Allen Barra on the demise of the WUSA:
If given a second chance, the WUSA would do well to learn from the history of other American pro leagues and focus not on TV contracts and corporate sponsors but on selling its product the old-fashioned way. Right now, minor league baseball, with virtually no TV exposure, is flourishing in more than 100 American cities and towns, even though many teams lose their biggest stars to major league teams as the season progresses. It seems hard to believe that American women's professional soccer couldn't sustain itself with the same level of grass-roots support as minor league baseball and cultivate its fan base from there.
Barra is talking sense here. An even better example might be the Men's Soccer minor league, the A League, which is able to survive with attendance numbers not terribly different than the WUSA, but with a cost structure that makes far more sense.
I think the fundamental appeal of minor league (and, to an extent, amateur) sports is their status as an alternative to, and often even a rejection of, the major leagues. There’s less big-money contracts at the minor/college level, and thus less talk about (what most fans perceive as) filthy lucre. How many avid fans of minor league baseball, college football and hoops, etc. cite this, without prompting?
That’s why I’m not sure applying minor-league marketing tactics would work for a revived women’s soccer league. If there’s no big-sister league to compare against, it won’t work.
Barra’s analysis is spot on. All pro leagues that have any level of success began as small grassroots efforts and they certainly didn’t depend on corporate sponsorship and TV money from the get-go. If your business plan depended on it from the beginning (and WUSA’s plan certainly did) you were destined to fail.
We don’t even have to take the example of minor league baseball, let’s look at Nascar, Formula 1 or Arena Football League or better yet, hockey. How many decades has it been around? 8? How many years did the NHL exist with just 4 US-based teams? 40 years? How many times has it had (relatively) big TV contracts? The last ten years?
Point is, even after 5 or 6 decades after the establishment of a professional league, players in the NHL still had to have off season jobs. Hell even today, the NHL depends much more on gate than on TV money. Lesson is, you have to work and nurture your fan base first.