Mr. Gulati: Tear Down These Walls
Mr. President: Please Endorse Our Stimulus Plan for American Club Soccer
Create New Economic Opportunities For Thousands of Americans, Give New Hope to Hundreds of New Communities and Land Us Another World Cup Final.
Help Open Our Leagues.
Dear President Obama:
I am writing you today to ask for your help in opening a bright future for American club soccer. Together, we can cement our bid for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, break our club game out of a century of isolation, infighting, insolvency and underachievement, and create new economic opportunities for thousands of Americans in hundreds of communities.
Mr. President, please endorse our stimulus plan for American club soccer. Join us in our fight against the global isolation that has handicapped it since 1894. Help triple the number of professional clubs. Inspire investors, supporters, communities and players from Kennebunkport to Kauai, and from Santa Fe to Sault Ste. Marie. Enable our professional soccer leagues to reap the demonstrable benefits of the open league model and finally reach their potential here in the United States. It is more than deficit neutral, and will not cost taxpayers a dime.
Reborn in the USA
As a soccer supporter, and a Hammer fan, I know you understand the basic tenants of the open league model. When a club finishes at the top of their league, it moves up to a higher league the next season. It is simple, fair, American, and akin to the rules that most of us hope we operate under in our daily lives. It is also a concept that reality television viewers have embraced by the hundreds of millions.
This open model already jumped nearly every geographic, political, and economic border on the planet. It brought club soccer to unassailable global dominance. Once we gather the political will to embrace it here, the benefits of the open league will be widespread, dramatic, profound, immediate, and permanent.
By granting an unlimited future to every club in every league we will profoundly change the fate of our lower divisions and benefit many smaller American communities. Under the open league model, a third division club with solid financial backing and a sound business model can reach first division status in just two years. The effects of this change on investors will be immediate. New capital will flow into the system as they jump at the chance to get in on the ground floor of our newly opened pyramid. As it triples in size, communities large and small will benefit.
Opportunities for American players and coaches will expand in parallel. We will finally build a bridge from professional soccer to the unrivaled youth participation that we have enjoyed for a quarter century.
Despite fear mongering, hysterical claims of cultural incompatibility, the admitted fragility of MLS, and owner’s addiction to the entitlements of our closed league model, the benefits to our first division will be no less significant. Our new system will remove the performance ceilings that MLS imposes on their own clubs through the restrictive policies of their micromanaged single-entity system. As a result, our top clubs will be freed to reach their national, hemispheric, or even global, destiny.
No longer will the success of our clubs be bound by protectionist league policies. We will finally end a century of bankruptcies, reorganizations, and debilitating league micromanagement. We will found a new system in which independent clubs vie for places in a stable, sanctioned framework of open leagues.
Ain’t This America
Our goal is the revitalization of American club soccer through the implementation of promotion, relegation, and free and independent clubs, not the blind adoption of European values.
We do not advocate open league soccer for the USA because we guzzle beer for a few October days in our lederhosen, prefer bidets, like to wear socks and sandals together, or enjoy parading around in our Speedos. We do oppose Major League Soccer policies that artificially limit quality of play through a series of anticompetitive measures. We believe our clubs should be allowed to progress as far as owners, players and supporters take them, not as far as any league allows them. After opening our leagues, American clubs will win their first games on Mexican soil – and advance in the FIFA Club World Cup.
Although it is true that no major professional American sport has ever embraced an open league model, there is precedent for a pragmatic approach in which closed and open leagues prosper side by side. In the early 1990s, after their professional soccer struggled under a closed league model, Japan reformed their soccer league system and embraced an open league model with independent clubs. Since then, their league has exploded in popularity, and their national team has risen to new heights - alongside an equally successful closed baseball league.
Unblinded By the Light
The need for change is in the numbers.
MLS, like their closed league predecessors and contemporaries, falls far short of reaching the potential of the American soccer market. In 2006, World Cup matches drew larger television audiences than World Series and NBA Finals games. Today, European club friendlies draw sellout crowds in American cities. We are currently enjoying a third consecutive decade of record youth participation. Our national teams have progressed further in international tournaments than ever before. Despite all of this evidence of a large market for club soccer, the popularity of our leagues remains stagnant. MLS Cup games lag far behind international matches in television ratings and regular season viewers are often measured in the thousands. MLS average attendance records were set way back in 1996.
Despite the dramatic successes of the open league to supporters, players, communities and investors all over the world, a long line of American soccer league executives cannot see outside of their closed league box. For over a century they have chosen infighting, bankruptcy, insolvency, reorganization, micromanagement and ultimate failure over the adoption of open leagues.
It doesn’t have to stay this way.
With your support, we can help all American soccer supporters see the light, and finally bring the benefits of our free market system to bear on our professional club soccer. Please endorse our plan today. By doing so, you will land one of the next two World Cups, promote local economic development, and help our game finally reach its vast potential here in the United States.
Thank you for your all of your efforts to land the 2018 or 2022 World Cup Final. Should you succeed, I am sure you will encourage the growth of the sport here in the USA.
Most Sincerely,
Ted Westervelt
SoccerReform.us
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