrolling everyone, have probably the best collection of talent in the universe and they’re about to utterly destroy Real Madrid in this weekend’s derby. But all isn’t perfect for the owners of Camp Nou, as their bid to put a team in Miami might be met with a couple of million-dollar roadblocks that will prevent them from making tons of worthless American dollars that will only end up being used to wipe Leo Messi’s ass. The first is the fact MLS is under contract with Adidas, and Barca is a Nike club. There might be a whole bunch of conflicts of interest there, except that Barca is leaning towards not using their famous blue and red for the Miami side. Secondly, and more importantly we thinks, is that they players they want to use on the team would be from their Latin American academies. That’s great and all except…

Second, Barcelona’s chief executive Joan Laporta said the day the bid was announced that the new club would be able to benefit by using players at Barcelona academies in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico; hoping to showcase the young talent and possibly sell players on to European clubs. But how would the club get around the single-entity system where M.L.S. owns all player contracts?

Um, not go into the MLS? That seems to be the only way, and the Times kicked around the idea of Barcelona fielding a USL team because Nike’s contracted with them through Umbro and the contract situation wouldn’t be sticky. But oh wait! There’s already a team in Miami (FC), so that wouldn’t work. We think the best thing would be just send Thierry Henry here and it’ll make everything just zoom by faster… for him, them and an MLS team in Miami.
Speed Bumps for Barcelona’s M.L.S. Bid [NY Times]