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Post by jash on Oct 18, 2017 8:53:31 GMT -5
My Facebook feed is full of complaints about the lack of pro/rel in US Soccer, I see it here daily, and we even have lawsuits filed about it. The idea is that it gives the league/clubs/players something more to play for and raises the level of play for everyone.
I'm not sold.
Just because it works well in Europe doesn't mean it would work well here, at least not today. Here are a few counterpoints.
First, the US/North America has several HIGHLY successful leagues that don't use pro/rel. How do they survive this obvious lack?
Imagine a country like England decided it wanted to have a professional American Football league. There is a passionate base of fans, some good youth interest, and an existing structure of some semi-pro/amateur leagues (hypotheticals here). Do you think they could pull it off? Pro/rel at its best requires a deep structure of well-organized and similarly run leagues. Here we have MLS, USL (doing pretty well right now), NASL (a joke currently), and then a free-for-all of other minor leagues. Leagues come and go regularly. Pro/rel might help that structure come, and then again it might not.
"Neighborhood" clubs that the locals support do or die, no matter what league they are in, is not a realistic goal today in the sports markets of the US. TV deals are critical to get and keep support, and non-first-league teams won't get good ones. Streaming services are a very poor replacement.
The cost difference between operating an NASL team and an MLS team is dramatic. Travel alone is a very large issue. Imagine Boris being asked to step up and pay more for a year or two because his team had been promoted. He'd probably have forfeited or thrown games just to prevent it.
Taking the EPL as an example, the pro/rel zone between first and second division is a revolving door of about 8-10 teams. Most top teams stay top always, and most second division teams stay there as well. It has little effect on the operations of almost all the teams in all the divisions on a year to year basis.
Finally, I see again and again the argument that without pro/rel the players and clubs have "nothing to play for". Balderdash. While there are some clubs that don't seem to care, the same can be said about leagues that do have pro/rel. And don't tell me there are many professional players who don't care. I watched the Atlanta Thrashers organization intentionally and cleverly run that franchise into the ground, and those players still cared every single game.
I think once there is enough money in soccer in the USA and once the top league (which may or may not be MLS when it happens) becomes top 3 by all measures, and once we start seeing stable and more ubiquitous lower leagues, then maybe we can start having a realistic pro/rel discussion. Until then it often feels like a magic bullet that people think will solve all of our problems. Maybe people support it so much because they know we can't have it so it gives us a good excuse for the growing pains soccer is still experiencing in the US.
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Post by Soccerhouse on Oct 18, 2017 9:21:47 GMT -5
There is definitely no magic bullet that is for sure, especially when you have such a disparity in resources among the top EPL and Laliga clubs. I posted this on another thread a second ago, but this discusses the financial aspect of it and the issue with small markets. outsideoftheboot.com/2017/10/18/a-growing-gap-analysing-the-championships-new-financial-realities/Cosmos and Miami's teams are the perfect example of investing money in a team, and then really what is the end game. How are they going to recoup those expenses and actually have revenue. It clearly takes ownership willing to invest, but I wonder if a club like Charleston Battery makes a profit? I assume with atlanta united picking up the salary of handful of players helps, but without TV revenue how much can a club like that really make at this point. Keep in mind the Battery used to have a DA program, but had to suspend it back in 2016 for failure to provide practice and game fields.
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Post by paterfamilias on Oct 18, 2017 11:02:36 GMT -5
All good points and well taken, Jash.
I am a big proponent of pro/reg, not because it works in Europe, but because the closed market tips the balance of focus away from performance on the field and more towards performance on the income statement. The bottom line must always be a consideration because you can't bring wins home and pay rent with them. Winning is a pro/reg environment does have immediate financial considerations. Communities and owners can then decide what kind of team they can afford to support. Let Austin compete to knock Columbus out of the top league of MLS on the pitch, not amongst a bunch of well heeled politicians and business folks.
The other leagues in American all came of age at a different time under different realities and circumstances. It doesn't hurt that American invented baseball, basketball and football. Soccer is an import, with nuances that are native to other cultures and sensibilities. The US is doing what it tries to do best in assimilating it to our own way of doing things. Perhaps that is a big reason that what we are doing does not seem to work here.
The other thing I like about pro/reg is that it is taking a big swing at fixing a really big problem here with US Soccer. The issues that permeate US Soccer are systematic and in my humble opinion require a top to bottom shake up. Pro/reg could be the mechanism to force that to happen (more so that an age mandate).
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Post by Soccerhouse on Oct 18, 2017 11:34:22 GMT -5
I'm sure we discussed this in the past, but in other countries are their national programs so closely tied to their professional leagues?
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Post by jash on Oct 18, 2017 13:32:42 GMT -5
I intentionally did not include this in my original post, but I'm not *opposed* to pro/rel. I simply don't think it could possibly work in the US today... and maybe not for another 10 years.
I think teams like Atlanta United coming into the league and building a team on young players instead of old ones helps the league. I think that fact alone will drive more change in MLS than an attempt at pro/rel today.
I also think there is a big question mark about pro/rel when we use second and third division teams as feeder or affiliate clubs. I might be wrong, but I don't think big EPL teams (for example) use other teams from the UK as affiliates, or at least it's not common. What if those teams were promoted and competed with you head to head?
I'd love to see us have a big enough soccer culture and enough leagues and teams in those leagues and enough TV coverage and local fan support to make pro/rel work. I just don't think we're even remotely close.
