MLS Single Entity Sends Handicapped Clubs to CCL. Do We Not Know, or Not Care?

Pro/rel won't be a magic bullet for Div2. Regionalized leagues will be the magic bullet. We can't force a national second division on soccer. Even minor league baseball doesn't do that.

 

You are right leagues should grow from regianal leagues, D-2, D-3 should merge and split into 8 regions (like the WPSL) and then if the fans come to the games, then they can start forming upper divisions little by little (with rel/pro) but this is not what is going on below MLS, the franchise model is what America knows, and that is what they all try to follow.

Also if you look at the numbers for D-2 and D-3 the number of fans are just not there, (other than Montreal) who gets MLS numbers 13K+.

 

Weak? I mean I think already it has been shown that ANY team can have success at one time or another, its just down to the coach, and the moves they make players wise.

Look at the red bulls, crappiest team in the MLS for a while, but even they made it to a MLS final and as of recently have had the strongest offense i've seen out of them ever recently, and play attractive, FINALLY. What their fans have asked for, thanks to a smart new coach, and smart moves by the club itself.

My point is, a team will win sooner or later, heck even the weaker teams would still probably rip shit in concacaf, if the salary cap was raised to a decent level, because even the crappy teams would have decent talent. Like in mexico, even the teams that are doing bad, still put us through hell, when they'd qualify to the CCL but would have a terrible season that year in the mexican league.

 

Why? We're talking about two ways of maintaining some semblance of parity in a league: through promotion and relegation or through payroll controls. Promotion and relegation does okay at handling large leagues but doesn't do much at the top of the pyramid where it can't act. So you end up with a lot of Scotlands and not very many Germanies.

Promotion and relegation means a few teams have a chance to do better in international competition; the trade-off is that almost all teams have no shot at winning anything domestically. In CONCACAF, that means giving one or two teams an extra few meaningful games in the CCL at the expense of having most of the regular season games be meaningless and most of the cities in the country doomed never to see CONCACAF play at all.

I really don't see how this is an improvement.

Who's "we," kemo sabe? How much of your money is invested in MLS? You didn't sell the MLS ownership anything, and they aren't going to sell you anything back. Before MLS, you in Denver had the Colorado Comets to root for. How well did they do in CONCACAF?

I don't know about that. I personally don't want there to be promotion and relegation, but I could see MLS implementing it someday when the conditions were right, if fans continue to demand it. Of course, that doesn't mean they'd dump the salary cap; just that teams would be relegated to a league with a lower salary cap. I absolutely don't see the salary cap going away ever.

The question is, did the Cosmos help sink the league with wild spending that unbalanced the league? To answer this question, it makes sense to look at those seasons in which the Cosmos existed and had gobs of money to do all that spending.

So where are all of the people willing to invest enough money to make American soccer teams internationally competitive without the protection of single entity, no promotion/relegation, and a hard salary cap? If you know any, please send them to St. Louis. Talk about Clint Dempsey: that team was bankrupted by Steve Ralston.

This is a bizarre conspiracy theory. Are you really saying that the NFL is scheming to protect itself from an angry mob of fans imposing promotion and relegation on American football? Because that's so ridiculous I'm not even sure where to start.

And worse--you're claiming that they're doing this to avoid paying "Clint Dempsey" level salaries. Clint Dempsey, a very much above-average Premier League player (something you seem determined to ignore), is earning about $2 million, which is more or less the average NFL salary. The average baseball player earns about $3 million. By American standards, soccer players, even the very top ones at the very top teams, are ridiculously underpaid.

The highest paid player in the Premier League is Emmanuel Adebayor, at around $10.8 million a year. The highest paid soccer player in the world is Cristiano Ronaldo, who makes around $16.5 million. In 2009, sixteen baseball players and four NFL players made more than Ronaldo, and dozens of American athletes made more than Adebayor.

Salaries in the American "closed" systems are already higher than international salaries, and that's with salary caps in place. There is no rational reason to think that the they are terrified of having to pay someone a quarter of what the Orioles pay Brian Roberts.

So that the other teams have someone to play?

Besides: promotion and relegation don't get rid of weak teams; they just replace them with other weak teams. American leagues instead give the bad teams an opportunity to improve, with salary controls, entry drafts, and so on.

I have yet to hear a real argument as to why replacing a bad team in Tulsa with a bad team in Baltimore is better for the fans, the league, the players, or anyone else than helping the Tulsa team get better would be.

 

chapka, that's how he works. He doesn't post in the Soccer in America or MLS Commissioner forums anymore because he got roasted. Anytime someone pokes a hole in his theory, he just ignores it and keeps trucking on.

 

see below

 

Having worked in D2, pro/rel is not the answer. Flat out. It is not. Regionalization is. Cut travel costs. Germany didn't have a unified second division into the 90s. They didn't have a unified third division until 2008. We're more than twice the size of Germany. And Germany is a stronger soccer nation that the United States.

And please, I'm not from Shaker Heights. I'm a West-sider.

 

I see it as the chicken and egg; nobody invested (and succeeded) before MLS. If soccer was profitable, then people would invest in USL or NASL and compete against MLS, if the open system is superior they would win out and MLS would go out of business.

