Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Wal-Mart Center! The brand new home of the AC Mile High Colorado Rocky Mountain Rapids Brumbie Hotspurs United FC! We don’t need a league of clone names! I personally thought the Dallas change was asinine as well as the ReAl Salt Lake thing. This league should have an identity of it’s own. It shouldn’t be a mini-Europe. Keep the current name.
Is it too early to start petitioning against KSE naming the stadium for Wal-Mart? I'd rather have it called Invesco Field II.
I don't know if a stadium sponsorship is up Walmart's alley. They do well with marketing and it would only raise their costs. Just because he is married to a Walton cousin or something doesn't mean Walmart will come and buy the naming rights. I was thinking Frontier Field could be cool. However I doubt an airline is going to be buying anything like this anytime soon.
i couln't agree more.......if you ask me i'd get rid of the east/ west conference idea and have one MLS premier league as in Scotland / England, with promotion and relegation to the A league
As of today the A-League doesn't exist anymore, well the name doesn't. But the changing issues with the A-league are the exact reason MLS shouldn't promote/relegate. MLS has spent 9 years now on building a financially conservative league that can support itself. USL has teams coming in and falling out every year. If a MLS team got relegated what would all of the work have been for? Their fan base would drop as they are playing against no ones. Keep MLS whole and stop this crazy talk! This isn't England or Scotland and we can't try to build our league exactly like theirs.
The level of corporate sponsorships in this country will forver prevent a promotion/relegation system for the top league. For minor leagues it can certainly continue to exist, but there's no way an investor will commit to a multi-year contract and a soccer-specific stadium (or simply a long-term contract with an NFL stadium) if they're not guaranteed of playing in the top flight no matter how much the team stinks.
Not that I want promotion/religation but the sponsorship dollars in the UK are similar and they get around this issue with contract wording and specifications that if a team is promoted/relegated the current contract will become invalid.
Dollars are similar? Hardly. Not only is the financial structure and value entirely different, but so is the situation with stadium requirements, television licensing, match scheduling, revenue sharing, merchandise contracts, public ownership of teams... Talking about sponsors is one thing, but the key factor as I pointed out is that investor-operators would never sink tens of millions of dollars into a team in the United States if they weren't guaranteed to play in the top division. Simply put, promotion/relegation will never happen at the top level in the United States.
I think the money invested in teams by owners and sponsors is similar. Bolton plays in the Reebok stadium. I don't know what kind of deal that was, but it had to be in the millions of pounds. When Bolton gets relegated, Reebok still has the stadium naming rights. Investor-operators do sink a ton of money into clubs. Look at Al-fayed and Fulham. He put money into the club while it was in a lower league and brought them up. There was a risk that wouldn't work out and his investment would be for nought. He did well and Fulham is in the Premier League again. The amount of money spent in the UK on football is similar to what is spent in the US on the major sports. I didn't mean Premier league investment is similar to MLS. I am not arguing that promotion/relegation should or could work in the US. I agree with you and think Americans wouldn't like it.
Loook. You're talking about teams with long histories, playing in a general league system that is over 100 years old, in the most popular sport in their country, the most popular sport on the planet, in a league that reaps financial revenue from the entire world. The amount of money and effort invested in the EPL and/or other soccer leagues in England may be similar to what is spent on some sports in the USA, but not MLS. Suggesting otherwise is completely ignorant. Furthermore, Fayed invested in Fulham because he knew that simply by spending gobs of money it would only take a few years to get the team into the Premier league. There wasn't much of a risk there, it's been done in England before as well as around the world. This is largely because there aren't rules such as salary caps, revenue sharing, player drafts, and limits on the number of foreign players you can have on yor team. As for Bolton, their stadium was built because their fan base was high enough over the years in the First Division to justify paying for it. Chivas USA may draw 25,000 per game at the Home Depot Center in 2005, but would they be drawing the same if they were playing in the A-League and not MLS? In a lower division, they'd probably be lucky to draw 5,000 per game no matter who they wound up signing to their club.
