MLS teams must be allowed to spend more to attract better talent to rise and compete for the CCL. The Liga MX domination isn't a good look for this region. Teams that are able & willing to pay more should be able to do so them to build a roster having the depth to compete in both MLS and CCL. Vancouver (on record saying they will be a "budget team"), Montreal (Bologna in Serie A is Saputo's baby + losing money in MLS) are unlikely to follow that trend if it happens. Toronto FC can keep up thanks to MLSE getting all the cash from the Maples Leafs and Raptors. PS: you got your CPL facts all wrong
If you say so. I noticed that you dont point out what it is I got "all wrong". I'd be fascinated. But I wont hold my breath.
I see. You dont think calling me a liar is de railing the thread but explaining what you mean by that is way out of bounds?
Don't worry about it, it's obvious he doesn't know what he's talking about. He thinks Concacaf Champions League is a thing.
It got Montreal Impact on the map in Canada and without their run, they most likely wouldn't be in MLS. It has much space to improve upon in terms of relevancy and a non-Mexican team winning it would help significantly. Don't know if tripling the salary would change anything in regards to CCL, but "when that happens", I expect MLS making it a much bigger "thing/deal" out of it that you're willing to admit, hence my comment that tripling the budget would help. The league certainly cares about winning that trophy and it would be naive to say otherwise. Until then, hard to take it seriously when everyone knows that it's a slam dunk for Mexico.
It's hard to take CCL seriously when a team can make more money getting to Europa League group stage than CCL's total prize pool. Where is the incentive for a team to do more than show up? As far as Mexican teams go, it's an opportunity to beat a U.S. team. I doubt you'd need anything more than that. As for Montreal, out in the first knockout round was quite a run. The cynic in me thinks that the ability and desire to pay the expansion fee was what got them noticed, but who knows. I'd like to see the league raise the salaries because there would be more incentive for kids to play. I'd like to see the soccer become a Southeastern Conference sport because there would be more scholarships, and more incentives for kids to play. The more kids playing, the better the competition, and the better the player pool.
I don't think the average fan cares about that or are even aware of that. US clubs might not care but that doesn't mean the rest of the region doesn't. They seem to take it very seriously, US team or not. They don't make this about MLS, they just want to keep their clean sheet. No, it was the 2008 Champions League run. They were a USL team with a Canadian heavy roster that beat TFC to qualify then a Nicaragua club in the preliminary stage then got out of the group stage with Atlante edging Olimpia and A T&T club Lost to Santos Laguna by 1 goal on aggregate Attracted 55k fans to Olympic stadium That put them on the sport map in the city because not many cared about soccer before that run, it certainly wasn't the expansion process. You're saying that the current salaries aren't incentive enough for kids to aspire to play in MLS? First time I'm hearing that.
I remember that because it stood out so much from everything I'd ever seen. I think there might be reason to believe that this experience would not be the average one, first because those games were extra-exotic and a huge feather in the cap for a USL team. But more than that I suspect there's a cultural difference between Canada and the US, where Canada is used to the concept of leagues that are not the best, but still very professional and good (ie the CFL). The US still has this 'second place is first loser' mentality, at least comparatively. Analogously to that, I think the thinking amongst most of the US sports community outside MLS's core following about being the best team in CONCACAF would be 'so what?' On the one hand, as MLS has continued to grow since then without being 'the best,' this attitude may have modified, the 'answer' to this question about what CCL means might still legitimately be different in Canada than the US. That said, I suspect your prediction does hold some weight. MLS has already given us some hints that if MLS teams started winning the CCL, the league PR machine would make a big deal out of it. If this happened, you could expect the prize pot to follow. Most non-league tournaments suffer from a similar problem: it is good to win, but presuming you don't, the earlier you're eliminated, the better off you are. That is true even of the FA Cup, let alone the CCL. And what you tend to get from it is a) a wide variety in how individual clubs will treat it, based on their own internal concerns (squad depth that should see the field, a league match in 3 days, etc), and a tendency to economy-of-force the early round games, hoping you can slog through them to play the real Best XI if you get to the late rounds. For now, that's likely to be the way of the CCL, and it would change only when a quarter-final game is a reliable draw at the gate and on TV. That's why an R16 Champions League fixture is important; the prize money flows from that rather than the reverse. Oh, I hear it a lot, it's usually a complement to the Best Athlete Theory ("if only our best athletes played soccer," another thing you're more likely to hear in the US, because the presumption is we would somehow dominate the sport). Usually the reasoning for why our best athletes don't play is that the other sports make players filthy rich, and MLS doesn't. Me, I kind of doubt that 6 year olds exploring their sporting prowess are really homo economicus at this point. I suspect the fame matters more than the money. (I mean, young people want to be Instagram stars, despite usually having no idea whether those people make truly big money.)
I think the media in Canada and the clubs has done a much better job at explaining CCL and why it matters than US medias, who understandably, have so much more going on with NFL, MLB, NBA, even college sports. If the casual fan isn't giving the information and incentive to care about the competition, why should they care? In the US, the MLS Cup is the prize, in Canada, without downplaying the importance of the MLS Cup, CCL trophy is viewed as the top prize. Clubs have thrown away their MLS campaign for it while in the US, there's been instances of doing the opposite. The NHL was founded in 1917 in Montreal and to this day, remains the best league in the world with 7 Canadian teams accounting for close to 1/3 of the leagues revenues out of 31 teams. It was an all Canadian league before inviting US clubs with the Boston Bruins seven years later in 1924. Although the CFL was officially founded in 1958, it came from an earlier league founded in 1907. Those 2 sports have history and are at their core, Canadian. Despite the NFL, being bigger, hasn't deterred Canadians as viewing it as Canada's top league and a major league in it's own right. (Higher viewership and attendance than MLS with only 1/10 of the population). There hasn't been a serious attempt at a Canadian major league in basketball or baseball. CPL is the most recent attempt at an all Canadian league, borrowing heavily on what the CFL did right in the way it markets itself, a major Canadian league with Canadian content sells. That might be true for MLS clubs, I'm not convinced that's how it is perceived elsewhere. We have to be careful to not project onto others. I agree with your latter point about kids getting into a sport out of passion for it rather than economics. In the US, there's so much choice and other sports are more mainstream than soccer but I think that it's definately changing, no? It has here with Soccer being the #1 sport being played, even ahead of hockey.
