Major League Soccer Innovating the Fan Experience

For a long time, there has been a stigma surrounding Major League Soccer suggesting that people just don't care about it.  The general idea about soccer fans in the United States is that they get interested during the World Cup and then disappear for another four years.

So, why then, is America's most popular sport, football, turning to MLS to help solve its growing attendance problem?  Yes, you read that correctly.  According to the Wall Street Journal, numerous major football executives have been studying how Major League Soccer teams engage their respective fan bases.

Here's the thing...that stigma about soccer fans in the USA?  By and large, it’s still true, particularly when it comes to TV viewership.  World Cup ratings in the States have been spiking since we hosted it in 1994.  This year, with the tournament held in a time zone that put games on in the afternoon to early evening, Americans watched soccer in greater numbers than they did the NBA Finals.  If past trends hold, the ratings will come crashing back to earth now that the World Cup is over.  MLS ratings flat out stink.  More people in the States watch the English Premier League than they do Major League Soccer.  Now, that's to be expected, to a degree.  The NBA draws bigger TV ratings than NCAA basketball, too.  The explanation just boils down to quality.  The EPL has a better on-field product than MLS just as the NBA does compared to the NCAA, making it more attractive to those holding the remote control.  However, the league was outdrawn on TV by the WNBA last season.  All due respect to any women who may be reading this, but that’s just embarrassing. 

Live attendance is a different story.  MLS is trending upward when it comes to putting butts in the seats, while every other sport is trending downward.  Even football.  Soccer is becoming a very popular, in-person experience.  Though eventually it will run into the same problem that the big three (NFL, NBA, and MLB) are having and be so heavily featured on at-home platforms that fans will start choosing to sit on their comfortable couch rather than spend money on tickets, gas, parking, concessions, etc., right now MLS has figured out how to make it really enticing to go to a game.

Half empty stadium in Florida - Getty Images

Wild atmosphere at Sporting Park in Kansas City

Call it self-awareness.  MLS owners know full well the stigma that follows American soccer fans.  That reputation has been earned.  It seemingly took the league over a decade to recognize the necessity of getting back to the basics; that there was no World Cup-induced magic bullet to creating sustainable popularity for soccer.  Today, MLS teams are focusing on cultivating an audience at home.  Sporting Kansas City and Seattle Sounders FC management have led the way in embracing the challenge of basing their audience-expansion plans on getting people to come to the stadium instead of watch on TV, bucking the modern, more lucrative trend.  It’s an admirable, grassroots approach of growing the teams, the league, and the sport, domestically.  SKC and Seattle are considered two of the smartest franchises in MLS, each with future visions (rapidly turning into realities) of becoming world-renowned.  Part of their genius has been targeting the younger demographic that comprises the bulk of the American soccer fan base.  What do young people have in common?  They want to be a part of something exciting and new; and if there's a way to do it while being directly engaged by a team on their smart phones and other techy gadgets, all the better.  The San Francisco 49ers have adopted that mindset in opening their new stadium with a "high tech experience" at the forefront of their plans.  It was something borrowed, though, from Sporting KC, whose tech-friendly, soccer-specific Sporting Park opened several years ago.

“I think what we’ve done is we’ve created a 'place to be' from a social standpoint (where) a soccer game breaks out every now and then inside of it,” SKC CEO Rob Heineman said. “It’s really our responsibility as a club during that 90 minutes in that soccer game to try to convert them from thinking, ‘Wow, this is a really great place to be,’ to, ‘Wow, this is a really great place to watch soccer.’”  Mission accomplished, Rob.  Sporting KC has 46 straight sellouts, won the 2013 MLS Cup, and were visited earlier this year by representatives from several Southeastern and PAC 12 Conference programs to study and learn. 

