Mon, Nov 20, 2017 page10

• MLS attendance up while TV ratings lag behind

  • AP, NEW YORK
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  MLS’ attendance is up and fan interest is booming, even if television broadcasts are far less popular and some young Americans would rather play in Europe.

  MLS averaged 22,000 in attendance for the first time in its history this season, ranked among the top seven leagues in the world. It is set to add a second Los Angeles franchise next year, announce two expansion cities next month and at some point finalize David Beckham’s long-pending Miami club.

  However, viewers averaged less than 300,000 for nationally televised regular-season matches, fewer than the average for a New York Yankees game on their regional sports network.

  Several top young Americans, such as Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie, have chosen to forego the MLS to play in Germany and test their mettle in a more demanding environment.

  And worst of all, the US men’s team — whose roster was filled with MLS stars — failed to qualify for next year’s World Cup, ending a streak of seven straight appearances.

  “We need to use this failure as a wake-up call for everyone associated with the sport at all levels to ensure that we have the right processes and mechanisms and development programs and leadership and governance in place to learn from this missed opportunity to ensure that it never happens again,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said this week.

  “Part of the maturation of becoming a soccer nation is recognizing that qualifying for the World Cup is not a birthright. It’s something you need to earn, and we are unfortunately in the company of some great soccer nations, like Italy and Holland and Ghana and Chile — Copa champions — that have also not qualified,” he added.

  “MLS and soccer in the United States have made great advances in many areas, but its promoters have found that the abundance of existing legacy sports leagues that have the highest quality of athletes on the planet creates a ceiling on professional soccer in the United States,” said Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm SportsCorp.

  “Long-term demographic things like CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy] and stuff with the NFL says maybe there is a long slow decline around some of that, but when you’re starting from where they’re starting, that’s going to take a generation,” Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said. “We’ll grow because most of the immigration to the US is from soccer-playing countries and the country is going to grow.”

  Player payroll has increased as MLS keeps adding what it calls targeted allocation money.

  While several older US players have returned to the MLS from Europe, many of the teens viewed as the future of the US national team have gone abroad as they emerge from the MLS youth academies, which have been mandated by the league since 2007 and produced more than 250 players with first-team MLS contracts.

  Pulisic, at 19 already the leading American star, left to sign with Borussia Dortmund at age 16, able because of his grandfather’s Croatian citizenship to play in Europe before he turned 18.

  McKennie left FC Dallas’ academy when he turned 18, signed with Schalke and scored in his US debut last week.

  “I didn’t want to become one of those guys that started in MLS and said, man, I wonder if I could have made it to Europe,” McKennie said. “I wanted to spread my wings and see what I could do over here.”

  Sometimes big contracts only stall a career. Matt Miazga left the Red Bulls to sign with Chelsea in January last year, saw little playing time and did not get in games regularly until late that autumn during a loan to the Dutch club Vitesse Arnhem.

  “If your only desire is to go to Europe, there are flights leaving every hour on the hour,” said retired US defender Alexi Lalas, now a Fox analyst.

  “But getting to a place in Europe where you are making good money, where you are playing consistently, where you are learning, where you are valued as a player and as an American player, where you are able to adapt and adjust and live in the other 22-and-a-half hours that we often don’t talk about, that’s whole ’nother story, and there’s not a lot of flights leaving that have that on the other end,” he said.

  With the US soccer community in turmoil following the World Cup failure, some have called for MLS to guarantee playing time for young Americans.

  “Our coaches universally believed that that was not the best way to ensure we had the highest-possible product quality to be able to have competitive games and to drive the growth of our fan base,” Garber said.
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