News: NFL's return to Los Angeles and & how it imapcts MLS .

That table shows how wrong people were when they assumed that the success of MLS would depend on attracting Hispanics.

 

Im still not sure what Portland having too many white people has to do with St Louis getting and MLS team and the NFL returning to LA

 

Quantum entanglement.

 

Why is that? Like, what are some of the things that would deter an investor from wanting to go all-in on a St. Louis MLS franchise when it seems like there are multiple groups going for other markets? Is it a political thing? Or financial?

 

Sure. Having 81 home games in a year is twice the NBA or NHL, more than thrice MLS, and ten times the NFL. That's a lot of additional operational costs to be covered.

 

Why not Cleveland or Pittsburgh? St. Louis is just not flashy or a big enough city to attract an investor from outside the area. Portland and Orlando are similar in size and had extremely successful lower division operations that grew into MLS. Salt Lake had someone with just enough money when the league was desperate enough--someone who also had ties to StL, but decided on Utah for the team. (Denver, Tampa, Columbus, and Kansas City got in at the beginning, which was when I was too young to really follow this sort of thing.) Well-known cities can attract attention from outside their immediate environs, but other markets need someone to chase it down.

 

It's also that the bigger schedule means that MLB teams have to rely on a smaller geographic radius for their core of their attendance. NFL teams often have sizeable fractions of their season ticket base who drive 3-4 hours to the stadium, and will even have some who fly in for every home game. If that's where people want to spend their leisure time and money, they can do it because of the small number of games, mostly on weekends. MLB teams also have long-distance fans, but fans that kind of distance away aren't going to get season tickets or anything close to that. So it's that much more important for MLB teams to be in a substantial population center where there are enough people nearby to fill the seats on a day-to-day basis.

 

Baseball has an anti-trust exemption courtesy of a 1920s Supreme Court ruling which held that professional baseball was a "diversion" rather than commerce for purposes of the Constitution's interstate commerce power. Back then commerce usually meant tangible things so the professions and financial services were regulated by states rather than Congress. The NFL doesn't have an anti-trust exemption so the ruling in the Al Davis case (and several others since) is that the NFL is a league of independent, competing teams whose owners can't infringe on each other's business opportunities.

 

Seems a bit discriminating to me. Its ok for football but not baseball. I forget why the NFL blocked the move initially. I remember Al Davis stating once in an interview he believed that Rozelle wanted the LA market for himself but never knew or heard the real reason from the commissioner.

 

Landon Donovan offers an interesting perspective about MLS to St Louis. Questions whether STL is a viable market from a sport business perspective. Cites Kroenke's reasons for leaving, calls him a smart businessman.

The interviewer is obviously a fan of MLS STL, but Landon makes good points

https://soundcloud.com/siriusxmfc/landon-donovan-talked-about-mls-expansion-on-counter-attack

 

MLS eyeing St. Louis for expansion, but who would own it?
KSDK

 

I did go off at a bit of a tangent.

 

Well the likes on my post out number yours 3 to 1, so...I win. haha.
It has definitely been played out but I couldn't stop myself.
BS posters still use the 60-90 days comment, now that is played out.

 

American football should be exposed for the garbage it is. Then soccer will have an easier time in growing it's fan base. MLS should market the game more aggressively.

 

Personally I miss "you need to spread some rep around before you..." Also "asshat" whatever happened to asshat? Man, those were days... I get misty eyed just thinking about them.

 

I think MLS is less reliant on a large city than MLB. The average MLB team has an attendance of roughly 30k, and their season has almost 5x the number of games, so in a given year a typical MLB team will have 8x the attendance of an MLS team. Also, making all 81 home games is probably wildly unrealistic for most fans, while a 17 game season is much more manageable. So you can almost certainly count on fewer season ticket sales which means that having a small core fanbase is less likely to fill the stadium at a given size.

When a sport gets very popular in a country it is limited to a large extent by the population. The top European Leagues are those whose countries have the biggest population. MLS is not really very popular compared to what the EPL is in the UK, or NFL is in the US. Having a good ownership group and a nice fan base in a smaller city (Portland) can easily be better for the league than one in a much larger city (Chicago). It does seem that, somewhat like the NBA, it prizes cities that don't have (many) other sports teams. Smaller cities like Orlando, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake, San Antonio all either have teams or are in the running for them. I believe there are five teams that have season ticket waiting lists (Portland, San Jose, Salt Lake, Orlando, Kansas City) and interestingly these are all smaller markets, and four of them (all except KC) only have one other Pro sports team. Both Scacramento and San Antonio also only have one major sports team. In most cases this is an NBA team and I believe part of the easy sell for MLS is outdoor sports entertainment.

The one area that population probably does matter is talent. NYC and LA are very large cities, and having two teams compete for the most talented kids is probably a very good way to get them to invest more in youth development without forcing them to.

 

I also think part of it is simply projecting into the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas

Of MSA in the top 48 (where we find Salt Lake City), the following MSAs had 2010-2014 population growths of less than 0.75%: Providence, Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Hartford. Pittsburgh and Cleveland were the only two major cities to have fewer people in 2014 than 2010.

