If Vancouver Moves, MLS Begins Its Decline

I have written and deleted 10 versions of this article over the last few years, so perhaps this is the time I publish it. This time, it is the bombshell news that the owners of MLS teams are thinking about moving the Vancouver Whitecaps to Las Vegas. If the Whitecaps were dismantled and packed to another city it would measure the final conversion of turning American soccer teams into wealth production tools that MLS has been working so hard to accomplish. It would also mark the beginning of the decline of American soccer.

I can often be accused of being a naive lefty. I won’t deny that I often talk about sports and their relationship to community in ways that seem incomprehensible to people who have actual bank accounts. That said, I’ll speak here as someone who has built a few businesses: the world’s only queer soccer bar and the most successful grassroots women’s soccer team in the country. I start there to say that: I am a naive lefty who talks about community because I’ve seen how successful it can be.

Let’s take a step back to a period when Major League Soccer was on the brink of collapse. At the beginning of the 00s, MLS was already stumbling and began contracting, losing both of its Florida teams. There were attempts to strategically pull back and plant seeds where they might be more successful: moving San Jose to Houston and launching the short-lived Chivas USA. But it wasn’t until the end of the decade that the league found a formula for success.

By the end of the decade, the league found its successful formula in tapping the power of communities. MLS capitalized on the long term success of the Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers while also harnessing grassroots energy to create the Philadelphia Union. These three clubs reinvigorated the entire league by simply putting the supporters first. There were obviously great supporters in the league before this moment, but these three teams changed the entire tenor of the league.

In contrast Chivas USA was created as a product that would appeal to people they saw as diehard soccer fans: the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles. It flopped for a number of reasons, but you could boil it down to creating a team and dressing it up in a way they thought would feel authentic to Mexican-Americans.

In Portland, Philadelphia, and Seattle, you didn’t have suits creating what they thought would feel authentic. Instead, the supporters did that for them. The people who had been watching a grown man dressed up as a lumberjack slice up a log after goals created an atmosphere that was infectious. It wasn’t just the people of Portland who now flocked to the team, it was other supporters around the country who wanted to build something to rival the Timbers Army, and it was casual fans who wanted to see something different and fun.

What saved the league was letting the weirdos cook. The league discovered that their best selling point was that the experience of a soccer match day is nothing like their peers. In all these other sports, you’re told to clap, you have to sit around and wait for a commercial break to end. It’s a consumer experience. At a Sounders game, though, soccer is something you participated in, it was an event you helped create. Everyone who’s been a part of it has seen the dad who brings his family to sit next to the supporters section because he just wanted to be closer to the fun people.

In the early 10s then, you saw the league shift. Suddenly, there were teams actively thinking about fanbases and what they could do, how they could make their market unique. You had teams thinking about how their stadiums could be constructed to serve the interests of supporters with the basic calculation that if you make the environment better, more people will come to games.

So then what happened? Since the beginning of MLS, its officials have lamented their low TV numbers. And this is fair enough: TV can provide far more revenue than just match day ticket sales. TV Viewership for the league has always been poor. And there have been almost as many theories for why that was the case as there were viewers. Most of the theories revolved around needing more money: we need more stars, we need to be internationally competitive, we need a higher floor of player quality. So the league created increasingly complex rules like Designated Players, TAM players, and U22 Initiative Players. I am sure the MLS suits have charts and graphs to look at how and when these different initiatives have moved the needle. But it’s fair to say that neither Beckham, nor Blanco, nor Messi were magic bullets.

In the pursuit of those TV numbers, though, MLS found its real drug: wealth. The wealth was there to serve a purpose. It was there to create a stable base for growth, because these teams were all losing money and those losses needed to be backed by someone who felt comfortable making that gamble. That all seems reasonable. But like all drugs, it was the twisted logic that follows that got them hooked. The calculation was simple: if we spend more money, we’ll lose more money, but we’ll create a product that can finally drive up the wealth of these teams to NFL and MLB levels of wealth.

High on the supply that fans in Portland and other markets rolled for them, the league started to cash checks from human rights violators like Sheikh Mansour to build a second NYC team. The $30M franchise fee that Seattle Sounders paid in 2009 became $150M 10 years later with the entry of FC Cincinatti. By 2025, when San Diego FC entered the league, that fee became the insane number of $500M.

It’s hard to pinpoint at what point it happened, but the league shifted its focus from putting teams in markets like Portland or Philadelphia where you could create the special alchemy of community and team that would succeed. Instead, they decided they would go as big as possible. They started playing in football stadiums again, they started hiking up the fees so the level of owner went from “rich as hell” to “God pays me rent.”

Has it worked? Has it led to higher TV viewership? While the team is simultaneously secretive and publicly crowing about its numbers, no one can say MLS is in a significantly better place in the last ten years. But we’ll look back in ten years and say this was the peak.

The league is in a difficult place with the Vancouver Whitecaps. The owners want to sell, they don’t have a good stadium situation, and no one seems to be interested. It turns out, driving the value up for all the teams is only good if people want to pay that price. The pool of people who can pay that price has become so small that you can’t find people who want to keep it in Vancouver. Never mind that Vancouver is a major city, the 28th largest metropolitan area in North America. The best possible scenario is moving the team to the 41st biggest metro, Las Vegas, which comes just behind Pittsburgh in those rankings.

The league backed themselves into this corner through their own choices. They chose to prioritize teams as sources of wealth. They chose to ratchet up the franchise fee to wring every last ounce of blood from that stone.

What they will find and why this is the beginning of the end is that they are blowing up their one unique asset: their connection between community and the sport. Building a strong fanbase requires building a dynamic and thriving supporters culture. If clubs are going to be transitory, if we start moving clubs around based on where there is enough capital to get a new property deal done, to where the people rich enough to own these clubs want them, then the entire contract between clubs and their communities is torn up.

Dissolving the contract in Vancouver affects every single MLS market. It’s an infection that cannot be contained. Fans in Montreal will wonder when their time is up. Fans in Philadelphia will start to think that maybe a new owner won’t want to be in Chester and that Phoenix looks much better. What is the point of spending your entire weekend making the TIFO that the team and the league will use in all their promotions if you know that your team may not be here next year?

I have long said that teams love fan culture and hate fans. They don’t want the annoying supporters who know how to advocate for themselves and who hold the club accountable. Instead, they want what one former Minnesota United President called “Brand Ambassadors.”

It comes down to this: if you want to turn American soccer into just another consumer experience, then that’s what you’ll get. Supporters will (as they have already started to do) stop making those TIFO, they’ll stop showing up early to create the atmospheres, they’ll stop buying season tickets and will instead just come a few times a year. Killing Vancouver would finally break the spell and turn this all into just another transaction.

And just to be clear, everything I’m saying now applies directly to the NWSL.