I gave the short menu a chance but I don't like having to leave it to use the page-specific dropdowns.
Maybe if the short menu itself expanded to show suboptions. I mean, I go to my schedule, roster and stats ALL THE TIME, it shouldn't take multiple page loads and additional menus to get there. It would be nice if the menu were customizable to show whatever pages you want (though there would still have to be an intelligent default setting for the sake of new players).
I agree that the long menu is too long. Plenty of the links on it are unimportant to a majority of players (Federations, National Team related pages, various administration type things) but the short menu is too short, so I'll take some screen clutter I can ignore over some inconvenience I have to put up with.