I didn’t think Phoenix FC would sell out their home opener, but they had a great crowd on a gorgeous evening and came away with a 1-0 win over VSI Tampa Bay FC on Saturday night.

Sun Devil Soccer Stadium, expanded from just over a thousand seats to somewhere between 2,500 and 3,600, depending on the source, is a terrific venue for USL Pro. Intimate yet not cramped, spartan yet not ramshackle, it feels like it will be a cool place to watch a game (until it’s 113 degrees, at least). And La Furia Roja, the supporters group, kept at least one side of the stadium rocking even when Netinho wasn’t scoring the first goal in club history.

VSI Tampa Bay was playing its first-ever match (it looked like they’d been thrown together at the last minute, and we could have played until Monday morning and I don’t think they would have scored), so Orlando coming to town on Sunday will be a better test of the actual soccer. Phoenix FC’s game operations still need some work (halftime consisted of a kid trying to kick a ball at a t-shirt hung from the crossbar) and they don’t have any visible sponsors, but the stadium and the result were just fine for the first night.

Good job by them, not a great prediction by me. Kudos to everybody involved and let’s see what happens next.

It’s cool that Phoenix FC got some play on CBS5 news here in Phoenix this morning.

It’s not so cool that CBS5 used a(n outdated) W-League logo as part of the graphic.

(Not surprising…just over a year ago, CBS5 used an NFL logo that was four years out of date.)

If you’ve ever thought the Premier Development League business model sounds great – no player salaries or workman’s comp, limited regional travel, short seasons – keep in mind it’s no guarantee of success. A dozen PDL teams – some of them clubs of long standing – are no more, according to the 2013 schedule announced today by United Soccer Leagues.

The biggest loss – at least from an historical perspective – is the Nashville Metros, who had been around in one form or another since 1990. Begun as an indoor team, the Metros moved outdoors, went professional, played at the second division level (briefly as the Tennessee Rhythm) before dropping back to the PDL in 2002. They’d been operating at a subsistence level – drawing 131 fans per game last year – before apparently giving up the ghost this off-season.

Orange County Blue Star, which began as the pro Orange County Zodiac in 1997, is also a casualty after 16 years, while the Brooklyn Knights are out after 15 seasons. The Fraser Valley Mariners (formerly the Abbotsford Rangers and Mariners) and New Orleans Jesters (nee Shell Shockers) both survived ten years but are no more. The Cincinnati Kings, who began as a third-division pro club in 2005 but had played the last five years at the PDL level, are also gone, as are the Ogden Outlaws, who had been around since 2006.

Shorter lifespans included the FC Jax (Jacksonville, Fla.) Destroyers, Fredericksburg Hotspur and Real Maryland Monarchs (which all played two seasons) and the one-and-one Boston Victory and Worcester Hydra.

Four new teams have joined the PDL for 2013, including the awkwardly-named New York Magic – F.A. Euro (that’s one club), Oklahoma City (no nickname yet, hopefully it’s not “City”), Real Boston Rams and Southwest Florida Adrenaline. So the PDL is net minus eight clubs from last year.

There have been several PDL success stories, as the Des Moines Menace, Michigan Bucks, Kansas City Brass, Orlando City U23s, Vermont Voltage and Westchester Flames have all been around for 15 years or more. But of the 210 PDL clubs in the modern era (since 1996), 147 are no longer with us and 94 (45%) have lasted three years or fewer. It’s not easy to do this, even with small budgets.

So it appears we’ll have 106 men’s outdoor clubs in 2013, down five from 2012, but still the second highest total of the century. With at least a couple of NASL and USL Pro teams joining the fray in 2014, and expansion still a near-term possibility in MLS, we could soon get close to the modern era record of 112 clubs set back in 1998.

With the end of the second official season of the new North American Soccer League, we can (almost) close the book on the Division II and Division III attendance figures for the 2012 campaign. Here are the unofficial numbers as I have them*:

As you can no doubt see, I’m missing a few numbers from USL Pro. A handful of games didn’t have reported attendance figures. It happens.

