Yesterday, Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber has hit back hard at the thought of a European club signing Donovan away from the Los Angeles Galaxy.

“He’s become a real soccer hero,” Garber said. ”MLS needs soccer heroes, and we have a great American soccer hero playing for us in LA, holding the torch for the sport in our country, and that’s very important. I don’t believe that it’s something we can do without.”

That may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing for Garber to say, and, in some respects, it is. But if his intent isn’t to drive up Donovan’s price, but to keep actually keep Donovan permanently as the property of MLS, than Garber will be doing a disservice to the game he is trying to promote.

The commercial success of the World Cup over the past few month has been far beyond what the vast majority of people expected in this country. One could argue that it was truly the first time – outside of when the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994 – that the country was truly excited about soccer on a national level.

The momentum that was created from the whole tournament, but especially the inspired play of the U.S., which led to international praise for their efforts, is something that could catapult the game here to levels that its fans have only dreamed of in the past.

A large part of that movement, undoubtedly, will come from MLS. The league received a massive boost yesterday, when the signing of international superstar Thierry Henry with the New York Red Bulls was officially announced after months of speculation. Although he is 32, adding a player of Henry’s stature and skill can only help increase both the interest and talent level in the league.

The star power of the league may receive an even larger boost in the coming days if rumors surrounding the addition of another big name, Ronaldinho, come true and he joins Donovan on the Galaxy. The 30-year-old Brazilian is coming off a season with AC Milan where he had 15 goals and 16 assists across 45 games in all competitions, including Serie A and the UEFA Champions League.

Imagine what he can do in a league like MLS?

The MLS isn’t hurting for star power, not with players like Henry, Ronaldinho and before them David Beckham seeing the combination of advertising dollars, solid play on the field and relative anonymity off of it as the perfect place to finish their careers.

Because of that, Garber needs to avoid the easy thing to do in this situation, which is to become short-sighted when it comes to Donovan. Until going out on loan to Everton in the first half of this year, Donovan had been a huge disappointment in Europe, failing famously with both Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern Munich earlier in his career. But the 28-year-old was a revelation with the Toffees, to the point that at the end of his last match the fans began chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” as he rounded the field high-fiving them.

Everton midfielder Phil Neville revealed where Donovan’s heart lies at this point, telling Everton TV during the team’s preseason tour in Australia that, “I’ve spoken to Landon and I know for a fact that he wants to come here.”

Letting Donovan go to Europe will only increase the exposure that soccer has here in the United States. That may seem to be a backwards statement, but it’s true. Americans are, for the most part, only interest in the highest levels of sports.

And while MLS has improved dramatically, as you see by the likes of Beckham, Henry and Ronaldinho being willing to come here, it still is nowhere near the level of top European leagues like the English Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Spain’s La Liga or Italy’s Serie A. Having the biggest name in American soccer playing in Europe will draw the curiosity of fans in the U.S., as they will keep an eye on him and see how he’s faring. It will prove to them that soccer is serious in this country, rather than something that is on ESPN2 when there isn’t a baseball game to air on a Saturday night instead.

It almost certainly won’t happen until the end of the season, but Donovan and MLS will come to a crossroads. He will be looking to give Europe a shot, to prove he can succeed over the long-term in the world’s premier leagues, while MLS will be hoping to hold on to their most marketable asset.

It may not be easy, but Don Garber and his league must do the right thing, both for Landon Donovan and for the future of U.S. soccer.

They need to let him go.

For months, all talk around the U.S. team was to, at the very least, finish second and qualify for the knockout phase of the tournament. With lightly-regarded Slovenia and Algeria in their group, qualifying for the knockout round was more than hoped for; perhaps, for the first time ever, it was expected.

And after drawing 1-1 with England last Saturday, it looked like that would be possible. But those hopes quickly began to fade when Valter Birsa fired a laser beam past Howard from about 25 yards out in the 13th minute, and Ljubijankic’s goal all but erased them.

The fact that the U.S. was able to come out in the second half and tie the game on two excellent goals from Landon Donovan and Michael Bradley was incredibly impressive. The fact that, if not for a bizarre and, frankly, terrible decision from Malian referee Koman Coulibaly to disallow a goal by Maurice Edu on the end of a Donovan free kick in the 85th minute, the Americans would have won the game is unbelievable.

Most commentators in this country will say that this is a great result for the United States, that they picked themselves up from the depths of despair at halftime, when they were staring a 2-0 deficit – and the end of their hopes for advancing – in the face. But looking at it this way glosses over a key point (and one that the wonderful Michael Davies, as well as Alexi Lalas, spell out here).

The United States should never have been down 2-0 to Slovenia. They never should have been in a position where they had to make an epic comeback to save their World Cup hopes. Because, once again, when the U.S. was a favorite on a big stage, they came up incredibly small.

