Um, because they're irrelevant to the premise of your argument. Cuz you're a **********. Oh, it's not the advent of broadbanding, it's the popularity. That's why there's more football on TV now. Wow. Your line of argument is even stupider than I thought. You're amazing. Really. As soon as you lay off the ill-conceived posts.
Stopping rommul and his ilk in their tracks is...college football. Alabama has had minor league teams, and they could never draw what Bama and Auburn draw. There are several college teams which draw more per game than any NFL team. Yet, those college teams play inferior football. It's almost as if passion and attachment to a team is more important than quality!! QED.
And if 'Bama goes 3-7 for a few years, how many of its fans would remain? In any case, 'Bama plays decent enough college football, which is a sport of its own. The NFL is another animal entirely ... or do we forget the "Ain'ts"?
But, see, the argument on the table isn't wins and losses, it's relative quality. The Crew of last year couldn't beat Blackburn of last year, so that's why MLS isn't bigger. You're making my point for me. Rommul is asserting that something is a huge factor, when all evidence points to it being a tiny factor. And to build up that tiny factor, he wants the league to spend far more than they'll get back. And if you don't like Bama, look at South Carolina's football history, and its attendance. I didn't use them because I wanted to use a college team that had a USFL and/or WFL team nearby. PS...that A'ints, too, make my point. They sucked, yet could have named the score against any college team in the nation. They were, to use a word, "better." Did they destroy LSU attendance? No. Are Louisiana football fans retarded, that they can't tell that even the 1 win Saint teams were vastly better than LSU? No, they know that. But they don't care. They've built up a loyalty to LSU, and LSU wins more often. The bottom line is, Rommul is a fascinating combination of extreme stubbornness and extreme wrongheadedness. He's like a dog fanatically guarding a pile of grass. Um, go ahead Fido, eat the grass.
I would also like to suggest that MLS players are undervalued. Just because the typical MLS roster only makes 10 percent of what the typical Mexican team roster makes does not mean the Mexie team is ten times better. By the same token, if you put the entire DC roster on teams in Europe, they would automatically make more money - doesn't mean they just got a lot better though. The truth is that MLS underpays its players while the MFL probably overpays them. We're still way behind Mexico in terms of league quality, but raising the salary cap by as much as it would take to bridge the gap would cause way more harm than good.
OK, I'm hardly the world's expert on college football, but just maybe the fact that they have bigger stadiums might have something to do with it. If NFL teams had 150,000 seat stadiums, how many wouldn't be full? what'll help in time is when you have generations of supporters, with fathers taking their kids etc. Tradition is a huge thing in any sport. Athough there's a correlation between the size of a club's catchment area and their support in England, there are clubs that buck the trend because they have a strong football tradition.
I think that's true, Matt. But to get back to the original point, yes, I think $2.1 Million is not really enough to compete against international competition. Let's say for the sake of argument DCU's team last year was underpaid and could have competed in CCC play. If that were true, it didn't translate to this season partially because DCU lost the most underpaid player they had. And that's going to begin to be more common. Bigger clubs are spending more and more time and money scouting MLS for bargains, just the way we do in Central America and the Caribbean. Now that guys like Beasley and Nelsen have proven themselves in bigger leagues abroad, it may not be real long before the comb gets finer and finer toothed. If American youth development gets to the point where our players arrive at MLS more skilled than now, MLS can still improve. But there is a limit to how far that can go if teams are siphoning off players constantly. (Though the theoretical limit would be the Campeonato Brasiliero, which is a pretty damn fine league, that would require millions of kids honing utterly outrageous skills on the sandy beaches of Southern California, which 199 other countries have tried and failed to produce). And voros's 'sliding salary scale' has a certain appeal. I would argue it's only in MLS's single entity, or something substantially like it, that you can a) assure it's a sliding scale and not a cliff, and b) assure it's awarded on performance rather than market size. (And if it were on market size, the system would never work, because there'd always be an incentive to move. In the US, unlike England, there's always a reasonably sized city with not much competition to move into, if you think you have a better shot at financial competition. And making a rule against moving doesn't really work, either, because historically it has been an open invitation for rebel leagues to come in and compete with you. Besides, do we want to give the MetroStars even more money to waste?) That said, there's a more legit debate about the morality of that move than voros has acknowledged. I would argue it would be a lot like taking the guy who won the last 50-yard dash and giving him a 5-yard head start this time around. They're supposed to be different races. Does the head start 'reward success?' Yeah, as long as you did it right. Is it really sporting though? I'm not so sure. I also have rather consistently come down on the side of people like sidefoot on the issue of how much is to be gained by a more general raising of salaries. A lot of people talk about the league's quality, sure that they can parse out the difference between performance, which is obvious but relative, and quality, which is absolute but very abstract. My belief is that if the New York club had won four championships in nine years, they'd be averaging 25,000 fans a game, and we wouldn't be hearing much of this. It seems a lot of the voices sharply critiquing MLS's 'quality of play' come from there, while voices from the general vicinity of the District of Columbia are strangely apologetic about MLS's quality. Maybe the simpler explanation is that people from both towns just like winning and don't like losing.
