http://hfboards.com/showthread.php?t=867279&page=10 \ Just reading through a thread on the age old will mls survive debate. And it got me thinking, was the NASL in the 70's one of the worst run sport franchises in history and in contrast MLS one of the best. Real short question, please keep in the context of explaining the situation to newcomers. I think it's useful perspective whether or not its entirely true. Just think Salary caps, Stadium ownership, designated player rule, stable teams, and a growth rate that is on par with the sports popularity.
The NASL may not have been run particularly well, but it's silly to say that one was the worst one and one the best. Salary caps, stadium ownership, and stable teams are all motivated by things that the league learned from the NASL. It wasn't nearly as obvious at the time, however, that teams needed their own stadiums, and pretty much every soccer team on the planet has succeeded without a salary cap. (I don't think any US sports league had a salary cap in 1968?) The designated player rule meanwhile is clearly inspired by what the NASL did - bringing in star players from around the world. I think this was pretty clearly a success in both leagues. Unfortunately for the NASL, just about the only soccer player most americans had heard of at the time was Pele. Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Eusebio, George Best, Gerd Muller et al. apparently didn't do much for attendance. Hard to blame the NASL for that one. The MLS has built on a groundwork that the NASL laid. When the NASL launched, the US hadn't had a legitimate first division league since the early 30's. There was basically nothing except very regional ethnic leagues.
Good post, don't get me wrong I get how it made sense at the time, but in retrospect what the NASL and mls did are polar opposites.
The problem with the NASL is that is mostly over the hill european players. How would they continue to function and get players to continue the league? also the NASL basically thought they could make the sport that barley 1% knew to making it one of americas top sport virtually in a few years. It took the NFL,NBA, NHL,NASCAR YEARS to become where they are today. it was a very naive attitude.
This is a little misleading. The reason other world soccer leagues, and other American sports leagues, didn't have or need salary caps back then is because they had other mechanisms to control player spending, most notably reserve clauses. American sports leagues instituted salary caps when they were forced to by free agency. Remember, at the time the NASL was in operation, there was for practical purposes no such thing as a veteran free agent in any sport. Once you signed with a team, your choices were to play for that team or not to play. I'm not sure younger sports fans really understand how recent a phenomenon the highly-paid free agent testing their value on the open market is. Baseball was probably the earliest sport to see free agency, in the 1970s. Real unrestricted free agency didn't come to football until 1993, and it was part of a collective bargaining agreement that also included the NFL's first salary cap. The same thing happened in the NHL: when the 2004 season was cancelled, the impasse was because players wanted free agency and teams wanted a salary cap. The current deal has more (but still limited) free agency and the salary cap the league wanted. In Europe, teams wouldn't have needed salary caps until after the Bosman ruling in 1995, because until then, there were no free agents in soccer. If your contract expired, your rights stayed with your former club, who had the sole option to re-sign you or to sell your rights to a new club for a transfer fee. And even after Bosman, it took some time for salaries to catch up to market values. Now that they have done so, teams are instituting "financial fair play" rules; not salary caps exactly, but a similar reaction to free agency. In other words, the NASL shouldn't have needed a salary cap, because no sports league had one. But that doesn't mean they didn't waste money like it was going out of style. If anything, the existence of the FIFA reserve clause makes the NASL's out-of-control spending even less justifiable.
Thank you for posting that. Perspective that plenty of people don't have, and many people have forgotten. Rep.
Nice thread. On free agency, Curt Flood did it for baseball, via the lawsuit, and that opened up a ton, and it was followed in other sports (whether via the legal system, or them just knowing which way it would go). In terms of the sports and payment, when Pele joined the Cosmos, he was the highest paid athlete in America. More than Reggie Jackson. More than any football player. Think about that. As mentioned, this was really before FA (and huge TV contracts) bloated salaries in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. But there is no question the sport is growing. Soccer Made In Germany was about it for the TV. Now we get Prem games on ESPN2, FSC, and sometimes other Fox stations. Multiple games. FSC will also give you Serie A. And has in the past given Bundesliga, Scotland, Eredivisie, Argentina and Brazil. Univision/Gala/Gol TV and the Spanish package will give you Mexico, Spain, and many SA leagues. You see under 30's wearing Messi/Rooney/Henry jersesys all the time. You hardly ever used to see that. Soccer bars. The US is one of only a handfull of nations (pop over 1 million) where soccer isn't the #1 or #2 sport (though by participation, it's getting close, if not there already). But we are gaining ground. Stadium ownership (thank you Lamar Hunt!) is key. Now, if we could only get rid of the turf as well (I'm looking at you, NE, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver).
By my calculation: Countries with a population of over 1 million: 152 Countries where soccer is the undisputed number 1: 128 Countries where its a number two sport: 18 Countries where its outside the top two: 6 Important to note that being number two is in many instances like being number 2 in the US, because in many of these countries soccer is not only the primary football code, but a popular sport in every sense of the term. No one would say baseball or basketball aren't popular in the US. Usually, its a different type of sport, like baseball, basketball or cricket that is more prominent. And, in my mind, these sports are very easy to get along with, complementing eachother much in the same was as Am football and baseball do. Japan is a good example of soccer rising rapidly in two decades even with a dominant baseball game. There is scope for growth that sports markets like the US make very difficult because they are suffocated with options. It's the countries with a domestic/other football code that are the most resistant to soccers overtures. The remaining 6 left: - USA - Canada - Australia - New Zealand - Ireland - Papua New Guinea
1 million is a fairly arbitrary place to draw the line. Look at it a different way. If you take the top ten countries in the world by population, which contain about four billion of the world's seven billion people, soccer is the number one sport in: 5. Brazil 7. Nigeria You could make a case for soccer having passed ice hockey in Russia (number 8) as well; it's certainly growing there. And soccer is a strong second place in Japan (number 10) these days, at least among team sports. But that still leaves almost half the world's population living in China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, all countries where soccer is well down the pecking order.
