Average attendance in MLS in week one of the season was up from 2009. At the top end, an impressive 36,241 saw Seattle’s opener against Philadelphia.

But as has been noted across the blogosphere, at the bottom end FC Dallas reported a crowd of just 8,016 for their home game against Houston, who brought a decent number of fans to Dallas themselves.

It’s not news that Dallas have a problem attracting fans. Average attendance in 2009 came in at 12,441, a decline of almost 5% on 2008, but this comes with an enormous asterisk: that average number was inflated by almost 3,000 thanks to a double-header at the Cotton Bowl with a friendly between Mexico and Colombia that attracted over 50,000.

So in reality, the 2009 home opener for Dallas was about par for the course in recent times (and that Cotton Bowl crowd also tells us, quite obviously, that there are plenty of people in the Dallas region who do like soccer who are not regularly attending FC Dallas games).

Many point to the location in far-out Frisco of Dallas’ stadium, Pizza Hut Park, as the reason for Dallas’ attendance woes; however, the fact that more people used to go and watch Dallas games there and don’t any longer isn’t a good sign. And of course, it tells the lie to the claim that all MLS teams need is their own stadium to succeed in attracting fans.

The fact is, it’s just obviously not worth the time or expense for soccer fans to go to Frisco and watch FC Dallas play. Match Fit USA notes that the team second from bottom in week one’s attendance chart, the Columbus Crew, have the same owners as Dallas, the Hunt family (MLS largely owes its existence to the late Lamar Hunt). Columbus, of course, have a winning team and also their own stadium:

Last year FC Dallas started terribly and used a late-season push to get themselves in playoff contention. Winning is always a draw, and it’s possible that the fans stayed away because the team was poor to start the year. That conclusion might be reasonable if the ownership of the club didn’t have such a poor track record, both in Dallas and Columbus; the Crew are in the midst of a trophy winning streak yet have failed to crack the top half of league attendance the last two seasons. Dallas’ problems on the field combined with Pizza Hut Park’s location is a double whammy; but even bad teams and those playing in massive American football stadiums far from their natural base can draw more than 10k.

Where we go from here is, of course, the problem. In a franchise system without promotion or relegation one answer to solve the problem of a team in a sinkhole as deep as Dallas’ dragging down the rest of the league is to move the team, an unpalatable solution from a fans’viewpoint.

It’s possible to recover from disasters like these; in 2003, the Fire opened with an even lower crowd than Dallas’ in 2010, for quite different reasons, but you see the point. FC Dallas, though, are in the midst of several seasons of marketing fail in their own, rather nice stadium.

MLS has talked up Seattle and Toronto’s success in selling itself to “football fans”, the young male demographic, as its prime marketing strategy in this era of the league.  Dallas, indeed, were one of the originators of this strategy in an unsuccessful way, with their renaming from the Dallas Burn to FC Dallas in 2005. Dallas also introduced membership in an official supporters’ club that has also been a failure, already rebranded from “Hoops Nation” to FCD Nation.

The fail has kept on coming. In December, we mocked FC Dallas’ abysmal “We are NOT spectators” marketing campaign.

This is a prime example of an MLS marketing foolishness: what succeeds somewhere is seen as a simple strategy for another team to follow, regardless of the nuances of the local fan culture, the history of the sport in each region or the prospective fanbase. Instead, there’s a powerpoint and some poorly paid graphic designer on their first job out of college is assigned the task of coming up with something that is supposed to mean something to people using a cupcake cutter vaguely copied from success elsewhere in the league.

It doesn’t take a lot, but it does take something to make people open their wallets and travel out to Frisco to watch an MLS game, and FC Dallas’ front office just can’t figure out what the hell that something is.

Quick Hits

• Various responses to yesterday’s news of the Labour Party’s proposals for increasing fan ownership in English clubs: why the co-operative approach to football could work and why it couldn’t, on what FIFA might say and why putting fans at the heart of the game makes sense.
• MLS apologizes for the poor condition of the new site they launched just last week, in what’s been a digital disaster for the league.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

FC Dallas obviously have a serious deficit of such supporters, and given the success of Seattle’s marketing campaign, they and many other MLS teams have wisely chosen to try to appeal more to your active soccer fan. So they’ve launched a new season ticket campaign targeting supporters, and good for them.

But…seriously?

That’s not a photoshop job, folks: I swear on the Brimstone Cup. They ARE FC Dallas!

Youth development is often considered at the level of the US Soccer federation, but what progress has there been this year from MLS and its clubs?

It flew under the radar, but MLS’ Board of Governors’ decision in July to allow clubs to sign two “homegrown” players from their academies who would not count against the 24-man roster limit this year (though nor can they play in league matches) is starting to bear fruit (last year, a few clubs faced dilemmas over whether to sign an Academy player who might not be able to contribute to the first team, risking losing them abroad).

Last month, DC United signed their first player from their youth academy, goalkeeper Abdul Hamid. Last week, the Red Bulls followed suit as they signed youth academy product Giorgi Chirgadze and just this week, FC Dallas announced the signing of Bryan Leyva, a Mexico U-17 international from their academy. This is definite progress, with MLS’ participation in US Soccer’s Youth Development Academy structure obviously now paying off. All three had been linked with clubs abroad.

On the other side of the coin, U.S. U-20 coach Thomas Rongen this week criticised MLS for abolishing the reserve league in the last offseason, which he says has restricted playing time for young players, partially explaining why he has less than he’d hoped in his U-20 World Cup squad. “You rely on their development with their respective clubs and situations and not too many of them are getting first team playing time, and since there’s no reserve league some guys aren’t getting enough games, or games at all, and that concerns me.”