A few other notes:

• San Antonio became only the fourth lower-level team to average 9,000 or more for a season (the others were Rochester, Montreal and Portland). The Scorpions did tail off a bit after the initial burst, as they averaged 8,541 for the second half of their home schedule after averaging 9,810 for the first half. Still, a tremendous showing.
• Even with San Antonio’s numbers coming in about 20% under those of Montreal (whose slot they took in the league this year), NASL attendance was steady, just under one percent higher than a year ago. Minnesota (helped largely by a big crowd for their Metrodome opener) was up 67%, with Atlanta up 57%. Carolina’s comeback from the dead continued as they were up 16% from a year ago, and drew a club-record (for a league match) 7,310 for their home finale. Tampa Bay was up just under 4%. Puerto Rico’s sixth consecutive year of average attendance decline was largely (but not exclusively) caused by its temporary home while Juan Ramon Loubriel Stadium was renovated, but they didn’t draw that well after moving back home (1,893 for four games). And Edmonton, which sorely needs an adequate facility, was off 18% from last year’s (already low) numbers.
• Coming off a stellar freshman campaign, Orlando City bettered its 2011 numbers by some 22%, breaking its own DIII record by averaging 6,604 per game. Rochester was also up 22% (or so they say), while Richmond was up 20%. Los Angeles was a big gainer as well (up 45% with a game missing), but going up to 666 a game…well, I’m sorry, that’s not nearly enough. I’d be surprised to see the Blues return, as I would to see Antigua return now that they’re out of World Cup qualifying and their government has no real impetus to continue to support them.
• USL Pro finished at 2,686 for an average (give or take…the four missing games surely would bring that average down) that is a Division III all-time high, better last year’s 2,261. Even if you zero out all four data points I don’t have, it’s still 2,604.
• Saturdays were the best days for attendance for both leagues, with the NASL getting 4,030 a game and USL Pro 3,364.
• Without their bellwether teams (San Antonio and Orlando, respectively), the NASL averaged 3,038 per game, USL Pro 2,280.

This is just about the last thing I’m going to have to say about soccer for a while. The game and I have decided to take a break (well, it’s been telling me to get out for a while now, I’m finally listening). So I wouldn’t expect to read much more from me on topics like this one for a while, if ever again.

*The NASL’s numbers disagree with mine slightly on Ft. Lauderdale and Edmonton. Anybody who wants to point out the discrepancies, please do so. I like being thorough. (EDIT: We’ve found the Ft. Lauderdale problem, but we’re still off a bit on Edmonton.)

I just noticed this seems to be the only stuff I post here anymore. Sorry about that. I really don’t have much to say that’s over 140 characters most of the time anymore.

Anyway, here are the latest attendance figures for the various leagues, with only a few quick notes because I’m otherwise engaged:

NOTES:

