Bring on the auditors!

Ben Knight, the Globe and Mail's esteemed soccer writer, had a great post up today about the Canadian Soccer Association refusing to reveal the terms of their settlement with Fred Nykamp (the chief operating officer they lured from Canada Basketball, kept in limbo for several months, and eventually fired before he could start work). If this were any other government-funded organization, people would be up in arms by now: they've been without a full-time president since Colin Linford's resignation, there's no technical director or COO in sight, they somehow managed to lose substantial money on a U-20 World Cup tournament that shattered attendance records, and now they've wasted an undisclosed amount of money on a settlement that wouldn't have been necessary if they hadn't been so inept in the first place.

It's not disputed that Nykamp deserved a substantial settlement for his shoddy treatment at the hands of the CSA: the taxpayers and average soccer players who fund the agency deserve to learn just how much money was wasted by its own incompetence. As Knight pointed out, a full-fledged audit would answer many of the underlying questions about the CSA, show which parts of the organization should be retained and which ones should have been scrapped long ago, and pave the way for the future success of Canadian soccer. This is unlikely to happen at the moment, given the lack of pressure on the CSA, but if enough fans get angry enough, something might be done.

Links of the day: (perhaps inorganic, but after all, the point is to advertise some great work that I don't have time to write full entries about!)
- Neate has an interesting take on the Ray Emery saga, and also caught the Boston Globe perhaps jumping the gun
- CFRC's Tyler King makes a good point about how untrustworthy the OUA is
- In the same vein, James Mirtle has a hilarious story in the Globe about how no one knows the CIS basketball scoring record
- Mirtle also has a nice post up on his blog considering how hockey's changed since the lockout
- A post I wrote over on my Journal blog about the Belgian Olympic Committee banning their athletes from expressing political opinions this summer