The tickets are a bit cheaper in college, and there are fewer games. Those are factors, but this isn't I'll argue, because the Falcons, Bengals, Bucs, etc for years had trouble filling their smaller satadiums. The Dolphins do now. In general, I'd say college attendance > NFL. Where the NFL blows the doors off is on TV.
2003 season http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/standings/2003/sec/ Bama 4-9 That's one of the more ignorant statements I've seen in a while. 2000 season http://www.infoplease.com/ipsa/A0880418.html Bama 3-8 1997 http://www.infoplease.com/ipsa/A0301758.html Bama 4-7 average attendance http://www.kenn.com/sports/football/ncaa/index.html 98 82,670 99 83,223 00 83,770 01 82,312 02 82,857 03 83,189 04 81,870 Their attendance has almost nothing to do with their record. If you really believe that after a few losing years they'd lose much attendance, you don't know much about big time college football.
How so? I think Rommul's point is more valid here. Just because Blackburn - or Barcelona, Chelsea and CSKA, for that matter - play better soccer than DCU, UNAM Pumas or Nagoya Grampus doesn't mean that they have a tremendously adverse role in the paid attendance for DCU, Pumas and Grampus. I think the same applies when one goes to see AC/DC or Metallica for $100 at a stadium and then ventures to a local bar where a few no-name bands play for $5 cover. No one expects your neighborhood bar to offer the same sort of entertainment as you see from the legendary performers. Still, the entertainment factor has to be there. If you think that you can sing a Troggs cover better than the band you are paying to see, then you are not likely to visit the same bar again. The key here is the perceived value of an individual event and, in the case of MLS, the perceived value of many soccer fans is that they're watching something less entertaining than a pick-up game in the park. Not only that, they see these supposedly major league players play a clueless hoof-it-up style coached by clueless safe-pass coaches. A while ago on the YA boards, an erstwhile PSL player Ryan Coiner commented on his hapless FC Union Berlin team as "these players don't even know how to build passing triangles". Knowing how to do that is considered a minimal acceptable standard for the bottom dwellers in Regionalliga, Germany's 3rd Division, and yet this general team skill is virtually absent from MLS. Presumably then, every European pro worth $100K is capable of performing this skill adequately, whatever else his failures might be. And when a fan sees that, he turns his TV set off. And this becomes no different from the old Ain'ts who couldn't tackle, run, pass and block and slumped to a humiliating 1-15 record. The perception of their failures was inability to perform the same deeds as their NFL competition. No one was comparing that year's Saints with the 1962 Packers or 1978 Steelers. The shame was being failures in its own mileiu, something that MLS seems to be repeating without acknowledgement.
sidefooter, I gotta say, I have no idea what you were trying to say there. In the NFL? Most wouldn't be full. My out-my-ass guess is that even at 100K, at least half the teams couldn't sell out.
That's because they did not have a string of losing records as the team was 10:2 under DuBose (Sean Alexander team) in 1998. Second of all, I have seen enough college and pro football to know that team's success on the field or lack thereof has a tremendous effect on attendance. Even in Green Bay, where every seat is sold years ahead, suffered during the lean Bart Starr/Forrest Gregg years. But thanks for listing the official numbers. I am sure they can't possibly be wrong.
so no facts are ever believable so you can't ever be wrong, sure. Some college football programs like Bama, Michigan, Ohio State, etc are so strong that they could survive several years of losing without losing much attendance. A decade or 2 of losing then maybe not, but it's not like Alabama parents are going to send their kids to Alabama A&M or Birmingham Southern (or even UAB) over Bama/Auburn just cause the team loses for a few years. It's not like there's a million other things to spend sports ticket money on. If you don't grasp that a few losing season wouldn't much harm the big, traditional powerhouses, then I have a hard time believing you've "seen enough" college football.
