Growing the Game

I’ve got some thoughts on the whole Detroit City FC-vs-USL-Pro version of the Bucks thing. They come from being a relative newcomer to the whole soccer thing (other than growing up the older brother of a high school All-State goalie, so I know what offsides looks like).

The friction between DCFC supporters and the Bucks camp to me seems to come from the fact that the two teams have fundamentally different business models. With DCFC, money goes in one end and a soccer community comes out the other. With the Bucks, money goes in and soccer players come out the other.

As a developmental team owner, Dan Duggan can say something like, “You may think that is crazy but my PDL model is not about spending one dollar or precious resource on fans” with a straight face…and he’s not wrong. That’s simply not why his team exists, and that’s OK. It literally does not matter if anybody shows up for the Bucks’ games, since they don’t exist for the fans. They exist for the benefit of the players on the roster. So be it.

Detroit City FC, however, exists not just for its players but also for the community, for the fans, for the maniacs in the supporters’ stands and for the City of Detroit. It’s the epicenter of a culture that’s gained literally international attention over the past two seasons and finally has people thinking that just possibly, Detroit could be a soccer town in addition to its other four beloved (or three beloved and one endured, really, a tight end in the first round?) sports.

And that appears to really rub Duggan raw. Where the friction really comes in is that for all his US Soccer-approved talk of “growing the game,” Duggan really hasn’t grown the game in Metro Detroit to any meaningful degree. He’s certainly grown a number of soccer players, and credit to him and his organization for that, but even the Waza organization, from my lone experience at one of their matches, has done more to “grow the game” than the theoretically-mighty Bucks. You can’t meaningfully say you’re growing the game if nobody’s interested in showing up for said game at your facility. The Bucks were the tree-falling-in-the-forest of soccer in Michigan for years, even when they had laudable success on the field. They’re like a PBS television show that nobody watches but wins awards from self-important educational foundations because somebody, somewhere might watch it and walk away educated. (Something with semiotics professors or lots of earnest discussion of privilege or inequality.)

And then came Detroit City FC. With a very smart ownership group that bucked (pun intended) the common soccer wisdom of attracting families and youth teams and then got very, very lucky with early supporters who did their thing without the leadership or involvement (or often approval) of the front office, DCFC exploded onto the scene and had the US soccer community (and some shady Greek-Canadians as well) buzzing about “MLS to Detroit” within a season and a half.

So, Duggan saw that hey, there was apparently a market for soccer in Detroit. And, as somebody who appears to see himself as the firekeeper of Detroit soccer (and who has more resources than the DCFC ownership, not least of which is his brother the new Mayor of Detroit) he announced that he was bringing real soccer to Detroit. You know, professional players. Because to somebody who loves the purity of the game of soccer, who happily watches players run up and down a pristine pitch in an empty dome, the better the players the better the experience. He seemed to think, in all good faith and in all seriousness, that “all the fans of soccer in Detroit want professional soccer in this city and eventually want an MLS team” and “DCFC’s success in the stands show that there are lots of people that are looking for a soccer team to follow in the area.” He then moved on to the tired US Soccer model of signing up all the youth teams in the area to fill the stands, and how the gameday atmosphere would be managed by his professional general manager.

And the DCFC supporters, predictably, lost their shit. Operatically. With footnotes and infographics. As they tend to do whenever poked, because the offseason’s really, really long.

No, Dan. DCFC’s success in the stands has been the result of the rejection of everything you think you’re going to accomplish. It’s not about the quality of soccer, or the Bucks’ stands would be full (or at least not a safe place to practice your javelin toss during the match, as they are now). It’s not about the youth teams, who have proven for decades that they aren’t enough to support a franchise. It’s not about a carefully-managed gameday environment. It’s about an organic passion and community that grows out of what American soccer fans have seen on TV from Europe and the World Cup and have wanted to experience themselves for decades.

Duggan really doesn’t seem to get that. In his mind, the point is the soccer on the field, and people who are “soccer fans” will want to see the best product on the field possible. Since DCFC supporters are soccer fans, in his mind, they’ll clearly want to come to his USL-Pro team’s games since the quality of the soccer will (presumably) be higher. And they’ll buy replica kit and wave scarves and all but watch the dirty words because there’s kids in the stands and a general manager telling them to be nice.

He doesn’t get it. He probably never will get it. DCFC’s success grew organically, but he’s trying to Monsanto his way into the same results thanks to his fundamentally inapplicable views of who soccer fans are and what they want from their team. And while that doesn’t make him a bad person, it does make him one more in a list of people who have tried to bottle the Detroit City FC genie and failed.

Now we can stop talking about this and focus on the season opener on Saturday. Allez Le Rouge.