usually they announce the hosting city for the Cup around Draft time. Maybe Garber will make the announcement the day of the Draft.
Too bad it'll be at a neutral site again this year, but it sounds like they thought pretty seriously about moving it to the higher seeded team's place. Maybe next year they'll finally reach a point where they're comfortable with moving it.
Maybe the league chickened out when they looked at the stats and realized that the Crew actually won the Supporters Shield 3 out of the past 6 years!
I'm thinking part of the reason was because they still don't think they control enough stadia to make it feasible. Plus, the good thing about knowing in advance is that there's enough time to plan all the other events (Supporters Summit, pub events, etc.) and have enough time so everyone can make travel plans.
Personally, I'd love to see the league do something the NFL should have done years ago for the Superbowl: set up a 4 city rotation of warm weather cities where the championship game will be played. My choices would be San Diego, Miami, Las Vegas and New Orleans. Just use existing stadiums and block off the seats like Seattle does until you sell it out. The benefits: 1. More exposure for MLS into new markets 2. A guaranteed destination every year, similar to how the Final Four and Super Bowl are done now, but with the added flavor of how the BCS Championship game rotates every year. 3. A surefire 4-day weekend trip every year. I know the skeptics will say "you'll never sell 20k-30k seats in a non-MLS city." Personally, I think you could find a segment of 20k people in any of those cities just due to their populations that would come out for one soccer game every four years (other than Las Vegas, but that's a high travel destination which wouldn't have a problem), never mind the thousands of MLS fans from cold-weather regions who would take a trip to any of those cities just to get out of the November weather, even if their team isn't playing. I know it would never happen in a million years, but I'd love to have an excuse to go to San Diego and Miami once every two years.
Is there anywhere to play in any of those 4 cities that isn't a torn-up football field, or FieldTurf? Plus, you won't get 20k-30k @ one of those sites, and MLS fans don't travel to actual MLS cities for the finals in huge numbers, let alone somewhere else. And, lastly, the NFL shouldn't do that either.
I think it's about time that Hunt Park gets another All-Star game or MLS Cup. PH Park got 2 in a row and HDC is sucking MLS's wang half the time. We need respect dammit. DCU talks tradition. Get your own stadium, bitch. We've had ours for 10 years now.
Hunt Park won't get anything while there are new stadiums are popping up across the country. You can forget about us getting the All Star or MLS Cup in Columbus any time soon
Not to get into arguing semantics here, but I wouldn't call 34k in Orlando or 23k in San Diego a "miserable failure" (and nevermind that those were All-Star games, and not championship games). Save for the 46k Seattle brought to the table this year (which was fantastic, by the way), those numbers are comparable to what you would get in nearly any other MLS city for MLS Cup with two weeks notice were the league to switch to a non-neutral site. Also, the two teams in MLS Cup this season would have destroyed the All-Star teams that drew those numbers. Much better players in the year 2009 equals a much more watchable game that actually hands out hardware. More fans? Maybe / maybe not. But I think you sell the league short. Again, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. But would you have thought more about going to MLS Cup if it were in sunny Miami as opposed to Seattle this year if your team wasn't in it? Many non-diehards would have. And the only way to TRULY guarantee it's a neutral site is to put it in a non-MLS city in the first place. Again, it's just a nice thought, MLS will never do it.
We get the best game in North America every four years. I prefer that over an all star game, or even the Cup.