MLS Facing Rough Times?

Thirteen years into the life of Major League Soccer and for all the signs of progress on the field, the league continues to operate more or less in vacuum as far as the general American sports landscape is concerned. For those people who love European football and do not feel MLS is worth their time, no MLS or even a weaker MLS which is distinctly “minor” in its marketing and visibility threatens the amount of European football available on TV here without paying exorbitant pay per event fees. Soccer’s upsurge in popularity in this country owed itself more to MLS than any other factor but right now the league faces challenges and unacknowledged problems that threaten its continued upswing. Moreover, the amount of European football available to those who do not purchase premium channels is currently at its lowest point since the dark pre MLS days.

Last night’s MLS action felt like 1998 or 1999 all over again in some ways but not in others. My American Soccer Show co-host Dave Denholm has rightly pointed out that the worst teams in MLS in 1998 were worse than any team today in the league. But I have, I believe rightly pointed out the best teams in MLS in 1998, DC United and the LA Galaxy would fairly easily beat any top MLS side today on a regular basis. Sadly, many other fans seem to have come to the conclusion I have about the quality of the league. Don’t let MLS’ clever PR sugarcoat things: Attendance is nowhere near where it should be in some markets, and in the case of Columbus in particular the interest in the club is probably half of what it was locally in the 1998/99 time period. It is a pity because the Crew are playing as well as anyone else in the league right now.

San Jose’s return to the Silicon Valley/South Bay area had a distinct 1998/1999 feel. For some reason I thought the Quakes were going to break out the old Clash jerseys and Dario Brose, Jeff Baicher and the incomparable Richard Gough were going to dawn the pitch. While Buck Shaw Stadium is clearly a better venue than Spartan Stadium, the football was of the unwatchable variety the Clash and then the Quakes became known for pre Landon Donovan and DeRo.

Unlike 1998 or 1999, I didn’t see a dominant team like DC United anywhere last night. In those days I would think to myself, “take this DC team to Europe for six months and see them surprise people.” No current MLS team gives me that level of confidence. So in some ways the interest may have waned because despite all of the talk of better play, the top teams are less dominant than they were in the league’s early days and thus less capable of competiting outside of MLS at a high level.

Another factor is Television. While MLS achieved a breakthrough by getting the Disney networks (ESPN and ABC) to pay for long term rights to the league in 2006, ABC currently shows fewer MLS on over the air affiliates than it ever has. In the 1999 season, ABC Sports carried 15 MLS matches all on weekend afternoons. In 2008, ABC will carry only two MLS matches, and a similar pattern has occurred with less and less US National Team games being on ABC. With England out of the Euro Championships, I fear that the ratings for that event could poison the supportive top brass at ESPN against Soccer beyond the MLS Thursday Night matches. While it is true that cable and satellite are more mainstream than they were in 1998, less and less MLS games are available on the Disney Channels and beyond that less and less soccer is available as ESPN has dumped the Premier League and La Liga right as well allowing them to fall to premium soccer specific channels. While this is great for those of us who pay to get FSC, GOL TV and Setanta it ultimately leaves the sport less accessible to mainstream sports fans than ever.

So if the football in many cases hasn’t improved over ten seasons, fan interest is lower than ten years ago in many markets (including the nations largest market) what exactly is MLS accomplishing? Many things: First off the player pool for the US National Team is deeper than ever and the US’ 2002 run in the World Cup which is what made Soccer even remotely mainstream in this country (not the success of Liverpool or Manchester United in European Competitions, despite what many may profess) was created by a team entirely developed in MLS with the two notable exceptions of Claudio Reyna and John O’Brien. MLS has also developed a much stronger reputation abroad than it had in 1998. In fairness part of that reputation was fostered by the fine play of DC United against clubs from South America and England in the 1998 to 2002 period. MLS has also brought top class football to the US shores by bringing in some top foreign players like Roberto Donadoni, Carlos Vaderrama, Lothar Matthaues and now David Beckham, Macello Gallardo, Guillermo Baros Schelotto and Claudio Lopez: the type of footballers we never were able to see for sustained period of time on American shores. MLS has also developed decent foreign talent on our shores: Ryan Nelson, Stern John, Shaun Bartlett, Ben Iroha and others all used their time in MLS to secure lucrative European club contracts and to become fixtures on their respective national sides.

But where is MLS headed? While new markets like Houston and Salt Lake City appear to have been naturals, the league is over expanding while having failed to have made a dent in many of its original core markets. For every Washington DC, we have a New England. For every Los Angeles we have a Columbus. As someone who has seen a team taken away from my market even though the intensity of fan support was in my humble opinion far greater than it is even today in Boston, New York and Kansas City, I have hard time not feeling that MLS has failed in the most fundamental way. Fans in New England can make whatever excuse they want, but the Kraft family has failed even through remarkable on the field success to engage the local population. In Northern California, I feel Lew Wolff’s ideas will create a success with San Jose that the club quite frankly did not have in its previous stint. San Jose had intense fans but not enough fans quite frankly to sustain itself in the current environment. That was due to the absentee ownership of first the Kraft’s and then AEG.

