Chivas USA has no foundation
Posted on December 24, 2012 10:09 am
I’m pleased to announce we have a guest for today’s topic. Here to discuss the future of Chivas USA with me is Dr. Hari Seldon, professor of mathematics at the University of Streeling. Professor Seldon, thank you for joining us.
HS: Your pleasure.
DL: Thank you, I – huh?
HS: I have read the materials you sent to me about Chivas USA. Your conclusion that the team cannot win in the long term is correct. Obvious, and childishly presented, but correct.
DL: Thank you, I – huh?
HS: Unless Guadalajara is overwhelmingly successful in Liga MX and in Copa Libertadores, and perhaps even the Club World Cup, then any hope for Chivas USA to obtain sufficient resources to compete in MLS is doomed before it starts. Guadalajara and Chivas USA cannot co-operate, and the situation is worsened by the illusion of co-operation. Quality players are a finite resource. Quality coaches are also finite. Quality managers and administrators – again, there are limited numbers of these. With Chivas, there are two mouths to feed, not one. Guadalajara will always lay claim to the better players, coaches, and administrators.
DL: But Chivas USA doesn’t have the burdens of a Mexican-only policy. They can sign players from anywhere.
HS: A superficially good point, but it shows shallow thinking.
DL: Thank you, I – huh?
HS: The Mexican-only policy is a marketing tool. It does not significantly affect the quality of play. If Club America had established a subsidiary in MLS, they would have faced the same choices. Quality personnel brought to one club is by necessity not given to the other.
DL: Couldn’t Jorge Vergara buy great, non-Mexican players for Chivas USA?
HS: Using money that could have been spent to improve Guadalajara?
DL: Could they discover new talent?
HS: Yes, provided Vergara creates an international scouting system entirely from scratch, a system which by definition will not benefit the mother club. Unless such an endeavor could be staffed entirely by volunteers, it will not be undertaken.
DL: But Chivas USA’s youth system is the envy of the league.
HS: Yes, and who will pay the salaries of these fine young players? Assume for a moment their youth system turns out a star player every single year. Eventually, those players will want to be paid a proper salary. And even if they want to stay in the organization, the Mexican-American stars will be brought to Guadalajara to help the main team.
DL: So the Mexican identity strategy is bound to fail.
HS: No. All of their strategies are bound to fail. What we are seeing with Chivas USA are two separate, but related, negative feedback cycles. We have seen that Chivas USA’s successes will transferred abroad, while their failures will stay in Carson. What we are seeing now is the second part of Chivas USA’s destructive marketing cycle.
DL: Which is?
HS: Don’t interrupt me. Step one, Chivas enters MLS promising to provide Mexican skill and talent. Fourth-rate Mexican talent from whatever Guadalajara feels it can spare loses all the time, and the target audience distances itself from the embarrassment. Step two, Chivas USA attempts a more inclusive, multi-national identity. Whatever is left of their original target audience is alienated for years to come. The new fans must make a conscious effort to avoid the associations of the parent brand – when expanding the parent brand was the original purpose of the club to begin with. This is made worse by the presence of the other MLS team.
DL: The Galaxy.
HS: They hardly represent the entire galaxy. In any case, the other team resists this attempt to drain their fanbase, and will make a significant response.
DL: Like signing Beckham.
HS: I see that “don’t interrupt me” are words that hold no meaning for you.
DL: But couldn’t Chivas USA have signed a Beckham?
HS: Any useful response would come at the cost of the Guadalajara club, and as such is impossible. The marketing now becomes shrill and bitter, openly disparaging the other club for its wealth.
DL: Pretty ironic, Chivas complaining about being outspent.
HS: Silence. The marketing centers around the club as a low-cost alternative to the other team. Unsurprisingly, the low-cost alternative fails to make money. The club now has fewer and fewer alternatives, and fewer and fewer resources to implement those alternatives. After a year or two of stagnancy -
DL: Is that a word? Shouldn’t it be “stagnation?”
HS: Yes, it’s a word, you twit. In any case, the club spirals downward into crisis, and the Guadalajara ownership must decide whether to keep the club going. Either Guadalajara admits defeat, or they try to implement the one advantage they feel they have. Which is the Guadalajara identity. And now we are back at step one.
DL: Can they rebrand, or move?
HS: No. Apart from admitting defeat, which the Guadalajara administration seems dead set against, all moving or rebranding would accomplish is to solve some marketing problems. Even if Guadalajara were to actually buy the other team and close it down, the necessity to support Guadalajara first and foremost will always be there. The MLS team will never be the top priority.
