• by Ted Westervelt, writing from Denver
• via soccerreform.us

All over the world, companies fight for market share – often to the death. In the United States, major sports leagues are companies. They strive to crush and devour the competition like few others. Both the USFL and XFL were ground to dust by the NFL. The ABA was consumed by the NBA. MLS snagged choice cuts from the NASL. Now, fresh off an attempt to kill the league via sanction removal, US Soccer and MLS minders are busy cutting off their resources.

This story never ends well for club soccer.

Indeed, it has been a roller coaster week for the North American Soccer League. First, the sugar rush of a razor thin 6-5 US Soccer board vote that extended their provisional D2 sanction for one more year (with MLS Commissioner Don Garber and USSF/NE Revolution President abstaining). Then the glycemic crash of learning that their clubs would not be allowed to participate in the US “Open” Cup (with no mention of Gulati and Garber recusing themselves from that decision).

Here we are, leading the world in soccer club failures. Meanwhile US Soccer is busy making life difficult for an entire league, putting five more US clubs on the endangered species list. US Open Cup matches may matter little to MLS and US Soccer – who between them spend an embarrassing pittance marketing the longest running national soccer competition north of the River Plate – but these games are a critical source of income to any second division club struggling in our lower castes of our feudal system. As an independent company worried about their national cup, it makes sense that MLS doesn’t choose to promote the tournament. As an independent soccer federation charged with promoting the sport on a national level, it is shameful that US Soccer spends so little on our legacy laden tournament, but that is a topic for a later rant.

There a lot of sexy reasons to adopt a system of promotion, relegation and independent clubs: Quality of play will be a focus of every team, not a marketing afterthought. Lower division clubs, free of their feudal caste, will draw new interest and investment. We will send top D1 teams into international play unhindered by the domestic parity initiatives foisted upon them by MLS. Less sexy, but no less important: When clubs are independent, and move through leagues based on quality of play, leagues will not have the power to engage in these petty battles, and clubs will no longer victim to the gluttonous needs of any one league or co-opted federation.

Rumors circulate that NASL parent company Traffic has ruffled the feathers of de facto MLS parent company Soccer United Marketing by competing for lucrative marketing rights to marquis soccer events in the US. Promotion, relegation and independent clubs end all of that inside baseball. Building soccer in the United States is challenging enough. The rest of the world already has a huge head start. We don’t have the time or resources to waste on collusionary league squabbles conducted by captive federations. As they battle the corporate arena, our club game suffers on the field. While US soccer tries to clear the market for an MLS dominated pyramid, our game creeps along in an atrophied state. EPL recently passed MLS in US popularity and our lower league clubs expire at a frightening clip.

Fail

The current NASL saga is sadly stale. Over the last century, no stone has been left unturned in the effort to make closed league soccer work.

The results are in: It has failed.

Stable, open leagues dominated the soccer world by focusing competition between clubs, not corporate entities, and the soccer world dominated the professional team sports world. Our leagues gathered too much power, fought each other and our federation, failed to reach their market potential, and collapsed.

Our domestically based 1930 World Cup roster

In the 1920s, our soccer clubs drew so many top players from Europe with higher wages and better working conditions, the Scottish FA referred to the phenomenon as “The American Menace”. Our federation tried to play an active, independent role in our club game, but as our top closed leagues gained power, they began to squabble. The leading league of the day, the American Soccer League, pulled clubs from the US Open Cup (then called the National Challenge Cup) beginning the Soccer Wars that weakened the American club system on the eve of the Great Depression. In 1930, US club soccer was still strong enough to send a domestically based team of club players to the semifinals of the first World Cup in Uruguay. By 1931, the league was terminally stretched beyond it’s financial means. In 1932 it collapsed into a reorganization that gutted a fifty year legacy.

In 1966, huge American TV audiences for the World Cup caused US pro sports owners to try again. Their response to the factors surrounding the demise of the first ASL was to avoid federation entanglements altogether. Initially, their efforts looked a bit like MLS. Though there was no official salary cap, the spending of every team stayed roughly comparable. If it wasn’t for the massive spending of the New York Cosmos, NASL 1 wouldn’t have exploded on the scene in the mid 1970s. That same spending, coupled with our continued adherence to a closed league model, proved fatal for their league. Although it peaked in a Cosmic renaissance, built a legacy that endures to this day (one that arguably keeps MLS solvent in the form of the Sounders, Timbers and Whitecaps) it died in a closed league financial collapse that dwarfed ASL’s. By 1987, the cratering of the first NASL left three professional outdoor soccer clubs breathing in the United States – the lowest number since 1900.

In the 1990s, top flight pro US club soccer returned in the shape of MLS. Paradoxically, this comparably quick return was due to a FIFA mandate that stipulated a functioning D1 and real soccer pyramid be in place prior to final approval to host the wildly successful 1994 World Cup. If independent federations couldn’t be reasoned with, and couldn’t be ignored, Perhaps they could be co-opted. Today, an MLS team President serves – uncompensated – at the top of US Soccer. MLS Commissioner Don Garber also sits on the sixteen member board. Of the 13 remaining voting members, a working majority have demonstrated their loyalty to MLS.

Today, US club soccer sufferers from the same closed league disease as their predecessors – but the board at US Soccer has enabled MLS to manage it with a array of intrusive treatments. The symptoms that plagued ASL and NASL are all still there: Spotty popularity. A frightening club attrition rate. Entire leagues threatened with extinction. Indeed, the current NASL soap opera reveals leagues with too much power, prone to infighting and collapse.

In a move any pharmaceutical conglomerate would appreciate, with the help of US Soccer, MLS has carefully managed the closed league symptoms – without curing the disease. They’ve cleverly stocked a lifeboat with enough provisions in an effort to outlast the competition. Quality of play is held down through tight spending limits. Parity is imposed as a way to obfuscate these limits on quality. Perhaps most importantly, by allowing MLS to sell D1 slots to the highest bidder, our federation has allowed the league to obtain the financial backing to keep the single entity survivors alive.

All of these efforts operate under one one huge assumption: Closed leagues are the only way professional sports can do business in the United States.

Hold on.

The closed US sports model was not handed down by Moses. It isn’t in the Constitution. There’s no saying that includes death, taxes – and closed leagues – as the only things Americans can count on.

US Soccer and MLS can’t continue this scheme without the acquiescence of the average American soccer supporter. If a small percentage of us believe the closed league model is the stable alternative, a few more believe that club soccer is just too young and unpopular to survive outside of the MLS single entity oxygen tent, and the rest just believe the league is hopeless, the malaise will continue. Leagues like NASL will continue to fall prey to the competing interests of more powerful leagues and shady political moves on our federation.

Of course, the US leads the world in soccer club and league failures, our soccer history is as deep as any country in the world, and the potential in our soccer market remains largely unfulfilled.

Perhaps its time to argue the point.

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