Word: soccers
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...many challenges face Women's Professional Soccer (WPS), the new seven-team U.S. league that debuts its five-month season on Sunday? Let's start with a hat trick. First off, the American sports landscape is as crowded as ever, so it's hard for any new entity, no matter what the sport, to carve out its place. Second, soccer in the U.S. has waged an epic losing struggle for market share as a spectator sport. The male pro counterpart, the 13-year old Major League Soccer, is growing steadily, but as a niche player. Third, women's pro leagues...
...what exactly are these soccer execs thinking, kicking off a new women's league during a near-depression? To be fair, WPS announced this current launch date back in August of 2007, when the economy was relatively rosy. "That's life," says Kristine Lilly, a two-time Olympic champ who plays striker for the Boston Breakers (the WPS will also have teams in the Bay Area, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis. A Philadelphia franchise will start next season). "When we made plans to start this league, we didn't think the economy was going...
...promised to learn from the mistakes that its predecessor, the WUSA, committed earlier this decade. Riding a euphoria that followed the U.S. victory in the 1999 World Cup (Brandi Chastain, shirt off), the WUSA's spending habits fit those overreaching times. "The churn rate in women's soccer 1.0 was dot.com-like," says Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. The league, which folded in 2003, budgeted $40 million to finance its first five years of operation. It consumed $100 million in the first three...
Borrowing a trick from MLS, the teams will also play in cozier venues. "For fans it's a more intimate, authentic soccer experience when you're closer to the field, instead of in cavernous environment," says Antonucci. "Plus, it doesn't cost as much to operate and staff a smaller facility." For example, in the WUSA the Washington Freedom played in RFK Stadium, the former home of the Washington Redskins and their 50,000 crazed fans. Now, the Freedom will play at a 5,200-seat soccer complex in Maryland...
Just as important, WPS plans to market the league beyond the ponytail posse, its core fan base of tween and pre-tween girls. "The WUSA was more aspirational for young girls," says Antonucci, a former Yahoo! executive and Stanford soccer player who has worked on the league's relaunch for more than four years. "What we're doing is socially important, but it has to be broader than that." In Boston, for example, the players have headed out to city bars to play pool with twenty-somethings and connect with young adult fans. On Sunday the Chicago Red Stars will...