I should probably write something soccer-related, as most of you are used to that and probably don’t care about me replaying the 1932 baseball season with a card-and-dice game. Fair enough.

As one of only a handful of American indoor soccer historians, I feel confident and justified in saying that the new Major Arena Soccer League is the single worst league in the 36-year history of the indoor game in this country.

(No, it’s not because of fights like the one you see above, which happened in December in Beaumont, Texas. There have been fights in indoor soccer for years. The number of people watching said fight could fairly be said to be a large part of the problem, though.)

The MASL is the worst-organized, worst-led, worst-executed league with the biggest disparity between haves and have-nots and the largest number of ridiculous incidents and face palms I have ever seen, and I’ve been following, working in and covering this sport almost since the beginning.

I’ve written before about the kerfuffle between single-point scoring and multi-point scoring, but that’s only one of the reasons this league is the worst ever. The rest are after the jump.

Let’s start with attendance. Here are the latest figures, through games of last weekend (caveat: eight games are missing because Texas’ “new owners” don’t feel the need to announce numbers anymore, and various other teams aren’t very diligent about it, either). (NOTE: This table has been updated to reflect the inclusion of a missing data point for Brownsville and to split Seattle and Tacoma into two separate clubs.)



Team G Total Average Median High Low Rochester 7 44,911 6,416 6,230 8,214 5,004 Baltimore 7 43,344 6,192 6,421 7,812 4,911 St. Louis 8 47,061 5,883 6,257 7,360 4,207 Missouri 8 35,620 4,453 4,359 5,812 3,369 San Diego 8 28,800 3,600 3,084 7,311 1,922 Dallas 8 28,536 3,567 3,790 4,008 2,344 Monterrey 7 22,940 3,277 2,684 6,339 1,328 Syracuse *6 17,730 2,955 2,904 3,814 2,237 Milwaukee 8 21,110 2,639 2,616 3,209 1,888 Harrisburg 8 20,493 2,562 2,298 4,455 1,339 Ontario 8 16,108 2,014 1,988 2,654 1,572 Chicago 9 14,707 1,634 1,556 2,483 991 Las Vegas 7 9,559 1,366 1,377 1,997 675 Wichita *6 8,129 1,355 1,425 1,864 885 Texas #6 6,977 1,163 1,141 1,388 986 Tacoma 2 1,900 950 950 1,105 885 Seattle 7 5,022 717 723 1,348 204 Hidalgo 3 1,943 648 250 1,468 225 Detroit 8 4,989 624 598 756 534 Turlock 9 4,640 516 509 570 460 Tulsa *4 2,055 514 516 562 461 Brownsville 9 4,415 491 450 850 225 Saltillo %4 2,015 504 418 980 200 Sacramento 9 3,758 418 415 525 358 MASL TOTAL 166 396,762 2,390 1,761 8,214 200

#Missing three games%Missing two games*Missing one game

Indoor soccer hasn’t exactly been packing ’em in lately, but the sheer number of poorly attended clubs in this new league is troubling. The teams that seem to exist only to give the serious organizations close cities to travel to aren’t doing anyone any favors (least of all themselves). The PASL had a decent model of frugality, so teams drawing low four figures wasn’t the worst thing, but this was supposed to be a “true national league” that would bring in sponsors and a national TV contract, and Sacramento drawing (an announced) 418 a game doesn’t help the optics.

Now to the facepalms:

Hidalgo became the first team to fold mid-season since the Edmonton Drillers in 2000. (That’s after Cincinnati, which was supposed to be the league’s 24th team, opted out was told their arena was inadequate between the announcement and the start of the season.) With only a month left in the season, it’s possible the rest might hold on, but several are sure to fold in the offseason.