Sort of a chicken/egg situation here. It's not really the media's responsibility to tell people what is important, the casual fans should be telling the media what is important. ESPN won't give serious investments to a competition they don't even own especially if the people who may be interested in it, soccer fans, have limited interest in it.
The odds of SEC programs adding men's soccer are slim to none. Due to Title IX rules, adding soccer would require adding a women's sport or two as well in order to balance the ratio of men's and women's scholarships. SEC schools already offer fewer sports than other power five conferences. Basically football, basketball, baseball, track, golf and enough women's sports to maintain a 60/40 men to women scholarship ratio given the 85 scholarships that are allotted to football. Tennessee for example on has 14 scholarship sports. Most B1G, ACC, and PAC 12 programs offer 25 plus. The reason is simple, so they can throw as much money as possible at football. You would think with revenues for college football and basketball ballooning it would trickle down to non revenue sports and increase scholarship opportunities, but with the facilities arms race in full swing, coaching salaries going through the roof, and more and more movement toward and increases in stipends for D1 players (especially football and basketball players) we're much more likely to see the number of non revenue scholarship significantly contract vs schools adding programs.... especially those in the SEC. Anyway, all that is to say, I doubt we ever see men's soccer added to the SEC.
I don't agree it's likely, just imagining what could happen if they did... The SEC has top teams across multiple sports. Imagine 13 men's soccer teams with those resources... If other sports are any indication, they would bring in top coaches, and attract top talent in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee... Alabama and Auburn.
For the purposes of the argument, money, fame and prestige are all interchangeable; a gifted young athlete will receive more of each applying his skills in a profession that isn't soccer, domestically (though the economics have changed significantly) Kids may not think of this in technical terms, but all humans make economic decisions all the time and spending lots of time getting great at kicking a ball around hasn't made economic sense in the US because, historically, there hasn't been much payoff. The "Best Athlete Theory" doesn't just apply to athletes; as a field, soccer faces competition for highly-skilled individuals across a broad spectrum of professions: coaching, GMing, refereeing, sports medicine, announcing, journalism, etc. A highly-credentialed and accomplished sports journalist, for example, stands to make a lot more money covering more relevant domestic sports, even if they are personally very passionate about soccer. "Pay to play" is a symptom that existed and persists not because of something sinister, but because historically there was no demand for pro soccer in this country -- and the professionals and skills associated with it sustaining it -- for decades. Prior to MLS, most people involved with the game split time with it and their "real job", which is whatever was paying them an actual, livable wage. It made no sense to invest time and money to become a highly credentialed coach because there was no way to make a good living off that skill. IMO, it's a Best Professional Theory. I believe we lose our best professionals (not just athletes) to other more prestigious and high-paying domestic fields. The more prizes a soccer team can win for being good, the more it makes sense to invest in high quality professionals across the board, not just athletes, but front offices, trainers, medical staff, groundskeepers and so on.
Eh, here in Columbus OSU is swimming in money. We have something like 36 sports teams. We have women's as well as men's hockey, field hockey, etc. The women's crew team just got a multi-million dollar palace, er boathouse built. There's no reason the Georgias, Alabamas, etc couldn't keep up and have soccer.
...except that they're poorer and don't have the same longstanding athletic traditions that the big, public midwest schools do (among which OSU is a bit of an outlier). The only way men's soccer expands is if cheerleading is sanctioned as a D1 sport (there's a movement afoot to make this happen).
Cheerleading wouldn't have the Title IX offsets needed for big football factories in the SEC and Big XII to add men's soccer. Especially as competitive cheerleading tends to include male cheerleaders as well, which limits the gender offsets. Basically to add soccer you need two things, one is adding either women's lacrosse or women's rugby, and two is be willing to spend the money necessary on men's soccer instead of just funneling it to the football program. I don't see the Mississippi valley schools adding lacrosse due to travel issues, and some of the coastal schools (like Florida) already have it. Rugby is in a gray area where a number of schools are interested, but it's a chicken and egg thing. If there were an NCAA championship, they'd jump from club to NCAA, but there's currently not enough NCAA women's rugby programs to qualify for a national championship. We're nearing the tipping point, though. I guess Field Hockey is another option, but it's even more geographically compact than lacrosse.
OSU lists "Spirit Program" among its 18 men's and 19 women's sports. Things like fencing, rifle, pistol teams are part of the athletics department but the school bowling teams aren't listed.
But at OSU they have a purpose, which is to not have to screw around with the numbers and kowtow to the NCAA. tOSU is one of knly 2 schools -this may have changed butnit was true a couple years ago-that offers max scholarships in every NCAA sanctioned sport. So they dont sit around worryjng about how many more womens field jockey players they need to scholarship inorder tk keep the male/female balance. They fully fund everything. Its the only quirk in the rules that exempts you from having to comply with the gender equity rules. Come up with a new womens - or mens for that matter - sport tkmorrow, allow up to 10 full rides and theyll be full up by the end of the week. They have so much money they just dont care.
There are four California schools that compete in NCAA field hockey, but the geography is tough. They play in the America East Conference with the likes of Vermont and UMass-Lowell. I don't think there are any other schools in the sport west of St. Louis or south of North Carolina.