Major League Soccer, once shunned by the international football community, is gaining respect thanks to its steady growth in popularity and new stadium projects, Commissioner Don Garber said.

Reuters reports:

The MLS got off to a rough start following its debut season in 1996, bleeding money in its early years as it struggled to attract fans in a North American sports market dominated by American football, basketball and baseball.

But after its initial growing pains, it began to find its audience with attendances averaging more than 22,000 fans per game last season, a league record.

MLS is set to expand to 30 teams in the coming years with seven soccer-specific stadium projects planned, giving the league legitimacy on a level Garber never dreamed of.

“Years ago the international football community barely acknowledged that we existed let alone rated us as having any sense that we knew what we were doing,” Garber told reporters ahead of the unveiling of the Portland Timbers’ newly-renovated stadium.

“And that was from (governing bodies) FIFA to UEFA to U.S. Soccer to CONCACAF.”

“Over time that has shifted. There really has been a generational movement on the development of the soccer culture,” said Garber, who took on his role in 1999 when many predicted the league was destined for failure.

“We finally are creating this idea that the United States and Canada can be a place that can be really good for the development for all aspects of the game.

“So it’s a good time to be in the soccer business.”

That business includes an $85-million upgrade to Providence Park, a 25,000 capacity stadium that opened its doors to a raucous sold-out crowd on a warm night in Portland, which calls itself “Soccer City USA”.

New stadiums are currently planned in Miami, Cincinnati, Columbus, Austin, Nashville, Sacramento and St. Louis.

“The arc of stadium development over the last 20 years has been remarkable, but I think it follows the arc of the development of the league,” Garber said.

Garber said one virtue of the MLS is that at the start of the season, any team can win the MLS Cup due to its salary cap system, which helps keep a level playing field that has produced 10 different MLS Cup champions over the last 12 seasons.

Now that he has the ear of the international soccer community, Garber warned European governing body UEFA against its plans for a Super League, which would replace the Champions League with a competition that would cater to Europe’s top clubs and be largely closed to outsiders.

“It would have a negative effect on every other team in Europe and it would be really good for those top 12 teams,” said Garber, who sits on the football stakeholder committee of world governing body FIFA and is the co-chairman of the World Leagues Forum.

“So I am not a fan of the Super League. I don’t think it serves the leagues well. I think it serves a handful of teams well.”

Garber said his goal is to continue to grow MLS “brick by brick” in North America until it is considered among the world’s best in terms of quality, the passion of its fans and the economic value of its franchises.

“Portland is a fantastic example of what MLS can deliver,” he said of the Timbers, who have sold out every game since they joined the league in 2011.

“The momentum is going to continue.”

 

Subscription platform JTBC has been awarded the media rights for the Olympic Games from 2026 to 2032 for South Korea and North Korea.

The announcement was made at a signing ceremony attended by IOC President Thomas Bach and Hong Jeongdo, the President and CEO of JTBC, at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The agreement follows the conclusion of a competitive tender conducted by the IOC.

The deal brings to end the control of Olympic media rights by the Korea Pool of terrestrial networks SBS, MBC and KBS.

SBS aholds the Olympic broadcast rights from 2018 through the Paris 2024 Games,

JTBC has acquired the rights across all media platforms, with a commitment to provide broad coverage across the organisation’s linear, digital and social media platforms.

The agreement includes guarantees that at least 200 hours of Olympic Games and 100 hours of Olympic Winter Games coverage will be broadcast on national coverage television channels.

In addition, JTBC will support the IOC and the Olympic Channel on a year-round basis to engage with future generations and promote sport and the Olympic values on digital platforms.

Live sports streaming service FloSports said yesterday that it raised $47 million from investors including current partner Discovery Inc. to grow its coverage of new and existing sports.

Other current investors that participated included Causeway Media Partners LP, Fertitta Capital and DCM Ventures. Strategic investors included World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a unit of Bertelsmann SE & Co KGaA.

Reuters reports:

FloSports launched in 2009 to concentrate on marginalized sports that were not covered regularly or deeply in traditional media, particularly track and field and wrestling.