When Hidalgo went under, it necessitated some schedule re-arranging, which resulted in a couple of bizarre (even for this sport) circumstances. First, Brownsville and Texas played what I believe is the first doubleheader (two full games on the same day) in the history of the indoor game on January 10. Hidalgo was supposed to play at Texas that day, but the Barracudas were tapped to replace them as the opponent for Oxford City (don’t get me started) that day. Since Brownsville was already scheduled to come to Beaumont the following Saturday, the 17th, it was (somehow and for some reason) decided to just play the January 17th game the same day. So they did, and Texas won both, 8-4 and 10-3, in front of a never-announced number of people, many of whom likely found the game by accident. So Brownsville saved a trip, but here’s the thing: Beaumont and Brownsville are only 440 miles apart.

Second, Dallas had lost 4-3 at Hidalgo on December 21, two days before La Fiera folded. The game was moved at the last minute to a smaller recreational soccer facility, and the Sidekicks protested that the goals were not regulation size. The league vacated the result, meaning Dallas would only have 19 regular-season games. Still with me? The replacement game was scheduled to be at Monterrey, so not only did they play it on the same day as the Sidekicks’ next scheduled visit to Arena Monterrey on January 11, the makeup game was only 15 minutes long because Dallas coach Tatu said that was all his road-weary, injury-depleted and fixture-congested side could handle. Click here to get a more thorough explanation. (By the way, good on him, but the league should never have allowed it.)

You couldn’t blame anyone for believing the Tulsa Revolution wouldn’t make it to March. First, they announced a move from the (larger and presumably more expensive) Cox Business Center to the (smaller and presumably cheaper) Expo Square Pavilion, but because of “complications moving the turf” from one building to the other, they originally postponed their January 24 match, then considered moving it to St. Louis, where their scheduled opponents, the Chicago Mustangs, stopped en route to Tulsa when they got the news and where the Revolution had already played the Ambush the night before. But after agreeing to the move, the Revs reportedly up and left and eventually forfeited the match, leaving Chicago to drive back home. Read more about that here. Still, the Revolution say they’re not folding. Okay, then.

The drama surrounding the Seattle Impact and its oft-accused owner, Dion Earl finally came to an end when the minor-league Tacoma Stars purchased the Impact’s MASL franchise rights and took Seattle’s place in the league in mid-January. Their first home game resulted in a big increase in attendance (883), and a good effort, but a loss. (The Stars are pulling double-duty temporarily, as they are continuing their Western Indoor Soccer League campaign – where they’re undefeated – so the fact they’re 0-4 since the switch and have been outscored 45-12 is not terribly unexpected.)

The fact the Stars are getting pummeled does point out another problem with the MASL: competitive (in)balance. Baltimore and Missouri (two refugees from the demised third MISL) are a combined 29-0 at this writing, while Harrisburg and Saltillo are each 1-13 and the league standings are a testament to inequality. (Incidentally, and not surprisingly, former MISL teams are 37-10 by my count against ex-PASL clubs this season.)

During a January 25 game between the St. Louis Ambush and Wichita B-52s (that the Ambush said had “more than it’s (sic) share of controversy“), some calls that went against St. Louis moved owner Andrew Haines to issue these two (since-deleted) tweets:

Maybe Haines is frustrated because his Ambush has been on the losing side six of the ten times ex-PASL teams have beaten ex-MISL teams this season.

Most recently, the Detroit Waza Flo traded their owner, Dominic Scicluna to the Las Vegas Legends in a deadline-day deal. We’ve had player-coaches traded before (Denzil Antonio in 1996) and player-owners (most recently the aforementioned Dion Earl), but never (that I know of) someone who owned and played for a team traded to another team in that league. The Legends and Waza Flo aren’t scheduled to play the rest of the season, and Detroit’s not likely to make the playoffs, so any potential conflicts of interest are taken care of. But it’s still strange.

Speaking of the Legends, if you go to their website and try to buy tickets by clicking on the “ORDER NOW” link, it goes here.

Yep. This league is a dog. (Though, to be fair, some of its teams are doing some really cool things.)

Oh, well. There’s always professional futsal.

Or not. I guarantee you futsal is not “a sport of the future.”