OK, but teams can't just be magically willed into existence to create sufficient numbers for a regionalized circuit. NISA formed a league with the clubs it had, not the clubs it wished it had.
Oh, and another piece of info relating to that "FIFA MANDATE" that pro/rel thumpers like to point to all the time. FC Juarez bought Lobos BUAP's license and is now in LigaMX. Lobos is defunct.
It's that you can suck in the CL but win your domestic table and that gets you enough money to keep rolling your domestic table, creating the perma champs referenced in Jason's article and hinted at in your analysis of the dutch champions. Seems like before, there was more variance in league winners, most likely due to management/coaching/playing talent. WHich probably increased attendance and income, but not nearly as much as CL money.
. Okay so hypothetically CL spots become locked in so now mirrors the US system. That doesn't make the situation better actually makes it significantly worse. There is an issue with gap growing between Europe's elite and the rest but it's not pro/rel's fault.
CL money didnot exist before 1992. The money a club earned was the selling of tickets and the match to tv stations and that not much for clubs not from the big 5 countries. In the 2004/2005 edition the CL pay out in total to the clubs was around 400 million€€ (http://101voetbalmomenten.nl/2018/11/06/champions-league/), so it's not so wild to make a statement 12 years earlier it will have been a fraction of this.
Not sure I agree with this statement. At least when it comes to the Northeast and upper midwest. I mean you said baseball was the exception but it's a pretty big exception considering it was the model for the Football League.
History says differently. PSV won 3 titles in the Amateur era and Feyenoord won 5. Feyenoord hadn't won the title in 16 years at the advent of the Eredivisie. Ajax had 8 titles but 5 of them had been won in the thirties and two in 1918 and 1919. Their title in the inaugural Eredivisie season was their first in a decade. In the 10 seasons prior to the Eredivisie, there had been 9 different champions (Willem II won it twice). 10 different clubs have won titles in the entire professional era. Worse still, out of 65 Eredivisie titles, there have only been 8 won by a team outside that trio. So it's quite clear that once money became a factor, the whole dynamic changed. Ajax and Feyenoord quickly began to dominate, with PSV joining them from the seventies onward.
I think someone made this point a while ago, but the reason high school sports are so popular in the US is because once you went west of the Mississippi, most towns weren't founded until the 19th century. The only institution in those towns that everyone supported was the new high school, and its sports teams. The high school took the place that sports clubs have in European countries. There simply wasn't enough civic support for the creation of all-ages sports clubs. There are thousands of amateur sports clubs around the US that travel regionally to play their opponents. They're just based out of high schools. For some reason, many non-Americans seem to have a tough time wrapping their heads around the idea of high school sports in the US.
And not just high schools, junior highs and even down to middle schools (6th grade, ~12 year olds) will have teams that travel to nearby towns. Though there's really no fanbase for those teams outside of the school students and the parents of the players. High school is really the only point where town/area residents will be fans even if they don't have a direct tie to the school.
No, but part of the apprehension to make the leap is concern over travel budgets. If you figure that the "original" NISA 8 were: Connecticut Providence Philadelphia Atlanta Daytona Beach -> Baton Rouge Charlotte LA SD Obviously NISA doesn't actually look much like that (and it's current existence is largely due to 1904, so it's sort of hard to exclude them, but we're just talking hypotheticals here), but assuming the first 5 weren't charlatans and vaporware, this becomes a more attractive option for the eastern Founders Cup teams (CFC, DCFC, Milwaukee Torrent, Miami, Cosmos) because the smaller the footprint, the easier to make the transition. I definitely agree that you sometimes have to go with "what you got" (NISA definitely falls into this category because of the aforementioned 1904), but I think USL-1 miscalculated to accommodate Tucson and might have gotten more initial interest if teams didn't have to worry about more travel than a Championship team. So, sure, we're still a long a way off from leagues the size of AAA or NCAA conferences (although that would be the ideal), I don't think it's unrealistic for a D3 league to form in a Boston->Charlotte->Ohio shaped/sized area.
NPSL Pro or whatever it was going to be called was meant to be an unsanctioned professional league governed by USASA..
Ajax won't take legal action despite UEFA 'admissions' over ... www.mirror.co.uk › ... › Champions League - Vertaal deze pagina 6 feb. 2020 - Edwin van der Sar says it is "hopeless and pointless" for Ajax to take legal action against UEFA over the refereeing in their draw with Chelsea ...
Absolute bullshit, it's not the referees fault Ajax imploded! The referee simply followed the rules of the game! It's time you got over yourself, you're starting to look pathetic!
But they couldn't get sanctioned because they couldn't get insurance and they couldn't get insurance because they were a pro league. But there was never an option for them to be unsanctioned: that's why it fell apart.
It was quite a bit of culture shock when my family moved from Toronto to suburban Michigan before my senior year. The high school football stadium sat about 2,000, and most games were sold out. People in town actually came to football games, even though they didn’t have kids in the school. And that’s nothing compared to how places like Texas take high school football seriously.
High school football is the dominant religion in Texas. One of the main reasons the NFL doesn't play on Fridays: if they did, the Cowboys and the Texans would have maybe 5,000 in the stands while many of the local high schools would draw twice as many people. Having gone to high school in Texas, I can pretty much guarantee it. Even big cities practically shut down on Friday nights during high school football season. My state semifinalist high school soccer team played in front of about 50 people most of the time, in the same stadium where the football team, whose best season in my four years of high school was 2-8, would play in front of more than 7,000 on average.
The NFL doesn't play on Friday or Saturday during college football season because if they did they would lose their antitrust exemption for pooling broadcast rights.
By the way, the Dutch soccer landscape until 1940 was a quilt of regional leagues and city related ones. In that year all the separateleagues joined the NVB and became sub leagues. So there wasnot a national competition. In the early stages the champion of the West was declared national champion. Only around 1899 there was a first play off for the national title between the east and the west. Around 1913 the south was allowed in too and in 1916 the north joined the play off for the national title. On top of that we also had separate leagues for Christian and Catholics. https://sportgeschiedenis.nl/encyclopedie/voetbalgeschiedenis/algemene-voetbalgeschiedenis/ After the war we had two leagues, amateur KNVB and a pro league of 10 clubs. In 1954 the two leagues became one league with a pro competition in 4 regional leagues. The champion was decided in a play off. In 1957 the Eredivisie was formed with below that one leagues with promotion/relegation in and out of it. So titles before that nation wide league arenot comparable with the pro titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_the_Netherlands
I'm not sure how else to say "pro/rel contributes" .... and how has been stated several times already. If you're an Arsenal or ManU or whatever top end elite team do you want a system that gives as much footing to your competition as possible or one that literally has a draining effect on them and actually churns over clubs each year effectively all but eliminating a few clubs from being competitors every season?
My impression was that many people at the games didn't really care about what was happening on the field. Rather, the game was more of a social gathering for the whole town. I knew plenty of high school kids who were just at the games to hang out with their friends. Which makes sense- in rural towns and sprawling exurbs, there isn't usually a central social hub for people to gather, so the Friday night football game serves that purpose. I think high school sports are the only viable amateur sports in large swathes of this country. For better or worse, the portion of the school budget that subsidizes sports like football helps pay for transportation costs and the like. I can't really see a model where amateur clubs outside of densely populated cities could afford the costs of travel and other expenses.
Travelling amateur youth clubs are very important for development in pretty much every sport except American football, but they rarely draw any spectator interest.