State of American Soccer

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Post by Pounder » Sat Mar 21, 2015 3:36 pm

For a "more informed opposing viewpoint"...

http://www.bigsoccer.com/blog/2015/3/20 ... nasl-twice

Opposing? Informed? Maybe. Maybe not. And we could argue for a while on whether the Indy stadium plan's progress gives testimony to NASL's potential or Peter Wilt's talent. Heck, I think it's a lot of the latter.

But it's certainly interesting.
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Post by preeths » Sat Mar 21, 2015 6:49 pm

That was a bit of a painful read. I thought over-expansion was typically blamed for the collapse of the original NASL?

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Post by Sam Hill » Mon Mar 23, 2015 12:37 am

[quote=""preeths""]That was a bit of a painful read. I thought over-expansion was typically blamed for the collapse of the original NASL?[/quote]

It was one of the causes, yes.

But they grew incredibly quickly without infrastructure and with owners who were sold on making money right away. They didn't know how hard it would be.

Current expansion of leagues just has not been that rapid or haphazard.
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Post by preeths » Mon Mar 23, 2015 12:27 pm

That's what I understood to be the case. Listing "The Cosmos made us spend money," as the chief cause, on the other hand, is a curious assertion. I think it ignores the facts that a lot of the owners didn't match the Cosmos' spending, their teams didn't draw crowds that would keep them from losing boatloads of money anyway, and, as you point out, many of the expansion owners couldn't keep up with Cosmos spending if they wanted to.

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Post by Pounder » Mon Mar 23, 2015 5:52 pm

[quote=""preeths""]That's what I understood to be the case. Listing "The Cosmos made us spend money," as the chief cause, on the other hand, is a curious assertion. I think it ignores the facts that a lot of the owners didn't match the Cosmos' spending, their teams didn't draw crowds that would keep them from losing boatloads of money anyway, and, as you point out, many of the expansion owners couldn't keep up with Cosmos spending if they wanted to.[/quote]

"They're spending the money. WHY DON'T YOU?"

Nearly every American fan to their owner. Nearly always.

Now... is the American soccer fan congenitally wired to believe that it's their civic duty to make millionaires and billionaires poorer? I could argue a core of these fans might believe this. Not that I'm about to spend 5 years shaking out the evidence.
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Post by preeths » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:57 pm

Oh sure, I think many fans are always going to want their favorite team's ownership to spend more. But unless disillusionment with the local NASL club's inability to keep up with the Cosmos kept an overwhelming majority of those folks at home, I can't see it as being nearly a chief reason for the league's collapse. The Cosmos' spending also helped the league as a whole get some publicity that it otherwise would have lacked, and they drew well on the road.

It just appears to me that some of those NASL teams didn't draw well at all, and several of those markets didn't do much for the league's TV potential, either. But more importantly, some of those ownership groups weren't strong enough to sustain any losses for any amount of time. Once the dominoes started falling, they just couldn't be stopped. Blaming the Cosmos...I don't get that.

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Post by Pounder » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:46 pm

While it's fair to question the soccer audience of the 70s and early 80s, you must realize that the perception of a lot of people following the game differs... and leads to one of the current schisms in the community. The staunchest defenders of MLS are generally older and tend to have wanted to correct what was perceived as what was wrong with the old NASL.

Funny thing: the bulk of the new American soccer fans are younger, and cut their teeth following European clubs via the Internet, the former Fox Soccer Channel (not that us oldsters don't cite the old PBS "Soccer Made In Germany"), etc. Far more youngsters, BTW.

*

http://reprints.longform.org/howler-mia ... elo-claure

This has turned out to be quite the article. Sporting Kansas City has issued a denial regarding Robb Heineman's quotes in it... though the denial is kind of botched. Some Twitter sources this morning seem mindful of this when declaring that Spice Boy is actually in Miami right now trying to work out the stadium.
Last edited by Pounder on Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: State of American Soccer

Post by Pounder » Tue Feb 01, 2022 12:59 am

https://www.protagonistsoccer.com/cover ... ttles-nisa

After all these years…

It took some time to get this league kicked off. Then they got a couple of the lower-level glamour teams and seemed like they were getting momentum. Now they’ve lost Detroit City (to USL, a development that shocked more than one observer) along with a handful of others, and now the appointed commissioner is trying to force out the founder. Another day at the American soccer office.

Peter Wilt is good for building a club from the ground up, as long as he takes a few years to finish. Forward Madison (USL League One) may be the shining example of his, and it must be noted that teams popping up in several of the leagues are close to matching some of the iconography and marketing done there. If you could just concentrate all that energy in one place, you’d really have something. But Wilt has turned out to be a club-builder and not quite a league builder. And leagues do tend to end up being fiefdoms.
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