May 30 2008
Soccer FanHouse Demands Your Love
And now, a football blog goes all “inside baseball” on your ass…
In case you hadn’t noticed — and really, why haven’t you? — the boys at AOL finally got around to launching an honest-to-goodness Soccer FanHouse last week, just after the Champions League Final. IrishOutsider and I are holding down the fort over there for now, though we are hoping to gain some awesome new bloggers in the very near future. Here’s a sample of some of the things I’ve been writing there lately:
- Cristiano Ronaldo Would Like You to Stroke His Ego All Summer Long
- Columbus Crew Fans Set a Very Bad Example
- Bikini-Clad Women Invade Italian Soccer Team Practice for TV Show
- Sunil Gulati Wants to Promote English Soccer More Than American Soccer
Soccer FanHouse was launched along with Olympics FanHouse and Fightin’ FanHouse, though they also shuttered the old Das FanHaus, which kind of lost steam after our pal Orson Swindle of Every Day Should Be Saturday fame bolted for The Sporting News. So there’s no place on FanHouse for me to put my random Aussie Rules and rugby rants. Guess I’ll have to keep this blog going for a little while longer.
By the way, let me just express my extreme disappointment in all you AFL fans out there for not uploading any video of Brad Johnson’s post-siren miss in last weekend’s Western Bulldogs v. North Melbourne Kangaroos game, which gave the ‘Roos a 3-point win. I had this awesome idea for comparing Johnson to John Terry and John Carney, but it wouldn’t have worked without the video…
Ah, well. Maybe next time. Either way, that was a fantastic game to watch.
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I just got Setanta Broadband; anyone have an answer to why Setanta Broadband has VOD of matches for soccer, rugby, and the GAA, but not the AFL? I’d like to be able to watch old matches or matches I have missed; it’s a little hard to check out the AFL if I have to log in live to watch everything. I really wish Comcast had Setanta, so I could unleash my TiVo on it.
Good stuff on the USSF and the chilly relationship with the US Open Cup. I actually think the US Open Cup is the achilles heel of MLS and could be the downfall of the entire league and the franchise owners know it.
Let’s say I start up my own side and call it JOE FC and spend $10 million on start up costs, $10 million on 20 players at $500K each, and $2 million dollars on adverstising for the US Open Cup. I’m still $8 million dollars below the franchise fee for an MLS club, I have a chance to win the championship of America and publicize it around the world where international fans appreciate such things, and I’ve got 17 players who make significantly more money then all but one or two players on any MLS squad.
Nobody knows what the US Open Cup is but there is a great opportunity to piggyback on the already clear understanding of the US Open concept in golf and tennis and educate people what the tournament is all about. Winning it isn’t worth a lot of prize money but advertising around the world that you won the American soccer tournament that David Beckham could not is worth a lot more than $100,000.
If I was a billionaire I’d consider starting my own professional club in America and playing only friendlies and in various tournaments and then focusing everything on beating MLS sides in the US Open Cup and then rubbing their noses in it with an advertising campaign.
Being unaffiliated works for Notre Dame. Why not for a pro soccer team?
I don’t think an unaffiliated club is that great an idea; no matter how good your players are, you are still going to want to give them some meaningful games to play in order to stay in form. It’s why the Football League was formed in the first place, because you need a regular schedule to play and can’t count on having a successful FA Cup run every year.
You are correct though, joejoejoe, in that the US Open Cup is an “achilles heal” of sorts for MLS, in that it makes it impossible for MLS to have a completely “closed shop” major league cartel like what you have with the big four leagues in the USA, because the minor league teams through the US Open Cup still have a chance to test themselves against the major league teams.
There is a rumor going around that some big new investors are coming into USL, and that they will be trying to make USL more competitive with MLS. If this happens, things could get very fun and interesting in the US Open Cup. If these new USL investors are real, and if they are smart, they will work on getting USSF to reorganize the US Open Cup and get it a proper sponsor and so on. I’ve posted my ideas for improving the US Open Cup over in the Soccer Fan House thread.
Joe: You would have to do it through USL, because you’re only other path to the Open Cup is through USASA, which as I understand it is strictly an amateur organization.
On the other hand, if you’re a billionaire who really wants to build a club that can win the Open Cup and compete in the Champions League, it can be done.
First, you’re going to need a quality stadium where you can play. That’s your first $15M.
Additional startup costs are about $7M, which gets you your coaching staff, medical staff, lawyers, office staff, advertising, community outreach and other overhead — not to mention your PDL club, which every USL-1 club has.
THEN you have to pay the 26 players on the roster. If you really want to blow out USL and be capable of beating anyone in MLS, you probably only need about $2.5M, and that’s with a salary range of $150K-200K for your stars and $40K for your bottom reserves — and they’ll gladly take $40K from you over $17.7K for an MLS developmental deal. (Keep in mind some current USL starters turned down developmental deals to make $30K-35K in USL.)
Oh, and you can only have 7 total foreign-born players, so you’re pulling a lot of talent from MLS — which might make it hard to schedule friendlies against MLS clubs, as the league might decide to get uppity with you. And because you’re the big spender, the other USL clubs are gunning for you every week.
So all told, you’ve spent about $25M in one season to build your USL superclub and run it for the first year — still less than the MLS expansion fee, but until you actually win the Open Cup and go deep into the Champions League knockout stage, you could end up losing several million bucks a year to keep your club going. And this is association football, where there are no real guarantees of success.
So yeah, good luck with that.
To echo Dave’s comments a bit, you don’t just need a single rogue billionaire out there willing to lose a lot of money to create a single super club, you really need three or four billionaires investing in USL clubs, in an attempt to lift USL up to MLS levels.
As to the US Open Cup format, there are other leagues/associations out there besides MLS, USL, and USASA (NPSL, for instance) and if they want to participate in US Open Cup I’m sure the USSF has some kind of formula worked out for letting them play in the early rounds. I don’t think there is any provision for “unaffiliated clubs”; I’ve never heard of unaffiliated pro soccer clubs, the concept is a bit of a non-starter. This ain’t college gridiron.