• MLS is on pace right now to draw slightly more than six million fans, but that’s if everybody holds their current averages and Montreal can’t now that they’ve moved back into Saputo Stadium.
• Speaking of which, how do you get 60,000 for a game in Olympic Stadium and yet not sell out the first game back at Saputo? The Impact only drew 17,112 for Saputo’s rebirth after averaging 36,498 (with a previous low of 19,223) for five games at the Big O.
• The Minnesota Stars had a franchise-high crowd of 2,908, the biggest NSC Stadium league attendance since the old Thunder drew 3,773 to a USL First Division match on September 20, 2009 against Charleston last July 22, when Montreal was in town and they drew 3,071 (thanks, ERic).
• Atlanta’s crowd of 6,000 against Carolina Saturday was also a club record, but tickets were free as part of We’ll Make It Up To You Fan Appreciation Night.
• Orlando drew 6,148 Sunday night and continue to lead USL Pro at just under 7k a night. On the other side of the coin, the LA Blues drew 276 and 239 for two matches against Dayton this weekend. The Blues, I fear, are not long for this world.
• I have seven – seven – attendance figures from the 31 matches played in the WPSL Elite League. It is not, apparently, a big concern for them.
• Seattle Sounders Women continue to lead the W-League after another sellout crowd of 4,500 at Starfire yesterday against the LA Strikers. Remarkable that Seattle has just now discovered a team that averaged just over 500 people a game last year and for most of the last several years, and that they’re still turning out after the US Women’s National Team stars are away.
• PDL figures are a lot easier to come by than WPSL ones, but I’m still missing about 15 percent of the games from the amateur league. Portland – on the basis of two 8k+ crowds at JELD-WEN, still leads the league, but its margin over Des Moines shrank after the Timbers U23s drew 505 to Sherwood High School yesterday. (Portland moves its U23 games around the area to venues of differing sizes.) And thanks to the fine folks at the Austin Aztex, who directed me to a figure I didn’t have. Austin – which lost the original Aztex to Orlando after 2010 – is doing well in the PDL.

Here are the latest attendance figures for all the various leagues in the US and Canada, through games of Sunday, June 3. I’m missing a couple of USL Pro attendance figures (both in Dayton), a couple W-League figures, several in WPSL Elite (both leagues have been a bit lax in other areas lately) and many in the PDL. But based on what I have, this is how the league attendance figures look as of today.

• Portland’s PDL team broke the league record with a school-day crowd of 8,174 for their match Friday morning against Vancouver. I couldn’t tell you what the old record was, and neither can USL, probably, so just go with it for now.
• MLS only had one match this past weekend while largely standing down for an official FIFA Match Day, but the league is on pace to draw more than six million this year, and projects roughly to a final average of 18,713 (which would be a record). Montreal’s average will go down a bit when they move into Saputo Stadium. More than half the league (10 clubs) are averaging more than 18,000 a game, which is quite the feather in their cap.
• They had to bring in temporary seating in Edmonton as the NASL club drew 2,521 against Atlanta yesterday. It was a season high for the Eddies, near their franchise record (set in the opener last year) and the first time they’d been over 2k for a league match since last June 26. Overall, they’re down 25% in average over the same number of home games as a year ago, but hope for increased attendance as they bring in more seating to their new stadium.
• Elsewhere in the NASL, Atlanta and Carolina are way up (46% and 59%, respectively) and the RailHawks hope to get a bounce from their Open Cup run. Puerto Rico is down 48% because of their temporary venue. Ft. Lauderdale is down 25% amid talk that their advertising and marketing budget has been slashed. And Tampa Bay – which finally got the historic “Rowdies” name back – has a nearly identical average after five home games this year as last. So much for nostalgia.
• San Antonio reversed a slide that had seen each of their home games draw fewer people than the last when they drew 8,639 for their game Saturday against Minnesota. After five home matches, the Scorpions are averaging just under 10,000, which has only been done at the D2 level by Rochester, Portland and Montreal.
• While Orlando and Rochester continue to lead USL Pro, the best story is probably in Wilmington, where the Hammerheads are third in the league at 4,119. Harrisburg continues to be bedeviled by bad weather, as their game against Richmond Friday was stopped after 84 minutes because of lightning and drew just 355.
• Looks like we’re only going to get WPSL Elite numbers regularly out of Boston. The other clubs don’t seem to think it’s important to count people (or if they count them, they don’t announce them). But, to no one’s surprise, I think we can safely say WPSL Elite, without the ability to market on a league level and with its clubs having limited budgets to market locally, will not be making anyone forget WPS.
• Seattle Sounders Women drew 4,500 for their official home opener against Colorado last Thursday (after packing Starfire for a series of exhibitions against local colleges). They weren’t a big draw on the road a day later in Victoria (no national team players made the trip) as just 502 fans went to their game against the Highlanders. We’ll see what happens with the Sounders Women as Hope Solo and company leave for the Olympics.
• Besides Portland’s U23 squad, PDL teams doing well at the gate include Carolina Dynamo, Des Moines, Fresno and West Texas, who are all over 1,000 a game. The league itself is at 629 (with several games missing), ahead of the historical average of just over 500.

