Over 11,000 for an Open Cup Game!

You wouldn't happen to be Rhinos CEO Steve Donner, would you?

He was on Kick This! this morning and his response to the question about whether they are looking to acquire the Quakes or Le Wiz for relocation next year sounded a lot like what you just posted.

It looks like the Rhinos current ownership isn't that interested in MLS' business structure as is.

Also, he did say that Garber and some of the owners weren't interested in PTP until Phase II was complete.

He said that neither side has closed the door on Rochester moving to MLS in the future, but he doesn't expect Rochester to have an MLS club next season.

 

Groupthink???

If San Jose fans had a BENEFACTOR, they'd still be in the league.

If Dallas fans lost Lamar Hunt, well... enjoy the latest human pinball reincarnation of the Sidekicks...

Have a nice day.

 

Me and MLSnet.com. Hey, FC Dallas... beat the Ragin Cajuns, er, uh... hmmm.... Longhorns ahead 60-3 and still no soccer from Pizza Hut Park... you suck.

 

Are you high? Did yo' mama drop you on your head when you were young? Do you ride the short bus?

That's the biggest out of place, non-sequitir I have ever seen. It's not even related to soccer as far as I can tell, much less the fact that Rhinos drew 11K to an Open Cup game on a weeknight and where the other three MLS USOC matches did not draw 11K combines.

BTW, you have demonstrated what a f u c k ing idiot you are by calling scoreboard against a team that has been affected the aftermath of Katrina. Real class, you ass clown.

Here's to hoping you run with scissors and find out why your mama always warned you about doing that. You stain.

 

Calm down... and switch to decaf.

Last night's link to the FC Dallas - San Jose game on MLSnet.com went to college football instead.

The point I was trying to make had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with "calling scoreboard" or insulting college football fans in southwest Louisiana. Just didn't like the fact that the link on MLSnet.com started out with Univ of Texas versus Louisiana-Lafayette (par for the course, I guess) instead of MLS's top 2 teams in the west at Pizza Hut Park. And an hour and a half later, the link still goes to a college football game that's clearly over.

I dunno, if MLSnet people simply put in the wrong link, then maybe the MLSnet people "suck" and not the particular Fox Sports channel that showed the UT vs. UL-L game in its entirety.

BTW, attendance at PHP for a crucial Sat night game between first and second place teams was: 8,023. So a game played at a new stadium in MAJOR League Soccer drew less fans than last week's Montreal game at Sherbrooke.

That does suck. Mightily.

And if my little post was not technically on topic, at the very least I've contributed lengthier posts on this thread that were far more informative than any of yours.

 

No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Select last night.

Well, the league's powers-that-be keep saying they're looking for "owner/investors"--a complete misnomer. An "owner" in MLS really doesn't "own" much of anything. There is no such thing as a franchise in single-entity MLS. You'd have little-to-no control over salaries. Little control over player acquisitions. And the word "investor" implies there's going to be some sort of payoff. It ain't happenin. Nobody ever made money running a major league team, anyway-- you only make money after you sell the team. Someday maybe Phil Anschutz and Lamar Hunt will recoup some of their losses by SELLING some of their teams. Good for them.

A good rule of thumb: every time you see the term "owner/investor" and think "Rochester" just substitute it with the word "BENEFACTOR" and think "MLS." Then you'll get a better idea of what's going on here.

Yeah, right. Chicago played in Naperville a couple of years with glorified risers and a good chunk of each spring at less than 8,000 seating capacity (to accomodate North Central College's spring track season). Dallas played in Dragon Stadium at a high school field with purple endzones and field turf. Pizza Hut Park opened BEFORE adequate parking was available.

Ah, the collective egos of multi-millionaire "investors."

Look at DC. A local group paid twenty-something million dollars for an organization that gets soaked every year in high rents (no control of revenues) to RFK. If this team is still losing 5 million dollars a year on their own, the local group will actually reap the benefits of single-entity by having its losses subsidized by the rest of the league's "investors" for years until they can get a stadium built, complete with shops, parks, etc. And a little birdie told me they were going to change the team name from DC United to "DC Remax."

 

There are several reasons why it makes sense for Rochester to be hesitant about joining MLS right away that don't necessarily amount to a blanket dismissal of the business model. The simplest of these is that a Rochester USL1 team in PaeTec makes money right away, where a Rochester MLS team loses some money (if for no other reason than due to league losses) before it makes any. And MLS hopes to charge $10 Million for this privilege.

Of course, if/when MLS turns the corner to the break-even and then profitability point, that $10 Million will seem like a bargain (there's some indication an MLS team already can't be had for that price due to owners looking forward to the 'Day of Profitability' and pricing that in). It's just that the price probably won't take that giant leap in only one or even two seasons (though the Harrison stadium opening will probably erase half the league's losses off the top).

Your take here assumes they don't learn from these mistakes. (In the last case it wasn't so much a 'mistake' at that moment as that they had backed themselves into a corner long before and couldn't get out without even greater pain.)