This isn’t to say that Slovenia is a terrible side; far from it. Any team that can knock off a talented side like Russia in a two-game playoff is a team to watch out for. But if the United States, ranked 14th in the FIFA rankings entering this World Cup, are to think of themselves as a side capable of winning on the world’s biggest stage, it has to be able to beat middling sides like this.

But do the Americans really feel they are on that level? I’m not so sure that they do. Take this quote from the team’s talisman, Los Angeles Galaxy striker Landon Donovan, after the match.

“My guess is there’s not many teams in this tournament that could have done what we did and arguably won the game,” he said. “And that is what the American spirit is all about.

“And I’m sure the people back home are proud of that.”

There’s no question that the people back home are proud of the effort the U.S. put forth in the second half to salvage their World Cup and, thanks to England’s own putrid performance in a scoreless draw with Algeria this afternoon, in the driver’s seat for a berth in the knockout stages.

But those same people aren’t going to forget the awful display they put on in the first half, when they allowed Slovenia to look like Brazil and pick them apart. If the U.S. wants to take the next step, if it wants to be considered a real contender for tournaments like the World Cup, Donovan and his teammates need to be upset about how they played in this game. They need to be more frustrated with the fact that they can’t seem to play well for 90 minutes; it takes them being punched in the mouth at least once to get going.

Good teams don’t have that problem. But good teams also expect to win every game. And until Donovan and his teammates are more frustrated than satisfied when drawing against a team like Slovenia – no matter the circumstances surrounding the game – then this team has no chance of truly competing to win the World Cup.

For American soccer fans, England’s national team will always be the best measuring stick for where the game is in this country. Until the men’s national team is considered to be an equal to its English counterpart, until it can be considered one of the five or six contenders to win the World Cup, there will still be ground to make up in the eyes of American fans.

Because of that, Saturday’s 1-1 draw with England in that opening game was hailed as a victory in many places, and overall was a success. But while that game easily generated the most interest in a soccer game in U.S. history, it wasn’t the most important game.

Instead, the most important game is the history of U.S. soccer is Friday against Slovenia.

Most Americans have never heard of Slovenia. The tiny Balkan country with a population of two million – the smallest country in this year’s World Cup – has only been in existence since 1990, when it gained its independence from the former Yugoslavia.

But, in that short span, it has created a respectable men’s national team. After qualifying for the 2002 World Cup in South Korea/Japan, but failing to win a game, Slovenia qualified for this year’s festivities in South Africa by winning a playoff against Russia, considered one of the better sides in the world.

Slovenia then opened their World Cup campaign Sunday morning against Algeria, earning what could be a decisive 1-0 win over the Desert Foxes. The win gave Slovenia a critical three points, as well as an early leg-up on their heavily favored counterparts in Group C.

It also leaves the United States in a critical position entering Friday’s game. With England all but assured of winning against Algeria later in the day, a U.S. draw or loss would leave them needing a win against Algeria and help from the England-Slovenia match on the final day of group play in order to advance to the knockout stages.

But even more important than that, failing to win against Slovenia would undo all of the work the U.S. has done in the past 12-18 months in order to advance the game back home. Before last year’s Confederations Cup, the World Cup was little more than an afterthought in the minds of the American sports fan.

But the combination of the completely unexpected run to the final by the American team – including ending Spain’s 35-game unbeaten streak and leading Brazil 2-0 before eventually fading in the final – and the never-ending hype machine that is ESPN, the World Cup, and the U.S. team, have been given more attention than ever before.

Because of that, even the average, usually disinterested American sports fan knows that the U.S. team entered the tournament as a heavy favorite to advance to the knockout stages, and that anything else would be a colossal disappointment. That’s why the game against Slovenia is so critical. If the U.S. is able to win the game and regain control of their group, they will keep people interested in them and the tournament, and will allow them to continue to gain interest and notoriety for the sport here in the States.

But anything less than a win against Slovenia, anything less than getting all three of those points, and a country with a population of less than 25 percent of New York City will do far more harm to the game of soccer in the United States than Saturday’s result against England did any good.

When Beckham first came to the United States in the summer of 2007, he had grand visions for what he wanted to do for soccer in America. He wore No. 23, which is associated with our greatest star, Michael Jordan, and Beckham clearly hoped to push soccer up into the highest levels of our sports culture.

But looking back, that first game, in which Beckham was only able to play the last 15 minutes or so against Chelsea because of an injury, was a sign of things to come. Because a hard look at Beckham’s time in American soccer can only be summed up in one way: as a waste of time and money.

