When Major League Soccer brought in the Designated Player rule in 2007 – paving the way for David Beckham’s arrival in North America – the initial signings were essentially based around selling tickets and shirts, with the upside you’d find an aging European-based pro with a few more miles left in his legs.
Perusing the list of former DPs is actually a rather amusing exercise as there’s a cacophony of hits and misses: Guillermo Barros Schelotto, Mista, Freddie Ljungberg, Barry Robson and Freddie Adu, to name just a few.
As MLS has evolved, so too has the team’s strategies towards their money men; several teams have opted to go the South American ‘rough diamond’ approach with hopes a younger DP will find his game and become a difference-maker before the inevitable jump to a bigger league–a player like Carlos Rivas with Orlando City. Others have jumped for proven players entering their prime who can make a few extra bucks in MLS, someone like the Vancouver Whitecaps’ Octavio Rivero.
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Rewarding and retaining an incumbent star is also a method of using a DP spot. See Bradley Wright-Phillips and Fabian Espindola as recent examples.
Then of course you have the Toronto FC approach of throwing silly money at players still very much in their prime, a Michael Bradley and a Sebastian Giovinco, for example. This is probably the safest strategy, and it does appear as if TFC is beginning to slowly but surely reap the rewards.
Of course, backing up the truck and unloading pallets of money at ‘name’ declining stars will always be an option, and a new club to MLS hoping to turn some heads and sell some tickets will always consider this as a very real option. Orlando signed Kaka, and TFC’s opponents this weekend, New York City FC, has Frank Lampard arriving soon, with David Villa already on their books.
So it will be a battle between two different ideologies at BMO Field this weekend, when Villa and Giovinco lock horns albeit at different ends of the pitch.
The Italian is emerging as perhaps the league’s greatest DP signing to date. So what if it resulted in the under-used Juventus man becoming the highest-paid Italian athlete in the world? The bottom line is he appears to be the real deal, is lighting up the league, and assuming he doesn’t catch “Defoe-itis” and crave a return home (after all, playing at TFC is like playing in a foreign country), he will become the league’s poster boy and its main marketing weapon in its seduction of overseas talent.
Villa of course is a far more traditional DP as noted above, but he is also getting the job done. Four goals in 12 games may not be considered prolific, but he is providing weekly evidence that he is still a difference-maker at this level, and as soon as he has a player of Lampard’s calibre picking up his runs, his numbers will improve.
Being the top man on a typically unbalanced expansion side is always going to be the challenge for new DPs, and Villa is learning this.
Purists still dislike the mere concept of DPs. But for me, I love the Designated Player, no matter what form he comes in, and I am relishing the prospect of seeing some true class on the field this Saturday at BMO.
