More like - "Hey we (team owners), are taking our balls somewhere else outside from this sinking ship and join another league!" Apparently, that implies an incorrect definition of "poaching".
If the metaphor for NASL was a sinking ship, Steve Malik was the mine that punched the irreparable hole in the hull.
The climax of NASL's demise started a lot more further than that. Did your history with NASL start with Malik? Lol.
The claims against Malik come from someone who in the same interview accused USSF of personally trying to bankrupt him.
Commisso can be hyperbolic and still be partially right about Malik's role in NASL's demise. That is, there is probably some truth there, even if it's ignoring many parts of reality. However, if we're discussing NASL teams defecting to USL, he plays an enormous part in that.
This is a bad take, why are you avoiding Minnesota United's or Montreal's decision to move to MLS? Is that Malik's fault? What about Silverbacks or the Strikers who both folded? San Antonio was first of many dominoes when Hartman decided to cash out and sell the team and stadium to the local government in 2015-2016. 2 NASL clubs (Tampa Bay and Ottawa) moved to USL a year before North Carolina FC in 2016. Rayo OKC was a joke. FC Edmonton left so did many others including NCFC. Puerto Rico folded, San Francisco folded. That left them with...6 teams? NASL's screw-up was internal. From Traffic Sports to the organization itself. "Still be partially right" isn't an answer to one's speculative claim, sorry.
I don't dispute that. No idea what this means, but Steve Malik is absolutely the ultimate cause of demise for NASL: “We get to September of 2017 and we couldn’t tell U.S. Soccer couldn’t tell whether they had five teams, six teams, or seven teams. We know they didn’t have eight because the North Carolina team had already indicated it was leaving.” ... "Still, the league included North Carolina FC in it’s application because they were under the impression that Malik was bringing the team back next season." https://www.google.com/amp/s/elites...s-nasl-receiving-end-wwe-style-heel-turn/amp/ It's not a contradiction to say that NASL's demise was inevitable and that Steve Malik probably accelerated it. If the guy in charge of finding expansion candidates to keep sanctioning has already decided to move to the competing league, well... Let's just say there's a difference in moving your club to a competing league and doing it when you're the head of the league and the representative to the federation without bothering to tell anyone. Also, you point to all of the clubs that folded in NASL, as if USL was any more stable in that period. But none of this is the point, anyway! Soccerwarz are a zero sum game: if you're not poaching, you're in danger of getting poached. I don't have to defend NASL (and won't!) to assume their competition was actively recruiting its members (and vice versa). USL absolutely in turn has to be concerned of MLS poaching all of its best franchises.
It is just one more symptom of the systemic illness that affected the NASL throughout its short life. By this time, USL had started becoming more stable. Their relationship with MLS had just begun. They used the third division to right the ship and then found a way to bring the best run NASL clubs over. Since the demise of the NASL, the USL has not only become increasingly stable, but it has added a new third division and strengthened its relationship with MLS. USL was clearly better at recruiting than NASL... NASL was a shit show on an organizational level. Individual teams may have been fine (especially those that moved to MLS and USL), but the league had way too much infighting to be successful. The differing goals - being the true second division vs competing with MLS - certainly didn't help. Considering that the leagues have a strong working partnership and shared interests, I am not sure that this is really a concern to them at all. USL probably has some ideas of which markets MLS will take, and I am sure that they know which owners plan to use USL as a stepping stone for MLS. If you pay attention to the expansion that USL has been focusing on as of late, they are looking at AAA/AHL level markets like Des Moines, Omaha, and Madison because that is where the gap is. These are markets that show no signs of ever being MLS-size, despite the rapid growth in places like Des Moines. For their third division, they are looking at AA/ECHL/A/SPHL markets for the same reason. With the ability to target growth in minor league markets, USL has a solid business plan. They are actively avoiding competing with MLS for markets. NASL's problem was that they actively pursued potential MLS markets and then were surprised when owners (of different ownership groups in the same market) jumped ship.
Would it make any difference if he stayed in NASL? Great, so NASL would've gotten 7 teams playing instead of 6. Rocco said a lot of things, some might be true, some might be downright false, what is true is that he seems to not get along with everybody and not playing by the rules. Here's the kicker - NASL was structured so that independent franchises owns a stake of the league and similar to a "one broad member from each club, one vote"-type of governing. If Minnesota United's owner best interests was a jump from NASL to MLS, then that's his own decision. If Scorpion's owner best interests is to cash out and not operate a stadium and team anymore, then that's his decision. If SF Deltas owner said he's losing a lot of money, there's not enough support, he'll rather fold the club within a season, then that's his decision. There was nothing to stop league movement from individual club owners best interests with the way NASL was structured. NASL didn't have an expansion committee until their very last season in 2017.
