With David Beckham in final, no MLS regrets

David Beckham was conspicuously absent in the days before last year's MLS championship game, which was played at his team's home stadium. League officials said he had previous engagements, but for Beckham, the league's marquee player and its highest-paid on-field employee, it simply seemed like bad form and a slap in the face to the league.

Beckham's attendance at this year's title game is mandatory because his team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, will play Real Salt Lake in MLS Cup '09 on Sunday night in Seattle. Beckham is one of the league's handful of designated players, mostly foreign stars who are paid more than the league's maximum salary of nearly $500,000, and his presence has shined an international spotlight on a league desperate for success and acceptance.

"Sitting where I sit, obviously, it's hard to say you prefer one team over another and keep my job as commissioner," Don Garber said Monday during a conference call, which served as his annual state of the league address. "When you look at what other leagues are able to achieve when the most popular teams in the largest markets play for championships, you have to be envious of teams like the Yankees, the Red Sox and the Cowboys."

Garber continued by mentioning one of Beckham's teammates, the American star Landon Donovan, who is also a designated player.

"Of course it's good to have David and Landon in the championship game," Garber said. "That being said, I don't think it says anything about the designated players. In our view, it's a successful initiative."

The league's often tortured relationship with Brand Beckham has been well documented. He will again join AC Milan as he works toward representing England in the World Cup next year. And this Galaxy team is the first to qualify for the MLS postseason since Beckham joined the club three seasons ago.

His return to MLS in the middle of the 2009 season was punctuated by the release of an incendiary book that detailed a fractious locker room and a conflict between Beckham and Donovan. Coach Bruce Arena's task was thus harder and more impressive as he took the Galaxy from the depths of the Western Conference to the title game.

"The Galaxy are one of the big stories of the year," Garber said. "And the turmoil in the locker room was a big story of the first part of the MLS season, and that was not necessarily a bad thing for us."

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity.