I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories, but if I was someone who bought into them, I would be chomping at the bit after something I read on Twitter the other day. User Adam Smith charted how many times the Major League Soccer Twitter account mentions and retweets individual clubs. Smith was trying to prove a point about the league relatively ignoring the Columbus Crew ever since Anthony Precourt announced he intended to move the beloved franchise out of central Ohio to Austin, Texas.

In fairness, your account retweets the individual clubs a lot as well. Crew are doing better here, a 5-way tie for 7th....so there's that. pic.twitter.com/J8ukI4Uml2 — Adam Smith (@asmith2729) March 7, 2018

What became apparent to me pretty quickly, after checking out the data, is that the Vancouver Whitecaps are fairing as poorly, if not worse, than Columbus in many of the categories. The club was featured in 24 Twitter posts since the start of the season, good for 19th best in the league. It was also retweeted by the main MLS account 22 times, which placed it in a tie for 15th. Clubs that fared better than Vancouver included perennially mediocre and attendance plagued teams like the Colorado Rapids, D.C. United and the Philadelphia Union. Even the lame duck Crew fared better.

This is not to say that Twitter is the be all, end all of how much the league cares about the Caps. But it is just one indicator of an apathy towards Vancouver that has existed for some time and is manifested in a series of ways. The league does the team no favors in a variety of ways, three of which we’ll explore here.

Travel

It is not exactly a secret that Vancouver bears MLS’ heavy travel burden the most. By MLS’ own calculations, the Caps have the most distance traveled in the league this season, besting LA Galaxy by over 8,000+ kilometers total. They have held this dubious honor for the last several seasons, including some particularly brutal road trips to Orlando, New England and New York City. Fixture congestion is also a problem, leading to some wacky routings. In 2016, for instance, Vancouver played at New York City on April 26, at home against Portland on May 7, at home to Chicago on May 11 and away to Toronto just three days later on May 14. All told that’s 14,000 km worth of travel and four matches in the span of just a couple weeks.

Another complicating factor is the Voyageurs Cup. The domestic cup competition guarantees that Vancouver must make an additional trip to Montreal or Toronto, often both, in midweek. Last season for instance, Vancouver had to play at home to DC United in league play, fly to Montreal for the Canadian Championship and then fly back home to take on Atlanta United at BC Place. Such a turnaround is rare in the U.S. Open Cup, as the league goes to great lengths to organize the competition geographically. This means that teams will only travel particularly far in the later rounds of the competition and last season no club made a trip nearly as far as the Vancouver-Montreal round trip.

Now, part of the problems Vancouver encounters in this regard stem from the fact that it is the northernmost team (and one of the westernmost teams) in the league. No amount of effort on the league’s part will be able to make British Columbia any closer to the Eastern Conference. And the other Cascadia teams, as well as LA Galaxy and San Jose Earthquakes, encounter travel issues all the same. But all of these clubs are really hamstrung by a seemingly bizarre, outdated MLS rule that teams can only have five charter flights per season. This means that the Caps fly how you or I do: wedged into commercial flights, hoping to avoid a middle seat and wondering why the in-flight entertainment isn’t working. This also means that players and coaches must spend more time at the airport than they have to and that, with connecting flights, distances for a team like Vancouver are even more warped. Jim Curtin of Philadelphia and Bruce Arena, then of LA Galaxy, are among the managers that have called out MLS on this policy.

But having all charter flights would lead to a price tag of $1 million or more per owner. Clubs like Atlanta United, LA Galaxy and LAFC would probably bite the bullet but would a team like Vancouver? Given that the club has shuttered its USL affiliate because of costs, it’s unclear if a necessary, yet ancillary, cost would be welcomed. Regardless, MLS needs to either alter the charter rules or place more of a premium on logistics in its scheduling process. Until then, Vancouver will keep getting the short end of the stick.

Television

First things first: I am an American Whitecaps fan. That means this section will be written from more of an American TV perspective, as we are not blessed with the fine offerings of TSN. One could make the argument that Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal have a legitimate national TV deal for virtually all of their games. This is not insignificant and, as far as local TV deals go, is better than what most American clubs have.

But the league has seemingly little interest in featuring the Caps on American TV, even in comparison to Toronto and Montreal. You could chalk this up to its lackluster style of play, the lack of marketing of the Caps’ star players or the fact that there are probably a not insignificant number of Americans who couldn’t find Vancouver on a map. But still, Vancouver should be featured more given the fact that it is a playoff contender year-in and year-out. In 2018 it will be featured on national TV in the US 0 times. In 2017, they were featured once in a Cascadia derby against Portland. By comparison, Portland and Seattle earned 25 appearances combined on national TV, including both of their Cascadia matches against each other.

