For Part 3 of 4, I look for the answers to North American soccer's "Chicken/Egg" question: "Do I go for the TV deal now? Or just get fans in the seats first?"

Item #3 – MLS and its owners should re-prioritize selling out venues over selling TV rights

FACT: Potential windfall TV deals, more often than not, follow the sell out of many stadiums

Nobody likes to watch a game on TV when it looks like no one even wants to watch the game LIVE. This is an insight that the NFL has leveraged with their “blackout rule.”

Simply put, if you can’t sell enough tickets to your games, we’ll put a team on TV that can. What has been the result? The NFL on-air product is one of the best in all professional sport, anywhere in the world.

And that product generates what has become a continuous cycle. If it looks like a great product on TV, you’ll go to the stadiums and buy it. Someone else then sees you enjoying the product on TV, then they go buy it.

And so on and so forth. However, many leagues (well, maybe just the NHL and MLS) lose sight of the fact the seats need to be filled FIRST.

While Gary Bettman still fails to realize that the Sun Belt Experiment is no longer the ticket to fanbase growth and the TV contract mountaintop, Garber, to his credit, has made a number of key moves to improve the live product, namely the requirement for Soccer Specific Stadiums (or an acceptable reconfigured stadium) as the point of entry into MLS.

Having attended many a Toronto FC match, “the Bank” does absolute wonders for the product (let's be honest, it's not World Cup) and has motivated me on occasion to turn the TV to CBC on a weekend afternoon during the summer.

And it is a fact that teams with “SSSs” average higher attendance than those renting extra time at old baseball diamonds or football stadiums.

If Garber is truly in this for the love of the game (lest we forget, he was nowhere near a soccer league or team until getting hired), my pipe-dream is that Garber redirects his ballooning expansion fees to investment in the live product. 

$140 in the 3 years can go a long way towards subsidies to accelerate new stadium or facility upgrade projects for existing teams (EXPAND BMO FIELD!!!) as an example. This type of investment would show great foresight on his part.

Being patient about the big profits now, can pay out in an even bigger way later. Sadly, reality tells me that this is likely not the case

Patience is truly a virtue and investing first in building fan loyalty in the local communities of North America’s soccer clubs will pay dividends in years to come.

But it does require PATIENCE, as well as a true love of the game, virtues that MLS’ predecessors in pro sport could afford but are sadly so rare in these “quick buck getting,” globalized times.

Lucky for the MLS and its owners, the NHL and the Sun Belt Experiment will serve as a warning to those that have invested in sport for all of the wrong reasons in all of the wrong ways.

Source: Click Here