Executives hash out key maneuvers for the year 2000
Early November, with leaves falling and temperatures dropping and football lines distracting, finds MLS still slogging through its playoffs.
Change is in the wind. Commissioner Don Garber has stated he’s shooting for an Oct. 22 championship game next year, or perhaps a final as early as Oct. 1.
What was proclaimed as the “Year of No Excuses” by the previous commissioner has become the “Season of No End.”
“Starting training camp in January and finishing with a championship game a week before Thanksgiving is too long,” said Dallas general manager Billy Hicks. “People around here are dragging. We’re trying to finish up, and we’re heading right in the middle of our heaviest season-ticket selling period for next year.”
A shorter campaign is just one of several major changes being discussed by those who run MLS.
Those changes adopted are expected to be announced a few days prior to MLS Cup 1999. Included in the discussions are the following topics.
Soccer Night in the USA
Garber, being a former NFL executive, is painfully aware of television’s vast reach and pervasive importance.
He is pushing hard for a regular weekly time slot into which will be inserted an MLS game. MLS has yet to find a broadcast window that satisfies the teams, the league and the broadcast partners.
Garber is not specifying Monday night, per se. He simply wants a consistent time slot, a la“Monday Night Football” or “Hockey Night in Canada.”
Thursday night games on espn2 draw tiny crowds, which taints the league’s image and irks sponsors. But the ratings aren’t bad. The sporadic telecasts shown on ESPN and ABC, usually on weekends, draw poorly.
Univision’s Sunday afternoon (1 p.m. Eastern) time slots work for the network, but most teams would rather play Saturday nights. Univision also cut back on its number of telecasts this season, and teams west of Columbus seldom host Univision games because of kickoff times of noon or earlier to accommodate the time slot.
“I think it’s significant that the ratings for our games in relatively fixed time slots, on espn2 and Univison, are up 30 percent,” said D.C. United general manager Kevin Payne. “ABC is about the same, and ESPN, which is [scheduled] all over the shop, is down.
“It’s all about habit. It’s appointment viewing. If you move around any TV show, its ratings usually drop.”
Sparse midweek MLS crowds do not provide the exciting, noisy backdrop common to NFL weeknight showdowns. “I don’t want it to be a situation where we’re playing on Monday nights basically in a studio, with a very small crowd,” said Chicago general manager Peter Wilt.
“To me, consistency is most important,” said Hicks, who also worked overseas for the NFL prior to joining MLS. “You’re creating a viewing destination, which was behind the NFL’s experiment with ‘Monday Night Football’ 30 years ago.
“What you have to do is spread the games out so that one team is not hosting three or four Monday night games. Our midweek attendances haven’t been very good, so it’s up to the teams to build that into their promotion and use it as an opportunity to sell it.
“I think the importance of having a regular time slot overrides many of the other concerns.”
The league’s slim membership of 12 teams greatly limits its ability to arrange enticing matchups. And would the league really help its cause with a balanced TV schedule that featured Kansas City as often as D.C. United?
MLS is still grappling with its TV travails. Kickoff time for its Nov. 21 championship game has been moved from 3:30 p.m. Eastern to 1:30 p.m., despite the likelihood ABC stations on the West Coast will choose to show the game delayed due to local morning programming.
Divisional shuffle being discussed
Shortening the season will probably mean fewer games, although there is by no means universal agreement on this issue.
Proposals for 26-game and 28-game schedules have been drawn up and reviewed.
A 26-game schedule would have to be unbalanced in some manner, which is not unprecedented: the 32-game schedules in 1996 and 1997 had teams playing every team in its own conference four times, and three games against every team in the other conference with one exception.
Expansion to 12 teams in 1998 accommodated a balanced 32-game schedule of four games per opponent within the conference and two games against teams in the other conference. Ditto in 1999.
Realignment was first discussed prior to expansion, and has been revived. Splitting into three groups of four would permit teams to keep the same ratio of games played – four against conference (or divisional) foes, and two with everybody else – while reducing the total games played to 28 per team.
A proposed realignment also places the three teams owned by Philip Anschutz into separate groups, and also keeps apart those operated by the Krafts, the Hunts, and the league.
Playoffs in September and an Oct. 1 final would conflict with the Olympic soccer tournament (Sept. 13-30).
“If it was up to me,” said Wilt, “I’d rather lose players like Josh Wolff, and Chris Armas if he’s picked as an overage player, during the end of the regular season instead of for the playoffs and the championship game.”
And it will be a few days before this year’s championship game when significant moves are revealed.
The league is also discussing revamping its player distribution system, what its next legal move is now that the discovery process of the players’ lawsuit has been completed, the building of its own stadiums, and renewing the corporate sponsorship deals on which it relies so heavily.
But how many games will be played, and how people can watch them on TV, are near the top of the list.
by Soccer America senior editor Ridge Mahoney