You can say what you want. You can defend it as a time buy. You can really do a pretty good job of rationalizing it if you need to, but when a league decides to CUT THE GAME, to change the rules indescriminately so to make things more convenient, it must and will always become a laughingstock. MLS, when faced with a terribly difficult choice, decided to CUT THE SOCCER. Period. It becomes very difficult to defend the "integrity" of this "league" -- wait -- "company" under such circumstances. I can't help but wonder if MLqweSt has the same kind of committment to integrity when it tells the public about its hundreds of millions of dollars it has lost, or about the real reasons for contraction. Who needs rules, anyway?
Holy cow, man. Do you have any understanding of the money involved? The sponsorships, the deal with Rubino? Just like I had no problem with the MLB All-Star game ending in a tie, I have no problems with the missing 15 minutes from Saturday's game. Why? Because they're freaking exhibitions. Teams muck with the rules all of the time in exhibitions. Why aren't you complaining about re-entry? or unlimited substitutions? When will the madness end? Next thing you know Rob Stone will interview Tony Meola on the field during the game! Please crawl back into your hole.
having worked in pro soprts, I do know a little bit. I really do. I'm not "In a hole," but blind support of a league that "contracts" 15% of it's members in one year because Qwest communications has lied about its accounting practices is ignorant. The league salary structure is a joke. There is virtually no reserve system. And now they INSIST on this idiotic "ALL STAR" game -- a game they should not have, and manage to "contract" the actual game ON THE FIELD!!! You are the one with your head in the sand if you believe that such decisions are made by sound business people operating on principles of integrity. You can go read the "move San Jose now!" or the "Move Kansas City now!" threads if you really want to, but I would rather hold the league accountable.
How is it the league's fault that the people in your area didnt support the team? You guys had some of the better teams in MLS some years and still nobody shows up. They had no I/o. A bad stadium lease. Are you gonna say MLB is a joke when they contract the devil rays because nodoby goes to the games? Do you really think they would have contracted your team if you were averaging even 13k a year? I doubt it.
To be fair to rjpflash, the post does raise old questions that are worth debating. The MLS All-Star game, like all of the current all-star games are fun events to attend, but are not really good TV product.(I don't watch any of them-MLS included.) I don't think the game does anything to enhance soccer as a TV property in the US. So even though most of their ABC games averaged .8-1.2 ratings, perhaps airing the all-star match on ESPN2 in their regular rotation and using the time-buy money to place a regular season match on ABC is a better way to go. It also raises questions about the league's attempt to bring the US soccer audience under one tent. I would bet that while they are a lot of fun for kids to attend, the older, Euro/Latino fan would rather spend a day at the beach-and certainly is not watching on TV. Does all-star stuff tilt too far as an "Americanized" product that alienates a large chunk of MLS' potential audience? Or has the league found a track it thinks it can ride to prosperity? It's an age old question re: football in America, finding that balance.
People, I am as upset as the lot of you. Changing the rules is something you just don't do. HOWEVER, what we need to realize is that All Star games are exhibitions by their very definition. It was the same with the baseball All Star game. Yes it sucks that everything doesn't go as planned, but remember it is only an exhibition.
rjpflash, i don't agree with you at all. i however do agree with everyones comment of it just being an exhibition so you need to chill out. now if that went down in the middle of a regular season game then i would have gotten all hottie tottie as you did. but at an "all star" game? come on. i sure didn't watch the allstar game because i had no interest in it. games like that are to make money and bring in sponsors. that's it. when you realise that you'll be a much happier (wo)man.
Look at the bigger picture of things. MLB is most likely going to strike, opening the door for MLS to attract a larger audience next season. After everything MLB is going through, including their All-Star game flap, the best thing for MLS is to market itself effectively through advertisements, quality of play, and the way the league is run. However, by cutting 15 minutes off the first half of the All-Star game so some crappy singer no one's even heard off(here's a token offer to the hispanic community we so desperately crave yet don't know a damn about attracting)can get her half time show in, we seriously undermine the credibility of the league, especially one month after MLB's All-Star "fiasco". To the fan who doesn't know much about the sport but is interested in it somewhat, seeing the All-Star game have time cut off to fit in a half-time performance screams bush-league and could likely make them lose interest in the sport.
Spare me, any yokel that uses a weather abbreviated exhibition as a reason to dismiss soccer wasn't likely to become a fan in the first place. This is the worst argument I've read in a long time.
Once again you really fail to understand the economics and business aspects. ABC does NOT have to sell time to anyone with cash. The All-Star game is what ABC is willing to sell time for, regular season games, it is not. At least not at the same price. MLS would love to have an occasional game on ABC, but it is just not going to happen any time soon. At this point, MLS Cups tend to be among the lowest rated sporting events ever. Can you imagine the black eye we'd get with weekly MLS on ABC ratings? All-Star and Championship games are "showcase" events. For the forseeable future that is all we are likely to see on ABC.
OK, time to calm down people. First off, did anyone notice there was a mini hurricane pummeling RFK for almost an hour? Do you really think ABC is going to give us another half hour of airtime to show the rest of the game had it not been shortened? Hell no! ABC hates MLS, we are lucky they show anything at all. Micky Mouse wouldn't even put any money out to buy the rights to the biggest sporting event in the world, the World Cup. Why would they give us any extra time to show MLS? So the game wasn't shortened just so Paulina could strut her stuff. There would have been a half time anyway, with or without her. And even her halftime show was so quickly thrown together that there was almost an accident with the fireworks. Did anyone notice the last fireworks to go off shot across the ground dangerously alomost taking out one of the guys trying to take down a giant Pepsi bottle? The game was shortened to try and get the game played in the ammount of time ABC had given us. If you will remeber they originally said the second half was going to be 30 minutes also and only lengthened it back to 45 minutes after ESPN had agreed to show the last 15 minutes. I couldn't believe ESPN agreed to do that. Someone must have agreed to sleep with someone to get that pulled off. So just relax everyone, it was a damn good game. And Paulina Rubio is hot as hell. And she was not there just to appeal to Hispanics, if you remember the song she sang was all in English.
