Re: Somerville Soccer Stadium
I think the real issue that would make Kraft hesitate on really pushing for providence is that a successful providence team would likely make a boston team more likely and not preclude it. Some other ownership group would see the success and say wow imagine what I could get in an even bigger, richer, younger greater immigrant city 60 miles north and I think a quick demographic study of the providence revs games would show there aren't many fans from Suffolk and middlesex county.
And if the market is going to split, kraft will want the bigger half.
The problem I have with this argument is John Henry.
The fact is, as I have said and will continue to say, that Boston is a weak soccer market. Kraft's failure to relocate 10+ years ago isn't helping matters any, but the fact is that MLS barely goes noticed in the shadow of foreign leagues and international competition. Frankly, one of the reasons I keep pressing on this move to Providence proposal is because I do believe Boston is a shit soccer town. And I believe it's always going to be a shit soccer town, where MLS ranks eighth in popularity behind the other four major leagues, the English Premiere League, college basketball, and college football.
And sorry, Proposition Joe, sorry everyone else, but I don't think I need to do a whole hell of a lot to "make Boston look like" a shit soccer town when it's undeniable that the media doesn't care about MLS and this thread is far and away the most vocal I've ever seen Revs fans. I'm not even going to put quotes around it as I normally would.
MLS will never be the most popular
soccer in Boston (never mind being a top five sport), thanks to the English Premiere League, and frankly, I don't believe that the silver bullet of a stadium downtown is going to change that, nor will an improving product, nor will the Krafts waking up one morning and suddenly giving half a shit again about the league they helped create, once upon a time.
But you know what? There's exactly one person in this city who has a connection to the EPL and is in a prime position to leverage it and that man's name is John Henry.
Liverpool/Roma is a sellout - again - and it's clear based on the Yankees FC that MLS can be accommodating of at least temporarily co-locating one of their franchises into a baseball stadium. The venerable old Fenway Park, aging though it may be, is more than capable of hosting a Fenway soccer team and Kraft's "talk much and do little" approach to stadium building leaves the door wide open for Henry to come in and take Boston right out of Kraft's hands. The Revs are not (and I don't believe they ever will be) a Boston team and MLS is in full-swing expansion mode, plus it's John Henry. You don't think the MLS would be 110% on board if he said he wanted to start up Liverpool USA right there on 4 Yawkey Way, with plans for a future stadium he'd build himself, Kraft and the Revs be damned? I know, I know, Chivas, but the circumstances there were completely different.
Frankly, if there was any hope of an MLS team making it here than I think John Henry would have already forced the issue with Kraft, whether that's with an expansion franchise or even an aggressive buy-out offer.
Kraft will get a stadium in or near Boston by 2025. If soccer is legitimately going to take off in this country and become a multi-billion dollar industry I cannot imagine how our state politicians would not want piece of that business in the state. Tax revenue, jobs, [Olympics,] etc. will drive finding a better location for the stadium.
Soccer has legitimately taken off in this country! The time for saying "if it arrives" or "when it arrives" is over - IT'S HERE.
The problem is that the soccer which has arrived in Boston isn't MLS. MLS has arrived in other cities, but it's passed an uncaring Boston by.
You can't make this assertion when the opportunity for Massachusetts politicians to say "Soccer's here, we've gotta get on board!" has already come and gone. And it's absurd to have people in desperation turning to an ill-advised Olympics bid of all things as the last hope of the Revs to find a home of their own.
[emphasis mine]
Now you're just venturing into the absurd.
Am I really? The New England Revolution are one of the founding MLS franchises and their ownership played a huge role in bringing MLS into existence to begin with. They're a joke of a franchise now, but they still have that history and they are still probably an MLS cornerstone. Maybe MLS won't be destroyed if the Revs fold, but it's not at all going to be like Chivas USA or lesser MLS franchises in other parts of the country folding. The Revs failing would do serious harm to the league, even if they are a joke today.
Again, its literally everyone's fault except for Bob Kraft.
Show me where I said the words "Bob Kraft is not at fault."
You can't, because I didn't, because the only thing wrong with your first sentence here was the last four words.
I am absolutely saying that everyone is at fault - the fans are disaffected, the media is barely present on a good day, the politicians aren't interested, the front office is happy stringing everyone along until someone chokes up a sweetheart deal for them, the communities are all too happy to keep getting strung along, the players and the product suck, the league would much rather pretend that what happens to the Revs has absolutely no bearing on MLS's future when that's patently untrue... EVERYONE IS AT FAULT FOR THIS. Literally everyone. Absolutely nobody involved in this conversation from jerks like me on an architecture forum all the way up to Bob Kraft himself is untouched by blame for at least some small portion of a very large problem.
I'd place equal blame at the feet of Bob Kraft and the media as the two biggest contributors to this, but that doesn't mean that everyone else gets a free pass.
If the fans had gotten louder, sooner, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
If Curtatone and all the rest had told Kraft to put up or shut up five years ago, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
Hell, if Don Garber had chosen to gone after Kraft before going after Chivas, we might not be having this conversation right now.
