And that doesn't begin to break down the fact that the average sports fan doesn't understand the difference between wealth and cash. Jeff Cooper is wealthy. The woman that won the big Powerball recently has a lot of cash.
Do we know that the owner has no patience to find out...or was it all just a ploy to gain attention?!? Diabolical... Your last part is perfect. If growth continues through the rest of the year, will ownership consider a second season, even if they don't eventually get to the 5000/game number that we've heard? Score one for the Deltas ownership in one regard. Moving the kickoff time to 5 pm seems to have helped out a bit.
I found this tidbit of info from Robert Palmer interesting when it comes to Jacksonville's attendance and how its counted... "We had over 5,000 tickets distributed for this match (the old way to count attendance). Its been a tough couple of weeks in Jacksonville, the building where the Armada corporate offices are located has been inaccessible since Hurricane Irma and we didn't have phones for almost 2 weeks. If our staff could have gotten in and fully executed on all of my plans I am confident we would have had a bigger number. Weds against Indy is going to be a crap shoot for attendance - its a rescheduled match for the game we had to cancel due to Irma. We had over 6,000 tickets distributed for the original match date, but it moving to a Weds is tough." So in the old way, the number for Sunday would have been reported as something like, say, 5100. And Wednesday would have been reported as something over 6000. Instead they actually reported a little more than 3300 on Sunday and they might get 2000 on Wednesday. I know that Wednesday is a weeknight but that's still a BIG difference between what they'll report now and what they would have reported earlier in the year.
I think there are many different stages of a business.Time and location always come into play. MLS did exactly what you said. Remember, it was really two owners who floated everything and took the huge gamble when things were going south in 2000-2002. They had the chops and will. They built a collective model that worked. First ever here for soccer. Now, after all the buildng and stuggle, when you enter MLS expectations on crowds and acceptance are completely different then they were 20 years ago. You don't start low and hope to build by tossing money at it for a long time. Unless NASL has the owners, multiple, with the chops to do this for a while and lose a lot of cash, a fast start is needed. At these lower levels, and sports especially, buidling slowly is not the norm. It's usually the newness crowd, and it gets paired down to your regulars, stabilize and try to build. SF has started near the bottom and have stayed there....in an expensive area, in a loaction that has failed time and again, with owners who aren't soccer savy. I hope they are willing to lose tens of millions for the long haul. Irrational? Many of us said that months before the ball was kicked. This was not hard to see coming. The chances of digging out of this to even create enough interest may not happen for a decade. It is easy to say these things on the net (long haul, keep losing oodles of cash) when it isn't your money. NASL to me is like the restaurant business at this point. Better make a great first impression because if you don't you aren't pulling out of it unless you have those "fantasy owners" always bandied about on the net. That is the exception. Only when it isn't your money does it become sensible and easy. This is not a shot at you. Statement of fact. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone try and expalin a horrific lower level soccer situation away like you did I would own a Porsche 911. It just doesn't work like that in reality 99% of the time. It just doesn't. Not trying to be dismissive or trite. Just the way it is. Ready for it kenn....."if it was done right". I like your optimism, but that alone won't create a succesful organization or owners willing to just keep flushing money away in the hopes that one day....yada, yada, yada. Uncle Phil and Lamar deserve every bit of praise they get...and it still isn't enough.
Are you kidding? We have enough info from other owners and teams over the years to know they are getting crushed financailly right now. If you want to believe this is some sort of Andy Kaufmanesque ploy, that has been going on since the team was announced to feel better about the situation then go nuts. BTW....I own a bridge up here in Brooklyn. Give you a great deal on it. PM me and I'll let you know.
The Deltas have made every conceivable mistake. Basic stuff like only having one full time ticket person who didn't know what they were doing a month before the season. Or not figuring out how to get the match day experience anywhere near what it should be in a place that chews up minor league teams left and right. If you had said all that, hearing what we all heard from the locals I would say they would be drawing in the three digit neighborhood, or at most what the Victory drew in 2006. Instead they're more than doubling that number and are going up...for now at least. My only question was about the level of attendance that would make Mr. Igel want to fund a second season. If you believe the 5000 figure that's been thrown around, then it won't happen. But what if it's 3500 and on an upward tend...is that good enough? Four thousand? The bottom line is that none of us know what he is willing to lose to keep his dream of soccer in San Francisco going. Some of us are very clever, but none of us are mind readers.
