"The Anschutz Entertainment Group will officially announce(today) that the city of Houston, Texas, will become the new home for the San Jose Earthquakes," MLS Commissioner Don Garber said via teleconference. "The move is effective immediately, and all players and coaching staff currently under contract will transfer to Houston as part the new team."
While the team is relocating to a new home, its identity will remain in San Jose as the league hopes to have a team back in the Bay Area city as soon as the 2007 expansion season.
"It is our intent to return to San Jose as soon as possible with an expansion team," Garber said. "As part of our commitment to the market, the Earthquakes name, the colors, the competitive records and all other things related to the team have been retained by MLS for its future expansion team."
Rumors of a move have been floating around for awhile. The Earthquakes have had difficulty getting the fans in San Jose to turn out on a regular basis despite the fact that the club has one championship under their belt, and but for the LA Galaxy might've taken another one this year. It was rumored that San Jose would relocate to San Antonio after the season ended, but San Antonio's city council never could quite bring themselves to agree to build a home for a new club. So off to Houston it is. I honestly don't know how great of a market Houston is for soccer. Like with Dallas, the suburbs of Houston are home to a powerful youth soccer movement, but that's never seemed to translate into serious support for professional soccer. Houston does have a large Hispanic population though, which can be drawn to MLS soccer, as Dallas proved in their earlier incarnation as the Dallas Burn. Of course this also instantly creates an intriguing Texas rivalry, which I suspect will get off to a good start early in the season. All in all it's good news for Texas soccer.
3 comments:
You're definitely right about their devotion to the Mexican league. But they seem willing to give MLS a chance; I remember the early days of the Burn, where there were thousands of hispanic fans at every game. Things is there's a short window to show them quality soccer before they go away and don't come back, as the-now FC Dallas is learning.
Whitey, when the Burn first came into being, Dallas fans were mostly hispanic. Xanthippas and I know; we were there! The Hispanic audience is futbol starved, and they really love the game.
The Burn/FC Dallas really screwed the pooch when they abandoned their hispanic fans. You could reliably count on thousands of them to show up at the game, until, that is, it moved to Frisco.
I think that really, this is a good move and that there will be a plentiful audience for soccer in Houston. As long as they cater to the fans they have and not the fans they want (rich white people), they'll do fine.
You know I agree with that, but at the same I think there was definitely a market for Mexican and hispanic fans, as evidenced by the games early on like Nat-Wu says. Just based on a very rough memory, I'd say there were at least several thousand hispanic fans at every game, and sometimes it seemed like they were a full 1/3 or even 1/2 the fans there. I think that goes to show that for a club like FC Dallas, you don't need to attrack the 65,000 hispanics that would show up to watch Mexico play in the Cotton Bowl. You just need maybe 1/10 of that to show up to the game on a regular basis. I think that's do-able.
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