Bidnesssoccer

The sale of United seems finally to have happened:

A San Francisco real estate developer has partnered with former Duke basketball star Brian Davis and at least two other investors to purchase D.C. United's operating rights, build the team's stadium in Anacostia and develop the land around it, sources said yesterday.

Victor MacFarlane, who heads the largest minority-owned real estate management firm in the country, will lead the group. He will be joined by Davis, a Bladensburg High graduate, and Discovery Communications founder John Hendricks. The group will pay Anschutz Entertainment Group, the MLS team's operator the past five years, an estimated $33 million.

Conspicuously (and thankfully) the name Christian Laettner is missing from the transaction. Any taint of the New Jersey State University at Durham is too much, but Laettnerless beats Laettnerness.

This paragraph bothers me:

The group is more interested in a proposed 27,000-seat soccer stadium at Poplar Point in Southeast and the mixed-use development that would surround it than it is in the team, said the sources, who refused to be identified because they did not want to upstage the official announcement at a news conference scheduled for Monday.

Thankfully Kevin Payne will still be involved in the soccer, but I've got fear that United will be (is already) an ancillary afterthought to the ambitions of real estate pimps. Maybe with Payne in charge, and if the pimps understand the value of putting a quality team on the field in terms of attendance, the soccer won't suffer.

The loudest, most devout, most loyal fans will.

I'm guessing Loud Side has two, maybe three years left (depending on when construction's finished). I'm guessing Barra and Eagles are banished to an endzone, and their primo seats will go to golfclappers, and those of us who need to stand the whole game will be hassled by nazi ushers for impulsively standing when Christian Gomez takes a freekick from outside the box in the 89th minute of a tie game.

I'm guessing I'm going to miss RFK by the fifteenth minute of the first game at the new stadium.

I dearly, desperately, hope I'm wrong.