Do you know this for a fact? Are you saying that they can't simply switch and get one time-buy on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon? I find that hard to believe-and that, BTW is all I'm suggesting. I understand you are not going to get a bunch of games on ABC. But going with one regular season match and MLS CuP on ABC and the All-Star game on ESPN is how I would go. Your point re: the all-star game as a "showcase" event for sponsors, has merit, but as I posted earlier, I don't think it has the impact as a TV event that they(MLS) want-it is a much better event for the league as a spectator event. I think the sporting public in the US as a whole, is conditioned by now to treat the games as the farces they are-the Home Run Derby draws a better rating than the MLB All-Star game itself-ditto with the Slam Dunk Contest-these events have in many ways surpassed the actual games. Why would you expect a soccer all-star match to be treated any better? So again in short, if the league can (and I think they could) switch the one game, I feel it would be better. Especailly if they can coordinate the schedule to have that afternoon ABC match a doubleheader with a crowd that has some juice.
I don't understand why some people still can't grasp the concept that MLS was serving Pepsi, not Rubino, in its decision. People, check out an NFL game sometime. Team A goes on a long TD drive. There's a TV timeout. There's one play, the kickoff. There's another TV timeout. The NFL doesn't do that in order to give the cheerleaders more time to shake their t*** in your face. They do it because they've promised Sludge Beer a certain number of slots, in exchange for this thing called "money."
Lighten up, Francis. You've clearly demonstrated that you don't know very much about what you're talking about.
Heck, why even have a half-time. Those players are in top condition. They don't need to rest at all. Bottom line is, shortened game or not, there was always going to be a half-time. To say that they shortened the game to fit in half-time is absolutely incorrect.
Woo-hoo! This again! Do you honestly think that anyone outside of this cloistered soccer community and the few media types like Rome and (occasionally) PTI who revel in the opportunity to make a dick joke at soccer's expense really give a rat's a** that fifteen minutes of the first half of an exhibition soccer game that maybe a million people watched (if that) disappeared? Or that they noticed at all? You can't have your credibility undermined if no one cares enough about you to begin with to think you have any credibility. Other sports don't have this problem because Americans like other sports. Cut short baseball's All-Star Game and it's a cause celebre for weeks. Cut short soccer's All-Star Game and we should have been done talking about this yesterday. One nice thing about being a niche sport is that your screwups occur in virtual obscurity. Arena Football contracted four teams over the offseason, does it appear to have hurt their credibility? Are they about to put their games on a major broadcast network next season? Are NFL owners buying into the league and setting up their own teams? Do they appear to be doing all right financially in many, if not most of their markets? MLS does not have the luxury of being able to dictate terms to anybody. They did the best they could under circumstances that were changing and getting more pressurized by the minute. Or, they could have forgotten about it the next day. I've said this before, but to the fan who doesn't know much about the sport, but is interested in it somewhat, what does seeing a 9-4 All-Star Game do to them if they then expect every game to be like that? Is that going to make them lose interest, if the next game they go to is 1-0 and they say "Wait a minute, the last game I saw was 9-4!"? ABC will carry the All-Star Game, MLS Cup, and a season-opener because those are "big games" (and, yes, TV time on ABC costs more than on ESPN). But they're not going to carry a game every week because the audience is not large enough to justify it, nor is the audience likely to get large enough to justify it anytime soon. It's over. Nobody died. It was an exhibition. Get over it.
I'm not assuming anything. I'm just tossing out the idea that maybe a regular season game (or even a playoff game) is a better network showcase than the all-star match. If the league thinks the Pepsi sponsorship is worth it-or thinks this can generate more eyeballs-well...more power to them. I think it's a waste-no one cares about all-star games, especially one for pro soccer. (I agree w/those who note that chopping off time is no big deal.) Again, they are fun to attend, but what does it do to enhance the profile of the league-especially on TV? In fact you can take this a step further re: the league. If the playoff system wasn't such a joke, you may very well have an exciting end-of-season match, in decently filled stadium, that might cause a little buzz, might turn a few heads in media (it's not as crazy as some of BS paranoids think.) If Andy is right though, and they have no choice, I stand corrected. But I would prefer them to show on ABC, a late season Galaxy match with something on the line at a sold-out new stadium, rather than the all-star "extravaganza," we are sure to get.
I'd agree with you on that last bit. But it is what it is. The All-Star Game, for better or worse, is looked at by somebody as a showcase for the league (maybe because we're culturally biased towards thinking that All-Star Games, with "the best of the best" are supposed to be big showcases). I don't believe, though, that the playoff format is the biggest thing keeping playoff tickets from being sold in numbers that we'd like to see. MLS playoff attendance has been, except for 1998, consistently lower than that season's attendance for many reasons (chief among them time to sell the games and group tickets), and that's been with a couple of different playoff formats. Last year's playoff numbers were the worst in league history (though coming on the heels of September 11 probably had more to do with it than anything else), but they're routinely not good.