Regionality and League Success

All these thoughts swirling around in my head about the viability of this market or that market, all kind of coming to a point in some of this very interesting discussion about the rise and fall of professional soccer in St. Louis.  As Pitch Invasion points out, Jeff Cooper was poised to create a regional club in a widely respected youth soccer base.  While a beautiful cog in the machine of a fully developed national game, the grand idea that is AC StL suffers like many upstart soccer ideas with their lack of any meaningful network effects.  To put it another way there is no way to leverage soccer accomplishments in a vacuum, which is basically what AC StL, StL Athletica, WPS, WUSA, and originally MLS attempted to do.  I think in the long view, the only thing that separates MLS from this pack is the well-known history of billionaires taking years of losses for the greater good.  In absence of this level of commitment, the odds are against a large majority of soccer ventures.

Something that does level the playing field to some extent is regionality.  Yes, I had to google it too to make sure I hadn't just completely made up a nonsense word.  Anyway, regionality, as I would apply it to US professional soccer, is the sum of the network effects that benefit each team by sharing common ties to a specific region.  The best examples of this are in the original Big 4 sports leagues, who almost exclusively existed in the Northeast for much of their early existence.  There are certainly outliers to this example, and living in Chicago I fully appreciate it, but in a case like the NHL, there would be no league today had the Original Six attempted to be spread across the country.  Sports leagues lend themselves to benefit from regional rivalries, a shared customer base, and lower costs of doing business (travel, advertising, etc).  Its a natural progression, and one that most soccer ventures have seemed to avoid or ignore as they tried to walk before they could crawl.  Now I know that millions have dollars and years of work by people much more experienced than myself have gotten us this far, but here we are once more with teams and (only slightly possibly) entire leagues on the brink.

American geography creates an interesting situation for anyone trying to create a sports league from scratch. Whether its American football, soccer, or professional paintball (is that still a thing?), leagues have to determine which markets will give them the most exposure and which markets will be the most viable, and then work out a system that keeps the teams solvent.  I'm not even getting into salary caps or things like that, I mean simply the cost of doing business.  In the case of WPS, I have to think its a tight squeeze to get teams from San Francisco to New Jersey when your gates are around the 3-7k range.  I know this was the target from day one, and part of the initial cost projections, but I want to guess that the teams that are struggling (WPS or MLS) are the teams struggling to be relevant in their own markets.  I think its great that places like Dallas, the Bay Area, and St Louis have active youth soccer cultures, but at the end of the day the professional teams need to be meaningful in the overall league picture.  Being a soccer island unto yourself is just not enough to get that critical mass of fan support.

This is where I fall off the bandwagon for expansion into markets like St. Louis, like Atlanta, like Miami.  Each all have their merits as individual businesses, but barring a fully developed national league, they are simply outposts of sports related entertainment.  For leagues that are still clawing for market share, that gives new efforts a real handicap at attracting all but the most committed fans.  Potential fans need to see their place in the overall league picture, and if that's not well established, there is no incentive to pay any attention.  I would compare it to some of the local unaffiliated minor league baseball teams in the Midwest.  The Schaumburg Flyers play their games in a beautiful, team-owned baseball field, and their games are fun, decent baseball, but they are barely a footnote in the Chicago media.  Absent meaningful stakes, or even the prospect of seeing future major leaguers, its merely baseball entertainment and fairly disposable, take it or leave it.  The same can be said for a number of struggling clubs as they try to shed a similar label of disposable soccer entertainment.  There just not enough there past the good intentions, and without equally good bankrolls to ride out the rough times, the waiting game can be a deadly game.  You can't run a league, a club, or even a stadium on good intentions alone.