Ailing MSL Clinging to Hopes : Soccer: League considers alternatives to keep from folding. No sixth franchise is on the horizon.

Nearing the end of its road, the Major Soccer League stopped the bus to let off its remaining owners on Friday--but no one left.

The five survivors decided to stay for another 10 days to see if they can’t pick up at least one more team to join them.

The owners previously had given themselves a Friday deadline to come up with a sixth team, the minimum number they say is necessary to continue. The alternative was to fold. But when Friday came minus a sixth team, they weren’t willing to announce a funeral.

Instead owners here and in Dallas, Cleveland, Baltimore and Wichita agreed to consider alternatives during a teleconference to keep the 14-year-old league alive. Options include fielding a team of Mexican all-stars, parading other international sides through arenas in games that will count in the standings, and pushing the season back to a spring-summer schedule to accommodate possible expansion, according to two sources.

There are problems that need to be worked out if any of the options are to be implemented, but owners appear more willing to go that route than to take an easier path through Tacoma and St. Louis.

A potential buyer in Tacoma, where the Stars folded two weeks ago, and a group in St. Louis, where the Storm have been dormant since the end of the regular season, have made it known they would like to keep the MSL in those two cities.

But in each case the MSL considers the prospective buyers under-funded--and other owners simply do not want weak partners.

“We’re not counting on Tacoma and we’re not counting on St. Louis,” said Oscar Ancira, Sockers’ managing general partner. “We’re not waiting for anybody. We’re basically saying we have five teams and the sixth team will have to come from elsewhere. We have discounted Tacoma and St. Louis.”

Socker Coach Ron Newman expanded on the reasons for that.

“This league has always been wagged by the weaker franchises,” Newman said. “The weaker franchises weren’t able to put more money in at the league level to start the right marketing plan, or anything like that. So the other owners have been held back. But the guys we have now are much more able to make a major league, to put some money in there and let it grow.

“(Tacoma and St. Louis) don’t have the money to help the league go forward. We just don’t want to hang on to teams that can just barely survive. The ones that barely survive restrict the growth of the league, and that’s what has happened over the past several years, and now the remaining owners find themselves in a position where they can really grow.”

Or can they?

“If we don’t find a sixth team,” Ancira said. “There won’t be a league.”

Perhaps the best alternative is moving the start of the season from October to January. That would take the schedule through June. Reportedly, several owners of National Basketball Assn. teams who also own arenas would be interested in MSL expansion if it would allow them to fill their empty summer dates.

Dallas Sidekicks owner Donald Carter, who also owns the NBA Mavericks, will spend the next week working on that possibility. But convincing NBA peers to join him might prove easier than convincing MSL owners to tinker with the schedule.

Baltimore’s Ed Hale as well as the Sockers’ Ancira would like to move the schedule the other way and start in mid-October rather than late October in order to avoid a conflict between the start of the playoffs and the start of major league baseball’s season.

Those two sports butted heads this past spring, and the result was a drastic decrease in the MSL’s playoff attendance from regular-season games.

The drop-off was most severe in Baltimore, where the Blast averaged only 4,400 fans for three semifinal games. That same week the Orioles consistently sold out Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Hale sounded particularly dour after Friday’s conference call.

“I’m not here to tell you the league has gone out of business,” he told the Associated Press. “But we’re as close as you can get.”

Ancira sounded more hopeful and estimated the league’s chances of survival at 70%. But he, too, downplayed the possibility of moving the season.

“If anything, we should make it earlier, right after the World Series,” he said. “That way we can finish before the NBA playoffs.”

Ancira, whose partners include some powerful businessmen in Mexico City, will work on fielding a team of all-stars from the Mexican league. He refused comment on the matter, however, and when asked if a sixth team might come from Mexico, he said, “the sixth team will come from somewhere.”

No one would discuss the third option of bringing international teams in for games that would count in the standings, but it has been done before by both the North American Soccer League and by the World Hockey Assn. during the mid 1970s. Perhaps it is a bad omen that both leagues now are defunct.

At any rate, it appears that hope is the last to fade.

“I see a number of real fine options,” Commissioner Earl Foreman said. “And if they can be produced, we’ll be in good shape.

“We’re still the major league of soccer in this country.”

At least until June 29, when owners will hold another conference call.