Ginther is the same guy who, after two gang-related shootings occurred in the Short North last year, decided the best fix was to have street vendors stop selling gyros after midnight. He is basically the Coachbot of city government, you put a microphone in front of him and wait for him to say something illogical and stupid with the most dispassionate tone possible.
The rich will pay a lot for a tax write off....Question is will HSG spend money to fix the Crew? They spend money on the Browns like drunken sailors arriving to port. What about us?
Which is why it's the only ballpark I've seen with the county flag among the outfield flags. Funny story: The Franklin County flag is similar enough to the Cleveland flag that I've heard a couple people mistakenly assume that the Guardians forced the Clippers to put the Cleveland flag net to the Columbus one in center field.
The solution is simple and he knows it as well as we do: Spend a lot more money acquiring players. It's not magic, it's not voodoo; people will watch good soccer, and to have good soccer you need a lot of good players and good players cost a lot of money. MLS just isn't up to it and they aren't likely to be any time soon. And of course, some asswipe brought up pro/rel, as if teams moving up and down a division somehow magically brings in more talented players. Only money does that. But if he's not going to spend that kind of dough - not that I particularly blame him - until the MLS TV rights pay him $400 million a year, it's going to be a long wait.
Jimmy's been banging this drum for years - about how too many MLS fans only watch one team and don't support the league overall. The first - and only - time he met with the Nordecke Board during my three year tenure his main talking point was asking us to help grow support of the league as a whole rather than just Columbus. As though the Supporters Collective for Columbus is all of a sudden going to start doing PR work for the league, or even other teams. I was kinda dumbfounded by it.
Yeah, while the article includes the phrase "the league’s restrictive roster rules" there's nothing the rules that limit Jimmy's ability to spend transfer money on better players, especially those who would fit within U-22 or Young DP designations that have almost no effect on the salary budget. Recall that Cucho was a Young DP when he first arrived. His cap his was $150K. And of course the roster rules have no effect whatsoever on his investment in the academy, Crew 2, or the first team's FO, including scouting which seems to have whithered on the vine since McGuinness left.
Well Jimmy learned the lessons of other NFL owners and from the crew. The new Browns stadium can expand from 67.5k to 75k for other events, and from the sound of it, that includes not just concerts but international soccer matches. https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/aecom-and-turner-to-build-ohio-super-theater/ https://neo-trans.blog/2025/10/02/h...eUfXc4k0pxQIoDyZtM_aem_WeDMh3upuNz58--VxpZm-w
He spent $10 million or whatever on Cucho, $5 million on Rossi, and $9ish million on Ali, $7 million on Zelarayan. Haslam sucks blah blah blah, but they've spent. I'd love to see our spend during the Haslam era. For 2025 only two teams have spent more on transfers than us: LAFC - $22 million NYCFC - $9 million Columbus - $8.4 million Transfer spend rank the last five years: 2025 - 3rd 2024 - 20th 2023 - 8th 2022 - 3rd 2021 - 24th Barring the post covid season, and a season after a championship where very little is probably needed to be changed, the team does spend on fees.
How did you compile those transfer fee numbers? Atlanta spent over $30M on two players in early 2025, right?
Cincinnati spent at last $12 million on Evander plus another $5-10 million on other players including Brenner. Those numbers are clearly wrong.
The NFL owners and their mindset are poisoning MLS. Several of the crappy MLS stadiums are their doing, with no upgrade in sight: Charlotte - turf New England - turf Colorado - a dump Haslam's comments reflect a top-down tone deafness and arrogance. NFL thinking. The amount of sports competition in Central Ohio they will have for early season MLS regular season games when the schedule changes is insane. Stop worrying about someone in Gahanna watching Dallas at Real Salt Lake. Work on improving your presence in the local market and keeping LDC filled. (Or regional markets, as the case may be with "The Crew.")
Absolutely, the regional markets. Keep an eye on the Crew's rivals. But to ask the fans to do that lifting for you... The hubris on that man is thicker than his southern drawl. I don't care if he's a billionaire or not, he's out of his depth when discussion MLS fans.
Yeah. I watch a ton of MLS, but I completely agree with your take. Haslam wants people to treat MLS like the NFL, and watch any games between any two teams because he thinks it will eventually make the product better. But the reason why the NFL is at the point where fans will watch random games is because the product is so good. It's ass-backward thinking.
I don't get the complaint about Colorado. It may be a dump, but it's a stadium for soccer. It's not worth losing sleep over. As for New England... wasn't there something in the works about them getting closer to getting a stadium? Did that flame out? Do I not remember it right?
It's a bizarre comparison to even make. The NFL is the 900 lb gorilla of American professional sports. I'm curious how many NHL, NBA and MLB fans routinely watch lots of games by teams they're not supporters of. Maybe it's common. I don't really know. In any event, if you agree with the premise that "if you build it, they wil come," MLS needs to build a league-wide top-shelf product before you can possibly expect fans to start watching in larger numbers. Investment in the product will be necessary to even begin building that type of viewership. Even so, I'm not convinced it's remotely possible to achieve. And Jimmy mentioned two of the (related) reasons why without seemingly recognizning it. Yes, Jimmy, the Premiership gets decent ratings. As does Liga MX. And UEFA Champions League games. The finite number of American soccer fans already have a lot of soccer to watch on TV, all of it better than MLS, and much of it world class. Then there's his comment about MLS being 10th-12th best league in the world. By comparison, how many pro football leagues is NFL comepeting with for TV viewers? I'm guessing the NFL doesn't worry too much about US-based fans of the Montreal Alouettes dragging down their ratings numbers.