With yesterday's blatant teaser, today's announcement that Jay DeMerit was really more of an introductory press conference than news in and of itself.
Who woulda thunk it? DeMerit Officially Joins Whitecaps
DeMerit is now officially the foundation upon which the Whitecaps will be built.
“Jay is a quality individual and leader - both on and off the pitch - and is the type of player we are looking to build our team with,” said Bob Lenarduzzi, Whitecaps FC president. “He has excelled both at the club and international levels, and we are thrilled that Jay has joined Whitecaps FC as our first Major League Soccer player signing.”
DeMerit has not played a competitive match since the most recent World Cup as Watford declined to renew his contract. That ended a run of six seasons in the English pyramid, much of which was spent at the highest level.
There was no mention of contract terms, but since he was not announced as a Designated Player we can probably assume he has signed for less than the $335,000 a DP counts against the salary budget.
Our Whitecaps blogger, 86 Forever’s Benjamin Massey, attended the press conference and had this to say:
The likes of Jay DeMerit aren’t going to send the Whitecaps to the MLS Cup on their own. The team still has no scoring whatsoever, and you can count its number of decent, MLS-quality transition players on one finger. Their greatest weakness is in skill players of all sorts, and that’s where you’re going to have the hardest time improving from the rest of the league’s castoffs in the expansion draft. We are, in short, not nearly there yet.
But, as Teitur said, the team is building from the spine on out. And this is a pretty good start to that spine.
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