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Goodbye, Columbus? Major League Soccer Club Grows As Greedy As NFL, NBA Teams

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This article is more than 6 years old.

Well, it’s finally happened: A Major League Soccer team has earned equal standing with franchises from the four major professional sports leagues in America –  and not in a good way.

An MLS club, the Crew, is pressing the cities of Columbus and Austin to build the franchise a new stadium. This is the sort of manipulative behavior we see regularly from owners of teams in the National Football League, or the National Basketball Association. Columbus Crew owner Anthony Precourt apparently believes he has the same leverage as owners from those more established leagues, even though that notion may be misguided.

In short: Precourt is threatening to leave Columbus unless he gets a downtown stadium to replace 18-year-old Mapfre Stadium, the first soccer-specific building constructed for an MLS team.

The “old” stadium is not a great beauty – more like an erector set than a piece of architecture – and it is located on the city’s outskirts, on the Ohio State Fairgrounds. Still, it represented something of a breakthrough when it was built not long ago, a loving, modest, $28.5 million gift to the sport from Lamar Hunt, the late billionaire and former Crew owner. The stadium remains fully functional, with a capacity of around 20,000. The U.S. national team plays one important qualifying match there against Mexico during every World Cup cycle.

But Precourt has been flirting with Austin, Texas, which really isn’t certain it wants to build him a new stadium, either. He is refusing to refund season-ticket payments to Crew fans, who have grown understandably angry with the mind games he is playing.

This whole affair represents a real escalation of civic war by an MLS team. Yes, in the past, expansion MLS franchises – such as New York City FC and Miami have met opposition to building new stadiums from the local populace. A more established club, D.C. United, managed to get one done in Washington after more than a decade of squabbling. Never before, however, has an MLS team threatened to move out of a soccer-specific stadium that was built for that franchise. The league would seem to be too young for such nomadic conduct.

Precourt may well be a bit delusional about support for an MLS team in Austin, and Texas in general. Out of the 22 teams in the league, the Houston Dynamo ranks 17th in attendance while FC Dallas ranks dead last. (Columbus is between them at 20th, with an average crowd of 15,439.) Lower-division clubs based in Austin have folded for lack of support, and the city’s mayor, Steve Adler, is predicting that Austin will not pay for a new stadium.

Still, Precourt is plowing straight ahead with his plan/threat to head south, to a city with a similar, sub-million population as Columbus. He claims this is a very promising migration.

“Did you anticipate that Atlanta would be a good soccer market a year ago?” he asked The Austin Statesman. “Did you anticipate Orlando would be a good soccer market a few years ago? Portland?”

The Atlanta metro area, it should be noted, has a population of nearly six million – almost triple the size of Austin's – and there was no other MLS team in proximity of the expansion club. Orlando and Portland, too, have their own unique characteristics that separate them from Austin – which, like Columbus, is a college town committed to its university’s football and basketball teams.

In any case, this has become a considerable embarrassment for the league and for Commissioner Don Garber. The Independent Supporters Council, a group composed of fans from all MLS franchises, has petitioned Garber to keep the Crew in Columbus. The supporters understand, better than anyone, how this sort of thing can spread to other franchises and become the norm, rather than the exception.

Over the years, MLS teams have found it far easier to free up land for stadiums in the suburbs, rather than downtown. That’s why datelines for matches read Commerce, Colo.; Harrison, N.J.; Sandy, Utah; Bridgeview, Ill.; Chester, Pa.; and Carson, Calif., rather than Denver, Newark, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

It’s not easy, and not cheap, to build in big cities. Even when the owner is willing to pick up the tab for construction, taxpayers don't necessarily want to donate prime land and pay for infrastructure costs. Inevitably, however, there will be franchise shifts in any professional sports league, young or established. Hunt once moved his Dallas Texans of the American Football League to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs, and where they now remain.

Columbus Crew supporters are getting the same harsh treatment once afforded fans of the San Diego Chargers, the Seattle SuperSonics, the Atlanta Thrashers and the Montreal Expos. It’s just that MLS doesn’t seem big enough, quite yet, to big-foot anyone.