MLS has also embraced the most diehard fans that they have by sectioning off specific areas of their stadiums to accommodate supporter groups.  Supporter groups are independent fan clubs that are often the driving force behind the reactions you hear during games.  They create massive banners and belt out chants and songs.  In Europe, the members are referred to as "Ultra," coming from the Latin word "beyond" in reference to their being a cut above the average fan.  Recognizing and appreciating the passion of the supporter groups, MLS decided to give their members reduced season ticket prices and specials on concessions (food, beer, etc.).  Currently, supporter group tickets are $10 less per game than the average ticket prices for general admissions.  MLS has created a culture that rewards diehard fans in more ways than one.  

Easier to pay for banners when your tickets are cheaper

“Everything has grown but the TV rating,” former MLS star and current ESPN Analyst Taylor Twellman said.  Until that number grows, Major League Soccer will continue to rely on drawing people to their stadiums by making the little things count.  The Portland Timbers, for instance, let their supporters park their bikes outside Providence Park and offer better quality foods that you would not often find among major sport concessions.  Their 20,801 attendees per game certainly seem to appreciate it.  The fact that MLS attendance averages exceed that of the NBA and NHL suggest that fans across the league approve of their team's efforts, as well.

"How good are you?" America vs. The World

There's a line in the movie, Major League, where the main character, Jake Taylor, is chatting it up with some hoity-toity types.  When Taylor's career as a Major League Baseball catcher becomes the topic of conversation, so, too, does the amount of money that professional baseball players make.

"Well it all depends on how good you are," Jake says.

"How good are you?"

"I make the league minimum," Jake replies, halfway between glum and resolved.

Money talks.  Especially in the sports world, quantifying worth is accomplished on a financial scale.  The best players make the most money.  The best teams are valued at the highest dollar amount.  Other variables are also taken into account, of course, but let's say that your goal is to compare and contrast different professional soccer leagues around the world.  You want to know where America's Major League Soccer stands?  Follow the money. 

Starting at the top, the best talents play in the European Leagues.  Unlike in the United States, where you will find the world’s preeminent (American) football, basketball, baseball, and hockey leagues, there is not a single soccer league in Europe that can regularly be pinpointed as heads above the rest.  England's Premier League and Spain's La Liga might be the deepest, but Italy's Serie A and Germany's Bundesliga regularly produce winners of the yearly European club team championship.  Nonetheless, Europe is where the finest players ply their trade.

You may or may not be surprised to find out that soccer's biggest stars make better money than any other team sport athletes on Earth.  Cristiano Ronaldo, who recent World Cup viewers best know for bursting Team USA's bubble with a killer cross that his Portuguese teammate buried into the back of the net to tie the game with just seconds to play but who soccer enthusiasts know as one of the three best strikers on earth, earned $52 million in salary for a single season with Spain's Real Madrid in 2013/2014.  Barcelona's Lionel Messi, who you just saw flame out in the World Cup Final for Argentina, earned $42 million last year just to play soccer.  LeBron James made less than $20 million.  Kobe Bryant is the NBA's highest paid player at $30.5 million/year, Matt Ryan tops the NFL at $42 million (seriously, Matt Ryan?), and Cliff Lee earned an MLB best $25 million.  Take out the anomaly that is Matty Ice's ridiculously overpriced salary and it would take awhile to reach the first non-soccer player (in Europe) on the list of highest salaried team sport athletes (source: Forbes).

The highest paid player in Major League Soccer is Clint Dempsey, whose $6.7 million per year salary is 7.5 times less than Cristiano Ronaldo's.  Dempsey's pay is certainly respectable, but if you want to know how far away we are in the USA from having teams on-par with the world's elite, compare our American captain’s salary to FC Barcelona’s $8.6 million per season mean wages paid to each player.  Most of the top four European league teams pay their players in a matter of a few weeks what an MLS player, on average, makes in an entire year.  So, there’s a wide gap.

It's barely worth mentioning that the English Premier League winner last season, Manchester City, paid its players combined wages of $413 million.  That's insane and so much astronomically higher than the MLS team with the biggest payroll, the New York Red Bulls at just under $10 million - 41 times higher!  Instead, look at one of the lower tier EPL squads, Southampton.  Their $75 million total salaries paid is still seven times that of the Red Bulls, 2.5 times higher than the top three MLS spending teams combined when you add the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles Galaxy to the mix, and just $9 million less than the entire payroll of the league, but it gives you a better idea of where we stack up. 

