I must admit that I was fascinated by the news involving Netflix over the past few weeks – A loss of 200,000 subscribers, potentially more by the mid-summer, price increases, an ad-supported subscription tier, and a bevy of shows canceled. But I was more fascinated by another streaming service’s struggles: The outright shutting down of CNN+ only a month after its launch.
I categorized what Seattle’s had unique success with in four categories – Financial ambition, competitive ambition, community significance, and club history. While some MLS franchises have hit on some of these, nobody has hit on all four the way that Seattle has, and in the future some degree of hitting on all four should be what Major League Soccer franchises strive for if they intend to emulate the success of the Seattle Sounders. I will break down what these aspects may look like in the near future and connect them to teams I feel are currently doing well in these regards, and which need some work.
I should qualify that Seattle is a unique Major League Soccer team. To quote the rhetorician Scott Steiner – “They’re a genetic freak, and they’re not normal.”
This is the first in a three part series of posts about the Seattle Sounders’ win over Pumas UNAM in the Concacaf Champions League final last Wednesday. Seattle is the first MLS team to win Concacaf since 2000, and the first ever to do it in the Champions League format. This first part covers what it means for a Major League Soccer team to win it in a historical context, the second will cover Seattle’s relative uniqueness as a MLS team, and the third will cover what other MLS teams can do in the future to emulate the Sounders’ success.
What struck me about Seattle winning the Concacaf Champions League final on Wednesday night was how dramatic it wasn’t. I can’t say I personally had any fantastic visions of what it was going to look like when a Major League Soccer team finally got over the hump of winning the Concacaf Champions League, but I just figured it’d be more difficult for that theoretical team than it turned out to be for the actual Sounders team that dominated Pumas 3-0 on Wednesday.
I was taken aback – I think awestruck, honestly, though in a very minor way, as much as awe can strike you through a computer screen – by the scenery of this US Open Cup third round match between second division Birmingham Legion and third division South Georgia Tormenta on Tuesday night.
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER’S TELEVISION RATINGS ARE POOR! THEY’RE LOWER THAN THE LEAGUE WANTS! DON GARBER WANTS MORE EYES ON SETS AND DEAR GOD HE’S NOT GETTING THEM! WE CANNOT HANDLE THIS MUCH LONGER AND IF WE DON’T FIX IT THE ENTIRE HOUSE OF CARDS IS GOING TO FALL. YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE MAD DONNIE!
I realize that I never really let myself feel like it would happen before last night.
Nobody ever commented on it but I had the same YouTube video linked in my Twitter description for about a decade.
You can look at it on the WayBack Machine, it had been there that long. It was like my junior year of high school and somebody posted that clip of Nic Cage putting on plastic fangs from Vampire’s Kiss in a Skype group I was a part of. After like a year I thought it’d be funny to keep it there. Now it’s on the site forever, now that the account is gone. Continue reading
There are only so many places we can find honest power over our domains anymore in life. Does it not feel that we are all so alienated from what we want in our lives? Isn’t that what we want – control, power? Taking what may seem impossible or unwieldy and taking control of it ourselves? What more is there to desire, ultimately?
And time… Time is that which cannot be changed. Father time, as is said, is undefeated. This is true on many scales, both that aging makes your back hurt when you get up in the morning so you have to stretch and that sometimes two basketball games you want to watch are airing at the same time. This second dilemma… It seemed impossible to overcome, a theoretical mountain higher than any other, especially in the realm of sports wherein the viewing of an event live on-air is so imperative. Impossible to overcome by normal means, and by normal men.
But in the words of one of the athletic world’s greatest minds – I’m a genetic freak and I’m not normal. And neither is my television setup Enter the two-television setup:
It’s too big for him. He’ll get sick. It’s too big. Why did you make him such a big one
