Harking back to my youth and marketing classes, I would say that MLS has likely failed to properly establish where it fits on the goold old niche map. Where the NBA and NHL (in most cities) are considered premier product with premium prices, MLB an average product with average prices (partually due to the lack of scarcity for the product), MLS comes in (to the naked eye) as a low quality product with higher than average prices and that's the crux of the problem. In order to eliminate this problem, I believe MLS has to either adjust its admittance prices, i.e., remain a low quality entertainment at affordable prices, a true minor league; or, improve its product quality to justify its admission prices and TV broadcasts. The former would do very little for the USMNT (though the top prospects would go to Europe) or the development of the soccer in the US and it historically resulted in the game stagnation with flat-line attendances and TV ratings (I will note improvement in sponsorships) and depends greatly on the kindness of strange politicians. The latter could result in a cash flow hemorrhage but will likely result in a greater paying attendance, TV ratings and sponsorships, to say nothing about the pure joy of having a quality soccer on the field. The last question is whether the positions on the niche grid justify the investment. Currently, it seems that the league is guaranteed to lose some money, even with the SSSs, but that losses won't be significant to its well-off owners. (assuming that there are no Bernie Ebberses among them) And so it remains to determine the revenue curve based upon the perceived improved quality. That is anyone's guess. Mine is that a $4M payroll is quite workable, provided that the coaching levels improve as well. $10M? Probably not.
Actually you have brought it up more often than that. Spare me the linguistic footsie. Your argument basically is that people whose teams are not successful have no legitimate complaints since they are simply jaded. In other words their criticisms should be discounted. What is quite convenienet is that you never say that people whose teams are successful and have glowing compliments with respect to the league should similarly have their criticisms discounted. It is only used when you want to dismiss the opinions of people who have critiques to make. Convenient no? How can I refute something when you will simply explain it away anyway by saying I am jaded. I don't see you leveling that charge at Burn fans If I agree with you I am not jaded if I don't I am. There is nothing I can say that you can't attempt to explain away with the "He is jaded because his team loses..." line. You have the perfect answer at you disposal. Good job. Your level of insecurity towards all things "Big City" is stagerring only matched by Superdave level of insecurity about all things "European" Does anyone really dispute that there is a much more sophisticated fanbase in places like LA Chicago and NYC than there exists in Rochester and Charleston? Is this your attempt ot score brownie points with people reading this thread? I thought we we having a serious discussion. If we are not just tell me so that I can save my time. This thread is all about discussing ways to bring in people who are not going out to games in this country. Seriously. Spare me the over-the-top-clutch-the-pearls righteous indignation. The only thing you are accomplishing is making american football fans look even more like oversensitive nerds than they really are.
Because someone is asserting that MLS does a lousy job of capturing the huge number of soccer fans in the US. Further, the poster is asserting that if MLS spends more on players, the increased revenue because of the joy of watching better players and better teams will make such expenditures profitable. On the other side, people are counterasserting that fans of other leagues are fans of those leagues for emotional or traditional ("I'm from there") reasons, and not nearly enough fans of those other leagues will peel off and follow MLS if MLS doubles salary expenditures in order to improve the product on the field. A comparison of pro and college football speaks fairly directly to this argument.
Your argument works to whatever extent there exists such an animal as a "general soccer fan." It also works to whatever extent current and potential MLS consumers can tell the difference between MLS now and MLS +. My view is that such a consumer notices when DC replaces Nelsen with Boswell, over the course of a few games. He notices when Brian West is replaced with...Chris Wingert?..., over the course of a few games. I'll buy that there's an impact. I won't buy that adding $2M in payroll per team will cause enough of those fans to spend more on MLS, that they'll notice $2M/team of revenue in quality. If MLS did what it takes to stop driving out the middle aged, middle class player, I think THAT would be bang-for-the-buck good. Or at least neutral. Beyond that, I don't see it.
MLS should have a premium on US players (and probably does). IMHO, except for a few special cases, they are worth more to MLS for their marketing potential and skill than they are to foreign teams. We can't compete for the best world talent, there is no doubt about that. So, any foreigners we get are going to be viewed as second-rate. If we just concentrated on keeping every last US player here instead, we could gain lots of respectability that way.
