Security
The CONCACAF Champions Cup exit by Real Salt Lake was shocking, but paled to recent changes at the club under co-owners Ryan Smith and David Blitzer.
Before the Major League Soccer season, Real Salt Lake, co-owned by Ryan Smith and David Blitzer, terminated several positions including a security guard who had been working at Rio Tinto Stadium/America First Field for years.
» Real Salt Lake made budget cuts on the heels of a $500 million valuation in 2024 and $0 in revenue, according to Forbes. It was well under the $700M average across all of Major League Soccer.
Having let leading scorer Cristian ‘Chicho’ Arango go to San Jose, RSL has yet to sign a DP [designated player] striker. Instead, the club has played moneyball, signing Lachlan Brook, Forster Ajago and Ariath Piol from the Australian A-League. Piol comes from McArthur FC, where three players led by Mexico international Ulises Davila were caught last year trying to “receive yellow cards on purpose so gamblers could make money on the actions.”
» Legalizing gambling has taken match-fixing to a new level here and abroad, and making prop bets on particular moments in games is a recent trend known as spot-fixing. Piol himself was not found of any wrongdoing in the criminal investigation in Australia, and has played sparingly for RSL since his arrival. Lachlan Brook has already played a portion of 2024 for RSL. Ajago was the scorer of RSL’s first two goals in 2025, snapping a two-game goalless drought for the club in the process and came to Utah after a decent showing [12 appearances, no goals] at Nashville SC. Ajago got his first goal for RSL in the return leg of CONCACAF Champions Cup against Herediano of Costa Rica this past Wednesday, at home. The head referee: Fernando Hernandez Gomez, given a 12-match ban back in 2023 for “kneeing a [Leon] player in the groin” during a Liga MX game between Club America and Club Leon.
» Considering RSL was last put in this spot eight years ago, two sitting presidents and a pandemic have passed. Suffice it to say Gomez was no angel of RSL’s on Wednesday. After Forster Ajago’s goal in the 26th minute opened the scoring for RSL, the referee kept his mouth shut when midfielder Diogo Goncalves was clotheslined inside Herediano’s penalty box, 11 minutes later.
That should’ve resulted in a penalty kick for RSL, yet the score remained 1-0. They’d hold this lead while Herediano sat back and defended for the rest of the first half. The ref even opened the place where his mouth was and blew the whistle on them, but only when mild transgressions occurred between the two penalty boxes.
It was as if moments toward the end of the first half had been choreographed, but few would dare admit this. Looking back on the game’s first 45 minutes, Diogo was also two-footed on a tackle at the edge of Herediano’s penalty box in the 30th minute, yet no whistle came from the mouth of Gomez [below left in photo]. Diogo whipped a curving ball on a corner kick toward Forster Ajago who was undercut—but no call for a penalty kick came. Emeka Eneli exacted payback on Herediano yet no call was given, either.
Clinical goals like the one Forster Ajago scored arguably helped one forget about the latest transgressions. For every foul called on RSL between the start of the game and halftime, three weren’t on the Costa Rican side. The persistent infringement that was rarely called on Herediano got to the 20-year-old Ghanaian Ajago, who rest assured knows plenty about institutions rendered to silence by greed and power.
» On a blistering cold and windy night in Sandy at the foot of Mount Olympus, the second half got underway. Head coach Pablo Mastroeni looked concerned watching his team get CONCACAF’d even after that wonder strike from Ajago, who was youthfully exuberant hugging his coach on the sideline afterward. But Brook didn’t earn a call for a foul after he was pulled down outside Herediano’s penalty area in the 52nd. The ref let play on in a stadium partly emptied by so many absences. 12,000 in all summed up a visual display of frustration from the displacements of supporters groups from their usual parking spots in the tailgating lot north of the stadium. The resultant price increases on parking fees due to the expansion of the Zions Club that, according to this statement below, will now be infiltrating the tailgating lot—having received various freebies in previous seasons—led to this statement:
Add to that all the ticket price gouging, unnecessary staff firings, and manner in which the team was being created on the cheap by part-owner/tech bro billionaire Ryan Smith and Blitzer, and they’re fast becoming lame ducks in a town that appreciates what they’ve done to help save the team from moving to Las Vegas or Phoenix, but would also appreciate them signing a DP 9.
