A few months ago, Peter Wilt posted an interview here with Jeff Cooper in which he described him as arguably “the most powerful man in soccer in the Midwest and one of the most influential in the country.”

Cooper is the lead man behind a unique endeavour in American soccer: a professional men’s club (AC St. Louis, part of the NASL in the USSF Division II which began play this year), a top flight women’s professional club (St. Louis Athletica, in Women’s Professional Soccer which began play last year) and an ambitious youth club, St. Louis Scott Gallagher, that amalgamated three of the area’s leading youth set-ups.

It seemed as if Cooper was putting together the perfect regional pyramid of soccer, from youth to the professional game in both genders.

But Cooper could not find the investment he needed to win an MLS franchise as well.

And now it appears that there is not enough investment to keep all this going: as reported today, it looks as if Athletica will be taken over by the league due to the team’s financial dire straits. “WPS and its Board continue to work closely with the appropriate parties on the matter related to St. Louis Athletica, including the possibility that the league will take over the team which would enable the Athletica to play the 2010 season in full.”

The men’s team seems to be in equal difficulties, a particularly awkward situation for Cooper as the Interim NASL Commissioner.

According to reports, Cooper’s investors, the brothers Heemal and Sanjeev Vaid from England, have pulled out, leaving the entire organisation in severe financial peril. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported yesterday that costs involved with St. Louis’ stadium have been one of the main issues facing the club’s finances:

A reliable source in St. Louis said that the money woes for AC and the Athletica stem, at least in part, from costs associated with operating the Anheuser-Busch Soccer Park, which Anheuser-Busch Inbev donated to Cooper’s group last summer. “The cost of the park is too much to allow funding for the teams,” the source said.

Three months ago, Cooper told Wilt on these pages that “Our model could be adopted to any market. It is scalable for larger or smaller markets. In time, every pro team in the US will become a real “club” with a youth program, academy, women’s team etc. It is the evolution of the game in this country.”

Cooper’s dream was grand and worthy.

But are there lessons to be learned here, if indeed AC St. Louis and/or St. Louis Athletica are taken over by their respective leagues? Would resources better have been devoted solely to the top flight women’s team, rather than trying to run a professional men’s team as well?  Is the evolution of the game not at the stage that such an ambitious set-up can be stable without an investor willing to lose millions a year for several years? Is it sensible for men’s and women’s professional teams to be part of the same club, and thus dependent on the financial viability of each other?

And St Louis, just pipped to the post by Philadelphia for the last MLS franchise awarded and still in line for a spot, certainly has a claim to historical worthiness.

Background
St Louis can also claim to be the original “Soccer City USA”. The sport thrived in the western outpost in the late nineteenth century. In his book Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin writes that “No US city embraced soccer more unreservedly than St Louis, which operated all manner of junior, amateur and semi-professional leagues, most stocked with red-blooded Americans equally at home on the baseball diamond.” The St Louis Soccer League attracted gates of thousands, producing many of the country’s best players and teams.

Intriguingly, St Louis developed a notably “American” playing style, one based on workrate and strength rather than passing. The St Louis Globe Democrat concluded that the American game had more “pep, punch and thrill” than the British game. It was far less a game of ethnic enclaves than in other parts of the country.

Unfortunately, by the 1930s, the St Louis league had disappeared, almost without a trace. The college game continued to thrive, though, and St Louis provided five of the players on the American defeat that upset England at the 1950 World Cup.

Professional soccer finally appeared in St Louis with the NASL’s St Louis Stars, founded in 1967 and playing at the Cardinals’ Busch Stadium. They draw almost 8,000 on average in their inaugural year, and almost 10,000 in their final year, 1977. The team were runners-up in the playoffs in 1972. They kept to the St Louis tradition of developing local talent; this allowed them a certain stability, but also meant a lack of star power ensured mediocrity.

The gap left by the demise of the NASL team was filled by indoor soccer. The St. Louis Steamers joined the Major Indoor Soccer League in 1979, pioneering soccer as glitzy family entertainment, music blaring and dry ice wafting over the field for player entrances. The Steamers were a success, attracting over 13,000 per game. Indoor teams have come and gone, though, in tune with that form of the game in the country as a whole.

Now St Louis is pushing this history in its expansion bid, touting its status as “Soccer Capital of America”.

Stadium
St Louis’ strongest selling point for MLS, though, is surely its stadium plans. St Louis Soccer United, the group backing the bid, has a tract of land in Collinsville, Illinois secured for an 18,500 capacity soccer specific stadium already. The stadium plans promise to take MLS to the next level in design, as these renderings show:

The project’s soccer-specific stadium will be among the next generation of MLS stadiums striving to capture the intimacy and excitement of the European game. It will incorporate a roof structure which fully covers the seating areas to help mitigate inclement weather conditions and hold in the sound of the crowd.

