The North American Soccer League (NASL) seems to be in a lot of trouble.
After losing Minnesota United to Major League Soccer and both the Tampa Bay Rowdies and Ottawa Fury to USL in the past few months, the future of the NASL has been in question with only nine teams still around for the 2017 campaign and both the Fort Lauderdale Strikers and Rayo OKC said to be having severe financial issues of their own.
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Couple all of that with the USL’s progress and it filing for Division Two status for the 2017 season, and everything is beginning to stack up against the NASL just five years into its second coming as a soccer league.
The latest news that the NASL champs in three of the last four seasons -- also the team which has the largest payroll and the biggest brand -- have now had payroll problems and have yet to make season ticket sales available for next season unfortunately comes as no surprise.
Dave Martinez over at Empire Soccer has the report, which also states that an NASL meeting will take place with the Board of Governors on Tuesday to discuss the future of the league. That doesn’t sound good.
Here’s the latest on the Cosmos:After another cataclysmic year at the gate, it stands to reason that the club could be looking at a bare-bones operation for 2017. Still, it is impossible to ignore the facts. The team hasn’t taken ticket deposits for next year. The location of their 2017 home venue, still believed to be MCU Park, remains a mystery. Players are being shopped for transfer. Payroll isn’t being met. Staff are being furloughed.
Does that sound like a team that is gearing up for the New Year? The NASL is conducting a Board of Governors meeting this Tuesday to address the future of the league. And for the first time since its reincarnation, one can only guess if the Cosmos will be a part of that future.
Simply put, it was tough to see the Comos’ business model being successful.
They’ve had big names, presumably on big wages, in recent years with Raul and Marcos Senna trying to help raise the profile of the club but attendance figures continued to dip below the league average (which was 5,912 in 2015) and with no big TV deals and Major League Soccer the main focus for commercial and marketing opportunities in North American soccer, the NASL’s status as a second-tier league meant many of its clubs have had to battle away just to make ends meet.
With the NASL trying to force its way as a first-tier league running alongside MLS for many years, it now seems like the league which originally flourished in North America from 1970-85 is once again on the brink of extinction.
For the Cosmos, their strong global brand should have meant they would’ve been successful in MLS but issues behind-the-scenes meant no agreement for them to move into the top-flight of North American soccer was made and then for the 2015 season New York City FC arrived on the scene in the Big Apple, meaning MLS now had two teams in NYC and the Cosmos fell further down the pecking order in terms of relevance. There’s no doubting the Cosmos would’ve been a success in MLS but looking from the outside, the door for them to enter MLS seems well and truly shut.
Nobody involved in the U.S. soccer community wants to see a league or individual teams struggle. So many have in the past and unfortunately many will in the future.
With the Cosmos reportedly in dire straits, the reality of the struggle lower-tier teams in the U.S. and Canada are facing is now all of a sudden very real.