Crew relocation is cowardly move
The ethos that came to be known as Massive took shape among Crew fans during the 2000s, if not earlier. It is different from the usual us-against-the-world mentality. It is beyond a mere contrivance. Massive is real, and it has to do with standing up to everyone, because everyone is against you — up to and including your team owner.
Goodness, but the Massive truth is now grotesque.
It has been a weird and unsettling week here in Columbus. As a community service, I would like to offer the following Field Guide to Civic Hostage Crises. I have had an inside view of one franchise relocation — I was covering the Hartford Whalers when the team moved out of my hometown — and Clio, ancient Greek muse of history, is howling in my ear right now.
Rally or die
Crew owner Anthony Precourt needs a new nickname because “Bobby Brady” doesn’t work with fangs. Respectfully, I would like to submit “Tony Prevaricourt” as an alternative. Think on that.
Anyway, Precourt on Tuesday announced he’s exploring a move to Austin, Texas, if Columbus fans don’t jam the stadium next year and the city’s power brokers don’t pile up sponsorships and pave the way for a new Downtown stadium, post-haste.
I say again: What we have here is a doublehostage situation, and it is generating more ransom notes by the hour.
Speculation in Austin is that Precourt, if he can’t get his manicured fingernails into his preferred patch of waterfront real estate in the Texas capital, might turn around and flip the Crew to one of the 12 cities bidding for an expansion team. He won’t sell the team to Columbus businessmen, but he might sell it to, say, Dan Gilbert, who is fronting Detroit’s expansion bid.
This smells at least faintly of a conspiracy, with the league and its owners in cahoots. I wouldn’t put it past these guys. They don’t like Columbus, not anymore, not when there are a dozen other cities clamoring to please them.
Remember: In ownership terms, MLS is a single-entity system (which is why the owners are known as “investor-operators”). If they can raise the take in any one market, all the “investoroperators” benefit financially. As Precourt and MLS commissioner Don “Goodell” Garber have oft said these past few days, the Crew’s “business metrics” are wanting.
The situation seems almost beyond Massive — but it is not, not yet, not quite. There is a remote chance that a Massive effort can save the team for Columbus. The odds aren’t good, but it’s all Crew fans have going for them: Crew supporter groups have organized a rally — a #SaveTheCrew rally — to be staged at City Hall beginning at noon Sunday.
The Nordecke Leadership, in a statement, beseeches: “Bring letters to write, phones for making calls, signs for painting and any other way you would like to express yourself. We’re not done yet and this is not over.”
Check out the hashtag on Twitter or Facebook and see the video at YouTube. The idea is to send a primal yaw in the direction of the league and it’s “investor-operators” that cannot be ignored. Shame these stuffed suits. Show them the meaning of ownership.
The Crew is the league’s first chartered franchise and it plays in the league’s first soccer-specific stadium. Columbus was a professional soccer mecca well before the legend of Dos a Cero was born. Precourt was going to frat parties when the Crew — and its visionary founder, Lamar Hunt — were laying the groundwork for what you see now in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and Orlando. Now Prevaricourt wants to hijack this community trust, and steal its history, for the sake of a few shekels?
We expected more out of this son of an oilman.
Stupid us.
What is really cool about #SaveTheCrew is that supporter groups from all over the continent — and even a few from the other side of the pond — have embraced the cause of Crew fans. Soccer people the world over have, at the very least, a cursory understanding of Columbus’ place in the international game. A great throng of them are all fighting against what they see as a criminal act (and it just might be, pending future litigation).
Soccer fans are a terrific bunch and they are the last best chance to save the incubator of American professional soccer.
Beware the messenger
The worst single task in the city last week was handed to the publicrelations person who had to write the letter to Crew season-ticket holders. The letter was emailed just before Precourt made his “exploring all options” announcement.
The letter is telling. It has 324 words, only four of them are “Columbus” — and “Columbus” can be found only twice in the body of the letter. Anyone who knows anything about branding, even Precourt, can recognize un-branding.
An excerpt: See ya, suckers! Word among seasonticket holders (and business partners) is that the Crew ticketselling operation went into overdrive to peddle as much as they could before Precourt’s teleconference-bomb Tuesday. They even started the ticket push earlier than usual, according to a litany of their best customers. I know of one group that views this as a conscious bait-and-switch on the Crew’s part, and is considering a classaction suit.
In order to make this sound like he has little choice, Precourt had to make Columbus sound like it was the worst soccer market in the world — but with the best fans!
Whatever Precourt winds up doing — and he is acting, talking and quacking like a duck that’s about to waddle away — he has to sell tickets for what will probably be a lameduck season.
If he were an honest human being, he’d come out with this pledge: “I will refund the money to seasonticket purchasers in the event the team moves.”
It would prove he truly is exploring all options, including keeping the team in Columbus, but don’t hold your breath.
Show me the money
At every turn, here and in Austin, Precourt talks about how he has gotten financially hammered.
OK, then, open your books.
Another thing he’s saying with great frequency has to do with how much money he has sunk into the operation. “Millions” he says, invested in stadium upgrades, locker-room renovation and practice-facility upgrades.
OK, then, open up your books.
