And the single semi-legitimate point I hear is that New York already has an MLS team and it isn’t well supported, so MLS should not place another team in or near the city until local soccer fans demonstrate their willingness to support MLS in some form.

But this point has been, I think, fairly well refuted, here and elsewhere. I’ll go through yet ANOTHER iteration of the argument so if anyone wants to try to pick it apart, they’ll have the opportunity. But I would hope we can discuss this on the merits.

1. The primary (and cynical) case is that the interest on the part of the league and, allegedly, billionaire investor Fred Wilpon demonstrates that from a free-market perspective, Metro/RBNY has failed to attact an existing huge soccer market.

So the free-market take is that the league is in the business of making money, and if NYC is prioritized over other markets it’s because there is an investor who believes he will make money and the league believes overall that it will succeed more with NYC than with any other market. I know this blog leans way left, and I don’t think free markets rationalize economic decision making as much as the right thinks, but this is a pretty simple case. I haven’t heard a single OTHER positive reason why NYC is under consideration, only negative reasons why it shouldn’t be… but that ignores the harsh fact that MLS is a business, and a pretty cruel one (witness the shit deal that many players get).

2. “Untapped soccer market”: You can quibble with the existing huge soccer market point, but the ONLY case I’ve heard is either anecdotal, like Richard’s “I couldn’t get the CL final on basic cable an hour north of the city, ergo NYC doesn’t care about soccer” or Papa Bear’s claim that he was in Queens and 8 out of 10 people surveyed said that soccer is for “faggots,” or actually circular and outright fallacious begging of the question: “New York isn’t a good soccer market because it doesn’t support the remote MLS team that exists at the periphery of the area, and supporting the remote MLS team that exists at the periphery of the area is the only way to define a good soccer market.”

Anyone who has spent any time away from the most tourist-oriented, bland parts of NYC or the parts that are culturally indisposed to support soccer (Puerto Rican, Dominican, African American, and a few old and very conservative white working-class enclaves which care for nothing but the Yankees) will find the idea that soccer is culturally a part of NYC to be self-evident. It’s the linchpin for the idea that there is money to be made off MLS in NYC. Without this fact, MLS wouldn’t care and no one would be interested.

What sort of evidence, short of going there, do people need? TV ratings: http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.main&articleId=51236 (2006 ABC World Cup final, not including Univision)? Setanta’s venue finder, where you can type various zip codes to demonstrate that there is a very large number of NYC area bars and restaurants who see a business opportunity in paying for soccer content, comparing very favorably with other localities(http://www.setantanorthamerica.com/venue_finder.aspx)? There are ways to get real metrics around this, you realize. As for me, I lived there and know how high the demand for soccer is in NYC.

3. Why don’t all these soccer fans then go to MLS games? Well, as the Metrologist has pointed out, they DID go to MLS games, despite the holy nightmare that is Giants Stadium (see my post above– the only reasonable counterargument I’ve heard is that the Giants and Jets draw well, but as it has been said, they play relatively few games a year, on fall and winter Sundays, have a long history including many years in NYC itself, and have the TFC advantage of sold-out games feeding more demand– you have to buy tickets for ALL games to go to one– AND they play in the NFL, which is so huge and makes so much money that it bends light and other comparisons do not apply).

Moreover, the team drew best when the league was at its worst, with horrible glitz and shootouts that were a deterrent to attracting the core soccer audience, and with 90% of the players being worse than the worst current MLS players. It was a stomach-churning fraud, and most people saw right through it and didn’t return– I was a rare case of a Brooklynite who found perverse pleasure in the Metros, but I could fault none of my friends for giving up. And then Red Bull took over and gutted the little tradition that had evolved.

The team’s history is a litany of failures, missed opportunities, cynicism, and total shit. MLS cannot “fire” Red Bull as investor/operators and give the team, stadium, practice facility, etc., to someone who would do a better job. Instead, the league seems to have the approach that RBNY will be consigned to the role of New Jersey teams in other established professional sports leagues, the Nets (who may yet move to Brooklyn and destroy my old neighborhood) and the Devils (who are moderately successful and have their own new arena a mile from Harrison’s stadium: teams who are on the other side of a geographic and maybe cultural divide, but still exist in a quasi-independent “market” of almost five million people and as such can succeed and maybe even thrive.

Fire away.

The crux of the issue seems to me to be deciding what sort of criteria the MLS should be using to determine appropriate markets for expansion. This is a touchy subject in North America because we all know how this ended up the last time around when anyone with a sack of cash could pony up and provide collegiate-level soccer to empty stadia.

The MLS perspective will be whether there’s a financial market for football, and our perspective is what sort of fans should the league be catering to. Soccer moms? Ethnic enclaves? General multi-purpose sports fans? The modern elite urban gentry courted by the likes of economists like Richard Florida?