MSAs in the top 50 with 8% growth are: Austin, Raleigh, Houston, Orlando, San Antonio, Denver and Dallas. Specifically, Austin had the 3rd highest growth rate of any MSA at 13%. While the University of Texas is presumably a large sports presence there, this should also be true of Columbus (Ohio State), and it obviously has an MLS team. Given that it seems to be very popular among MLS' favorite demographic (millenials) and it has no competition from any major sports, I don't really understand why MLS isn't trying to expand to Austin. Sure, they probably don't have an ownership group in line, but neither does St Louis. And we are looking at 13% growth versus 0.66% growth. I think having previously successful USL/NASL teams is overrated, too. It is also worth noting that college sports do not run during the summer, so you have no competition during that time.

 

Other than Miami, I don't see any metro area with a median age of 40 and over getting an MLS team, so Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit might not factor into MLS' long-term vision. St Louis' soccer-loving Bosnian population is a plus, so signing a name like Dzeko would be a no-brainer. But STL also has a median age (38.6) above the US average (37.5) and a shrinking central city population, compared to other rumored expansion cities that have the younger, thriving core that MLS covets. Of all the current, future and rumored MLS metro areas, only the big 3 Northeastern metro areas plus Miami and St Louis have a median age of 38 or older.

http://www.demographia.com/db-metroage.pdf

City of St Louis Population:
1950: 856,796
1960: 750,026 (−12.5%)
1970: 622,236 (−17.0%)
1980: 452,801 (−27.2%)
1990: 396,685 (−12.4%)
2000: 348,189 (−12.2%)
2010: 319,294 (−8.3%)
2014: 317,419 (−0.6%)

Median Age (2013) of U.S. MLS Markets and Future MLS Markets
Miami: 40.4
Boston: 38.8
Philadelphia: 38.3
New York: 38.0
-----U.S. Average: 37.5-----
Portland: 37.5 (surprised to learn that POR and SEA are among the older MLS markets)
Seattle: 37.0
Orlando: 36.7
San Jose: 36.7
Kansas City: 36.6
Minneapolis: 36.6
Chicago: 36.5
Washington: 36.3
Denver: 36.1
Los Angeles: 35.8
Columbus: 35.7
Atlanta: 35.7
Dalllas: 34.2
Houston: 33.6
Salt Lake City: 31.8

Potential Future MLS Markets
St Louis: 38.6
-----U.S. Average: 37.5-----
Charlotte: 36.9
Sacramento: 36.6
Las Vegas: 36.5
Nashville: 36.1
Indianapolis: 36.0
Phoenix: 35.7
San Diego: 35.1
San Antonio: 34.2

 

More luck then telling folks around the country to give up their guns.

 

This speaks to how much more preferable it is for MLS to be in relatively less crowded markets, rather than focusing on the largest ones, as baseball must do. Selling 2.5M tickets for a season is a serious task. NBA and NHL teams have the lowest per game crowds, but average teams in those leagues sell 600-700K tickets per season. Most NFL teams do over 500K in eight dates.

MLS gets somewhat bigger crowds than the NHL and NBA, but on far fewer dates--350K tickets is a significantly lower total sales volume. That's what makes smaller markets so viable for the league, even with a long-term goal to sell more tickets. I doubt the league expects to vastly outsell the NBA on a per season basis even well into the future, so the markets which can support it will resemble those which serve the professional leagues other than Major League Baseball. Like you, I believe MLS is best served by placing new teams in the markets which have high populations relative to the number of pro sports teams in the city--places like Sacramento and San Antonio... and now San Diego. Saint Louis wouldn't be a bad choice, but may take a little more work to be a success than those cities.

For the markets I'm most familiar with CSA is better for measuring the population base that the team derives its support from, especially for Salt Lake. By CSA, SLC is very slightly larger than KC, Columbus, and Vancouver (though Canada counts differently than the USCB). On the other hand I've heard people claim the opposite, particularly in the case of DC and Baltimore.

 

I think this is definitely true for Pittsburgh and Cleveland. They are not particularly large, have declining older populations, and in the case of Cleveland are quite close to an original MLS franchise. Detroit is the largest CSA without a team, and with a population of over 5 million is larger than most European cities.

Age is probably a good way to look at things, as having an older population is probably indicative of young people not wanting to live there. This seems like it is kind of a self-fullfilling prophecy, as young people not living there makes it less likely that other young people move there, and is probably a hard cycle to break. These cities were once thriving, and just because Austin is a hot place for young people today doesn't mean it will be in 30 years, but it is difficult to imagine these rust belt cities making a strong revival.

I think for the business side this is definitely true. Looking at college sports in the US or soccer teams in Europe, even "smaller" US cities are more than capable of (in theory) supporting attendances of 40k+. For most MLS decisions the first thing that should be recognized is that league revenues are primarily driven by attendance (this is why the whole Fall-spring schedule to boost TV ratings won't happen, makes no sense to swap winter for summer in a league whose revenues are attendance driven), and the benefit of a larger TV market is in a sports saturated CSA (like Detroit) can easily be made up for in attendance for a smaller CSA who is more likely to have higher attendance (Sacramento or San Antonio). Now, again, the one area that size does matter is development, and San Antonio is simply going to have a smaller possible yield for soccer talent than Detroit.