Restart opportunity

by Steve De Rose
Published on January 7, 2005 under Major Indoor Soccer League 2 (MISL 2)


In an incident unprecedented in the history of professional indoor soccer in North America, the Major Indoor Soccer League has terminated two of its nine franchises a fourth of the way through the season.

Just before the calendar year changed, the League's Management Committee, by a supermajority vote, compelled League Commissioner Steve Ryan to take decisive action concerning the Monterrey Tigres and the San Diego Sockers franchises. On December 30, 2004, the Sockers suspended operations indefinitely, and the Monterrey franchise discontinued operations for the remainder of the 2004-05 season.

The result is a hodge-podge schedule which finds only the Saint Louis Steamers playing a 40-game season. The other six remnants will play 39 games: 20 home and 19 away. Go ahead. Make your Jack Benny retorts now.

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The League will compact to a one division format. The top four teams will make the playoffs. The semi-final round will be home-and-away with a "golden goal" overtime period after the second game if necessary. To potentially accommodate a team which cannot obtain a home date on a specific weekend in early May, the higher seeded team may host either the second or the first game in this round.

The Finals will be a best-of-three (home-away-home) series spread over three weekends in May (again, if necessary).

The "shock" applies to San Diego, a city with the legacy of excellent players and teams to, initially, which hd to resort to a Canadian penny-stock entrepreneur, a Mr. Raj Kalra, to acquire the franchise before the beginning of the 2004-05 season. Then the subsequent failure by the League to require that Kalra post the appropriate financial instruments to operate the team over the course of a seven month season resulted in the franchise being locked out of their home arena midway through December.

Negotiations with another potential owner in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, were broken off after a media leak identified the interested party.

Although the League holds all the players' contracts, it was unwilling to commit the additional funds which could have enabled the San Diego franchise to finish the season. An option which was not considered was transforming San Diego into a barnstorming team to test potential future League cities.

The "awe" portion applies to Monterrey. Monterrey led the League in average attendance last season. But their ownership played fast and loose with the League's bylaws, in both the business and soccer aspects. They used ineligible players in a clutch of games last season, and wound up forfeiting victories as a result.

This season, their finances were called into question. A contract with the Monterrey Arena could not be satisfactorily executed. The League took back the franchise, and was negotiating with the owners of the Monterrey Tigres (FMF) team to operate the side. But the former owners of the team cited contract language, which stipulated that they had exclusive rights to present an indoor soccer team in the Monterrey Arena. The League attempted to concoct an agreement which would allow the Tigres management to use the Monterrey Arena, but the team's former owners either did not, or would not, respond to their queries. The number of missed home dates for Monterrey was approaching the ‘impossible to reschedule' level. The League pulled the plug on the franchise for this season.

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On Wednesday, January 5, the League dispersed the San Diego and Monterrey players. The order of the dispersal draft was:

Chicago Storm
Cleveland Force
Saint Louis Steamers
Kansas City Comets
Philadelphia KiXX
Baltimore Blast
Milwaukee Wave

Here were the results. Consider that not every player drafted will actually play for that team. Remember that it costs a team nothing to select a player in a draft. The draft went twelve rounds.

Chicago Storm
Mark Ughy (San Diego)
Jacob Ward (San Diego)
Kevin Sakuda (San Diego)
Attilla Vendegh (San Diego)
Paul Wright (San Diego)
Ato Leone (San Diego)
Lee Morrison (San Diego)

Cleveland Force
Genoni Martinez (Monterrey)
Tamas Wiesz (San Diego)
Mathius Johnson (San Diego)
Suad Arnautovic (San Diego)
Rodrigo Oliva (Monterrey)
Alejandro Cardenas (Monterrey)
Ali Ngon (San Diego)
Chris McDonald (San Diego)
Adam Braz (San Diego)
Joe Mattachione (San Diego)
Adriano Lima (San Diego)
Guillermo Lucero (San Diego)

