I am interested in learning why WUSA fail. Is there any existing threads with good discussions already taking place? How did the business people screw up and what was their business model and why didn't it work? I know they are not Phil, Bob, and Lamar type of investors. I don't think the investors would put in $100 million without any kind of business model that is not highly speculative. The business people must have screwed it up in a big way. Any explainations appreciated. Thanks.
fah que, i was just reading several on-line articles on the demise of the wusa; the new york times's website as well as espn/si presented pretty detailed explanations as to why the women's league failed financially -> to sum it up: failure to attract sufficient coportate sponsorship, lack of TV contract for 2004 season, and spotty management.
You forgot to mention the most important cause (the cause that set all other causes into motion): Abysmally poor fan support.
Best article I found so far http://espn.go.com/sportsbusiness/s/2003/0915/1616775.html and also some of oliver's posts.
All of that and a bad economy and the investors weren't the best. Some of them really cared about soccer.
Here's a reason why it failed: fans of sports are generally men, men in this country don't like to watch women's sports in general much less a sport they hardly watch men play. The MLS is barely scraping along and you expected to see a women's soccer league make it? If you didn't see this coming you are way too optimistic.
You're half right. Go to any sporting event with the possible exception of an NFL game and you'll notice that 30% or more of the crowd is made up of women. One of the biggest obstacles facing women's sports in my opinion is that there are women who love (some passionately) men's sports and there are men who love (again some passionately) women's sports. There are just a lot more of the former. Men's sports seem to have greater crossover appeal, perhaps because of history, perhaps because of husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and brothers. However, it's not due to hype. They existed before there was hype. On a somewhat related note, I was thinking about a round table on Outside the Lines of Title IX. It's least meaningful impact is on sports, but that's its highest profile impact. A proponent of the law said that, as the years progress and the programs endure, the demand among women to participate in sports would increase. The thing that struck me was that no one had to create a demand for men's sports. The men themselves created the sports and felt the demand to participate. There's not one sport that women play that wasn't either created by men, adapted for women by men, or created by women misunderstanding a sport created by men. I'm not saying women aren't competitive. I'm not saying women don't like sports or don't want to participate in sports. I understand the origins of Title IX as it applies to sports. I don't believe that any law can make women care about sports as much as men. Call me a sexist, chauvinistic, misogynistic what-have-you if you like. I'll just never believe that. Mainly, I'm annoyed that the Women's Basketball Tourney takes away broadcast time that could be devoted to the Men's Hockey Tourney.
This is an excellent paraphrasing of what I think most of us are trying to say when we talk about our indifference to the WUSA, and women's sports in general. Professional soccer is soccer at the highest level, and that's clearly the men. How can they call it then professional soccer? Whatever, I'm too tired to get into it all again with all those feminine supporters who fail to read the signs for what they are. I just wanted to point out a well written post.
Professional soccer means you get paid. By your definition, Serena Williams is not a professional tennis player, and any soccer players outside the EPL, Serie A, etc., are not professional. The point about "creating a demand" also is a little overstated. Fifty years ago, women had little reason to even think of playing soccer or many other sports. Now, girls grow up with more options, and many take advantage of them. All that said, the WUSA overestimated its audience. There is a`fan base out there -- consider how many A-League teams other than Rochester would love to swap attendance figures with the WUSA -- but not enough to warrant the money the league sunk in.
The problem with the WUSA is that it tried to be too big. They definitely got enough fans to the games to support a league. If you can draw 5k you can have a league. The problem is their overhead. They simply thought that the appeal of the best women's soccer in the world was going to be greater than the appeal MLS had (and they were terribly wrong). WUSA needed to do 1 of 2 things. They either needed to piggyback off of MLS. Basically doing double headers to reduce overhead on stadium rental, transportation, training facilities etc. Or they needed to play more like AA baseball. I would have chosen to go the AA baseball route. You play in small, cheap stadiums. You don't play the entire country but have maybe 2 divisions. And you don't set up these travelling issues. Get an east coast league with Boston, DC, NY, Philly, and add 2 more teams within driving distance. Get a west coast league with LA, San Jose, San Diego, and find a few more teams again within driving distance. They don't need to be huge towns because you aren't wanting to go huge. Go ahead and play every team in your division/conference 4 times for 20 games and the top 2 teams in each division play the top two from the other in 1 game playoffs to see who goes to the Founder's Cup. Be small, think small, and see how you grow your sport. But in ignorance and arrogance the WUSA thought that World Cup attendance and national team attendance translates into league attendance. Maybe they didn't realize how many people watched the USMNT in the 94 World Cup compared to MLS attendance...
That's a good point Beau. I guess I should have said that the reasoning struck me more as being backwards. "Build it and they will come." Whereas in the case of men's sports, they came and built it. Put it another way. I don't think men's sports should be cut to make way for women's sports that the female students didn't request, all in the name of redressing historic imbalance, e.g. Arizona Women's Rowing. There's got to be a happy medium that doesn't drive UCLA to eliminate its Men's Gymnastics Team. Perhaps that there must be enough funding to accomodate women's sports, even if it gets less than men's. Or that there have to be a equal number of sports for each gender, not necessarily dollars. Of course I know what's also largely responsible for the shortfalls and cutbacks. What I'd really like to see is some of these dead weight football programs cut back to make room for more hockey. How does this grab you? Big XII Hockey. Or better yet; The Maui Invitational Hockey Tournament.
