Friday, March 9, 2012

Things to Do in Denver When You're Drunk



Sweet baby Jesus on fire
Ima need a damn lawyer and a miracle
To pull my ass out of this

Wow. Has it been 135 days since we were here before? It just got dark here in Denver about a half an hour ago. At this time tomorrow we'll know what's up. Everyone and their mom has already written a preview of this match.

What the heck am I going to say that these folks haven't said at least 12 times?

I guess I'll just post a link to this.

You know, it's interesting. My girlfriend and I are sitting in the hotel right now as I write this and she is channel surfing. She has stopped on ESPN, ESPN 2, Altitude and pretty much every news network and I have not heard word one about the season starting tomorrow. ESPN.com has nothing on the front page at all about the MLS season starting tomorrow. Sports Illustrated does a bit better with one article buried deep below the fold. SB Nation has nothing on their front page either.

Earlier this month during the "State of the League" meeting in Columbus I asked Commissioner Garber the following question "What is MLS doing to attract fans in non-MLS markets?"

Garber's response was essentially to grow the sport in the MLS markets and to continue to try to get more games on national television.

So, honestly the answer is do next to nothing? It is absolutely absurd that seventeen years in to this league we still have such a disconnect with the national sports media. According to the Huffington Post soccer is now the second most popular sport in the United States with people 12-24.

Why are there NFL fans in Alaska? Obviously it's not because they get to go watch their favorite NFL club play 8 times a year in Juneau. (Or for that matter even once). If you pull payroll and history out of the equation and just look at the sport there is little difference between the EPL and MLS to an average American sports fan (except the MLS games are on a much more convenient times).


Why is it while other leagues are looking to increase their footprint in other ways than expansion the MLS doesn't even have an effective plan to market the Crew in Cleveland? (...or for that matter the Revs in Hartford, the F*re in Milwaukee etc.)

When I lived in Dayton I couldn't walk in to a gas station between March and July without seeing a Reds pocket schedule. When I was a kid living in Fort Wayne, IN the Cubs regularly sponsored a "Fort Wayne Day" where a local media sponsor would help to sell tickets and bus trips to Wrigley. The Cubs didn't need the additional ticket sales. They wanted to ensure that the people in that market, which was about equidistant from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati, would be more likely to be Cubs fans.

Major League Soccer faces a much more potent opponent than the Detroit Tigers. That 12-24 market I was talking about earlier? That's a national number, and if nothing is done those kids will be sporting jerseys from England, Italy, Spain and Mexico.

I know... I know... but what about USL Pro? In taking Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Montreal MLS has effectively snatched the most viable teams in this league and the only ones with any sort of potential for creating a geographical footprint.

The biggest issue that MLS faces is the EPL. The EPL wants American money... (OK, to be fair they just want money, but they'll certainly take American money.) MLS, however has an advantage... they have the same advantage also with Serie A, FMF etc... MLS is here.

I will applaud MLS for a few things. In the last five years they have taken their online presence from being an absolute joke to being comparable if not better than their major league counterparts in the United States. They have learned how to capitalize on the buzz that new teams generate and have made that a catalyst for the media conversation. The issue is, there is a great deal of disparity between the haves and the have-nots in MLS.

While writing this I just had a conversation with my bartender at the hotel bar. She professed to not be much of a sports fan. I could tell this was evident when I asked her who the Colorado Rapids were. She replied that she had seen someone from the Rapids on TV during the intermission of the Nuggets game. She thought they were either the soccer or the hockey team in town. I helped her along and told her that they were the soccer team and they were playing the Crew tomorrow. She said she didn't realize that there was a professional soccer team in Denver. I informed her that the team had their own stadium. Her response was "You should tell them to let people in Denver know when their games are. I like soccer and I would totally go." (I couldn't place the accent that the bartender had, but she just told another patron that she was Polish. I would assume with the fact that at some point in her life she lived in Poland she would have at least a partial knowledge of the sport).

As a major league sport this is unacceptable.

Whilst writing this I have also been speaking to the much more intelligent Sam Fahmi. He has brought up a few points. His first point was tradition. There is no soccer tradition in the United States. While I agree with this there is an intrinsic problem with trying to create such tradition. You have to have tradition to create tradition and a seventeen year old league that's still trying to get it's shit together will not have tradition until it does just that. You can try to astroturf tradition, but I believe the manufactured tradition that has been created at some of the recent USL promotions will ring hollow in years to come.

The other comment Sam made which I had not thought about until right now is location, location, location. This has not helped Columbus (but I've written small novels and will continue to write small novels about Columbus' problems), but if you look at the other lowest drawing teams you'll begin to see a pattern. Of the seven lowest drawing MLS teams last year (teams under 15K) only the Crew play in the city limits of the city they represent. Conversely four out of the top six teams do play in their home city and the teams that do not are in the two most populous metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.

I am incredibly excited for this year's MLS season. I know quite a few friends who are also excited, but (and I think my sentiments are shared throughout MLS) not enough people are excited. We need, as American and Canadian supporters to figure out a way to overcome Europe and Mexico. We need to figure out a way to get folks in markets that have no MLS team excited about MLS. Most importantly, we need to excite and inform the prospective clients of MLS teams who live in ACTUAL MLS MARKETS that they have a team... and those teams are playing a game they might enjoy.

Quite a lofty task.

Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.




(btw - thanks to my girlfriend for titling this post)