Saint Louis Steamers
Mariano Bollella (San Diego)
Sean Bowers (San Diego)
Marco Lopez (Monterrey)
Justin Neerhoff (San Diego)
Renaldo Candido Pereira (Monterrey)
Riley Swift (San Diego)
Kevin Quigley (San Diego)

Kansas City Comets
Armando Valdivia (Monterrey)
Ryan Mack (San Diego)
Victor Quiroz (Monterrey)
Oswalda Medina (Monterrey)
Marco Coria (Monterrey)
Ricardo Gil (Monterrey)
Marin Hernandez (Monterrey)
Rich Cullen (San Diego)
Walter Gomez (Monterrey)
Francisco Portocarrero (Monterrey)
Aurelio Portes (Monterrey)

Philadelphia KiXX
Dan Antoniuk (San Diego)
Steve Butcher (San Diego)
Herculez Gomez (San Diego)
Oswalda Medina (Monterrey)
Alan Gordon (San Diego)
McKinley Tennyson (San Diego)

Baltimore Blast
Nevio Pizzolitto (San Diego)
Mauricio Alegre (San Diego)
Victor Nogueira (San Diego)
Alejandro Moreno (Monterrey)
Brad Flanagan (San Diego)

Milwaukee Wave
Richardinho (Monterrey)
Hewerton Moreira (San Diego)
Braeden Cloutier (San Diego)
Martin Nash (San Diego)
Corey Woolfolk (San Diego)
Vitalis Takawira (San Diego)
Fadi Afash (San Diego)
John Menyongar (San Diego)
Octavio Montera (Monterrey)
Ian Fuller (San Diego)
Anthony Farace (San Diego)

The ultimate result leaves professional indoor soccer in North America at its lowest point since the summer of 1988, when the old MISL shrunk from eleven to seven teams, and the American Indoor Soccer Association, the current MISL, had only five sides. If you include the four American Indoor Soccer League teams (Massachusetts, Detroit | Windsor, Cincinnati, and New Mexico), the total is eleven.

This has pierced the mental coil of quite a few indoor soccer fans. They are openly voicing if these failures might be the premonition that indoor soccer's time will soon end. A neutral observer's vista might find this to be the case.

There are scores of other entertainment options competing for the time and money of people who could be enticed to buy a ticket to an indoor soccer game. These other entertainments have much deeper pockets, which they can afford to waste on insipid productions. The backwash of this is the amount of money they spend publicizing their releases. It takes only one mega-money maker to offset the losses of nine others. The higher amounts they spend effectively bar the door for indoor soccer teams to market themselves without going deeply into debt.

When even a completely vapid motion picture can drop $250,000 on advertisements for its opening weekend, how can indoor soccer effectively market itself over a seven-month season with the same amount of money?

You may not have asked for this, but it is time I give it to you. Indoor soccer needs a different mindset. It currently has only one Ace in its hand: the labor situation in the National Hockey League. When and if this is settled, despite what that league's bigwigs have been and continue to utter, there will be teams ceasing operation. Indoor soccer needs to be in a position where it can be the substituted arena tenant for the defunct ice hockey team.

The League's teams need to redirect their marketing away from families. Families do not want to bring their children to an event in which they do not know how it will end. They want happy, happy endings, and nothing that might cause horrendous nightmares for little Buffy.

Sports entertainment, by its very nature, cannot provide this. Not unless it is willing to script out the games - including the outcomes.

Conversely, the target audience that the League really wants to attend the games is uninterested in attending an event that will potentially be overrun with children. Everyone in the front office in Westport should recall what they did and where they went when they were the age of the people they want to attract today. Did they want to hang out in the same places with young kids? No, of course not. That was uncool. I know many of them attended indoor soccer games. What did they experience that made them return to the arena the next time, and the time after that? It was not the type of experience they are currently impressing upon their member franchises.

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Major Indoor Soccer League 2 Stories from January 7, 2005


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