Its probably news to the MLS owners (especially guys like Kraft and Anshutz) that they only invested once. All those cash calls were what exactly? Not "keeping the level at the right height otherwise they would drop out"?
That's......................rather generous. LAX is still viewed in the most of the country as a Prep School Sport played by rich white kids. I grew up in one of the game's three epicenters and was told repeatedly that LAX was the next big sport...............30 years later the game is no bigger, and in many respects the sport has stagnated and even regressed. LAX originated in the St Lawrence Valley. In fact in 1860 it became Canada's National Game.......... Mike Ashley and the Toon Army say hello!
Cheapest season tickets for Real Salt Lake are €250 compared to €660 at Chelsea, so I'm not sure who is being milked.
Another source says that it was played by Native Americans as early as 1000 AD. The Canadian version heavily influenced the modern version
Sure. Not American mainstream so that’s why there are...checks notes... 73 NCAA Division I men’s lacrosse teams, at least two professional leagues, numerous NCAA D1 women’s teams, thousands of high school teams. As for the cultural appropriation comment should the Dutch not play soccer since they didn’t invent it? Don’t bother answering.
Chelsea are one of the worlds 'elite' clubs playing in the worlds 'elite' league, if ever Stamford Bridge has empty seats on match days they might think about lowering the cost but all the time all season tickets are sold and there are waiting lists then perhaps we can see why they don't, that's the difference. To be honest though I was priced out of football a long time ago.
Historical nitpick time, While James Naismith was a Canadian citizen when he invented the first rules for basketball, he was also living in the US at the time, invented the game on orders from his American boss to provide a wintertime activity for his American students, and his rules did not include many thing we would consider fundamental to basketball (such as a shot clock, three point line, not having a tip off after every basket, and being able to dribble the ball) that were later developments by Americans. To the point, who really invents something, the person who has the most basic idea of the core concept, or the person to builds up and refines that concept into a finished product?
Volleyball was invented at the Holyoke Massachusetts YMCA by an American, William G. Morgan, in 1895. Morgan had met Naismith and seen basketball in Springfield in 1892 just one year after Naismith invented it. Morgan thought basketball was too rough and vigorous for older and less fit YMCA patrons so he came up with what he called "mintonette" based on badminton and tennis. The YMCA board of physical education came up with the name volleyball and put it into their manual.
We are finally getting a USL team (well looks good won't celebrate until we actually kick off, even then will be nervous after our "Fleet misadventure"). And I do plan on getting season tickets, possibly joining the SG as well. And while I am excited to have a team and don't require it to have access to MLS to be interested, I would sure as hell be a lot more invested if we could. Simple as that. You can't know that for a fact. While pro/rel doesn't alone stop relocation it does reduce a lot of the factors driving it. And would make it much harder for the NFL to actively keep a market open in order to leverage other markets into using taxpayer funds to pay for a billionaires home. Which is exactly what happened in LA. And yes I am proud of my city for saying no to the bully, doesn't make the black eye we got not hurt though. I hear the argument that this is business and at the end of the day business people need protections for their investment or they won't invest. But here's the thing, if the fans started just treating this like business the whole thing is screwed.
If San Diego USL is successful they can either try to get an MLS bid or...and here's the beauty of our system versus the cartels that run Euro soccer...they can join with other well-heeled USL teams and build a D1 league. The standards aren't really that hard to meet.
That boat has sailed a long time ago. Sorry. You're a consumer. I'm a consumer. That's all you are. Sure some consumers treat the product differently than others but at the end of the day, a passionate sports fan is no different that the people who go to Comic Con and cosplay as Star Wars characters. You're a passionate consumer. I've read dozens of books that I think would make for a great movie but if a production company doesn't think it's worth the investment to greenlight a production it doesn't matter how passionate the fans of a novel are.
Hey don't get me wrong I am not happy with the prices charged at Premier League football matches but it does seem to be the going rate and because Premier League tickets are 'gold dust' despite their price the clubs don't feel the need to lower them. When I first went to Stamford Bridge you could stand in the shed end for a quid! I was too young at the time unfortunately. Then Ken Bates raised the price to a Lady Godiva to sit and my old man wasn't happy - when the press pointed out to Bates that it was more expensive to sit at 2nd division Stamford Bridge than it was to sit at 1st division Old Trafford he said 'yes but look at what you would save on the train fare!' :-D
Soccer tickets, like anything else, are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Granted, there has been a pretty concerted effort over the last few decades to "phase out" fans of teams who are lower than middle class (at least, in the stands). That's true in most major sports on both sides of the Atlantic.
