The recent expansion teams are not all wildly successful. Seattle (2009) can be contrasted with Philadelphia (2010); Portland (2011) with Montreal (2012); and Atlanta (2017) with Minnesota (also 2017). The notion of a 1.0 and 3.0 league is false. There are simply good owners who invest in the product and bad owners who don't.
So a dirty player head butted another player in the face. It is clearly visible in video and got no punishment. You know what ruidiaz just learned....to continue to play like a dirty punk. If this is what MLS wants, good for them. Not only that he got the player he hit in the face red carded. This is not the last time he will do something like this. I guess mls likes thugs.
I object. Very hard to argue that the team currently 7th in the league in attendance isn't pretty darn successful (at least off the field) in its own right.
"Pretty darn" ain't quite the same as "wildly." I can envision the video now, "Minnesota girls gone pretty darn."
There's also a lot of landing room between Atlanta and complete and utter failure of a market, which is what TOzer is predicting in Austin.
If NYC had called themselves Man City USA you could have counted me out. I think that goes for a lot of fans.
I wonder if Chivas USA had launched under the name LAFC as a secondary tenant in Carson back in 2005, how things would have worked out.
Just as terribly. The ownership group was arrogant and thought they could dominate MLS with 3rd team Guadalajara rejects. They didn't do a single bit of English language marketing until YEAR 5. The name Chivas USA was an issue, but it was a a minor one. Business schools around the world should study Chivas USA as a Marketing 101 of what not to do.
That's gonna be an outrageous notion to people who'll make proclamations about the success of a prospective team based on the success of teams 200 miles away, people who coincidentally forget about the AEG ownership of the Dynamo. Looking at Anthony Precourt, who was a shitty owner in Columbus, and predicting that he'd be a shitty owner in Austin or anywhere else? That's just a wild-assed, groundless prediction, according to those folks.
But to say that the Precourt-owned Austin Fightin' Neckbeards is gonna be way more successful than the Precourt-owned Columbus Crew requires one to believe that Anthony Precourt will have his eyes opened about how to successfully run a professional soccer team in the United States somewhere between Columbus and Austin, or that he was an evil genius who was Rachel Phelps-ing the Crew the entire time. The former, while possible, is very unlikely. The latter seems to be refuted by the low level of competence with which this relocation has been handled thus far and the low level of competence with which Precourt has run the team in Columbus while getting ready for the move.
Maybe not an evil genius, but we do know, based on the contract that he signed when he bought the Crew that his intentions were to move the team to Austin from day 1. Knowing that it isn't that outrageous to think that his apathy and malaise in Columbus was deliberate to force the hand of the BOG to approve a relocation request. After all, a rising tide lifts all boats, and and anchor does the opposite. You can also look at the fact that Precourt is privately financing 100% of the stadium construction costs in Austin but wasn't willing to do that in Columbus. The guy wanted to be in Austin. He devised a plan to make that happen. That really isn't a crazy theory when you look at the facts. P.S. There are A LOT of Columbus fans who believe that Precourt was deliberately tanking as an owner in Columbus so he could go to MLS BOG and say "see, this market isn't working, let me leave".
That's real swell and all, but his actions throughout this saga do not exactly indicate evidence of any sort of long or even medium term planning. The Earthquakes move to Houston in 2006 was not universal beloved, but one thing that you can say about AEG is that they handled it quickly and decisively and with a minimum of fuss, outside of some naming issues. They announced the move at the end of 2005 and the team was playing in Robertson Stadium in April of 2006 with a new name, new uniform, and good crowds. Meanwhile, PSV has been the gang that couldn't shoot straight from the moment that Grant Wahl spilled the beans. I'm sorry, but that's supposed to impress me? I'd be more impressed if he actually got the City of Austin to pony up some serious cash for this stadium, outside of forgoing tax revenues on land for which they were already getting zero tax revenues. And he's doing this on land that is a terrible place for a 20,000 seat stadium, no matter how badly some people want to sunshine-pump it as a great location. (Hint: It ain't. It's horrible. It has poor access by car, by bus, and by train. There's no room for parking and no firm plan for more parking.) Saying that he had a "plan to leave Columbus" is really overselling it. An actual plan would've involved more, you know, planning and behind-the-scenes work in Austin. That probably would've prevented his mouthpiece from standing in front of the City Council touting the academy as a community benefit one week, then saying "well, maybe we shouldn't have counted that as a community benefit" the next week when someone had the temerity to point out that the Crew's academy is boys-only. Some advance planning might've prevented his boys from being surprised by an actual state law in the state where he currently owns a team. It seems to me that literally the only things that he did that had anything with a whiff of advance planning were (a) tanking the Crew in Columbus and (b) greasing four city council members. And even then, that may not be enough, if there's a referendum to overturn the City Council, which there might still be in a city that has been famously unfriendly to pro sports stadiums over the years. But yeah, let's give the guy a ********ing participation medal for bumbling and stumbling this far with his half-assed scheme.
I don't anyone is disputing this in a general sense, or that the plan may prove personally beneficial to him. What many of us are saying is that this plan is a harmful precedent for the league to abide by selling someone a franchise knowing that person wants to move it from day 1. It flies in the face of how sports is supposed to be community oriented in asking fans across the league to be die hard through thick and thin but allowing owners to treat those same fans with disdain. In short, it's a great plan for PSV but as it's laced with selfish and cruel intent don't be surprised when others call it out for the shameful act it is. Pretty much everyone who has followed the story knows that's what he's been doing. That's why we're so pissed about it.
This is the same playbook Ken Behring used in the mid-90s to move the Seattle Seahawks to Anaheim. He even got as far as having players report to the Rams facility in California for off-season workouts and moved the executive offices down there. Anyone who's saying Columbus to Austin is a done deal needs to look at their history. The Seahawks were a lot closer to moving than the Crew is now.
San Francisco Giants to Toronto... San Francisco Giants to Tampa Bay... Minnesota Twins to New Jersey... Minnesota Twins to Las Vegas... Minnesota Twins to Portland... Minnesota Twins to Greensboro... Minnesota Twins to contracton... Minnesota Timberwolves to New Orleans... Minnesota Vikings to Los Angeles... Minnesota Vikings to San Antonio... Not until you see the tail lights is the move done and dusted.
Buffalo Bills to Toronto Buffalo Bills to LA Phoenix Coyotes to Hamilton Phoenix Coyotes to Winnipeg Jacksonville Jaguars to London (this one could still happen in a few years) Sacramento Kings to Seattle San Francisco Giants to San Jose New Orleans Saints to San Antonio New Orleans Saints to Oklahoma City
All of the people in this thread that I've replied to are disputing this. That's why I wrote it. No argument. Except for their not. We all like to romanticize sports and make them more than what they are. But at the end of the day, they are business and decisions are made based on balance sheets, not the emotions of the community. Yup. Welcome to the world of business.