Attendance continues to be off in Major League Soccer. Six percent over last year which saw the first average decline in the league in a decade. That is the first sign of a pyramid scheme beginning to crumble. Don Garber is the culprit. "We should be a selling league," he intoned last season. And franchise template Atlanta complied. Now the defending league champion Five Stripes are languishing in a tie for fourth in the East after selling their best player in the off season and hiring a new coach. Attendance is still a phenomenal 51,657 but that's off 3% from last year. The folly of the MLS business model in its insistence on "cozy" soccer specific stadiums is on display with LAFC. The jewel-like Banc of California Stadium seats only 22,000. The bling of this franchise is blinding and here's betting that if they were able they would be drawing 40,000 per match. But they can't. Their average attendance is already over capacity at 22,159, up 1%.
The second shoe to drop in a pyramid scheme is the quality of new additional "clients." Here, watch, carefully watch, Inter Miami CF. This franchise has disaster written all over it and its paltry $25 mil expansion fee is baked in. The league will get no more money from Inter ownership and the Beckham bling they had was replaced by dull Mas concrete. Word (denied by Inter ownership) is that Becks has sold his share in the team and they will be playing in a rebuilt stadium on the site of old Lockhart Stadium, home of the Miami "Fusion," in Fort Lauderdale. Inter Miami will draw flies to Lockhart 2.0, which will make a mockery of the Miami name, as it did the "Fusion" and will be an embarrassing failure for the league. For the next few years MLS HQ will be preoccupied with "What to do about Inter Miami" as they were with the "Fusion" and the Tampa Bay "Mutiny." Garber has said those were the league's darkest days and "contraction," folding the two Florida franchises, was the result. Folding, or moving, the new Miami team, will happen too. There is nothing worse for a league's public perception than folding or moving franchises. Brings up memories of the World Hockey Association, the American Basketball Association, the World Football League, sham operations that barely hung on. Scares off other investors. If any exist. Where now Garber after Miami, Nashville and Austin, the latter two not exactly combining to spell "major league." Sacramento? Wee! Charlotte? Haven't they suffered enough with the "Hornets?"
Like Bernie Madoff Don Garber has the pyramid schemers nightmare scenario dead ahead with no way out. He's not going to be able to pay the "dividends" to the existing owners that they have come to expect from wave after wave of expansion suckers paying $200 million only to lose $50 million a year, and becoming a "selling league" is a joke that will dilute the already second-rate soccer on the field while making nary a contribution to the owners revenue. The league continues to rely at an ominous level on in stadium ticket sales, another harbinger of failure, because their TV contracts are paltry and becoming more paltry by the year as the English Premier League makes increasing inroads in the Colonies viewership with ratings that dwarf televised MLS matches.
MLS has defied economics gravity since inception. You can only cry fire and be proved wrong so many times. But, I don't see a way out; others with more letters after their names don't see a way out so for what it is worth I don't think MLS will be around five years from now.
This is Public Occurrences.
The second shoe to drop in a pyramid scheme is the quality of new additional "clients." Here, watch, carefully watch, Inter Miami CF. This franchise has disaster written all over it and its paltry $25 mil expansion fee is baked in. The league will get no more money from Inter ownership and the Beckham bling they had was replaced by dull Mas concrete. Word (denied by Inter ownership) is that Becks has sold his share in the team and they will be playing in a rebuilt stadium on the site of old Lockhart Stadium, home of the Miami "Fusion," in Fort Lauderdale. Inter Miami will draw flies to Lockhart 2.0, which will make a mockery of the Miami name, as it did the "Fusion" and will be an embarrassing failure for the league. For the next few years MLS HQ will be preoccupied with "What to do about Inter Miami" as they were with the "Fusion" and the Tampa Bay "Mutiny." Garber has said those were the league's darkest days and "contraction," folding the two Florida franchises, was the result. Folding, or moving, the new Miami team, will happen too. There is nothing worse for a league's public perception than folding or moving franchises. Brings up memories of the World Hockey Association, the American Basketball Association, the World Football League, sham operations that barely hung on. Scares off other investors. If any exist. Where now Garber after Miami, Nashville and Austin, the latter two not exactly combining to spell "major league." Sacramento? Wee! Charlotte? Haven't they suffered enough with the "Hornets?"
Like Bernie Madoff Don Garber has the pyramid schemers nightmare scenario dead ahead with no way out. He's not going to be able to pay the "dividends" to the existing owners that they have come to expect from wave after wave of expansion suckers paying $200 million only to lose $50 million a year, and becoming a "selling league" is a joke that will dilute the already second-rate soccer on the field while making nary a contribution to the owners revenue. The league continues to rely at an ominous level on in stadium ticket sales, another harbinger of failure, because their TV contracts are paltry and becoming more paltry by the year as the English Premier League makes increasing inroads in the Colonies viewership with ratings that dwarf televised MLS matches.
MLS has defied economics gravity since inception. You can only cry fire and be proved wrong so many times. But, I don't see a way out; others with more letters after their names don't see a way out so for what it is worth I don't think MLS will be around five years from now.
This is Public Occurrences.
