Save The Caps And The Soul of MLS

Two-and-a-half months on from the first troubling cries that the situation in Vancouver for the Whitecaps might truly be dire, new reporting is shedding light on just how far down the relocation road MLS is with the Canadian outfit.

It's decidedly not good.

I'm not going to pretend I'm entirely uninterested in the candidate cities listed by Tom and Paul in the linked article about Major League Soccer's meetings re: the future of the Whitecaps in Vancouver. Vegas in particularly in fascinating, not because I think the city "deserves" an MLS franchise in any way or because someone there says they want to build a 50,000-seat venue with a retractable wall (at least per the very early and intentionally provocative renderings and as part of an absolutely INSANE bigger project), but because the allure of Las Vegas and the league's dalliance with that market reveals so much about the motivations at the heart of its plan for future growth.

A league that started out as a scrappy underdog is decidedly not that anymore and the story of the Whitecaps speaks to the attitudes inherent in the 3.0 era. Whatever criticisms we might have regarding the league's broadcast rights deal or inability to truly break into the mainstream with the G.O.A.T. flipping in goals down in South Florida (frustrations that stem from things not happening fast enough for our liking), MLS is now thick with billionaire club owners and is acting accordingly.

Strategic thinking has overtaken the base need to survive, meaning that the plight of the 'Caps isn't so much a problem MLS needs to fix as it is an opportunity to open a new market. Viewed from a narrow business perspective, MLS might even see relocating the Whitecaps from Vancouver to Las Vegas or Phoenix as an upgrade in market and an overall boost to the strength of the league. It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that a league with a team in a major American market like Phoenix (TV market #12) or Las Vegas (currently experiencing a major league sports boom) would be more attractive to a broadcast partner than a league with a team in Canada's third largest city.

It certainly wouldn't hurt the bottom line of the ownership collective if the scenario plays out the way Tom and Paul outlined.

Any relocation would have to be approved by MLS owners, with a purchase price and relocation fee agreed upon. San Diego FC paid a $500 million expansion fee, so owners will want to ensure that they receive at least some sort of payment from any new group entering the league. Sources expect a relocation fee to be added on to any sale price so that the overall package for an incoming group would be north of that previous $500 million figure.

While I hope the bar for relocation is extremely high and MLS won't use flimsy excuses to move the 'Caps, the incentives are not in favor of keeping the club in Canada.

This is where we get to the issue of relocation as it pertains to MLS and how the league positions itself within the wider culture of soccer/football while nested in the landscape of American professional sports.

Back when the Crew crisis was in full swing and I spent hours on the radio railing about the heist Anthony Precourt was attempting to pull off in broad daylight (R.I.P. The United States of Soccer), I took particular pains to point out the hypocrisy at the heart of that story if MLS allowed Precourt to steal the Crew from Columbus.

In the legal sense, provided he met whatever requirements existed within his owner/operator agreement with the league, Precourt had the right to transfer his franchise to Austin (something I believe he was scheming to do from the day he purchased the club's operating rights from the Hunts). But MLS had spent the years immediately leading up to the Columbus drama leaning into soccer exceptionalism and the passion of its fanbase to sell its product.

Somewhere around the beginning of the 2010s, MLS shifted from pitching itself as a family-friendly sports league where Mom and Dad could take Billy and Susie out to for a wholesome evening of soccer to a serious, passion-driven league thick with diehard supporters. That shift included using supporters in league advertising campaigns, sometimes going so far as to include images of groups lighting banned incendiaries that led to sanctions against clubs and groups (a tension that continues to this day). This INC interview with Don Garber is a good representation of the league's revised approach.

"We cater to, and are very focused, on our core market: Those people who have grown up with the game and love the game through some family history or country they’re from. That core fan base is the center of our bull’s eye and we focus a great deal of our attention on that group. 

"And then there are layers that grow from that group that we cater to and spend time thinking about, but as you get further and further from the core and more to the casual fan, we tend to spend less time, effort, and resources on the outer rings of the circle.

"As we grow the center circle larger and larger, those (fans) become our prophets, helping to communicate what a terrific league we have."

Soccer is different, MLS was saying. Soccer supporters live and die with their teams in ways that make the sport, and by extension the league, special. Join in the passion on display every week in MLS venues across the country (now soccer specific and built with your tax dollars!) because it's unlike anything else in American sports. Despite the fact that MLS was just like every other major American professional sports league in how it operated, the league worked to send a very strong message that "community" was at the heart of its ethos.

Explicit or not, that message carried with it a promise: The clubs belonged to their communities and would remain rooted within them. All sports franchises manipulate the bonds fans have with their teams, recognizing as they do that our relationships with them go well beyond a business-customer dynamic; for MLS to cynically used "passion" as a marketing vehicle only to let a carpetbagging owner steal the original club from its home of two decades would have been beyond the pale.

I know we live in the era of "nothing matters" and the relocation of a sports team is a small potatoes in the big picture, but I don't want to wave away the plight of the Crew then and the Whitecaps now as unimportant. What's the point of any of this if there's never any certainty? Why should fans spend increasingy higher amounts to follow a club if they can't trust the people in charge to take care with that relationship?

I realize the real world problems facing the Whitecaps in Vancouver are significant and can't be wished away. I'm not so blinkered about the economics that I can feel comfortable saying that the responsibility of the current owners, the league, etc. is to suck it up and hemorrage cash to keep the Whitecaps in B.C.

But I do feel comfortable saying that MLS's responsibility to do literally everything it can to stave off relocation is paramount to it being worthy of soccer fans' trust in the years to come. This is not a league that has the benefit of generation after generation of fandom and cultural relevance enjoyed by North America's other big sports properties. The roots don't go nearly as deep and while MLS has grown dramatically over the last 30 years, its shouldn't be in the business of alienating the minority of soccer fans in this part of the world who are at all inclined to give it a chance.

Steal my soccer club from me and I'll just go watch the Premier League. Or better yet, I'll go find a lower division club in my region to throw my love behind because while there's always a chance it could collapse, at least I can believe it won't be cynically ripped away to service the league's market footprint.

Damn the Man. Save the Caps.

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