Arace: After flurry of dealing, Columbus Crew ready to compete for MLS title
The way things are trending, MLS commissioner Lionel Messi is a lock to win the league’s Sporting Executive of the Year award for his subversion of Inter Miami’s salary cap, his proximity to a major ocean and his impact on Apple TV’s international television ratings.
I'm kidding pretty much.
Crew president/general manager Tim Bezbatchenko should be a finalist, or something. After months of planning, he leaped through the summer transfer window on July 5 to seek transformation. The last bit of it – the acquisition of wing Diego Rossi, a former MLS golden boot winner, from Fenerbahce of the Turkish Super League – got over the sash just before the window slammed shut Wednesday evening.
The move that created the biggest buzz was an outgoing transfer: Bezbatchenko sold Lucas Zelarayan, probably the greatest player in Crew history, to Al Fateh of the Saudi Pro League. Al Fateh is not one of the four government-subsidized teams in the Saudi League. It’s kind of the Columbus of the Ad-Dahna desert. Reports of the transfer fee Al Fateh paid for Zelarayan range from $3 million to $6 million, which is less than Greg Norman and Mohammed bin Salman, combined, spend on toothpaste. Or saws to cut up journalists. Or driver's licenses for women.
“We explored what could be done to keep both (Rossi and Zelarayan)," Bezbatchenko said. “It would have taken seismic changes to our roster.”
The story of this summer transfer window began on Decision Day, Oct. 9, 2022, when the Crew lost 2-1 in Orlando and fell short of the playoffs. Within hours, coach Caleb Porter, who delivered and MLS Cup in 2020 and then failed to make the playoffs the next two years, was fired.
There followed "a drastic shift," Bezbatchenko said, "done in three pieces."
The first piece was opening up cap and roster space, which meant parting ways with a handful of players who did a lot of winning in Columbus, players such as Derrick Etienne Jr., Petro Santos and Artur.
The second piece was the new coach, Wilfried Nancy, who likes to create a culture of healthy competition among players who are positionally flexible and mentally prepared to play his possess-and-attack style. Nancy’s 3-4-2-1 doesn’t fit everyone skill set, and that is why other stalwarts – Jonathan Mensah, Eloy Room and Milos Degenek, to name three – were moved this year. (In the case of Room and Degenek, they both wanted to return home to the Netherlands and Serbia, respectively.)
“Some players who moved on – Mensah, Artur, Room, Santos – were fantastic players and they helped us win a championship,” Bezbatchenko said. “What we’re trying to do is build a team that can make the playoffs and compete for the MLS Cup, and to repeat it from one year to the next. In 2021 and ‘22, it became apparent that we weren’t going to get in, and we said, ‘OK, what’s the next step. Who do we need? What should we look like? What do we need to put together to consistently compete from year to year?’ ”
The third piece was this summer transfer window, “to know who we are, who we can be – and get after it.”
Bezbatchenko and his staff spent months doing homework on Yevhen Cheberko, 25, a left-footed center back and Ukranian national who was playing in Croatia. The transfer was done, for all practical purposes, before the window even opened.
Bezbatchenko wasn’t exactly looking for a right wing back, but when he heard that Julian Gressel, 29, might want out of Vancouver to be closer to the East Coast, Bezbatchenko was bent on recruiting him. Gressel, among the top three assist men in MLS since his rookie-of-the-year season in 2017, is a player Bezbatchenko has coveted. And he fits nicely in Nancy’s system.
Bezbatchenko was happy with young Sean Zawadzki, 23, a converted midfielder, playing in the middle of the back line. Nancy is happy to challenge anyone, and happier when the challenge is met and exceeded. But he swung a trade for veteran center back to fill the hole left by Degenek. Rudy Camacho, 32, played for Nancy in Montreal and knows the system.
Bezbatchenko had the position of wing/second forward circled on his depth chart. He knew Zelarayan, 31, had another year on his contract. He also knew Zelarayan couldn’t play forever, and he wanted more depth up front. He thought he’d wait until the offseason to deal with the situation.
Then, Neil McGuinness, the team’s director of scouting and recruitment, heard that Rossi might be available.
Rossi led MLS with 14 goals in 19 games in 2020, when he was 22 years old. A year later, LAFC loaned him to Turkish giant Fenerbahce, which ultimately bought him for more than $7 million. Fenerbahce did a front-office facelift this summer and the new regime was making changes.
“We scouted (Rossi) and a number of other players,” Bezbatchenko said.
Then came a call from Saudi Arabia. There had been rumors that Saudi teams were targeting MLS players, which makes sense for lower-echelon clubs that aren’t government-backed. They don’t have Ronaldo money, in other words.
Bezbatchenko was in a tough spot. His first thought, and that of ownership, was whether it was possible to have both Zelarayan and Rossi on the same roster. MLS teams are allowed to supersede salary restrictions for three designated players. For the Crew, the DPs are/were midfielder Darlington Nagbe ($1.8 million guaranteed annually), forward Cucho Hernandez ($2.9 million) and Zelarayan ($3.8 million).
Inter Miami, which was fined for subverting roster rules by hiding payments to players in 2021, is supposedly still under suspension for said crimes. But Miami manages. Over the past month-plus, the Herons added two DPs on top of their three DPs. And thus Messi has been reunited with his Barcelona buddies Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba, who took a non-DP contract, they say. (There are rumors that Luis Suarez and Andres Iniesta want to get back together with the old gang, too. Stay tuned.)
