Engagement with MLS is somewhere close to zero.

Back when I was involved in coaching youth soccer I found the other coaches had never heard of the New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls, L.A. Galaxy, etc.

These folks were fans of man united but had no interest at all in US soccer.

Who knows? Maybe not having lockouts will mean that if some team starts playing well people will be able to watch it. MLS definitely needs something to happen to get people interested but it seems to me they should relegate the whole league.

Our local small-town youth soccer league hosted a tournament over Memorial Day weekend. The nearest MLS team sent a big box truck with their logo painted on it, and set up a bunch of activities and a merchandise tent.

They are definitely working on improving engagement - but perhaps each team is at a different level ;)

Good for them.

As a South American fútbol fan: the <City> <Random GRR word> is very annoying.

Just say “New York Fútbol Club”. See, it breathes already.

Also make way for teams that are just called “Sports Association Firebug” for historically cogent but difficult to parse at first.

A lot of the MLS teams are like this - Atlanta United, Austin FC, Sporting Kansas City, Toronto FC... It feels a bit clunky and "we wanna look more european" in my mind, but MLS is at least split between US and EU style for names.

There's literally "New York City Football Club" in the MLS.

My guess is that those are actually the teams you're least likely to have a lot of fans of. LA, NYC, and Boston all already have massive and influential sports teams. The folks likely to want to watch/know about MLS are in the cities that don't - Kansas City, Austin, to a lesser extent Atlanta or Portland.

MLS is being fairly smart with its expansion and focusing on cities where they're not trying to pull fans away from the NY Yankees or the LA Lakers or whatever. Sure, they still have teams there as well, but the die-hard fans are going to be in the towns where folks are happy to have any team to be excited for.

> not trying to pull fans away from the NY Yankees

In this thread we’ve learned there’s a New York Red Bulls and a New York Football Club.

Correct, but if you look at the MLS in general, they have a lot of teams in under-served cities. The post I was responding to was claiming that the MLS is doing a bad job because there aren't many fans of the NYC teams, which may be true, but A. There's a lot of people in NYC, so even niche things can be popular enough to be a good idea. B. MLS has a lot of well-liked teams that aren't in major areas.

I'm near Orlando and it was a big deal when Orlando City came to town. That excitement has mostly subsided outside of Orlando proper and people are generally back to the Magic / NCAAF / NFL now.

Depends on where you are I think. At my kids soccer games I see lots of coaches and dads wearing Sounders gear.

My local MLS has youth development teams.

Soccer will only benefit from the decline in youth American Football participation.

It doesn't need to challenge NFL or NBA for there to be a lot of success and money made all around. The potential room for growth for MLS is massive in comparison with the other established big leagues that already have reached a saturation point have have less room to grow.

This is why the NHL has spent the last few decades starting up hockey teams in the American South where there's few fans instead of say, Saskatoon, where there'd be a legion of fans. In Saskatoon it's a small market and you'd already be top dog with no growth. In Phoenix you may never reach the other leagues, but even if you can move viewership by a few percentage points, the size of the market ensures massive gains.

Yep. Soccer's breakthrough in the USA has been "just around the corner" since the '80s. No matter how many PLAYSOCCER bumper stickers you shove in people's faces, they still don't care.

As a sport in grade-school, especially for girls, it has blown up. It's just more fun to play than it is to watch.