Look, I get that, from a pure business perspective, showing Whitecaps matches is not the best decision for American broadcasters. And Montreal runs into the same problems, where they can’t even get matches against Toronto FC (one of the best rivalries in the league) on FS1 or ESPN. But Toronto FC has undoubtedly benefited from exposure in the U.S. Even casual fans are able to learn about and become familiar with not just USMNT stars like Jozy Altidore and Michael Bradley but also Sebastian Giovinco, Victor Vazquez and others. Showing Canadian teams in the U.S. allows for fans to become familiar with and even (gasp) support teams that they may not have any sort of geographical relation to. The fact that MLS shows a general apathy to exposing anyone outside of British Columbia to the Whitecaps is part of a broader problem (which I address below) of a lack of marketing of Vancouver’s best players.

And there are issues with how MLS negotiates Canadian TV rights as well. This Twitter thread gets at some of them but apparently individual clubs have little to no say on how the TSN deal was re-negotiated. Given that MLS is effectively negotiating both their local and national TV deal, this seems wholly unfair. American clubs have effectively unlimited authority in dictating what their local TV deals look like but this power is effectively poached from the Canadian sides by the league. This may not be a big deal now but, as the thread notes, could be, as teams are angling at trying more ambitious deals with streaming services like YouTube TV. What kind of flexibility will the Canadian sides have once the inevitable happens and cable subscriptions bottom out?

So I have the word from @DAZN_CA about the deal with MLS Live in Canada this year.



▪️#TFC #IMFC #VWFC games on 48 hour delay.

▪️games will stay up for a week

▪️90in20 highlights will stay up for a month

▪️all other MLS games will be live and have a 90in20 highlight. — Chris (@salishsea86) March 9, 2018

Marketing

This is by far the vaguest topic and one that is backed more by anecdotal, rather than empirical, evidence. But circling back to the original issue, MLS features Vancouver on social media relatively little. It is not using the team in promotions for nationally televised games because, well, none exist. And stories related to Vancouver (not counting match previews or transfer rumors) rarely pop up on mlssoccer.com (you have to go back to January to find one of MLS’ own journalists doing a story on the Caps).

It’s fair to say this is, at least in part, the fault of the club. The Caps have made relatively little headway when they qualify for the playoffs meaning that, unlike Toronto FC, they cannot stake their claim to exposure via on-the-pitch performance. They haven’t made the types of high profile signings that make casual fans stand up and take notice, like Atlanta United, LAFC or NYCFC. And the Vancouver market, while bigger than many American metro areas with MLS clubs, is below-average for MLS.

But the team has its fair share of marketable players. It has players who are or have been meaningful contributions internationally, including Mexico, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Venezuela, Sierra Leone and, of course, Canada. It has players that are fun to watch, score spectacular free kicks (Cristian Techera) and slap their teammates after they score goals (here’s looking at you Kendall Waston).

And they have Alphonso Davies who, despite being one of the hottest prospects in global football, is still woefully undermarketed to casual fans. It is impossible to watch a Whitecaps telecast not on TSN and not have the announcers feel compelled to discuss Davies’ backstory. While this is good news, it also means that someone, either MLS or the club or both, haven’t spent a whole lot of energy in building Davies up and making it known to fans league wide that one of the best young talents in the Americas resides in Vancouver.

I’m not going to sit here and make the case that Vancouver is being purposefully screwed over by MLS. There is no grand conspiracy going on here. But there is an apathy that seems to exist in New York about not just Vancouver but also other medium sized markets. It is just that Vancouver has other structural and geographical obstacles involved that compound the problem.

But the club doesn’t need to wait for the league in order to improve on some of these points. It can start marketing its star players in new and exciting ways. The club has no Spanish language content, yet is one of the most consistent importers of talent from Latin America. Why not capitalize on the presence of Efrain Juarez, Cristian Techera, Kendall Waston and Anthony Blondell to expand its reach and become a club that is at least known of and followed in Mexico or Uruguay. It also would do well to double down on marketing itself in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and even Alberta (RIP FC Edmonton). The club has done that by forming academy partnerships with soccer organizations in those provinces but it could be expanded even more. With the arrival of the Canadian Premier League coming soon, why not arrange friendlies with sides in those areas and, potentially, expand those relationships to include more formal partnerships with clubs. Expanding this reach both increases the club’s fanbase and inherently expands the de facto market size of Vancouver far beyond British Columbia.

Look, I’m just a dumb American so there are factors here probably beyond my grasp. But, in my mind, there is no reason Vancouver can’t punch above its marketing weight, even as MLS leaves it (and other medium sized markets) behind. Have ideas for how to do this? Be sure to leave them in the comments.