Perhaps the gulf between American soccer fans and their British counterparts isn't as wide as previously supposed: a 27-year-old man remains hospitalised after being stabbed at a DC United-Tampa Bay Mutiny game at Washington's RFK Stadium last weekend.
In his role heading up the NFL's international operations, including NFL Europe, Don Garber spent the past three years attempting to sell American football to a soccer-dominated audience. Now he has accepted the equally thankless task of trying to sell soccer to reluctant American sports fans.
Garber, who spent some time in Dublin two years ago as the NFL official in charge of the Pittsburgh Steelers-Chicago Bears exhibition at Croke Park, was named Major League Soccer's (MLS) commissioner last week, replacing Douglas Logan, who had served in the post since the league's inception in 1996.
The MLS owners have thus ousted a 56-year-old sports marketing executive and replaced him with a 41-year-old sports marketing executive. Logan's failure to turn MLS into a box-office smash proved his undoing, and the lateral move in seeking his replacement suggests an underlying belief that the league's problems stem from marketing deficiencies and not from their misguided thinking in the fundamental concepts underlying the four-year-old US league.
A few years ago, my friend Ken Jones, the former Welsh international who went on to a successful journalistic career with the Independent in London, found himself in conversation with Alan Rothenberg, the president of the US Soccer Federation.
When Rothenberg boasted that the sport was on the verge of taking off in the United States, Jones, a world-class curmudgeon when it comes to matters like this, replied: "Yeah. You're going to turn it into a women's game."
Less than four weeks after 90,000 spectators packed the Rose Bowl for the US-China Women's World Cup final, a paltry scattering of 5,072 turned up in Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium for an August 5th regular-season game between the hometown Wizards and the defending MLS champion Chicago Fire.
And, officially, there was no connection between the embarrassing disparity between the attendance for this summer's women's games and the attendance shortcomings of MLS; but when he took office prior to the American league's initial season in 1996, Logan had predicted a 15 per cent increase in attendance for the following year. Instead, the average crowd dropped from 17,406 to 14,619 the next year.
Audiences dwindled even further in 1998, and are hovering at slightly above 15,000 per match this season. Conservative estimates have the league losing an aggregate $20 million a year.
Although most MLS games are televised in some form, very few are broadcast nationally, and many audiences for local cable telecasts have been too small to even measure. Replacing Logan, who had a year and a half to run on his $250,000 per annum contract, in mid-season not only smacks of panic, but suggests that the owners feel this failure is rooted in marketing decisions made at the top.
The evidence, however, suggests that the owners' insistence on salary limitations and an over-reliance on front office personnel with little or no background in soccer may be more to blame. And Garber's initial pronouncement upon taking office - "What this league needs is more than someone who can speak to soccer issues, but who can speak to business issues in sport" - offers little hope that a remedy is at hand.
From its inception, MLS has operated with a single-entity structure. Each team's "investor" buys into a stake in the entire league. Player acquisitions and contracts are handled by the league, with players subsequently allocated to individual teams.
Moreover, the entire process is somewhat hamstrung by a self-imposed salary cap which theoretically limits player spending to $1.7 million per year. Team rosters are also limited to five "foreign" players.
The theory was that this would accelerate the development of home-grown talent, and while this goal may have been modestly successful, the foreigners the league has signed have not, with rare exception, been the sort of "impact" players who would make a significant difference either on the field or at the gate.
Foot-dragging by the league office, for instance, interfered with the New England Revolution's early efforts to sign Paul McGrath until it was two years too late. Acquisitions from Europe tend to be players well beyond their sell-by dates.
Germany's Lothar Mattheus, for instance, has been rumoured to be on his way over all summer.
Moreover, from its outset MLS tended to alienate the more sophisticated, hard-core soccer fans by monkeying around with the principles of the game in order to make it more palatable to American audiences. The shootout, eliminating the draw as a result for even regular-season games, is downright silly, as is the league's insistence on running the stadium clock backwards, as in American football.
Just last summer, one mainstay of the US team which participated, albeit briefly, in France '98 (he shall remain nameless, since he remains under contract to an MLS team) told me that if the Americans truly hoped to reach a place on the world soccer stage, "every player on the national team should be playing in Europe".
That may have been a slight exaggeration, and there is a glimmering of hope for the immediate future: nine of the starters on the US team which beat Germany 2-0 in Mexico City last month, for instance, came from MLS rosters.
To date, though, the widespread grassroots soccer participation in America has not translated into receipts at the box office - and that proved Doug Logan's eventual undoing.
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