Excellent, that will shut up all the Overtown skeptics . As for myself, to save time and money, I am planning on parking at Anacostia Park and swimming over to Audi Field when I go to any games. I surreptitiously scouted the location while shooting a movie there recently, and have come to the conclusion that nothing could possibly go wrong with my plan.
I feel like direct blue line service to Rosemont gets you most of the way to your 80% figure all on its own.
Minor point of order; New York has 9 (3 NHL). Yet proportionally to population (and corporate presence), Greater New York and Greater Los Angeles are still among the most under-served sports markets. (Though I certainly wouldn't argue that Toronto has fewer NHL teams than the specific market should have.)
Billy Haisley is an unmitigated idiot. I've forgotten more about soccer on this planet than that guy has ever known. I'd love to sit down with him and watch a game between Roda JC (from the town my wife was born in) and Sparta Rotterdam. But I'm guessing he couldn't be bothered.. To be fair, he is representative of a bunch of people I've known over the years. There used to be these guys who would download a torrent of the latest Real Madrid-Barcelona game a few days after it was over and then host a party so we could watch and they could seem all worldly and sophisticated. Neither one had ever ventured to a Sounders game and probably couldn't have told you the name of more than a half-dozen of the players in the game they were watching (wow look at that Messi, isn't he something!). But boy did they think they knew everything about soccer.
So you would like me to post more photos and videos of Audi Field proximity to Nationals Ballpark? I have hundreds of photos and tens of videos.
The message in a lot of the soccer media is that MLS is irrelevant. And that message and that attitude ranges from Deadspin's hysterical opposition to Men In Blazers' genuine but head-patting affection. Haisley is a trolling hack and a particularly bad example, but the effect on rank-and-file American sports fans is no different than with, say, The Ringer which doesn't cover MLS whatsoever. This seems like an under-discussed topic around here tbh. There's page after page of microscopic dissection of every last piddling TV rating, when the broader reality is that the cultural tastemakers are completely dismissing the league.
WTF is Bill Haisley? Should I know who this is? Bottom line is that the younger generations are not using the traditional forms of sports media (Print, TV, Radio, and even websites). They are drawn to Twitter and Facebook where they can filter and follow what their specific interests are.
Deadspin writer. Don't look him up. I'll give you an excerpt from one of his recent pieces to demonstrate why: "Maybe Rongen is right and everyone else who’s ever seen Messi play and considered him a genius non pareil is wrong, or maybe Rongen, as is the fate of many tap-eaters, has stuffed his mind with so much game footage and needlessly complex theories about how soccer is supposed to be played and has doused all that with a heaping helping of unearned arrogance that his brain is now fried and useless and leads him to proudly espouse the most self-evidently moronic takes without a hint of self-awareness or shame." If you got through that, you may have noticed that it is one ********ing sentence. He's a long-winded hack who knows jack about soccer and is an awful writer to boot.
Deadspin and The Ringer both have pretty huge audiences among urban millennial sports fans. One is aggressively hostile to MLS, the other completely ignores it. Deadspin is owned by Univision too, it bears mentioning. Men in Blazers, which I adore, and which is genuinely supportive of MLS, nonetheless very much presents the narrative that the thing to do if you enjoy soccer is to pick an EPL team and make that the cornerstone of your engagement with the sport, matching the incentives of NBC, their parent company. I can't think of a comparable digital-native sports platform which gives MLS the time of day. That's a problem, because young people's engagement with media is exactly how you describe. The message to the soccer-curious is that the elite European game is what matters, MLS does not.
It's basically the TMZ approach to sports. Famous players and clubs only. To them the whole world of soccer is made up of about 15 clubs, and they know the names about 25 players. My favourite story to this effect is when I was watching the USMNT with the Outlaws here in Austin and one of the chapter leaders claimed to be a huge Tottenham fan. I asked him if he was Jewish - not that everyone who loves Tottenham is, but I assumed he at least understood the history. He looked at me like I was nuts and asked me what I was talking about. Seems he had been a Tottenham fan only as long as Dempsey had been there. So then I asked if he liked Fulham too and again he didn't know what I was talking about. He had no idea Dempsey played at Fulham for years before his short stint with Tottenham. I was wearing a Sounders kit and he had no idea at all what a "Sounders" was either. He said he loooooved "football" but his frame of reference was a couple dozen players on a handful of clubs. He knew nothing, really, about the sport. If they gave this guy a bully pulpit, he'd be Billy Halsey.
If there is one thing MLS as a league has been on the forefront of, it's digital media. They've been very progressive and proactive in this realm. They were one of the first leagues to design their website with Social Media in mind. The MLS App is one the best sports apps. They've been streaming their content digitally long before the other leagues. I would argue that fans of MLS tend to get their content either from the league's APP/Website, Fan driven websites, and/or SiriusXM FC.
This describes probably the majority of the pro/rel, winter schedule, "real football", group of "fans".