Sunil Gulati Wants to Promote English Soccer More Than American Soccer

The current status of the US Open Cup is kind of a throwback to or holdover from the pre-1990 era USFA/USSFA/USSF: amateurish, muddle-through-ish.

Reserving a spot in the CONCACAF Champions League for the US Open Cup winner is a nice start, but here's a checklist to turning this tournament into something worth watching:

1) Corporate sponsorship,

2) with real prize money worth competing for,

3) and TV coverage equal to MLS at best, or USL at worst,

4) and match scheduling that does not suck,

5) and a permanent home for the US Open Cup final,

6) and a permanent date for said final.

Those last items are worth thinking about. Consider such smallish, but popular, annual sporting events like the Little League World Series, or the College World Series. Would they have amounted to much if these events were moved around every year, from place to place and to different times of the year?

Having a permanent home helps a lot. Now, US Soccer is never going to have its own Wembley, at least not in our lifetimes, but a small stadium (5,000 to 10,000 seats) could work well at the US National Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, NY; they already have a small stadium, it could easily be upgraded into a usable facility for an annual game. Once you know where the final match is going to be held every year, it's a lot easier for people to plan their calendar around it.

Speaking of calendars, it doesn't hurt to pick a date for the final when people are going to have time off, and if it's going to be played in the fall anyway, why not Thanksgiving Day? It's not a weekend so it doesn't interfere with the MLS schedule, and people have that day off anyway, why not give soccer fans a good excuse to get away from family for a change, or to take family on the road? Yes there's lots of college football on that same day, but we got to get over this phobia that we can't even pretend soccer exists during the fall. It does exist, and it is supported, in spite of college and NFL football. It's more important to appeal to the soccer fans out there rather than worrying about what non-soccer fans are going to do (hint: they won't be watching the US Open Cup final no matter when or where it is played, anyway).

Now, as to the games prior to the final....if MLS honored the FIFA international calendar, there would be a lot more weekends during the MLS season when MLS would not be playing due to international competitions, and those weekends would be perfect for US Open Cup matches (would help out the lower level USL sides as they don't have international players anyway).

And whether matches are held on weekends or in midweek, they should be held in the regular MLS stadia (or USL stadia) and not fobbed off on to some distant high school stadia as many MLS clubs are wont to do, and the US Open Cup games should be part of the MLS club's regular season ticket holder packages, ie, they should be fully marketed and sold by MLS as much as by USL, USSF, and any other participants, and not remain an orphan tournament as it is currently.

Anyway just some of my thoughts on the subject.

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Dave: Thanksgiving Day is a non-starter for a permanent Final date. It's not just a college FB day, it's an NFL day, and there's no point in trying to compete with that if you want people to watch.

Labor Day, on the other hand, might work, if you can get the boys in CONCACAF not to schedule the prelim rounds of the Champions League around that time, which might be tough.

But yeah, a corporate sponsor and some TV coverage are exactly what the Open Cup needs. I almost get the sense, though, that MLS is somehow blocking this from happening...

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Dave,

As I've pointed out before, MLS attendance goes UP in the Fall, in spite of the NFL and NCAA football. Your problem is that you are looking at this from the perspective of someone who is primarily a gridiron fan.

The fact is, gridiron is maxed out in its growth potential. There are not going to be any more people watching American football on Thanksgiving Day a year from now, or twenty years from now, than watched it last Thanksgiving Day.

If USSF insists on holding the US Open Cup Final in the Fall, than Thanksgiving Day is no worse than any other day in the Fall, and frankly for scheduling purposes is significantly better.

Labor Day isn't really in the Fall, it's late summer. It has all the same problems that Thanksgiving Day has, in that there are plenty of other distractions.

Again, try to understand, soccer ain't competing against gridiron in this country. It's competing for the attention of the existing soccer fans in this country who aren't following domestic soccer.

Too many people are still thinking in terms of 1970's mass media, where everything is filtered through a handful of Big Media broadcasts. Under such a setup, worrying about "competing" with the NFL was (past tense!) an issue.

Under new media, 21st century style, this simply is not the real issue. NFL and NCAA gridiron shouldn't be anything that the USSF or MLS worry about.

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Being from upstate New York, and in Oneonta right now actually, I can assure you that soccer here on Thanksgiving would be cold and poorly attended. I like the idea of having the final at the National Soccer Hall of Fame - but why not Columbus day? It's close to when the final has been in recent years, and is a minor holiday - lots of people have off from school and work, but don't necessarily have huge plans with family, as they might on Thanksgiving.

It really is a shame, though, that the US Open Cup isn't a bigger deal. It's a great tournament, and has the potential to be a much bigger thing. I hope that a USL team wins it this year and gets to the Champions League, which might wake US Soccer up to the fact that they should show their own tournament some respect.

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Oh, please, not the weather excuse. Put a roof over the stands if you are afraid of the weather.

BTW, the year before last the US Open Cup final was in CHICAGO in the cold, windy fall weather - there weren't many people in the stands, either, in spite of the fact that the Chicago Fire were the home team (and won). So even if games at Oneonta were sparsely attended and cold, that would hardly change the usual way the US Open Cup final game is played, currently. At least holding them at the same place every year would build some continuity.

And when did we become such a nation of wimps? The old ASL played its season right through the winter, in the middle of January and February even, in the northeast, New York and New England included. Gridiron fans in this country have no problems with this sort of weather. Soccer fans in Europe have no problems with this sort of weather. Is it simply that too many US soccer fans are products of youth soccer and Soccer Mom white bread suburbia and are afraid of a little cold? They don't seem to be afraid of it for high school football games on Thanksgiving Day; why is soccer always inundated with these weather wimpout excuses in the US?

We're only talking about a 5,000 seat stadium, I don't even know if there is room for more than that in the existing National Soccer Hall of Fame property; if we can't get 5,000 people from across the USA to attend with a year's advanced notice for an annual event, well, what exactly is the US National Soccer Hall of Fame for? We aren't talking about just locals going to the game, we're talking about drawing from the entire base of the US soccer fandom, once a year, to fill 5,000 seats. If we can't do that, we might as well just call it quits.

And Colombus Day is a Monday, which most people work. It's not midweek (like Thanksgiving) and people aren't going to have the half week off like they do for Thanksgiving. That means you probably are going to be limited to just locals or people within driving distance of Oneonta for a Columbus Day game, and that's probably not going to be enough.

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Labor Day at least has the advantage that more people have that day off; but if you held the game then you'd have to start the entire US Open Cup schedule sooner so as to get the preliminary games out of the way at least a month sooner in the spring/summer.

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