By Richard Snowden

According to the old maxim, you've got to shovel plenty of manure to grow a beautiful rose. And these days, there's plenty of manure-shoveling going on with the Los Angeles Galaxy.

As many (if not most) will already be aware, Galaxy overseers Anschutz Entertainment Group canned coach Ruud Gullit and president/general manager Alexi Lalas on Monday, a move produced by a seven-game winless skid and a recent tirade from AEG executive Tim Leiweke, who reportedly spewed all manner of thinly veiled threats at the team.

In all honesty, perhaps Leiweke should have yelled at himself instead. After all, it was on his watch that the club fired one coach while in first place (Sigi Schmid), ditched another mere months after winning a league title (Steve Sampson), and allowed the non-soccer folks behind American Idol to import Gullit, the purported purveyor of sexy football whose coaching career has so far been as tarnished as his playing career was bright.

It's no coincidence that the "E" in AEG does not stand for soccer, though. Presumably, Leiweke doesn't just demand victories from the team he likes to fancy MLS's crown jewel – he insists on winning with style and panache. And that attitude works out fine in a truly capitalistic league system (see Barcelona, AC Milan, et al), where clubs are free to spend themselves silly to grab every flashy wunderkind they can afford.

But in the somewhat communistic system of MLS, where the salary cap is firm (well, allegedly, at least) the league holds veto power over its teams and parity is a veritable religion, L.A. is stuck with three stars (David Beckham, Landon Donovan, Carlos Ruiz) eating so much salary-cap room that they can't afford a strong supporting cast. As such, not only is the football far from sexy, but the results haven't been too comely, either.

So, for all his many laudable successes – signing Beckham alone is a coup of Cosmos-like proportions – Leiweke is now forced to confront the reality of the poor choices that have been made during his tenure. And whether you love the Galaxy or not, you've got to feel some genuine compassion for the guy; we all know that it hurts to look in the mirror and realize that your problems are the result of your own mistakes.

Not surprisingly, the predictions of doom and gloom are ubiquitous among America's venerable and august soccer scribes at the moment. "Nothing rosy can be forecast for the short term" in L.A., Soccer America's Ridge Mahoney wrote, lamenting "the train wreck the Galaxy has become." Grahame Jones of the L.A. Times, meanwhile, pronounced the Galaxy's "Major League Soccer season [to be] in meltdown mode."

The m-word was seen in the L.A. Daily News as well, where Nick Green asserted that "the Galaxy has never been this ugly." Comparing the situation to both the Keystone Kops and a Saturday Night Live sketch, Steve Davis of ESPNsoccernet joined in with "Honestly, they just can't get anything right out there."

Or can they? For all the manure flying around in Galaxyland these days, a small but lovely rose might just be starting to peek through.

Ever since MLS's inception, possibly the single biggest problem the league's handlers have grappled with is lack of media attention. In most cases, attempts to address the issue have been costly; signing international stars like Beckham and Lothar Matthaeus have cost the league millions of dollars and too often (as with Matthaeus) backfired.

In this case, however, we can see yet again the positive effects of the investment made by Leiweke and AEG in Becks. Without his presence in the Galaxy team – not to mention that of Beckham ally Simon Fuller and his 19 Management organization – this SoCal soap opera would never be likely to generate much interest. Consider this: Would a similar fiasco in, say, Columbus get this much attention?

And make no mistake – it certainly is getting plenty of attention. Nothing says "water-cooler chat fodder" quite like one telling bit of data from Monday: By mid-afternoon, shortly after the firings of Gullit and Lalas were announced, the story ranked number seven among the top 10 most-read stories on the L.A. Times Web site.

Yes, you read that right. Not among the top 10 most-read soccer stories. Nor, for that matter, among the top 10 most-read sports stories. It was among the top 10 most-read stories of any type – just a couple of spots behind the story about Barack Obama's new ad mocking John McCain's own "celebrity" status, with the Angels, the Lakers and even the hugely popular Dodgers nowhere to be found on the list.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of the "Beckham effect" have clearly been greatly exaggerated.

It would obviously be premature to claim that MLS has arrived based solely on this information. But the league has certainly taken a solid step in the right direction, and it has undeniably come light years from where it started.

As most of us would probably acknowledge, much of what makes mainstream U.S. sports so popular is the dramas and soap operas that occur off the field. For better or worse, the latest arrest, doping scandal or locker-room bust-up among basketball, baseball and football personalities makes headlines and keeps tongues wagging. There's a reason for the old saying that there's no such thing as bad press.

From the coverage of the Galaxy's "meltdown," we can see that MLS is finally beginning to join the club, so to say. It may not be the most flattering press attention, but it clearly makes for compelling copy, something MLS has generated far too little of in years past.

Ultimately, that may prove to be the most important end result of the Galaxy's current woes. Tim Leiweke's crown jewel may have laid an egg on the pitch, but off it, that egg seems to be turning golden.            

HAVE YOUR SAY…
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