Los Angeles Sol's Shannon Boxx, right, attempts a header shot over Washington Freedom's Sonia Bompastor, left rear, and Becky Sauerbrunn, left front, during the first half of a Women's Professional Soccer soccer match, Sunday, March 29, 2009, in Carson, Calif. (AP Photo/Gus Ruelas)
The news seemed to come out of nowhere. Even as the suspicions built up throughout Thursday, the response from those who had followed the club was still “are they really no longer with us?”
So it was that Los Angeles Sol, the regular season premiers and flagship team from the US Women’s Pro Soccer debut season, had been ‘discontinued’, as the official press release untactfully put it. The news passed without much notice from those outside of women’s football, yet there is an inherent lesson here for professional football in Australia, in both its male and female guises.
It’s a lesson that starts in 2003 when the last fully professional women’s football league in America, WUSA, folded.
At the time, the league’s administrators made two key organisational mistakes. First of all their “we want to be in the big-time” approach to stadiums, salaries and promotion saw the league make a cumulative loss of US$100 million in just three seasons.
Most of the WPS learned from this but the Sol didn’t, and in the end it was this ambitious over-spending that led to the club’s demise. This is particularly notable as Los Angeles had the highest profile and highest attendances of any of the WPS’ seven inaugural clubs.
The club’s successes weren’t enough to compensate for their “old school” approach (sound familiar NSL fans?).
Back to the WUSA though, and their second mistake was employing a single entity system for the clubs. In essence this means all the clubs came under the auspices of the league and shared their profits and loses. So if the old Washington Freedom sold a piece of merchandise, they got as much of a share of the profits as every other club did.
The WPS turned its back on this set up and is all the better for it. Instead of keeping Los Angelas Sol alive and saving face, as a single entity system would have allowed them to do, they have cut off the diseased limb before it infects the rest of the league.
Let that be a lesson to anyone who would like to see such a system put in place in Australia. Even in the MLS, which is healthy and growing, the drawbacks of the single entity system have held back youth development and club growth within the league.
So the story of Los Angeles Sol, who burned bright but fast, should serve as a reminder to fans of the A-League and W-League.
Yes, we must take risks. Yes, we must continue to grow and develop the league on and off the pitch. However, these developments should never come at the cost of the league’s long-term viability.
The WPS’ future won’t be decided by the loss of the Sol. In fact, they will most likely be stronger for it. The league is about to open its first purpose built stadium in Atlanta, welcome two new franchises and wont be allowing club owners to make the same mistakes as Los Angeles’ did anytime soon.
It may have been a great first season for Los Angeles Sol, but there are a lot of fans sitting around right now wishing it wasn’t their last.
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