Yesterday, MLS held a press conference announcing talks with a potential Detroit ownership group. Just like that, a new expansion drama starts, but this time it’s David versus Goliath. More specifically grassroots soccer David versus single-entity Goliath. Where David crowd-funded his stadium and Goliath is an aging European Designated Player.
Detroit City FC, for those unaware, are American soccer’s semi-pro darlings and deservedly so. They bring out huge crowds of fans who are passionate enough to crowdfund a stadium renovation. They are the gold standard for Non-League (Division 4) soccer in the US by having built something passionate, unique, and successful.
Into that context comes Major League Soccer and a couple of billionaires (Dan Gilbert and Tom Gores) like bulls in a china shop. But casting this as a David versus Goliath story isn’t quite accurate. In fact, it doesn’t have to be oppositional at all.
Now, I absolutely don’t want to tell Detroit fans how to feel. They can hate or love whomever they want. Instead, to make a point, let me talk about Minnesota. I have supported Minnesota soccer since days when it was fewer than a thousand people in the stands of a humdrum suburb–and that is recent history. In those days, I knew every staff member because there were only four people with the club.
Let’s Talk Money
Each iteration of the team I have supported lost money (the last time a professional Minnesota soccer team made a profit was apparently over a decade ago). They hemorrhaged it, in fact, and they weren’t the exceptions. This was and is the case for almost every soccer club in the US. In order for a pro soccer team to succeed, it needs either an owner who can lose money or a reasonable trajectory toward making money.
Whatever your feelings about MLS, it has some teams that make money and a reasonable trajectory toward its clubs making money. Here, I’m speaking of television rights, where MLS certainly isn’t bringing in colossal sums of money, but it is growing.
Now a team can always choose to be amateur or semi-professional (and the non-league teams in the US belong more to the former than latter). And that team, like Detroit City FC, could do quite well for itself, even get a home of its own. But we need to recognize that DCFC is the singular exception. There are other great grassroots movements like those in Nashville or Birmingham. However, they do not have access to the two most important things: significant revenue capture from their home venue or television revenue.
So there are essentially two options: if you’re a professional team you need a lot of money. If you’re an amateur team, you don’t need as much (though look at how many non-league teams die without a funeral). The reality of soccer in the US is that you need a very wealthy person to give you professional soccer. The reality of choosing the grassroots route is that you’re sacrificing quality on the pitch.
From Rags to Riches
When Bill McGuire came into Minnesota soccer and bought the dying Minnesota Stars, he changed the name, the colors, and the gameday experience. Gone were the days when the fans would roam the pitch after the match. And gone were the days when the player/assistant coach was hand pressing all the customized jerseys himself. But we had a team and that team was still ours.
In a couple of years, when Minnesota United (or whatever the hell they’ll be named) play their first match in Cloud City, the experience will be light years away from the days of the NSC Minnesota Stars. When I started coming to games, you knew that every player on that pitch could hear you heckle them. The Dark Clouds were goddamned Jedis at heckling players, masters of the arts of getting inside the brains of their opponents with clever banter. That sort of intimacy will be impossible in a stadium of 22,000 people.
And while I am excited to watch the highest level of soccer in the country played in what could be one of the greatest soccer venues in the world, sure there’s part of me that will miss those old days. Who wouldn’t? I often retell the story of that Carolina RailHawks match in 2009: delayed by rain for two hours, only 30 or so of us with just a case of beer screaming and singing in the rain. That was magic.
But I also knew some of those players and how little they made. I knew the staff who were doing five jobs a piece. I also knew that every year we wondered if we’d have a team next year. So I don’t really miss those days.
Two Different Kinds of Parties
The move to MLS means we can’t light things on fire at matches anymore. It means paying more for a game. It means that the players have more distance from the fans. It also means watching a much higher level of soccer. It means a beautiful stadium. It means watching your team on TV and having people around the world talk about your team. It’s not a magic carpet ride, certainly, but it’s something I look forward to.
During this past off-season, a new semi-professional club called Minneapolis City SC started up, playing in the Premier League of America (PLA). I think that they quite wisely recognized the niche they could fill: they can give the old kind of party that you used to be able to have at Minnesota matches. Just drink a beer and heckle the hell out of some poor schlub from Milwaukee (that city has so many schlubs). Is it the best soccer around? No, but it’s still fun as hell to watch live soccer.
There is no competition in my mind between this experience and Minnesota United (and I mean that with no disrespect to Minneapolis City). Soccer is only ever partially defined by the product on the pitch. Half of the experience is your interaction with the game. There is something freeing about just buying a cheap ticket and watching some soccer. My first love is the Loons, but I think DETHLOON will permit me to fool around a bit.
Back to David and Goliath
And this brings me back to Detroit. Detroit City FC will likely face two options: work with the MLS team or remain separate. If they are co-opted by the MLS owners, the experience will drastically change, likely surpassing even the changes for us in Minnesota. Whether to embrace or reject those changes is a decision each Detroit fan will make.
But let’s not be naive. These are the changes of professionalization and not the damage done by the evil MLS machine. This is the state of affairs for modern soccer. Take a minute and look at the footage of actors dressed up as AC Milan players pantomiming a “Haka” to sell men’s skin lotion. Then take another moment to vomit. I am not saying that fans should accept this sort of crass commercialism (especially when it is so grossly appropriating another culture), but we can find a million examples throughout the world’s best leagues.
The Dark Clouds face a tricky future with Minnesota United with whom they have had a pretty genuine relationship so far. But it is not an impossible task. And it is very similar to the position Detroit City FC fans could be in with the new MLS team: they have some sort of leverage that they can parlay into building a club that is genuinely engaged with grassroots efforts.
And Detroit City could also remain separate. There are those who claim that MLS coming to town is the death of DCFC. But I don’t see why the relationship has to be oppositional. Having an MLS team in the same city as an NWSL team is not oppositional and yet both are vying to get a largely overlapping group of soccer fans to come out on the weekend. Detroit City will always be its own kind of party, a party that can’t be replicated in an MLS stadium. Fans of Les Rouges can simply embrace this difference.
Fans in Detroit will decide for themselves, but in the meanwhile I’d suggest everyone else start pumping the brakes on the MLS is murdering baby soccer teams in their sleep narrative. MLS is ham-handed and outright silly at times, but if Detroit City’s fanbase is as passionate as it seems, they can survive and even thrive with the competition.
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