Let’s say that all of this is completely legit and Miami, with months of preparation for Messi’s arrival, cleared enough cap space, acquired enough Targeted and General Allocation Money, and had the roster flexibility to make all this work under league rules. Even though they’re on double-secret probation.
OK. But Messi’s salary (anywhere from $60 to $125 million a year, depending on the report) is being subsidized by side deals with major MLS sponsors, Adidas and Apple TV included. He’s Messi. He’s the biggest thing to happen to the league because he’s among the greatest players of all time. So that means that sponsors’ subsidies that are above-board are completely different than below-the-table payments when it comes to roster rules?
The league had to be flexible, just as it was when Atlanta appeared to carry four DPs during the offseason of 2021-22, and when the league signed off on the non-DP contracts handed to Georgio Chiellini and Gareth Bale by LAFC. Why did Bale take a $33.3 million pay cut? Because he wanted to play for Will Ferrell’s team!
I don’t want dive too deep into the league’s rabbit hole of roster rules and its selective use of said rules. There is only Garber in those depths. The point here is that Columbus was afforded no flexibility. None. Zero, zip, zed.
Bezbatchenko was running out of time. The window was closing.
“It became clear we would have to open up a DP slot,” Bezbatchenko said.
Selling Zelarayan was the cost of buying Rossi.
“We spoke to Lucas,” Bezbatchenko said. “At the end of the day, this is something he had to want to do. Once he made his decision, his transfer had to be completely done before our offer could go out on Diego. We’d worked some basic terms with Fenerbahce, but we couldn’t do any analytical contractual documents until (Zelarayan’s transfer) was signed.
“We pushed to get (Zelarayan’s) transfer done as quickly as possible so we could honor him before the Club America game (Monday night). While it was legally messy, it was really important to us that Lucas have his moment in our stadium. He will go down as one of the best, if not the best, player in Crew history. It was a special moment.”
It was one of the most surreal days in Crew history, and that is saying something about a team that was once owned by a man who was in cahoots with the league to move the team to Austin, because he liked the queso.
The Crew played a Leagues Cup game against Club America, the Yankees-Cowboys of LigaMX, in front of a sold-out crowd at Online Actuarial Stadium in the Arena District Monday night. As fans streamed down Nationwide Boulevard past tailgate parties, phones rose and fell like waves as news of Zelarayan’s transfer pinged across the worldwide web. An hour or so later, after the anthem and before the Crew went on to thwack the Yankees-Cowboys of LigaMX by a 4-1 score, Zelarayan walked to midfield and bade farewell to the fans.
“Thank you, for the love, for the support,” Zelarayan said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s too difficult to speak at this moment, but thank you to all the fans. I hope you enjoyed watching me play here. The fans will stay in my heart forever.”
For Bezbatchenko and others in the higher echelons of the Crew front office, the moment was surreal. Bezbatchenko had just sold off one of the most beloved players in franchise history – a man who, while on the downside of his prime, was leading the team in scoring and still radiated magic – and fans were thinking, “There goes our Cup shot.” Bezbatchenko was closing in on Rossi, but he couldn’t grab the microphone and midfield and say, “Wait! I’ve got an elite, 25-year-old forward coming in! Trust me!”
Bezbatchenko couldn’t advertise because he had too much paperwork to do. He got the deal done with the Saudis in a record time for a lawyer. But he still had to tend to the fine print with the Turks. If there was one wrong line in the contract, the whole deal might blow up, especially with MLS poised over the plunger. Garber has no sugar for Columbus.
Of course, Bezbatchenko would never say anything disparaging about the league, one of his former employers. Bezbatchenko was a contract expert when he worked for MLS at the outset of his C-suite career, so he knows the difference between David Beckham, commissioner Messi and the greatest goal scorer in MLS history, Chris Wondolowski, who retired two years ago from the San Jose Earthquakes. Wondolowski was making around $800,000 at the time. He understands flexibility, or the lack of it.
“We had 48 hours to get a written deal done (with Fenerbahce),” Bezbatchenko said. “There are always a lot of last-minute things that need to be ironed out. It was challenging.”
The financial terms of Rossi’s transfer were not disclosed. Reportedly, the fee to Fenerbahce was in the range of $5.63 million before bonus clauses that could take the price as high as $7 million. Rossi’s Fenerbahce contract is believed to be worth around the MLS TAM (sub-DP) line of $1.65 million. As mentioned above, his transfer fee could be more than $7 million, depending on clauses in the contract (for instance, if the Crew re-signs him).
“We felt like paying the fee made sense,” Bezbatchenko. “You can’t go into Argentina and get a starter for less than $3 million, let alone get a former golden boot winner, who’s 25 years old, out of Europe."
To Columbus fans, I must say that while the owners are not progressive in their politics, which is to say they are not in alignment with the bulk of their fan base, they will write checks to make the team better as fast as they will write checks to J.D. Vance’s senatorial campaign. Said owners may or may not be subsidizing Donald Trump’s legal defense fund, they’re not going to go on-record about Gareth Bale contracts – and they’re certainly not going to say anything about Miami’s alleged salary-cap manipulations, because they’re making money on it.
That said, the last word goes to Bezbatchenko, who, is a maestro in his own right (until he screws something up):
“Having Lucas for 3½ years was a blessing,” Bezbatchenko said. “We should all appreciate these players when we have them. (Guillermo Barros) Schelotto was here for the same length of time. Pipa (Federico Higuain) had a longer run. Now, people will be coming for (young Crew players) Aidan (Morris), Sean Zawadzki, Mo (Farsi), Patrick Schulte. It’s part of global soccer.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Arace: After flurry of dealing, Columbus Crew ready to compete for MLS title