Certainly. It was a dysfunctional organization, historically run by crooks. If we're using relative terms for stability, then, sure, but this seems pretty revisionist. The issue here is that in 2017, we're only 3 seasons removed from Antigua Barracuda (and plenty of failures since then). USL benefited a lot from NASL's failure. Certainly USL had a much better relationship with USSF and that mean a lot. I think this is a little hard to quantify. I'm not about to take Commisso's complaints against Malik at face value, but there definitely was interest in joining NASL that was never followed through. That said, a centralized league is, without a doubt, going to have an easier time attracting investors, since that its whole business model. This I 100% agree with. Anytime a USL team's attendance exceeds 10k, the questions of when MLS will come calling creep in. New Mexico is obviously an exception here, but we're seeing it with Indianapolis and Louisville. That's on top of the obvious "markets" MLS would probably desire: Phoenix, San Diego, Las Vegas, etc. We don't know what happens to USL-C once MLS is done expanding. All of those are D3-sized cities, though. This presents another issue for USL: if they lose teams in St. Louis, Nashville, Charlotte, Sacramento, and (potentially) Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas, you start to run into an issue of how to replace them with D2-sized cities. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of D2-sized cities without a team, but available city is not the same as willing investor. This means that they will have a lot of recruiting to do or a reliance on MLS reserves teams to stay in compliance. USL can be both trending upward and potentially be a speculative bubble. My personal feeling is that League One expansion (or lack thereof) shows some indication of this: the Championship is "hot" because teams are being promoted from it to MLS. So while NMU or Hartford or Birmingham are joining without MLS ambitions, they're joining a league that has that energy (and I simply cannot believe that MLS isn't San Diego's eventual goal). Historically, yes, but the inverse isn't true. And that's the problem: they are going to have to keep doing the work and taking the risk of building markets only for MLS to pick and choose the ones it wants when it wants. And now there are 3 teams in direct competition with MLS clubs in Austin, Miami, and Queensboro. And possibly Charlotte, as well. And that's not including the ones that are being replaced by MLS teams. US soccer is simply too unpredictable to make confident forecasts of leagues', especially lower leagues', futures.
I agree that we really only have Commisso's side of the story and that's non-objective, but: "Commisso mentioned that investors gave presentations from the following markets: Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Albuquerque. None of these applications were approved during the period of time Malik was on the Board of Directors." https://worldsoccertalk.com/2017/12/05/rocco-commisso-speaks-steve-malik-ussf/3/ It's obviously very likely that none of these were legitimate expansion candidates (I mean, Philadelphia has to be Matt Driver, right?), but who knows? Not sure how this is really all that different from Orlando/Nashville/Sacramento, St. Louis, and Lansing, respectively.
When Commisso makes statements about the USSF trying to personally bankrupt him you have to view everything else he says through the same lens.
Might have to take a look back at PLS, I don't think it allows a person like Rocco owning a bunch of teams like Detroit, Hartford, other NPSL teams in addition to the Cosmos. Also those LOI teams Rocco tried to bring on included you guys as well.
Not that the PLS existed then, but MLS couldn't have existed for the first 10+ years of its existence if this was true. That said, the context of his quote seems like this was unrelated to the "me and my buddy Riccardo are going to bankroll a bunch of clubs to get sanctioning". Eh, like everything there's a grain of truth: USSF can both be draining his finances and not being the instigator (i.e. his lawsuits are the drain, but it's still the USSF involved).
Am I the only one who remembers when the NASL was a front for a criminal enterprise? Back to Kivlehan’s piece, he normally carries the water for the Cosmos and the independent soccer folks, but his piece was pretty stark in the challenges facing NISA. I give it another year.
2020 Spring Schedule released: https://www.nisasoccer.com/schedule Some highlights: 1904 FC moved from 70,500-seater SDCCU Stadium to a ~3,000 HS stadium in the same area (good move, IMO) LA Force moved from Rio Hondo College in Whittier to another college stadium in Cal State LA. Michigan Stars exists...so, that's nice.
Good on 1904FC for making a change. Now the stadium will only be 1/3rd instead of 1/70th full. That said while Lincoln High might be closer to their nominal fan base in the south bay, it’s also the heart of SD’s gang territory unless something has changed recently.
Already got my plane tickets for the Roots opener at the end of the month and the first round of the open vs sac.
you really just have to applaud them: https://www.detcityfc.com/news_arti...-I1_AAdcAE0bkdFOE4Eg1-4NxcnmUYsbzcIaxcISoI0Mw
I was going to say something snarky about pro soccer teams playing in a high school stadium, then I remembered FC Dallas received funding from the Frisch ISD in return for high school football playing at Toyota Field