India? Pakistan? Bangladesh? In these countries, the second most popular sport is probably field hockey. In China, basketball and baseball are about as popular as soccer (all behind table tennis). Japan is out if you include sumo. And, frankly, using "second most popular sport" as a metric is ridiculous. In many countries it's a polite way of saying "not at all popular"... is soccer the second most popular game throughout the West Indies? Sure. Does it get even one tenth of the interest cricket does? Not a chance in hell. EDIT: soccer has always been more popular than hockey in Russia. And is the biggest team sport in Indonesia.
1. 1 million is not an arbitrary place to start, because below 1 million you are getting countries with absolutely no influence on sport, with a large majority of them being small islands. 2. Wow, what nonsense. Indonesia's biggest sport is soccer by leaps and bounds. If you don't know that, then you probably shouldn't be commenting on the topic. As for China, its biggest domestic sport is soccer, with an average of 18,000 this season; not only that but the media clearly reflects its popularity. That NBA officials keeps claiming basketball is number 1 in China is their prerogative, but it doesnt make it true. To say that soccer is well down the pecking order in those countries outside of the US is just wrong. I dont know how else to put it - you're unequivocally wrong. Russia... its not even black and white. Soccer is the number 1 outright. Go and look at their media outlets and get clued in. There is no case to be made, its bigger than hockey, even while its Premier League continues to be in the nascent stages of development. So, in others words, in the top 10 most populous countries on earth, soccer is outright number one in 5 of them. It is the primary football code in 9 of the top 10, minus the United States. Then, countries ranked 11-20 in the population rankings, soccer is the number one sport in 9 of the 10, outside of the Philippines, where it remains the primary football code, behind number 1 basketball. In other words, 14 of the top 20 are soccer first countries. Not quite the picture you're trying to paint. The fact that you even mention that baseball is almost as popular in China as soccer or basketball pretty much voids your entire argument. That is the most ignorant comment I've read for some time. Instead of relying on hearsay to make your arguments, you could do a little bit of research. Sumo: Look at a Japanese newspaper online - usually media are a great indicator of the popularity of things - and tell me again whether sumo is more popular than soccer. Bit of research before espousing nonsense wouldn't go astray. Also, again, if you knew anything about the sub-continent, you'd know that soccer is the 2nd most popular sport after cricket there, in particular in Bangladesh and India. In India and Pakistan, field hockey is the spiritual "national sport", but in terms of actual popularity, its below both cricket and soccer.
you learn so much about the world by looking at newspapers online! I've spent plenty of time in India (my girlfriend's Indian) and while a lot of people play soccer and it is indeed a popular spectator sport. Olympic field hockey is incredibly important in that country... much more so than the performance of the national soccer team. I can't speak with the same level of certainty about Pakistan and Bangladesh, but in any case cricket's domination on the subcontinent is much, much greater than, say, soccer's hold on Europe. Sumo's status in Japan has been compared to baseball in North America... for young people, it's a total non-factor but it is still the most important sport for older generations. I'd concede that soccer's probably passed it now in terms of media attention from my experiences. Baseball is, without question, the third most popular team sport in China. I probably shouldn't have put it up with the other two. But the evidence for basketball's rise is overwhelming... it's even passed soccer in participation.
The problem is not below the line, it's above the line. I'm not saying it's not a good measure because Iceland doesn't count, but Bahrain does; I'm saying it's not a good measure because it equates India with Bahrain and China with Mauritius. I never claimed to be an expert on Indonesian sports, and I'm not sure where the anger is coming from. I was under the impression that badminton was bigger than soccer, but I'll certainly take your word on it. And you saying the NBA is wrong doesn't make them wrong. Basketball is big; so are ping-pong, wushu, and badminton. China is like the U.S. in that there is a lot of interest in foreign soccer, but their domestic league is in much worse shape than MLS. Between fixing and poor attendance, there is a long way to go for China to catch up. And that's not even getting into their national team program. Yes, the last few years have been good for attendance in the CSL, mostly because of the rise of Beijing and this year's spending spree in Guangzhou. But it's only a few years ago that more than a quarter of the teams in the league were drawing fewer than 10,000, and more than half were under 13,000. I'll give you Indonesia and Russia. That gives you 4, 5, 7, and 8 out of the top ten. I'm not sure what picture you think I'm trying to paint. My point is simply that, if you're talking about soccer's global reach, comparing the number of countries that play, without regard to how large or small those countries are, is not very productive. The post I was responding to was claiming that soccer was #1 in 128 out of 152 countries. My point was simply that that's a somewhat misleading way of looking at it when you consider that India alone has a population equal to the smallest thirty or forty countries on that list.
Christ you know a thread has gone off topic when Im checking the name of it to see what its about, turns out im the threadstarter
Can i have some of what you were smoking when you wrote this?? "Right now, MLB (and the China Baseball League) have virtually no local corporate support. MLB's annual total income in China, including sponsorships and merchandise, totals less than US$1 million, according to an industry source, compared with an estimated US$300 million for the NBA." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LJ01Ad04.html Update: You must mean the Republic of China, a.k.a Taiwan