Right, it takes a long time to erase the tradition the colleges have devloped over decades. And alums don't suddenly become alums of other schools. But I don't know why we're talking so much about college football, which is not a very relevant comparison. It's a bit of a distraction, for my money.
I think we can all agree that at some level the better product is worth more money. The problem I have is that if you leave it here, it's an airy proposition with no practical value (and it's always accompanied by a relatively snarky comment about how horrible the league has managed it so far and how obvious it is that they could eb doing better). This camp never wants to hazard a guesstimate on numbers, but numbers are the crucial issue. How many people are out there who need something better than the league can provide, and what is their cutoff point? And I still say that the difference between quality and performance is obscured in most fans' eyes. Just look at the attendances in Rochester! Does anyone seriously believe their attendance would go up if they went up to MLS level, charged a bit more for tickets, and, with basically the same team, sucked it on the field? This is where sports are different than music concerts. In sports, winning salves a lot of wounds, and losing opens them up.
I never said it haa to be as good as Mexico. Yes it is a threshold argument. But what will the quality be of the resulting wheat? It might be too early to make a judgement but this league seems to be little more than a season long trial.
There is so much class exhibited in this post that I think it neede to be repeated. No responses are necessary to people with this type of disposition.
You never get tired of saying that do you? Thats a fairly effective way of dismissing peoples arguments. Nice.
You must spread it around before giving to Stan Collins again (for your entire sequence here...well done)
The problem with that argument is we are not talking about places like Rochester. The audience in Rochester is very much like the crowds that come to MLS now in places like Columbus. We are talking about places like NYC Chicago and LA that tend to have a much more sophisticated fanbase than places like Rochester. We are talking about what will attract more of the people who have come to MLS games didn't like what they see and chose not to come back. At least I thought I was.
Rommul would like it to be known for the record that he doesn't beat the same drum with every post. Actually, this is about the third time I've brought this up. Thank you, but "that's a fairly effective way of dismissing people's arguments," is a somewhat less effective way of dismissing other people's arguments, because you're calling attention to the whole issue. My argument is not simply about scoring a point on the MetroStars--in the immortal words of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, that would be like pooping on poop--my point is that winning salves wounds and that losing opens them up, that a 3-nil scoreline at the same level of play looks one sweet helluvalot better when you're the one on the 3 end, a point which you would have to address to refute. Ah, yes, I see. Those country rubes are irrelevant to your point! As, one supposes, are the vast, unwashed masses that constitute America between those three oases of culture (and of course we should exempt our nation's capital therefrom), though they might consitute two thirds (and bound to rise) of the league's teams. Mind your betters, they know what's good for you!
Well, let me be more direct here. MLS, as a product, has an intrinsic value and a relative one. Intrinsic is determined by the quality of entertainment - loosely taken as a soccer game - that one derives from being in the stadium or watching the game on TV. Relative is judged by the quality of what MLS calls entertainment compared to other soccer games, other live performances, other TV programs, etc. Once a consumer determines the value of a product, he then ranks it visavis his other choices. If MLS falls into a "$50 for the night'o'fun" category, then it has to compete against other entertainment outlets for the same entertainment buck and I would speculate that it doesn't do very well there based on people's subjective set of preferences. Even on those who are general soccer fans. PS. As to 'Bama paying customers, Swedcrip, this doesn't tell of the "no-shows" or the "leave-earlies". MLS and other sports fudge ticket/attendance numbers too. If a game or a season is a near sell-out, then the "fudge factor" is relatively small. If a season is uncharacteristically low compared to other seasons, then it can get much more statistically significant compared to the base numbers.
Well, sidefoot, I'm down with all of that. (Except the college football part. I went to Texas A&M right smack in the middle of the longest period of extended mediocrity in the team's recent history, and what happened to attendance? Well, they had to expand the stadium--by like 20,000. Why? Well, because TAMU hasn't actually been a mega-college for all that long a time, and the number of wealthy alums is growing at a geometrical rate. They built the Shake Hands With God seats in 'The Zone' because they needed a new place for the actual students to sit.) But it skips the crucial points of how many and at what cost. At this rate, we're arguing article-of-faith propositions, and I'd like to point out my article of faith is cheaper than yours.