Hale Announces New League

Assuming the new league gets off the ground, and with the limited info available, what do you think it will look like on 1 Feb 2017?

My guess:

• Franchise system
• MPS
• Baltimore and St. Louis and mostly NE clubs. Hale's comment that AHL owners may own clubs suggest to me that small cities in the NE may be his target. However, in my personal opinion, I don't believe the AHL thing will pan out.
• Since Hale needs to be the number one owner and driving force of any league his Blast play in I don't believe there will be any big name/deep pocket owners involved in the new league.
• Hale states there will initially be eleven clubs to begin I believe there will be approximately eight for season one.
• To get the league off the ground, a couple of the clubs may be of the "Rec Center" variety.

If Hale's league does not get off the ground next season where will the Blast be playing next season? The MASL or not at all?

 

If I was a betting man, I would say the Blast will be in the MASL next season. Even if Hale is serious, there is not enough time to get nine (or six, or four) more brand new teams all ready in time to start a new league by October 2016. There would need to be some serious defections from the MASL which I don't see happening.

 

The only realistic scenario I see is Baltimore, Syracuse, St. Louis and Florida, which would be fun to have Andrew Haines own half the teams in the league.

 

I don't know the economics of the league to argue for our against rec center teams being good or bad, but to argue solely lesser travel expenses makes it worth while is short sighted. Those are the teams who fold and leave behind debt that other teams are on the hook for. So saving a few thousand on a road trip might end up costing you tens of thousands in a single entity league. But without the numbers none of us can say which is better for the average team.

 

It's not even necessarily a case of being "good". If anything they are place holder teams that extend the league's footprint. For instance, the MISL3 had interest from a group in Phoenix, but the closest team was 1200 miles away so it pretty much was DOA. But if you have teams in multiple markets in the region it starts to make sense.

If you follow the trajectory of the PASL/MASL it has been a slow progression of increased standards and attendance. The idea is to keep costs down and build the framework of the league. If you keep that trajectory and attract more qualified owners, the smaller teams will work themselves out one way or another organically (they will either fold, drop to a lower league, or sell to a more qualified investor).

 

If history is any indicator, there would also be team in, say, Allentown PA, funded under the table by Ed Hale, so that the league would have a fifth team. And the Allentown Rioting Roaring Twisters would go 1-19 and fold by May.

 

Non-league opponents. National Pro Fastpitch used this as a business model in the mid 2000s.

 

I don't believe Ed Hale is as much concerned about the rec center teams themselves as the owners of said teams, and owners of other teams who shouldn't be qualified.

We can argue forever the pro's and con's of having avg. attendance 200 club's playing in the league. But what can't be ignored is the overall lack of vetting of owners and the type of people allowed to be in the league. TAG, Earl, and GOD who knows who else have proven to be terrible choices and have/could land the league in deep waters.

If you want to get guys with passion and who do it right but need time and maybe some financial help start in a rec center for a few years, let them get drilled nightly for a few years while they grow, but as long as they are trying and are not scum bags no one has a issue.

That hasn't been the case, and the owners who seem to be so hell bent on single entity and blaming Ed Hale for everything are the same who lack the foresight to avoid issues like those that have arose. Stop ignoring the big problem by covering it up with "its about rec teams or not" argument.

 

Still gotta pay 'em. They still have expenses. If the league could underwrite a tour by Zenit of Leningrad or someone, we would not be having this conversation.

And why go see non-league games? Unless the opponent is sexy (and who is?), they are going to cost money to bring in and cart around and that defeats the purpose. And there is nothing in it for the non-league team.

 

Meanwhile, money is flowing into futsal: http://sportsday.dallasnews.com/soc...al-nba-owners-prestigious-soccer-clubs-joined

 

What the owners don't get is your hire a commissioner to run the league and if he does a bad job you hire someone else. You don't try to run the league yourself. There are 5 or 6 owners who think they know how to run a league and they all have different agendas and none of them know what they're doing.

 

Here’s my 2 cents on the subject (please be gentle). If Hale is to be believed and there will be AHL owners involved in that new venture, he may actually have something viable. With the AHL having 30 teams currently, there are potential new markets to tap into if the league shows some early promise. How many other AHL teams would buy in (if any do), who knows? On the surface at least, such a business plan appears to make sense for a few reasons. No guarantee it’ll work out obviously, as it is Indoor Soccer. It’d also require Ed Hale to play nice with others, and that one is...you know. The sport has had more lives than a cat though. Many have tried their best to kill it, but no one can. I doubt that one more attempt at a league will do it .

 

AHL cities, like Rochester, Utica, Albany in New York, Hartford and Bridgeport Connecticut, Springfield Massachusetts?

 

The issue as I see it -- many AHL teams are already not the primary tenant in their arenas. An indoor soccer team would be, what, third on the pecking order for home dates?

 

And it will flow right back out.

 

A couple of those could work, and others like Hershey and Lehigh Valley might also. A Hartford team was actually admitted into the MASL, but the prospective owners were discovered to be crooks. It doesn’t say much for the MASL vetting process (assuming they actually have one). Hartford could be a very good market with a real ownership group running things.

