9/28/03 - 27.6% of Americans Hates MLS Sports you love to hate - Chicago Sun Times De Rosario sets Quake tone - San Francisco Chronicle Fast San Jose puts away Burn - Fort Worth Star Telegram Quakes score early and often - Alameda Times-Star, CA Adu Invited for Under-20 Tryouts - Washington Post Kroenke lifts MLS profile - South Florida Sun-Sentinel - Jeff Rusnak more to come...
DeRosario makes 3 look easy - SJ Mercury News Soldier Field's turf, irrigation system make playing surface a field of dreams - Chicago Daily Southtown Pointless effort would hurt Crew - Columbus Dispatch Earthquakes jolt Burn early, often, 5-2 - Dallas Morning News Rookie Warren Gets Call as Rimando's Replacement - Washington Post Soccer: Despite poor performance, Galaxy secure playoff spot - Carson Daily Breeze Playoff Bound, in Spite of Loss - LA Times Miscasting W.U.S.A.'s Target Audience - NY Times MetroStars' hopes face a must-win scenario - North Jersey Herald Metros look for redemption in D.C. - Bergin Daily Record Revolution pushing toward the future - Boston Globe Revs focus on Crew - Boston Herald There's of course a lot of good stuff on the WWC, I just chose to not include it. If someone else would like to go through and do so, please do. I just don't think it's particularly relevant.
yeah i was trying to find something more witty to come up with in the title. it was just ment to be a joke, something like "MLS, more popular than Dog Fighting"
On the turf problems at the old Soldier Field: So if a five-day rule conflict arises between the Fire and Bears come MLS playoff time, does this mean that the Fire may play one or more of their playoff games at Naperville?
I can't wait for more people to hate MLS so it starts generating as much money and TV air time as boxing and PGA. I do find it amazing that 27% of Americans have taken the time to form a bad opinion of MLS when 95% of the people I know couldn't tell you anything about MLS except that there might be a team in San Antonio.
Yeah this has been raised on the Fire board before, that player(s) comments that soccer games were tearing up the feild. Seems awfully silly to me that a bunch of football players are complaining about the soccer team tennant tearing up the feild. I wouldn't imagine that the Fire would have to move a playoff game in order for this silly rule but only underscores the importance of getting the Fire stadium deal done asap.
Thanks. I swear I checked the Houston paper but thanks for grabbing it. Interesting quote at the end which had been discussed in the Rochester Stadium thread. "The Dallas Burn's star striker, Jason Kreis, continues rehabilitation on a torn anterior cruciate ligament he incurred on the artificial surface at the Burn's temporary home in Southlake. "The injury is coming along slowly," said Kreis, who is one of MLS' all-time leading scorers. "It is extremely tedious at this time. It has been a long and arduous process." Kreis believes the artificial surface is to blame. "It was 100 percent the turf's fault," Kreis said. "I was 20 seconds into the game, planted on my left foot, and it didn't slide out like it would on natural grass."
I wonder if most of the respondents didn't just say "soccer" and the researchers extrapolated it to be MLS. I also wonder what the other side of that question is, I heard a news report about the same survey asking about fans' favorite sports, and the NFL was clearly #1, but I would like to know where MLS ranked.
I think many people (including myself) are of the opinion that they'd rather be hated by a small segment of the population than ignored by the great majority of it.... As i've heard in some Spanish love ballads (pardon the reference to them) : Hatred hurts less than indifference....
Lies, damned lies, and statistics 1000 people is a fairly crap survey. I bet they had a list of things to choose from--how else would people come up with Bullfighting? So, people saw/heard soccer on the list and said "yeah, I hate that." Hate is a pretty strong word, though. I mean, I dislike golf, but I wouldn't say I hate it... Wish I could read this one: Miscasting W.U.S.A.'s Target Audience - NY Times
the login for the NY Times is Username: bigsoccer2 password: bigsoccer it's a very good article. very on point with some relative 'expert' oppinion as to a lot of the assumptions that have been made in the discussions here in regards to the league.
27% of Americans suffer from erectile dysfunction. On the other hand (no pun intended) 50% of them are women. Also, another 30% were either pre-pubescent or geriatric. Of the remaining 20%, 13% were too fat to see their shoes, let alone an erection. At 7% studies show that we are a stiffer bunch than the French, at 11%. And that's what counts.
I think this survey probably just listed all these sports and people had to list their 5 most hated and even though probably 95% had never seen an MLS game, people probably just saw something with soccer and said oh yeah I hate that boring sport i'll check that one off. I saw Nascar is right next to MLS, wouldn't it be great if we eventually got to that level. Its better to be hated than to be totally off the radar like a track and field or volleyball.
from the Adu article. This seems like an odd thing to put in a report from wire services. that's awfully speculative. Seems odd to phrase it that way too. I wonder how that sneaked in there?
from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11069-2003Sep27.html I wonder who put the pressure on Thomas...Nike? US Soccer? Psycho BS readers?
Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics The number surveyed isn't an issue, but how it was conducted might be. This is actually a fairly standard sample for surveys these days, and gives you a reasonably small margin of error (about plus/minus 3 percent). But that's only valid if it's an unbiased sample and there aren't problems with the questions themselves. That's where your other critique is much more relevant: Precisely. And the fault is not just with the people who conducted the survey but also with those who report the results, like the Chicago Sun-Times here. What was the actual question wording? What was the complete list of choices given to respondents? What other questions were also asked which might affect responses to this question? If they were open-ended, how did they translate those into the list that was reported (eg, if someone says they hate "soccer", would that count against both MLS and WUSA)? How strong are the conclusions we can draw from the wording used? Really, and this is true for most public opinion surveys, sometimes the problem is with the survey and sometimes it is with the distorted or incomplete way it is reported by the media. This time it appears to be both.
I think we can all gather from this that two-thirds of all statistics are meaningless. Seriously, I wouldn't take a survey from a sample size of only 1,000 people to be truly scientific. Was the writer representing that survey to be a so-called "national" results poll? If I remember anything from my college statistics class, foggy memory and all, even if that's a local polling, 1,000 respondents doesn't mean that the results are cut and dried. Frankly, that looks like one of those quick articles the writer put together to fill space and meet a deadline.
Proof of the survey's lack of sports knowledge: no hockey on the list, while dog fighting is. Being hated/disliked by 27% is better than not being on the list at all.
Kind of like that old PT Barnum-ism... "It's only bad publicity if they spell your name wrong," isn't it?
Thanks, that was a good article. I figured WUSA had made a mistake targeting young girls as their key spectators, but this article brings up other, more complex points. However, one thing remains, unfortunately:
I think that a lot of Revs fans are probably whistling the same tune, based on their recent marketing strategies and by looking at the crowds at Gillette. Their stadium location is a problem, and they have gotten away from the 'Get your Kicks' kind of push recently but their advertisements are still very much aimed at the youngins.