WUSA haunted by TV, attendance questions as first season draws to
a close.

By Robert Wagman
SoccerTimes

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Sunday, July 22, 2001) -- Before the Women’s United Soccer Association began play in April, I said I was going to withhold judgment and comment on the status of the new league, both on the field and off, until after the weekend of July 15, by which time the WUSA would have settled into something approaching normalcy.

The million-dollar public relations splash beginning the season has faded, teams have gotten to know one another from a competitive standpoint and attendance-enhancing promotions have given way to normal week-in and week out-matches. So it is a good time to try to evaluate how well the new league is doing.

Even this deep into the inaugural season, what makes it difficult to judge how well the new league is doing is simply trying to determine what context in which to judge it. Should the WUSA be evaluated as one would any other professional sport -- by the quality of play on the field and by whether fans are turning out in sufficient numbers to produce a profit? Should it be rated as the latest example of a social phenomenon -- women in sports -- with a central purpose to further women’s causes? Or, given its ownership structure of mostly major cable television operators, should the league be judged as a kind of television series using stadiums as outdoor studios?

In the days immediately following its startup announcement, the league was buoyant in its predictions of immediate success. So many sponsors and advertisers were forecast to flock to the league and its expected young, female demographic, that the league boldly predicted it could break even with an average attendance of about 6,000. However, when the expected sponsorship revenue failed to materialize, the league said it would probably need an average of about 8,000 per match to break even.

Then, in the weeks leading up to April 14 inaugural match here in Washington, the league went on a major campaign to lower expectations. What was stressed was the league has $40 million in commitments from its investors, enough, top officials said, to fund the league for five seasons. Then, when nearly 35,000 attended the WUSA opener, the league’s founders thought they had hit the mother lode.

How things have changed.

At the turnstiles, the league is doing better than expected in only two of its eight markets, Washington and Atlanta. In Washington, buoyed by the heavily promoted opening match that drew fans from all over the country, and two doubleheaders staged with Major League Soccer’s D.C. United, each drawing more than 30,000, average attendance is a surprisingly robust 17,218. Atlanta has also averaged about 13,000 fans per game.

Elsewhere, the Boston and Philadelphia teams have averaged about the 8,000 break-even mark. But the teams in San Jose, San Diego, New York and Chapel Hill, N.C., lag well below the supposed break-even mark.

Perhaps a better indicator of how the league is doing at the turnstile can be shown in the period between July 12 and July 15. Between Thursday and Sunday, seven matches were played. Two in Washington drew 7,210, on a Thursday night and 10,077 on Sunday afternoon. Two matches in Boston drew 8,066 and 6,038. A match in New York -- played in Uniondale, Long Island -- drew 4,382. Philadelphia had 5,683, while Carolina pulled in only 4,635 on a balmy Friday evening.

Take away the inaugural match, and the MLS-supported D.C. United-Washington Freedom doubleheaders, and the league is not enjoying the support at the gate to meet even its modest goals.

On the field, the quality of play certainly is not what was in the United States during the 1999 Women’s World Cup. All eight clubs started slowly, with teams struggling to blend players coming from diverse backgrounds. In the first weeks, a 2-1 result was a scoring bonanza. 1-0 was the usual score line and 0-0 matches were common.

Things have picked up, and the quality of play has improved. Interestingly, several of the teams who looked the strongest on paper, including the Mia Hamm-led Washington Freedom are not currently in the playoff picture. The New York Power, with league-leading scorer Tiffeny Milbrett, is in freefall, having lost four straight. Somewhat surprisingly, the league’s hottest team in the Bay Area CyberRays, unbeaten in 10. The only team playing consistently to form is the first-place Atlanta Beat, with U.S. Women’s World Cup stars Briana Scurry in goal and Cindy Parlow up front, paired with China’s top player, Sun Wen.

The most interesting area to contemplate is the WUSA on television. From all indications, despite a great deal of money being poured into production and promoting the telecasts, the ratings have been just awful. The league speaks bravely of having to develop audiences, and of finding the optimal times to broadcast matches, but insiders admit the ratings have been half or less of what was expected and sold to advertisers.

Looming large over the new women’s league is the specter of the failed XFL, the football league started last year by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation. About $100 million was invested in the idea that a tougher, more extreme brand of football than played in the National Football League would draw young viewers in huge numbers. When it didn’t, NBC pulled the plug despite repeated statements it was in the league "for the long haul."

This same kind of statement can be heard coming from the WUSA. The league says that investors from the cable world such as Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable, and the league’s broadcast partners, Turner Network Television Sports, and its division CNN-SI, all expected this kind of first year, and all are already eagerly looking forward to Year Two.

Hopefully that is the case, but these entities are not concerned about growing the sport of soccer in America or promoting women’s athletics. One unanswered question is how quickly WUSA is going through its initial funding, what they call the "burn rate" in the dot-com world. The prediction that the league has enough funding to last five seasons might depend on what the first year has cost and whether the cable investors are going to be more patient than NBC was with the XFL.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

Senior correspondent Robert Wagman's "It Seems To Me . . . " appears regularly on SoccerTimes. He can be e-mailed at bobwagman@soccertimes.com..