This'll teach a Mercury reporter to spend 48 hours coming up with all the economic reasons why a major league soccer deal is a bad idea...it turns out the deal to bring the sport to Portland may be on the verge of falling apart because of a personality clash between the two principle brokers.

City Commissioner Randy Leonard told the Portland Business Journal Friday that Timbers and Beavers owner Merritt Paulson had "stormed out" of a meeting with Leonard and the mayor on Thursday night, after refusing to insulate the city from cost overruns on the planned renovation of PGE park.

So I asked Leonard to clarify what he meant by "storming out," when he talked to the PBJ, and got the following response by email, earlier this afternoon:

Sam announced at the beginning of our negotiations Thursday evening that he had to leave at 6:15. I said I would stay as long as it took Thursday night to get a deal.

So first off, the comment by Merritt that he thought we had a previous engagement was disingenuous.

After negotiating for a while, Merritt and his team went into a another room as Steve Janik went between each side, us in the Mayor's conference room and they in a different conference room on the 2nd floor of city hall.

Sam had left and Steve came back into our conference room and said that the other side had decided, after our last offer, to leave. As soon as he said that, they walked through the Mayor's conference room door unannounced, looked at or talked to no one, grabbed their coats and left without saying a word. Not a "see ya", "thanks, Randy, for missing dinner with your family once again for us", "good night" or even a "screw off you jack asses".

I called that storming out...what would you call it?

Randy

Paulson told the PBJ Friday that he's still optimistic about striking a deal, but Commissioner Leonard has a pretty long memory when crossed. Having said that, he might be persuaded to forget the snub, I guess, if Paulson would just write a large enough check.

Jack Bogdanski thinks the spat's all for show. "The only safe assumption is that the Paulson stadiums deal is still very much on track, regardless of how utterly insane it is," he writes.

Meanwhile Jeremy Wright at MLS to PDX has a guest column at Blue Oregon about why progressives should support the deal.

There'll be a vitriolic rebuttal of Wright's guest column on Blogtown by a house representative, Monday morning. Not to mention more numbers and financial projections than you can shake a hand of god at. Still, I swear: This is getting tenser than the penalties in the England/Germany match at the world cup in 1990!