Women's Soccer In Crisis As St. Louis Folds Mid-Season

It's becoming more and more apparent that America fell in love with Mia and Brandi in the summer of 1999 and not women's soccer.

For the second time in four months, Women's Professional Soccer has lost a club. At least the Los Angeles Sol, which featured four-time FIFA World Player of the Year Marta, had the decency to implode during the off-season. St. Louis Athletica afforded the league no such courtesy and announced late Thursday that it was ceasing operations because of a "funding crisis."

"It's incredibly difficult to lose a team in mid-season like this," WPS commissioner Tonya Antonucci said. "We looked at a few options as a league together with our board and U.S. Soccer, but the operational hurdles and finances just didn't work out. In the face of a severe funding gap in St. Louis, the local ownership group is shutting down the team at this point."

That group also owns A.C. St. Louis of the U.S. Soccer Division 2 Pro League, which will remain operational for the time being. But the women's club, despite fielding reasonably well-known national teamers like Hope Solo, Shannon Boxx and Lori Chalupny, will be sacrificed. The players will become free agents next week.

St. Louis is supposed to be a great soccer town, or so we're told, and Athletica played in a quaint little stadium that the area's youth soccer folk are used to frequenting. In four home games this season, the team averaged 3,027 fans, with a decline in each match from 3,356 in the opener to 2,346 two weekends ago.

When the Women's United Soccer Association folded in 2003, blame was pinned on an unrealistic business plan and a naive reliance on investors from the cable TV industry who were banking on ratings. After a six-year gap, WPS launched with leaner, more realistic goals, smaller stadiums and lower salaries. It seemed to be a sensible approach.

But no product survives if there's no interest, no matter how many PR consultants try to push it. The 1999 Women's World Cup constitutes all the evidence women's soccer backers use to argue that there's a demand for the product. But what if the product those fans were demanding 11 years ago wasn't women's soccer? Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Julie Foudy, Michelle Akers and the rest were transcendent personalities the likes of which America had never seen - feminine yet dominating, athletic yet articulate, telegenic yet strong. The public ate it up. The World Cup was a patriotic celebration of that feminine and athletic ideal. And we got to beat the Chinese.

Since then, it's been one blow after another. The 2003 Women's World Cup, also held in the U.S. because of the SARS crisis in China, drew a fraction of the crowds. The hastily-arranged schedule was the excuse. The WUSA folded. But that had nothing to do with the interest, or lack thereof, in women's soccer either, right? Then it took six years to launch another league. Then the flagship franchise folded after just one season. And now another one is gone as well.

"This is a setback, but it's one individual franchise and the loss of a team is an unfortunate reality of pro sports," Antonucci said. "We have the same number of teams that we had last year during a successful first season. We'll get through this stronger and keep moving the league and business forward."

Expansion teams in Atlanta and Philadelphia account for the return to seven clubs. The Atlanta franchise, named the Beat after its WUSA predecessor, just opened a $16.5 million, 8,300-seat stadium on the campus of a school called Kennesaw State University (home of the Owls!). The Beat drew 7,248 fans to the grand opening. The second game attracted just 3,112. The third was scheduled for Saturday against St. Louis. We won't hold the crowd of zero against them.

But it's hard to take the WPS seriously at this point, and even harder to imagine that anyone else will step forward and view women's soccer in the U.S. as a good investment.

Meanwhile, more than 10,000 fans showed up outside Madrid last week to watch teams from Lyon and Potsdam contest the final of the UEFA Women's Champions League. Go figure.