MLS can crow, but there's still work to do
Don Garber is making sense — mostly.
Beginning his 13th season MLS commissioner, Garber presides over a league growing like the U.S. economy, slowly but surely, and he's not afraid to brag about it.
Modern stadiums, improving attendance, a new national television contract with NBC and its networks, an initiative to take control of the league's referees, a plan to crack down on violent tackles that last year sent some of the league's most dynamic players to the sidelines with career-threatening injuries — all are reasons for Garber to crow.
And he did crow Thursday on a conference call celebrating the start of the league's 17th season Saturday.
“It is a very exciting time for us,” Garber said. “We are coming off the most successful season in our history. We broke our attendance record that was set in the first year of the league. Our average of 17,872 and a total of 5.4 million fans is a number that we are feeling very proud of. We also had 87 sellouts. That was an all-time record, and all of you know that it is hard to imagine that the league, our teams, would be selling out so many games and we expect to have a similar number of sellouts in 2012. We had 10 teams above 17,000 on average attendance; also a record for us.”
The glaring weakness in the league's business side, however, is its anemic television ratings, and Garber knows it.
“By 2022 if we are going to achieve our vision and be one of the top teams in the world we are going to have to have higher television ratings,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. But the growth of our TV audience, we believe, is a function of the growth of the overall popularity of the league, our players and our clubs. And that is a process that is going to take some time.”
Where Garber stops making sense is his insistence on putting a second team in New York, hoping to create a rivalry with the Red Bulls that might finally help that club fill its gorgeous new stadium on a regular basis. The league is so gung-ho for a second New York team it is looking for stadium sites before it even has an owner for the prospective expansion team, a courtesy St. Louis couldn't get.
“We still have work to do to finalize even a time frame for the 20th team in New York, but we continue to be optimistic,” Garber said.
One more point Garber needs to address: the lack of transparency in how the league operates and its finances. The league treats player contracts, its salary cap and allocation money like top-secret information beyond the pay grade of the country's leading generals. That lack of information stifles interest in and coverage of the league.
Finally, this comment about the ghost of Major League Soccer's predecessor, the NASL, was too interesting to pass up:
“I do not think that the ghost of the NASL ever leaves the offices of Major League Soccer,” Garber said. “It always sort of seems to hang above the sport, and I think it will for the next number of years. Maybe when we have been around longer than they have we will be past the last tombstone, if you will, for that league.
“I still travel around the country and have lots of people who are wearing old NASL jerseys at fan rallies and say that they came into, that their interest in the sport grew with some relationship that they had with a NASL team. Certainly the foundation and formation of MLS was structured in a way to not suffer the tragedy of the folding of the NASL. The single entity is directly related to that. So I think it will always be a part of us. Lastly you got the Sounders, you've got the Earthquakes, all this talk about the Cosmos (team nicknames passed down from the NASL). It seems to always want to be a part of the American pro soccer scene.”
Follow Orrin's soccer reports on Twitter @orrinsoccer.