That could be an issue in some places. It'd be ten dates over roughly twenty weeks, so getting creative with a couple of Saturday/Sunday matinee games, etc. would probably be necessary. I know that in Rochester, the former Lancers were fourth in line for dates behind hockey, indoor lacrosse, and minor league basketball. That was one of their many problems, I won’t get into the others.

On the reverse side, are there AHL owners who are also operators of their buildings? I don’t know the logistics there. I believe there are 16 AHL teams currently owned by their NHL affiliates.

I thought the same thing . But hey, if Cuban can get some of his mega-rich pals to invest, more power to him. I saw in the article they're going to have a FIFTY GAME SEASON? Whaaa? Talk about being down the pecking order scheduling home dates for half of those, much less trying to draw warm bodies to fill seats for them.

 

Based on what?

I'm always curious as to the nebulous mental calculus people are doing when they say "(Insert market currently without a team or with an under-performing team) could be a very good market for (whatever league we're talking about.)"

Based on what?

Where, exactly, have the "very good" indoor soccer markets been and what characteristics do they share? If those are applicable to whatever city currently under discussion, fine, at least that would be something more definite than "with a real ownership group running things" or "if done correctly" (my personal favorite).

There aren't any real ownership groups who are going to get into indoor soccer. Name for me the last one that did. The people who own the Comets? They've done pretty well. But the vast majority of the last 20-25 indoor expansion teams have gone belly-freaking-up, haven't they? The New Jersey Ironmen were owned by NHL owners who had money and were playing in a new building. How'd that work out? And that was with a couple of years of ramp up time.

If it's "market size," then show me comparable markets that have been successful. If it's "youth participation," show me the numbers and the correlation to an indoor team's success. If it's lack of competition from major league sports, show me comparables.

But if it's just "well, they haven't had an opportunity to screw up an indoor soccer team in a while," that just doesn't seem good enough.

Where has indoor been successful for any sustained period of time at all? Milwaukee, Baltimore, Philadelphia...San Diego back in the day. The Wave is still around, but I'm not sure you'd hoot and holler about how successful they are, given how many owners they have gone through in the last eight years. Or are our standards so low now that we think Cedar Rapids is successful because they can get 2,000 a game and there haven't been any stories of them not being able to make payroll? Or do we think Haines is successful because he hasn't been sued lately?

(Almost) no one is going to make an actual, bona fide attempt to do indoor soccer right because there's no upside in it and anyone that dumb likely didn't become rich enough for it not to matter. It's not a good investment. There isn't going to be a renaissance.

I don't believe the whole AHL ownership thing for a minute. These people are running hockey teams. The much-vaunted "economies of scale" and "filling dates in the building" aren't that important when people don't come to games.

Cuban was smart enough to have a great idea at the right time and was able to capitalize on it, so good for him for how he made his initial wealth and for how he's kept from losing it all because he apparently has some idea about where to invest money.

But this....it's just a dog. It has no chance. I can't imagine the sales pitch was anything but Donnie Nelson relying on his personal relationship with Cuban, unless the investment just wasn't much.

If they really intend to play fifty games, they're less self-aware than any league organizers I've ever seen, and I already think they're pretty un-self-aware.

But, again, back to the general point of the thread: good luck. I do not believe anyone can cobble together 10-12 realistic ownership groups in this sport for a league that spans the big-ass country that we are. Unless you're doing Jedi mind tricks on these people, at some point, they have to be able to do a little research and see how calamitous it has been for others who have invested in indoor in recent years.

 

I doubt they can pull those 11-12 teams in one year either. But, for arguments sake, let's call it 11. Baltimore & St Louis puts the magic # at 9, and Florida makes it 8.

There was rumblings last year that AHL owners had be contacted, were interested, and needed time to get things in order. IF* these are the same guys, and instead of steering them towards the MASL or because they wouldn't join the MASL in its current form, they could join the league with a year + of prep.

Did they really prep? Did they really start to build anything in the community? Who knows, probably not. But hypothetically speaking getting 8 people shouldn't be hard realistically that 8 isn't 8, when Hale could probably finance a team himself to make it 7, Syracuse (if it lives) would make 6, and Sam said he was "itching to get back in" so I could see him with Hale's or Rochesters Amerks ownership backing running Rochester again to make the ISL needing only 5 teams to get to the magic 11 team number.

What 5 cities is anyone's guess..but I believe Allentown was mentioned a lot last year and last we heard from them they said they would be aiming for "next season" so we can see how that turns out. Hartford as mentioned if they can put a better ownership team in place. The other 3 I have no idea besides complete guessing that would be as good as listed AHL eastern teams cities in a hat and pulling at random.

 

My guess would be: 1. Baltimore 2.St.Louis 3.Florida 4.Hershey 5. Syracuse 6. Rochester 7. Lehigh Valley 8.Providence 9.Hartford 10.Toronto 11.Utica

 

The League is going to have a set of standards that must be followed. Including video feeds ( you tube was mentioned )

 

Thank god your not a betting man,

 

there will be 2 teams in Florida.

 

we need a commissioner who has no vested interest in any team

 

I think the Going after AHL teams is a good idea. The Already own the walls all they need to do is spend $25,000 on carpet and goals. Then between the AHL Games and the IPL games they can control the arenas and get a better rental rate by booking more dates at the arena

 

Ill Just say this from what i have heard you list is pretty close to the teams mentioned .