Nah, I respectfully disagree and think it's the other side that's splitting hairs to win the argument on this one. The point is how many people thought women's tennis was a waste of time 30 or 40 years ago. How many people said no one would ever bother watching it. Maybe we'll find out there's this crucial distinction between individual women's sports vs team sports but at this point I think it's fair to challenge everyone's crystal ball on the matter. Who thought the World Cup would get those kind of ratings again? Weren't we told it was a one-time thing, a perfect storm of interest in 1999?
Regarding women's tennis, it always has been able to challenge men's tennis for popularity, and vice versa. This is true notwithstanding that women's and men's tennis are quite different in some respects. And, it was true during the very brief period in which the men were paid more than the women. The tennis fan community, as a whole, never has expected them to be identical. Each is attractive, in its own right, as a sport. Notwithstanding that tennis is an individual sport, I think there's a lesson there. Women's soccer needs to be appreciated in its own right as a sport. It's not the same as men's soccer. In that sense, the continuing comparisons of women's players and teams to men's players and teams seem to me inappropriate. In 60 years of playing and watching tennis, I don't think I've ever heard anyone criticize a female tennis player by comparing her to a male tennis player as a basis for demonstrating her shortcomings. It just doesn't happen, and people who know tennis would know such comparisons don't make sense. Women's soccer needs to be marketed as its own sport. And, I believe it needs to find its own audience, which might in part be the MLS audience but almost certainly won't be the NFL or MLB audience. This was the point of the Nike marketers in the seminar in which they discussed how to market women's soccer, and those are people who actually know something about marketing.
Spot on here - although during the early stages of women's tennis, there definitely WAS a period where the women's game was compared to the men's (to its detriment) - the culmination of the Bobby Riggs/Billy Jean King showdown was getting women's tennis past that. I don't know how women's soccer is going to engineer that moment (or if it can, or needs to). As for Lloyd any new pro sports league is going to lose money for years (how many $100's of millions did MLS lose before getting to break even - assuming they are now at that point - wasn't the league about to fold rather than deal with a labor dispute?). So far the number of D1 pro leagues that have survived in the US is 1 out of many - men's or women's - I'm glad AEG decided to invest in and then stick with MLS in the face of mounting losses and investor flight. WPS is going to need a similar level of commitment from a small number of owners. It'd be nice if SocFed would work to help them rather than hurt them. It'd be nice if soccer fans in general were supportive. It'd be nice if the media/blogsphere gave support/credit (actually it has to a great extent) to the guys who've already shown quite a bit of staying power in WPS. It'd be nice if the "train wreck" attention can be converted into actual fans. Certainly another Olympic Gold medal run would help (gosh I hope all the DB/WPS stuff doesn't blow up this team). None of that is essential - it just speeds or slows what is increasingly looking like an inevitable process. Evidently Lloyd isn't investing and Peter wants to buy in on the cheap . . . of course, it's not their dough anyway . . .
It was a 'perfect storm of interest' in 1999. Last year? Interest went through the roof, true, but there's no way it had the impact that '99 did.
Marta can be, I think she is more exiting than any player in MLS, her style and relative skill. But Obviously I am in the minority thinking that.
I don't think there was ever that much friction between DC United and the Freedom. There were doubleheaders throughout the WUSA era. In the WPS era, the president of DC United was one of the speakers at the Freedom's kickoff press conference, and the Freedom piggybacked off of DCU's ticketing system for at least the first season.
I was thinking back to the early WUSA days, but I am happy to know my impressions were incorrect. Thank you.
Perhaps not, but if you really don't care about the women's game even with a lot of the world's best players on the field in a challenging game, there's only so much the Freedom could do to bring you in. In the WUSA days, I think there was some underlying tension. Disappeared later. The Freedom actually played a doubleheader at RFK when they were still a W-League team, and they set up a table out by the tailgate. I didn't detect any problems in the WPS days. Could be wrong, though. So then, not MLS? Or many Major League Baseball teams? Their value may increase, but they lose money. Or Barcelona?
That's not what I was suggesting at all. There simply has to be more to it than seeing a player or two for it to be meaningful over the long haul. Curiosity isn't enough. The national team is easy to care about because we have a built in connection. What's the connection with a WPS team? That's the problem that needs to be solved to get fans instead of customers. To me, this isn't about the sport of soccer alone, it's selling a women's team sport. That hasn't been successful yet. I think we can care about the players, but you need to care about the team above all else.
Do you really believe MLB and NFL's Hollywood accounting? I don't, especially with the Marlins just down the road. Barca was founded in 1899, I suspect they have made money and gained a little value over their existence. With single entity, has not the league as a whole made money and increased in value in MLS? Hard to judge by teams when the league doesn't. And remember,this discussion began with talking about league viability independent of owners willing to operate at a long term loss.
They played two doubleheaders at RFK during the long hiatus. In 2004, when still just a barnstorming team, they played a women's team from Nottingham Forest, England*, before DCU played the men's team. In 2008 they played a fellow W-League team, the Richmond Kickers, after DCU played the Earthquakes. *The Freedom were short several players because the national teamers were in camp, and the internationals had gone home. They filled in the roster with local teenagers, one of whom scored a hat trick in that match. I resolved to remember that teenager's name since I figured I'd hear it many times again. The name? Ali Krieger.
