I like Austin a lot. Great place to visit and if I were younger, it’d be on the list of places to live. I don’t get it from an MLS perspective but they saved the crew so I guess this is the trade off.
Yeah, St. Louis approved a privately financed soccer stadium for MLS late last year near where the Blues play. It's obviously pending the go ahead for construction until MLS officially names STL the 28th team though, so PHX could potentially still get that spot.
St Louis, Phoenix, Sacramento, Detroit. Any clue on the 5th? That seems like a clear 4 to get up to 31
I sort of doubt Sacramento. If they wanted Sacramento, they would have already done it. Phoenix/St. Louis and Detroit if they get a stadium. Maybe San Diego figures something out? The media market rankings can be misleading because Charlotte does not include Raleigh-Durham but I think you'd be able to pull fans from there. It's a couple hour drive but at least in terms of regional pulls, that might be attractive. Tampa is 11 but I'm not sure another Florida team is a good idea right now.
Hey, Austin will be the best attended MLS team in Texas if they can get the players families to go to the games.
Sacramento needs to find a billionaire minority partner. They’ve been told every time that they’ll get picked over until their ownership group has more money.
NY3? They going to play at the Mets stadium? I would think they try to fix Chicago before doing that.
What happened to that group of Alderman that wanted to reject it? I saw the Alderman in Chicago rejected Rickets plan for the downtown stadium.
No clue where’d they’d play. I do know that when discussing expansion last year the ETR guys said NY3 and LA3 could both be part of the 32 but the league would favor NY because it’s the league HQ. Chicago sucks because the owners don’t care and they’re stuck in that Bridgeview deal till like 2035. Like I said above Rickets deal got shut down. I think MLS’ plan was to pull some Crew-Austin shit with the Chicago MLS-USL teams to move the fire to the new downtown stadium. No clue what they’ll do now.
you can't leave it as is for another generation....it's too big a market to just punt because of bad stadium location
I agree completely. I know the Fire season ticket holders got the same exact “engagement survey” or whatever they called it that they sent to the Crew a year ago. So the league knows as well. IIRC, there’s something in the contract that says the “owners can move locations if it’s not financially feasible to remain there and there is another location that is feasable”. So I’m sure they’ll keep trying to find a new stadium deal and have their lawyers go to work. It’s just a really shitty contract and the MLS lawyers fucked it up. Remember, that was back in the early 2000s and MLS’ marketing strategy was “go where the soccer moms are.” That’s why there’s so many of the stadiums for that time 15-20 miles from downtown out in Suburbiaville. Luckily Portland and Seattle happened and they learned that was an awful marketing strategy.
The 2017 plan did get rejected. Then a different group of owners led by the Enterprise Rent a car people came in and are privately funding it. That new plan is fully endorsed by all of the major players.
Yeah, this is the main problem with FC Dallas as well. It's 28 miles and on a toll road from downtown Dallas and 50 miles from Fort Worth. Any weeknight game is going to have appalling attendance just due to the logistics of it all. Doesn't help that FC Dallas has mediocre owners as well though.
Yeah I wasn’t even going off the media rankings but just thinking of the cities we’d heard about most. Did not include SA because Austin killed their dream
To be fair, RSL tried very hard to get its stadium into downtown Salt Lake City. Larry Miller, owner of the Jazz and official nemesis of Dave Checketts (RSL founder) blocked every effort. Sometimes the political reality and the best marketing strategy do not line up.
Don’t even care about Austin tbh. We saved the Crew so whatever. Buuuuuuut, the chant about the city council vote. Not enough cringe in the world for that
Website for Stay-at-Home Mom's. At least thats the only way I know of it. Had a neighbor who ordered from there constantly and would ask my wife to grab the box off her porch all the time.
Interesting, I post about NY3 and a day later they are building a stadium for them. Is anyone surprised?
The raiding of Argentina continues. If DC can get another solid starting CB, they're one of the favorites next season.
They definiteky geared towards females and moms. They are trying to move into other categories and sale types than what they have typically been known for.
I wouldn't even really care if they sold Kaku. He was a creature of hype and was ineffective for the final 3rd of the season. We'll just replace him with a bench player from Red Bull Salzburg on loan.