I really don’t get this whole David Beckham situation. (if you missed it, Beckham was booed throughout his first home game since returning from Milan yesterday) Or rather, I don’t get why people are so upset about the guy. It all comes down to expectations, I guess. What has happened hasn’t been great, but absolutely none of it is even the least bit surprising or unpredictable. In fact, if you didn’t see most of what has happened coming then you just didn’t spend the effort to understand the situation.

As American sports fans we have an expectation about what a world class star can do. MJ, LeBron or Kobe immediately can change a bunch of slugs into a top squad. CC Sabathia instantly made the Brewers a playoff team last year. Matt Ryan fixed the Falcons in just one year. We expect a star to be a star, and we expect him to have a huge impact immediately. Soccer’s not like that. Beckham may not have played quite as well as he could have since coming to the MLS , but even if he had been absolutely perfect the impact was going to be minimal at best. He’s a midfielder, so he’s not expected to have the ball all the time and score every time he touches it. Heck, it’s soccer, so no one scores all the time. If you see a goal at all you are lucky. People saw the ridiculous money that Beckham was given, thought that they would see fireworks, didn’t, and got upset about it.

The Beckham issues go deeper than that, of course. The latest frustration with him is his flirtation with AC Milan. He would rather be over there, and he hasn’t hidden that desire. Again, this can’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Let me be frank for a second – theMLS sucks. It is not good soccer, and it is not even remotely relevant internationally. It may get there one day, but for now it is a place where top American players play before heading to Europe to ride the bench (Altidore, Adu), and where old stars come to ward off retirement for a couple of years. It’s not a world class league, and it’s not played in front of anything like the crowds they play in front of in Europe. Of course a guy is going to long for the big time – no one playing for the Yankees dreams of one day toiling for the Durham Bulls.

The MLS needs to take some blame here, too. You would have assumed that they would have had a major, comprehensive plan in place before agreeing to spend so much money on Beckham. The last couple of years have made it clear that they really don’t. The league was mostly irrelevant nationally before he arrived, and it is just as much so now. Most hardcore sports fans in this country couldn’t name all of the teams in the league, nor could they name 10 players. The league seems to have assumed that Beckham’s presence would singularly change that, and they seem to have given up when it didn’t immediately happen. It was a ridiculous, desperate move by the league, and the chances of success were minimal.

I’m not saying that Beckham is totally without blame here. He is guilty of not assessing a situation very well, and of taking a deal that he never should have taken. Since then, though, he’s only part of the problem. He wants out, and I can’t really blame him. I probably would too in his situation. Everyone would be best served by ripping up the contract, keeping the rest of the money where it is, and forgetting that this nightmare ever happened.