The Major Soccer League, the only major nationwide professional soccer competition in the United States, folded Friday after 14 seasons.
The league's demise came just two years before the World Cup, soccer's top event, will be played in the United States, and leaves the country without a nationwide professional soccer league of any kind.The final blow came Thursday evening when efforts to arrange a deal to sell the St. Louis Storm fell through.
"We've been fighting this and working together for months now," MSL commissioner Earl Foreman said. "St. Louis was shaky and we just couldn't bolster it up."
Dallas, Baltimore, San Diego, Wichita and Cleveland all were committed to playing the 1992-93 season, but Foreman said the owners in a conference call Friday decided unanimously that the league shouldn't remain in business following the departure of Tacoma and St. Louis.
"At this time, we probably have the strongest group of owners we've ever had," Foreman said in Baltimore. "Just not enough of them."
The league's existence has been threatened each year since 1988. The league's salary cap was reduced four times from $1,275,000 to $600,000.
"We did some good things but we just couldn't overcome this cloud," Foreman said.
The folding of the MSL leaves the United States with two minor professional leagues: the five-team American Professional Soccer League and the indoor National Professional Soccer League. There hasn't been a major nationwide professional outdoor league since the North American Soccer League folded following the 1984 season, and the U.S. Soccer Federation has delayed plans for a new major outdoor league until after the World Cup.
The MSL began as the Major Indoor Soccer League in 1978, when it had six teams. It reached its zenith in 1984, when it started the season with 14 teams in two divisions and had one championship series game televised nationally by CBS.
Foreman, who founded the MISL with Philadelphia businessman Ed Tepper and was its first commissioner, retired at the end of the 1983-84 season but returned following the 1988-89 season. A sign of the league's troubles was that four franchises folded in the New Uork area.
Foreman said some owners, such as Donald Carter of the Dallas Sidekicks, said they would remain in business.
"Some of the people want to keep playing," he said. "Don Carter is going to maintain soccer, come what may. He has told me unequivocably, the Sidekicks aren't going anyplace."
The league's average attendance actually rose about 20 percent this past season to 7,851. In 14 seasons, the MISL and MSL drew more than 27 million people and had 32 franchises. The league dropped the "Indoor" from its name in 1989.
At the start, the league was called "human pinball" by some, but the USSF has been supportive in recent years. FIFA, soccer's governing body, has even begun an indoor championship.
"If there is a legacy, the legacy is the sport," Foreman said. "I have faith in the game. We were probably a year away from having a truly international league of U.S., Canada and Mexico."