Yes, and I also think soccer will have to become a much bigger NCAA sport before MLS can get into the top tier. The NCAA develop fans as much as it develops players.Originally Posted by ManUtd4ever
Yes, and I also think soccer will have to become a much bigger NCAA sport before MLS can get into the top tier. The NCAA develop fans as much as it develops players.
It also really annoys me when people complain about sports or actors getting paid millions.
When you become the top 1% in the world for any skill in any category, you will get paid according to it.
Top 1% of photographers aren't, Top 1% of research scientists aren't, Top 1% of Academics aren't.
We pay more to people that can kick a ball than we do to people that can save the world, cure disease, bring cleaner more efficient items to us. If US sport Salaries were limited to 150,000 a year you could take the remainder and raise every person in the US above the poverty line. That is how much the US spends on Sports. It is a nation that puts brawn over brain. Europe is a little but not much better in that there is only one really high paying sport, though Hockey isn't far behind. The US has 3.5 major sports that they do this with. Heck the US cares about Brain so little that College Athletes make no money while the schools get all the revenue, literally exploiting people who should be getting an education to brawn.
Also I was just making a statement on the worth on the talent, it wasn't an argument per say, just an opinion.
This argument over player salaries and such is so old and the ship has sailed on it. At one point a sports salary was pretty close in line with the rest of the work force. For insatance in 1970 the average NFL salary was $23K, the minamun salary even in 1982 was $20K. First came the labour stoppages and then ultimately TV money blew things up.
Remember The Man, The Legend, The Goal 5-12-07 and All That #9 Left On The Pitch, Thanks For The Memories !!!
Top research scientists end up getting patents on compounds and/or getting very lucrative offers from major pharma/investment companies. Top academics become presidents of universities and consultants on top project.
Photographers your likely right (i have no idea who pays well in that industry). In the end you are paid based on what people can make off you unless you own the organization, once you cap $$ you cap ambition.
top photographers make money.
she might not be the best...but she's very well known.
Full Name : Anna-Lou Leibovitz
Occupation : Photographer
Industry : Entertainment, Fashion & Retail
Networth : $ 20 Million
who is going to be the QB for the argos this year?
Please tell me this wasn't a serious post.
“What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.”
Didn't she declare bankruptcy at one point?
I see the growth of the league as an S-curve in terms of growth. Right now so long as expansion is occurring, the salary cap growth rate of the league will remain high at between 5-10%. But once all the teams have joined (28-32 range) the rate of cap increase will slow to something approaching inflation. What will drive costs at that point will be the overall quality of the domestic player. That will drive up salaries as other national leagues compete with them. Over the long term (next 25-50 years), I can see MLS being bigger and more competitive than any other league in the world other than the Premier League only because PL teams don't have limits on how much domestic talent they have to field. La Liga doesn't have enough owners with deep pockets beyond Barca and Real Madrid to have an overall high league quality. Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 have only 1/4-1/5th of the US population base and in the long term won't be able to keep up with US development once the Americans get really serious about soccer.
she did.
i had no idea.
but that doesn't mean money wasn't coming in...she just didn't manage it well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_...ncial_troubles
and this has nothing to do with this thread.
I'm equally guilty of going off track.
Last edited by Wagner; 01-11-2016 at 01:29 PM.
Are many Americans really serious about it, though? Sure, lots of suburban Americans sign up their kids for soccer but have many high school soccer teams started to rival football teams in popularity?
We're not talking about players here, though, we're talking about fans, and how many MLS will have in years to come. It may be tougher to increase the fan base than we think. But as I've said, so what? This discussion started with people slagging the CFL and I son't really understand that. Sure, it's not the top league in its sport but so what? MLS may be like the CFL forever - not a top league but one with a big enough fanbase to keep it going. We just want MLS to have more teams and fanbases like Saskatchewan rather than Toronto.
Your football experience is very different from mine. I don't know anyone who follows or watches CFL.