DL: What if they build their own stadium?
HS: ”Dear Chivas fans, we have decided to spend millions of US dollars to build a stadium, instead of buying players to get beyond the first round of Liga MX.” I suppose they could build their own stadium, provided Jorge Vergara never wants to set foot in Mexico again.
DL: So, they can’t move, they can’t stay, they can’t rebrand, and they can’t keep the name.
HS: There is one solution, of course. Promotion and relegation.
DL: What?!
HS: Promotion and relegation is the only viable option. Not just for Chivas USA, but for MLS as well. The thrill of relegation battles will make every game meaningful.
DL: I thought you were a mathematics expert! And Chivas fans aren’t Chivas fans because they worry about relegation every season, are they?
HS: You see, true football fans -
DL: Oh, for -we’re out of time. Merry Christmas.
HS: I realize the truth scares you, but-
DL: AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR! GOOD NIGHT!
I do agree with the overall premise that Vergara can’t spend significant resources as Chivas Guadalajara continues to struggle. Even if they win Liga MX and Vergara decides to build a stadium in LA, there will be fans wondering why Vergara is spending money on a stadium in S. California instead of buying the best Mexican players and try to win Copa Lib.
I think there is only one solution to this situation and that is for Vergara to sell his MLS franchise for maybe 50M+. He then takes that cash and purchases a NASL franchise (called CUSA) and builds a modest but expandable stadium like San Antonio is doing around LA. With probably 20-30M left to spend, he goes around the country and builds youth soccer clubs in predominately Mexican communities. The strategy would be that CUSA academies will find the best Mexican American players as youth and send them to CUSA NASL. There Chivas gets to own their contracts unlike in MLS. He takes the best players and sends them directly to Mexico without transfer fees paid to the league. He spins it as being a much better option for development and will allow Chivas Mexico to grow with all the new talent. CUSA stays alive in NASL and no money came directly out of Vergara’s pockets.
You are an evil little man.
That “professor” sure is snooty but “he” brings up some valid points. Doesn’t seem like any hope or solution for Goats USA except for folding.
Chivas USA are a trainwreck in slow motion. as the demand for expansion in other cities increases i can’t see how Vergara can continue to resist pulling the plug and selling out to another expansion group. with only 20 or 24 teams for all of U.S. and Canada it makes zero sense to continue with this useless abortion of a club taking up space in a city that already has the Galaxy. i’d give it another year or two…
no surprise that Chivas USA is a huge mess, Guadalajara not withstanding. Vergara can not even manage one team properly, much less two. best thing to do is sell one team to solely focus on the other. i much prefer him selling Guadalajara because the man has single-handedly ruined the team, but i doubt that will happen since that’s his money maker.
This is more or less bad business logic.
When a holding company owns two subsidiaries, they don’t look at spending resources on one as taking them away from the other–there’s no reason to. They look at *each* as needing to produce return. The question of “do I spend a dollar on CD de G or C de USA?” is answered with another question “which one will net me $1.05 in return?” If the answer to the second question is “both”, then so is the first. If the answer to the second question is “neither” then so is the first. But the one entity basically never depends on the other.
I should add a bit about “finite resources.” Ultimately, yes, the sum total of all resources are finite–but Jorge Vergara could expand his soccer operations by 1000 times and not have exhausted them, so the statement, while true, is irrelevant to his business.
Sell CUSA to Pele.
Pele relocates team to NYC.
Rebrands as Cosmos.
DONE.
There are only a finite number of players who are good enough to compete for Liga MX. Expanding operations by a thousand times won’t change that. Chivas will never be able to justify the expense of maintaining a Copa Libertadores-level team and an MLS contender. Club America will always be there to bid against them.
If Vergara owned two MLS teams, then they could be treated independently, the way AEG did – because there was a limit to how much anyone can or will spend to win an MLS Cup. Liga MX has no such limitation. Vergara could run a thousand soccer teams, I suppose, but they would all depend on Guadalajara, and Guadalajara must spend what it takes to compete.
Lost in all of this is how Vergara completely screwed Saprissa in just a handful of years of ownership.
Dan. Come on.
Chivas GDL are a parent club.
Akin to Necaxa – America or
Estudiantes – Leon or
Morelia – Jaguares or if you’re one of THOSE guys
Zenit – Chelsea.
Its a business.
They’re subsidiaries.
True, C USA would work better as an NASL franchise, but its still a feeder.
