They'd say nobody cares about the Fire before they said that. One other thought that I didn't add...even if the team were competent in terms of the roster on the field (like they sort of were last year), the fact that the atmosphere at Fire games is and has more or less always been hot, wet garbage doesn't help anything. If Fire games were like PTFC or SSFC games in terms of the supporters groups being as much of a draw as the on-field product, that would help attendance and general "brand" awareness. I know some of that is chicken v. egg in that the team has been run into the ground for a while, but Section 8's singing and chanting has always been....limited in its creativity and engagement. There are only so many ways to chant the word "Fire" before it loses its impact.
Is it the meatballiness, or is it just the competition presented by all four other sports? If you look at New York and LA as sui generis (and none of those teams are exactly attendance or mainstream market crossover superstars either), the list of MLS teams competing with all four sports is as follows: Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, DC, Minnesota, New England, Philly, and (arguably) San Jose. That'll do as the list of MLS stragglers. Different regions of the country, different demographics, different weather, different stadium locations, different times entering the league, different levels of recent success on the field, but what they all have in common is deeply rooted historic allegiances to the big four sports strengthened by heavy established coverage in the legacy local media outlets and a bevy of corporate relationships within the community. Maybe those cities are also populated with ugly American goobers to a greater extent than Kansas City or Orlando, but that seems unlikely to me.
Maybe...although it's interesting how much cross-over there is between that list, and a list of MLS front offices/ownership groups that are absolutely terrible at what they do.
Right, that has to be worrying about Miami. Toronto is a bit of an exception that proves the rule, right? You look at the population of the greater Toronto area and that's a market that seems badly UNDER-served by the big four. New York has 8 teams, LA will soon have 8, Chicago has 5, Toronto has 3. There should be 3 NHL teams in Greater Toronto, but that's a whole other story.
Maybe, or maybe moving to a strip mall in the suburbs and undertaking a kinda laughable euro-poser rebrand is the kind of thing that works in a market with no NBA or NHL, no local college football interest, and a then-mockery of an MLB franchise, but would make a front office/ownership group look "terrible at what they do" elsewhere. I have a hard time seeing Deportivo Chicago playing in Rosemont between the outlet mall and Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill experiencing the same sort of renaissance, even if it involved the same sort of immediate uptick on the field. I tend to believe the authentic connection with the fans in some MLS markets says more about the fans than about the club ownership. Could Stan Kroenke really have screwed up the Timbers?
I can't wait to observe the LA Rams launch with the new stadium, they are going to get in their own way somehow. I have experienced their professionalism enough to know.
If they dumped a stadium in Rosemont, it would be immediately be more accessible to 80% of the MSA. So by default, you'd have some improvement. But that's where you get into all the other issues. It's not just the stadium, it's the stadium AND Hauptmann AND years of neglect and incompetence AND a bad gameday experience.
Yeah, we're in agreement on the interlocking series of challenges the Fire face. I guess the question is whether the huge size and population of the Chicago market, with the concurrent saturation of existing sports teams and fan interest, should be viewed as more of a massive opportunity or a challenge and low-key hurdle.
Reportedly KSE considered ripping up the Pepsi Center parking lots to build a SSS and a parking garage but I don't know how realistic that was both from a usability (what if the Rapids and Avs/Nuggets had games around the same time?) and willingness (just a plan they could show as "competition" for local municipalities they were trying to woo?).
True story: I worked in the newspaper business as a reporter and editor for nearly 20 years. When the Sounders MLS team started I told the sports editor at the small town daily I worked at that it would be a big deal. He laughed at me and said no one cared about soccer. I warned him that people in the Pacific Northwest do (he's originally from Colorado and is in to the Broncos and NASCAR) and that he should play it up because the community would expect it. He never did. Even after 10s of thousands at every game and the highest MLS TV ratings in the nation, he refused to do anything other than run a story inside the sport section from AP. I've been out of the business for 7 years now, but he's still there and I would bet a bunch of money that he still thinks 1) Soccer is a stupid sport. 2) Nobody cares about soccer. Soccer fans in Chicago and Miami and anywhere else need to build their own culture and their own media, because the old media is run by people stuck in a mindset. Perhaps Miami will be different given the culture of the community the media there serves. But I highly doubt it will be considered as important as the Dolphins, UMiami football, the Heat, and probably even the shitty Marlins, now that Derek Jeter has brought fame to that story.
The percentage of Americans who are like this has plummeted in the last decade. But you're right, they are disproportionately represented among baby boomer hot take artists running local sports media outlets. Luckily those folks are aging out of the industry. The next wave of enemies look more like Billy Haisley than Mike Francesa.
