The strongest factor for me is proximity - supporting the local team. I went to BYU games in college and to Timbers games in Portland. But I’ve moved a bunch and don’t have a “hometown” team to stick with. So, absent that or a local team, when its just my son and me watching on TV at home, I’m much more entertained by Messi. I don’t feel that need to support the ‘domestic league,’ unless I felt it was reaching out to me (to Indy; even things like preseason tournaments might be enough to hook me). If they want interest in the unserved markets, they’ve got to show interest in the unserved markets and not just ‘be domestic.’

Now, for any team that I can’t watch live, I don’t want them to care about me. I want them to deliver an excellent product. Barcelona does. But I would wholeheartedly support a less excellent product (like your child’s painting, or a local MLS or USL/NASL team) if they were in my town. Not every soccer fan would. This frustrates me, too.

You’re absolutely right about pro/rel not guaranteeing a team in Indy or any community and that what is really needed is good owners with cash. And should MLS keep growing, I can’t see investors choosing pro/rel over a large, American style league (something like 4 conferences of 8 teams - play conference teams twice and everyone else once). I prefer pro/rel and prefer its advantages, but, as you know, I don’t have the cash. And if I was an owner, I’d probably only prefer pro/rel if I was one of the richer owners. So you’ve definitely turned my thinking on that.

I’ve known some real soccer snobs - who grew up in Berkley and trash MLS whenever its brought up. I agree they are insufferable.

Thanks, Kenn. I’ve enjoyed your writings for years.

So it’s not about proximity, then?

You just said “Chicago isn’t my kid.” But if they had Messi, they would be?

That’s like me saying, “If only my kid was more talented, or taller, or good looking, I’d love him/her more.”

But that good-looking kid in Barcelona, to whom I have no connection whatsoever? I’ll claim HIM and his family as mine? That’s insane.

And pro/rel would be no guarantee you’d have a team in Indianapolis. I worked for the team in Indianapolis. The reason you don’t have a team - any team - in Indianapolis is because nobody has the combination of money they’re willing to invest/throw away combined with the savvy and smarts to make it either work or not be a complete failure.

We’ve never had pro/rel, yet they have a team in Charleston, South Carolina. And a nice stadium, too, I’m told. We’ve never had pro/rel, yet they had a team in Minnesota from 1990-just now. We’ve never had pro/rel, yet they have a team in Portland. We’ve never had pro/rel, yet there’s been a team in Richmond, Virginia since 1994. We’ve never had pro/rel, yet they’ve had a team in Rochester since 1996.

And if you DID have a team and DID have pro/rel, there’s STILL no guarantee you’d ever have an MLS team, or, I would submit, even the guarantee that just the PROMISE that one day if EVERYTHING broke right, you might get lucky and get to MLS would bring fans out in droves.

If they instituted pro/rel tomorrow, that’s not (despite what crazy tinfoil hat wearing people say) going to instantly open up the floodgates and get people to invest in lower-division teams where they have not before. It’s not going to get people jazzed and excited about a sport they don’t care about because they think it’s boring. It might get you and your son and the people at work to talk about it, but it’s NOT GOING TO GET YOU TO MLS.

And until and unless people who AREN’T currently supporting their domestic league get off their asses and high horses and stop waiting for everything to be goddamn perfect before they deign to do so, we’re going nowhere.

Barring that, we’re going to have an annual infusion of people like Seattleites who’ve just noticed that we have a league and oh, aren’t we the greatest ever, and did you know we’re responsible for all this? And those of us who’ve been at this going back to the 1970s hate those people.

And here’s another news flash for you, Chuck: Barcelona doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you.

But there isn’t a team in Indy. And I’m no more inclined to support a team in Chicago or Columbus than one in Buenos Aires or Madrid. Chicago isn’t my kid. There is no affection. Barcelona isn’t either, but they have Messi. Stick Messi in Chicago and I’ll hang a Fire poster on my wall.

I do actually like the Fire a bit since they got Blanco. I love to watch him play - he entertains; and I just want to be entertained, otherwise I have no interest in sport. I’m not motivated by altruism - that somehow if I spend more time and money on MLS products in a generation or two the MLS will be better. Who cares; I can watch “better” now.

But I would spend money on a local team, because it would be entertaining: I could go to games with my son (soccer - like hockey - is infinitely better live), I could talk about it at work with others who knew what I was talking about, I could chant with the crowd, AND I would be helping the team get better, which only makes it more entertaining for me. That would be my kid, and I would look past the roughness of the drawing and hang that picture on my wall.

I agree that MLS doesn’t NEED pro/rel to get better. But it could use pro/rel to reach me and pull money out of my pocket. Me, and the 6 others like me. Untill then, my son wears a Messi jersey that happens to have a Barcelona crest on it.

(But maybe for his birthday I’ll get him a Blanco Fire jersey . . . or Veracruz).

What’s worth more? What’s “better?” And, yet, what would I rather have on my wall?

There seems to be a choice that (too) many American soccer fans seem to make. They seem to say, “Well, I can watch MLS and actually HELP things get better, or I can just watch Barcelona, call it a ‘thoughtful allocation of limited resources,’ and say that MLS won’t GET better until they have promotion and relegation.”

Success in the model I prefer really does depend an there being a lot more people like me in a lot of cities in America. There aren’t. There are 6 of us.

I think it has more to do with fans than infrastructure. We have more than enough sports stadiums in nearly every city in this country to host an MLS team. Sure there would be date congestion and field modifications, but it would be workable IF there was demand.

And sure attendance would drop off if a team went to Div. II. But would the Sounders or Galaxy or Fire die off because they got relegated? I don’t think they would - assuming there was a stable Div. II, which clearly is an unrealistic assumption right now. But I’m hopeful. I think MLS involvement could very well stabilize Div. II in not too many years and is a pretty good way to expand MLS into markets it may otherwise never reach. That is not unreasonable, is very workable, and is the reason the brigade keeps harping on it.

