Before I was glad MLS didn't have a dominant team like a Real Madrid, M.U. or Inter (or a Yankees type team) that wins a big percentage of they're championships, instead we have a league that all teams are pretty much even so anyone can win a championship, but now I think this league does need a team or two that everyone would recognize around the world (hopefully metros being one of them), this year the league is plagued with mediocre and bad teams, a 6-4-4 means you are the best team this year, that can not be good, with the silly playoffs that we have an under 500 team can be champion, I'm not sure if that happens in other leagues. Anyone think the league is better off like it is now or having a DC united team like the first 4 seasons. Get rid of the east & west conference.
I couldn't agree more. MLS needs the Fire to become the Real Madrid, ManU, Inter kind of dominant team. It would do well for the league to have a team that is going to win all the big matches and have everyone cheer against them while doing it.
I totally agree with you guys but the team that needs to shine like Real Madrid is the Colorado Rapids. It's time the league stop favoring their spoiled brats of New York , Washington and Chicago and give Colorado the break it deserves. 1st, MLS need to get rid of this stupid Mickey Mouse single entitly joke and allow Kronke to spend 20 mill on a real team in Colorado.
No, it's definitely San Jose. No wait, Dallas, they've been persecuted too long. No, hold that, Kansas City, they have nice uniforms. Wait, a team with a winning tradition - Los Angeles. People who want an unbalanced league never want their team to be the Bengals or the Devil Rays - I'll take the league as it is, thank you very much.
we had one in dc a few years back and i am confident that united will return to glory. oh and inter isnt the most dominant team in seria a.
no..no..NO! Dynasties are boring, dynasties are ugly, dynasties suck for everyone that's not a fan of said dynasty. I love not knowing at the start of the season who's going to be champion. Ultimately, not having dynasties will HELP the league to become the worlds most popular, and competitive.
I disagree. EPL is a bit over the top where no one aside from Man U/Arsenal has won it since '95 (don't hit me if i'm wrong -- off the top of my head). However, to have a good team up there everyone wants to knock off is way better for the league. Think back to the days of the 49ers and of the Cowboys when they were wreckin shop left and right. It was great both because they were awesome teams that were fun to watch AND because I wanted to see someone -- ANYone -- beat the crap out of them. Think if college football had a bunch of 8-3 teams in the top of the rankings. Would you give a crap about the BCS? I wouldn't. (Unless, of course, the Hawkeyes took it all. That would be the best BCS of all time and would prove the system worked.) I want to see one team that stomps all over the rest against another team that stomps all over the rest. I don't want to see one team go on forever and ever, but a three year dominance stretch from a team or two now and then would be great. Marquee teams with marquee players would be totally marquee. (Side note: with only 10 teams, that would leave such a big imbalance that all games not involving the best team or two would be boring as hell. Once we get up to 14 or so, bring on the short-term dynasties.)
Sorry, but you're still an unknow quantity, Mr. Thunder. Clearly, the Quakes should be the dominant team in the league. Stack the Quakes like the Gals and Metrotards are stacked every year but keep the good field management. Forget having crap like Sigi trying to lead them. What a waste. I mean, how many MLS Cups have they won in the last three years without getting all the stacking the other teams get? And doing it by taking Galaxy cast-offs and whipping them into shape to make them real players. Since they've already got the lead in the recent domination race, I vote for the Quakes to be the dominatrix of MLS. What the heck, the Galaxy is already our submissive.
The NFL is probably the most profitable and successful league in the world as a whole because it has a more balanced league and not a dynasty structure. It would be good to have a little less parity, but not to the level of Man U or Bayern... Spain is actually much more of a level horserace than you people seem to acknowledge. Same with Italy.
Thats only been in the past 10 years. And today alot of people(fans, media, etc.) HATE parity. Most people think the NFL has gotten boring and "cold". Meaning it has gotten harder for fans to relate to players because one year they hate them, the next year their on their team. That happens WAY too much. Not to mention that when your team fights, and struggles for years to get a championship, the following year pretty much means all the free agents are gone. Which means youre back to square 1. I dont know about you but Id rather have the days when you saw the 49ers steam roll just about everyone, and the Steel Curtain stop everything anyone threw at them. And Im not a fan of neither team. It just means ALOT more when your team is able to defeat them like my Giants did to the 49ers a couple of times. If they weren't a Dynasty it wouldve been just "another opponent". Id rather lose to a Goliath every year than beat by a bunch of sewn together teams, its just makes that 1 time out 10 that we win that much sweeter, when you have no money, no respect, and nothing to lose. Ive also been a fan on the other side of things and it hurts so much more when you have so much money, talent, and history only to get beaten by a bunch of nobodies.
And to think its 25 posts. Everyone at BigSocer laughs about this sooner or later when they first join. I figured it was a magical number like 100 or I don't know .... 69. Do fans really care though? In the nhl - I saw the caps go crazy with superstars and ended up with nothing. The fans went to the games - but what can you say to a first-round playoff exit? Two years in a row - and those guys are gone. When they let Bondra go - I knew the jig was up. Of course for the Detroits, and Avs, and stars - championships and great runs followed their big signings so don't know how those fans took it. In a way, that being "the buisness" one can easily yearn for the 'fabled' days when players stuck with a team their entire careers. Of course, fan loyalty is hard to just "BUY" Look at any U.S. leauge (except NFL) if the team is doing bad, only hardcore fans show up. When a team is about to wrap a cup - fans show up again. Can you blame them? For the average "family wallet" who wants to spend 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs, sodas/beers to see your local side loose? Again, only the hardcore fans go to those. Not that hardcore fans are automatically not "family" members. Some of the biggest and feverent fans i've seen anywhere are kids. Of course its not them - that buys the tickets + etc. And oh yeah - I agree there should be a dynasty team - but it should be DC United.