Supporters
St Louis Soccer United tout a high rate of local participation in soccer (10.2% of residents play, compared to 7.1% nationally) and a thriving metropolitan area of 2.7 million people as a base for strong support. Jeff Cooper, the man running St Louis bid, seems to understand the culture of soccer support, touting the possibility of what would technically be an Illinois derby with Chicago, less than three hundred miles away. He recently told the Daily Herald that “With all the rivalries in other sports that St. Louis and Chicago already have, it’s a ready-made rivalry. “We have a great market. It would be a fun rivalry to have.”

You can guarantee that several hundred Fire fans would make the trip every season; if, unlike Columbus (Chicago’s current closest team), St Louis could return the favour, you’d have an MLS version of the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry in baseball. St Louis is also even closer to Kansas City, which might just give the Wizards the jolt their fanbase seems to need: Kansas City’s isolation from other MLS markets surely hasn’t helped its development. A stronger basis in the Midwest with some real rivalry games would add to MLS credibility.

Backing
Financial backing is where St Louis fell short in their contest with Philadelphia. Had St Louis Soccer United put forth the bid they have now ten years ago, they would have waltzed into MLS. Unfortunately for them, it now takes far deeper pockets to get into MLS, and thus big investors will still need to be found for this to happen.

Overall
St Louis is only the eighteenth biggest market in the country, and isn’t as glamorous a location as New York City or Miami media-wise. But if there are to be eighteen teams in MLS, and given St Louis history of supporting local soccer and developing talent, one has to respect their bid, especially with their stadium plans so well developed. But as always in MLS, it will come down to money, money, money.

Good on Philadelphia, and well done to the supporters who helped make it happen. The question is where this expansion takes the league.

Commissioner Don Garber threw St Louis, who had vied for the sixteenth spot, a bone in the press release.

With the announcement of the 16th team, MLS added its sixth team since the start of the 2005 season. Expansion conversations continue with approximately 10 markets throughout the United States and Canada. MLS officials will continue those discussions as the League could feature as many as 18 clubs by 2011.

“As evidenced by our patience in the case of Philadelphia, we will only expand when we believe the circumstances are right,” Garber said. “We continue to seek the essential combination of strong ownership, an appropriate facility controlled by that ownership, and a market with a tradition of supporting the sport. St. Louis is one of the leading candidates we are considering and we are hopeful that all elements will come together soon for the city to join the League.”

Despite Garber’s words, MLS is expanding at a serious pace, raising issues on and off the field.

One question is whether the quality of the players can keep up with this pace of expansion: as the league expands, dozens more roster spots need to be filled, and the quality of the “filler” players in MLS is already low as it stands. Building a league that can appeal to the millions of soccer fans who already exist in the States depends to a degree on the quality of the play.

Raising the salary cap?
The answer, of course, is to raise the salary cap and attract more and better players from abroad. We will surely see less Americans per team in the coming years, though fortunately for the national team, this ought to be of little concern as the total number of Americans in the league won’t necessarily decline. But there certainly aren’t enough good ones sitting in a cupboard somewhere to fill four new teams by 2011 (Seattle, Philadelphia, +2).

Will the salary cap be raised substantially by then? I think so. The collective bargaining agreement between the players’ union and MLS expires next year, giving a window for this to happen. Though the salary cap isn’t directly determined by these negotiations, it would seem to be the right moment to move on it (and while they’re at it, stop paying developmental players a wage that would shame Montgomery Burns).

Given MLS has many new owners now — it welcomed Oscar de la Hoya to Houston just this week — the burden of an increased cap doesn’t fall as hard on one entity, as it would have before on AEG when they owned half the league.

Moreover, expansion itself should help pay for higher salaries. Philadelphia’s “entrance fee” to the league is likely around $30 million, and that seems sure to rise further for the seventeenth and eighteenth teams. The league and all its owners have also started making money out of their commercially successful SUM venture, selling broadcasting rights in the U.S. to events like the World Cup and InterLiga. MLS has been cautious to ensure that the new owners have seriously deep pockets, one reason St Louis haven’t won over the league yet, so new owners like Andell Holdings in Chicago can certainly afford a rise. Unlike football in England, ownership is seriously vetted.

But compared to England, salaries are an amazingly low proportion of the turnover in MLS, especially for those like Toronto who sell-out regularly. Whilst the fetters on finance should be kept on to some degree in order to avoid an NASL-meltdown, to compete with the ever richer European leagues (even England’s second division is now able to poach MLS players financially), the reins will have to be loosened somewhat to avoid stagnation on the field in the coming years.

The question of expansion also brings up all those old chestnuts like whether there will be promotion/relegation (I don’t see owners investing $30 million to buy into a league that it could get stuck in the second tier of), whether there will be a single table and balanced schedule, and so on. My guess is no to all of that, as MLS seems to work on the principle of copying the other major leagues structurally, even as on the field we’re seeing a purer game than originally (no shootouts, for example).

We might even see the conferences broken into divisions at some point. The distances in America also make sense for a geographically carved set-up: with Philadelphia joining, the North-east ought to be a hotbed for rivalries that’ll get fans travelling and adding to the atmosphere. Lets see what the Sons of Ben can do now they finally have an actual team to support.