None of those things happened, though, and we're having this conversation right now because a whole lot of people are culpable for the fact that there's a dead-ass soccer team playing in a dead-ass football stadium outside of town when we could have had a stadium long before now.
Putting the stadium on the Commuter Rail will not change anything. Gillette Stadium is currently on the Commuter Rail and it doesn't do anything to help attendance because the Commuter Rail is expensive, time exhaustive, and difficult to use compared to rapid transit. People are clamoring for a stadium located on rapid transit because they want to use rapid transit to get them to games.
Gillette is only on the Commuter Rail in the most technical and open-ended of senses, with a stop that sees two trains coming from two different locations exactly twice per Patriots game - once to the stadium before kickoff, and once back in the other direction exactly half an hour after the game is over, and god help you if you miss that one train.
If you're going to see a headline international match, or if you're going to see a sufficiently popular concert, you might get lucky and the MBTA will deign to run exactly one special round-trip train. Otherwise, and at all other times, Gillette Stadium's "stop" sits... unused, forlorn, abandoned.
Come back to me with this argument when there's more than one goddamn round-trip that you can't even count on getting per game, because in the meantime, there's nothing stopping us from utilizing the commuter rail more like rapid transit.
I don't think I've addressed this argument before, but moving to Providence temporarily doesn't seem to be a sensible option. Why invest in a stadium and a fanbase if you are planning on moving somewhere better in the near future? Why would anyone in Providence root for a team they know will move away and why would the front office care so little about establishing a solid brand and history for the team by yanking them around New England.
After 25 years down here, there's no guarantee they'll actually want to leave. I want to leave the option open, in fact, because I'm confident that either they won't, or after 25 years of the same song and dance there
still won't be any progress on a stadium in Boston.
But even if they do leave, Providence needs the venue space and will find another use for it.
Again, its literally everyone's fault except for Bob Kraft.
Yes. Bob Kraft is stonewalling and he is at fault for this process taking so long. This is the singular reason why a stadium hasn't been built. At the end of every single day it is Bob Kraft's decision not to build a stadium or engage in good faith negotiation.
No, they aren't just as much at fault as every other culpable party in this arrangement because there are no other culpable parties.
You know, except for the absentee media that refuses in large part to hold Kraft accountable for his crimes. Or the fanbase that similarly makes it profitable enough for Kraft to continue to tread water on this slow boat to nowhere. Or the league itself continuing to give this whole affair the three wise monkeys treatment. Or the politicians who gleefully march to the beat of someone else's drummer and refuse to get proactive about bringing this thing to some kind of resolution.
They're all culpable too.
Providence is not a bird though. It isn't a wise business decision, it isn't a decision that would be supported by the league, and it isn't a decision that Bob Kraft would even likely be interested in the first place.
In order: that's debatable, if the league picks the eve of a move to start caring about what happens to the Revs then I'd be shocked, and he'd be interested if the economics made sense.
I recall that there was discussion about a stadium near Alewife, probably in this very thread.
Also the point of including Somerville, Revere, or Quincy in these sorts of discussion is because they have viable locations for a stadium near the T. It has nothing to do with any conspiratorial agenda against Providence.
There's no reason to count Somerville, Revere, Quincy, and Cambridge as "cities" distinct from Boston unless you're trying to artificially inflate the number of cities on the list ahead of Providence.
They're all part of the same urban fabric, the same metro reason. That they have their own distinct governing bodies and are artificially divided by political boundary lines is a quirk of New England politics rather than anything else. If you cut the region out and dropped it anywhere else in the country, all four of those places (and all the rest of the technically-distinct edge towns surrounding Boston) would have been merged into the city long ago.
You keep repeating these things over and over again to make Boston look like shit and Providence look like gold. I believe these accusations about Boston as a soccer market and about Boston area politician's interests have been covered in many other posts in this argument already.
I'm not making Boston look like shit as far as soccer is concerned, it's doing a perfectly serviceable job of that without my help.
Who is going to support a major league sports team that is only going to last 25 years and is only in their city to take advantage of their desperation? None of this actually sounds good for Providence and it seems to me that the basis of this argument is to fustily prove that Providence is a major league city.
See above.
Miami let an original franchise die and yet MLS and David Beckham are very interested in getting an expansion team up and running in Miami. This is because they are very aware of the problems that lead the original team to its doom (mainly being unaccessible and far away from the urban core!)
If the Revolution were to die then MLS would immediately seek to get an expansion team going in Boston. Frankly, if the Revolution were to die it would be because MLS took the team away in order to move it to Boston.
Miami was not an original franchise, it was one of the first two expansion teams and folded after four years. You might have been thinking of Tampa Bay, who were an original franchise but lasted only six.
The Revolution are not a comparable situation for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they've lasted far longer and also hold the distinction of being the only franchise to have televised all of its games.
I don't think you have made any compelling argument that getting a stadium deal in the next ten years is impossible. You have either accused Boston area politicians of being uninterested in a soccer stadium (which there does not seem to be any evidence) or have blamed them for not giving the Krafts a free stadium built on top of low income housing.
Think what you want.
