Long story short: Atlanta was awarded a Major League Soccer team. They will become the 22nd team in Major League Soccer.
This is cool and all, and I’m all for Atlanta having more professional sports teams. But I can’t help but feel mixed feelings about the whole end game as a whole, and question whether or not they’ll actually succeed. If the end result is an embarrassing sell and relocate, like the old NHL Atlanta Thrashers, then honestly I’d rather this not come to fruition at all, because although many believe it’s better to try and fail than to not try at all, in this case I think it’s questionable to try, if there’s too much uphill struggle.
Simply put, I do believe there’s a massive uphill challenge of starting a Major League Soccer team in Atlanta. Sure, Atlanta is a major market in the country and major markets should be represented in as many ways as possible, but this all goes back to the unfortunate circumstance that, Atlanta is a football town, first and foremost, full stop.
If it’s not football, people in Atlanta will have a hard time caring about it. Doubly, if they’re not actually in the upper echelon of MLS standings, because Atlanta sports fans are horrendously fairweathered and vanish at the drop of a hat if they’re not successful.
The embarrassing departure of the NHL Thrashers, and the tragic (to me) way Atlanta treated the MLB Braves, prompting them to move outside of city limits into Cobb County, and that the NBA Hawks’ marketing plan revolves around the star power of opposing teams’ players, should all be definite red flags to how the actual city of Atlanta might treat an MLS soccer franchise.
The city bent over backwards and ate their own assholes to accommodate the Falcons, who have accomplished absolutely nothing in their entire franchise’s existence, for no other reason that they’re a football team. However, the Braves, one Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises with a long history of success, one world championship, as well as being America’s Fucking Pastime is pretty much told that football comes first, and if they want to relocate outside of Atlanta, that they’re free to do so.
I really hope that whatever happens with Atlanta’s future MLS team, that they start off hot, and generate a lot of interest, because that’s pretty much going to be a defining point on the team’s overall survival. If they start off slow, lose several of their first few matches, and fall into the MLS cellar, then Atlanta may as well start the clock to when another, hungrier city offers to buy and pull them out of Atlanta.
One thing that concerns me is that several news outlets appear to believe that the success of a few international friendlies that occurred in Atlanta is justification enough that Atlanta is the type of city that really really wants a professional soccer team. They seem to have ignored the obvious fact that the games that turned out to be massively big deals involved international squads representing entire Latin American countries, and that the 60,000+ fans that showed up to each of these games were mostly people of such Latin American heritage, supporting their country’s squad.
I remember these games vividly, because the Mexico vs. Nigeria game wasn’t that long ago, and I remember foolishly passing through downtown as thousands of obvious Mexican people wearing Mexican flags and colors were boisterously on their way to the Georgia Dome. A few years ago when Venezuela had a match, I remember being literally stuck in my parking garage, because the backlog of the cars caused by the infinite number of Hispanic people pouring out of Gwinnett County onto the highways of Atlanta really suffocated things all the way to where I was sitting in my own parking garage.
Hispanic people wanting to represent their native countries and support their countries’ national teams does not guarantee that they are going to automatically support a local soccer team. It’s extremely easy in this day and age to get Univision or BBC and watch vastly superior talented soccer teams play in South America and Europe, as opposed to watching MLS, which is still well below the talent curve of the world’s most popular sport.
But not to be too much of a downer on this parade; seriously, I really would like to see an MLS team succeed, but I just don’t have much hope. But if there’s one thing that I have noticed throughout my travels is that MLS teams tend to find some niche success in cities that are typically known for having hipsters, people who think they’re intellectual, and liberal markets; for whatever reason, these are the types of people that seem to enjoy MLS action. Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Washington D.C. come to mind immediately. These are markets that also have MLS clubs, that enjoy satisfactory success, and Atlanta kind of has all of the above, that may respond to the creation of an MLS squad here as well.
Regardless, I’m hoping for the best, but given Atlanta’s track record in dealing with sports that aren’t football, I can’t say that I’m very optimistic. I guess it also depends on where their supposed stadium is going to be built, which given the nature of the already clusterfuck highways we already have, it’s going to be a challenge to find a place that’s both convenient and not too sketchy to where it deters people like the area surrounding Turner Field does.
I wonder how much initial success the yet-to-be-named team will get by virtue of the honest mistake people will inevitably make when hearing “futbol” thinking it’s “football?”
