The Long Island Rough Riders won D3. My advice to take a champioship team in the Rough Riders and make them Metrostars. Paul Riley is an excellent coach (and did suit for the 'Stars one game). Go with a winner, the Rough Riders. Also they won the A-League a few years back.
Not to be snide, but the best Rough Riders players since the advent of MLS, with one exception, have been very marginal MLS players. Buddle is the exception, but he was 19 in his year with LI, and had a lot of room for development. I'm talking about the Cordt Weinsteins, the Michael Butlers, the Fernando Fernandeses, the Carlos Ledesmas. If the Metros were replaced with the Rough Riders, we would be lucky to win a single point. The players are fine for the lower divisions, and they seem fairly well coached, but if this suggestion isn't a joke, the guy who made it is out of his mind.
Haig, I agree with everything you wrote, but I've got this bad feeling that if the Metro doesn't very soon get itself together, from the Stadium situation to its nearly annual affair with Clubhouse/Front office anarchy, the Roughriders may be all we have to look forward to. I haven't seen the Metro P&L figures, maybe things aren't as dire as I fear. But it is hard for me to imagine that the Metro can continue to make a go of it at Giants Stadium, especially when the Club seems nearly as disorganized and lacking direction now as it was in 1999. A bad venue and a Club in chaos aren't conducive to building a fan base but are conducive to eroding one. At least in the past, Giants Stadium presented predictable problems (the field, the parking, the concessions, the provocative security, etc.) now each month seems to bring more bad news (NJSEA supported competing events, subordination of Metro playing dates to other events) and the Metro are no nearer now to a real solution then they were in 1997. I'm pretty sure that the Metro Lease expires in the near future although I don't know when. That means negotiating a new one with a hostile, conflicted, Landlord and with even less leverage. Can the Metro survive this? Can the League?
I'm with you on that, and the only way I can see the Metros continuing as an enterprise, what with angering much of their fan base with crummy play, a lack of accountability in management and coaching, and a shell game with the stadium plans, is as a loss leader for MLS. Ultimately, the league would probably lose more money in sponsorship and advertising without a team relatively close to the national media operations, advertising agencies, and major corporate headquarters. You have to wonder if this team is being run as bare-bones as possible just to have a presence in NY without making too much of a dent in investors' wallets. Kind of how K-Mart and Best Buy opened sure-to-be unprofitable stores in the city.
Loss Leader - that's us all right. Thanks for making thing very clear. And to think we sing ourselves hoarse for the sake of corporate presence in the New York market. Now there is something a person can take to heart and call his own!
A famous RoughRider-Metro was omitted from the above list. Yes it is, Mr. Pants. Paul Grafer. In Grafer's last full year as RoughRider goalkeeper, the team won the Division over Rochester but was upset in a 1 game playoff round with Toronto. Rochester went on to win the playoffs. Seriously, Paul Riley is a professional coach who is organized and a proven winner. He doesn't deserve to coach is a messed up organization like the Metros. He should wait for a good offer from a good organization.