 

Lets put things in propr perspective.
1. The owner of Rhino's cant afford entery fee and cant afford to pay losses of MLS.
Simple there is no one with the money needed to put Rochester in MLS.

Also a city of 222000 is not what MLS needs or wants.

You can flame me all you want . But its a fact.

 

But MLS's "business model" is EXACTLY WHY Rochester isn't in the league RIGHT NOW. A Rochester MLS team could finish in the black even in it's first year by being a .500 team "with the league's lowest payroll." (yet another USRufnex reference to Tulsa and the NASL) Tulsa survived in an NASL filled with huge payrolls for the likes of Johann Cruyff, Franz Bechanbauer, Trevor Francis, etc, etc... by being a "hard working team" with "the league's lowest payroll."

But the Rhinos WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED to have "the league's lowest payroll." Despite the fact I could argue the present team isn't too far behind MLS standards of play RIGHT NOW.

Prices for a franchise... oops--there's that "business model" again-- er, uh... prices to get your city a team... have been lowered to $10 mil and even if that price went down to $1 million, you'd still be asking potential "owner/investors" to cough up millions to prop up teams in the league's largest markets (markets that shouldn't need any kind of subsidizing). Then these same expansion o/i's get to spend tens of millions more to arrange a "public/private partnership" for construction of a soccer specific stadium.

Oh, and the day after that "Day of Profitability" will be the day MLS mortgages it's soul to get Beckham in the league. Nobody "makes money" on major league sports... they make money AFTER they sell their team. And I doubt Rochester owners are looking for that sort of arrangement. I suspect they just want to do whatever it takes to get the highest level of soccer in the city of Rochester for the long term (yes, Virginia... even post-MLS?!?).

But the other half of those losses could take the next 5-10 years to overcome while other MLS owner/investors subsidize the new DC group in their pursuit of a soccer specific stadium/retail complex. All this after Rochester's already got their's built. But I'd betcha MLS owners would let United move into a new stadium BEFORE "phase II" is complete.

No, my "take" here is that AEG and Hunt Sports are the only ones ALLOWED TO MAKE MISTAKES.

Okay, time to stop bothering Rhino fans and start my own thread (in MLS General or Fans or sumpthin...)

 

Well, money talks and BS walks. MLS owners have put up a massive amount of capital, and if your alternate business model is to come in with almost none, put out the lowest payroll in the league, and hope merely to be competitive that way, you can see why they wouldn't exactly be enthused. For one thing, that's the kind of business model where you'd jolly well better not make mistakes, becuase you're going to have to

So, in order for your argument to have any validity,

1: A team needs to be able to compete consistently with MLS clubs on a significantly lower payroll. And in order to make this possible,

2: MLS would have to morph into a copy of the NASL, ignoring completely that the two leagues are totally different now. Instead, the future of the league must be in spending flamboyantly and abandoning the US player base MLS has worked so hard to develop.

I could set up an alternate universe argument where the complete opposite of both of those two things were true, with just as much credibility. More, I'd say.

 

Never said "almost none." Keep the expansion fee at $10 million... or raise it higher if you like. But if a franchise in an "alternate business model" with a higher, yet reasonable league-wide salary cap wanted to spend more money, they could spend more money. If a Rochester franchise wanted to spend a lot more money for 3 or 4 "money" players, they could do so. Or they could hedge their bets with roughly the same type of team/salaries they have now.

There's a word for that: freedom.

As for that oft-quoted $10 million expansion fee, I think that is less of a hurdle than the concept of having to have the same salary structure as all the other teams in the league.

Having "a .500 team with the league's smallest payroll" was merely an example of one possibility (of many) that simply doesn't exist in single-entity. More money, higher salaries one year, unloading/trading high salary players and reloading with developing younger players years later.

Nobody expects the KC Royals, Florida Marlins and NY Yankees to have the same payroll year-in and year-out, yet MLS actively enforces it by "assigning" players.

"Morph into a copy of the NASL?" -- God, I hope not.

NEVER said that. I applaud a league that would rather develop american players and build new stadiums over a league that spent huge amounts of money importing over-the-hill superstars to play in astroturf-laden NFL stadiums complete with the pompous pronouncements by league officials trumpeting how soccer would dominate major league sports in this country as soon as "the kids grow up."

My point about MLS signing a Beckham-type player after its "Day of Profitability," is that it's really hard to see a situation where a single-entity business model in its present state can exist open-ended. When the league grows, my guess is they'll take off the "training wheels" of single-entity. And how would this benefit Rochester? (or "local investor groups" in general who may not have the money of a Checketts, Vergara or Kraft) ??? You spend 3-5 years subsidizing league losses, then when MLS becomes "profitable," the deeper pocketed owner-investors in the league deem single-entity no longer necessary.

... And we're back to square one, with a Rochester team that "needs to be able to compete consistently with MLS clubs on a significantly lower payroll."

Vicious circle, eh???

Yep, I always wondered what a single-entity NBA or NFL would look like.