Seattle Vise: Cosmos Success Limits Sounders

The Sounders in the Single Entity, the Perils of Enforced Mediocrity, and Why They Won't Rob Peter to Pay Paul.

A Ride in the Delorean

The Seattle Sounders, a major club in a major American professional sports league, are turning away fans from empty seats, and staging important international competitions in venues that are guaranteed to fill beyond capacity. 

We’ll need to access the flux capacitor to shed some light on this situation.

Imagine yourself in New York City in the late 1970s. You are dodging blackouts, listening to KC and the Sunshine Band on the eight-track of your Trans Am, and probably watching a few original episodes of Land of the Lost. If you hang out at Studio 54, you regularly run across the kings of the New York sports scene, Cosmos players. From 1977 thru 1982, they were a disco inferno with an owner who bucked the trend. 

NASL ownership, like MLS ownership, was largely composed of a conservative bunch of owners of other sports moonlighting as soccer owners. The Cosmos took another direction, and changed the landscape of American soccer forever. Over this five-year span they averaged more fans per game than Yankees. In 1977, and likely after that, they also averaged more fans per game than the Giants – in the newly constructed Giants Stadium. Giants attendance figures are “unavailable” for some of those years in which Pele, Giorgio, Franz, Shep, et al. were giving them a run for their money.

If George Steinbrenner and Wellington Mara ever had a conversation about this embarrassment, there is no record. It would have been an interesting one.

Flash back to 2010, and three thousand miles west. After a record setting season in 2009, the reincarnated NASL club is poised to join the Cosmos as the only twenty first century soccer club to draw more fans than their NFL counterparts. A year after being resurrected in mock promotion, season ticket sales are up nearly 50%, and passed 30,000 with almost three months to go before opening day. What do Sounders’ brass do? Engage in a ninety-day program to lift season ticket sales to 50,000 and open the rest of Qwest Field? Set a new incredible standard for American club soccer?

No.

They cap season ticket sales with the stadium only half open.

Said former Seahawk executive Tod Lieweke, “This community once again showed why Seattle has the best fans in the country. The demand for tickets has exceeded our expectations, and the seating expansion to 27,700 will allow more fans to join us without jeopardizing the intimacy of the stadium.”

The Single Entity/Closed League Conundrum

Behind the platitudes covering their reasons for turning supporters away from empty seats, and an odd reference comparing the atmosphere of top-flight club soccer that of a cozy jazz club, lurks the MLS single entity model. 

Conceived in the early nineties, the single entity set a new standard for owner protections. It was decked out with all the perks that US Soccer President Alan Rothenberg needed to lure big time American sports and entertainment moguls into the business as quickly as possible. He needed a league to form, at least on paper, to fulfill an agreement with FIFA: The US would have a functioning first division on the books prior to hosting the 1994 Word Cup. 

President Rothenberg got his wish, in a deal that Faust himself would recognize. MLS went on the books with a wide range of perks by which well-heeled owners could shield themselves from nearly every conceivable risk. Their single entity was granted unprecedented powers to limit the autonomy of every club. It allowed them to artificially engineer parity by enforcing mediocrity on every club. It entitled them to permanent first division status. It gave them the tools they thought they needed to stuff soccer into their closed league model once and for all. 

Entitled to the top of our sanctioned pyramid, they turned it into a TGI Fridays. 

The league owned a majority of every team, and set up a redundant series of controls to protect itself from any one owner who would seek to elevate her club at the expense of the others.

Match outcomes would be randomized through invasive club controls on player salaries, squad sizes and player allocations. The league determined quality of play for every club, not owners and supporters. 

It was the magic bullet, and gave them the tools they thought they needed to force the American club game into their closed model. By carefully governing the quality of every club, they would avoid all the mistakes of a century full of close league predecessors. 

On one hand, never again would poor clubs fester in the bottom of the league. On the other, never again would owners and supporters be allowed to build the best clubs they could support.

MLS, and cross-pollinated NFL executives, had a handy fix in their new single entity. Cosmos mistakes would not be repeated.

Sounders Strain the System

For the first time since the Bee Gees ruled the charts, another behemoth club is rising. The strain on the league-mandated, if barely discernible, growth curve is showing. Seattle is approaching Cosmos levels of support, in a league that only allows them to turn a fraction of that support into club improvements. 

The basic strategy behind the single entity has served domestic leagues of domestic sports like the NFL. It works when leagues are recognized as being the best in the world. It prospers when clubs are insulated from meaningful international play.

It does not work for soccer. It handicaps well supported teams, in a league that is in no danger of being recognized as the best in the world, in a sport in which top clubs, like the Sounders, are exposed to meaningful international competition.

Therein lays the tension: Sounder fans are turning out in world-class numbers, for a team that is being prohibited from reaching world-class status by arbitrary closed league policies that place a higher value on randomizing outcomes of league matches than the quality of any one club. 

In a related threat to the system, the Sounders are poised to blow past the maximum capacities of MLS highly touted, but far from large capacity, soccer specific stadiums. Under the parity-thru-enforced-mediocrity strictures that define the league, would anyone be shocked to find MLS marketing wizards also seeking to control on the levels of support any single club can produce? 

Which brings us to the part of the game in which MLS single entity handicaps their clubs the most: Champions League play.

Here, Sounders/Seahawk executives again make curious decisions. Instead of using Qwest field to stage these competitions, they choose the Starfire Complex in Tukwila. Capacity 2200, according to the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

In this way, a club poised to average well over 30,000 fans per game (after arbitrarily cutting off season ticket sales three months before opening day) will set Champions League matches in a stadium that can only accommodate 6% of their average crowd.

Sounds Good/Sounds Boring/Sound Off?

Sounder supporters, you are poised to see the debilitating effects of the single entity model at closer range than any those of any other MLS club. Never has the league applied their strictures to such a well-supported club. Never has a team tested their authority this directly.

If MLS marketing wizards can placate you with guaranteed first division status, turn you away from international play, and make you comfortable in a league that ultimately defines the quality of play of your club, it will be a huge triumph for their single entity model.

If you follow the path of millions of former MLS supporters, you will drift away from a distant game in which elevated levels of support do not translate into elevated levels of play. You will become another statistic in a century of failed attempts to install our domestic, closed league model onto our club soccer. You will be victimized by a league that cannot capture the interest of the average American soccer supporter, much less the average American sports fan.

Of course, if you get angry, realize that your storied club’s destiny on the international stage is being compromised by the owners of a short sighted domestic league desperately trying to maintain the entitlements of the American closed league sports model, soccerreform.us is here to feel your pain, and translate it into action. 

No American club in recent history has been blessed with the kind of support Seattle has received. Freed of the strictures of the MLS single entity, this support could not only make them a permanent fixture in the first division of a new, open pyramid of independent clubs battling for promotion and against relegation, it could push them deeper into international competitions than any American club has ever gone before.

Not under this system.

MLS/NFL cross-pollination has many effects. Along with a shared long-term subscription to the closed league model, they share a theory that lays directly at odds with the growth of pro club soccer in the USA. They believe a finite number of sports fans make either/or choices about which games in which sports they patronize – either virtually or in person.

In the eyes of the disproportionate number of NFL alums in MLS, clubs like the Sounders are just robbing their Football Peters to pay their Soccer Pauls.