USL General News thread

It doesn’t say how much money ESPN is paying USL, do anyone knows ?

 

That's a two year-old story I posted on error.

Mid to high 7 figures was mentioned, so probably about the same as Fox pays for MLS.

 

The New York Cosmos are back! First match played since 2020. In front of....150 fans.

Cosmos beat FC Motown in friendly, first game in front of fans

 

The original New York Cosmos averaged 4,517 in their first season. We'll see how the pretenders compare.

 

Only a few years later, on August 14, 1977, the New York Cosmos faced the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the NASL playoffs and won the match 8-3, with a record attendance of 77,691 fans at Giants Stadium, making it one of the largest crowds in NASL history.

I would love to see those days again!

 

Everyone was there! No-one remembers the games when there were 65,000 empty seats.

 

I recall my cousins living in NY attended the last NASL Cosmos game at Giants Stadium against the San Jose Earthquakes on September 12th, 1984.

English striker Godfrey Ingram who played at Luton Town , scored the only goal and the Quakes won 1-0.

My cousins said there were only 10,000 fans and the stadium was completely empty.

 

7,581

 

I thought there was 10k but you may be right as it was 41 years ago.

Just this weekend I posted on the NASL Facebook page that on June 16th, 1985, the Cosmos in their last ever game against Lazio drew a final attendance of 8,777.

That game ended in a brawl.

 

Even with those attendance numbers the peak of the NASL average attendance was around 14k

 

That had a lot to do with the NASL adding too many teams who should have never been admitted.

 

So Giants Stadium charged $65,000 in 1985. That's $200k in today's money ($10 a fan for Red Bulls games). And I bet the Cosmos got none of the matchday concessions revenue. This is why control of stadium operations is so important.

 

Tickets also cost only $10 in 1985 and thinking back, that wasn't much money then either.





From reading those articles, I don't blame Pepe Pinton and Giorgio Chinaglia for throwing in the towell.

 

You can really understand why Rothenberg's priorities were purpose built stadiums (control revenue) and single-entity (control costs).

 

U.S. Soccer Players Authorize Playing Strike Amid Tense Labor Talks

 

[QUOTE="Paul Berry, post: 43517468, member: 269000"Cosmos got none of the matchday concessions revenue. This is why control of stadium operations is so important.[/QUOTE]
That is correct, the NJSEA took everything and they still actually own the land where horse racetrack was rebuilt as well as the old Brendan Byrne Arena land as well.

 

Already posted and discussed (3 days ago), but of course you're just spamming away without paying any attention to what anyone else posts.

 

My humble and sincere apologies to you and to everyone else who might have been impacted by my oversight. You are correct as I obviously failed to scan for the topic. I actually did think about starting a new stand-alone thread as it is definitely worthy being such an important news item, but in the end decided against it. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts on the matter as you usually do.

 

Lexington signs former USMNT & NYCFC/Colorado winger Jonathan Lewis.

 

Ted Lasso Star Tries Out for USL Side, Could Sign Professional Contract

 

A nice addition to the USL Championship website (I assume USL1 will mimic it) this year. The schedule drop down now has a "watch" option that takes you to the broadcast schedule for the current month.

The CBS portion of the schedule includes 14 regular season games on CBS Sports Network and 1, Pittsburgh v Louisville on July 18, on CBS.

ESPN will be broadcasting 5 matches on ESPN2.

 

They built the stadium in a small town not on the way to anywhere. I'm a native southeast Georgian. You don't get to Statesboro unless you really want to. Savannah, on the other hand, is a tourist mecca on I-95 with an airport. It also has, you know, people. 15 or 20 times the population of Statesboro.I never understood why they would make such an investment in Statesboro. Soup sandwich. Rubber crutch. Submarine with a screen door.

 

The only thing I can think of is a good deal withe university and the price purchasing the land for the stadium.

Like you said, it's not really that close to anything. Looks like it's about 30-40 miles on a straight line from Savannah with nothing in between. The metro area (71k) looks like it's about a quarter of the population of Lubbock and we're too small for anything other than maybe USL1. The city proper saw the population grow by 17.6% between 2010 and 2020, up to 33,438. GSU has something like 25k students.

It would be one thing if it was an owner who was willing to pour money into a passion project and could afford to do so, but apparently this guy has been losing millions every year even outside of soccer.

I think USSF honestly needs to update the requirements for each level of pro soccer and make sure the owner's have a lot more money with a much larger bond set aside.

 

That bond should be in place at least 3 months before the season starts. I don't think USSF will do anything, as they're afraid of a lawsuit, this is down to USL to resolve.

 

USL isn't going to resolve it either. They have 70 prospective expansion groups looking to get in. USL HQ will continue to cash those expansion fee checks and pass the earnings onto their private equity investors.