According to the normally reliable BOB HUNTER New York Red Bulls corporate management flew in a group of players from their Salzburg Austria team who were standing by to don NYRB uniforms and play Santos last Saturday if the MLS Players Union had gone on strike.
Furthermore, he says that Major League Soccer did indeed plan on playing games with replacement players and included provisions for "temporarily" shutting down New England and Columbus.
While Hunter, a widely respected professional journalist and editor, is unclear as to why those two teams would have been selected to go dark, it would seem almost too obvious to suggest that the thing those two teams have in common is that – unlike most other MLS sides – they play in venues which are 100% owned and operated by the same entity that operates the team.
Thus, they're relatively easy to simply shut down if there's a problem coming up with 16 full sides..
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