As we saw in another thread, the Rapids have the 2nd lowest salary total in MLS. So where else (other then on the field) might we be ranked low? I decided to track the "news" articles on MLSNet.com. I looked at June and July. Looking just at the headlines, here is the breakdown of articles about each team in MLS. I simply looked at which team(s) appeared in the headline and tallied them. I did this fairly quickly and I expect someone else's tally would differ but anyway... L.A. - 44 Chivas - 43 N.E. - 41 RSL - 36 K.C. - 35 Metros - 35 D.C. - 31 Dallas - 27 S.J. - 27 Crew - 25 Chicago - 21 Rapids - 19 As one might expect L.A. and Chivas get the greatest number of stories. New England, due to their success I guess rank 3rd. Surprising is RSL 4th and maybe more surprising is K.C. 5th, both ahead of the Metros. The Rapids occupy the bottom, the least amount of stories. Of the 19, 4 were about the July 4th game and 3 were about the 3-1 win against Chivas. Oh and yes, perhaps I have a bit too much time on my hands today.
Since you're bored here's another project for you: In honor of the -zero- Rapids named to the All Star team today, how about the rankings of all MLS teams to date with the number of players they've ever had selected to an All Star game.
Some of this is due to the Rapids decision not to join up with the other MLS teams in running a linked website. If you look at all the other league sites they are all hosted on the MLSnet server and use the same template. This allows for crossover of articles from the team site to the league site. New England and Colorado run their own independant sites and as such many of the articles you see about other MLS teams on MLSnet don't appear there for them. BTW I actually support the Rapids decision as I hate the MLSnet template...
Plus, most of the stories on MLSnet aren't written by MLS staffers. The league pays an outside journalism source for their web content. That source then hires freelancers to cover local teams. Some teams (DC for example) have very active freelancers. Others don't.