The third round of the 2012 Lamar Hunt US Open Cup saw eight of the 16 participating Major League Soccer teams sent packing by lower-division sides (a record for number, obviously, but not percentage, as half of the field of eight crashed out in 2004′s fourth round). This has led to the usual sturm und drang on the internet, with some fans claiming the results are proof of everything from parity to the necessity of promotion and relegation to the existence of Bigfoot. What usually happens in these instances is MLS teams that lose get pilloried for not trying or not caring enough to put out a representative team. For many teams – like Chicago, which had four games in 11 days –  it’s a matter of prioritizing and making best use of rosters that aren’t as robust as in other leagues around the world. But I wanted to see how true the shorthand “Those teams that played more regular players were successful, and those that didn’t, weren’t” really was.

I first looked at league playing time by each of the 16 MLS teams’ first elevens (turns out, yes, there’s a correlation between teams that put a lot of their bench players in the lineup and teams that lost, not a surprise), but then I had an idea: why not total up the salaries of each MLS team’s starting lineups to get a different view of the types of players the teams were putting out there?

Thanks to the MLS Players Union, the salary information is readily available, so it was just a matter of plugging it all in. Turns out there’s a correlation between salaries and success. It’s not perfect, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Of the eight teams that had the most 2012 salary money represented in their first elevens, five won and moved on. Of the eight that were spending the least on their starters, only three were winners.

Here’s the chart of what each of the 16 MLS teams in this year’s Open Cup were spending on base salaries on the 11 players they started in their third round matches:

(We don’t know what the lower division teams’ annual salaries are for comparison, but, rest assured, they’re south of Chicago’s.)

This chart makes Portland’s home loss to Cal FC - an amateur team bankrolled largely by US Soccer legend Eric Wynalda – all the more dramatic and baffling. The Timbers not only had the most expensive player of the round (Kris Boyd, who makes $1.25 million), they spent nearly $800,000 more than the second-place team (New York) and more than Dallas, Columbus and Chicago combined spent on their starters. Seven regulars – those who had played more than 50% of the possible minutes for the Timbers in the league – started for Portland, the highest figure in the league (Philadelphia and Seattle started six each and both won, Los Angeles, New England and Chicago started two among them and all lost).

Again, the correlation isn’t perfect, but Colorado was the only one of the five thriftiest teams that got a result and advanced (New England’s penalty kick defeat at Harrisburg officially counts as a draw). And the Timbers were the only one of the top four most expensive lineups that are out of the competition.

Salt Lake made no secret of being in it to win it, but despite the presence of five regulars and two part-timers, they lost at home to defending NASL champ Minnesota. Houston – which prioritized an important friendly, if there is such a thing, at home tonight against Valencia, fell to expansion NASL side San Antonio. Barring those results, and had Boyd not missed an 80th-minute penalty for Portland, the correlation would have been nearly perfect.

The takeaway? As always, money isn’t everything, but it helps. And when you run out a team of reserves against a hungry lower-division side in a one-off Cup situation, it’s buyer beware.

The full list of annual base salaries of each of the 171 players who started for MLS teams in the third round of the Open Cup is after the jump:

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Now that everybody in the top three men’s leagues has had at least one home game, here’s the first Taking Attendance report of the 2012 season.