» It is awfully hard for a club to dude its way out of so many missteps when it loses the right to stay in CONCACAF Champions Cup after losing to a mid-level team that didn’t have its best player and didn’t score until the 70th minute, moments after RSL made three wholesale substitutions—then watched in horror as Herediano clinched its passage to the next round a few minutes later by way of a damned Panenka on a penalty kick.
» On the topic of money, muscling one committed group out for the sake of making profit from higher food and drink prices appears sinister enough on the surface, but to leave out seven supporters groups that you know can’t afford the price hikes and push them out of the stadium they’ve always inhabited is some next-level hogwash. It isn’t something that any of RSL’s previous owners would’ve dreamed of doing. If this ownership group is indeed hiding issues, what else is there that remains concealed in the catacombs of a stadium built through the work of a few glad hands on a Superfund site? That said, it does fall in line with this hastily produced announcement on drinks:
Until such a time that these RSL supporters groups can wrangle up a meeting with club brass, the stands will stay somewhat empty out of protest but also out of frustration at all the issues plaguing this club, not just at how the club kept Arango around when it was obvious he needed to be sent packing earlier.
There have been public demonstrations before about the way the club has handled some of its internal matters, but this writer has never heard of seven different types of RSL fan demanding to talk to the manager at the same time.
» Even so, the news of the week was that despite a lame duck administration gouging prices across the board, a group of RSL fans directly affected by displacements still paid for season tickets for that fired security guard, restoring some faith in humanity — starting with the game Saturday against Seattle that ended as a 2-0 win in front of 1,500 fewer supporters than the stadium’s capacity. «
Overthink This Photo 📸
📷 » Utah Royals FC
Nothing says Utah more than the Great Salt Lake, the largest body of water west of the Mississippi River. The Utah Royals NWSL women’s pro soccer team that calls America First Field home unveiled its second uniform in advance of its season opener in 10 days.
I suppose you can kind of see the lake at night in the new kit [i still think the Utah Shred pro ultimate frisbee team did it better, with the lake at sunset], but I don’t see the salty marshes, the swarms of mosquitoes or the brine shrimp buzzing on top of the water.
Also, congrats to Royals striker and Japan int’l Mina Tanaka [below], who scored four goals and had three assists in the recently completed SheBelieves Cup, helping lead her homeland to a title and captured the tournament MVP. Royals teammate and midfielder Ally Sentnor [2 goals] along with Utah goalkeeper Mandy Haught-McGlynn played for the USA team that finished runners-up and lost 2-0 to Tanaka’s Japan squad in the final. «
BoOk Em, BrIaN! »
» This book started out slower than molasses for the first three chapters. Maybe it was by design, because by the time chapter four got rolling talking about clutch hitters, it had me hook, line and sinker as the author called BS on the use of the word “clutch” in baseball.
“The idea of certain hitters having some magical power to raise their games in clutch situations is appealing on an emotional level, contributing to the heroic stories we build around our favorite players, but the existence of such clutch hitters is not supported by data.”
The author then showed why drafting high school pitchers early in drafts results in busts, 84 percent of the time. Sure, the guy uses a truckload of jargon every two pages or so, but the book is worth a read—as long as you can handle all the data journalism. «
#WhatAreWeDOING Playoffs [Most-voted candidate advances to next round; two candidates per week]
» #1 Candidate: I saw and heard one of the cutest things at a recent BYU basketball game at the Marriott Center when a 9-year-old girl sang the national anthem. However, leave it to some guy [who’s from Utah] to rain on her parade and be a jack wagon to her father:
» #2 Candidate: This week has two very viable candidates. After Utah AD Mark Harlan pulled the chump move of getting rid of Craig Smith three games before the end of the men’s basketball season, a coach from Harlan’s alma mater [Arizona] stuck up for Smith and how his sons stuck out the job regardless of their father’s situation:
This was also the last topic talked about on the BVU Show:
Advancing to the #whatarewedoing playoff second round thus far:
Frat pledge set on fire
Player pushes his coach
Ohio State female coach
Dad uses baby to clean off car
Rob Ryan rant
Tiger Woods misunderstanding
Thanks for reading; be safe and be well. I’ll see ya next time. «