With J Hutcherson -- We'll start with an update on Women's Professional Soccer. The league's TV deal with Fox Soccer gets them a regular weekly time slot, Chicago has announced a thousand season tickets sold, and Los Angeles has reportedly all but signed the one marquee player WPS believes will make an immediate difference. To put it another way, queue the vintage screaming sound from all those WUSA games.
Then there's the reality.
WPS's time slot is Sunday night. Since they were the ones to put it in a press release, we can assume Chicago is top of the leader board in tickets sold with that thousand. Marta might not make a difference.
It's the last of these that's the biggest issue in January, considering so much has been put on getting Marta to sign a contract.
For those of you otherwise occupied, Marta is the new best player on the planet. She's leaving Sweden's Umea IK where she's quite frankly a world-beater. 111 goals in 103 games since 2004, a UEFA Cup (the Champions League equivalent for women's soccer), and basically only adding to her sizable legacy at 22 years old.
She is among the best players on the planet, period.
What that means to WPS is not the self-high five it will become when they finally make her move to LA official. At no time in the history of women's pro soccer in general has a US fan base shown they really cared about non-US players. This isn't even a better version of Beckham coming to push a league further into the mainstream. For women's soccer, WPS is the mainstream by default.
After WUSA, the few clubs in Europe paying reasonable salaries for their women's teams didn't draw all of the world's elite. WPS will. Even in their limited scope, the pay and opportunity is not going to be passed up by most.
From a competitive standpoint, terrific for anyone interested in watching quality soccer. From a public relations standpoint, WPS is still waiting for a marketable star that hits a general audience. The US contingent is no longer in a position to guarantee that just by showing up.
It is highly unlikely Marta will be able to take that role in year one. To her credit, she's taking a greater risk than her new league. It's just not a given, even if the league itself would very much like to take it that way.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
