This week, the 30-team MLS announced that Larry Berg will succeed commissioner Don Garber, who took the helm in 1999 when MLS fielded 12 teams. We went back 27 years into our archives to revisit the expectations that greeted Garber.
• In Garber’s challenge: views from the ranks, Ridge Mahoney surveyed the likes of Alan Rothenberg, Clark Hunt and Bruce Arena. Responses included:
Arena: “The marketing part has to get a lot better. In some of the cities it’s very weak. … By making this move, the investors have shown they’re in it for the long haul. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have made this change.”
Hunt: “We do not have a sufficiently large national footprint with only 12 teams, and the only way to increase that is through expansion, which will in turn help the TV ratings.”
Rothenberg: “Soccer is not new; it’s more how we market ourselves and position ourselves. I’m sure the experience he gained there is not going to hurt him at all. A certain amount of hostile reception will probably serve him well here. A quality product marketed in a powerful way will lead to success.”
• In Don Garber’s making sense, columnist Paul Gardner cited this quote from Garber:
“Our strategy, as I feel it should be, is to go back and shore up our relationship with the core soccer fan and build our fan base from these fans out.”
Then Gardner wrote:
American soccer is an increasingly sturdy part of the world’s greatest, most important, richest professional sport. It is about time that it started chucking its weight around. If there has to be a marketing campaign, then that should be its theme: one that will silence the naysayers and the smartasses and the anti-soccer wiseacres.
Underpinning it, there must be an increasingly credible MLS, built on an improving level of play and on service to genuine soccer fans. A league built on high-caliber players, not on low-level TV commercials.
The first step toward that had to be the realization that the fans are already out there, waiting for the product they want. Garber seems to have taken that in, and for that he deserves a lot of praise.