The people I know who go to CFL games are the ones who get free tickets. And even then, I had a friend on Facebook who came into 20 free Argo tickets (a group trip got cancelled)...free and only 2 people jumped on the opportunity to go. Both of whom only went for something to do on a cold rainy day, not because they were CFL/Argo fans
I think that's the 4th time in this thread alone that I've seen that pic.
Yeah sorry, was first time I saw it. Thought it was brand new, since they just uploaded it on facebook. Looked it up and saw it posted before. I took it down. I hadn't followed this thread since it got has many pages
Simple colour change and they are projecting the blue to be people not the colour of the stadium.
Ricky Ray. But don't rule out them signing some marquee NFL QB at the last minute.
The reallity is we will have no idea how BMO will look, the condition of the field from both a cosmetic and physical stand point will be until we all walk into the stadium and see it for ourselves. Once games are being played the true story will be told.
Remember The Man, The Legend, The Goal 5-12-07 and All That #9 Left On The Pitch, Thanks For The Memories !!!
You live in Oakville, which I like but that is not the city. I see people wearing TFC gear on pretty much a daily basis. I live in the beaches, have an office at Yonge and Sheppard and go all over the GTA and southern Ontario. I hardly ever see any Argo gear. and I am not anti-Argo or CFL at all, quite to the contrary. I also think that lots of CFL fans, including me, do not follow the NFL, and most NFL fans have no interest in the CFL they see it as a minor league. I used to be huge into Football, I came here at 15 was a big kid and soccer was shit, so I started following the NFL. But I always loved the CFl because of its Canadian tradition, and got tiered of the NFL, because it has gone away from the smash mouth into the flash, and I just do not like it. Plus in the past 10 years I have followed footy, the real one almost exclusively (Serie A and TFC in particular).
But going back on the subject, I take note of TFC gear and as I sadi I see it every day. I also notice when someone were Argo gear, and I see it once a month at best.
Yes, I remember before the Alouettes folded they couldn't give the tickets away. Then they were the Concordes for a few years and they couldn't give those tickets away, either. Even this new incarnation of the Als would probably have folded, too, if they hadn't gotten lucky and been forced to play at McGill stadium.
It may be too late for the Argos to benefit from a better stadium the way the Als did. There may be a one year bump because of the novelty and then it'll fade. Who knows? Maybe now that the Bills have been sold and it looks like an existing NFL team will be moving to LA there will be no more talk of the NFL to Toronto so if anyone does want to see football it'll have to be the Argos. Even that may not be enough to sell many tickets.
The whole CFL east has been on precarious ground for the last few decades. I remember Hamilton almost folding in the mid 1990s. Ottawa has been resurrected twice in the last 15 years. And Montreal, there is no way they are making a profit, just existing.
More like they had over a decade of Calvillo providing them with a playoff calibre team. My understanding is Al's attendance was shaky this past season. Montreal is a Habs town that will go to whoever happens to be winning and having a good time.
Its why I think Drogba possibly/probably not going back to the Impact is HUGE for them.
Winning certainly helps, but can a city that big really only support one team in one sport? Football is very popular in Quebec at the university level, too. I was in high school in Quebec in the 70s when football died, my last season we played 8-man because there weren't enough players for full teams. CEGEP and the French universities didn't have teams. But in the early 80s it started up again at the youth levels and kept growing.
25,000 people 8 times a year seems easy in a city as big as Montreal and it will probably be easy to get that in Toronto, too, although there is more competition for the sports dollars here. 25,000 people 15 times a year for MLS games should be easy, too, but you may be right, it may not happen this year.
Montreal as a sports city is a very different animal, there teams bottom line lives and dies with how the team is performing. Even the Habs feel it in the wallet and in attendence when they are down in the dumps like they have been in the past.
Remember The Man, The Legend, The Goal 5-12-07 and All That #9 Left On The Pitch, Thanks For The Memories !!!
Not going to debate this because of how much you contribute on these boards but there are loads of people, philosophers etc etc who disagree with your point, many of whom are not stupid.
worth repeating.
