What type of players would take part in a league run like a glorified Div. II college program? Questions that need to be answered: 1. Will the top internationals come play for peanuts and be displaced from home for 3 or 4 months. Especially with Olympic tune ups! 2. There comes a time when some of these young women have to decide, "do I continue to live a dream or do I get on with my life and get a job?" 3. Will soccer fans tolerate WUSA2 not having the best players on the pitch, just so that they can keep it "visible". Second rate soccer might hurt more than help!!! With the Internationals you will have to round out the rosters with lesser domestic quality. 4. Who is going to coach for basically no money. At this point Assistant Coaches will have to be volunteers. These adults have families to worry about. Can they hang around and wait, hope that it does in fact take off in 2005. Assistants made around 48,000 to 50,000 a year. Not this time around!! WUSA couldn't get Waldrum or Jerry Smith from their respective Univ.. when it was the best players. Who would do it now? Why not wait a year and do it right? After all, 1 year to get it right isn't all that bad. No World Cup, No Olympics, just a league with all the best players and coaches!!
Interesting point... take the talent pool at the end of 2003, and how many of the roster players would continue to play into 2004??? And take the corresponding job markets... how many WUSA players could cease playing and find jobs where they'd make nearly the same amount of money... not a pleasing jobmarket out there... International players generally were working full time, or close to it while pursuing their hobby... soccer as a hobby is closer to the reality than the concept of professional soccer... wusa offered a new world, not an ideal one... I suspect rapid roster turnover would be a rule...I don't see a shortage of players willing to pursue a roster spot... 8 teams at say 20 slots is 160 players... my whole speech from year 2001 was WUSA was to succeed by generating new STARS to replace the FOUNDERS... this has been a mixed bag....oddly it's more the INTERNATIONALS success in wusa..from prinz and meinert to pichon and katia... my view is a year without soccer sends more players into alternate life plans... which is the right approach.... I'd play in 2004...and live with whatever it is.
I'd agree with Adam (for once!): having a league of any sort in 2004 is less disruptive and maintains continuity better than not having a league, and this is true at all levels: players, staff, fans, visibility, etc. The longer a wait before bringing the league back, the more it will be like starting over from scratch.
I understand your point about the players! It is easier for them to wait it out. Although I don't think a $25,000 job is too difficult to find. Most of these young women have degrees they could put to use. I don't think there will be a shortage of players trying to fill roster spots. What about the quality of these players though. Players aside, what about the coaching? They need to decide, go for a coaching job in college, which start getting announced as soon as seasons end (Mid November) or stick it out and delay and possibly have to wait another year for the college jobs to open up. I don't think it's so black and white with the coaches. I wouldn't want to be in their position. What's wrong with starting from scratch! The first try was a disaster. Start over and do it right!
WUSA2 One of the keys for USA WNT is the Olympics. A four team league with all teams in the East to reduce travel costs, and little emphasis on foreign participation might give the USWNT the competition and training required to be ready for Greece. It could be like the four team tournaments that the US Basketball teams have used to choose and prepare for the Olympics in the past.
I'd view 2004 more as a barnstorming effort... On any 20 player roster, perhaps as many as 10 players could change from year to year... The top 50% of the roster is where teams succeed and fail... The bottom 50% is where I see tons of transition, where the difference in skill level to non-roster skill level is more narrow. Take a player like Stacy Tullock, a significant player for the Charge for two years, although it's a very small minority who recognize her value. Playing in 2004, could easily keep her in wusa, while waiting a year, could easily mean she's off pursuing other options. every team has a half dozen similar cases... I understand the idea of 2005 with a fresh start, getting the management phase in order... Identifying the talent to run the league effectively is the challenge facing the league ... established business guru's I'd doubt are very much interested in such a low profile venture... getting the proper business acumen in place is the key.. I guess we need to make oliver dictator and grin and bear it.
The thing is, the league only needs a few stars, the rest should be semi-pro where their travel expenses are covered and they get a small amount of compensation. Sure, you'll loose some players but you can probably still get 1/2 the butts in the seats that the WUSA did with costs that would not only enable the league to survive while it built a fan base but even turn a profit.
Re: WUSA2 how about 4 in the east and 4 in the west, the winner of each side meet once for the championship, so there'll be only one long distance trip each year, at the end of the season.
Hey, that's an insult to Div II programs! They're much better run than WUSA! I'm also in the camp of waiting a couple of years. My hope had been for WUSA to die and go away so that all our efforts wouldn't be wasted on something so hopeless. Now we have the opportunity to reload and do it right. My hope is for a WMLS to start up in 2005 or 2006. I'm convincing myself more and more though that the next Div I league will not be in the US, but in Europe.
Re: Re: WUSA2 Where in the west? San Siego wants nothing to do with it and San Jose costs way too much. Is someone willing to try LA? Portland? Denver? If you got that much money to lose, why not Vegas, too?
A professional league needs to be independent of any national team. It's the merit of the league itself which will cause the league to thrive. To organize your football future around pursuing a gold medal, creates a venture subserviant to the national team. I think this is a flawed approach. Creating a league LESS dependent on the national team and USSF is a better option... another point...waiting 2 years means the CORE name players are TWO years OLDER... creating the new stars is my model for success...so those recently graduated from college are the critical players to me... And having them replace the status of the FOUNDERS is one basis for a successful league.
WMLS is never going to happen. Women's soccer needs to take a look at the US 2nd division (A-leauge) for ideas about how to run a successful league. Top A-league players earn between $50,000-$60,000 a year. Bottom level players might make $10,000 for the season. Most teams have a salary budget of $500,000. A women's league could survive on that and would only need to average around 3000 fans a game to break even.
I think WMLS can happen when MLS has enough soccer-specific stadia (or good deals on other stadia like I think they do in NE and KC with NFL connections) but that's a minimum of 2-3 years away and I think they'd be happier letting someone else run the show if they step up. I agree that the A-League would be a good model for WUSA II to follow.
Momentum in professional sports is everything. In this case, even with the negative buzz surrounding the suspension of operations...WUSA is in the public eye right now. Out of sight is out of mind...out of mind is lost momentum which will make it that much harder to "re-launch". Laying out one year or two years or five years will attach a stigma of "failure" to women's soccer as a whole (the larger end of the bell curve won't associate the failure with "WUSA"...they'll associate the failure with "women's soccer". And who wants to associate with a "failure"? For professional womens' soccer to maintain viability, it must be kept going on whatever level remains feasible in the short term. Use Arena Football as an example and model...they played on a big scale their first few years, then went virtually underground for 3-5 years getting their finances back in order. They never "ceased operations"...just flew below the radar for a while. Now they've built the sport into something that a major television network has invested in and major NFL money has found its way into (by way of Jerry Jones and John Elway). A few years of "WUSA-light" will be less damaging in the long run than "WUSA-out-of-sight".