Selling stock in an MLS team

I think the company no longer exists in its current form. In fact, I think it went the way of Pets.Com.

Paul

 

It's on the "pink sheets" for chrissakes. DO NOT BUY THIS STOCK!

 

It is still around!

It is around still....sdsd and is still traded for I think around .70 OTC.

The problem with MLS is two-fold.

a) they are private and don't want to answer to shareholders. They like complete control.

b) single-entity. stock ownership in a single team would not work with single-entity.

 

What ARE you talking about? "Who" said MLS teams couldn't be publicly traded companies? Of course they can. But they're not. And they're not likely to any time soon.

Furthermore, anyone that follows soccer teams on the market will tell you just how bad an investment it is.

At Emerald City Gazette, we created a stock index featuring the publicly traded teams that we know about. The index was normalized to a par value of 1,000 on its inception of 7/25/2001. on 7/26/2002 the value of the index was at 577.208, or a drop of over 42%. Nottingham Forest was delisted during the year.

Other US sports teams have been publicly traded over the years. Normally, it just isn't a good investment.

 

I'm not sure an individual team could be traded because of SEM. MLS as an entirety could be traded assuming they ever went public (highly doubtful) but I don't think an individual team could.

 

If they were to join MLS, would MLS have to buy them out? And at how much per share?

 

http://www.mindspring.com/~andymead/ecg/

Subscribe to the magazine.

 

As I've been given to understand it, you don't "own" a team, you purchase operating rights to a team owned by Major League Soccer. There's no "little-known codicile in the Faber College charter" against a publicly traded company purchasing operating rights to an MLS team.

(Pre-law, pre-med, same thing...)

 

i posted this over on mls general forum too but these guys used to own a-league franchises in san diego, orange county and the bay area and all three teams folded a year or two ago. they own nothing now. their new magaizine looks nice, very glossy, but i'm sure that'll make them billions. they left behind myriad unpaid bills when they folded their last teams. the guy who started it all up is a big dreamer and supposedly a big soccer guy but all he's known so far how to do is lose money and not run his businesses very well. give this guy money at your own peril.

 

That's not what I said. I said there is nothing legally keeping an MLS team from being publicly traded. Now, the fact that the owners of MLS, the I/O's and such don't want to make it so, makes the whole matter moot.

Business choices are just that.

Interesting read, but the San Diego Soccer Developement Corporation was named that in January, 2000. It's December, 1999 incorporation in Nevada was as Rollercoaster, Inc.

 

I can shed some light on the whole SDSDC/Rollercoaster thing.

SDSDC made a big deal of its IPO a couple years back, after the San Diego Flash had had a couple (seemingly) good years and they had big plans for a soccer-specific stadium in San Diego and an A-League team in Las Vegas (the Strikers) and they were going to be the first soccer team in America to be publicly traded.

Well part of the deal was that instead of going through all the rigamarole that you have to go through to actually take your company public, they merged with Rollercoaster, Inc., which already was public, so they'd more or less be public themselves (I'm not a stock guy, but this is how it was explained to me) in a much easier fashion.

The problem with it is that all of a sudden, you have to make public all the financial statements and things that, as a private company, you can keep totally secret. SDSDC's SEC filings were hilarious when you got to see how much money they spent (and on stupid things) and how little actual revenue they generated despite having semi-decent crowd numbers for the A-League (another reason attendance figures can be deceiving).

They sustained such losses that they couldn't operate a team in 2001(?), and the Flash went away right before the season started. A local youth club, the Nomads, stepped in and ran the club for 2001, but it didn't come back for 2002.

Anyway, MLS, LLC (and I'm not even sure you can take an LLC public, I have no idea) would be unlikely to put itself or any of its component parts (which, as someone stated, are really just the investors buying into the LLC itself) on the stock market, if for no other reason than your finances become very public knowledge (whether the numbers you release are factual or not, as we've seen lately). And I'm not sure investing in a soccer team in this country, especially, would be seen as a great investment (I don't think it's seen as a great investment anywhere, actually).

If you have $12 and think about investing in SDSDC (or whatever it's called now, perhaps Soccer Development Corp of America, I think), just take your $12 and go throw it in traffic. It'll have the same effect.

 

But Kenn, they've got 90 minutes, and we both know how profitable the Soccer Magazine industry is in this country.

 

Righton. Actually a friend of mine is heavily into that deal, too. I have several copies of their first issue if you want one. It's the World Cup Preview. I think Brazil and Germany will do well, and the US and South Korea could surprise.

 

I'd love to have a copy. Have they continued publication?

 

They plan to, last I heard. Theirs is slicker. Yours is better.

 

I see they're claiming 30,000 subscribers for advertising reasons. How did I not get an offer to subscribe? Or at least comped.

Well we're getting waaaaayyyy off-topic.

I think the Onion Bag Soccer Monthly is stuck on the third or fourth issue. I remember seeing some guys at the All-Star game with "90 minutes" credentials, so I guess they're doing their thang!

If you've got the June issue, that would have to be a pre-premier, as July is V1N1. Cool.

 

I don't know what issue it is, it has the World Cup trophy on the front and is the World Cup Preview issue. I didn't know there had been another one after that. Maybe the one I have is July.

And don't worry about going off-topic on this one. The topic was ludicrous to begin with.

 

The one on their website www.90soccer.com is Brad Friedel. Sounds like they did a "preview" issue.


That's definitely slicker than mine. A bit pricier, too. You have to call an 866 number to get subscription info.

 

They're running late on the August issue. That's never a good sign in the publishing industry. Especially the big glossy color stuff that has lead times and such. My guess is that they're running into the same issues that everyone else in the industry has: ad revenues are ************. Soccer America has to be sucking up most everything. I do remember the credentials at the All-Star game, so they're not completely dead yet.

 

Yes, they did a preview issue, it says "Premier Issue" on the front of it. I hadn't seen that one with Friedel, obviously.

Something like 50% of all magazine startups fail in the first year. As yours is more a labor of love than an attempt to be the 442 for America, you're doing fine. They have ambitious plans, but if the SDSDC thing is any indication, their track record leaves them open to skepticism.