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Long story short<\/a>: Atlanta was awarded a Major League Soccer team.\u00a0 They will become the 22nd<\/sup>\u00a0team in Major League Soccer.<\/span><\/p>\n This is cool and all, and I\u2019m all for Atlanta having more professional sports teams.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t help but feel mixed feelings about the whole end game as a whole, and question whether or not they\u2019ll actually succeed.\u00a0 If the end result is an embarrassing sell and relocate, like the old NHL Atlanta Thrashers, then honestly I\u2019d rather this not come to fruition at all, because although many believe it\u2019s better to try and fail than to not try at all, in this case I think it\u2019s questionable to try, if there\u2019s too much uphill struggle.<\/span><\/p>\n Simply put, I do believe there\u2019s a massive uphill challenge of starting a Major League Soccer team in Atlanta.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If it\u2019s not football, people in Atlanta will have a hard time caring about it.\u00a0 Doubly, if they\u2019re 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\u2019re not successful.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019 marketing plan revolves around the star power of opposing teams\u2019 players, should all be definite red flags to how the actual city of Atlanta might treat an MLS soccer franchise.<\/span><\/p>\n The city bent over backwards and ate their own assholes to accommodate the Falcons, who have accomplished absolutely nothing in their entire franchise\u2019s existence, for no other reason that they\u2019re a football team.\u00a0 However, the Braves, one Major League Baseball\u2019s most storied franchises with a long history of success, one world championship, as well as being America\u2019s Fucking Pastime is pretty much told that football comes first, and if they want to relocate outside of Atlanta, that they\u2019re free to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n I really hope that whatever happens with Atlanta\u2019s future MLS team, that they start off hot, and generate a lot of interest, because that\u2019s pretty much going to be a defining point on the team\u2019s overall survival.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s squad.<\/span><\/p>\n I remember these games vividly, because the Mexico vs. Nigeria game wasn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Hispanic people wanting to represent their native countries and support their countries\u2019 national teams does not guarantee that they are going to automatically support a local soccer team.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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\u2019s most popular sport.<\/span><\/p>\n But not to be\u00a0too<\/em>\u00a0much of a downer on this parade; seriously, I really would like to see an MLS team succeed, but I just don\u2019t have much hope.\u00a0 But if there\u2019s 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\u2019re intellectual, and liberal markets; for whatever reason, these are the types of people that seem to enjoy MLS action.\u00a0 Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Washington D.C. come to mind immediately.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Regardless, I\u2019m hoping for the best, but given Atlanta\u2019s track record in dealing with sports that aren\u2019t football, I can\u2019t say that I\u2019m very optimistic.\u00a0 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\u2019s going to be a challenge to find a place that\u2019s both convenient and not too sketchy to where it deters people like the area surrounding Turner Field does.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cfutbol\u201d thinking it\u2019s \u201cfootball?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long story short: Atlanta was awarded a Major League Soccer team.\u00a0 They will become the 22nd\u00a0team in Major League Soccer. This is cool and all, and I\u2019m all for Atlanta having more professional sports teams.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t help but feel mixed feelings about the whole end game as a whole, and question whether or … Continue reading Atlanta and the pursuit of professional soccer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[164,15,143,58],"class_list":["post-38926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-futbol","tag-og","tag-ohatlanta","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38928,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38926\/revisions\/38928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}