Business Daily - internetsoccer.com

20 March, 2001 (Teamtalk) --

Something To Think About

For a professional American sport to prosper, it needs specific stadiums for its clubs, built around their needs and scaled-down from the mammoth facilities used by the National Football League. Now where have I heard this before?

Actually, this time it�s Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig describing 40,000 to 50,000-seat baseball-specific stadiums as the way forward for the world�s oldest continuing professional league.

Selig is letting the economics do his talking, with new stadiums becoming a draw in and of themselves, miraculously turning mediocre teams into mediocre teams with a nice new stadium and a marked increase in attendance. It�s an old model that has worked every time there�s been a boom period in stadium construction... well maybe except during the era of the multipurpose municipal stadiums of the 1960�s and 70�s that several cities have gleefully blown up to make way for baseball and football specific stadiums.

The current push towards Major League Soccer investor-operators pouring millions into their own soccer-specific stadiums needs to be tempered with the knowledge that we are in a full-fledged boom period in stadium construction. It�s an era where no one wants to share facilities, leaving major American cities with multiple arenas and stadiums with a limited number of events to make them economically viable.

Journey To The East

Legendary Italian club Juventus has joined fellow giants Manchester United - and lesser lights like Crystal Palace - in launching a marketing and promotional campaign geared specifically at Asia. The deal is in association with English marketing firm Giraffe, oddly enough owned by current Ipswich Town defender John Scales, and hopes to raise roughly $12 million a year.

Though some of the clubs actively pursuing it would probably disagree, the move to global branding isn�t automatic and the relative interest in anything once it is removed from its specific locale is somewhat dodgy at best. Manchester United has already encountered problems in their global branding operations, and similar attempts by American professional teams usually has more to do with fashion than an actual interest in the given team. Yet all will inevitably persist.

All of the North American professional leagues have played games overseas and launched foreign marketing efforts, similar to the Mexican Football League selling itself to a Spanish-listening American audience. This amalgamation of the various sports and teams throughout the world has removed any real indication of locality other than the place name that appears on the shirts, leaving clubs in different sports and countries competing with each other across the globe. The effect this has on local teams is obvious, and something that needs to be seriously considered in the race to open new markets.

And Finally...

The Xtreme Football League set a new record on Saturday night for the lowest-rated sports show in the history of primetime network television, and it still managed to draw a rating that would have most US Soccer supporters writing their local sports editors for more coverage. Thankfully, Major League Soccer had the good sense not to sell the fledgling league as the second-coming of Serie A, or even the NASL for that matter, and allow it to find a target audience before having to challenge the existing professional leagues in the ratings wars or give some members of the media any more ammunition.

More tomorrow,

Soccer Business Daily is available Monday through Friday. J Hutcherson can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]

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