Disagree. Most of the Hispanic fans that the Burn drew were Mexican. This was something I found out through talking with many of them and through a visual survey of the replica jerseys in GA. Plus, there's just not that many Colombians and Salvadorans in Dallas. There are some, but not nearly that many. According to the 2000 census, there were 1.12 million Hispanic or Latino people in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area, of which only roughly 22,000 were of Salvadoran origin and 4,000 were of Colombian origin. Meanwhile, 890,000 of them were of Mexican origin. Trust me, I'm not foolish enough to think that one in every four or five Salvadorans and Colombians locally were out at the Cotton Bowl for Burn games.
Which is wrong. There were Mexicans -- lots of them -- which supported the Burn, even though it hadn't had a Mexican player on the team since 1998. In fact, I'll be so bold as to say that most of the Burn's former Hispanic fanbase was Mexican. And as a rule of thumb, if you attract any great numbers of Hispanics for anything in Dallas, chances are that most of them are Mexican. It's simple common sense. If you've got only 26,000 Salvadorans and Colombians in the area, chances are that you're not getting 5,000 of them for any event. It's a hell of a lot easier to lose customers than win them back. FC Dallas are trying to do the same thing that they did to get those fans in the first place -- grassroots, grassroots, grassroots. A lot of the brains behind the Burn's grassroots effort are now gone, so I don't know how successful they'll be. And really, I'm not really sure how much effort HSG and the current GM want to put into it. But you see, I don't say that it's a lost cause and the Burn have proven me right. You have to go about selling your team differently than you would to the Anglo community and you have a lot of obstacles to overcome with respect to that and it's a slow, organic, labor-intensive process, but it can be done. It was being done by the Burn. And I think that Chivas USA will do it, even with a multi-ethnic roster, because I think that they will approach the marketing of their team to the Hispanic community in LA and elsewhere the right way. And I think that's what's going to surprise most people. It's not just going to be "put a Mexican name and put a Mexican shirt on the players and watch the Mexicans roll into the Home Depot Center."
Sorry maybe I should have made myself clear, I meant before the season THIS YEAR 2004, not before the 2003 season. That's exactly what I'm talking about, their perspective. It just seems to me the Hispanic community have preconcieved notions of what they expect out of a soccer team and what they want to see in on an American soccer team. It's not right or wrong, it's their perspective. In their pespective they need a large number of the right kind of Hispanic players in order to support an MLS team. That means MLS either accomodates them, and we've seen where that's lead in the past, or MLS moves on, establishes what it's about(which should be the best soccer they can provide, with the best players they can provide) and hopefully in that way earn the respect of the Hispanic population that MLS lacks. Again to clarify, wasn't talking about what Dallas got out of the trades, which was poor although I always thought Ali Curtis could have turned into something really good, but what Dallas brought in to the club in the 2004 offseason. Such as say Jolly and Gibbs was an upgrade to Suerez and Broome. However, the Hispanic media of the 2004 offseason seemed to bitch and moan because Dallas picked up a player with the suname Gibbs despite his talent, instead of a surname Rodriquez. What does it matter? I agree totally Southlake got it moving. Although if your a true fan of a club you'll follow them to hell or it's Earth bound equivalant, purple fake grass. So that in itself kind of says to me that this grassroots effort the Burn was so proud of really didn't do that much to create a large number of "fans" in the Hispanic community, just bodies and FCD can get new bodies with Frisco. Still, when they moved back to CB in 2004, the Hispanics could of come back. I'm sure that's what HSG wanted with the move back, the admintance of errors, and I seem to remember much preseason graveling from Wagner in some articles. They didn't come back though and I think a lot of that had to do with all the negative pub the Hispanic media covering Dallas in preseason in 2004, which always seemed dubious to me because it was lead by the former Hispanic assistant coach that didn't get the job.
Just a hunch, based on things that I've read in the media and heard from behind-the-scenes. Chivas USA's marketing effort is fairly grassroots-oriented and comprehensive. I could be wrong.
If that's your standard, then you could say that the Dallas Burn didn't build many fans, period, Hispanic or otherwise, because there weren't all that many Anglos following the Burn to Southlake. Honestly, towards the end of the 2003 season, there were honestly games where there weren't 1,500 people in the stands. It was one factor, but honestly, all the crap that went down in 2003 made the ground fertile for that kind of nonsense. Another factor was that the team moved its Spanish radio broadcasts from the biggest Spanish radio station in town to a second-tier station. Yet another is that the Burn didn't have as much in the way of Spanish-speaking players for community appearances. Still another was the change in general manager from Andy Swift, who was fluent in Spanish and very accessible to the Spanish media, to Greg Elliott, who isn't. Finally, I don't know if noticed, but the Burn weren't all that good this season. But of course the Hispanic fans didn't completely come back to the Cotton Bowl in the same numbers that they did in 2002. Neither did the Anglo fans. Any salesman will tell you that it's easy to lose a customer, but that it's incredibly difficult to win him back. Having said that, more Anglo fans came back than Hispanic. But I'll put that on all the things that I listed above, as well as an inferior Hispanic marketing operation in comparison to previous years, not simply on the fact that we weren't running the "right" players on the field. Will having some Hispanic players help FC Dallas when it comes to marketing themselves to the Hispanic community? Yes, of course it will. But it's not the only thing. Hell, if a few more of the gringos on the team spoke Spanish, that would go a long way in that effort.
Or, you could be right. Hopefully, you are I'm just a little skeptical that they would do anything drastically different from the rest of the league because the GM is from the Galaxy.