Of course, MLS could just keep poaching top markets and get large like other American league. This seems unwieldy but is probably doable. But I don’t think adopting pro/rel is mere formalism, it is a way to expand influence into every interested market (which might even reach 32, depending on expectations. I mean, how high are they? Seattle high? Because I think I also remember a 2009 playoff game with only 7k or so in attendance).

I’ve known people like your #5, fortunately not many. The #6 people are everywhere and I sympathize with them. Though I think it is about quality and not style. I’ve watched tons of MLS games and don’t know what the “American style” is. After watching Champions League, MLS teams just look unpolished rather than polished at their particular style. Sure, not everyone can be Barcelona, but everyone can watch them, and that is what MLS must compete with. I have limited time (debatable considering these posts), why should I spend it watching Chicago or Columbus instead of Barcelona? Because Chicago is closer? Because it is in America? That isn’t snobbery (it is with some I’ve met, no doubt), its thoughtful allocation of limited resources.

What good is the possibility of being promoted if you’re not ready for it, in an infrastructure and financial sense? It’s like giving Marissa Miller to a 12-year old boy. He’s not ready for that.

I believe some of your reasons have merit, but I would add these:
5 - A deep-seated belief by some (even Americans) that Americans cannot compete in soccer and anything created by Americans isn’t soccer worth watching or caring about.
6 - That the “American style” of soccer is unattractive.

Your 4th point above…what do the people in a given market do when an MLS team replaces their lower-level team? They support it quite a bit more strongly, yes? That tells me it’s not geography…it’s either the level of play or snobbery. That even if they HAD a lower-division team with the CHANCE to MAYBE, one day POSSIBLY move up, they wouldn’t support it until it actually GOT to the top flight.

And, as I’ve said a jillion times before…let’s say Charleston gets promoted. Then what? Blackbaud isn’t adequate for MLS. So then what? Expand it? With what money? The process will take long enough that the Battery would very likely be back down in the second division before the construction could be completed. And if it’s not the next year, what do you do with that stadium (and its debt service) when you ARE (almost inevitably) back down?

We need a much, much stronger infrastructure before lower division teams can approach, organizationally, Division I neighborhoods. And, despite what some may think or it may seem, there aren’t 32 places in this country you could put a Division I team so that you could split into two 16-team leagues of roughly equal quality just so the Eurosnobs can have their precious Looks Like Europe system of promotion and relegation.

It doesn’t work here and wouldn’t work here for very valid reasons that the pro/rel brigade refuses to acknowledge. I don’t know why that is.

American soccer’s setup isn’t going to coalesce overnight or in the next 15 years. That’s too long for some people to wait. And that sucks, but that’s life. Get a helmet. You and I might be dead before it makes sense for American soccer to resemble English soccer. And that might just be the way it is.

And, true, I do have something to gain from pro/rel. But I also have something to gain from Southwest selling cheap tickets, not charging for baggage and eliminating first class. It sounds insane for its owners, but they are making millions off it. If there are enough people like me, what we want isn’t immaterial.

An of course there are hundreds of thousands (nay, tens of millions!) of Americans like me - who are huge fans of the game, live in unserved soccer markets, have no more than a casual interest in MLS, and would rally around our local team and help “push” it into the top tier - if that were possible. There is a possibility that this is overly optimistic thinking.

It is very interesting to me that the most passionate soccer fans in this country do not follow this country’s professional league (Seattle (maybe) aside). I believe the reasons are: 1) Ethnic - my futsal Mexican buddies follow Cruz Azul and my buddy from England is a Newcastle fan. 2) Newness - I only really follow the USMNT because, I think, it is the only team I’ve watched, or could watch, since I was a kid. 3) Quality and pace - which is the reason my American friends give for watching Premier League. And 4) Geography - that is, no local connection to a team. To me these all seem like they would take decades to change (certainly 1 and 2, and probably 3). 4 seems like the best opening - MLS could develop a system with broader geographic reach.

If there were millions of people like me (or maybe even just tens of thousands), it would be good for the sinlge-entity. And, if this truly is a single entity, don’t the shareholders have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the entity and not in the best interest of any individual club or club owner? (This NFL suit has me pretty excited right now).

1 - There is not a lot of evidence that fans can tell the difference in the level of play between USL-1 and USL-2 - at least not in attendance figures of teams that have gone up and down. Charleston’s situation is, I would guess, temporary. But they, as an organization, will be in a better position than most, having gotten a couple months’ head start that they would not have normally had.

2 - Exactly. The NASL teams are making no secret of the fact that they’re a league-in-waiting and that this temporary situation is just something they’re tolerating. I’ve made the analogy before of living under the same roof with your spouse while you’re legally separated and are getting divorced. Only now, your spouse is openly dating someone else and is planning to marry them the minute your divorce becomes final. USL/NuRock has a lot of work to do between now and April 2011 to put together something approaching a league that’s sanctionable.

3- No, they don’t have far more to gain from pro/rel than they have to lose. YOU have more to gain. Someone who’s actually invested jillions of dollars in the sport does not. And, as I said in the other thread, there’s more to the second/third divisions than just pro/rel or player development. Those divisions haven’t been used for player development…well, ever, really. Lip service was paid to that a while back. But if the people in Charleston or Charlotte or Minnesota want a team and someone is willing to pay the freight, more power to them. What you want in that scenario is immaterial. Likewise, if the people in Wilmington either won’t support or won’t bankroll a team, there won’t be a team. Simple as that.

You may as well ask why the Aegon West Lancashire Football League exists or why Matlock Town has a team in the Unibond League. Not everything has to lead to something.