Saturated sports markets aren’t an excuse. Quite frankly, last year I was shocked by the amount of interest the Colorado Rapids have garnered in the mainstream sports community since Stan Kroenke bought the team. In other words, AEG was the reason the Rapids never broke through locally. Denver is the market that has the smallest metropolitan population yet has teams in each of the four major professional sports leagues. (NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB) The Rapids, despite struggling for years except on the 4th of July which served to spike attendance every season, now have found their local niche in quite possibly the most over saturated team sports market in the country. Toronto FC clearly has made a major dent in a hockey driven town with a semi successful NBA team and an MLB team as well. Real Salt Lake has done alright in a market that is small and has a highly successful NBA franchise. But Salt Lake has an owner in Dave Cheketts that knows the American sports landscape from more angles than most and he has helped RSL find it local niche.

The lack of committed local ownership is why I will give New York a semi-pass without giving the same deference to Columbus and New England. However, the lack of general fan interest in New York and the lack of local media coverage in the largest and most cosmopolitan market in the country (and a market that was wildly successful in the NASL even some years averaging close to 50,000 fans per game) continues to be alarming.

Let me be quite frank: MLS has made great strides particularly in quality of play but its failure to become more than a minor player in some of its core markets after thirteen seasons and multiple marketing strategies has me extremely concerned. Unlike five years ago we are not talking about whether the league will survive or not, but I am asking what form will the league survive in? How long can attendance remain flat in certain markets while costs of operating a team and marketing a team continue to increase? Will multiple teams have to move to markets that like Houston and Salt Lake City that were neglected for years even though proving to be natural for the league?

These questions ultimately need to be answered. I’m anxious to hear feedback from you, the fans of this league and the game here in the United States as to where you see this train going.

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Has MLS Really Learned the Lessons of the NASL?

While I am pleased for Philadelphia and particularly for the Sons of Ben that the league has chosen to add a 16th team in 2010, I have serious concerns about the rapid expansion of the league and the seeming desire to make a different set of rules for each potential expansion city. Philadelphia probably deserved a team, but did Seattle really deserve one? How about a return to San Jose so quickly when the public threshold set by Commissioner Garber was never met for the Earthquakes to resume play in MLS?

For years MLS shied away from any resemblance to the old NASL: in many cases to its own detriment and causing failure in some markets that had embraced the NASL. Now the MLS seems to be racing to replicate the NASL in some odd ways while continuing to shun the legacy of that league in others. The NASL was a renegade league. For many years the league openly defied FIFA and the USSF. At the time the United States National Team was a weak sister and generally could not get out of the first round of World Cup Qualifying. The NASL also had a strange set of rules, some that the MLS originally adopted. Remember the 35 yard line for offsides, the one on one shootout, and the clock stopping and counting down to zero? But the NASL had its bright spots. An incredible fan base in certain cities and thus the ability of those cities to embrace second and third division teams of the same name into the future. The league also spurred the growth in youth soccer nationally from which MLS and the US National Team has now long benefited. In addition, the league was able to penetrate the mainstream sports media in a fashion that MLS is still attempting to: sure Pele, Cryuff, Best and Marsh all helped, but so did the aggressiveness of certain teams and the understand of marketing by many of the clubs.

Take Tampa, Florida for instance. The Rowdies generally had the second highest average attendance in the NASL from 1975 thru 1984. (Behind the New York Cosmos). The Rowdies reared an entire generation of young people on the game to the point that when I would often travel to Tampa in the early 1990s, and try and talk about soccer in a crowd of sports fans I would not be met with the hostility I faced almost everywhere else in the country. In fact at that point the Rowdies name was still alive and well in the form of the A-League Rowdies and the Tampa Bay area had developed the nation’s second biggest youth soccer network, and an immense number of soccer specific retail stores that unlike many shops today did not specialize in selling Real Madrid or Manchester United jerseys, but soccer equipment and soccer related videos.

When MLS began in 1996, I was initially shocked by the cities selected. Los Angeles (The Aztecs) had flopped in the NASL while San Diego (The Soccers) had been super successful. Boston (like Philadelphia) had two teams fold, and one move to Jacksonville, FL. of all places (I went to a Jacksonville Tea Men game against my beloved Strikers at the Gator Bowl in 1982, and my chief memory of the game was shock that so few people could attend a professional sporting event), while Chicago had always been a staple of the dearly departed league but was passed over for Columbus of all places. Kansas City instead of St Louis seemed beyond bizarre to me. Fort Lauderdale, Seattle, Chicago and Houston had all been left out despite a thriving long term soccer fan base in those cities. (obviously now all four have had their stab at MLS, but none were awarded franchises in 1996 while Columbus and Kansas City were.) Truthfully beyond the obvious selections of New York, Dallas and Washington, only San Jose and Tampa Bay made perfect sense based on the support the NASL made there. But in both markets the league made a critical mistake. Rather than embrace the legacy and ready made fan base from the NASL they ran from it. Instead of naming the respective teams the Earthquakes and Rowdies, two very amateurish sounding names, the Clash and Mutiny were given with even more amateurish looking logos and uniforms.

