Don't forget how much Chinese is paying Drogba and Anelka. Another thing is the soccer market is rapidly expanding while market for US sports is pretty much saturated already. edit: ok quick goolge got me Kobe is top earner in NBA at$53.2M. Messi is roughly on par. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/01/25/the-top-earning-nba-players/ http://www.therichest.org/sports/highest-paid-football-players/ It seems that soccer is better at least for top 10 in earnings from a quick look.
In order to reach that salary, Messi had to leave his home country at the age of 13 and move to an entirely different continent. Kobe got signed to his hometown team at 18.
Except you can't limit yourself to just those two sports because there are more options out there than just soccer and basketball. Any comparison that ignores the influences of the other sports is faulty.
How exactly ? In the top 10, soccer has two ... just like basketball. Basketball's 2 are higher than soccer's 2. On that list of the top 100 paid athletes in the world, basketball has 13 while soccer has 10. So what part of that makes you right ?
Except that isn't true. The trade for Charlotte's 1st round pick was about LA freeing up their center position so that they could go after Shaq. The trade itself was completed the day prior to the draft with Charlotte agreeing to use their first round pick to get whomever the Lakers wanted in exchange for Vlade Divac. Charlotte didn't even know who they were supposed to draft until a couple of minutes prior to drafting Kobe. There were also 12 teams ahead of Charlotte that could have picked up Kobe if they wanted to.
So.... who wants to talk about promotion/relegation? Seriously, that is the only reason I even come to this thread and read. Instead I get a battle over what a teenaged athlete would choose. Also for all of your information, coming from a teenager myself who has witnessed it at many schools, most sports a player chooses depends on little to do with money. It depends on how popular the sport is in the school, parents opinion and friends. That is really it. So now can we go back to the topic at hand. Should MLS adopt pro/rel?
Then I bow to your superior knowledge. I wasn't following the NBA back then and made an assumption. We were having that conversation, then one fraction of a sentence implied that there were more sports that American kids might choose over soccer, compared to kids from other countries, which DCU took exception to (though TBH, if that claim had supported pro/rel, we all know he'd agree completely). I'll give you my cut-n-paste answer. No MLS shouldn't adopt it. The reason it was adopted in other nations was largely because the teams predated the leagues and many outside the top divisions were big enough to warrant them competing for places. America doesn't have the number of teams at the right level to warrant promotion to and from MLS. It also probably doesn't have the history and culture that would allow teams to generally retain sufficient support in the event of relegation. Finally and more debatably, US sport has it's own way to add and remove teams to the league in the form of expansion and contraction. It has it's pros and cons, but it's probably more appropriate from a cultural standpoint and also for the single entity structure which MLS uses to (quite successfully) run the league. More vitally, as pro/rel would require the approval of the team owners, who have invested heavily in infrastructure and expansion fees. They are very unlikely to vote in something that could hurt their franchis(es) standing. So aside from the above arguments, as well as not being an especially good fit for US soccer, it's also effectively impractical at this time.
There you go and that is basically my reasoning as well for why it should not happen here yet. MLS is doing so well right now doing what it is doing. Why change it and take the risk. Also in the lower divisions, many of the teams are Eastern focused. Until more teams come up from the West in the lower divisions and do well than I dont see pro/rel in the near future. Right now I expect MLS to have 20 teams by 2015. After that I expect MLS to stay at 20 for around 5-10 years, in those years they shall narrow the next 4 cities down. Eventually, I would say by 2030 we could have either 30 team MLS or the more popular MLS 1/MLS 2 with 20 teams in MLS 1/10 in MLS 2. We dont know what will happen in 18 years.
I'm not sure why MLS would wait 5-10 years to expand beyond 20... Orlando City seems to be on the verge of making the jump and I'm sure San Antonio is drawing some attention with its numbers... Now, after those two, the timeline seems a bit longer, but at some point MLS is going to hit critical mass and I could see the expansion line getting queued up again.
Maybe Orlando City and maybe San Antonio. That all depends on the stadium situation and the potential price for the 21st and 22nd franchises.
yep. All depends on how that goes. Right now the first phase I can say is well done and will be ready by 2013. But then you have all the other phases. Can Hartmen get the phases done within the next 5-10 years (after the 20th franchise) to get to the 18,000 eventually planned.
You do know that they're constructing Phase II immediately right ? With the plan being made specifically for expansion of the stadium I don't see why they couldn't get each phase built in 12/18 months, considering they're building the whole thing (Phase II end point) in roughly a year.
They are not going to get 18,000 seats done that quick. Yes maybe I did just not think properly thinking that it would be tough to get that done in a quick time (looking at them attendance wise). I give the operation then maybe 2 years. They average 8,000 a game. They want to have 18,000 seats eventually available. 2 years seems more reasonable considering that in 2 years time they will still be a NASL club and I doubt the attendance can go that much higher in that time.
They might never get to 18,000 as a NASL club, but that isn't the point. The point is that they can get to 18k in relative short order if they get a MLS team.