Major league baseball is in trouble … in Florida.
Major League Soccer is in trouble … in the sense that Chivas USA might move at some point.
When you’re worrying about individual teams instead of a league, you’re at a stage women’s soccer has yet to reach in this country.
So when Sunil Gulati says they’re looking at 11 possible owners in 10 possible markets, that could mean this league is operating with more margin of error than leagues in the past. (Jeff Kassouf looks at the geography; Jeff DiVeronica confirms Western New York as one of the interested parties.) The WUSA had eight teams. WPS struggled to reach that total and was scraping for owners in its last couple of seasons.
That could be a preliminary number, of course. Perhaps, like so many WPS expansion candidates, some of these owners will be ephemeral. Or maybe the optimists will win out here, and the new business plan is winning over prospective owners.
The business plan is surely as reasonable as it’s going to get, particularly with U.S. Soccer backing this league more explicitly than it has in the past.
Duresport.com 