The mistake was corrected in San Jose after three terrible seasons as the Clash, but was never corrected in Tampa, and now one of the best soccer markets in US history has been relegated to seeking a USL-1 franchise owned by an English Premier League team. Fort Lauderdale was a market that began to embrace the MLS just as the league pulled the plug: the name “Fusion” didn’t tap into all the Striker sentiment locally that still existed. At times Fort Lauderdale could get upwards of 5,000 fans for A-League Striker matches that included some of the former NASL Strikers like Thomas Rongen, Nene Cubillias, and Ray Hudson. The NASL Strikers had consistently averaged between 12,000 and 15,000 a game. But when the MLS arrived with much fan fare crowds were flat for the first three seasons (after the opener) but then spiked to close to 12,000 a game the Fusion’s final season when finally a product worth watching was on the field. This average attendance was not spiked by a single doubleheader (which has for many years been cleverly used by New England and the Metrostars to pad their crowd numbers) and incorporated many midweek games were the attendance was under 10,000.

Seattle has now been awarded an expansion team without a stadium plan in place, and with an attendance average in USL-1 which is the lowest of the three clubs in the Pacific Northwest. Philadelphia on the other hand, despite the efforts of the Sons of Ben were forced to wait until funding for a state of the art stadium were approved before getting the go ahead for a team.

While many of the MLS initial franchise choices were outstanding like Los Angeles and Washington, others like Boston and New York have struggled to make any sort of impact in the local mainstream sports scene or with generating consistent crowds. In the case of New York this was certainly not the case in the NASL, and knowing the Cosmos name was off the table thanks to Pepe Pinton eccentric behavior some attempt to link the Metrostars with the Cosmos would have been wise rather than the futile attempt of New York’s original ownership to link the team with AC Milan via kit colors and the signing of Roberto Donadoni.

Major League Soccer was initially formed to help develop young, internationally savvy American footballers. The league has for many years succeeded in doing just that. However, as I pointed out in my post this past Sunday, fewer and fewer young MLS players are working their way into the full national team player pool as time goes on. As MLS gets on the foreign player gravy train and refuses to address squad limits and a measly pathetic salary cap where an inherent bias exists against home grown players getting opportunities, this trend will only intensify with rapid expansion. Much like the NASL, the new expansion teams will be tempted to pollute their squads with high priced foreigners and then fill in the remaining spots with young Americans making a measly salary thus leaving the young Americans with national team potential to be developed either overseas or even worse in the USL. Through the years the tiny MLS salary cap has in fact kept a steady flow of good players going to USL which is good for the second division, and maybe on the whole good for US Soccer, but not good for MLS.

Fear of going the way of the NASL forced MLS to start with a single entity structure, restrictive salary cap, and squad limits. Fear of DC United becoming the MLS version of the Cosmos, forced the league to rapidly strip the one club able to serve as a worthwhile ambassador of the growing American soccer culture abroad of almost all its marketable assets and render MLS in the eyes of some critics a “mickey mouse league,” whose teams cannot compete on a global stage. The critics of this league who make these arguments do not recall DC United’s mastery of Vasco De Gama in the Inter-American cup nor the great victory the achieved for MLS in conquering Spurs at White Hart Lane in the middle of the EPL season. Those critics do not recognize it was league policy, not the standard of football in this country that made MLS clubs so uncompetitive on the global stage. The bottom line on the NASL as it arrived at a time when much of the US was different demographically, and when the US National Teams were not competitive in any way shape or form on the international stage. Sustaining a domestic league regardless of quality when your own national team is in the pits and has no chance of qualifying for any significant event is beyond difficult. The NASL did however develop a base from which the US nearly qualified for the 1986 World Cup and then did qualify in 1990, despite not having a FIFA sanctioned first division to develop players.

MLS has consistently stated they do not want to repeat the mistakes of the NASL. But it seems throughout the league’s now twelve year history they have not learned the positive lessons from the NASL and have instead taken a road of guarded insular thinking masked as a recipe for competitiveness. At the same time MLS has shunned the legacy of the NASL both in local markets and in the general soccer community by re-creating the wheel in a far from perfect form and in many ways forcing American professional soccer and local markets to re-learn and re-embrace a game it already understood and loved.

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More Expansion for MLS?

Published reports seem to confirm a rumor I heard Monday regarding the possible return of MLS to south Florida, this time courtesy of Boca Juniors, the legendary Argentine club. (I will admit when I heard the rumor I dismissed it completely until I have now seen it published on two reliable websites) Guilermo Barros Schelotto one of the greatest Boca players ever has had much success in his first MLS season with Columbus and that has evidently convinced Boca executives to discuss opening an MLS franchise. Miami is the most likely place for the team, although New York is also a possible location if Boca goes forward with this concept. Apparently Boca executives are so serious about the idea they either recently met or will meet very soon with Don Garber.