In a wild span of days, K.C. learns it'll keep club, stars

	Wizards and U.S. national-team veteran Josh Wolff was set to go to English team Derby County, but wasn't approved for a visa. Jonathan Daniel/ Getty Images
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Your team is in danger of missing the playoffs. Your home venue will probably be a high-school stadium the next two years. And your most highly paid players (national-teamers Eddie Johnson and Josh Wolff) are disappointed their moves to Europe fell through at the last second.

And yet, if you're a die-hard Kansas City Wizards fan, it may be the most exhilarating week in team history.

Welcome to MLS, where the big picture (building new stadiums, finding local owners, keeping teams in their home cities) trumps day-to-day concerns -- like figuring out why the Wizards, with more U.S. World Cup players than any other team, have been so awful the past two months.

First off, the good news. A group of local investors, OnGoal LLC, announced that it had bought the Wizards on Thursday from Lamar Hunt, almost certainly ensuring that the team will stay in Kansas City for the long term. The team is also making big strides toward a new soccer-specific stadium that would open in Johnson County, Kan., in early 2009 (per acceptance from various voters and politicians).

Aside from the unfortunate ownership name -- OnGoal is only one letter from "OwnGoal" -- the sale of the Wizards is huge for MLS, which gains another investor and adds more stability to a league that's moving in the right direction these days. And it's even bigger for long-suffering K.C. fans, who have been waiting anxiously to find out whether their team would stick around, fold or be moved to a city like Philadelphia or St. Louis.

You could end this story right there, because that's by far the most important news of the week in Wizards Land. But there's more to what transpired behind the scenes this week that's equally intriguing.

To wit: The new Wizards owners hardly wasted any time making their presence felt on Thursday, quashing a deal that would have sent U.S. national-team striker Johnson on loan (with an option to buy) to Spain's Real Sociedad. Johnson would have been the first American field player ever to compete in La Liga, the finest soccer league on the planet.

Want to get an idea of how crazy things can get when you mix an MLS ownership switch, MLS' single-entity structure, the U.K.'s Byzantine work-permit rules and the final frantic days of the European transfer window? Then strap yourself in and follow me as I explain what happened with the stillborn deals that would have sent the league's third-highest-paid (Johnson) and sixth-highest-paid (Wolff) players to Europe.

Wolff's case was simple enough. All the arrangements had been made for MLS to sell the 29-year-old World Cup veteran to Derby County in England's second tier when the U.K.'s Home Office denied Wolff a work permit on Tuesday. Wolff fell just short of fulfilling the work-permit regulations -- requiring that he played in 75 percent of the national team's A-level games over the past two years -- and was denied again on appeal.