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Major League Soccer is still a minor league player in American sport. The average match attendance last season was just 15,600, compared with over 60,000 for all but two teams in the National [American] Football League. The MLS players aren't paid that well. Only last November they won a collective agreement which will provide them with pension benefits and raise their pay from a minimum of $28,000 this year to $34,000 in 2009. However, the MLS is a great improvement on the North American Soccer League which went bust in 1984 after importing overpaid foreign players heading for veteran status. Moreover, MLS has a marketing subsidiary that ensures that almost all its games are televised live.
Now the MLS has been boosted by the arrival of its first overtly Latino team, Chivas USA. MLS reckons that half of its 50 million fan base is Latino. Moreover, that segment (two-thirds of it Mexican in origin) is growing. There are now around 40m Latinos in the USA, some 13 per cent of the population, and by 2025 their number is set to increase to 61m or 18% of the population.
Chivas USA plays in Los Angeles and is an offshoot of Mexico's Club Deportivo de Guadalajara known as 'Chivas' or 'goats', originally an insult that became a badge of pride. The club's policy has been to employ only Mexican players and has long been one of the top ten brands in Mexico. 22 of the 26 players in the US club are Latino and it is part of the first television rights for an individual team in MLS history. The team is using the custom built stadium of Los Angeles Galaxy and is attracting sell out crowds of 27,000.
MLS commissioner Don Garber, keen to extend the geographical range of the league, wanted Chivas to set up in Houston or San Diego. But Los Angeles, where half the population is Latino, was more attractive. The great rivals of Chivas, Club America of Mexico City, may start a team in Houston. And there is even talk of clubs such as Arsenal, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Barcelona setting up American satellites.
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