I would differ and lump MLB mainly in the same category as the two listed. Why? Well, the average ticket price, last I checked, is slightly higher than MLS, but only slightly, so that's not the key. The key for me is MLS competes with itself by having 81 home games. The game on Saturday night competes with the game on Sunday afternoon. Most fans who go to one don't go to the other. Full season MLB tickets are obviously much more expensive than MLS, and are relatively seldom bought, though as much due to the time as the money. That leaves not many good examples of the 'niche sport' (not major league, not really minor league) we're talking about. One could be the Arena Football League. The Columbus Destroyers range in their prices from $11 to $30. The Colorado Crush from $7 to $50. The Chicago Rush are $8 to $50. Columbus Crew tickets are $10 to $40. This is a league that in one sense is a 'minor league' (the best players move on to the NFL) and in one sense is the niche sport we're talking about (they're looking for similar attendances and revenues, at least within an order of magnitude). And somehow that league works. Is it based on quality of play? Is it based on price, which seems not fundamentally different to MLS's price structure (though you could argue that the cheapest seats are continually cheaper, and that MLS might learn from that--for instance, no one ever seems to sit in the corner seats in Columbus. Perhaps the Crew should make those seats in the cheapest in the house, or at least no more expensive than the end lines, as they are now.) I would argue, instead, that the obstacle to MLS is not price, or quality of play, but 'malign neglect'--the majority of people in most MLS cities don't know about MLS, and don't really want to know about MLS. They don't spend a lot of time hating soccer, but they're happy not to think about it much-- -- or not about MLS much. A note here is that some of the malign neglecters could be soccer fans, but soccer fans that care only about certain types of soccer. The key to remember is the rough principle is the same: you can't say that they, as a group, want to be converted to MLS. Some of them may have been lining up at the ticket stands individually. But some of them don't: some of them only care for the soccer of their home country or the club they grew up with. Some of them will tell you it's a standard of play issue, but what they really want is the spectacle of the San Siro or the Nou Camp. Some of them will tell you that, but never give MLS a shot at showing itself to be modest but decent entertainment. It doesn't really matter. If they aren't specifically open to MLS (if they never address it, they're a malign neglecter), it's difficult to impossible to force the issue. The only cure in reducing the proportion of malign neglect, it seems to me, is time. Max Planck once said you don't convert the people to your ideas, you convert the younger generation, and wait for the older generation to die. In that context, I actually think MLS has made some mildly suprising progress in 10 years, but that's only because not much could have been expected. The goal in the interim is to assure the league will be around long enough to kick in. That involves getting to the breakeven point, because if you get there, then it doesn't matter whether the league needs 10, 20, or 50 more years, because you can wait. (The NHL still had 6 teams about 50 years after its founding). To do that, you'll need to group to gether as many of the fans who might attend a niche league, but you do that at the lowest cost. If you get losses to zero, you win. And it seems these plausible MLS fans are not sensitive primarily to price (with a major exception possibly being those of Chivas USA, for whom not all the evidence is in as of yet). KC did not pick up that many fans when they lowered their ticket price to $5 for the playoffs. The Galaxy has not lost many jacking up their prices. Instead, I think the 'quality of the product' is key. However, the quality of the product, which must have improved a great deal in LA for the Galaxy to get away with such higher prices (and in Columbus, where, charging moderately higher prices, the Crew attracted more fans), can't be primarily the quality of play--the quality of play didn't rise that much. (Rommul has argued it fell since 2001, and certainly teams showed less tendency towards attractive, attacking play.) The dollar impact of both of those venue moves was large, at least $1.5M per year in increased ticket revenue in both cases (before you start figuring the reduced costs). It seems these teams have indeed won this game. The Crew have wiped their losses out (and Hunt in all likelihood makes money on the venue), and the Galaxy actually make some small change. Now, it remains to be seen whether the pattern will be repeated in Dallas and Chicago. If it is, the evidence at that point would be pretty conclusive that MLS has at least found a model that works. I'm not actually convinced you're wrong about that, though there are complications (are we still going to base the league primarily on American players? We can't make them better by simply throwing money at them, and though there are maybe a half a dozen US guys who would be in this league for double the current pay-scale that aren't now, and while you can surely get some better foreigners for that dough, in money cases you'd be throwing more money at the same guys). But the bigger point is, we're playing with other people's money, and several of us (not to accuse you per se, since you've been more flexible in your thinking than many who've taken this tack) are doing it pretty frivolously, and pretty certain the league has done something 'wrong.' I object to that methodology prima facie--if the league was seriously going to move to a higher pay-scale, there should be not only flaws with how they're doing things now (since, for the first time, those flaws no longer look eventually fatal), but a good solid reason in favor of the specific move they'd like to make.
