At the ballot box yesterday, San Diego voters made their selections.

Come November, the business of sports will return to the ballot.

Pending a Superior Court review initiated last month by City Attorney Mara Elliott, voters will decide the fate of two land-use measures for the former Chargers stadium site in Mission Valley.

Each proposes a stadium that would house football or soccer or perhaps both.


Authors of the plans haven’t agreed on much in public comments — but they do agree that if a stadium is built, having a Major League Soccer team there would make sense.

MLS is a much, much bigger plank to the SoccerCity plan as described by Nick Stone, the point man for the private-equity group that launched the initiative.

Yet San Diego State Athletic Director J.D. Wicker said that if SDSU were to build its own stadium for the football Aztecs as part of the SDSU campus-expansion initiative, having an MLS team there, too, would be desirable.

MLS is a mystery to most San Diego voters, one suspects, in comparison to the sports leagues linked to past ballot-box measures here.


Major League Baseball and the National Football League, in 1998 and 2016, respectively, were revenue giants that boasted the best baseball and football players in the world.

MLS is more of a bet on the come. It is the top U.S. soccer league, but its level of play isn’t best in class in the world, soccer being the most popular sport in European countries and many other countries.

MLS is gaining with younger sports fans, a sign the league will continue to grow.

The league has a West Coast footprint that includes two teams in Los Angeles, another in San Jose, and three more in the Pacific Northwest counting Vancouver.


Now in the midst of rapid expansion, MLS has grown from 14 teams in 2008 to its current 23 and will add Cincinnati next year.

Raising the number to 26, Miami and Nashville are to get teams in 2020.

Not stopping there, the league said it plans to add two other clubs at a later date, raising the total to 28.

Expansion is good for cash flow, as there’s a fee to join the league, which has a single-entity ownership structure rather than the individual team ownership familiar to other major American sports leagues.


When MLS announced its expansion plans in December 2016, it reported $150 million as the fee for the teams that wound up going to Cincinnati and Nashville. The same announcement said that price of admission for the 27th and 28th groups — of which San Diego would be among the candidates — “will be announced at a later date, at a price delivered in conjunction with the timeline.”

As reported by the Union-Tribune last June, in a leaked document sent to SDSU, the SoccerCity planners listed a $150 million MLS expansion fee under “land securing cost” as part of a project that plans mixed-used development. (Under the same header were $40 million in “team losses” and $18 million to build a soccer dormitory at Chargers Park.)

The brisk expansion of MLS is of interest to analysts such as Stanford economist Roger Noll as they try to get a sense of where the league is headed financially. To hear Noll earlier this year, the road ahead won’t be a footloose frolic in the grass.

“… The profitability of the original set of franchises in MLS, is completely dependent on expansion,” Noll told the “Field of Schemes” podcast in February.


“It is true they have secured some television. They have increased their popularity. But it’s nowhere near enough to justify the prices of the franchises and the costs of the stadiums. And, obviously, expansion can’t go on forever.”

Ultimately and for other reasons as well, Noll grimly concludes MLS is likely to meet the same fate as the top-level American soccer league from 1969 to 1984.

“I don’t see the business model of MLS justifying the amount of expansion that’s currently going on and the expenditures on new facilities,” Noll said. “So I think if we move out 10 years … MLS has a good chance of having happen to it what happened to the North American Soccer League in the 1980s when they did the same thing. They got over-exuberant and over-expanded.”

A few words about soccer.


For my taste, no other sporting event beats soccer’s World Cup for entertainment. Soccer is fun to watch if the players are good enough to play it well. MLS at times qualifies as good enough and ought to improve if it can continue to pay a competitive salary.

The business of soccer in the U.S. is still evolving. It’ll be interesting to see how efforts to build MLS shake out after the expansion money trickles off.

Tom.Krasovic@SDUnionTribune.com; Twitter: SDUTKrasovic