The Premier League is the richest in the world, but MLS would find itself in a similarly meager position against the other top European leagues.  Against the second tier European leagues, however, MLS would be pretty comparable, with the exception of outstanding teams like Scotland’s Celtic, Holland’s Ajax, or Turkey’s Galatasaray.  The same could be said of MLS versus Mexico's Liga MX and the South American leagues, though financial data is, admittedly, a lot harder to verify in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.  Major League Soccer has an advantage over all but the “Big Four” Euro leagues, though, in the ability to offer attractive contracts to world-renowned players (regardless if they’re on the decline) with the added bonus of giving them exposure to the vast American sports and entertainment media.    

Perhaps the most important thing to note in concluding the economic statistical analysis between MLS and the rest of the world is that we’re on the rise.  The advantages of leagues with more money is obvious, namely that they can afford to pay higher wages for talent in demand.  In the past, MLS could not keep pace.  Popular American stars, often homegrown in MLS, would make bigger names for themselves in the World Cup, parlaying their time in the spotlight to a transfer overseas.  MLS teams simply could not afford to keep their best players.  That is changing.  As the league has improved, Americans are coming back.  Dempsey was not the only US National to return home last year; Michael Bradley did, too.  They’re each making over $6 million.  Landon Donovan started that trend last decade, with an understanding that as the face of the sport in our country in those days, he could better help American soccer and MLS grow by staying.  What was once an exception is not yet the rule, but it is, now, becoming more common.  Word has it that Jermaine Jones, he of the rocket shot from outside the 18 yard box against Portugal, is on his way to Chivas USA in Los Angeles.  This weekend, World Cup starters Matt Besler and Graham Zusi were locked up to stay put in Kansas City.  Even a few years ago, they both would have been gonners. 

So, “how good” are we? 

We’re no longer the world’s “minimum.”  Major League Soccer is growing. 

The topic of MLS player earnings deserves greater exploration in this blog.  The fact is that MLS relies on higher paid players to improve viewers, interest, and quality of play, but it still can’t afford to pay consistent salaries; such is why the league average is still below $150,000/year.  80% of the money goes to 30% of the players.

  

Can a Rivalry 3,000 Miles Away Make Me a Fan of Major League Soccer?

Back in 1975, the seeds were sewn into the fabric of the Pacific Northwest sports scene a rivalry that would one day have the potential to turn one fan on the opposite coast into an avid supporter of Major League Soccer.  I am that fan.  The rivalry is that of Seattle Sounders FC vs. Portland Timbers.

Forty years ago, soccer was experiencing its first American boom period on the heels of the North American Soccer League (NASL).  Famous players from all around the world wanted to be involved in the USA's foray into the world's game.  Pele from Brazil, Franz Beckenbauer from Germany, and Johan Cruyff from Holland were just a few of the big names who helped make the league a trendy, popular entity in the late 1970s.

Seattle vs. Portland was a regional feud that bred a generation of soccer enthusiasts.  Even after the country's collective interest in the sport stalled and the NASL folded in the '80s, the Pacific Northwest's passion was a driving force in the emergence of smaller leagues that gave a professional home to quality players unable to put their skills to use abroad.  Eventually retaining their names from the NASL days, the Sounders and Timbers kept playing for the majority of nearly three decades without much of an audience.  Though small in number until both squads were revitalized as MLS franchises in the last several years, the fan bases kept the spirit of the rivalry thriving.  Today, each team's supporter groups are among the most passionate in Major League Soccer.

So, what does that have to do with me?

