Henceforth, Major League Soccer will employ two rulebooks. One for the common folk and one for league royalty.
On Thursday, New York Red Bulls superstar and striker Thierry Henry tried to celebrate a goal by new teammate Mehdi Ballouchy. You've probably seen the YouTube clip, if not the game. Henry approached the ball to give it another celebratory thump. Also angling for the ball was Dallas goalkeeper Kevin Hartman. He got there first and put his foot behind the ball as Henry took an almighty swipe.
Hartman will be out for several weeks.
It was dumb on Henry's part, not to mention unbecoming of a player of his stature and experience.
Inexplicably, Henry didn't get a yellow card for the infraction (it would have been his second of the game) or even so much as a reprimand by the referee.
Many cried foul and yesterday it was announced that Henry would be fined $2,000, a large sum by MLS standards.
More cried foul. And rightly so. For Friday will come Major League Soccer's most highly anticipated league game ever, when the surging Red Bulls travel to the Los Angeles Galaxy in a clash of the league's burgeoning titans. The absence of the league's most high-profile signing since David Beckham would be ill received.
Still, Henry should have been suspended. There was a recent precedent suggesting this. Real Salt Lake's Javier Morales was suspended for a game and fined for kneeing the Seattle Sounders' Osvaldo Alonso in the groin two weeks ago, an act also not punished by the referee. Henry's transgression wasn't nearly as unsportsmanlike, but it was unsportsmanlike all the same.
And it's hard not to get the sense that the league made Henry pay his way out of a suspension. Morales' fine was $250, after all. By giving Henry a fine eight times higher than Morales received, MLS has tried to keep up appearances without having to sit one of its two biggest stars (David Beckham being the other, of course) for Friday's big game.
Spineless.
"The members of the disciplinary committee should be embarrassed and ashamed," Hartman's agent told WashingtonPost.com. "It's either no punishment or there must be a suspension. I'm sorry to discover that they've established a double standard for the treatment of their marquee players as opposed to the treatment of their rank and file."
But karma's a funny thing. Turns out Henry's going to miss the game anyway because of a nagging injury. But that's beside the point. Credibility is achieved through consistency and accountability, not by letting the princes get away with things the paupers do not.