Columbus Crew to Austin Texas?

The league is very different now. San Jose was (effectively) ownerless and about to be homeless. And teams were much, much smaller operations now. There are USL D2 teams with bigger front office and technical staffs than some first decade MLS teams maintained. Kansas City ran the league (almost doing the treble) in 2004 with only three on-field coaches and a combined business/technical GM/President with split duties.

That was also before the implementation of the homegrown rule. I was actually pretty shocked with this whole thing popped up a year ago. You can find posts here prior to this where I opined that MLS was now in a post-relocation era. While "never say never" I supposed that the Development Academy systems and Homegrown rule were going to anchor MLS teams in a way that the other major sports leagues teams weren't. The cost of relocation, the loss of a generation of player rights, and delay of having to restart from scratch would be too great. By having DA teams and increasing girls' DA teams, MLS teams are organically creating generations fans in a much more collegiate way. Families are spending their weekends with their kids being part of the team, not just being fans.

I still stand by that analysis. I think it will be increasingly hard for teams to relocate.

But I don't think this is a real follow on to what happened with the ClashQuakes. I think that was one of the final pieces of the league sorting out the compromises that were necessary to get the league up and running in the first place, but were increasingly detrimental to the future stability and growth of the league.

This is just an owner with a hard-on to have a team in Austin, Texas.

 

All good. It's tough. As explained above, I've been there.

 

Very perceptive post.

I think Brett would be well advised to note that there is no signed deal with MLS to bring in the Crew or any team.I would have expected better from him, but it's hardly surprising that Austinites truly believe it's a done deal despite the fact that there has been no announcement, no commitment of any kind. Yet the article he links to talks about how a deal with MLS is done.

All that has happened is that the city and Precourt have agreed to agree. Kind of like a couple 20 year old sophomores who are "pre engaged". To them, it means it's OK to hop into bed and do the beast with two backs but Daddy won't be so easily persuaded.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with how MLS does business knows there is quite literally no such thing as an iron clad deal with MLS even when Don Garber stands in front of a microphone and announces one. Which, to be clear, he has not.

And honestly, all Precourt-loathing aside, if an expansion candidate brought the Austin deal as it stands now to MLS, they'd be laughed out of the building. It literally fails on every single front. How the league can EVER approve that sad joke of a bid is stupefying.

I can only add that I have been saying since last December that if you can figure out what MLS has told San Antonio you will have the answer to the whole puzzle.

An hour after the PSV Austin announcement, a reporter contacted SS&E and got a blistering comment. They'd been screwed, they were pissed, they'd been lied to. Then, after a reported "two long phone calls" with New York" they fell silent and have stayed that way. Utterly mute. Not a syllable.

Even after the prosecutors for the city and the county submitted scathing findings accusing MLSof nothing less than "fraud" to a judge who was eager to sue the crap out of them, SS&E refused to get involved. And without them, there's no injured party. SO the whole thing got dropped.

Like I said, figure out what they were told/promised in those secret phone calls and you'll know what MLS' game is.

 

It just occurred to me that the other owners, while possibly supportive of the concept of freedom of movement and even the idea of Austin over Columbus, have to be looking at this from afar and cringing. I mean, it seems the most PSV have done in corporate outreach is look at Wikipedia and announce that they've identified 134 possible sponsors. At some point Precourt may even write a letter.

Is Precourt capable of putting together and running a successful operation? What does Arthur Blank think of Precourt's business acumen?

 

From the Austin article

1. 
   We can all judge the merits of the argument. I'll just say it's a stupid argument...anyone claiming to be sure of how the Modell Law will fare in court is lying.

1. 
   I would add that a fourth possibility is waaaaaay more likely than #3, which would be that PSV gets an Austin expansion team, and the Crew stay in Columbus. It's basically the inverse of #3, in terms of which team is the expansion team and which team gets Gyasi Zardes.

 

Arthur Blanks most recent comments being an exception though, Although he kept them fairly benign. Though I didn't read them as particularly positive for Columbus.

 

San Jose had as much a real place to play as Houston did at the time--a mid-sized old college football stadium. AEG just didn't want to play there anymore, so it moved to an old mid-sized college football stadium in Houston.

 

I thought the Spartans were refusing to re-up the contract for the Earthquakes to player there. I may be mis-remembering things. I know that they weren't interested in the 2008 expansion Earthquakes.

 

I never heard of that. The lease was expiring, and the lease terms had always been bad for MLS, but it wasn't a case where SJSU was kicking them out and refusing to renew.

In the 2006-2007 timeframe, before the expansion was official, Wolff's Plan A for a stadium was a shared tear-down/rebuild at Spartan Stadium, and there were negotiations, but ultimately the university was unwilling to give up control/management of the site.

 

Weren't SJS also working on a reconstruction of Spartan Stadium too (the same reason that caused the construction of Crew/Mapfre Stadium)?

 

Do you not understand what the word IF means?

 

None of which changes the fact that Austin wouldn't be an expansion team, which was what you originally stated, and was the only point I was responding to.

 

Yeah, Crew Stadium exists because Ohio Stadium was not available in 1999. The Wizards were leaving Arrowhead in 2008 regardless of who owned the team due to work at the stadium. The Fire wound up in Naperville because of the construction of new Soldier Field.

 

Because it wouldn't be. Let me help you out.


ex·pan·sion
ikˈspanSHən/
noun

1. the action of becoming larger or more extensive.

By definition of the word expansion, the league would have to get larger. IF Columbus RELOCATES to Austin, the league would stay the same size, hence why it wouldn't be considered an expansion team.

I'm trying to be as nice as I can be, but you're making it tough.

 

How is NYCFC an illegitimate team?

 

That didn't happen until after Wolff's expansion effort moved on to other ideas.

 

Arguably, the reconstruction of Spartan Stadium still has not happened. In the ensuing more than a decade, San Jose State has installed fake grass and painted the balustrades blue. The proverbial lipstick on a pig.

 

Point is, I haven't hears MLS say one thing about Austin. Nothing. Their website isn't MLS, Garber hasn't announced anything, no press releases from the league.

Nothing.

You keep using the word "if" as an afterthought, like you think it's finished that Austin gets the existing team and Columbus gets expansion.

That is about as far from reality as you could possibly be.

So stop trolling or I will start really abusing you.

 

That isn't what the word "if" means.
If he meant that, he would have said "when"
Stop getting so upset at statements from people that are not declaring anything in a definitive way. People are allowed to try to think through different scenarios without declaring that scenario is going to happen.

 

Yeah, the Crew could be moved to Austin and put on hiatus until Stadium Corp completes the stadium. Simultaneously, Columbus can be awarded an expansion team, which begins play on Mapfre in 2019, with the current Crew players using the Crew IP.

That's the MLS way.

 

Well they didn't meet the MLS stated criteria for a new team. Of course spreading around a large sum of money can overcome lots of objections.

 

I think the NYCFC situation was more that MLS was spending a lot of money and time trying to get a second team in NYC, and were only too happy to hand off the responsibility to another organization.

 

It's short for Idaho Falls, naturally.

 

The Cotton Bowl is not exactly in the best of neighborhoods....

(and before you ask, yes, I've been in that neighborhood as the husband of a HS friend of mine was pastoring a church there).