You must have me confused with quite a number of other people who believe it. I have arrived at the conclusion quite slowly, only after extended and repeated subjection to your diatribes caused me to look around to see who it was that was agreeing with you. You load your own arguments with normative terminology and then object when people do it to you. My argument is that it is difficult to tell the difference between quality, which is absolute but abstract, and performance, which is obvious but relative and contextual. And that this cuts both ways, as I was perfectly willing to acknowledge in my last post. Winning championships can mask problems just as losing can create them where they don't exist. Besides, I spent years living in Texas, rooting only for Dallas. And it isn't like DC United wasn't bad when I got here--they were quite bad, actually. They just haven't been as consistently bad, or made as many obvious screwups, and the tickets don't cost as much. That point is not worth making, because if it were true, it could never disprove my central point. If we're both talking out of our asses, the default position (i.e. what the league is doing right now) wins, because in that case none of us would be equipped to comment on it. You've just driven yourself into a logical cul de sac. I recommend you turn around and look for a through street; I somehow doubt you will. Data would not be jaded--data are unemotional. NY is an unusual market in several ways, and having been a continuous loser is only the beginning of them. However, if you don't think losing records have ever hurt them, I'd suggest you haven't been paying attention. I live in Washington, DC. I consider that a big city, and I love it here. I was making a sarcastic argument because the tenor of yours fundamentally delegitimizes the opinions of three fourths of the country-- all the while insisting that there are 'millions' (or hundreds of thousands? Am I putting words in your mouth again? Trying to parse specifics from your opinion always seems to run that risk) of true sophisticates like yourself that would flock to the league if only the standard of play were the equal of --what? Actually you've been fairly conveniently vague on that point. [Rommul] Insulting people is a common way of not addressing their positions[/Rommul]
Strange. Only one Metro supporter (Crusio) seems to agree with me at all while at least two (Takk and OKcomputer) tend to take the other side of the argument when I start up. It always nice to have your own facts. You load your own arguments with normative terminology and then object when people do it to you. Uh no it is not. You don't need to be a objective to realise that teams like DC an Columbus despite their records last year were very poor football teams. You need to seperate your perceptions from everyone else. I think it would be better if you said that You have difficulty telling the difference between quality, which is absolute but abstract, and performance. That is clearly illustrated by the statement you made that Aleckos 10 goals in 2004 were CLEARLY better than Razovs 18 in 2000. Do not take your inability to recognise quality as a a state of that all people share. It is not difficult at all. Which doesn't mask the fact that under the circumstances you laid fans of winning teams are not credible enough to critique the league because they are not seeing things clearly enough. I don't see you telling Dallas Burn fans that they can't say nice things about MLS because they are not seeing things clearly enough. You don't question teh credibility of fabs of losing teams when they say things that you agree with. You only use that rationale when people are saying things you don't like. So please spare me the BS. It does not cut both ways. Last time I checked there is no numerical way to quantify quality. Curious that I never said anything like that.
Hmm I am going to take that as a shot at me. I have been clear about what I think needs to be done and all of what I advocate involves several steps before any money is spent. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showpost.php?p=3633037&postcount=41 Nice potshot though. "Inflexibility"? Hehe
Illogical. I said all all A come from B (and I didn't even really say that--I pointed out a notable trend in that direction), and therefore you concluded I must believe that all who come from B are A. That does not follow.
How can two people out a population of at least several dozen be a trend (especially when there are at least the same number of people on the other side of the argument)? You are seeing what you want to see.
I say it's much more difficult. Razov's 18 goals versus Alecko's 10 are performance--they are contextual, having taken place in different years, on different teams, under different circumstances. On quality, I'd still take Alecko. You can call that bias, fine, but I'd take, for instance, Taylor Twellman over either of them. Of course, if it was bias, and I was looking at the world through balck-colored galsses, you'd essntially be affirming my point. We can go round and round on that forever. And do you wanna know why we can? Because it is--not--obvious. It's no surprise that people might regard it as obvious, but once they start talking to each other, they start debating about it, which proves that it isn't obvious even as they tell you it is. The rest of what you have to say on that topic is a distraction to the points that were discussed.
The problem with that post is that it was not written to answer the question being discussed. As to the whole "is $2.1 Milion enough to comepte?" the answer is quite vague, but it seems like the answer is "yes." Which puts us at a disagreement because suprisingly enough I say, "no."
You picked one paragraph out of my post, isolated it from the point it was trying to make, and went full bore. Up until that point, I was trying to probe an interesting question. After that point, it's been a borderline flame-war. Debates with you, whether I'm your counterpart or someone else, are routinely the least productive exercises on this board. That's because you're more interested in 'telling people what they don't want to hear' than investigation. I call that inflexibility.
It speaks directly to the point you were trying to make that "other" people were being frivoulous with other peoples money. It is clear that I advocate a lot of steps before any money is spent. I am sorry that those facts are inconvenient for you but alas you are still wrong.