[HALL OF FAME] More than 30 years after Oneonta, N.Y., hosted the first soccer exhibit, the National Soccer Hall of Fame is closing up shop in the upstate New York town. Plans are in place to distribute the permanent displays and store the archives. As for its 62-acre campus purchased in 1989, the Hall of Fame will seek to transfer title to a local development agency.

American soccer's great players and builders will continue to honored. In January, the Hall announced the election of Thomas Dooley and Preki Radosavljevic as Players and Bruce Arena as a Builder. The Veteran Player will be announced in the coming weeks.

The annual election process will continue without interruption, and the location of specific induction ceremonies will be planned.

Oneonta became known as "Soccertown, USA" following the national championship won by Hartwick College in 1977, and efforts to host historical exhibits about soccer soon followed.

The first museum was located in downtown Oneonta. After land was purchased on the outskirts of town, four world-class soccer fields were built.

In 1995, the Hall was awarded a $4.5 million grant from the State of New York to begin the construction of a dedicated museum on that site. In 1998, the U.S. Soccer Foundation pledged $1 million, and a fundraising campaign generated over $7 million.

Its location close to the Baseball Hall of Fame in nearby Cooperstown made a Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta a natural move, but it never took off.

Attendance never topped 20,000 in a single year, and revenues from admission fees and event and facility revenue never matched expenses. Losses were to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

All but three staff members were laid off last fall.

“The National Soccer Hall of Fame is saddened to be closing our doors in Oneonta, a city and region that has showed great support for both the museum and the sport long before we opened here,” Hall of Fame President Jonathan Ullman said. “Ultimately, we need to move forward in a manner that maximizes our resources and provides the greatest possible access by the public to the history and heroes of the sport, and this is the first step forward in that process.”

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Last summer Soccer America contributor Emily Cohen traveled is to the National Soccer Hall of Fame with her 10-year-old daughter. Here is what they found.

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Should the Soccer Hall of Fame be shut down? Is there a better home than Oneonta? Should it be turned into a traveling museum? Does anyone care? What do you think?