When will the MLS be top 4?

I think average revenue and salary per game would be more accurate, calculated like average attendance. Leagues are going to have substantially higher revenues and salaries when they play more games.

 

More accurate for what, painting MLS in the most favorable light? Meanwhile, the NFL tops the list in revenue and plays the fewest games by far.

 

NFL has the largest roster size and NBA is the smallest so the Avg. Salary is skewed a bit.

 

Upon opening this thread I was expecting an OP along the lines of: "When will MLS be on par with La Liga/EPL/Serie A/Bundesliga"...and I was going to have to post this...



Au contraire, this isn't one of those threads! Kudos OP!

 

It will be a top 4 league in the US when people actually start to watch it on TV. This will happen when everyone that actually likes soccer in the US start to watch MLS. This will happen when the level of play of MLS increases and teams start developing American talent that become world class players.

 

Honestly, I think it will happen when the older generations die.

I don't mean that harshly at all because I know there are still a good amount of fans over the age of, say, 45. However, I don't think we can deny that the younger generations are far more accepting of the sport as a part of American culture and thus more likely to watch it on TV.

Every year the sport gains more and more relevance.

 

We're having a version of this discussion in the Commissioner forum right now so I won't repeat all of that here, but here's the short version:

Forget the NFL and MLB, but focus on the revenue line for the NBA and NHL. For MLS to have comparable revenue, assuming a NBC type US TV contract that paid $200M a year like the NHL and comparable ticket pricing, MLS teams need to average about 700,000 fans a year. With 17 regular season home games, that's 41,176 per game.

Simply put, Seattle attendance numbers have to be the rule, not the exception.

In other words, not soon . . .

 

the problem isnt that people dont like soccer. its that most people that like soccer dont watch MLS. When MLS captures the soccer audience, that is when it will enter the top 4.

 

I guess the TV ratings are a black hole in the chart above for now, but I wonder if the combined TV viewership of all the soccer leagues by people living in the Canada/US market would even come close to cracking NFL numbers. I'd venture to say it would be somewhere in the NHL realm.

 

When TV sportscasters' attitudes towards soccer changes.

 

Might catch and overtake the NHL by 2025-2030, but the other three sports? Much longer.

 

It'll be easier to forecast when the MLS renegotiates its CBA (Assuming the increase in Salary Cap is large enough).

It should bring about an interesting dynamic to change, more better players will want to come to MLS, more owners will be attracted to the league, more teams will join, and MLS will be putting its money where its mouth is.

2022 is a realistic expectation. But I want to wait til a new CBA before I put a stamp of confidence on it.

 

How can MLS catch up if the other leagues have greater gains in year-by-year revenue? Just going by revenue (and the revenue figures in the chart above), the only way MLS catches the NHL by 2022 is if it grows by $300 million each year and the NHL has zero growth, which would definitely be going against its trend. Even with the lockout, I believe NHL tv ratings are up.

 

When superstars in the other 4 leagues sign contracts that cost more than our stadiums..... It means it going to be awhile.

 

It will be amongst the top four leagues when MLS finally comes to its senses and stops Americanizing its league with its divisions and conferences and its playoffs and its spring to fall schedule and of course its single entity franchise system and salary cap that's an abomination unto Football God™, and starts being what the great soccer leagues in the world do by becoming a single table league that has only 20 teams independant from MLS and plays each other twice in a season, home and away from fall to spring, with no playoffs where the league champions are the ones that finish the season at the top of the table and, most important of all, PROMOTION AND RELEGATION, where the worst teams in the league get sent down and replaced with the best teams in the league below it that will be created and strengthened because all of the above will be implemented which will instantly create millions of brand spanking new soccer fans in America that will fall magically in love with the Beautiful Game, which in turn will then cause the major U.S. television networks to throw billions of dollars its way with new TV contracts to showcase the league, forever and ever, Amen. Because that's exactly what some of the expert posters here on BigSoccer say will happen, and if you disagree with them, then you're not a real soccer fan.

Oh, almost forgot, the teams from Godless socialist Canada need to get the hell out and form their own league so that they can make way for real American soccer cities like Boisie, Tulsa, and Tuscon.

 

Marginal gains, MLS currently still has more to gain on the margin. MLS is still moving along its slow growth model, when the league feels comfortable it'll loosen constraints.
Think in terms of year-to-year revenue. If MLS's revenue from 2020-2021 is not significantly different from the revenues of the "big 4" by all acounts MLS would have made it on revenue.

Something interesting to note. is that MLS only has 2/3 the market size of all the other leagues (i.e. # teams). So you'd expect if to be normal for MLS to have a smaller revenue stream and a smaller TV contract.
Another factor is years active as a professional league, (NFL:92, MLB:144, NHL:95, NBA:67, MLS:17) . Although how do you really define professional? and how much accurate data can be acquired. it might be more realistic to say years active since 1950 (sports fans that were 10 years old then are still alive now) . the big 4 would fall to 62, a more uniform number, while MLS would still be 17.

The point is, it wouldn't be too difficult to set up a regression, and to see which variables MLS should change to catch up to the big 4 by 2022.

 

Economically at least, as soon as MLS is top 4 in the US they are on par with EPL.

 

It's closer to $30 million. I'm not going to look it up, but the NBC, ESPN and Spanish-language (don't remember which network, Unimundo or TeleVision or something) rights add up to something like $27m.

 

The $200m you have listed for the NHL is only for the US. The Canadian NHL rights are an additional $100m just for the CBC. (I doubt Canadian TV numbers impact the value of the other Big Four TV contracts significantly.)