[WakeyTerrier]

Football will never die in this country but the average working man is slowly but surely being squeezed out.

Sky TV is the main culprit, closely followed by the mismanagement of the clubs by the Leagues and the Chairman who use the Sky money in the wrong way. The Sky money was never meant for £250k a week wages for players, it was meant to subsidise the rebuilding of stands and to subsidise tickets but this has never happened.

Category A,B,C,D and so on....just another way to rip the average football fan off....new shirts home,away and third kits every season....extracting more money out of us poor souls who feel the need to have the up to date kits.

Money,money money...it's all the clubs(well most) think about these days, never mind a generation of football fans they are missing out on because they can't afford to go.

[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

I agree  with what Ska'd is saying here.  I live in the Norther California Bay Area and the San Jose Earthquakes are one of the modern day typical US football franchises who are steadily on the rise in terms of popularity.  They have just opened their brand new purpose built stadium that holds nearly 20,000 fans and is built in the style of a more European stadium.  Gone are the days of the major teams over here playing in NFL stadiums in front of 2/3 empty stadiums, they are now filling purpose built ones like this one.



The emphasis over here is on relative parity between the teams in the leagues, this is achieved by revenue sharing most of the money that comes into the league equally among the teams allowing them to be able to compete regardless of market size.  Of course some will rise to the top due to bigger attendances or sponsorship deals but the league is built on mutual benefits and prospects for all teams.  The success of the US national team has been key to the rise in popularity of the sport and whereas the original leagues were all about showbiz, the current set up is all about making the US National team a worldwide force, so the number of foreign players is restricted to allow the US players to develop.  You no longer hear anyone calling for wider goals or other quirky rule changes to make the game more exciting, as the quality of the play has risen across the league, so the interest and excitement has risen, leading to more support and crucially more TV coverage.

I've been really impressed with the new stadium (admittedly only seeing it on telly!), especially the fact that the horseshoe shape gives them a decent capacity here and now while also potentially allowing for a new stand to be constructed from scratch if attendances grow.  Plus the club are actually making an effort to put together a decent team with a decent manager for the first time in about three years!

MLS really is football's best-kept secret at the moment, and its level playing field is its greatest strength.  Even though that system can sometimes cook up some real absurdities in terms of transfers (i.e. new clubs being allowed to pick their players from the squads of the other clubs, and the time last summer when they basically flipped a coin to decide whether Jermaine Jones would play for Chicago or New England), it's still better than knowing that one club is going to spend more cash on one single player than all the others spend in the whole transfer window put together.

Trouble is, the more popular it gets, the louder the calls for private ownership and free market economics will be, and as we know, it's all downhill from there...

[St Charles Owl]

But it doesn't have to be downhill from there. If there is onething the MLS have learnt from other sports in the US is the way collective bargaining and revenue sharing works to make the sport as a whole more prosperous. You only have to look at the NFL to see what can be achieved with private ownership but joint initiatives and control.

[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

I don't know much about the workings of NFL, but isn't it effectively a whole different case because it's completely unchallenged and unrivalled as a professional league within its sport (i.e. there are no other American Football leagues in the world which could tempt players away from NFL)? They can get away with stuff like salary caps because the superstars of NFL and NBA aren't going to hop over to the German NFL or Italian NBA for bigger bucks. Plus, in football we've got the extra competitive aspect of continental club championships (I know MLS ultimately wants to outdo the Mexican league in CONCACAF tournaments) and international competition (again, the US will ideally be aiming to really make a mark at a World Cup within the next generation or so).

When the whiff of big money comes, I'm not sure the ideals of the more insular, isolated American sports will hold in firm in US football.

[St Charles Owl]

Yes, I agree that the NFL is somewhat different because as you say its a league with no rivals. Ultimately though, if the big money is ever to arrive in the MLS it will come from this side of the pond anyway, so again will be separate from anything that goes on in the rest o fthe world. US sports don't need a global audience, they have a ready made, aflluent, sport loving audience all to themselves already!!! If the MLS takes off, then the tv contracts it will be offered by the big channels over here will easily rival the Premier League deal, and if they stick to collective bargaining and revenue sharing then all teams will benefit from it. At that point you wll see the salary cap increase so dramatically that it would be able to compete with the European leagues eventually with wages and there would be no need for the "stars" to move anywhere else. But I do think they are many years away from that, if they even get there at all, so for now aging stars will end their career here, young players will start their careers here, but the true quality will move to Europe still.