4/30/03: Salty

Urbandale Pulls Out of Stadium Deal - Des Moines Register

 

Deford had a piece on Morning Edition talking up Beckham.

http://discover.npr.org/rundowns/segment.jhtml?wfId=1247707

Will probably show up on CNN/SI sooner or later as a column.

What's this have to do with MLS? Nothing. Nothing.

 

lil back tracking by Carrerri there. still don't like that attitude but at least he's saying that he understands the coach is his boss.

 

Not an MLS story, but

For Courage players, success not about money (WRAL-TV)

The amazing thing is how many newspapers in non-MLS cities picked up the AP McBride story. Doubtless there would have been more were it not for the Conspiracy.

 

Oops. I should pay closer attention. I thought they were already building the thing and the Menace would be in it next year.

Either way, oops.

 

ya know i think one effect that the WC had was that local media outlets understand the importance and signifigance of local players getting a call up to the national team. seems to me that there are always a lot of stroies about that now automatically.

and Richie Williams making his journalistic debut with the Newark Star Ledger.

 

It's unreal what has happened. It was in the final stages. The city, like all leaders in the area, got cold feet and backed out.

BTW... this story was on the front page of the paper.

 

DM Register didn't pick up the AP story but it did have a small blurb at the top of Sports, page two, with a soccer ball graphic and "American Soccer Team Picked", "US coach Bruce Arena an all-Major League Soccer roster Tuesday for the American's exhibition game against Mexico on May 8th in Houston."

 

decent, but too short.

 

Bruce Arena, however, loved the story and plans to read it over and over and over again, no matter what anyone else thinks.

 

regards to the philly story-
"A handful of teams are close to making money; the others are losing money," Garber said. "But there is more interest in investing in the league than ever before."

come on, how does one not laugh at that??? i mean you are trying to get to the Eagles to buy a franchise and the best you can say is 'they are close to making money'.

btw, if this was the Factor, mr O'Reilly would say garber is spinning. what he said is just another way of saying all the teams are losing money.

and wow! theres a whole forum on it expansion here
https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=35

 

I would imagine what you'd tell the Eagles is "The teams closest to making money are the ones with good stadium deals, or their own stadia, and that could be you."

I doubt very much that statements you make to a newspaper are your primary means of communicating the value proposition to a potential investor.

 

I'm curious to see if these stories made the print versions of the newspaper. It's one thing for the website to post a quick AP article. It's another to actually put it into print.

 

salty dogs- silly name but their logo isn't all that bad.

http://a-league.com/team_images/Syracuse_FC.jpg

actually theres a handful of a league teams with decent logos check out http://www.a-league.com and click on each one to see a better view.

 

you're right about that. there are soem really high quality ones, a lot of "Football Clubs" floating around though. don't really like seeing that but hey, its their league.

 

From the Newark Star-Ledger:

"'I have a lot of faith in FIFA,' said Heather O'Reilly, the talented 18-year-old forward from East Brunswick who is a rising star with the national team."

Something only an 18 year old could say.

 

From the Springfield newspaper:

"The Wizards have two players with local ties in former SMS player Chris Brunt and Jack Jewsbury, a Kickapoo High School..."

Kickapoo? I bet their rivals have a good time with that name during sporting events.

 

The Kickapoo High School Chiefs manage to combine a school name to snicker at with a politically incorrect mascot. Not a combination you see often.

 

If you were a USWNT member, you would probably also think that FIFA is taking good care of your team.

 

MLS needs to do some rethinking on the $10 million expansion fee.

It's going to be very tough, if not impossible, for the league to find investors willing to fork out $10 million to join the league since any new I/O will find himself subsidizing the losses of the Metros, etc, with the operating profit from his own team.

I'd say a more reasonable expansion fee would be $3 million or so. A fee of this level is not high enough relative to the other costs of creating an expansion team that it would be particularly onerous or irksome to the new I/O, and yet it places at least some positive value on the new expansion team.

Once the league becomes profitable -- after stemming the losses of the Metros, DC, etc, and by hopefully adding some profitable expansion franchises -- the expansion fee could be raised to $10 million or higher.

But in the meantime, MLS should bite the bullet and reduce the expansion fee in order to attract expansion teams and improve its chances to survive beyond 2006.

 

Maybe. Except (a) you've set the price already, and setting a new team at $3 million sets the price lower. It's like if someone starts building houses in your neighborhood that cost $85,000 and yours costs $250,000. Maybe since it's basically just Phil and Lamar and Kraft in this, that's not such a big deal, I don't know. And (b) expansion fees traditionally get spread around. $3 million isn't going to go very far among the other 9 franchises.

 

Didn't Horowitz pay a $20 million expansion fee? So it appears they've already lowered it. Just not enough, IMO.

 

Could it go lower? Sure, but it isn't ever going to 3mil. It might go to some inflation adjusted equivalent to the original 5mil, but it won't go lower than that.