The NWSL just got rid of their draft. Who knows if we’ll see other leagues do the same.
A draft is tricky when it comes to soccer. It might create parity for the league as a whole, but it will also hold the league as a whole back. It works for the NBA and NHL because those are the best leagues in the world and players already playing pro abroad want to come to the US to play in them. That would not be the case for any pro US soccer league.
In addition many of the worlds best prospects are coming from a US college for the NBA/NHL. With soccer, the best prospects don’t attend college - they begin pro development at a young age. The US amateur model is fundamentally one of the things that prevents the US from competing globally in the sport.
The MLS draft is only for NCAA players right? I seem to remember a weird system where certain clubs call dibs on a certain potential international transfer player? With NIL… maybe the time is to shift away from a draft? I don’t know the answer but its certainly complicated.
@Brandonq Yeah, the absolute best-case scenario here is that this ends with an MLS-USL merger with the existing MLS teams getting all of the top-tier slots to start and having resources that would help them continue to field the best teams. But as long as this ends with promotion and relegation in the U.S. and North Carolina FC in the pyramid without having to cough up hundreds of millions in expansion fees, then that’s a massive win for the franchise. You can always play your way up from there.
There’s a long history of upstart professional sports leagues that went out of business because the incumbent stole all of their best ideas. But USL’s best idea is promotion and relegation (although combining the men’s and women’s operations is also a fantastic idea), and you can’t have P&R without a pyramid, and you can’t create a pyramid without inviting the existing USL teams to make up the second and third tiers. So if MLS steals this idea, that’s a victory for the USL.
No. You can think of P&R and the closed-shop draft that the big four American leagues run as two different, incompatible, ways of dealing with the fact that each year some teams will be good and some teams won’t be. You can’t really have them both. And with P&R, the teams near the bottom of the table already have a tremendous incentive not to tank. Tanking is not a problem like it is in the NBA, etc.
Yeah, recently the P&R scrums in England have been mostly contested by a small number of yo-yo teams, but that’s not what you see in most countries, or even in England until recently, and I don’t think it’s what you’d see in the U.S. There’s nothing comparable to the Big Six here, either, so I think you’d see more diversity in the top of the table from year to year, you’d see some teams getting to the top tier and sticking, and you’d probably have a much wider diversity of teams getting promoted from year to year, and that means you’d have some teams coming up for a year or two, and then dropping back down to the mid-table of the second tier for a longer period.
Nice! I just went to a Red Wings game in Detroit last week - nicest indoor arena I’ve ever been to. Hopefully the new experience (beyond this simpler Phase 1, obviously) comes close to that.
Amazing concourses that feel like city streets, great lighting and and AV systems, and super steeply raked seats so you feel like you’re right on top of the ice.
I got to go to Little Caesars Arena the first season it opened. It’s definitely the best indoor venue I’ve been to as well. Unfortunately I doubt Lenovo Center will come close to how nice it is. But none the less, the upgrades coming are exciting.
Bunker Suites… are there really people who would deal with the hassle of traffic and parking just to go to a room basically in the basement under the lower bowl and sit in a room with no view and no windows?
They’ll have access to seats in the first few rows of the ice. I’m sorta imagining it as a similar experience to the Legends Club but more private (and expensive).
So if you care about the game, you go to the bunker for pre-game and intermissions. If you don’t care about the game you stay in there during the periods.
Yeah, I like the Lenovo Legends Club area (pay a premium for more room in what’s essentially a private concourse with easier access to concessions and restrooms), but I really don’t get the appeal of the Bunker Suites.
Similar to the on field suites at NFL or college games. You basically retreat into a cave and walk right out into the closest view you can get. Never good for watching all the plays unfold, but it does feel like you are participating in the game when you walk out at that level, which would be similar for folks here walking out onto the area of seats right behind the glass.
So, it appears that Raleigh was a bonus for luring Will Wade to NC State. He mentioned it in his statement.
Then again, we were competing with Lake Charles, LA. It’s hardly a contest. If he could get and develop talent at McNeese THERE, then I have high hopes for the Wolfpack.