Interesting question. I think I'd be rich if I knew the answer. One of the famous comments about MLS, which I believe was made by either Jeff Bradley or Filip Bondy, was an observation of the crowd at a 1996 United-MetroStars game, marveling that people cared so much about teams that existed only on paper a few months earlier. How did that happen? I can't believe marketing or the game-day atmosphere would account for that. The great aspects of the atmosphere were entirely fan-driven. Why were they willing to make that happen? Sure, but it's just a little too glib to say something's viable if it's on an upswing. I have no idea whether PDL teams or D3 teams would meet your criteria, but PDL is adding teams all the time, and some D3 teams are well-entrenched. A lot of European teams are viable because they have creative partnerships with sponsors and men's clubs. It just works.
I think to make them work we need a Title IX for women's professional sports teams. If Miami gives 200 Mil toward Marlins Stadium, they have to build one for MagicJack, too. Yes, it is a joke, but perhaps it's telling that college women's sports are not very self supporting either, but exist largely by operation of law.
It was a pretty good joke. It's the followup that's more suspect. Something like 95% of college men's sports are not self supporting either - we should keep that in perspective, shouldn't we?
College sports exist primarily to enhance student life and school status. Check out how many Division I-AA football teams make money. I think I'd rather invest in a WPS team. But if we're passing laws like that for stadiums, can we pass one that says D.C. should give $20 million toward infrastructure around a D.C. United stadium since it already gave $600 million-plus for the Nationals park?
True enough. But look, I like women's soccer, but I still think we are shortsighted in discussing WPS's viability if we ignore: 1 It's soccer. 2 It's a women's sport. 3 It's a women's team sport. 4 It's not a National Team competition.
Oh crap -- I thought we were talking about Olympic modern pentathlon. My bad. Margaux Isaksen deserves a pro salary! OK, I'm teasing but still ... implicit in a discussion of how we can make women's pro (or semipro) soccer work is the possibility that we can't. I don't think anyone's overlooking that. But it's tough to be definitive. The question in a sense is how many pro women's soccer players the USA can support. From what we've seen, 28 or so doesn't seem to be a problem. How about 50? Or 120? And intertwined with that is the question of how much U.S. Soccer and other authorities want to help out. We've seen an explosion in elite-level youth soccer in the last five years. Money to support that is coming from a variety of sources. Can or should any of it be redirected to the top of that pyramid? Having a pro league and building a strong national team are mutually supportive goals in most respects, so who pays for what? So the issues are far more complicated than just "whether pro women's soccer is viable."
Eventually you just get down to misogyny (Beau hates this word, but what else do you call a guy who dances around all kinds of arguments and eventually is reduced to whipping out the list above? anti-feminist? sexism? I don't really care and would like a less loaded word, but you gotta call it what it is). Not to mention if more folks thought like this we wouldn't have to worry about this because no one would've sailed the Atlantic over here in the first place.
Bold mine. Beau's answer is the best. But the question is true of men's sports as well as women's. The answer may seem self-evident, or not worth asking, if you only look at the major sports, the ones that have made it, but if you look at all the other fledgling sports they face the same problem. I don't even know everything that's out there: I think there's a pro lacrosse league? Then there's indoor soccer, arena football, beach volleyball, X-games, team tennis... It isn't just women's sports that face these extremely ponderous philosophical questions with no comforting answers ready at hand. We know that a women's team league hasn't succeeded yet so we know the odds against one are long, but the philosophical doom-and-gloom is a bit much. How many of these other sports have created celebrities like Abby Wambach, Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, and even Megan Rapinoe where a noticeable number of people then were interested in seeing them play live?
As a male, I am a huge women's soccer fan. I have also played this game all my life and still do, in college and now in the "old men's leagues". I first started watching women's soccer when my dad was a referee and told me about women's games he refs and how the soccer is very good. I took his advice and started watching women's soccer. Then I started going to Notre Dame women's games in the mid-nineties. I also started watching North Carolina women's games around that time on my way to Myrtle Beach to play golf. I was a Debbie Keller fan, who was from Chicago and she was playing for UNC at the time. I also started following the USWNT in the mid-nineties. Went to Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. And actually got addicted to where I was spending money flying all over the country to watch Mia, Julie, Brandi, etc. I did this for years. I have become a religious follower of women's soccer because first of all I love the game and I love it in all it's forms. I am a Chicago fire season ticket holder and I was also with the Red Stars. I can honestly say I had more fun at the Chicago Red stars games then at Fire games during the 2 years the Red stars were in the WPS. In the women's game I don't expect to see the same thing I see in the men's game. I don't compare it to the men's game. This is where I thing many fans fail, is they compare women's soccer to men's soccer. To me it's still soccer but in a different form. And as a soccer junkie, I love the game in ALL its forms. Wish more people were like me.
And it's tiresome. Everyone said "US Cup" wouldn't work - and it was so successful that SocFed had to take it away from Region I in order to kill it. '99 was supposed to be in small stadiums and lose money, remember? People said WUSA would never work (after the Fed killed off the NSA with sanctioning issues), then that it would never be replaced. Now WPS is having struggles that are inevitable for ANY new league . . . and it's all about the fact the athletes are women? Really? This is going to be a challenging journey, just like it is for MLS (which doesn't pass any of Lloyd's tests, as we know, except for the one about not being female), or the NBA, or MLB (which both had "league owned" franchises - i.e. teams that were worthless/couldn't be sold - recently/now). On the plus side, you can't buy into to those leagues for the under $2 million cost of a WPS team, and in WPS your employees are a lot more marketable in a lot of ways.