The case of New York is an interesting one because there’s a little bit of everything. In theory the greater NY market might support two clubs, but it seems to me that it would be prudent to wait and see if new digs might transform the pull of the NYRB, who at least in terms of the squad itself should be pulling in more fans than it is right now (at least I’d shell out to see JPA and Altidore play). I also know that for hardcore football afficianados, it’s a tough sell to watch soccer on the gridiron. North American supporters deserve much, much better (yes art. turf at BMO, I know, I know).

My own belief is that it takes more for a traditional target market like those ‘wacky soccer playing immigrants’ to build a fan base for a club. I understand that talking football culture to the converted is a waste of time, but the game needs a broad appeal to really catch on. I respect, I really do respect, that TFC was not alone with its successful first season. The difference though was the team has garnered regular coverage in every single national newspaper, every television sports cast, radio etc. Canada’s major cities hosted the U19 tournament and drew the second highest turnout in the tournaments history, topping a million spectators, the vast majority Canadian. And even with the bungling of the CSA, we have a disproportionate number of players plying their trade in Europe relative to the size of our population. This is part of why I think TFCs success will continue, although, granted, in two years time I could be eating my words…

For the post above, I meant Montreal but apparently a good number of small towners travel to see the Impact play, some as far as Riviere de Loup.

As for assertions about Queens: where were you? Howard Beach in 1985? Queens is more than 2/3 foreign born or children of foreign born. I don’t want to rile the Toronto guy up again, because I know many Torontonians to love to tell people they live in the most diverse place in the world, but in the 2000 census, 54% of Queens residents spoke a language other than English at home, and according to the NYS Comptroller, 138 languages are spoken by the borough’s residents. If foreign birth/recent family immigration is correlated to support for soccer, and I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, Queens has no problem. That’s not to say LA isn’t a great soccer city, but what on earth would lead you to defend your indefensible proposition that soccer is not very popular in NYC or part of the culture? Don’t you realize that there are actually people who live/d in NYC who will call you on it? Do you think a more and more strident set of assertions is going to carry the argument?

Now the idea that ethnic diversity doesn’t necessarily result in MLS support is a different proposition, and I’ve heard Torontonians make a credible case that a significant amount of TFC support (especially from the SGs) is NOT from Toronto’s large immigrant communities, though Richard makes the case very well that diversity contributed to more local knowedge of the sport, and that helps TFC.

But it seems to me that the perception that MLS teams are scarce, and must be competed for by FANS as opposed to bazillionaires, has led people to make absurd generalizations about relative interest in the support in cities they know little to nothing about. The claims made about New York City are completely off-base, and difficult to respond to, because they’re patently untrue. I’ve been to Toronto a few times, and I had no doubt that there was great interest in soccer, even though I didn’t see anyone playing or any on television, PRECISELY BECAUSE it had similar, uh, demographics (shorthand for “kinds of people”) that I saw in NYC. There may be a competition for MLS teams, but let’s not make it a competition in which we deliberately engage in distortion of facts.

As for Papa Bear, obviously he’s trying to get some licks in on NYC. I’ve seen this sort of thing from him elsewhere. Dude, you’re bringing down the tone of the discussion, so step it up or be gone.

What you’re offering is not even remotely close to the correct comparison, though, and Tom already explained why, against the example of TFC. So let’s try and be a little fairer – would a new St. Louis team beat the 17k+ average that the Metros have had over their entire existence? Possible, but I wouldn’t bet the stimulus rebate on it. Would a St. Louis team in its first year beat the 23k the Metros drew in their first? Not a prayer.

Come take a ride with me in Queens and I’ll show you soccer like you have NEVER seen in your life. FMF? lol lol Come with me to Hell and Ill show you all you want to see and more. I can take you to several places to eat where, if you overhead the conversation between the staff and patrons you would swear it was Estudio Futbol.

Better yet, stay in LA, Live in the FMF world. We are happier here with ‘real soccer’

I’ve been to Queens, chief. It’s not even in the same universe as LA. It’s not ALL FMF in LA. La Liga is a regular topic of discussion as well. You’ve obviously never spent more than a cup of tea in LA or else you’d know this.
Look at our national team. 80% of them are from the LA area. Its not a coincidence I promise you. Many people grow up living and breathing football in LA. There is no other place like it in the US. SD and NorCal are more football savy and fanatical than anywhere in NY would ever imagine being.

So you remain in NY and keep believing the hype. NY deserves no second team until the one on the doorstep actually draws anything that resembles a fanbase.

@Metrologist “Anyway, three teams in the NYC area would make sense before one in dusty outposts like St. Louis.”

you really need to step away from the crack pipe. A St. Louis team would outdraw RBNY immediately and any other team tossed into NY.
Typical New Yorker blind (utterly unjustified) arrogance.