Moderators, if you feel this is in poor taste, please don’t hesitate to delete. Thank you in advance. Hello Rapids fans. Please don’t think I’m coming to troll, I’m simply coming to ask for your help. Many of you have publicly expressed your support of for the situation that we Crew fans are finding ourselves in. For that we thank you. I ask that you give us just 60 more seconds of support to go to https://savethecrew.com/letter and sign the letter. You can select your club at the bottom and I believe that the more fans from around the league that sign this, the louder the collective voice will be. Selfishly, I say “thank you” for helping support us in this time of need. But also, I remind you to think about the other teams that this could happen to. Some day in the future, this could happen to your team as well. Please don’t let the league start a bad precedent. Thank you, Ian Fontaine
Signed. I've had the privilege of seeing 3 games in Columbus over the years (none involving the Rapids, though) and the Columbus fans have always been class. The MLS wouldn't be the MLS without the small market teams. The MLS needs the Crew to stay where they belong - in Columbus. BTW, I hope the Crew win the Cup. That would be the perfect answer to Garber, Precourt and the sleazy dealings that the press reports to have occurred.
Done...I too have had the privilege to attend a game in Columbus, and I was welcomed heartily! This is a terrible precedent to set, especially as it is directed at a small market team of such tradition. Backing you all the way in your fight for your franchise and for the Cup!
The MLS sure seems to be rooting for Precourt to move the Crew to Austin. Compare the way mlssoccer.com presented Precourt's meeting with city officials with the even-handed approach to the same meeting in the Columbus Dispatch. It's disturbing that the MLS uncritically published the owner's press release, without contacting the city officials for comment. It says a lot about what the MLS thinks of the fans. The more I see and hear about this, the less I like what I see and hear. I definitely understand the frustration of the Crew fans.
You have to understand that Garber may very well be the person driving this whole deal and at best Precourt is just his patsy. WE CAN'T EVEN GET THE CREW TO ANNOUNCE THAT THEIR OWN PLAYOFF GAME IS SOLD OUT!!! So either they are intentionally sabotaging the attendance number and will release a sizeable number of tickets at a point where they can't possible sell, or they're willfully incompetent by not recognizing and promoting the sell out. After all, positive news about the amount of fan/corporate support in Columbus flies directly in the face of both Precourt and Garber's comments and narratives. Several Crew fans have reached out to Greg Lalas and other MLS executives asking why the one sided coverage, and they have (not surprisingly) not received a reply. I would urge you all to go to the website www.crewnotdoneyet.com and take some time to digest the timeline that's been laid out there by fans. It's unbelievable. And of course, the previously mentioned www.savethecrew.com/letter to sign the letter that will be sent to the commissioner and each owner. Thanks again for all your support.
I signed this the other day - The way MLS has handled this has been shameful. I don't usually root for non-Rapids teams to win (I do root for teams to lose), but I hope the Crew win it all.
FWIW, if Precourt pulls a Milton Keynes, we'll have a team to hate other than RSL and the Sounders. I'd boycott them but, as a STH, it would be pointless. I'll just boo the crap out of them and refuse to call them anything but Columbus.
Andrew Erickson @AEricksonCD 17h17 hours ago Ohio AG Mike DeWine statement: "Should ownership of the Columbus Crew initiate a move of the team without complying with Ohio law, I am prepared to take the necessary legal action under this law to protect the interests of the State of Ohio..." #CrewSCpic.twitter.com/noQhKZRG3Q
The state of Ohio should test the legal waters with it. So here I am thinking 150 million space bucks for an expansion franchise is a steep fee. Then the next thing I see on the ESPN ticker is Rodger Goodell signing a 200,000,000.00 contract extension. It makes me think that Precout's 60 Million dollar purchase of The Columbus Crew is very small fries.
Garber's "State of the MLS" address and the following Q-and-A focused heavily on the Columbus situation. Some of his statements are hard to reconcile with the news coverage. Don't miss the question Alexi Lalas asked at about the 37' mark.
Hmm. That was a horseshit answer. If their answer is they're just going to run the league like any other for-profit pro sports league, why should I give a shit about it. From their point of view, I can watch better soccer on TV, and can buy those leagues' jerseys and stuff. So much of their advertising focuses on supporter culture, which is different from what you get from other leagues. Now that that dedication has helped build a profitable league that all the new rich guys want in on, they start threatening to pull teams from cities that aren't going to go Seattle/Orlando gaga? MLS leadership needs to check with all the people in the Nats forums who constantly put MLS down and don't give a rat's ass about it. I am old enough not to be naive about these things, but this whole Columbus thing and the road it's pointing down has really pissed me off.
I found the part right before that mark to be insulting. "Maybe Columbus should look at what Detroit, Nashville, Cincinnati, and Sacramento are doing ...." (Garber, State of the MLS 2017, 36:12). Does he not know the difference between dating and married? Pre-sales and Post-sales? Seems to me that it is easy to get glamoured by being pursued and forget about those that have been there all along. Next we will be hearing that Seattle needs to step it up to Atlanta levels and that Atlanta/Orlando/(insert name here) actually invented the MLS instead of Seattle. (Note how I am trying to show MLS 2.0 did to MLS 1.0 what MLS 3.0 will do to MLS 2.0 and 1.0. Progress is a great thing, but it seems dangerous to poke the previous teams in the eye. MLS isn't that established that it couldn't still fail.) rod.
I have decided that for every season Columbus doesn't play in MLS I will not watch the league for two. So this might be my season following the league. I don't feel that I could support them even if I wanted to.
To follow up on this again, when the Toronto Argonauts won the Grey Cup on November 26, it was front page headline news in The Globe and Mail. When TFC won the MLS Cup yesterday, it was one of the stories on the front page of the sports section.
What you say is correct but ... pointy ball. On the other hand 27 to 24 would be a hella hockey game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Cup
I have followed a couple of pointy ball players that went through the Argonauts. sadly, I find the game more interesting than some of the NFL games around...