Vergara doesn’t necessarily need to spend any more money on Chivas Guadalajara after the players they got this offseason, they have a solid youth system, and any money they do spend will easily be re-cooped with selling their players yo Europe, like Fabian and Enriquez will go soon.
So I think the money to spend on players argument is a flawed one, its an assumption made by people who really haven’t been playing that close of attention to the club.
I think Chivas USA can succeed in the near future if Chelis is able to implement his style. lets remember he made Puebla a winning team for a while, and you cant say Puebla were big spenders when he was in charge, and they don’t really have a good youth system like Chivas or Chivas USA.
Also im pretty sure Saprissa wasnt screwed, they won the Concacaf champions league a couple of years after he bought the team, and got third at the world cup. He changed the structure making it Costa Ricans only, and won a crap ton of titles, and was the backbone of the national team.
Fair enough, perhaps it took more than just a handfull of years to screw them, but they finished last in their minigroup in the 2010 Invierno. They recovered in the Verano tournament, but Vergara didn’t wait for that tournament to finish before divesting from the club.
…so maybe relegation is the answer. Institute it for one season so that Toronto and CUSA’s owners get scared and sell out.
dan, you put the psycho in psychohistory.
Must…will into existence…love button for Ji’s comment!!!
“There are only a finite number of players who are good enough to compete for Liga MX. ”
“Finite,” sure, but there’s absolutely no way Chivas could possibly employ a significant fraction of the talent, and expanding their operations by 1000 times still wouldn’t tap that supply out. Point is the supply may be finite, but Chivas’s demand is a speck upon it. Therefore the finite supply is more or less irrelevant, it might as well be infinite.
+1 for the Isaac Asimov ..er reference? use of character?
I truly cannot believe the amount of kilobytes taken up discussing ChivasUSA and their seemingly impossible quest for a meaningful MLS campaign. Yet, The NewEngland RRRRrrrrrrrrrevolution, 18 years in existence and a completely non-Soccer owner, never gets bashed!!
My conclusion must be, the indifference and Apathy towards the Rrrrrrrrevs…is as real and tangible as the owner himself!
I guess people really care about Chivas. Where-as the Junior pats are truly not worth the discussion..considering the ever dwindling attendances and general irrelevance in Boston sporting journalism(for what ever that’s worth nowadays) the point is mute.
Carry on..! Fuerza Vergara!
I was waiting for an entry from the Encyclopedia Galactia…
If both Chivas teams were run like rational businesses, there would be nothing preventing both from thriving. There are plenty of businesses that hold multiple assets and are able to make each separate asset succesful and profitable. If anything, owning several similar assets creates an advantage in terms of expertise and economies of scale (look at, for example, the Sounders/Seahawks). However, as touched upon in this article, Mexican soccer is not a rational business. That is always going to be the biggest obstacle to Chivas USA’s success.
Chivas USA should just relocate and star over again
“The Mexican-only policy is a marketing tool. It does not significantly affect the quality of play.”
Bah! You should interview a fictional economist instead of a mathematician. The only way this statement could be true is if every other nationality had players that were not significantly better than the Mexicans that play for Chivas. More choice is (almost) always better but never worse.
I would rep this a million times if I could, for the Foundation theme. Dr. Seldon!
Chivas is a sinking ship.
When they announced this franchise nine years ago, I thought it was a terrible idea and the execution proved me right. They had some fans and good will to begin with but when they dropped the faux-Mexican thing, they won some gomes but lost some of the goodwill. Strange thing is that, in the meantime, the Galaxy have morphed into this awful corporate, whitebread team. They’re not the team of the people any longer. There’s a place for the guys in black hats, an LA Raiders to the Galaxy’s Rams. The problem is now how to achieve it and with the current management, they never will.
@RevsFanDan,
This being a SciFi thread, kilobytes are nothing. Just wait until we get to Yoda—er, Yottabytes.
Yawn. Let me know when someone writes something intelligent. In the meantime, [spam deleted].
Honestly, nothing personal. This is the room for arguments. Write Huss if you want to advertise. -D.
Wish Chivas USA had continued with their original plan and started in San Diego. They could have had the best of both worlds, had the Chivas brand (which is obviously huge in San Diego) and been in a market with no competition so they would have been the team for the whole market not just one group. Also this was before the Xolos were in the top league in Mexico (and I believe before they existed as a club at all) so Chivas could have marketed heavily South of the Border as well.
Popular Store Items
Popular Posts
Latest from the Forum
About Big Soccer
Copyright © 2011 Big Internet Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Click here for our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Views expressed by the bloggers and users of BigSoccer do not represent the views of Big Internet Group, LLC.