Crowd surge helps, competition hurts
NEW YORK— Major League Soccer’s attendance is up and fan interest is booming, even if television broadcasts are far less popular and some young Americans would rather play in Europe.
MLS averaged 22,000 in attendance for the first time in its history this season, ranked among the top seven leagues in the world. The league is set to add a second Los Angeles franchise next year, announce two expansion cities next month and at some point finalize David Beckham’s long-pending Miami club. But viewers averaged fewer than 300,000 for nationally televised regularseason matches in the U.S., fewer than the average for a New York Yankees game on their regional network. Several top young Americans, such as Christian Pulisic and Weston Mc Kennie, have chosen to play in Germany and test their mettle in a more demanding environment.
And worst of all, the U.S. — with a roster filled with MLS stars including Toronto FC’s Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore — failed to qualify for next year’s men’s World Cup, ending a streak of seven appearances in soccer’s showcase.
“We need to use this failure as a wake-up call for everyone associated with the sport at all levels to ensure that we have the right processes and mechanisms and development programs and leadership and governance in place to learn from this missed opportunity to ensure that it never happens again,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said this week. “Part of the maturation of becoming a soccer nation is recognizing that qualifying for the World Cup is not a birthright. It’s something you need to earn, and we are unfortunately in the company of some great soccer nations, like Italy and Holland and Ghana and Chile — Copa champions — that have also not qualified.”
MLS playoffs resume next week after the international break with the first leg of conference final. The Columbus Crew — whose owners are threatening to move to Austin, Texas, in 2019 — host Toronto FC, which finished first overall in the regular season, while the Houston Dynamo are home to the Seattle Sounders.
“MLS and soccer in the United States have made great advances in many areas. But its promoters have found that the abundance of existing legacy sports leagues that have the highest quality of athletes on the planet creates a ceiling on professional soccer in the United States,” said Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sports Corp. “It has not (surpassed) and perhaps never will supplant any of the major legacy sports unless and until the quality of play and players increases significantly and the U.S. men’s team in particular is more competitive and, in fact, wins some of the major international tournaments.”
The momentum of playoff runs was interrupted because of World Cup qualifying, and the culmination of the league’s season competes for attention with the NFL and college football among the wider American sports audience.
“Long-term demographic things like CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and stuff with the NFL says maybe there is a long slow decline around some of that, but when you’re starting from where they’re starting, that’s going to take a generation,” Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said. “We’ll grow because most of the immigration to the U.S. is from soccer-playing countries and the country is going to grow.”
Launched with 10 teams in 1996, two years after the U.S. hosted the men’s World Cup, MLS expanded to 12 but cut back to 10 after the 2001 season. There has been steady growth since expansion started in 2004. Next year’s total will be 23, already well over the norm for a first division, and the league is planning to settle at 28.
Infrastructure could not be more different now. The league has 14 soccer-specific stadiums, two more renovated for the sport and one built with both the NFL and soccer in mind. Three more soccer stadiums are under construction.
Average attendance is up 60 per cent from 13,756 in 2000, boosted this year by 48,200 for Atlanta in its opening season. MLS trails only Germany’s Bundesliga, England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Mexico’s Liga MX, the Chinese Super League and Serie A, with Italy’s first division ahead by only 22,177 to 22,106.
But that has not translated yet into big TV ratings in the U.S. ESPN averaged 272,000 for 30 telecasts this season on ESPN and ESPN2, and Fox averaged 236,000 for 33 broadcasts on FS1 and Fox. In addition, Univision is averaging 250,000 viewers for its Spanish-language MLS telecasts. But the Premier League attracts a larger audience, averaging 422,000 on NBC, NBCSN and CNBC, even though many matches are on weekend mornings.
“We’re not the Premier League,” Garber said, pointing out last year’s MLS Cup drew1.4 million viewers on Fox. “The fact that we’re able to generate ratings growth across all of our partners here and in Canada, and dramatic growth in Canada, is a positive. So we actually, we and our partners, feel pretty darn good.”
Player payroll has increased as MLS keeps adding what it calls targeted allocation money. While several older American players have returned to MLS from Europe, many of the teens viewed as the future of the U.S. national team have gone abroad as they emerge from the MLS youth academies, which have been mandated by the league since 2007 and produced more than 250 players with first-team MLS contracts.
With the U.S. soccer community in turmoil following the World Cup failure, some have called for MLS to guarantee playing time for young Americans. Garber said league coaches “universally believed” that would be a bad idea.