Has MLS expansion come at the expense of the league's established teams?
The routine is well practised by now. The great and good of the North American soccer community are invited for an announcement to be made by Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber, usually flanked by a league legend; someone like Alexi Lalas or David Beckham. Promises are made of a new stadium, a name revealed, a badge unveiled, official songsheets passed around and a new MLS franchise is confirmed.
In the past two years alone, this routine has been observed in Austin, Cincinnati, Miami and Nashville and with Garber recently revealing that MLS will expand to hit 30 teams over the next few years (26 by 2020) it won’t be the last time that such rituals are performed. Sacramento, St Louis, Charlotte, Detroit and San Antonio are already vying for position.
But what about some of MLS’s founder franchises? The league has spent so much effort extending its reach that certain teams, some of which are woven into the fabric of soccer culture in the United States, have been neglected. At least that’s the argument put forward by many fans of these teams.
“We certainly believe that the Crew has received less attention from the league than other newer, shinier teams,” says David Miller of Save the Crew, the grassroots organisation that rallied to stop the Columbus Crew from being moved to Austin. “For example, this season our home matches occur heavily in the early part of the season, when you often have to wear full winter coats to games. You’re not going to incentivise random drop-in attendance when the temperature is approaching freezing.” He has a point. Eleven of the Columbus Crew’s 17 home games this regular season will be played before the first day of July, six of which took place in March and April.
At least the Crew, with new ownership and a new direction, have hope of rejuvenation, with ground to be broken on a new downtown stadium later this year. For the New England Revolution, another of MLS’s “forgotten” franchises, the outlook is much bleaker.
Only the LA Galaxy have made more MLS Cup appearances than the Revs, they are part of the MLS bedrock and yet the franchise has suffered almost existential erosion in recent years. With an average crowd of around 12,000 per game, New England have one of the lowest attendance records in the division. Their owners, the Kraft family, have overseen the New England Patriots’ dominance of the NFL but are much-maligned for barely maintaining an interest in the Revs. The team are slumped at the foot of the Eastern Conference with just three wins from their opening 13 fixtures, and they fired their coach, Brad Friedel, last week). It’s little wonder the Revs support feels disenfranchised.
“We still operate very much as we did when the team was founded,” explains Matthew Puglise of The Rebellion supporters group. “This club needs a rebrand badly. We need to sign players that draw people to the stadium, like when a Thierry Henry or a Zlatan [Ibrahimovic] comes to town and we get 40,000 people into Gillette Stadium.”
However, getting a winning team on the pitch would only go so far in addressing the deep-rooted issues the New England Revolution face. At Gillette Stadium, an out-of-town megastadium designed for NFL rather than soccer, they are a fading franchise. Relocation to Boston has been mooted, but as things stand there are no immediate plans. While the Columbus Crew have built a soccer-specific stadium, albeit a flawed one, and will start construction of another one within two decades, the Revs are still stuck where they have been since the start.
Geography is a common problem. MLS has identified and quantified the value of being in as many downtown locations as possible. That is where the league’s young and progressive fanbase can be found and so teams like the Crew and Revolution are paying for their failure to capture this audience in unsuitable suburban stadiums.
The Chicago Fire can also count themselves among such company, although much like the Columbus Crew there are at least plans afoot to make changes. Big ones. Just this week, it was reported that the Fire have agreed to pay $60.5m to end their SeatGeek Stadium lease early. Next season, they are expected to play at Soldier Field before a long-term stadium plan is drawn up. There has also been talk of a rebrand. “We like to see the Fire unleash its potential out in the whole market,” said Bridgeview mayor Steve Landek in light of the news.
Of course, much of the debate over MLS’s “forgotten” franchises comes down to how much interference one believes the league’s central office, in its centralised structure, should have in the ownership and operation of member clubs. How much, for instance, can Garber really do to revive the Revolution when Robert Kraft shows no sign of dipping into his pockets, the same pockets that have helped fund the New England Patriots’ six Super Bowls this century.
Back in the mid-2000s, when the league could barely give franchises away, MLS had more freedom to shape the division as it pleased. Now, the dynamic in MLS ownership has shifted, perhaps for the better, but almost certainly for the more complex when it comes to the resuscitation of flatlining franchises.
“At a point, one wonders how such a large league will function,” says Karl Schuster of the Section 8 Chicago fans group. “If expansion leads to neglect of older clubs then it seems to be a bit of a myopic strategy on the part of MLS.” Indeed, while evolution is undoubtedly positive for the league, it will only have the desired effect if everyone is carried along with the turn of the wheel.