A few notes:

• MLS projects out (if everybody holds their current average) to draw more than six million in 2012 and to break their all-time average record. Montreal’s average is going to drop (obviously) once they move back into the renovated Saputo Stadium. Also, for the moment, Montreal leads the league in average attendance, the first time in a while Seattle hasn’t been there.
• San Antonio has taken Montreal’s spot as the NASL attendance leader, despite getting increasingly diminishing crowds after a 13,000+ opener. Atlanta and Carolina are both up nicely in average attendance over the same number of home games as a year ago (as is Minnesota, but that’s more a function of their large Metrodome opener skewing a small sample). But Fort Lauderdale, Tampa Bay, Edmonton and Puerto Rico are down (the latter two because of venue shifts). Tampa Bay, which lost 25% off its 2010 numbers by moving to St. Petersburg, got the supposedly magical “Rowdies” identity back and are now down another 10%. Nostalgia is great, but it doesn’t always sell like you think it will.
• Rochester lead Division II in average for years, and they’re leading Division III for the moment on the strength of a home opening crowd not everyone believed was 7,959. Orlando continues to draw extremely well. There’s been no significant change among the other teams, though Los Angeles had a decent (2,432) home opener and now are back to drawing hundreds.
• The PDL season is fully underway, with Des Moines and Fresno once again up top (all of Fresno’s tickets are free through a sponsorship deal) and the league so far running almost 100% ahead of its normal average (I’m missing six games worth of attendance figures here early). Carolina also drew well for its home opener this weekend (2,741). As you can see, many PDL teams put development ahead of everything else, and their attendance figures reflect that.
• Though it’s too early to do a full chart on it, the WPSL Elite season (featuring the remnants of WPS and a few other ambitious clubs) opened this past weekend, with Chesapeake drawing an estimated 400 to their opener on Thursday and last year’s WPS champions, Western New York, getting 1,304 to theirs. Obviously, it helps to have Alex Morgan. The W-League season is also underway and also too early to chart, but Charlotte drew 559 to its Friday opener, while Tampa (playing in Brandon) drew 90 to its Sunday opener.
• As always, standard disclaimers about announced figures apply. If I had drop counts, you’d get those, too, but I don’t, so these numbers are the ones we have. YMMV.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way up front, shall we? There is not currently, nor has there ever been, a full, traditional system of on-field-merit-based promotion and relegation in any American pro soccer endeavor that I’m aware of^[1].

With that said, the essence of promotion and relegation, the ability to move between levels of a nebulous pyramid, does exist, and has for more than a decade^[2]. But more than half of the clubs who have ever moved up to a higher level have struggled and, in many cases, either moved back down or folded altogether within four years. And you can hold up the successful second division organizations that have recently become successful first division organizations as examples of how it could work as long as you also understand that Seattle, Vancouver, Portland and Montreal had, on average, nearly two years to prepare for their first MLS seasons, and didn’t try to make the move over one off-season.

What follows is a list of teams that have moved up, down or both, between levels of the game in this country, since 1995 (I believe it’s comprehensive, but additions and corrections are, of course, always welcome):
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After hearing the clamoring for years from a vocal minority that changes needed to be made to the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, the United States Soccer Federation announced a sweeping set of changes to the country’s oldest soccer tournament yesterday.

Among the changes for the 99th competition: the biggest field in the tournament’s history (64 clubs), with all US-based professional sides (from MLS, the NASL and USL Pro) in the tournament proper for the first time; an increased representation by amateur sides; and an increased chance of lower-division sides hosting matches, something traditionalists feel is critical to enhance the charm of the tournament and increase the chance for upsets. Instead of a straight bidding situation to host Cup matches (which has been the case for years), a random draw will take place through the quarterfinals whenever two teams are matched up who both apply to host and who both have stadiums that meet USSF criteria. It’s not a pure 50/50 shot for all matches throughout the tournament, but as long as a lower-division side is interested in hosting and has a decent stadium, they’ve now got a better chance of bringing an MLS team to town.

Today, USSF tells us the lower-division teams are stoked to have a better chance to host MLS teams in the Cup. So I figured I’d look to see how they’ve done, historically, when an MLS team comes to town.
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