Tightrope act

Commissioner excited about MLS present, future

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (Ticker) -- If MLS commissioner Don Garber is stopping to smell the roses, he sure isn't letting anyone know about it.

In a year that has seen significant growth in attendance and television ratings for his league, Garber still has his hands firmly on the gearshift, down in the low range.

"If anyone thinks it's time to stop and catch his breath around here," said Garber, "they've got another thought coming."

It would be easy to relax. No one would blame the league office for wanting a break after the last seven rocky years. But now that MLS Cup looks like it will break its own record crowd of 57,431 this weekend at Foxboro -- stadium sales were around 50,000 on Friday -- there is something new in the air.

For once, it isn't dread, it's excitement.

From the start, MLS -- with its insistence that it develop the American player -- paled to many people's rosy memories of the NASL. And when the product was often lacking in those early years, MLS was easy for the casual sports fan to ignore.

Faced with mounting financial losses -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- and incessant criticism from the media over quality of play and finances, MLS went public with its owners' commitments to stick it out through 2006 and take on a national press that often seemed antagonistic to the sport itself.

MLS, of course, has at times been its own worst enemy. Former commissioner Doug Logan once famously promised that average attendance would top 20,000.

Earlier this year, Logan agreed with many when he said, "I wish I had never said that," and was badly burned.

The New York franchise was incompetently managed, with close to 200 players and six coaches passing through in just seven seasons, and the league had to shutter two teams, Miami and Tampa, to stem losses.

But this year, the league seems to have finally turned a corner. Phil Anschutz's huge investment in the league -- the Denver billionaire owns and operates 5-1/2 of the 10 teams -- has stabilized the financial situation.

A new stadiums is being built in Los Angeles, and in two years it seems likely that L.A., New York, Columbus and Dallas will either own their homes or be in the process of building them.

New England and Kansas City currently control their stadiums, and Chicago has a new deal with Soldier Field that will add $3 million a year to that team's bottom line.

Tim Leiweke of Anschutz Entertainment Group also announced two weeks ago that MLS, despite contracting Miami and Tampa last season, will announce expansion plans within a year and that those new teams will not be owned by AEG.

In fact, AEG people privately say that in time the group will divest itself of all but one of the teams, turning MLS into a more traditional sporting entity.

Much of the momentum the MLS is experiencing came from the pickup of the World Cup rights for $60 million by Anschutz and the formation of a marketing entity called SUM with Dentsu and Lamar Hunt to shop them and also buy and repackage more rights deals.

Add the improved quality of play, a new plan to promote the league by virtue of its schedule, the fact that several key sponsors have come back on board and it seems there is a definite sense that professional soccer, while still a long way from the majors, is on the right road at last.

"We're still on the first two rungs of a six-story ladder," Garber said. "But we've got things to be pleased about.

"After the World Cup, we picked up two or three more sponsors, which would not have happened otherwise, but that wasn't why we did it. We did not look at that as a revenue stream.

"We looked at is a way to sell the sport, and what we got out of it, immediately, was that we showed ESPN that the sport had a real value for the company. Strategically, that was huge."

This year has been one of the few sweet ones for Garber, who has been buffeted since he took the office. Garber, who once admitted that this was the hardest thing he's ever had to do, succeeded Logan and disappeared from the public eye, prompting speculation from some that the league had things to hide.

This year, he has been much more open, candid and available, even through such difficult times as the collapse of the plan for a McKinney, Texas, stadium, which was to house the Dallas Burn.

Still, Garber has had a tricky dance. A marketing man from NFL Europe, Garber has had to not only sell the sport to a disinterested public but to sponsors and his own investors.

It has been a tightrope act, walking between the small core of devout American soccer fans and the larger mainstream, which the league knows it must attract.

"What we have had to do, and what has been hardest," Garber said, "is to sell the whole egg. I'm concerned that if we just talk to the hard-core fan, we lose others.

"For example, if we lengthen the season, we increase attendance, but dramatically reduce our media footprint. In the summer, we have the papers to baseball and ourselves."

But what Garber knows he and MLS need most is time.

"Consistency brings results," he said. "Look at the Arena Football League -- they've been around 10, 20 years now and their franchises are starting to have some value. We need that same consistency. Now, we're nowhere near a major league."

Time, sadly, has always been MLS' enemy, it seems. While MLS has been guaranteed funding through 2006, the increasingly unsteady fiscal climate is creating unforeseen problems.

Anschutz has been sued by the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer, in an attempt to reclaim some $1.5 billion in funds the state contends were taken illegally from Qwest Communications, whose board Anschutz headed until recently.

Anschutz currently owns five teams outright and co-operates a sixth, San Jose, with Silicon Valley Sports and Entertainment. Also, Lamar Hunt, who owns two teams (Columbus and Kansas City) is in ill health, and while two of his four children, Clark and Lamar Jr., are said to be passionate about the game as well, it remains to be seen what would happen if the patriarch were to pass away.

The situation is less critical in Columbus, which has significant outside investment from the Pizzoti family and other local investors. Yet without Hunt's backing, it is difficult to imagine them holding the franchise together.

Yet, with more soccer on the airwaves and an increased commitment from ESPN and ABC, MLS finally has begun fighting the battles worth winning. The Cup also will get its largest ever radio clearance with the syndicator Sports Byeline (affiliated with Armed Forces Networks) and Radio Unica offering a chance to reach 200 affiliates across the country.

"This," Garber said, "is one of the most exciting times we have had in seven years."

 

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