That's clearly not the case in the BL, where prices remain low even though teams like Munich, Schalke and Dortmund could easily charge far higher prices. MLS teams are prioritising full stadiums over milking fans for short-term profit. Of course the long-term goal is to fill every stadium.
Humm looks like you're arguing both sides. On one side I constantly see the argument that creating a soccer league from scratch is a very expensive, difficult and risky proposition, hence the owners need assurances for their investment. But then you also argue it's quite simple. Having said that I actually do agree that as long as MLS is continuing to actively expand one of the main arguments for pro/rel in the US isn't there. We have seen a number of markets use USL to get into MLS and I am hoping that it's in the thinking of Landon and co. Now personally I would still prefer pro/rel but it's more of a personal preference as long as MLS is expanding. I know which is why I don't follow MLS, and haven't watched an NFL game in two seasons, after watching probably 50 a season for the previous 30 years. I am obviously an extreme case but the lesson I learned was how easy it was to replace NFL football in my life. I get that we are all to a certain extent being duped, fine, but let's keep some of the romance and unpredictability. Otherwise I might as well just watch CNBC all day
I agree, pro/rel is my preference but people seem to forget that soccer has officially been played in this country since 1862 and in all that time it failed to grow organically. In fact it has had 4 growth spurts, the 1890s, 1920s, 1970s and 2k+ all fueled by wealthy businessmen or owners who expected a return on their investment. I mean this is US professional soccer 131 years after the game was first played here: Kenn.com 5 teams after 131 years. How long do you let organic growth continue before you try something else?
I never argued to the contrary. The current buy in for USL Championship is $7 million, which isn't a small sum for the second tier of a niche sport in this country. Then you have some USL owners who've been there for a while who have helped build the league (like RSL's owner) who are supposedly being moved down to USL League 1. This is after many MLS teams have made the investment that allowed USL to get a D2 sanction. They don't want the value of their clubs to drop and I kinda hope they sue USL into oblivion. Getting a D1 sanction isn't that hard for a well-heeled league. Yes it still takes a ton of investment but to be D1 you need a 15,000 seat stadium, have a professional front-office setup (GM, etc.) and they need to meet pro-league standards for ownership. IIRC there's not a higher net worth requirement for D1 than other leagues. There's only the "pro" league standard. Those aren't insurmountable obstacles for rich owners. MLS rightly keeps people who can't operate a team out of their league but there's nothing stopping USL or NISA from taking bigger risks. The USSF standards are pretty simple but getting there takes investment...tons of it. There's never an argument for kicking a team out of a league for not having enough money to buy the merit to stay up. It only serves to punish fans and the only reason anyone thinks pro/rel is part and parcel to soccer is because, besides not being able to spell 'darby' correctly, the English couldn't figure out regional leagues and left their league organization in the hands of the FA cartel. This set a trend for the rest of the world that thankfully we don't participate in. Then don't pay to be entertained in any way. USL or any other league isn't more 'pure' than MLS because you're still a consumer to them.
Since this thread is into historical nitpicks about the origins of basketball, lacrosse and soccer at the at the moment, here are some: 1. The games that were played on the Boston Common by the Oneida Football Club in 1862 were not soccer. The game that the Oneidas played was much more similar to rugby than to association football. The first game played in the United States under the association football rules that were standardized at the Freemasons Tavern in London in 1863 was played in Waukesha, Wisc. on Oct. 11, 1866, between a team of Carroll College students and a team of Waukesha townies. 2. The first growth spurt in American soccer (not yet called soccer at the time) was in the 1880s, not the 1890s. It did not involve wealthy businessmen and owners. It involved factory workers in Fall River, Mass.; Kearny, N.J., and St. Louis. Particularly Fall River. 3. There were wealthy businessmen and owners involved in the first stirrings of professional soccer in the United States in the 1890s, but they weren't seeking a return on their investment. They were owners of professional baseball teams, and were seeking a use for their stadiums in the baseball off-season that would not be as unprofitable as letting those stadiums sit empty. I suppose that they were seeking to increase the return on their investment in baseball.