Photo: Danny Karnik /AP Photo

With a Major League Soccer title within reach, this should be the best of times for Columbus, Ohio, soccer fans.

Instead, it’s the worst.

The same conniving owner and a greedy league many fans wanted in San Antonio have betrayed the Columbus Crew’s well-meaning supporters by plotting to move the club to Austin.

With apologies to Charles Dickens, the existential soccer crisis currently gripping Ohio’s capital city simultaneously exposes everything that’s good and bad about U.S. soccer.

Unbeknownst to fans, while their beloved Crew were finishing the regular season and preparing for the MLS playoffs, team owner Anthony Precourt had been plotting against them. In late October, Precourt unveiled his sinister scenario: A plan, four years in the making, to move the highly successful team to Austin.

Precourt didn’t act alone. Major League Soccer knew of his plans and let him do it. They even helped him, allowing Precourt to sit on the league’s expansion committee. League officials also gave Precourt a legal loophole for the move.

And by doing all of that, San Antonio’s MLS bid became collateral damage, since the league wouldn’t want two teams splitting the I-35 corridor fanbase.

Precourt’s plotting and MLS’ ham-fisted complicity are the latest steps backward in a forgettable year for U.S. soccer. Mix in the abject failure of the USA in men’s international competitions, and you end up with an American soccer landscape that’s turned into kindling.

While the nation’s soccer structure burns, the Crew have remained focused. The club begins a two-game, home-and-away semifinal against top-seeded Toronto FC next week.

It’s created an interesting dynamic, says Crew fan Tim Myers.

“We’ve come to the realization,” Myers said, “we’re in a real life version of ‘Major League.’”

That was the 1989 film in which a fictional owner of the Cleveland Indians needed the team to lose and for ticket sales to plummet in order to justify a sweetheart deal to relocate to the Sun Belt.

While others protested, Myers went to work. He crunched as much public data as he could to see how it stacked up against Precourt’s complaint focused on bad attendance and little corporate sponsorship.

It didn’t.

Myers can prove Crew attendance doubles seven other MLS teams. Moreover, his research shows the club has 40 percent more corporate support than the league average.

The general feeling among many fans, said “Save The Crew” spokesman Morgan Hughes, is that Precourt and MLS wanted the Crew to do badly this season. It would be easier to move a losing club than a title contender.

The home schedule, for example, was front-loaded, Hughes said, meaning fans had to sit in sub-freezing temperatures at the beginning of the season. In addition, teams that draw huge crowds, such as Toronto or the Los Angeles Galaxy, were scheduled midweek, when attendance is spottier.

There’s more. The club’s most highly attended games every season are six “Dollar Beer” promotions, Hughes said. This season, however, there were no such promotions.

None of this makes Precourt or MLS look trustworthy.

San Antonio and every other city bidding for MLS expansion franchises should heed the advice to avoid the league.

That’s not the case in Columbus, Hughes and Myers said, where forgiveness and optimism are in the air.

Fans are willing to move past Precourt’s backstabbing if he opts to stay or if the move to Austin falls through. They will continue to support the team if it stays put.

They call it loyalty.

With all due respect, it seems more like “Stockholm Syndrome,” a condition in which a kidnap victim begins to sympathize with the kidnapper.

Columbus — both fans and city leaders — continue to act in good faith, choosing to support the team and do their part to grow American soccer.

Well, the joke’s on them. As it turns out, they are dealing with a league and an owner who confuse “loyalty” with “fealty.”

rbragg@express-news.net

@roybragg