It tapped into fans’ passion for the sports they played and expanded to cover more than 20 sports, including soccer, basketball, volleyball, rodeo, bowling, softball, cycling, cheerleading, weightlifting and ballroom dance.

With the new round of funding, “we will further enrich underserved sports communities by broadening our existing coverage and expanding into new verticals,” said FloSports CEO and co-founder Mark Floreani in a statement.

Last year the firm inked or extended at least 250 media rights deals, boosting the number of games available to watch in some underserved sports and creating content about key matches and star athletes.

Last month the Colonial Athletic Association signed a four-year, seven-figure partnership for FloSports to cover the league’s 22 sports, the first time any collegiate conference selected a direct-to-consumer streaming service as its primary media partner.

FloSports’ subscriber numbers and annual recurring revenue have both grown by more than 50 percent year over year.

Net subscriber growth through the first quarter of 2019 was greater than all subscriber growth in 2018, the company said.

FloSports has a library of 2,000+ hours of content and owns exclusive broadcast rights to 4,000+ events, with over 1 million hours live streamed since inception. The company has 250 employees and is based in Austin, Texas

Qatar will host the final two of the old-style seven-team Club World Cup tournaments before the competition is expanded to 24 teams from 2021, global soccer body FIFA said on Monday.

FIFA confirmed that Qatar would stage the event in 2019 and 2020 when it would also serve as a test for the World Cup which the Gulf state will host in 2022.

Reuters reports:

“For us, it is a great opportunity, it is a great test event to try out some of the operational plans we have in place in the lead up to the World Cup,” Hassan Al Thawadi, General Secretary of Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee, told reporters after a FIFA Council meeting.

The competition currently features the club champions of the six continental federations plus a team from the host nation but has struggled to capture the imagination of the public since it was first staged in its current form in 2005.

From 2021 onwards, FIFA will hold the competition on a four-yearly basis with 24 teams and wants to include at least eight from Europe.

However, this has been opposed by the European Club Association (ECA) which wrote to FIFA President Gianni Infantino in March to say that its members would not take part because there is no space in the international calendar.

(Photo above shows Infantino and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Minister Foreign Affairs & International Co-operation, at the 2018 edition)

The ECA has 232 members, including all of Europe’s biggest clubs.

FIFA said it would approach potential hosts for the expanded edition of the club tournament before making a recommendation at the next council meeting in Shanghai on October 23 and 24.

Australia’s football players union has launched a campaign calling for prize money parity at the FIFA Women’s and Men’s World Cups and offered support for the country’s footballers to take legal action against global governing body FIFA.

Reuters reports:

Professional Footballers Australia Chief Executive John Didulica and other PFA executives wrote to FIFA last week demanding an immediate doubling in prize money for the women’s tournament, saying the players were “victims of discrimination.”

The winning team at the women’s World Cup in France, which starts on Friday, will receive $4 million in prize money from the tournament’s total pool of $30 million.

France banked $38 million for winning the men’s tournament in Russia last year.

“The PFA expressly reserves the rights of the players to have this matter resolved through appropriate means including mediation and arbitration,” said the Australian letter, addressed to FIFA’s Chief Officer for Women’s Football Sarai Bareman.

The PFA have launched a website (www.ourgoalisnow.com) outlining the campaign’s aims and instructing women’s players how to participate.

Australia’s ‘Matildas’ team, quarter-finalists at the last women’s World Cup in Canada, have thrown their weight behind the campaign, with players posting its logo and video on their social media accounts.

Gender pay disparity in football was put in the spotlight in March when the U.S. women’s team sued the U.S. federation alleging gender discrimination three months before their World Cup title defense.

Although prize money at the women’s World Cup in France is double the amount from Canada, the pay gap with the men’s tournament actually increased to $370 million from $343 million.

The men’s prize money grew from $358 million at the 2014 Brazil World Cup to $400 million in Russia.

FIFA is hosting its first Women’s Football Convention in Paris on June 6-7, where it said leaders from the world of sports and politics will discuss the development and empowerment of women in soccer.