Jump to content
  • Finding the audience


    Duane Rollins

    It almost seems blasphemes to openly worry about CanPL popularity at this point. Suggesting that the league will struggle to find relevance in a crowded sports market is something grumpy old sportswriters, clueless hockey fans and (some) Ottawa Fury fans do.

    The rest of us are all in. True believers in this wonderful project. Planning has been ongoing for five years now. Everything has been put in place to make this thing work.

    But…

    It’s failed before. Twice. First when the NASL blew up in 1984 (although that was more top do with American teams – OK, the New York Cosmos – overspending and ultimately misreading the market. Once the stars left so did the fans. The second time was all on us though. The CSL died on the vine in the 1990s and with it the hopes of nearly two decades of Canadian soccer.

    Those failures are not viewed with nuance by most. Rather, it’s just proof that trying again is foolish and that it’s only a matter of time until it all comes crashing down again.

    If you’re reading this you probably feel that things are different this time. You understand that two of the three NASL teams that didn’t fold (Whitecaps and Toronto Blizzard) were in Canada and both would have continued on if the league had not pulled the plug. It’s appreciated that the CSL was littered with owners who had far more good intentions than actual capital and that the CanPL owners are running in a completely different tax bracket.

    You get all that, but that doesn’t mean that the feeling will be held by the majority of sports fans in this country. Those grumpy sportswriters and broadcasters still hold a lot of influence. The most listened to sports radio show in the country has featured two segments on the latest attempt to start a spring football league in the USA, but not a single word on CanPL.

    We in the soccer community can dismiss the importance of this, but the reality is it’s an obstacle that is going to need to be overcome for the league to thrive.

    Note, I said thrive, not survive. It will survive just fine. The demographics have shifted. The soccer-hating generation is literally dying off. Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that the three MLS teams would have become as important to their market as they have. Now, it’s silly to even suggest that’s going to change. Flash-forward 20 more years and it stands to reason that many of the current CanPL markets, and some we have yet to even conceive, will feel the same way about their soccer team as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal feel about theirs now.   

    But, there will be struggles initially. Struggles to get attention and to get butts in the seats.

    And, make no mistake, those that want the sport to fail – and their remains a few who do – will glory at any struggle the clubs face.

    Hell, even MLS still faces this in certain places. To the point that they had the research firm Boston Consulting research the market in 2015 so that they could grow their fan base. This is useful to CanPL fans in that they also included Canada in the research. Although they did not separate the data, you can draw conclusions of what CanPL will be facing when it comes to getting people to care.

    What they found was that 66% of MLS fans fell into one of two broad categories. The “Soccer enthusiasts”--  highly engaged, soccer-first fans – and the “Hardcore Sports Fan – basically the crazy guy at the end of the bar that can talk in detail about the 1996 Western Regional final in NCAA basketball while filling out his fantasy NFL line-up and watching the Sens play the Hurricanes on a Tuesday night in November

    That guy also likes soccer now. That’s a change over last couple decades.

    The thing is those two groups only account for 32% of all soccer fans. So, MLS is missing out on 68% of its potential market.

    Therein lies the biggest problem for CanPL. How do you avoid the same resistance to MLS that more than 2/3 of American soccer fans have?

    It starts by understanding why that 68% aren’t watching their local team. There the numbers are a little less obvious.

    The inclination of many would be to assume that those fans are so-called “Eurosnobs,” – fans only interested in watching the highest levels of play. However, the MLS research suggests that only 2% of fans fit that description. Related, that 2% account for 98% of the posts on BigSoccer’s US abroad forums.

    Where, then, do the rest fit in? We can only speculate, but it stands to reason that a good chuck are “MexiSnobs” and a good number don’t have a local team to relate to.

    You can’t do much about the ____Snobs fans. They have made up their mind for the most part. But, on the latter point you can absolutely address it. You need to be doing all in your power to make sure that the clubs are extensions of the community they represent.

    MLS does a lot of things right, but they often default to the business side of life. If you talk to a lot of MLS fans they will tell you that their loyalty is to the stand that sit in and the friends that have made at the game over the years more than it is to the franchise that they watch.

    Even as MLS teams do things to become true “clubs” they can’t ever totally shake that “franchise” label. The CanPL has the great advantage of being able to look at everything MLS has done right and everything that it has done wrong.

    And that might allow them to tap into the missing 68% more effectively.  

    Edited by Duane Rollins


    User Feedback

    Recommended Comments

    There are no comments to display.



    Please sign in to comment

    You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



    Sign In Now

  • Image from iOS.jpg

  • Posts

    • Some of the parallels I got collecting the Copa America album. 
    • Didn’t realize today had a full slate of games. Millar, Colyn, Corbeanu, JD, and Kone should all be playing today. 
    • In this thread post match updates on all Canadians for March 29th to April 4th If you find updates posted in some other thread then post them here as well, but be sure to credit the original poster. If there is news that is particularly significant (eg. someone scores a big goal, someone gets injured, etc.) then feel free to begin a new thread on that topic in order to draw greater attention or start a discussion, but also post that news here. Some comments on news posted in this thread are okay, but let's not let this thread go off into a long discussion. If the news already appears in another thread (as per the previous bullet) then post your comments in that other thread, otherwise if you want to say something significant or if it is likely to generate replies then begin a new thread
    • Meanwhile we get 13 lines from Nike.☹️
    • ^^^truly bizarre stuff. My only thought on seeing that tweet was that's more like it if you want to be viewed as a step up from that level, which you should be with close to a seven figure player salary budget and full-time training. Hopefully he won't derail this thread any further by elaborating further with any more of his spite filled mindset.
    • Knight-Lebel on the bench for Bristol City v Leicester 
    • This will be a major blow to that fucking weirdo in London, Ontario. 
    • Alberta already had a preexisting provincial amateur league covering the Edmonton and Calgary areas that are not drastically far from each other geographically. All they had to do was take the clubs with the strongest off field setups from that like Edmonton Scottish and throw in the Calgary Foothills from PDL and some strongly financed youth club and youth academy oriented teams like BTB et voila. In the Maritimes there is no preexisting culture of a shared league so you need to persuade people in Halifax where the strongest soccer culture is located to do a lot more driving to face clubs in places like Charlottetown that may not be an upgrade on what they were doing locally up to now. The less than stellar plan for year two may point to a reluctance to do that amongst the potential participants that would need to buy into the concept to make the whole thing fly.  
    • ^^^will continue to comment on whichever posts I choose to. Posters don't get to dictate who can respond to their posts on a messageboard and that means having to deal with viewpoints that are more representative of the mainstream soccer community in Canada that historically has not been hugely enthused about CSA levies on their registation fees. Pretty much sums it up but something something Steve Cooper something something Carlo Ancelotti because that's what we want to happen and would rather daydream about like a ten year old kid rather than deal with the way things actually are. If they could headhunt a CEO in the shape of Alyson Walker by January why could they not have done that with the CMNT coach position with the coaching hire taking priority in terms of who needs to be able to work with who? Kidding on the CEO is calling the shots on this is a useful way to deflect blame later.
×
×
  • Create New...