Most of peoples' position in life has very little to do with objective merit. I make a living (barely) in a field where 90% of the top earners are doing so because they actively cheat and deceive the public (via fake and purchased reviews for books). Morality is, intrinsically, a measure of what society will accept, and if they're caught, they'll lose their big meal ticket. But another cheat will just replace them, because the market for ebooks is flooded and anyone can publish.
I knew a cop who never made more than 60,000 a year in his career before he retired, and had the ignominy of living across the street in a subdivision from one of the biggest dealers in the city. He got to wake up every morning and see that this guy was basically untouchable and made more in a day for selling crack and meth via his many underlings than this cop did in a year. He got to see a house twice the size, a trophy model wife, the dealer's kids going off to private school while his schlepped the bus a half-hour to a public school.
Life, unfortunately, is not a meritocracy.
I got on the soapbox a page or two back about why TFC have greater future prospects than the Argonauts and why nothing should ever be done to diminish the perception that BMO Field is first, foremost and always a soccer stadium. This, coming from someone who grew up loving the Argos.
My instinct in this is shaped by many years of roaming the city in both a personal and professional capacity with sports. Having a family has certainly made it clear which of soccer or football is foremost in the minds of the young, desirable audience that any sport strives for. That's your future. That's who's buying tomorrow's tickets. That's who commercial sponsors will be marketing to.
Just take a wander any weeknight to any playing fields in the 416 or nearby environs and it's soccer mad. My own experiences have taken me to parks with multiple pitches like Lamoureux, McLevin(Abbas Ali), Eglinton Flats, Eglinton Park(N Toronto), Downsview, Ashtonbee Reservoir, Sunnybrook, Centennial, Summerlea, Carmine Stefano, North York Civic/Esther Shiner, G. Ross Lord, Richview, Bluehaven, Rememberto Navia, Flemingdon, Jim McPherson, Clairlea, Ellesmere Reservoir and Wanita plus many school fields or single field parks like Dieppe, Highview, Earlscourt and on and on.
Plus multi-pitch venues on the outskirts like Bay Ridges, Vaughan Grove, Mt. Joy, Hershey Centre-Icelands complex.
It's insane how many people are involved. Try getting a parking space near the field most nights. Try finding open area for kids to warm up before a game. Try finding open space to conduct practices. Toronto is absolutely soccer saturated and approaching a point where you could call it a crisis as space on teams or house leagues begins to get tight.
This isn't new nor is it news. It's been going on for generations. Nothing but growth. Given this country's immigration policies and trends, you can be sure it's tailored for even more growth to come. You can't say that about Canadian football in Toronto.
If you're a parent, you can't remotely consider letting youngsters indulge in full-contact tackle football. Not with all the emerging data on head injuries from heavy contact sports like football. Not with highlight reels this week showing Vontaze Burfict in full-on rage mode against the Steelers. So when kids finally get involved with football, it likely isn't until junior high or high school. At that point, you're starting with a tiny percentage of participants compared to those who began playing soccer years before and are still playing. Those football playing opportunities are dwindling as high schools continue to drop the game from their intramural curriculums.
Where the CFL absolutely loses is that when/if kids do take up an interest in football, the CFL is absolutely drowned out by the NFL's multi-platform media machine. It's this huge, sexy beast full of charismatic superstars and highlight reel plays that get blasted all over the US and Canadian media and utterly dwarf anything the CFL can offer.
Sure, you can say that MLS and TFC pale in comparison to the top European leagues. But they're not here, on our doorstep, to offer a live, attendable alternative. MLS is the only choice for those wanting a live-game experience. And so far, it would seem sports fans in this city have endorsed TFC in the most vital manner possible - with their wallets. They buy TFC tickets and merchandise, they show up and they support vociferously.
All this while the team has largely been a complete pooch on the pitch and no one's sweetheart in the media.
You don't see TFC or MLS being propped up the way Toronto Sun features the CFL on multiple pages every week or TSN goes about nibbling the toes of the CFL, with pre- and post-game shows, nightly in-depth or situational reports and highlights galore. MLS on TSN means stark, spartan game coverage and then? Boom - straight into another vital program like the 50 Most Nonsensical Refs Calls of The Past Year. None of the build up or follow up, none of the mid-week analysis, no playoff previews. Nothing to capture or build a soccer audience the way they coddle the CFL.
