MARTA MARTA MARTA MARTA!!!: Marta Viera de Silva is (SORT OF, maybe, Uhm...?) coming to LA!

A few days ago, having received an e-mail announcement of the international "draft" picks for the WPS teams, I wrote this:

MARTA has apparently been 'drafted' by the new LA professional women's team. I have a pickup game to join shortly, so can't do my research on this just yet - but OH MY GOD, I am so HAPPY! I am going to pass out from excitement! FORMIGA - first pick (are they reading From A Left Wing?) - is going to the Bay Area!!! Look out, though - Cristiane will be (might be?) playing for the Red Stars, who really seem to have their shit together. Look for a full report from moi sometime over the weekend. If you don't know who Marta or Formiga are, just read my posts below on the Olympics, or search their names on this blog. On reading the press material a little more closely, though - who knows. This could be smoke and mirrors? Who knows anything about the LA team?

Melissa from The Offside's WPS wing has done some of the homework to decode the WPS "international draft" statement. It's not a draft, it's a wish list. And it would be just like the top-down thinking at AEG to name Marta as their choice before they've, well, given the team a name and done any work to connect this future-team to the actual fans of the women's game in the region. My enthusiasm above is a sad, sad indication of how starved we are for information.
I tried e-mailing the contact address given for the LA WPS team on the WPS site, and got that query bounced back. Calls and e-mails to contact persons listed on the WPS LA website (which is, really, a virtual ghost town) are unanswered. Sure, it's just little ole me. Not the LA Times, or Sports Illustrated. But I don't see stories in those outlets which tell us what the hell is going on. Just this solid rant from Grahame Jones ("Hey Phil: Bring Marta to LA") on LA Times's new sports blog site, which is operating on just about the same level of information I've got. Which is nada.

The Offside explains why we don't see German players in the draft list. But why don't we see any of the Nigerian players either? Did anyone else watch those Olympic matches? The whole thing seems to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Sigh. It isn't even worth getting angry about. The WPS announcement of teams wish list/declaration of intention to recruit doesn't seem to mean much of anything - beyond perhaps a warning shot to European clubs to start paying their better players better money.