In the time since Beckham arrived with his five-year, 250 million dollar contract, Major League Soccer has seen hardly any increase in interest from the general sports fan here in the U.S. I don’t think I could possibly find a person who, from memory, could list all of the teams in MLS. Instead, the league trudges along in a state that isn’t much different than it was before Beckham arrived.

That hasn’t been helped over the past year, as Beckham has spent much of it jetting back-and-forth across the Atlantic, first to play for the England national team, in which he’s found a place again under new coach Fabio Capello, and then for Italian giants AC Milan, whom he moved to in January on a loan deal.

Part of me feels bad for Beckham, who clearly came to the United States thinking his time playing for England had come to an end following the 2006 World Cup, and wanted a new challenge. But things changed, Capello became interested, and Beckham has performed better than anyone ever could have expected. He was so impressive with Milan that the Rossoneri tried to keep him permanently after his loan deal expired – much to the annoyance of everyone involved with MLS, who felt (and rightly so) that Beckham had fallen far short of everything he had promised to try and do here.

No one seems more annoyed by the Beckham Show than his teammate and the second-biggest star in MLS, Landon Donovan. As part of the work on his book, “The Beckham Experiment,” Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl got some very interesting quotes from the Galaxy’s captain.

“If someone’s paying you more than double anybody else in the league, the least we expect is that you show up to every game,” Donovan says in the book. “Show up and train hard. Show up and play hard.

“I can’t think of another guy where I’d say he wasn’t a good teammate. But with (Beckham), I’d say no, he wasn’t committed. My sense is that David’s clearly frustrated, that’s he’s unhappy, and, honestly, that he thinks (Major League Soccer) is a joke.”

Beckham shot back at Donovan for his comments, and the two have supposedly had a meeting and sorted things out in advance of tonight’s return. But that still doesn’t change the truth of Donovan’s words – and there is little doubt they are.

And really, the most amusing thing about when those comments happened to be released was that Donovan had just helped the U.S. National Team stunningly reach the Confederations Cup final against Brazil, a game that arguably had lifted American interest in soccer to its highest-ever level – the thing Beckham himself set out, and so far has failed, to do himself.

When he signed up for The Beckham Experiment, to steal Wahl’s phrase, the Englishman thought this would be a fitting way for a global icon to end his career – attempting to lift the soccer consciousness in America to a level it hadn’t reached before. Instead, he surprisingly found second life in Europe, and once he did was ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

Because of that, it makes tonight’s forced marriage between Beckham, Donovan, the Galaxy and MLS look like its doomed to failure. But even more than that, it seems likely that few will notice, or care, what happens to it.

David Beckham is back. To many, that will statement will produce one answer. So what?

Less than two weeks into his second stint with Real, Perez has followed through on his campaign promises by spending over 220 million dollars in less than a week on two of the best players in the world – Brazilian attacking midfielder Kaka from AC Milan and the world’s most explosive offensive player, Portugese forward Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United.

Despite the fact that Perez spent as much money on those two players as the Yankees will spend on their entire 2009 payroll – and that was just to get the right to sign them to contracts, remember – realize that Real still has designs on some of the other top players from around the world, with Valencia striker David Villa all but set to go to Madrid, with the possibility of Bayern Munich’s Franck Ribery also on the table.

But the important thing for Perez and Co. to remember as they begin to plan victory celebrations through the Spanish capital at the end of next season is that the last Galacticos era didn’t result in trophies for Los Blancos; instead, it only led to worldwide attention and adoration for the team of superstars.

If superstar-studded lineups meant championships in European soccer, Chelsea would have already won several titles under the direction of Russian billionaire owner Roman Abromivich. Instead, Chelsea has fallen short numerous times to more cohesive teams, including Manchester United last year and this year’s champions – and Real Madrid’s arch-rivals – Barcelona.

And, in the end, it’s Barcelona that Real is striving to compete with. Coming off the first treble in the history of Spanish football, Barcelona is the taste of Europe after its utter domination of Manchester United in Rome in the Champions League final. In that game, Barca’s Lionel Messi proved to the world that he, and not Ronaldo, is the world’s greatest player at the moment.

And while Barcelona has several stars of its own, from Messi to Theirry Henry to Samuel Eto’o to Iniesta, it is their incredible cohesion as a unit. Against Manchester United in the Champoins League final, Barca demolished them with their pristine passing all around the field. Manchester looked helpless to stop them, despite having a team of stars of its own including Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Patrice Evra.

It is that combination of skill and cohesion that Real Madrid will have to combat against in the coming season in La Liga. Given how well Barcelona played this season, along with the fact that they may be upgrading Eto’o to Zlatan Ibrahimovic – who, depending on who you talk to, is the best striker on the planet – no matter how many Galacticos Perez manages to get his hands on, it’s going to be an uphill battle for Real Madrid to get back to its trophy-winning ways, both at home and abroad.