Which is why I said the following in the last post: "The amount of money spent in the UK on football is similar to what is spent in the US on the major sports. I didn't mean Premier league investment is similar to MLS." Other teams have not had the success Fayed had. Lots of money went into Leeds and now look at them. For every success there is a team that trys to buy sucess and fails. Fiorentina in Italy. There is always a risk in professional sports. And the same things happen in the UK. Look at Wimbledon. They had a nice big stadium, went belly up and now they are in Melton Keyes as the Dons. It happens. Big money is spent on teams and then they fall into the lower divisions. Crystal Palace. They've gone Premiership down and back up a few times over the past 10 years. They continue to have major sponsorships, however I'm sure the contract is changed each time they flip flop, which was my original point.
I think that there could be a regulation type system some day ... so long as everyone gets a chance at playing for the MLS Championship. Now saying that ... I don't think it will ever happen ... but here's sort of a scenario that could work. Instead of conferences, we have two Division ... say Division I and Division II. There are 15 teams in each Division ... each team plays 28 games ... 2 against each division rival. Each division has thier own standings ... and at the end of the season ... something happens to the affect of ... The Top 8 teams from each division make the playoffs and play eachother for MLS Cup ... in addition ... the top 4 Division II teams will play in Division I the following season and the bottom 4 in Division I play in Division II. Or something odd like that ... but it's ALL MLS ... and every team has a chance at the championship. You could even make the leagues slightly different by having different caps for the two Divisions or something like that. Just a thought I'm tossing out there ... that being said ... it'll never happen my friend
We're not talking about the "major sports" in the USA. We're talking about MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER and other professional soccer leagues in this country. Furthermore, the concept of promotion/relegation is not hardly a foreign concept to anyone involved in any sporting league anywhere in the world. There's a reason that baseball and hockey don't employ this system at any level in this country: money. I'm not aware of a single team anywhere in Europe that has spent Fayed-like money (or even half that) yet has failed to shoot up the ladder and win promotion to the top tier. Please, name a few. And no, teams like Leeds and Fiorentina don't count. Why? Because those teams were already in the top flight. They spent an excess of money not to reach the top flight but to try and be more competitive in it (and in European competition). Their failures are not a result of their amibitions in gaining promotion, but their amibitions in being trumping the likes of Manchester United and Juventus. Not to mention, a big part of the problem with Leeds and Fiorentina is that they were spending money they didn't have! They borrowed money based on the assumption that they'd make it back due to Champions' League success. Leeds and Fiorentina were not clubs that had guys like Fayed (or Anschutz, Hunt or Kroenke) backing their finances. What the hell are you talking about? Wimbledon had lost their own stadium prior to 1990 and had to share Selhurst Park with Crystal Palace. Fact is, in the modern era of English football -- that is, since 1992 when the Premier League was formed -- Wimbledon has been the poorest of teams that has played in the top flight, and were forced to move to Milton Keyes because they had built up something like $40-50 million in debt and still delcared bankruptcy ("administration" in the UK) within 2 years of doing so. Their rapid deceline had much more to do with incompetent management than anything else, but in truth they've never had anyone come on board with money to invest. If anything, Wimbledon serves the purpose of two prime examples of modern European football: how prior to 1990, any team could rise from nothing to win top honors, and how post-1990 the same team can't even compete due to financial concerns. Where do you get your information? Seriously, it's amazingly inaccurate. Crystal Palace has never had "big money." Not before 1990, not after. The closest they've come was a few years ago when a dot-commer (or similar) who was a supporter came into a few million and decided to buy the club when they were in administration for a few million pounds, and he's spent miserly ever since. Their entire existence is a tale of moving up and down throughout all divisions of English football, and the entire reason that they've never been able to stay in the Premier league very long is because they've never had any money -- neither enough money to invest in new players nor enough money to avoid having to sell off their best players. And right around 2000, they too went into administration. Their stadium, Selhurst Park, is a really fun place to go with an incredible atmosphere but the team hasn't been able to afford to invest a single dime into the place... hell, they don't even own it. It's about 80 years old and I think the last time they made any renovations to it was in the mid-90s, when they upgraded one stand. I've had nothing but incredible times heading to Selhurst Park over the years and have always told folks heading to London that's where they should catch a match (no matter what division Palace was in or who they were playing), but the stadium is a dive. I can't speak to whether or not Palace has any "big sponsorshops" right now, but I strongly doubt that their sponsorshops are even half of what most other EPL teams have arranged. As for their sponsor contracts being conditional... perhaps, but that's not always the case. When Newcastle was struggling under Ruud Gullit, there were incredible concerns from NUFC's sponsors that the team would be relagated from the EPL only one year into multi-year deals. More importantly is the fact that it's not the sponsorshop contracts that are at issue: player salaries and transfer amounts are not conditional on level of play and neither are stadium investments. There are bonus clauses and conditions that allow the players to break their own contracts, however if the player decides to stick with a contract then the club is legally required to pay their salary no matter what division they're playing in. Overall, you also entirely ignore the fact that teams throughout the world of soccer -- outside the USA and perhaps Japan -- draw fans because of tradition, local pride, and convenience. Palace could drop down into Division Two and they'd still draw more fans than the Rapids ever have, simply because their fans care less about the moniker of "premier" than Americans care about the moniker of "major." All of this nonsense is missing the point, and that is that the structure of professional sports in the United States simply will never allow minimally financed teams to compete in a top league. Hell, USA travel expenses alone would bust all but the 10 richest teams in England.
