Republican tax bill takes aims at college athletics, stadium financing USA Today I would imagine this would dramatically impact the MLS expansion landscape, like for example when you hear announcements like this: Key Metro Council committee votes to endorse financing for $275M Nashville MLS stadium It will be interesting to see if this bill would affect the expansion race if this passes, and if cities like Columbus would have any leverage to keep their team if the owner is so hell-bent on Austin (though I don't think Austin ever offered any incentives as of yet).
I think this is great. Too many stupid public entities help finance wealthy owners’ stadiums. Studies show the community hardly benefits as compared to the owners. Let owners finance the whole thing themselves. Corporations have got to stop wringing concessions out of municipalities who struggle to take care of their residents.
I don't like that sports companies are often publicly singled out in this sort of thing. All sorts of companies get all kinds of benefits; look at Disneyland in Anaheim, or the bidding across the country for Amazon HQ2.
I wouldn't count on that tax bill passing. Still, I would be all for that provision. Sacramento (West) & Nashville (East) have to be 25 & 26 with Miami 24. Then we take a breath. See how the Columbus/Austin thing shakes out. Then make decisions on 27 & 28.
Agree completely on Sacramento and Nashville being the two most likely to be announced in December and perhaps we'll get some public assurance about Miami at that time as well with some indication of a timeline for their addition. Meanwhile, I'd be shocked if Detroit didn't get one of the final slots whereas Cincy's hopes could be influenced by the ultimate outcome of the Columbus/Austin scenario.
Do you watch MLS? Let's just say the talent pool is somewhat diluted and we don't need MORE teams. As much as I love to watch the quality of play has some 'room to grow'
Teams are singled out because the subsidies are so radically out of line with the public benefit. Spending hundreds of millions of public dollars to build a stadium so that an owner can increase ticket prices for the locals who fill the seats can't be compared to something like Disneyland, which draws millions of tourists every year.
Do you know of a top level league that has at least 24 clubs other than Argentina? England has multiple lower leagues with 24 clubs, but I don't know of any other European countries with leagues at any level with more than 22 clubs.
Know what's funny? I can go back to almost day one of MLS and see posts like yours. Tedious. There are a ton of factors at play, all of which have been explained concisely on multiple occasions, by numerous people, that you have either ignored (join date 2003), don't like, don't want to believe, so you throw out the same boring comment I guarantee you will toss out every year for the rest of your life. Yawn. I'm not going into the time, money, infrastructure, investment, coverage aspects, spreading knowledge needs, opportunity, world wide player pool, etc, etc, etc.... You are boring. You are tedious. Go ahead....time to get insulted and reply with some snark, and your opinion presented as fact, all as you take internet offense. Yawn.
It's hard to make an argument for the current parking structure rental agreement, which should be doing exactly that: bringing money into the city from tourism. The city owns it, but Disney rents it for $1 plus maintenance. When it's a municipality paying for a stadium or other business, they don't care if the 'tourists' are coming from five or five hundred miles away. And it's common for cities next to one another to bid each other down on other businesses; one pair of cities near where I live has a notorious rivalry over car dealerships, making deals that return large amounts of sales and property taxes to those who build in their auto malls. It serves no particular public benefit.
The stadium financing thing is definitely a slippery slope. The same sort of financing tools help cities/towns attract hotels, grocery stores, big-box retailers, performing arts, etc. Legally, it would be hard to draw the line at sports. You'd have to find some objective criteria that can be measured which would likely end up excluding some of the other things people like. I do agree that public funding for sports stadiums is ridiculous. It has helped kicked of an inflation in sports that drives up player salaries, ticket prices, etc. I know TV $ has more to do with it, but that's a different topic all together.
Detroit's stock has got to be down after the league's response to them deciding to put it in the NFL stadium. And I can understand why, since Ford Field will be one of the few (only?) to try to retro-fit to a soccer team, and in the best of circumstances, NFL stadiums are a gamble on getting very large attendances by MLS standards.
A week ago I would have agreed with you. They had the vision thing. The stadium announcement has hurt their bid, I’d imagine. As for public financing, it’s been given a bad name thanks to the behavior of more than a few NFL and MLB owners. But governments spend for the public good and/or to generate economic activity. Each case needs to be looked at individually. For example, the comparatively minor amount of money needed for the St Louis bid seemed like a good investment. As for the premise of this thread, without getting political, I think the Trump tax plan is about as likely to succeed as Obamacare repeal. So it’s going to be a moot point.
The original statement was "European leagues" not "top level league". The English Championship qualifies under the former but not the latter. (Though one could argue that a MLS who consistently met the standards of the Championship would be a damn good league even if it weren't a "top" league)
great logic Jay.... So the USA should be just like Europe... fine... then all we need is 55 leagues each with 18-22 teams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA that's just countries and that doesn't even include multiple leagues per country.
I'd be happy if no stadium go public funding... let's just hope this applies to every major sport in America and not just applied to MLS after MLB or NFL gets an exemption.
A lot of big businesses are given tax breaks as an incentive. There are 98 HGPs in MLS of which 51 have signed in the last two seasons. They include players like Jordan Morris, Nick Lima, Tyler Adams, Paxton Pomykal, Andrew Carleton, Marco Farfan, Jack McBean, Alphonso Davies and Ian Harkes. If 1/3rd of those players make it and that production rate continues I think there will be plenty of talent.
Those countries are MUCH smaller than the USA: Germany: 83 million France: 67 million Italy: 60 million England:54 million (65 million for UK) Spain: 46 million *USA: 326 million (plus another 37 million in Canada which is part of MLS) Also, consider our massive geography. Our single country is the size of the entire European continent. Add Canada, and it's twice the size of their entire continent. So, we can probably support a few more clubs than most other countries. If it's dilution of talent you're worried about, that's all about increasing revenue and the expansion of the league actually helps in that regard. By the way, people who criticize the quality of play in MLS are comparing it to a handful of the biggest and best teams in the world. Have those same people watched a match between Bournemouth and Crystal Palace? Palace went 7 games without scoring a single goal. Once you get past the elite teams in other leagues, it's not like you're seeing the "beautiful game" among the mid-table and bottom-table teams. And because the quality is so heavily consolidated at the top, there's no intrigue in most leagues about who is going to win. Every year you know it will be Barcelona or Real Madrid in La Liga, Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, PSG in Ligue 1, etc. Even in EPL there are 6 teams that are head and shoulders above the rest and only 3 real title contenders among them. There's no competitive balance.