well thats my theory for why a very large % of soccer fans in the US do not follow MLS. Care to share your theory? btw..i did not mention pro/rel. Because i think ur right. If pro/rel were implemented now or next year or two years from now it would be bad for growth of the league. i've never heard a good argument that free agency would lead to the league folding. This is one of those things that is trotted out whenever someone questions the single-entity/no free agency model. The international player market decides what a player is worth. Once MLS becomes integrated into the global business of soccer they will purchase players that their clubs can afford. Please explain why you think free agency would make MLS go under.
You didn't mention it here, but you have mentioned it elsewhere. Like here: You seem to endorse pro-rel, without bothering to realize the obvious problems (like where do teams get promoted from? Or relegated to?
thats a list someone else wrote. Most of which i agree with. i started another thread in the MLS forum with a plan for pro/rel by 2024 if certain economic triggers are met. These include a 2nd tier with 3/4 of clubs playing in their own MLS size SSS and every 2nd tier club having a youth academy. That answers the question where a team would get promoted and relegated to. I didn't mention pro/rel in my post here because it's so far off and not essential right now.
This has been explained time and time again. You just choose to ignore it. Pure free agency within MLS goes completely against single entity because the player contracts are held by the league. The individual contracts are not held by the teams, they are held by the league. That's why Dwayne DeRosario could play for 3 teams last year; there was no violation of the FIFA limitation because his contract was always held by MLS. Allowing pure free agency within the league would require an end to single entity because it would mean the contracts are held somewhere other than with the league.
We're not talking about the rules experiments during the first few years of the league. We're talking about how MLS organizes itself as a business. Frankly, the number of soccer fans in this country who aren't MLS fans due to its organizational structure is vanishingly small. Complaints about single entity are the hobby of a small number of posters on BS and other soccer websites. The average soccer fan doesn't care, assuming they even know about it. Since 2001, MLS has grown from 8 to 19 teams. MLS teams have built a couple of billion dollars of soccer specific stadiums. The expansion fee for new teams has gone from basically nothing to $50 milllion plus. I could go on and on, if you'd like. I'm not sure what the Chicago Fire's tax bill has to do with the popularity of baseball in the Chicago area. Or this discussion.
Other countries care about American Football? That's news to me... and no those one-off games the NFL hosts in London do not count.
In general, your post is very good and I totally agree, but how are you figuring that the league ever dropped to 8 teams? It started with 10, expanded to 12, (Miami and Chicago), contracted back down to 10 (the two Florida teams), and it's been growing ever since. No teams have contracted since, and the only team which moved (SJ to Houston) not only prospered in Houston but new owners came along to resurrect a team in SJ. Other than that detail, I totally agree with you.
The only reason I went into such detail wasn't to call you out--I thought maybe there was some technicality I wasn't thinking of. Just wanted to get my facts straight. And again, your post was spot on.
I can't understand why it would be popular anywhere else besides here. Like basketball, only people with athletic prowess similar to the X-Men can play it. Since it's so popular around the world, please name me a country where it even registers on their sporting conscience.
Basketball is also pretty popular around the world. There are some pretty good basketball leagues in southern Europe, for example. As for the NFL, it is quite popular in Mexico, Canada and the Carribean.
Not really. There's a pretty big difference between countries that care about the game, and countries that have some people who care about the game. You could easily point to the Wembley NFL game as evidence of interest in the game in the UK, but you could also be in the UK on superbowl weekend and not see a single reference to it anywhere unless you went looking for it. Basketball's popularity in some parts of europe has nothing to do with the NBA or globalisation in the modern sense. It's been popular in parts for generations. Basketball has had a continental championship in Europe since the 1930s. You can see a whole host of sports from around the world on sports channels these days, which can give a rather misleading picture. Certain sports might be broadcast to 158 countries around the world, but they might only draw ratings that register in about 8 of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football#Outside_the_United_States I'd say it registers in most of those places.
yes, but only at a basic almost recreational league level. There are cricket leagues in the USA. Would you say cricket really registers?
Erm, no. The X-League is pretty freaking big. Ditto the CFL. Germany loves American football (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Bowl). Australia has 6 state leagues. The Belgian Bowl has attendances in the thousands. Mexico loves American football as well (their college teams travel all over the US and they also host multiple special matches between semi-pro teams, college teams, etc against the US teams). Canada, England, Mexico (1978), Japan (even goes down to HS and JH level and the JFA was founded in 1934), and South Korea (KFA founded in 1945) have a substantial college level of American football.
OK, I should have said for most on that list. For most sports I'm sure you could get lists of where the game is organised into some kind of league. It's not widely indicative of popularity. A league in each Australian state doesn't mean a great deal. Even before the A-League formed, there were multiple-divisioned state leagues for soccer. Hardly anybody went to watch those either. I'm not sure why you listed England though. The NFL has its fans here, certainly, but the league is nothing.
No, it doesn't. It's a niche sport without TV presence (not to mention a professional league). The German Football League's average attendance is about 1000 per game, and even that is highly inflated since out of 14 teams, the top 4 have better total attendances than the other 10 teams combined (the German Bowl is the ONLY game that goes anywhere near five digit attendances). Average attendances 2011: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Football_League_2011#Zuschauerzahlen_Hauptrunde_2011
The most well supported NFL Europe/WLAF teams were from Germany (5 total). As the WLAF lost teams German teams popped up. Germany has the German Bowl (full pro) and the Junior Bowl (Junior teams). It has a Women's Bowl and an Indoor Bowl as well. There's also some Flag Bowl things too for both the full pro and junior levels (not sure what they are honestly).
The German Bowl is the name of the final match, the league is the German Football League. And it's not fully professional by a long shot, it's an amateur league (the only players who are payed are the handful of Americans). The NFL Europe made massive losses and didn't have much of a media presence nationwide, it had some regional popularity however. But: this was only reached by massive marketing, the game being seen as a novelty and everything being bankrolled by the NFL. It had no lasting impact on the popularity of football in Germany - where are all those people who went to football games back then now? Why doesn't Germany have a pro league, or hell - even a league that can compete financially or attendancewise with 5th division soccer clubs?
Meh, anyone who goes somewhere and makes a broad statement like that in two days is ignorant. You cant possibly go somewhere new for two days and make a judgment such as that. I honestly didn't read the article because it sounds like garbage but a lot of time journalists of small time publications do stuff like this to get hits and draw attention... I dont know but its no where near the truth and I think it should be quite obvious. Soccers popularity and growth now vs ten years ago is pretty much night and day.
They might not play football all that much, but the NFL is popular in the Caribbean. The countries in the Caribbean get a lot of American television channels, including sports. There are also a lot of cultural connections given how many people from those countries have relatives in the US.
In order of popularity: Cricket then football/soccer. Even netball is more popular than american football which is down there with baseball. And when I say Caribbean I am referring to the English speaking Caribbean