I've been searching for a reason to invest time and energy into MLS since the league opened play in 1996.  For the last four years, that search has expanded into the realm of claiming a favorite team.  It has been an all-around fruitless endeavor, unfortunately.  I love soccer, but as Peter Keating recently wrote in his ESPN: The Magazine article, I am amongst the "broad coalition [that] comes together en masse pretty much only once every four years."  As much as I want to support American soccer by committing to watch our top domestic soccer league, I've managed just to tune in for the World Cup before going back to my usual sports viewing routine.  I, as Keating writes, "can appreciate a well-defined, dramatic (soccer) spectacle without attaching [myself] to the season-long rhythms of its underlying sport." 

However, after reading an outstanding book, Sounders FC: AUTHENTIC MASTERPIECE: The Inside Story Of The Best Franchise Launch In American Sports History, that may be changing.  I might have found my team to root for and, with it, the hook that holds my attention to MLS.  Sure, the team is almost 3,000 miles from where I live, but the amount of respect that I gained for Sounders FC after learning of their story trumps any geographic distance.  

To quickly recap, Seattle's MLS team was a decade in the making.  The city is one of America's soccer hotbeds, which helped the NFL's Seahawks get their current stadium built.  In need of public money, officials targeted the Emerald City's soccer community back in the late 1990s, pitching to them that, if they helped pass the vote to get the stadium funded, the Seahawks would eventually share a home with an MLS team.  The vote passed.  From there, a series of fortunate events took place.  A young businessman with a passion for soccer bought and managed the minor league Sounders.  A movie executive decided he wanted to buy a major league franchise.  Drew Carey, a huge soccer fan, heard about it and wanted in.  Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seahawks, joined the party.  The soccer hungry Seattleites wanted their MLS team and the four aforementioned personalities meshed perfectly to make it happen.  The Sounders proceeded to buck conventional wisdom by shunning their "expansion team" label, hiring the ideal coach and finding the right mix of talent.  Consequently, the team has been a contender from day 1.  Since debuting in 2009, the Sounders have set MLS single game attendance records (think World Cup Final caliber crowds) and season average attendance records (45,000 per game).  Seattle very quickly developed a well run soccer organization with an extremely passionate, ever-growing fan base. 

I enjoy a good story.  Bottom line.  Sounders FC has a tremendous story that resonates with me.  The local economy in Seattle openly gives a lot of credit to the success of the MLS team.  Downtown bars and restaurants, particularly, are able to keep thriving outside of the football months thanks to soccer.  I think that's fascinating.  The entire sport of soccer in the United States has an underdog mentality and Seattle provides the classic characterization.  The Sounders share a building (and a management staff) with the city's NFL franchise, yet the world football squad refuses to play little brother to the American football Super Bowl Champion.  And they are prospering.

Getting back to the Seattle-Portland rivalry, there's nothing like a dramatic feud to help you invest in a product.  During the Portland rally that MLS Commissioner Don Garber hosted to announce that the Timbers were being called up to the big leagues, fans began to loudly boo when Garber cited the success of the Sounders as an example of the Pacific Northwest's soccer greatness.  That was, of course, a tame example of the animosity.  One Timbers fan was dragged by the neck and kicked by Sounder supporters in 2009...after a pre-season game.  I'll try not to hold that against them as I consider joining the "Rave Green" fan base.  Yes, there's serious heat between Sounders FC and the Timbers. Think Carolina-Duke, Lakers-Celtics, Giants-Eagles, or - to use a more soccer specific example - Barca vs. Real Madrid.  Though only a few years old in MLS years, it is already considered to be one of the league's premier rivalries.

As it turns out,  I have a brother-in-law in a similar situation as me.  He wants to pay greater attention to Major League Soccer.  He just needs an excuse.  Can you venture a guess as to where he resides?  A few hours from Portland.  He owns a Timbers scarf (which we bought him when he moved to Oregon) and a Timbers jersey.  Game on.  During a recent visit, he and I heavily discussed MLS and made plans for future trips to Seattle vs. Portland games.

Passion begins with a spark.  It must then be cultivated.  Tonight, I watch the Seattle Sounders FC host the Portland Timbers on ESPN.  Can it cultivate my passion for soccer sparked every four years by the World Cup?

I'm about to find out...