Utah Royals relocating, RSL next?

RSL may indeed be next but I am putting a question mark in the title.

 

Wow I hope not. This would be terrible for the fans and for the league as a whole. Salt Lake City is such a cool market for the league to be in and the stadium and facilities they’ve built there are spectacular. It’s a shame this question is even on the table.

 

I know what this is: it's the one sure way to end that lawsuit the Kansas City Royals brought a couple of years ago about the use of the name "Royals" in a sporting sense. Just buy the team and move it back to Kansas City, problem solved!

 

I sure hope this is a Royals only thing. No reason at all to move RSL. But new ownership is required, and MLS'/Garber's track record is not good in doing right by existing fanbases.

 

What does DLH/MLS do if the highest/only bids for RSL come from the groups that submitted expansion bids for Phoenix, Detroit, Las Vegas, or Tampa?

 

Yeah, I think the fear from RSL fans is not that RSL are moving to KC, you are correct there. The fear is that selling things off piece by piece makes it easier to move the team.

If I understand the situation, their awful owner owns RSL, formerly the Royals, a USL team, and the stadium.

I think he has about a month left before MLS can step in, take control, and sell his franchise/investor share to someone else.
As Crew fans, that did not go well for us.

Anyway, I guess the thinking goes that local buyers would be much more interested in keeping the USL & NWSL teams and the stadium. Whilst out of town buyers would just pay for the investor fee and set up shop elsewhere.

And that selling off stuff piecemeal, instead of all to one buyer, is the track that leads to an out of town buyer.

 

Well, they should only accept bids from parties interested/promising to keep the team in Salt Lake. That language should be in the sale contract.

If MLS wants a team in Vegas, Phoenix, or Detroit, expand to 32.

 

If Dave Greeley is within 50 miles of any deal to buy RSL you better raise hell. That man is a butcher of anything MLS. Watch out.

 

That’s my point - what if there aren’t any bidders willing to commit to keeping the team in SLC?

 

Certainly. I think the key is what you hear coming out of the league. Maybe the Columbus experience will make MLS shy about thinking so cavalierly about moving a team. Garber et al were all too willing to bemoan the lack of corporate support in Columbus, little interest in a local buyer for the club. But it was largely a lie, meant to justify a desire to move the team. If you hear Garber making similar statement about things in SL, worry. But if our experience in Columbus is anything to go by, there are normally investors out there (in the end, there were multiple groups interested in buying the Crew), but they might need to be courted.

Too, RSL has a nice stadium, a great new training facility. Post-COVID, it's going to be harder for MLS to arrange the kinds of public-private deals that have made similar facilities in other markets possible. Hell, look at NYCFC. Miami's "temporary" stadium. Delays in Nashville. The stadium disaster in Chicago. Why MLS would even consider moving a team out of a modest, but growing market that already has a stadium and training facility in place is beyond me. My guess is, they're not.

I don't know squat about the Salt Lake City business culture; how deals get done in that city; who the real power brokers are. But I do know about those things in Columbus, and have to assume that SLC has its own version of them. Negotiations to buy the club won't, I assume, be played out in public on the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune.

 

I would love for San Antonio to be included on that list. L-l-l-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-v-v-v-v-v-e it.

 

https://www.rsl.com/post/2020/12/06...rship-utah-royals-fc-group-kansas-city-kansas

Utah Soccer LLC Transfers Ownership of Utah Royals FC to Group in Kansas City, KS.

 

Noticed on the ESPN crawl that Pat Mahomes of the NFL Kansas City Chiefs, his wife a former soccer player, is getting in on the new ownership of the Royals as the team move to K.C.

 

My guess is that DLH's people either weren't finding potential buyers who wanted to buy the full 3-franchise package, or didn't try very hard to find that kind of owner. I don't expect that a move of RSL is very likely. If anything along those lines is happening, it will probably leak very soon.

 

As a born and raised son of Rochester New York, allow me to remind them that we invented the Royals in 1945, which moved to Cincinnati is 1957 or so, then moved to Kansas City and was rebranded the Kings, which are now in Sacramento.

KC can't lay claim to it. Just because they stole it 30 years ago doesnt give them squatters rights.

 

As a counterpoint, I'm not from Kansas City but did exhibit cattle at the American Royal in Kansas City. That stock show, one of the big four in the U.S., started in 1899 and got the name "American Royal" a couple of years later. Among a certain group of people "Royal" has been associated with Kansas City for a long time.

Extra note: I was also a FFA member. That organization was founded at the American Royal in 1928 and the annual national convention was in KC for a long time.

 

Salt Lake keeps copying Denver. Second to get an MLS team, second to have Beckerman on their MLS team, second to win the Rocky Mountain Cup, second to have their MLS team bought by their NBA team owner...

(Yes I'm leaving a hanging fastball over the plate here, waiting to see if a Salt Lake fan is going to drill it into the seats)

 

But first to win MLS Cup!

As a Crew fan whose team lost to both RSL and Colorado in the POs during each team's final runs, I remember both losses well. Screw you, Conor Casey!