When a politician suspends his or her campaign, it effectively means the end of the campaign. Even if it is restarted, all of the momentum generated has been lost and almost impossible to recover. Sports league operations are no different, and especially soccer leagues in the USA. So the news today that Women's Professional Soccer has suspended operations for the 2012 season is very bad.
Even if you put aside the immediate reason for the closure, which is the ongoing legal dispute with magicJack owner Dan Borislow, WPS was in a difficult situation. It started with seven teams in 2009, but only two of those seven were still playing in 2012, and the league was reduced from having a nationwide footprint to a regional one. Now, the Women's Premier Soccer League and W-League are regionally oriented, but neither leagues are billed as the top-flight women's league. Even with the purportedly modest goals of the league, which were to implement a local, grass-roots model, revenues from ticketing, sponsorship, and broadcast fees could not cover league expenses such as payroll, overhead, and stadium operations.
Assuming that WPS does not return for a 2013 season, this will be the second failure of a women's professional soccer league in ten years. I think that many people have forgotten two things related to women's professional sports.
First, public attention devoted to a World Cup or an Olympic soccer tournament, with the best of the best players, is not at all related to what is given to a domestic league, in which the talent level is more diverse. Women's soccer, even more than men's soccer, is an "Olympic sport" in the eyes of the American public, which means that attention is paid during the major tournaments and fades in the interim.
Second, running a women's professional league is really, really difficult. The WNBA is still around after 15 seasons, but they would not have survived two or three seasons without a sugar daddy that is the NBA. As far as I know, the only professional women's sports that are self-sustaining are tennis and golf. Perhaps you could add figure skating to that group, but that's it. Women's soccer does not enough of a broad-based appeal to be self-sustaining, and in North America it doesn't have a men's league that can absorb costs. Perhaps that will change in the future when every MLS team is playing in their own stadium and is starting to turn a profit, but I doubt that any profit will provide enough margin to absorb the kind of losses that a women's soccer team would sustain.
There will be much discussion about which direction to take first, but as Leslie Osborne tweeted this afternoon, this is a sad day.
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