Misc: Major Professional Sports Team in Iowa
- Thread starter BCoffClone125
- Start date
This. Teams in the twin cities are frequently referred to as "small market teams." If #15 is a small market, what's #72?
Now let's look at the Twin Cities as a comparison.
Twins
Vikings
Wild
Wolves
Thunder
Saints
Lynx
Swarm
In the TC you have 3.4 million. So that's one teams for every 425,000 people even including the "small" teams like the Lynx, Swarm, Saints, and Thunder.
Actually, Lynx is not a small team - the average attendance is about 8k, which is a good size plus from what I've seen people are paying to get good seats instead of coming because of free tickets. Not sure about Swarm. Saints are definitely small - it was never intended to be big - people just want to have fun. Thunder attracts about 1-2k - hard to attract people when they play so far away in the northern burbs (except this Spring where they play in the dome) plus it's NASL - not MLS level soccer.
Twins
Vikings
Wild
Wolves
Thunder
Saints
Lynx
Swarm
In the TC you have 3.4 million. So that's one teams for every 425,000 people even including the "small" teams like the Lynx, Swarm, Saints, and Thunder.
Actually, Lynx is not a small team - the average attendance is about 8k, which is a good size plus from what I've seen people are paying to get good seats instead of coming because of free tickets. Not sure about Swarm. Saints are definitely small - it was never intended to be big - people just want to have fun. Thunder attracts about 1-2k - hard to attract people when they play so far away in the northern burbs (except this Spring where they play in the dome) plus it's NASL - not MLS level soccer.
Very, very, very little chance. Population is too small and because of that, there isn't the corporate sponsorship that is needed (which is really the deal breaker for DM).
Selfishly as ISU fans, we should want BCS level sports to be the biggest game in the state. We dont' need competition from major league level pro sports competing for the attention, time, and dollars of our modest 3 million people.
Some suggest soccor is a maybe, but the big problem there is there is no place to play. The Menace couldn't find any city in the metro interested to go in with Kum & Go and build even a modest stadium. I find it really difficult to believe there would be any support for financing a soccer stadium as I'm assuming like every other sport, MLS owners expect cities to help build their facilities. That doesn't seem likely.
Selfishly as ISU fans, we should want BCS level sports to be the biggest game in the state. We dont' need competition from major league level pro sports competing for the attention, time, and dollars of our modest 3 million people.
Some suggest soccor is a maybe, but the big problem there is there is no place to play. The Menace couldn't find any city in the metro interested to go in with Kum & Go and build even a modest stadium. I find it really difficult to believe there would be any support for financing a soccer stadium as I'm assuming like every other sport, MLS owners expect cities to help build their facilities. That doesn't seem likely.
Corrections:
You're two AHL franchises behind - It is Iowa Wild now. Also missing Iowa Barnstormers.
The time for a town in Iowa to get a major league franchise is in the early years when the league and sport are miserably unpopular. Think about the small towns in OH/PA or nearby in the early years of the NFL. Or the tiny eastern towns that had NBA teams when the league was irrelevant. People rewrite the history to make it seem like the desperate years were fun or romanticized when its really just an unpopular sport and lousy business model.
You'd think, but that doesn't assure we'd have a team either...
Waterloo Hawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Also you failed to include the Valkyrie in your TC list.
Minnesota Valkyrie - Legends Football League
In all seriousness, they will probably go under shortly.
I believe that each of Des Moines, St. Paul and Minneapolis have their own Roller Girl leagues. It's surprising how many fans the leagues up here have.
If you look closely, a certain famous ISU coach played for Waterloo...
Wooeee, Coach. That was a dinger!
I see a future with more professional sports that are each less popular than what we have today. There will be dozens of niche cable networks "bundled" with NFL and College Football packages that will need programming. The lack of "centralized" pop culture makes the few "sure things" like NFL and College Football more important. More obscure sports leagues will try and work, and a city like Des Moines has "a chance" at something as lousy as Major League Lacrosse or Pro Women's Volleyball. But its more like the abstract concept of more niche sports in the future, more crap put together to fill television schedules. The MLS in its first years was little more than a TV network with a soccer business on the side.
The next bad idea of a sports league might look at Des Moines and think its unsaturated. The relative saturation didn't stop two out of state groups from convincing themselves that Des Moines was a budding hockey hotbed. They saw the covered skywalk system downtown and thought there was no way they could lose.
The next bad idea of a sports league might look at Des Moines and think its unsaturated. The relative saturation didn't stop two out of state groups from convincing themselves that Des Moines was a budding hockey hotbed. They saw the covered skywalk system downtown and thought there was no way they could lose.
Also, Menace and Bucs are both amateur teams, not professional.
It would make more sense that Omaha get a soccer team for TD Ameritrade Stadium than DSM. As an aside, the KC team built a 25k stadium out by NASCAR and our doing very well.