That may be true, but... The NFL has had parity as one of its overriding philosophies since the late '50s. It's not something that the owners came up with in the mid '90s. The reason why you saw the great teams of the past that stayed together was because players had little or no freedom of movement. And because there was no free agency, the owners didn't see the need for a salary cap. Result: Bradshaw, Harris, et al stay in Pittsburgh for 15 years because they can't really leave. On the other hand, management took decent care of them because they didn't really have to worry about a salary cap. But when people rail against parity, while waxing romantically about the Steelers dynasty, they never think about what came before the dynasty. The Pittsburgh Steelers were the laughingstock of the NFL throughout much of the '60s and built themselves, not through Yankee-like massive expenditures of money, but through smart management and good draft picks. They were crap for decades, but once they got smart management in place, the NFL's parity-driven system gave them the tools to overcome that legacy in a few short years. If you look at the 49ers in the '70s, theirs was the same story. Ditto for the Cowboys in the late '80s. They were crap, but built themselves through the NFL's parity-driven system, through smart draft picks, smart trades, and smart coaching, not through open checkbooks. People who talk about how much better the NFL was in the eras of the dynasties too often forget about how those dynasties were built and how they stayed together. And even today, when the "scourge" of parity has supposedly ruined the NFL, which league is it that has not only stayed America's obsession, but solidified its standing as America's obsession. The NFL captures and holds the nation's attention -- more than ever -- from late July to late January. Call me crazy, but I think that it might have something to do with the fact that at the beginning of each training camp, the fans of roughly 28 or 29 teams have hope and can honestly think that this year will be their year. You might think that a lot of fans are turned off by parity, but the numbers don't lie. While every other pro sports league in this country retrenches or retreats, the NFL keeps marching onward and upward. People like not rooting for cannon-fodder. People like the concept of "on any given Sunday..."
For a league with TOO MUCH PARITY, the New England Patriots quite on their way to becomming team of the decade...further along than the steelers, niners, or cowboys were at these points in their respective decades.
I would also like to make a distinction, between the true "dynasty" like Bayern Munich and Real Madrid and the New York Yankees, and the "mini-dynasty" like the Cincinnati Reds from 1970-1977 and the St. Louis Cardinals from 1982 to 1987. I think all sensible people agree that it is a bad idea for MLS to have "permanent" dynasties. But I believe that MLS would be well-served to tweak some rules to encourage "mini-dynasties." How were the Reds of the 70's built? They came up with two different crops of good young players (Rose, Perez, May, etc., and Bench, Concepcion, etc.) and kept them together. They traded Lee May and Tommy Helms to the Astros for Joe Morgan and Denis Menke and...a pitcher. Jack Billingham? But that's impossible in MLS. One reason, MLS can't do much about. If an MLS team got together a bunch of young players, the Johnny Bench equivalent would end up in Europe. Even the Dave Concepcion equivalent might. On another reason, MLS can do something, and I wish they would. There should be a fairly large "discount" for pay increases for players who stay with a team. In MLS, the dumbest thing you can do is build for a future longer than 2 years out. If you build with young players, and they stink, then they lose games for you. If they're good, they get big pay increases and cream your salary cap. I advocate some measure that would make it so that in such a situation, your salary cap is badly dented, but not creamed. An NBA-like system. Of course, in the NBA, the importance of one or two players makes it fairly easy to create a dynasty, even with the cap. The nature of soccer won't allow that. Anyway, I'd like to see an NBA-like system rather than an NFL-like system.
I've traveled a little and the few people who know a little about MLS can only mention DC United, dynasty type beginning and now with the Adu factor, so this league lacks team recognition in the soccer world, MLS and the Mexican league teams should dominate every Concacaf championship and wouldn't it be nice now that the US national team is BETTER than the Mexican team also have our teams stomp those teams from the MFL (had to put that in.) We don't need a team that wins all the time but we do need a couple that will always be strong contenders and the rest hate (please let it not be ChivasUSA whenever they come) doesn't matter what city they're from. No one can say that the NFL is better now with weird teams making it to the Superbowl than it was in the 70's with a Cowboys/Steelers domination league. 8 years and still can't buy MLS products in malls
Right now i think MLS needs to keep parity because since the league is so young. Imagine if the Earthquakes or Burn were in a MLS where DC United, the Chicago Fire and say the LA Galaxy were all the power houses and the fans know they have no hope each season to be a winning team. They would be luck to draw at least 8K a game. Maybe 10 years down the road it would work, as there would be a stronger fanbase and more teams. I think MLB is a good model because it seems like every 8-10 years or so a new group of dominant teams emerge. This season is the perfect example because there is a lot of parity and a bunch of new teams capable of getting the title of "powerhouse". I personally think that's more exciting because if your team is in a winning season drought then good ownership/management may permit that team to be in the next wave up powerhouse teams. (for example; compare the 90's Indians, Braves, Expos, Dodgers, Mets, and Mariners to now and look at the new big teams...Cubs, Reds, Astros, Padres, Phillies, Angels, and White Sox)
One of my favourite things about American sports is the parity. It is great knowing that a number of teams can win the NFL at the start of the season. European soccer has dominant teams in their domestic leagues but the champions league has parity. The final four teams his year were a surprise to most people.
Once upon a time, the Steelers were one of the "weird teams" making the Super Bowl. And now, the New England Patriots have won as many Super Bowls in the past three seasons as the Cowboys won during the entire decade of the '70s. And yes, the NFL is better now.
Yeah, too bad we can't have a team that, say, won 3 out of the first 4 chamipnship games, or a team that, say, won two recent championships sandwiched around a season during which they had the best overall record.