Hey look! An actual post about football (sort of).
First, I keep forgetting Major League Soccer is pushing this Rivalry Week business, which if they’re going to give it a terrible name, they should at least add “MLS Rivalry Week Brought to You by Gavascon: Gaviscon And It’s Gone.”
Anyway, rather than rotate the derbies (and no, Toronto FC versus Montreal is not a derby, although Toronto FC fans hate Columbus Crew so much we don’t even want them as a local rival) and at least generate one juicy fixture per game day, the league in its wisdom is just cramming it in like Monsieur Creosote. Except it’s not exploding, it’s just kind of whining a bit.
Here are two entirely unrepresentative takes on the last round of MLS games. Here’s Steve Davis:
Crowds were fantastic in Montreal and Seattle. The grounds were full in Utah for Real Salt Lake’s Rocky Mountain rivalry.
On the other hand, plenty of dandy seats were available in Philadelphia (in fairness, a crowd of 15,689 in lousy weather wasn’t bad at PPL Park), New York and Dallas. Same for the game going on right now at the Home Depot Center outside Los Angeles.
Perhaps the season needs to steep a little more before we go biting into all the delicious acrimony and hostility of the league’s chief rivals. Applause to MLS for trying something. This is only the first spin of the Rivalry Week wheel. They deciders will have plenty of opportunity to adjust.
You might ask yourself why this matters. Geoff Gibson has the answer:
New York Red Bulls vs. DC United… 0 – 0. Sporting Kansas City vs. Chicago Fire… 0 – 0. Seattle Sounders vs. Portland Timbers… 1 – 1. These aren’t exactly headline worthy scorelines, but they’re exactly what we got this past Saturday if you bothered to tune in for NBC’s 10 hours of MLS rivalry day coverage (and of course, you at least tuned in for one of the three). A shame because the idea was solid, but the execution just never materialized with regards to on-field excitement.
First, was it solid? Part of the attraction of a league is knowing in theory about the teams that aren’t your own. That’s what TV is for. Mashing all the derbies in one 10-hour day discourages potential viewers from wading into unfamiliar territory. At least in my MLS market, the idea of a Canadian sitting down to watch even DCU v NYRB is like asking a Texan to watch Phil “the Power” Taylor for two hours. Someone will do it. Just no one else.
There is no question that MLS is capable of producing barn-burners. After all, leaky defending can sometimes lead to slap-dash play and horrendous half-way line over-the-top passes leading to one-on-ones with the keepers.
But if the league and its backers honestly think the TV product must be primarily helped by the on-field play and full stadiums, they’re backing the dead horse. Even the best leagues in the world (just marker in the inverted commas if you need to) produce dead weekends where Aston Villa doesn’t make a million hearts sing across the universe with a late goal.
League football is what it is. Often good, sometimes shit, once in a while incredibly exciting. But crossing your fingers and hoping the exciting stuff gets on TV so lot of people who don’t like MLS see it and are converted doesn’t strike me as a mature strategy for audience growth. It’s the rest of it: club culture, the players (and being good here doesn’t count, but being interesting sure does), and knowing more teams than the one you go see in person. That’s a difficult thing to cultivate, but it’s sure better than wringing hands about some bad games and empty seats.
Millennium Magic has been a concept used by the Rugby Super League for a number of years now. The concept is that all of the teams play their rivals over one weekend, at the same venue. Works well overall in that sport.
Perhaps MLS could tweak it somewhat and test the marketplace in a potential new venue, like the RFL did with Wales and Edinburgh. Either way, you get loads of fans attending as it works out as a great little weekend getaway.
that would not work.
I’m not exactly crazy on the whole concept. Americans might be a little more comfortable with the idea from college sports, but overall I wonder if this is more MLS marketing sizzle that delivers a decisive lack of steak. A few of those games have a legit rivalry feel to them, but others have all the energy of a three hour university lecture in your least favorite topic with a professor who speaks in monotone.
The league seems to always be trying to find other ways to get people interested in it’s games, which I can’t fault them for, but i’d much prefer the direct approach of improving the product. Salary cap is increasing at a measly 3% a year and there are still lots of dreaded underachievers out there who are painful to watch. Raising the MLS minimum wage and allowing for more squad depth IMO is still a relatively low-cost way to improve your product and draw people’s attention.
The whole marketing thing is great, the league does it really well. But at the end of the day your product is your product and you can only juice that so much.
If the games were exciting everyone would be praising the idea.
Hey, it’s no worse than NBC’s Wednesday Night Rivalry promotion with the NHL. They’ve given us such heated rivalries as Detroit/Los Angeles and Chicago/Colorado. Maybe it’s all just a sign that Americans really need someone to hate if they are to become interested in something. Isn’t that how they learn geography?
Yeah, it seems as though this was an idea that was working for the NHL side of things and they extended it to MLS.
Except with the NHL, the rivalries are, you know… historic. Outside of the PNW triangle match and the Montreal / Toronto / Vancouver hate, there just isn’t the sense of rivalry amongst MLS teams. Although I’ll fully admit that, as a Canadian, our perception of MLS is essentially that the league consists solely of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and whichever mystery teams they happen to be playing this week.
cue Americans learning geography
http://incakolanews.blogspot.ca/2013/03/south-america-according-to-dallasfort.html
I enjoyed it. It would be great to have 3 rivalry weeks in a season (while the schedule is unbalanced).
3 week is great as it brings in casual fans early in the season.
I can’t criticize them for trying.
I mean, if they’re willing to put up 10 straight hours of MLS on NBC/NBCSN at least it shows commitment to the sport.
I actually liked the concept. Nobody really knows much about MLS rivalries, especially over here in Europe. We know about the Galaxy because they are the MLS glamour club, and so we know about them and Chivas, but that’s about it. So to put all of the rivalries on on one weekend was very educational, and that’s what the MLS needs right now, simple awareness. It was also smart to make this “Rivalry Weekend” (good name) right at the start of the new MLS season, to build up some hype, and during the months where its typically hard to get fans out to the live matches otherwise. Also, Toronto FC versus Montreal is most definitely a derby. Only in England do they tend to restrict the use of the word to apply only to clubs playing within the same city, but a true derby is any match between fierce rivals. Munich 1860 vs Augsburg is a derby, for example, even though they play in two different cities. Technically Liverpool versus Manchester United should be considered a derby too, but the English never label it as such.