It has all the appearance of a grumpy associate doing a deliberately shabby job.
There's all manner of ballyhoo that playing in the Rogers Centre worked against the Argos. Yeah, well, that situation also isn't new or news. But if the so-called Argos fans love the league so much, how come they never turned out to at least say thanks and show appreciation after the team won the Greh Cup in 2012? Season tickets dropped below 4,000 soon after. Last season's attendance was absolutely hilarious but it wasn't like it was a dramatic drop from the previous two years. Is it because everyday sports fans were cynical and skeptical about how bogus the 2012 cup victory looked after that inexplicable trade that sent top QB Ricky Ray from Edmonton to Toronto?
In 1983, the Argos won their first cup in 33 years and the victory parade absolutely paralyzed the downtown core for hours as a crowd close to 100,000 jammed the route from start to finish. You can look it up. It was mental. I was there. Ticker-tape cascading down on Bay St., fans lined so deep the vehicles couldn't get through without cops opening temporary gaps, fans piling onto the cars to hug or kiss players. It was like the war just ended.
In 2012, I went back to see how that parade crowd compared. It was stunning. Not much more than a couple of thousand thinly strung along Bay St., many of those simply curious bystanders, stopped for a moment, then walking along in the opposite direction as they headed somewhere else or just caught up in a delay as they waited to cross the road. Can't blame them. The reward at the end of the route was the cruel and unusual sight of Rob Ford and his Don Bosco Bozos sharing the stage area with the cup.
I was sad for the club but here was the clearest evidence that despite all media tub thumping for the Argos, they had simply lost the attention and interest of the city. It wasn't just that they weren't interested in the Argos, they weren't interested in the CFL period. It just isn't a big enough prize anymore in a city accustomed to its other pro teams playing the best from across the continent.
TFC, MLS and the game of soccer are moving in all the right ways to grow and develop sound foundations for decades to come. The work done to bring in top talent has improved the quality of play annually and this year earned the club international recognition with Giovinco's image appearing all over European media as he continues to play well and remain a part of the Italian team heading to Euro 2016. The fact that TFC can feature such promising home grown talent like Osorio, Chapman, Morgan, with many others in development at the academy and TFC II only promises better things to come for club and country.
Soccer fans get this. Even those fan boys that love to wear shirts of trendy Euro sides like Barca, Juve, Bayern or (shudder) Chelsea and talk down about MLS still show up at BMO Field when the going gets good. Once TFC begin winning consistently, that will become much less of an issue. They have it in them to be giants in this city. One title will bring back the Bay St. madness described above.
You can't say that about the Argos and never will. No matter how much love and money the TSN/Tannenbaum axis drop on them, it won't change anything. The perception is that their stewardship is simply a caretaking job to let the NFL come to Toronto someday. How sickening must that be for die-hard CFL fans?
Nothing in that mandate says BMO Field should be changed in any way to alter the long-established designation that first, foremost and always it is a soccer stadium. One forced by politics to stretch to accommodate shambling, hard-up renters who've been kicked out of their parents basement.
MLSE have a good thing going with TFC. As long as they don't piss off the soccer fans who have been, and can forever be, the best friends BMO Field could ever hope for. Screw it up again with soccer fans and they will be very hard to retrieve.
Last edited by greatwhitenorf; 01-12-2016 at 03:07 AM.
/endinternet.
There's always a comparison that is wilder than the one you are making.
If you think society overspends on sports, what do you think of the fact that people spend more on lotteries than all other forms of entertainment combined (including sports)?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...-shame/392870/
btw powerball prize is $1.4B tomorrow night. If someone here won that, they could buy TFC and BMO and solve this thing
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/10/no-wi...worth-13b.html
Last edited by ensco; 01-12-2016 at 07:22 AM.
“What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.”
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