With the academies strengthening and finally producing MLS-quality players, a return of the reserve league (or other integration of a true developmental league) is critical to increasing the flow of players into senior rosters, allowing them playing time and more opportunity for first team coaches to assess their readiness for MLS play and keep them match fit. MLS clubs have made progress with their academies, and the league now needs to cement a structure to integrate them into the professional system.

Worldwide News

• The New York Times has perhaps the most convoluted explanation of why diving isn’t good for football ever written. I’m all for a little academic insight into sport and some intellectual peroration — the author of the piece is grandly titled as the president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport — but I’m not sure one needs a PhD to conclude that “Soccer does not flourish when diving occurs. . .Perhaps, the more diving is condemned, the less players will be inclined to use it.” Well, yes. You don’t say. The bigger question is how we get to that cultural point in the sport, aside from NYT opinion pieces.
• David Conn reminds us why he’s the best journalist in English football, with a fantastic three-part feature on the engimatic ownership behind Manchester City’s fortune. And there’s an excellent pictorial review of Manchester City’s transformation on the Guardian as well. Meanwhile, City claim their focus is now on their youth academy.
• When is scoring a boatload of goals (81 goals in 93 league starts) not enough for a first-choice striker? When you’re Rangers’ forward Kris Boyd, left-out of Champions League play by Walter Smith for his lack of all-round contribution and fear that he’s a flat-track bully.
• What would happen to American soccer if influential anti-immigration lobbying organisation FAIR had had their way in the past thirty years of their campaigning? As the debate on immigration reform heats up again in DC with FAIR lobbying Congress this week on their near-zero immigration platform, Imagine 2050 considers the potential impact on diversity in soccer.
• There could be more upheaval in USL, with reports coming out that the Cleveland City Stars may be moving to Elkhart, Indiana. The Stars’ sudden promotion to USL-1 was a bridge too far for the club.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter. Many thanks to Richard Whittall of A More Splendid Life for holding down the fort in my absence earlier this week; he’ll be back sweeping up at the weekend.

Big Story

When your club’s biggest fan since day one sends an open letter of despair to ownership in lieu of a season ticket renewal, you have serious problems. Dustin Christmann is known to FC Dallas supporters as the  “First Fan”: a season ticket holder since day one (even though he lives 1,000 miles away from Dallas now) and a founder of supporters group The Inferno, he was given membership number 0001 in Hoops Nation.

Christmann wrote to owner Clark Hunt that “I’m tired of enabling an incompetent organization in which performance is clearly optional.” He went on to iterate the numerous poor decisions by ownership that, despite a move to a soccer-specific-stadium, sees the team consistently struggle to succeed on the field and at the box office.

Christmann is at his most bitter when he discusses the re-branding of the team from the Dallas Burn to FC Dallas: “Yeah, I know… “Dallas Burn” is a crappy name, but nice job finding a different but equally crappy name and outfitting the team to answer the question “Where’s Waldo?” The bigger question for FC Dallas is where their leadership is.

Europe

• The Observer looks at the growing crisis in Scottish football, a topic we’ve touched on frequently here. “What is clear is that a production line that once delivered international-class players at the rate of a car plant has been reduced almost to idleness,” Glenn Gibbons writes.
• All the newspapers have their say on Liverpool’s loss to Aston Villa, with many pointing fingers at Steven Gerrard, and the word crisis bandied around endlessly. A week ago it was Manchester United getting this treatment, and Kevin McCarra contemplates if the “the Premier League is shedding its predictability.” Lets check back after 30 games, shall we?
• Three games was enough for Bayern Munich fans, though, who have posted an open letter questioning the club’s play on the field. It seems awfully early, but as Raphael Honigstein points out, the club have had their worst start to a Bundesliga campaign since 1966: with champions Wolfsburg visiting the Allianz Arena this weekend, many are already starting to wonder if Jurgen Klinsmann’s tenure was really so bad.
• Valencia fans have made a major effort to ease their club’s financial problems, with 26,000 fans purchasing $26.5 million worth of shares in six weeks. But with the club still hundreds of million in debt, the club’s new stadium development remains stalled.

North America

• The Philadelphia Union’s official website has a story on their supporters group the Sons of Ben, a legend in MLS before the team has even played a game. Their “membership” has passed 5,000: though the caveat is they seem to count members as people on their email list as they have yet to go to paid or formal membership, this is still very impressive.
• The unsung superstar of Grant Wahl’s The Beckham Experiment was journeyman Alan Gordon, stealing the subplot as perhaps the most likeable character in the book (not that that was much of a challenge when the others work for AEG or Beckham). So it’s curious to learn that Gordon is not pleased with the book (despite not having read it), saying that “Obviously, to sell books, you need controversy, and you need to bring out the negative in things. To be honest, I don’t want my name in that book.” At least read it first, Alan!
• The New York Time’s Goal blog has an update from Jack Bell on Nike’s sale of USL, confirming MLS will not be the buyer. The question remains what kind of a relationship whoever does buy USL pursues with MLS: will it be more cooperative?  Bell says a consortium of USL owners are attempting to buy the league.
• An interview with Jack Cummings, the departing President and CEO of WPS’ Boston Breakers, answered one question fans of the league had been asking: why did the WPS season start so early and end before September? He explained that it came down to facilities, with too few teams having enough control of a venue with college interfering in the fall. Also on women’s soccer in the US, the Equalizer has a good interview with the W-League’s Director of Operations discussing similar scheduling issues and looking at the structure of the league.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Overall, I’d say there’s more variety than in past years, and Adidas have thankfully toned down the wavy stripe obsession from 2007 (see the 2007 versions here). What do you think, and which ones are the best and worst?

Kansas City Wizards, Real Salt Lake, San Jose Earthquakes

DC United, New England Revolution, Chivas USA

New York Red Bulls, Columbus Crew, Chicago Fire

FC Dallas and Houston Dynamo