[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqcLaNacMzw"]YouTube - MISL, Major Indoor Soccer League, Krys Furman ALLMix[/ame] This seems to be all pre-1985 MISL footage. Pretty cool.
Also on Youtube is part of a Philadelphia Fever vs San Francisco Fog game and if you look under the Baltimore Blast, you will find Game 4 of the 1982/1983 MISL Championship Series where Peter Baralic scores a shorthanded goal with 46 seconds left to tie San Diego and they go on to win game 4 in OT. Al Trautwig does play by play on the USA Network. There are also highlights of Hartford Hellions on Youtube.
Something is wrong.........there is talent on the field, fans in the stands filled with excitement, and arenas.....REAL arenas. Where the heck are they playing at the 2 minute mark? Doesn't ring any bells. Scott Manning was one of my favorites. Love the expressions on his face.
Excellent work finding this. Not too many fans at the Cow Palace in 1981 for that game against the Fever.
I love this footage, but the owners STILL lost their asses, with significantly larger amounts than they do today (without accounting for inflation). With packed arenas, and TV deals, our sport couldn't make a profit. We have to accept (or not) that the level of our sport is simply going to be played at a point where enough owners can stay alive with enough teams in a league to create acceptable losses to the ownership group. If one of us went out and won a couple hundred million bucks on the powerball, and were able to underwrite half a million bucks of losses per team, and had a 10 league team - we could keep going for 40 years til the money was gone. Thats the economics.
Ticket prices were too low and salaries were too high back in 1985. If they had TV and full arenas and didn't make money it didn't have anything to do with the sport, but the economic model. In today's $$ the salary cap was about $2.70 million per team. But, yes, it's an entirely different reality for the sport today.
I recall the owner of the NASL team here in Edmonton, who also owned the NHL Oilers, saying during that era is he only had to pay the soccer players what he was paying the hockey players, he'd be making a mint. But then again his business practices were rather questionable back then, and apparently haven't gotten any better, he eventually went bankrupt and moved to California in '02... since then his house has been raided 3 or 4 times by federal agents and been arrested for fraud.
The salaries were way out of line and didn't match up with the income. Those owners were nuts and the players union didn't help the situation. The owners thought that they were on the ground floor of a breakout of a new sport. They were burned through money and it was hopeless.
It's really no different today in MLB, the NHL and NBA. The numbers are all bigger and so are the losses. Some teams only make money when they get about 10 playoff sellouts to stem the losses. Lots of teams are losing $20+ million a year.