Major Soccer League Set to Open 14th Season

It was a typical off-season for the Major Soccer League

It lost one franchise. Almost lost two others. And let an expansion team slip away.

But somehow the league, now with seven teams, starts its 14th season this week.

“It can’t continue,” league commissioner Earl Foreman says. “My belief is that it won’t. The league is as it was last year and two years ago -- dependent on its owners.”

The first game is Oct. 19 when Dallas travels to Baltimore, but the season really gets underway Oct. 24 with four-time defending champion San Diego going to Dallas to open a full weekend of play.

It’s still too early to assess the full impact of the league’s latest near collapse.

“It’s hurt,” Foreman says. “The last 90 days after the season hurt. We’ll go forward, hope to have a TV package this year.

“This season we go in with more season tickets sold than any other year.”

This past summer’s antics seemed like a replay of almost every off-season for the past five years -- except for last year when the league started with the same teams it had the year before and it looked like the MSL might be stabilizing.

But San Diego owner Ron Fowler announced in midseason that the recession was hurting his beverage distribution business and he couldn’t support the team.

That sent tremors through the league, especially in Kansas City and Dallas. Sidekicks chairman Phil Cobb folded his team the day after the last regular season game.

Kansas City asked for additional limited investors but couldn’t find enough. City efforts and help from Hallmark greeting card company weren’t enough to save the club either.

In the meantime, the remaining owners were hassling with the players union again over lowering the salary cap $100,000 to $550,000. The players, again realizing they have no alternative, agreed to the cut, thus reducing it 60 percent from its initial starting point of $1.275 million in 1986.

There were some white knights in all of this. Oscar Ancira Sr. and Jr., father-and-son owners of a frozen Mexican food producer in San Diego, purchased the Sockers franchise, and former Sidekicks owner Donald Carter, the owner the Dallas Mavericks, stepped in to buy 51 percent of Sidekicks, the same club he sold in the summer of 1986.

John Aleckner bought the other 49 percent.

But the Pittsburgh Spirit, announced as an expansion franchise on June 11, pulled out and didn’t submit their letter of credit by Aug. 1. Team officials said they’d wait another year.

This also convinced a Buffalo group to wait another year before committing itself to a team.

The outcome of the summer was to reduce the league to a seven-team, one-division format.

How long can this go on?

“The only way I can answer that, to be fair, is as long as the NHL, NBA and NFL did,” Cleveland Crunch general manager Al Miller said. “They all took a long time to get established. Historically, we’re not going to be any different.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have two or three more. It’s not a matter if we’re going to lose clubs, but if we’re going to gain clubs.”

Foreman has hired a deputy commissioner, John Borozzi, formerly the Baltimore Blasts vice president and GM, and says he will spend most of time this season on expansion.

Foreman plans to beef up the MSL’s public relations department, play indoor exhibitions in Europe, returning to Zurich, Switzerland like last season. There has even been talk of starting three expansion teams in England.

The league’s offices will move from suburban Kansas City’s Overland Park, Kan., to Baltimore, probably by mid-November.

The league did grab some headlines this summer when San Diego coach Ron Newman said the club was trying to get Diego Maradona.

The 1986 World Cup MVP from Argentina is serving a 15-month suspension that will end in July. The ban, imposed by the Italian League for testing positive for cocaine in March, is being enforced by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, making him ineligible to play in the United States, or anywhere else.

Sockers managing general partner Oscar Ancira Jr. met with Maradona’s agents in Buenos Aires in late September and apparently impressed the 30-year-old striker.