Greenie, maybe our definition of big money is the gap here. Churchill sponsors Crystal Palance and I'm sure it takes one million pounds or more to get on there. I can't find any published info on it, but after hearing about deals for Premiership teams in general, it costs a lot to get onto the front of a jersey. Here is an article about sponsorship at Luton and it talks about a six-figure amount, in the second division. That is going to multiply significantly in each division as you go up. This was my original point, as teams go up and down the size of their sponsorships changes acordingly and the market for professional sports sponsorship has worked a way to acomidate promotion and relegation. I never compared UK football to MLS. My original statement, "Not that I want promotion/religation but the sponsorship dollars in the UK are similar and they get around this issue with contract wording and specifications that if a team is promoted/relegated the current contract will become invalid," was vague. It should have read "Not that I want promotion/religation but the sponsorship dollars in the UK are similar to American major sports and they get around this issue with contract wording and specifications that if a team is promoted/relegated the current contract will become invalid." I was talking about American sports and I tried to clarify in another post. I'm sorry I used some examples without doing complete research. I'm not too worried about this so you don't need to respond.
Took me 30 seconds to find the following article detailing most of the Premiership teams' shirt contracts: http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/articles/2004/8/10/BranditlikeBeckham Now, Churchill hasn't disclosed their dollar value for Crystal Palace, but a good number of teams are at or below the 1M pound level. Perhaps you don't realize that there are individual athletes in America (and in Europe, for that matter) that make more in yearly sponsorshop deals than a number of Premiership teams? In other words, sponsorship dollars mean very little in the grand scheme of things, even in Europe. Television, ticket sales and merchandise are the key income streams -- and an investor with deep, deep pockets. If the first three streams are limited, you're going to have a hard time retaining those investors. Add in the threat of relegation to the "minor leagues" and those investors are sent running for the hills. Think of it this way: MLS clubs struggle to exist at it is with an incredibly low salary cap and tight budgets for team operations. Most clubs are still a long way off from breaking even. One of them was almost shut down and moved because of trouble finding an investor. How exactly would these clubs continue to operate if they were relgated to the A-League -- or more to the point, how would you convince and investor-operater to keep pouring millions in to what was once a "major" team ans is now "minor?" Hell, Rochester still can't afford the minimum buy-in for Major League Soccer, a price which is set primarily on the notion of forcing a long-term commitment. Impressive. Not only do you try to get the last word with a cop-out, but won't even admit that you were uninformed and incorrect. Look bub, don't go spouting figures and dressing up your opinion as fact if you can't back it up.
This is absolutely hilarious. Is there a thread anywhere on these boards that can't be derailed by simply whispering, "promotion and relegation." Next topics: Single Table Shirt Sponsors Talk amongst yourselves.
Considering this thread was referred to as "dumbest ever" (or something to that effect. Ask Bonji, not me. I'm only a more proficient "Internet searcher," not the post-a-minute BigSoccer denizen), this thread at least did develop into something worth discussing. Well, until Bonji decided he was tired of talking out of his ash. Now, as for your next topics, teams already have shirt sponsors (just not on the front) and multiple press sources have confirmed that MLS has at least discussed (and is possibly still discussing) 2005 being single table...