Soccer's Next Great Arrival is Predicted

I agree that soccer in America is nothing without Anschutz and Hunt. Which kind of makes me question Anschutz's conservative cred.

 

It's like a clinic.

 

To make sure the league didn't go the way of the NASL and then you'd have a bunch of stadiums sitting around. They tested the waters in rented facilities, gauged the attendance then built accordingly, smartly.

 

You're using circular logic.

First you said the goal was always to draw 15,000 to 20,000. Now you're saying they build stadia to that size because they were so smart that they tested the market first & determined that was the crowd size they could legitimately expect to draw.

Which is it?

 

What were the odds on a 5-0 thumping? You could have made a fortune betting that line.

 

I didn't say it's a necessary discussion, I said it might be better, i.e. more interesting.

Think about it. Where would the league, and in some part Soccer in America, be without them?

And they didn't just own a team each, together they owned up to, what, six teams at one time I think. Out of how many? Ten?

A Mark Cuban or George Steinbrenner might be able to prop up their own team, but these two guys propped up the entire league.

As we saw with the USFL and other leagues, a free spending owner can lavish spending on his own team at the ultimate determinate of other teams and the league itself.

MLS was very lucky to have two involved, rational, passionate owners who were willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to grow a league and a sport.

It's a pretty interesting and unprecedented story.

 

You that dense? They rented the available staudims in major markets, which were NFL stadiums. Those stadiums were available (unlike say a college stadium which have more events) but had way more capacity than necessary. I'm sure MLS would have been thrilled if they drew 50k per game, but the idea was to build smaller stadiums which were better for fans, were more likely to be filled and which didn't have football lines.

 

Webster, I'm not dense.

The plan was to fill the NFL stadiums. They only built Crew Stadium because they were essentially evicted from Ohio Stadium due to renovations. (It was built in 11 months.)

It's success changed the business plan. The league/owners saw that the smaller stadiums, in which they could control all revenue made better sense -- especially because they realized that they were never going to fill the bigger stadiums.

But to make it sound like that was the plan all along is false. It's false. Sorry.

They did not go into this venture with a long term goal of drawing 15,000-20,000 fans per game.

That's where they are and that's fine. But it's far different than the original goal.

 

They never thought that they were going to fill the big stadiums. I don't think that any team got more than 25k on average during the first few years.

 

The League was conceived in 1993, a year before the '94 World Cup. It was expected to benefit from the excitement and exposure of the sport.

Unfortunately, they didn't play their first season until 1996.

The league averaged 17,406 in it's first season. It was expected to grow. It never did. It's inaugural season was it's peak. It's never drawn more fans per game since.

Now, I think they had to be disappointed even with their first season numbers, nut if the sport/league had grown as expected/anticipated/predicted, it would be well on its way to filling NFL Stadiums.

At the very least, it would have had to build stadiums bigger than the 20,000 seat places they've been building.

But it didn't. And here we are.

From 2008:

 

Here are the latest numbers:

2009: 16,037
2010: 16,675

http://www.socceramerica.com/article/40114/mls-attendance-on-the-rise.html

Only Seattle, LA, and Toronto drew over 20,000 per game.

Seattle at 36,173 is well, well ahead of the league average and draws 15,000 per game more than their nearest competitor.

Interestingly, two of the newest teams, Seattle & Toronto are 1st and 3rd in attendance. I wonder if those numbers will hold up over time.

(Admittedly, the fan experience at both places is supposed to be great and the communities are said to be very supportive, so maybe it will. But, that's not been the experience across the league.)

 

If you say that MLS has not met expectations because it doesn't get NFL numbers, then by the same logic NBA franchises have failed equally. Surely they do not want to to limited to facilities like Madison Square Garden and the Staples Center. They must clearly want to fill up larger venues.

I'm sure there were maybe a few people in MLS's startup that thought they could get NFL crowds, probably a few coked up execs or some greedy owners/investors. But I'm sure most people were realistic with their expectations.