80% of the MSA? You'll have to show your work. Plenty of folks live in, say Naperville or Bolingbrook, or Joliet, or Aurora or any other number of population centers closer to Bridgeview than Rosemont. This complaint about the south side is a treasured tradition of north siders and out of town types that have friends/family living in the north side & north suburbs. Now, is Rosemont a better location than Bridgeview? Sure. But location ALONE won't fix the Hauptmans. That said, there are examples in Chicago of centrally-located teams drawing poorly. One need only go back to ~2006-2007 to have seen the faraway, remotely-located fire outdrawing the Blackhawks, for example. In MLS, one need only recall the (snicker) DeGuzman Toronto teams horrifically underperforming. This, despite their centrally-located venue. Then, (SURPRISE) putting money into the roster & improving the front office later led to the high attendances they enjoy today. On balance, the quality of the product >>>>>>>>>> the location of the product, in terms of a team's success. Here's hoping the Miami Beckhams learn this well-known lesson.
No, location alone wouldn't fix things, because the ownership group makes tire fires look positively quaint, but Bridgeview is a terrible location. I don't think Joliet is part of Chicago's MSA. All Chicago's issue's feed off of each other.
Will County is 100% in the Chicago MSA. Even Kendall and Grundy are IIRC. And just colloquially, Joliet is absolutely part of "Chicagoland" As a Crystal Lake native, I'm a self-appointed expert on what does and doesn't count as a Chicago suburb.
Joliet, and Will county, and even NW Iniana are certainly considered parts of the region. Just as Elgin, and Waukegan, and (in some definitions) Kenosha. As an aside, if one were to use a mirror image of Chicago, if the Bridgeview location were in the northwest suburbs, it would be located in Niles. (Around Touhy & Harlem.) If this were the case, roughly ZERO north siders and ZERO out of town types would call it "terrible." Bridgeview is not ideal, by any means. But a good product gets fans to drive further for other and better entertainment options in Chicago and elsewhere. And, I suppose "all of Chicagos issues feed off of each other," much like a paper cut and a slight cold makes a liver cancer patient less healthy.
Touhy & Harlem would be a terrible location. Too far of walk from the two nearby Metra lines, and not walkable from a CTA rail line, either. It’d be easier (i.e. wouldn’t take nearly two hours across at least one bus, two trains and a game day shuttle) to get to (via Pace bus) but the only real benefit is that it’s on the north side, which isn’t losing large amounts of population as the south side is. Nobody (that I can see) is saying that more people will not travel further (but lol at the idea of people from Joliet coming to Bridgeview in droves for a good squad) for a better product, just that not enough will to justify the location as anything other than terrible and a last resort that the team settled for due to a lack of better located options and financial issues.
I think this is very incorrect. And to respond to your other point, there are many people in Chicagoland who live closer to Bridgeview than Rosemont, but it's a minority, and given the highway and transit links, I would say 80% is a pretty decent estimate for the share of people in the market who could get to, say, the Rosemont Theater in less time than they could get to Toyota Park. There are Fire fans in Oak Lawn who would get screwed, true, but you do the best you can.
Touhy and Niles would be easier to drive to for a large chunk of the population, but that's about it. It's the fact that Bridgeview isn't near any public transit and to get there by car from 3/4's the MSA takes about 2 hrs. But your second paragraph nails it: if the team were competently run and the team consistently good and/or entertaining, I'd find it worth the 4 hr round trip to go there. But the team is bad, the atmosphere sucks, so why drive 4 hrs round trip to watch a bad team play in a bad atmosphere? The team settled for Bridgeview because it came up 4 years too early and they had to make a decision based on the financial stability of the league at the time. If they were closer, I'd probably talk myself into going more often to a) support MLS in Chicago and b) see actually good teams play since I feel zero allegiance to the Fire because they are a) bad and b) incompetently run. And real talk: nobody is driving from Joliet to Bridgeview to watch the Fire.
Driving? No. But if you ran a shuttle service from the Summit Metra Station? If you want to make Bridgeview work, those are the terms you need to be thinking in. As opposed to having Chicago place some (absurd and crooked) costs on operating a bus service with alcohol and just throwing up your hands and banning alcohol on Pub to Pitch buses.
Selective editing on my part, but this to me is why MSA is a faulty way to discuss attendance issues - sure, Joliet, Waukegan and other satellite cities are in the Fire's MSA, but there is never going to be a significant amount of in the stands support from those areas, so to me, the real target audience is the 2.7 million people densely packed into the city. Make it easy for them to get to your stadium and they'll support you during lulls in competitiveness as long as they're temporary. I think this really highlights the 'all of Chicagos issues feed off of each other' point very well. There's a ratio of distance to suckiness (or the inverse of entertainment value) that most people will endure for an event, and for those 2.7 million people in the city, the abundance of other, more convenient and likely more entertaining options absolutely skew that ratio to the point that even a good team in Bridgeview (or at Soldier Field - although MLS was a different beast at that time) has trouble averaging more than 17k. To meekly attempt to get this back on topic - Miami can likely suck for a bit longer in a good location and still draw respectably than the fanbase will allow them to suck in a bad location and the league knows this and is trying to make sure their location is as optimal as possible before letting them in.