Good morning, friends. Here is some additional information surrounding the Supporters’ Shield debacle, and how the decision was made.

SPOILER: it’s even dumber than you thought it was going to be.

Let’s talk about the board of the Supporters’ Shield Foundation. It’s appointed by the ISC, and operates independently of the ISC biard and the member groups who belong to the ISC. They are required to send monthly updates to the ISC board.

These monthly updates arrived as usual up until this month, with no indication that there was any thought whatsoever of cancelling the Supporters’ Shield for the 2020 season, which would be wrapping ip in a few short weeks.

At their October meeting, the SSF informed the ISC board that they were canceling the Shield for the 2020 season. Immediately following this, the SSF posted a single message in a committee channel on Slack.

There was no broad communication about the decision sent to the full ISC membership, no post in the general Slack channel, no email to members or any form of notification or communication given beyond this post in the committee channel on Slack.

And given that single post indicated that a decision had already been made, there was no opportunity for further discussion or a vote. And, as the channel was for a committe, not all members were subscribed to it. The last time the channel was even used was over the summer.

The post in question did not use the @ function or any other alert tags or functions to ping the entire channel, either. No heads-up message went out to the general channel to direct anyone to the committee channel.

As a direct result, an overwhelming majority of ISC members did not see the post on the committee channel, including many of those who were actually subscribed to the channel. Those who did see it were afforded no time to react, as the decision was final & MLS had been informed.

This post on the committee channel is what the SSF is referring to when they say that notice was given to members. The post requested the information remain private and went on to say “we came to this decision over the summer and are going public tomorrow.”

The only subsequent information from SSF was yet another non-flagged post in the same channel that revised the soon to be public statement based on feedback from the league, and confirmed it had been sent to the press. Again, no time was given for discussion or a broader vote.

ISC member reps were never informed ahead of time that a discussion around cancelling the Shield for 2020 was occurring.

The information in this summary of events comes directly from the @Nordecke leadership team, who have been infinitely more informative and more transparent during this debacle than anything I’ve seen from the ISC or SSF since, well, ever.