#savethecrew

This is a post by Pauncho cut and pasted from the 15,000+ thread that is stickied. Je wrote it on May 18. It is a very good general summary.
CREW SUMMARY
5/18/18 Pauncho
This is a very complex story with many moving parts. Any summary which was short enough to read would distort by oversimplifying. Including this one.

Tony Precourt is a spoiled rich kid who bought the Crew to move it to Austin, for lifestyle and not investment, reasons. He is supported by the league,apparently because they have long believed Columbus is too small a city to be a success in MLS as it goes forward, and the local business community isn't sufficiently supportive. Crew fans believe the incompetence of the owners, and more recently deliberate sandbagging, has had more to do with poor "metrics."

Going forward MLS is pushing for stadia to be located in the "urban core" so they benefit from attracting a more sports-fan like (less families going to minor league baseball-like) fan base, going to bars and restaurants before/after games and generally being treated more seriously.

Austin is a very similar city to Columbus, a metro area of about 2 million, state capital and site of a flagship State U. with a football team which totally dominates the local sports (and entertainment) scene. They have a cooler reputation than Columbus because of the local music scene. Tony has not done significant marketing surveying (we know of), which is suspicious for concealing poor local interest. Efforts by 'astroturf' organizations to drum up visible local support have been quite unsuccessful.

Tony expected Austin would just give him a downtown park to satisfy MLS' desire for a downtown stadium, but that was rejected. There is a 25 acre site 10 miles north of downtown where a chemical plant exploded and burned down around 1980. It is still vacant (in what is otherwise a red hot real estate market), although the city says remediation of any toxic residue is complete. The site is in an industrial area about a mile from an upscale shopping mall. This site, called McKalla Place after a nearby road, is being studied for a stadium site. McKalla place has only one road entrance, is served by a rail line which can only carry 800 passengers an hour, and does not have water lines or nearby sidewalks. Precourt Sports Ventures (Tony's primary corporate entity) has released a drawing of a stadium on this site which shows only 1000 parking spaces along with 500 bicycle rack spaces. Nearby parking is pretty scarce, and PSV seems to be relying on the shopping center to let fans park there, which will never happen. PSV says they will do a traffic and parking survey after reaching an agreement with the city. Crew fans think this is an effort to conceal very serious problems.

Guesstimates of the total cost of a stadium and necessary infrastructure upgrades are in the quarter billion dollar range.

Austin City Council has assigned their city employees to prepare a comprehensive report on the issues involved in using McKalla Place as the site of their stadium, which is due to be presented two weeks from today. Representatives of PSV have stated it is their intention to build a 20,000 seat stadium with private money. When the study is presented there will be intensive negotiations over who pays for what. Crew fans generally think Tony has burned his bridges in Columbus so thoroughly that he will have no choice but to take whatever is offered, or sell the team, which he adamantly denies having any intention of ever doing.

MLS has a business structure called single entity, originally intended to enable the league to survive the early years with low salaries without running afoul of antitrust laws. MLS as a whole owns everything, including each of the franchises, and men like Tony are called investor/operators, owning a fraction of the league as a whole (and other things) and with a contract to have some rights in operating a specific franchise. This is important, because the league can force an owner out, and have done so in the past. Also, the way MLS actually operates endangers this antitrust protection, and so the league is very afraid that discovery in a lawsuit would reveal secrets which would hurt them.

In 1995 when Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore and the Cincinnati Bengals were also publicly discussing moving, Ohio passed R.C.9.67 (called by some the "Modell Law") which throws some legal obstacles in the path of a professional sports franchise that wants to move. Ohio and Columbus have sued Tony using this law. At this point there are only procedural matters being litigated, trial on the merits is scheduled for March. MLS, and the other professional sports leagues, are very much opposed to this law and would be hurt badly by a spread of laws like it, and a finding the law can function constitutionally.

From various sources, we know there are at least two groups of local investors interested in buying the team and operating it in Columbus, and there is a plot of land in the downtown area on which they could build a stadium.

Is there enough fan support in Austin? Is there enough voter support that the City will pay to get a team, and get a productive business on the vacant toxic waste site? Is McKalla Place so flawed that the league won't allow Tony to go there for the next 20 years? Is the lawsuit enough pressure that the league will settle by forcing Tony to sell? Are the mystery potential purchasers rich enough and making a sweet enough offer to get it done? Anybody who claims to know these answers yet is lying to you. Crew fans here are mostly cautiously optimistic the team will stay. The local media in Austin act like it's a done deal with only details to be worked out. We will find out a lot beginning in June, when the negotiations between PSV and Austin begin in earnest.

 

Don’t mind Chelsey. We’re all a little sensitive here in Crewville, and that topic has come up before.

 

You were. I’m not sure how “calloused” posters are from other parts of BS.[emoji6]