Good morning everyone, congrats to those of you who's team advanced in the USOC last night. Good luck to those of you who's team plays tonight, unless they're playing FCD. Schweinsteiger unsure of his MLS future beyond this season Goal.com Health concerns make MLS's courtship of Ibrahimovic a complicated ... ESPN FC (blog MLS - Sky Sports Football skysports the 18dotcom soccer headlines The18 SI planet futbol Headlines Si MLS News, Analysis, Results & Stats foxsports MLS TSN headlines TSN Cbc.cananda soccer Headlines CBC Canada Fourfourtwo MLS Headlines 442 Major League Soccer News and Scores ESPN FC
Luke covered the main points. I've heard a few things I'm not going to discuss. Publicly, Malik has said the three sites they're looking at are all in Wake County. One of which is an undeveloped parcel adjacent to WakeMed Soccer Park - which would possibly be the worst possible location with regards to traffic flow in and out. Wednesday night games are already hell with only 5-6k attending. I believe the other is in downtown Raleigh. While that'll get all the expansion board fan-boys wet, isn't particularly relevant or preferable in this sprawled market. Malik is definitely a doer not a talker. I honestly don't know if he's got the wealth to play at the MLS level by himself or not. If he does, I'd put Raleigh in the top four based on what I see behind the scenes. The problem with that is that I don't see behind the scenes of the other expansion bids, but then none of the other 11 expansion bids was asked to take the open pro council seat on the USSF board, either.
Given how the North Hills area has developed, if they put it there, it will be very similar to the vaunted "downtown location." (When I was a wee boy growing up literally 1 mile from there, in a different part of North Hills, we were at the edge of developed Raleigh. Now that area is somewhat pretentiously called Midtown. It's dense with restaurants and bars; it's very difficult to find a parking place on a Friday or Saturday night.) There would have to be some road work done, but the area is open enough for that.
Sure, add an MLS team just as I'm about to leave the area. Glancing at the plans, looks like the proposed Durham-Wake commuter rail would go through Morrisville and Cary.
I live just north of I-85 in the very northwest corner of Durham city limits. It's 27 miles to WakeMed. That's 28 minutes after the game tonight. Getting there for the USOC game tonight will likely take over an hour - and that's using the short cuts and surface street routes I've learned over the years to get past the nastiness on I-40, the Durham Freeway, or alternate routes like US-70 and I-540. North Hills would not be an improvement to my commute. But honestly, if we got an MLS team - and I got a job with the organization, I'd probably have to move to Raleigh eventually. The savings in time/transportation costs/aggravation alone would make it worthwhile.
Um, that last link was just another navel-gazing BS post about whether MLS will ever overtake the NHL as part of the "big four." Yawn. I was expecting something about how if Bruce Arena wasn't such a self-righteous arrogant prick, a guy who scored more than 100 MLS goals might have gotten more than a mere sniff at the NT.
We're less than a decade from when a post-lockout NHL had 30 teams - each of which spent more on salaries in a year than all 12/13/14 MLS teams did. The only reason that isn't true is because there are now 22 MLS teams and now up to 3 DPs/team. People who engage in such silliness don't realize how much the big 4 American leagues dwarf pretty much everything else on the planet. While individual soccer clubs can outspend individual big-4 teams in the U.S., there is no league even in the same ballpark. My guess is that the Czechs in the NHL make more than the same number of top paid Czech soccer players everywhere else in the world combined. And that might be true for Finns, Austrians, Slovaks, Russians, and Swiss. It's just not worth worrying about. MLS will (or won't) catch the EPL before it catches the NHL or NBA.
A lot of the time it's people who do not live in hockey markets who make that comparison. The Bruins charge beaucoup bucks for tickets, way more than the most expensive MLS ticket and still sell out 41 home games. We also have several AHL teams (with cheaper tickets) within an hour of Boston, not to mention many top collge hockey programs in the area. And forget it if you've evern been to Canada, where hockey is YUGE even in the off-season. The NHL isn't going anywhere, and nor should it. MLS is a very viable league and can/will grow even further to the point where it is relevant in every market. You can see this happening over time, and every World Cup cycle is a bigger and bigger deal. It's a gradual thing, which is fine by me.