 

To be completely honest, our old GM planned on getting the team to MLS eventually. How he planned on getting us there, nobody knows. The team had a lot of plans, but no money because the investors weren't interested. Plain and simple. There was a rumor Drew Carey WAS interested in buying the team. How valid that is, I don't know. There was another one that Randy Lerner was interested in the team. Again, I don't know how true that is.

The fact of the matter is, if either one of them wanted in to get a top MLS team, they could have. Randy Lerner would have no problem doing that. He already owns a team, all he needs to do is decide he wants an MLS team and we'd have one. He has the money. I don't think pro/rel would have changed the investment opportunities.

Could Cleveland support a top level soccer team? I think so. We already have people who could put a team there, but they aren't interested. The City Stars shouldn't have moved up last year; the team was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt after just 6 games. That's why you need regionalized travel in second division soccer.

 

As long as they make money, or at least don't lose more than their investors are willing to lose, no matter what the TV ratings are. The NHL still exists and their ratings aren't that much better (and have been much worse).

Tell me how, then. How does having an MLS team lose money help someone's bottom line? Because as far as I can tell, losing money is losing money no matter how rich you are.

Bullshit. The primary thing a league without a salary cap allows you to do is to buy yourself a championship if you're richer than the other guy. If anything, it's a salary cap that forces you to be careful and innovate with the resources you have.

Or, hey, what if we designed the business so it was profitable? For example, by controlling costs and sharing revenues?

What you're describing is a system less desirable than the one we have now. A less desirable investment is going to be a less desirable investment, no matter what.

Again: there was plenty of time for investors to do all the things you're suggesting before MLS started. They didn't.

Then why does MLS still exist?

"Let's make it easier for rich teams to buy championships. After all, if you're not a fan of the best team, you don't deserve a winning season. Rewarding front-runners and bandwagoners is the essence of sports."

Can't do it with autistic monomaniacs obsessed with promotion and relegation, either.

 

Or, how about this. Instead of imagining, demonstrate it. Because it's absolutely ridiculous, and ridiculous facts aren't something that you normally get to assume without any evidence.

So what on earth makes you think that:

1) the only way to get money out of U.S. soccer fans--who famously already spend money following European or Mexican teams right now--is by stopping them from going to NFL games that mostly sell out right now anyway and mostly aren't played at the same time?

or

2) Anyone but yourself thinks that promotion and relegation would immediately lead to a huge increase in the quality of MLS play?

If the MLS owners didn't want MLS to succeed...they could achieve that by not investing any money in MLS much more effectively than by investing money in MLS.

Sorry, but that's unmitigated bullshit.

How's spending gobs of money doing for Real Madrid? In the last ten years, three titles and four second-place finishes, plus one Champions League win. The teams that beat them? Other teams with gargantuan payrolls, like Barca.

And Man City? They were struggling near the bottom of the Premier League until they started throwing cash around; at which point they jumped to fifth, behind only the teams that had a lot more cash to throw around.

Take a look at the Scottish Premier League and tell me it's not predictable. I can tell you the top two teams right now--will you take that bet at even money?

 

My favorite part is his complaint about ticket prices being affordable.

 

Somebody better tell the Germans that they should increase ticket prices, then.

 

So you aren't saying your suggestion was sensible, and you agree it's stupid, but those dumb NFL owners aren't great businesspeople like you, so they just don't "get it" like you do? Ooo...kay.

No, I define success as profitability. And yes, survival is required for that.

Both of which are true. As you pointed out, Man City spent a huge amount of money to improve their position. But Chelsea still has the biggest payroll in the Premier League, and they ended up with the title.

Great. So let's not even bother playing the season; you can play it in your mind and the rest of us can have actual teams to follow.

 

I've seen how selective soccerreform.us can be about which questions he answers, how he can often contradict himself, & how he is all about tearing others down. I'm actually surprised that he doesn't have a yellow or red card by his name by now.

For instance, he recently pointed out that the Germans have pro/rel, yet have financial protections. Yet what has gone on in Germany has handicapped the league some in UEFA competitions, which seems to contradict this thread about handicapped MLS teams in CONCACAF. By contrast, Spain has greater success in Europe, but most of its top-flight clubs teter on the edge financially.
Ideally, sport should be able to have the league make sense competitively, which pro/rel does in the lower divisions better than US leagues, but pro/rel is far worse in the top flights. If competitive balance makes the MLS less success in CONCACAF, I think that's something I can live with, especially after seeing what's going on in Spain, a league that's only had 9 clubs win in 79 seasons with the top 2 accounting for 51 of the 79 championships.

I know there is a cogent argument for the pro/rel that is his end game, but he doesn't really make it.

I also don't understand why he is so passionate about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What's so wrong with regionalization? If we had regionalization below the MLS with playoffs to determine who wins promotion it would be just like every pro/rel system where at some point it turns from a national league to regional leagues, just in America we would only have one national league at the top of the pyramid instead of 5 in England, 3 in Germany and France, & 2 in Spain and Italy.
What's so wrong with revenue sharing? UEFA may put in place Financial Fair Play guidelines that limits clubs ability to spend. The upside of revenue sharing is that you can put all teams in a position of being financial stable & able to win the league.
If you can get pro/rel, be happy, leave these frills alone.