It's simple really. It has less to do with the fact that it was a women's league or that it was soccer than most people think, IMHO. It's damn near impossible to run a successful new sports league. Think about it. You have high upfront costs, you're in an already cluttered marketplace, you're not going to break even any time soon - the odds are stacked against you. Now, combine that with the poor economy. When the economy's struggling, businesses aren't going to spend a lot of money on sponsorship, and they sure as hell aren't going to risk what little they spend on an unproven, risky venture. And it's hard to blame WUSA for not partnering with MLS at the beginning. MLS made only a half heated attempt to reach out to the women. Plus, if you weren't a soccer fan, would you have gambled your fortunes with MLS back in 1999, 2000? Arrogance or not, WUSA was always going to have an uphill battle. Maybe if WWC '99 had happened a few years earlier, a few more years before the economy tanked. Or if the league had caught WWC 99's momentum a little earlier, who knows. But history of start up leagues is piss poor. If MLS ends up becoming profitable and stable, it will be nothing short of a miracle and the fans and the owners should be proud of themselves.
College hockey is a great sport. And athletic departments could add it for men AND women to get around Title IX. Not to name-drop, since I don't exactly spend all my work or free time chatting with soccer player, but I once started to get into a Title IX discussion with Julie Foudy. I showed her a chart I'd made showing which schools were in compliance by the numbers -- basically, it was the service academies, Georgia Tech and one other fluke school as I recall. I made the point that Georgia Tech was only in compliance because the student body is overwhelmingly male (they're the only ACC school without women's soccer), and Title IX actually should be addressing that problem as well. Shouldn't Georgia Tech be under more pressure to comply than, say, North Carolina or Stanford? She replied that the numbers were only one of three ways to be in compliance, which was only somewhat reassuring. I agree -- there should be some sort of middle ground. I can't stand reading these rowing press releases. But in principle, I like the fact that Title IX has opened up so many doors. I'd just like to see the enforcement given a mild dose of reality.
Warning: this answer is not politically correct. Soccer participation for girls and teenagers can only be a positive thing. Soccer keeps people in shape and focuses on teamwork. That being said, rabid soccer fans appreciate well-played soccer. While the WUSA were very tactical, when compared with other professional leagues it was very slow and non-agressive. I don't want to hear, "you never watched it," because I did. My own experience is what I base this on: after being so frustrated with the lack of pace, and wanting to support it, but not having the interest to watch another five minutes, I bailed. The bottom line is that the majority of sports fans are male, and what draws their attention is the machismo of players and seeing skill displayed that they don't have. No one wants to be the guy who says, "I could play WUSA-caliber footy."
I know all of a sudden it's chic to blame the demise of WUSA on the lack of corporate sponsorships, and no doubt it played a big part, but a) blowing through the initial $40 million in less than a year showed terrible management skills in the early going; and b) Mark Ziegler of the SD Union Tribune in today's papers provided attendance expectations for WUSA which came out in a 5-year plan released by WUSA before its first season: Year-----------------Projected----------------Actual 2001------------------7,500-----------------8,307 2002------------------8,200-----------------7,114 2003------------------9,000-----------------6,720 2004------------------10,400---------- 2005-------------------11,800 Despite not learning from MLS that after the first year attendance tapers after the "newness" wears off, WUSA thought they could do it differently and consistently build their fan base to higher and higher levels. Oops. Too much unrealism. (Sorry for making up a new word.) Don't get me wrong. I've very sad to see it go. I went to about 3 games a year and always enjoyed them. But I'm a soccer fanatic. I enjoy ANY kind of soccer. I have two dear friends who fell in love with the 1999 WNT and went to some Spirit games with me but both came to the same conclusion: dreadfully boring. I personally think my friends were a bit naive - it's one thing to watch the WNT string together 20 beautiful passes against a helpless Third World side resulting in a goal. It's another thing to watch two evenly based teams go at it, complete with tough defense and tough woman to woman marking all over the field. Two different pieces of flesh we're looking at here, and I'm not sure my friends ever really "got it" in the first place, and fell in love with a dominating part of soccer initially, instead of with the more nuanced part of the game itself.
From the ESPN article http://soccernet.espn.go.com/feature?id=277363&cc=5901 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think this paragraph says it all. quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe the WUSA died because it was mismanaged. Maybe it died because Americans have little interest in professional soccer. And maybe it died because women's professional sports cannot capture a large enough market share to be profitable for investors and sponsors. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think it was a combination of all of these things with emphasis on the last one. Women's professional sports cannot capture enough market share to be profitable. What other women's professional team sports league has made it? None. It is sad for the many fans who loved the league but we are a market society and everyone votes with their pocketbooks.
Re: Re: Why did WUSA fail? I think a key mistake was the extent to which it was sold as a women's league and not a sports league. And one part of that mistake was limiting the number of foreigners. If the 9th and 10th best field players had been replaced by the best internationals willing to come to MLS, that have made a big difference in the quality of play in my eyes. Women aren't very good dribblers, the women's game is based around passing. And that doesn't work if a couple of players can't pass the ball well. But if each team had had 5 internationals, that would have clashed with their "role model" vision of the league. Before you go there...IMO, the league wouldn't have been swamped with foreigners just because the salaries once you get past the top are pretty low.
They Marketed Something Different My biggest problem with the WUSA was it was all about "I am woman, hear me roar," and nothing about soccer. My late teen daughter, goalkeeper and lacrosse player, and I attended a Breaker's game in the first season. The entire atmosphere was like an N Sync concert, not an athletics contest. Once was enough, we wanted soccer, not a pre-teen female happening. We do, however, attend many Revs games a year, and even travel to some matches. We love the game and love to watch soccer, thus no to the WUSA.
It may have been for pure financial reasons, but I think that ESPN article quotes the main reason: There's just not enough people willing to support the cause. There are many people in support of girls playing soccer but not enough to support them doing it for a living.
The arrogance of WUSA when it started and rebuking any cooperation with MLS was a huge factor. When WUSA decided to compete head to head with the MLS on Saturdays, I must say I became anti-WUSA.