Quote:
Originally Posted by Boomcoach
As much as I enjoy pre-rel, I do not see if working in the US market. Owners have not forked out hundreds of millions to be relegated to a lower league.
I still enjoy the MLS a lot. It gives me league to follow, I can get to games, and it gives me soccer during the months that the European leagues are not playing. I prefer seeing teams bringing in young talent that can move to better leagues in the future, to the big market splashes on over the hill European players, but that just gives me another reason to hate on the Galaxy, so that's all to the good!
I am looking forward to see what the new coach brings to my Crew this year. A number of my favorite players have been traded or released, but they were in their mid 30s, so I understand it. They seem to be setting up for one more signing, acquiring GAM and TAM, so I look forward to that.
Go Crew!!!
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I think maybe even more to the point, the US is a very large country, way bigger than a lot of Europeans truly realize. In England you can have a 2nd and 3rd level league that's "national" but still doesn't require a huge amount of travel. In the US, taking the NBA G-League for example, you still have the Windy City Bulls regularly having to travel a couple thousand miles to the West to play California teams or a thousand miles or so to the East to play Boston's affiliate. The UK doesn't even divide its leagues into north and south until like the 5th tier down, at which point a lot of teams are either semi-pro or just kind of dipping their waters into paying their players full-time wages. I don't see how even like a 3rd tier league could make it on a nationwide basis, and even then if you had, say, a West Coast Soccer League, that *still* represents a huge amount of ground to cover from, say, Seattle to Colorado or San Diego. Like, even when you get way, way down to "only" a Washington State based league, which would surely be way down into the semi-pro if not outright amateur levels if you had a fully realized English style tier system... Washington State is the same size as England. Even at that, like, 6th or 7th tier, you're travelling hours each way every time, like, Bothell plays Walla Walla.
We do have regionalized minor leagues in baseball which I guess sort of puts the lie to that, except that those by and large formed in the pre-TV era when if you wanted to watch baseball in Denver or Salt Lake City you had to go out and watch the local team. Also of course they're slowly dying, to the point that MLB, a league that makes billions of dollars a year, props up the fact that they grossly underpay minor leaguers by making arrangements with local families to house them during the season. There's no way in hell MLS would get away with that, let alone a presumably independent promo-rel league.