By Paul Gardner, Special to SI.com, World Soccer

The explosion of Latinos like Cuauhtémoc Blanco ended up being a bigger story than Beckhamania during the '07 MLS season. Simon Bruty/SI

Gullit now has to learn the ins and outs of signing players under the MLS single-entity system -- it's not straightforward -- because the team is clearly inadequate.

Amid the frantic Beckham saga, some words of quiet sense came from MLS deputy commissioner Ivan Gazidis, who pointed out that "the real MLS story for 2007 was that MLS was importing players from South America who are very significant players in our league."

What Gazidis didn't say was that this represents a clear change of direction for the league which, for the past 12 years, has been much more oriented towards bringing in European players. The Latin American trend has been quickly successful -- Brazilian Luciano Emilio (D.C. United) was the league's top scorer with 20 goals, one ahead of Colombian Juan Pablo Ángel (New York Red Bulls).

The Latinos have also brought flair and excitement -- the arrival of Mexico's Cuauhtémoc Blanco with the Chicago Fire immediately brought out the colorful Mexican fans and transformed the team into a championship contender. Blanco's individual skills were honored when he won the goal of the year award.

Gazidis also mentioned that MLS is stepping up its study of youth development programs in other countries. "We have really been going around the world, and specifically to Argentina, Brazil and Mexico," he said. Again, the emphasis on Latin America is new, but long overdue.

The Latin theme has also been taken up -- again tardily -- by the U.S. Soccer Federation. President Sunil Gulati took an unprecedented step in appointing Wilmer Cabrera as coach of the national Under-17 team and head coach at the USSF's Bradenton (Fla.) Academy -- a full-time school for the country's best 15- and 16-year-olds. Cabrera, a former Colombian international who now resides in the U.S., becomes the first Hispanic to hold a head coaching position with any U.S. national team.

Returning to MLS, after a poor championship final in the past two years, MLS Cup 2007 was a reasonably exciting game. The finalists, as in '06, were the Houston Dynamo and the New England Revolution -- and the result was the same, a win for the Dynamo. The luckless Revs represent another example of triumph and disaster within MLS -- they have reached four of the last six finals and lost them all, while managing to score just two goals.

For the New York Red Bulls, there was only failure. Another poor season ended with the dismissal of coach Bruce Arena. But where the ex-national team boss was left looking for a new job, the other major coaching casualty, Yallop, moved smoothly a few hundred miles up California's coastline to take charge of the San Jose Earthquakes. This is a new team (the old Earthquakes, which Yallop had also coached, moved to Houston in '06 and became the Dynamo).

Yallop's task of assembling a new lineup (the Earthquakes bring the number of teams in MLS up to 14) started with the expansion draft. The draft provided him with a basis of experienced and moderately salaried players, after which he can set about adding a few stars including, no doubt, a highly-paid "designated player."

There is another aspect of special interest in the Earthquakes' signings. The new club is owned by the same group that operates the Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics. The A's have proved very successful over the past few seasons at maintaining a high level of success despite operating with a much lower budget than teams such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

This "cost-effectiveness" results from the policies of the A's general manager, Billy Beane, who has established a reputation for canny player deals on the basis, mainly, of specialized assessment of players' statistics. (The system is known as sabermetrics, from the acronym SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.) Beane's methods have proved highly successful -- in '06, for instance, the A's had the fifth-best record in baseball with only the 20th-highest payroll.

Beane has expressed great interest in soccer and is keen to see whether his methods can be applied to the sport. He will get his chance to find out with the Earthquakes. His methods tend to pay scant attention to the subjective judgments of scouts and coaches, and more to evidence of "objective" playing stats. Whether soccer stats -- a comparatively recent discipline -- lend themselves to that sort of reliable interpretation, or whether the whole system appeals to Yallop, remains to be seen.

As for a quick assessment of '07 -- maybe it was the year of Beckham after all, with more to come; or maybe it marked the year when, at long last, American soccer began to pay serious attention to its potentially huge Hispanic fan base.

Or could it be that '07 will be remembered as the year when Beane upset the traditional soccer methods of player assessment? Only kidding of course ... but remember that word: sabermetrics. Soccer fans, you have been warned.

To subscribe to World Soccer Magazine, click here.