Fortunately, D.C. United Won't Have A General Manager Vote Like The Seattle Sounders

From Oct. 7 to Dec. 7, season ticket holders for the Seattle Sounders will get to cast a vote either for or against retaining Adrian Hanauer as the team's general manager.

Hanauer will probably receive a majority of votes to keep his job, but the fact that there's even a possibility of fans voting out a successful general manager just goes to show how stupid this process is. Regardless of our personal feelings on the Sounders, they've made the players in every year of existence (every year of soccer's existence) and reached four straight U.S. Open Cup Finals, winning three of them. How can you even consider firing a guy with that kind of track record?

I dunno. Maybe because fans are generally unreasonable.

There's a Seattle fan right now on Sounder At Heart stating that he'll cast NO votes for Hanauer because Eddie Johnson isn't any better than Mike Fucito, and because he questions some of Sigi Schmid's gameday roster decisions. As if it would be at all appropriate for a GM to interfere with such decisions.

I'd like to think that D.C. United fans are smarter than that, but I'm sure there are some that aren't. That's why I'm glad that our team doesn't allow its fans to vote for such an important thing.

Because if United fans were able to vote for or against Dave Kasper in 2010, we know what the result would have been. Kasper would have been dismissed. And he would have been replaced by someone probably less qualified. And he probably would have gone to the Portland Timbers or something and brought Dwayne De Rosario there instead of here.

Had Kasper been fired, we wouldn't have De Rosario. We wouldn't have Brandon McDonald, Robbie Russell, or Maicon Santos. We might have drafted Chandler Hoffman over Nick DeLeon. We might have drafted Zarek Valentin over Perry Kitchen. Boy, it's a damn good thing we don't have a GM vote.

United's roster failures in recent years have been attributed mostly to the team's disappointing record in international scouting. That's more of a resource problem than a personnel management problem, and resources isn't something that Kasper can control.

You may or may not share my positive opinion of Kasper and the rest of the United front office. But regardless of that, hopefully you agree with me that we as fans shouldn't have the ability to decide if he stays or goes. Best to leave those decisions to the professionals, while we do what we do best: sing loud, root passionately.