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Post by Soccerhouse on Oct 18, 2017 13:54:00 GMT -5
One huge bright spot is we in America love the underdog, the cinderella story. The small school from Indiana that beats all the big boys in the ncaa tournament.
But I agree, given the investment these buy ins are for MLS, Arthur Blank wouldn't agree to a new system, where they could all of sudden be relegated for having a bad season. Can you blame him?
You would think that given the current structure though, MLS teams would be more interested in playing young players given their is no risk of relegation. But at the end of the day, its a business, their bottom line is to fill the stadium, sell seats, hotdogs, beer and merchandise and then sell an occasional player or two.
Atlanta United's success should be a wake up call for the league - Tata is the difference, with out him, not sure the magic is there to be honest. Do you attract Almiron, Martinez, Perez, Assad, Villalba and Carmona and even Garza?
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Post by rifle on Oct 18, 2017 16:37:55 GMT -5
I'm totally in favor of P/R. I think US 2nd, 3rd, 4th division (and beyond) soccer struggle ONLY because they cannot capitalize on their investment by climbing the ladder. Sure a team can draw fans, but knowing the team is 2nd tier is enough to keep some fans away. I think US 1st division soccer struggles because the worst owners don't care enough about soccer. (Clearly they care about soccer - but why not enough to invest and hire people capable of lifting their quality?). I think USSF is complicit in stacking the deck against lower division soccer. I think everyone's fears of some billionaire losing money is comical. I think there is a direct correlation between USMNT failure and our closed league structure. I think USSF and MLS stealing training compensation and solidarity payments is a crime. This in turn keeps club soccer a country club sport. "Tinfoil Ted" wrote this, and I think it would work. soccerreform.us/blog/?p=43
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Post by gaprospects on Oct 18, 2017 20:47:59 GMT -5
Lower division soccer in this country struggles for many reasons other than not being able to climb the ladder. Do you really think the NASL would improve by having its most well-functioning teams leave the league and replacing them with the worst-functioning teams from MLS? Lack of pro/rel isn't what causing a league like NPSL to schedule their championship game after one team's players have all returned to their college teams, or any of the other bone-headed decisions that these leagues have made over the years.
And on training compensation/solidarity payments, the lack of payouts to independent clubs is due to federal child labor laws. It's not a USSF/MLS conspiracy. And realistically, how many significant transfer fees have been payed out for American players over the years? How many independent clubs are really even capable of producing a player on that level? Most of the teams that would come to mind are massive organizations with thousands of paying families involved, do you really think that a small windfall percentage from that transfer would do anything to alleviate the pay-to-play at those clubs?
I'd love to see pro/rel in the United States. I agree that not having it inhibits competition, promotes complacency among owners at the top of the pyramid, and has a direct negative impact on how well we develop young players in this country. But it's not going to magically solve all of our problems, and it's certainly going to create new ones (ensuring survival of relegated teams is extremely important to a successful pro/rel structure, currently no one has a realistic plan for this).
Think about NPSL and PDL for a second. Both are amateur leagues that operate regionally on 3-ish month schedules. Most teams take buses to away games and operate on 5, maybe 6-figure budgets. There are teams in both leagues that have ambitions of becoming professional clubs and have reasonable plans for how to make that happen. But if you just promoted a team from one of these leagues into a fully professional league with a 6-7 month season and a national schedule? They'd be lucky to make it through the full year without defaulting just due to the travel cost alone. This isn't England where the longest away trip is less than 400 miles.
In order to make pro/rel work without destroying tons of clubs in the system, serious structural overhaul would need to happen to the US Soccer pyramid. Way more professional leagues with more professional-level players that operate on a regional level (remember, there's already worries about diluting talent due to MLS/USL expansion, this would be a much larger scale). And that's before you address anything to do with MLS's structural irregularities that would make pro/rel more difficult to implement. You aren't just going to be able to tear down a massive existing structure like this (which is, by the way, the most successful this country has ever built), the same way you aren't going to just end a billion-dollar-annual business like pay-to-play.
There are lots of significant, feasible changes that people can work to implement though, so I'd rather see people work to do so rather than endlessly drone on about things that are impractical.
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Post by fridge on Oct 19, 2017 7:35:40 GMT -5
Great intellectual discussion, but as noted above, this is like arguing where I'm going to take Gisele (Tom Brady's wife) on a date. NEVER going to happen (sorry Gisele I'm married)!
MLS franchise costs $150,000,000. New stadium at least $40,000,000. No one is going to invest $200,000,000+ and then be exposed to "relegation" and eliminated from the revenue and TV contracts to support the investment. The relegated MLS teams would go bankrupt just due to not being able to turn off the enormous overhead. Operating costs exceed $20,000,000. Also, as for the promoted teams, what business model allows them to survive? Who is going to invest $20,000,000 into a promoted team which has no infrastructure to then be profitable over 3-5 years let alone immediately with a real risk of being relegated 1 or 2 years later?! Who would invest in a stadium when in the 2 years it is being built, team could be relegated again.
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Post by rifle on Oct 19, 2017 17:49:32 GMT -5
An Open Pyramid means the cost of entry isn't $150M. A HS or University stadium in most places is big enough to build a foundation of support.
Our present system has done okay. But prior to Arthur's money bags - how many of you watched more than one or two MLS games a season? There is a reason that the answer is nearly nobody. The domestic pro game is restrained. That needs to end.
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