Everyone hates a buzz kill, so let me apologize straight away.
Since women’s soccer and women’s professional leagues are topical, there’s something that needs to elbow its way into this conversation straight away, something that always gets left behind as the debate motors right into more provocative and polarizing stuff:
That starting a league in this country is damn near impossible.
When we start talking about soccer leagues, the prospects of success or failure almost always becomes a referendum on whether Americans like soccer. But that’s not where the conversation needs to start. It needs to start here:
Most professional sports leagues that didn’t start more than 50 years ago are doomed the day they open a front office. In this way, it has nothing to do with a sport’s popularity.
(MORE: A breakthrough moment for women’s soccer that wasn’t much of a breakthrough)
Even pro sports with well-established domestic roots struggle mightily to find their way in a league upstart. As I’ve written before, the graveyard of busted and bankrupt leagues are littered with corpses from American football – and I think we can all agree that football is a popular sport here.
XFL, r.i.p. Same for you, U.S.F.L. (Ask your father. Or his father.)
We keep hearing about some rich guys starting another pro football league to compete with N.F.L. – but presumably those guys went back on their meds and ditched such a cockamamie notion.
Properties with no recognition, with zero history from which to draw, without any brand equity are massive money pits. They are mostly failures waiting to happen. (All of this is why Major League Soccer, even though it continues to lose money, is a pretty amazing success story. This is MLS season No. 17.)
Think of it like this: so many of expenses of an upstart league are the same as with a recognized one, although on a much smaller scale. (Player salaries, front office salaries, stadium costs, event expenses, marketing budgets, travel, etc.) But the income disparity in receivables is outrageous, mostly because there’s so much less TV money (or none at all) coming into a freshly dug league.
So, any conversation about whether a U.S. women’s professional soccer league needs to begin there, with the no-BS recognition that it’s a long, brutal, uphill slog, no matter which sport we’re talking about.
-
- mrtuktoyaktuk - Aug 13, 2012 at 10:34 AM
-
It took FIFA’s political clout, many bags of $$$ from the WC94 and a trio of extremely deep pocket sports moguls to get MLS launched. 15 years of operating losses followed. Only when the Soccer United Marketing money is added to the mix does the business model even make sense to the ownership groups.
The women’s leagues have none of those things to stake a launch (WUSA did have WC money but not the other things, WPS, basically only good intentions in the bank account). If USSF and MLS really wants to build a foundation for a pro women’s league, fold them into the SUM gravy train. Make USSF and MLS have some skin the game even if they are directly launching/owning teams.
-
- mrtuktoyaktuk - Aug 13, 2012 at 10:36 AM
-
should read *aren’t* directly launching/owning teams.
-
- zekethebulldog - Aug 13, 2012 at 11:44 AM
-
I think MLS needs to step up here. They have the facilities, the brand name and the fan base. The women’s teams should be put in cities where the MLS teams have the biggest draw. Have season run at the same time and have the women’s games played before the men’s, when possible. Do two for one deals. Start with six teams or so and go from there.
-
- footballer4ever - Aug 13, 2012 at 12:11 PM
-
Unlike the NBA, MLS can’t afford to piggy-ride a women’s league like the NBA does with the WNBA. MLS is still trying to solidify and grow just to carry on a burden which will ruin both leagues in the end. We, MLS, just can’t afford that risk.
-
- gatordontplay - Aug 13, 2012 at 12:29 PM
-
Let’s be honest here soccer is like every other olympic sport.. If they’re not supporting a jersey that says USA they don’t care.. It wont work end of story
-
- Steve Davis - Aug 13, 2012 at 2:18 PM
-
Uh, except that it is working. Just fine. MLS … yeah? (Or did you mean to say “women’s soccer?”)
-
- signguydino - Aug 13, 2012 at 1:33 PM
-
Except that UFC is basically a new sport and makes more profits than all MLS teams combined, and has a TV contract many times greater than Mediocre League Soccer. Not to mention far higher ratings. And they were next to dead 11 years ago. They learned to adapt. But don’t upset the MLS-bots and the narrative that “the infrastructure is not there yet” for promotion and relegation in American soccer.
-
- boohowdy - Aug 20, 2012 at 2:22 PM
-
UFC isn’t new. It’s been going on for decades. It just got popular recently.
