Time for Taking Stock of MISL’s Ups and Downs

If the fortunes of the Major Indoor Soccer League were charted like the stock market, indicators would not exactly be encouraging.

Let’s look at the last few months. . . .

The league announces that it will fold if a new collective bargaining agreement lowering the salary cap is not in place by April 15.

The agreement is in place, cutting total salaries per team from a maximum of $1.275 million to $900,000.

The players are not pleased.

It was better than the alternative, except . . .

St. Louis folded.

Minnesota folded.

Chicago folded.

Tacoma folded.

The Sockers were at the precipice of folding and taking the league with them.

There have been other ups and downs of lesser magnitude. The Sockers have had a few by themselves, such as one bankruptcy hearing in which they went from hopeful to dead to hopeful to limbo in the space of about 15 minutes. And there was another hearing, just last week, in which the patient figuratively died before it got on the table . . . and still revived to end up in limbo for yet a few more days.

In the MISL these days, limbo is one of the most positive places to be.

The latest scenario unfolded in Cleveland Tuesday, when MISL moguls gathered to contemplate the plunging fortunes of their plaything.

Moguls?

OK, the MISL does not have moguls the way the National Football League and major league baseball and even the National Basketball Assn. have moguls. There are probably a couple dozen owners in the three established sports who could fund the MISL by themselves.

MISL owners do not have shipbuilding companies or chains of hotels or fast-food empires or industrial conglomerates. They are successful businessmen, to be sure, and some, such as Cleveland’s Bart Wolstein, probably could match bankrolls with some of the real moguls of professional sports. However, for most, we’re talking Marvin Gardens and Atlantic rather than Broadway and Park Place.

With this in mind, consider that the brightest ray of hope going into Tuesday’s meeting came from the Great Gloom of the Pacific Northwest.

This was in the form of a group from Tacoma trying to resuscitate that franchise before the body cooled. The leader of this group was Jim Manza, described as a restaurateur and businessman. It sounded a little bit like a bunch of people pooling their money to buy a thoroughbred, but it could work in the MISL.

The credibility and potential success of this bid was only everything to the future of the San Diego Sockers.

The bid of managing general partner Ron Fowler to purchase the Sockers out of bankruptcy was based on the existence of an eight-team MISL. Since the Sockers remain technically one of only seven survivors, the acceptance of a Tacoma group would bring indoor soccer back into focus hereabouts.

Why an insistence on an eight-team MISL?

I’ll tell you why. Fowler has a top bid of $825,000 to get the franchise out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. True, his company, Liquid Investments, is one of the creditors that would be paid, but he probably would do much better if the entire $825,000 stayed in whatever bank account whence it might come.

To protect an already precarious investment, Fowler had to draw a line . It may have been arbitrary, but hardly capricious. Buying into an MISL franchise is a most speculative investment, and it had to get to the point where X number of teams make potential sense and Y number of teams indicate a further downward spiral.

X equaled 8 and Y equaled 7.

Thus, Tacoma’s future was the Sockers’ future.

As might be expected, Tuesday’s meeting also ended inconclusively. Tacoma’s group was given until next Wednesday to formalize its plans and come up with a letter of credit. This was not exactly a beginning, but hardly an end, either.

For the MISL and the Sockers, it represents yet another visit to limbo. But remember, it’s better than the alternative.

Once again, it is a time to wait. Ron Fowler could not be pushed when “absolute” deadlines were staring him in the face, and it is not time to leap now.

Cool heads, something I might not previously have associated with the MISL, have come to understand that it is worth taking the time to try to save this embattled league.