Next to Disney and I am in! Sorry, this just gets old. No joke, I have seen this routine (the Deltas...well they are special in how they are doing it) 50 times since the 70's.
Agreed......but history repeats way more than the exception, which can occur. If this turns out another way I will laud these guys night and day and hope we find a dozen more like them. With age and experience you can sometimes become cycnical. For soccer, I juat want pragamtic. It's their money. I hope they dig in long term, but the older I get the more history repeats. I have seen this way to many times before.
I hope the new vetting process that both leagues have taken up will slow the carousel down a bit. USL just happened to learn the lesson first with the Puerto Rico division and Antigua messes, among others. NASL didn't learn the lesson until this past year, which is how we got Rayo and the Deltas. @oneeyedfool makes the point that the Deltas would likely not pass muster with the new standards in place. But it may be too late. Little known Disney fact: it was mostly swampland when Walt acquired it. The engineers put a nice bed of dirt down before building any of the theme parks to avoid flooding and to allow for underground passageways within the parks for Disney characters to get to their jobs.
Why not? They had a stadium. They had a market. They had a primary owner. They had a cheque. I'm sure they had a "plan" consisting of all sorts of "activations" and "iterating." Which of these ballyhooed vetting criteria would the Deltas have failed to meet? Consider: this new OC team was vetted. What criteria do the Deltas lack that OC has? This is the problem. You guys keep believing everything you're told, and see it all through the lens of optimism bias. The reality is the NASL needs to do business, desperately, with anyone they can. That drove expansion in the past, and continues to drive it now.
Excellent points. I'd also like to know what the new criteria are. If one of the new criteria is that they need to have had experience marketing a sports team, then, yes, it seems that Deltas failed to meet that criterion (...and how). However, it seems like they have everything else. And if NASL does indeed have really strict new criteria, than that is awesome. Truly. It obviously would have hurt them in the short run in terms of losing their D2 status, but if NASL is really the answer to America's soccer woes, then the new vetting criteria should allow them to slowly build up with new, strong teams at D3 and consequently allow them to get back up to D2. If prospective owners are not interested in sitting in D3 for a season or two, I wonder how committed they are in the first place. They'll lose money hand over fist the first few years regardless of whether they are in D2 or D3, so if NASL is the answer, then shouldn't they be committed regardless?.
I imagine all the rescheduled, hurricane-cancelled games will be on weekdays as well. Or have they been rescheduled?
The odd thing is that it was AEG and HSG that started SUM. They granted Kraft an option to buy a share later. How different this might have turned out if Kraft never bought in (or SUM shares had gotten disconnected from MLS team ownership along the way - apparently Clark Hunt was trying to sell the Wizards without the accompanying share of SUM early on)
I'm waiting for @oneeyedfool to respond since he knows about this more than I do...he's the one who mentioned the new standards. But apparently he's busy getting yelled at by Rocco so I'll take a crack at it...paraphrasing his excellent work. When the league hired Keith Bruce (who had run the Super Bowl 50 organization) his goal was to find candidates for a new commissioner and establish new standards for potential expansion teams among other things. What has been reported is that there are now 11 firm criteria that need to be met, and it's much stricter than the old method...which was probably a checkbook and a pulse. San Francisco came in before the new standards were set down, San Diego and Orange County were the first groups to be subject to them, retroactively in the case of San Diego since they started the process beforehand. The three cities that are the subject of so much discussion here were in various stages of the process. Atlanta is done, New Orleans is probably further along than Detroit since the Detroit group's potential investor backed out, starting the process over again. @C-Rob is right, among the standards is a commitment to front office staffing in terms of marketing and ticket sales, which is what would have tripped up the Deltas had they been subject to the new criteria. Another potential problem for the Deltas could be the requirement to have a second and third place to play in case the primary home field is unavailable. Again I stress I do not know all 11 of the standards, just that there ARE 11 based on the reporting.