It is true that Precourt — or, more accurately, Precourt Sports Ventures, a limited liabilities corporation which operates as a private-equity firm — has invested in upgrades. But I’m not buying “millions.” It’s more like “hundreds of thousands” — or about as much as he might spend to upgrade his bathrooms or put marble countertops in his kitchen at his mansion in the Bay Area.
The stadium is just nigh obsolete. If Columbus is to have an MLS team, a new building is needed. Nobody is disputing that. Precourt sunk some money into the place, probably good money after bad. We get it. But it’s not like he restored the Roman Colosseum.
We’ve also been hearing a lot about attendance. It is an issue, but not in the apocalyptic terms Precourt has used.
Last year, the Crew was 16th out of 20 teams in attendance. The bottom four: DC United, Colorado, Chicago and FC Dallas. What do all of them have in common? They are all charter teams save for Chicago, which in 1998 became one of the league’s first expansion teams.
The bottom five in attendance this year: Philadelphia, DC, Columbus, Colorado and Dallas. Are they all moving to Texas? Or, is the whole league moving to Seattle?
There are some bulletproof markets. There are some new markets that are going like gangbusters. And there are decades-old markets where winning translates into a bump in ticket sales. It is these older teams who built the league, the Crew first and foremost.
It may be true to say, “Attendance among our longstanding supporters in our 18-year-old stadium doesn’t compare to Atlanta.” But let’s see how Atlanta is drawing when it's a .500 team in 2038. That would be a fairer comparison.
Another of Precourt’s talking points has to do with the investment in a third designated player. It’s true that, as of last summer, the Crew has the first full compliment of DPs in team history. It is also true that the trio are among the lowest-paid DPs in the league. In sum, the Crew has made smart, budget-savvy signings on the top end of their pay scale, but they haven’t come within a mile of ponying up what it takes to sign anyone with any name recognition.
As for the rebranding, I will say this: Rumor had it that someone on Precourt’s staff, if not Precourt himself, floated the idea of removing the Lamar Hunt statue from the stadium grounds.
One more thing: Why should anyone assume that the Crew has this incredible business side to its operation? Because Precourt says so? The Hunt family was pilloried for its lack of business vision — and there has not been a major improvement since Precourt took over in 2013. Ask soccer fans in Columbus about the Crew’s efforts at advertising and they say, “What efforts at advertising?”
See the bigger grift
Precourt was a member of the league’s expansion committee until earlier this year. Why is he no longer a member of the committee? It could be that he had to clear his schedule so he could line up lawyers, lobbyists and real-estate agents in Austin. It also could be that the league needs some plausible deniability before it pulls a fast one on the cities that have spent years blowing money and licking boots as they assembled their MLS expansion bids.
Austin did not bid. Now, a team might just drop from the sky into the middle of their city. It’s a mystery how these things happen, isn’t it?
If you’re San Antonio, for one, you might be thinking about suing for fraud. Tuesday morning, you woke up and found out that Precourt might be moving the team to Austin — which would effectively crush your expansion bid. And you hear that Precourt has been working this plan for two or maybe even three years? While he was on the expansion committee?
I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds actionable.
It may turn out that the league tears a team out of Columbus, moves it to Austin, scuttles San Antionio (Forget the Alamo) and wraps up this carnival act by sticking an expansion team in Cincinnati — so Garber can say, “Look! I put a team back in Ohio! I’m a truly thoughtful person!”
Follow the lawyers
San Antonio is angry. Columbus is something beyond angry. Folks in City Hall and the local business community are mystified, stupefied and just plain fried about how Precourt has conducted himself.
Their anger has little to do with a potential move, although that certainly burns. The napalm of it is Columbus people heard little to nothing from Precourt throughout this process. This is how they found out something might be brewing: Six months ago, somebody with Columbus connections happened to be in Austin on business and this person overheard some chit-chat about Crew relocation during a cocktail party. Say what?
Word got out in Columbus and Precourt, when asked about it, said he would have a presentation ready in September. Then, he basically let all his 614 calls go to voice mail through the spring and summer. My guess is he used this time to finely craft his talking points.
Precourt reappeared to deliver his state-of-theCrew speech last month. He was specific about the team’s finances and notso-specific about a new stadium. He offered little in the way of a plan. City leaders were flummoxed.
At some point, a Columbus group made an offer to buy all or half of the team. Included in the offer were pledges of support from the business community. Precourt said last week that he had “received no serious offers,” but the 50 percent offer was very serious, according to the people who did the offering. Precourt countered with a 51-49 offer, which means I get your money but keep my decision-making ability.
Nobody in the city, not even the mayor, knew about Precourt’s Tuesday announcement until news leaked on the eve of the teleconference. That is not only galling, it’s unseemly.
It is true, as Precourt says, that there is no good way to do this. He chose the worst way. He did the city wrong, at every turn, and from what I’ve gathered over the last week, the city sees any number of avenues for legal action.
Garber said he does not believe in relocation, except this time. Those are the kinds of things the people in the club say. I’ve seen this playbook, this game plan to pull a fast one on one city, deliver the goods to another city and claim redemption. Clio, ancient Greek muse of history, is screaming in my ear.
She is saying the Massive #SaveTheCrew rally has a slight chance of shaming the shameless, and is the last, scant hope of saving an historic Columbus institution.