Part Two from my interview with league commissioner Tonya Antonucci, continuing with the decision to launch in 2009 discussion …

That’s the best long-term plan. Get this right. Don’t do it fast, but get it right and be in a position where we can come off the heels of a World Cup and come off the heels of an Olympics. It’s more exposure for all the athletes and more time for planning and development and then we launch. That was the decision and I think most people are feeling pretty good about it.

We’ve heard from some people within MLS saying, “We understand what you had to do. If you recall, we had to delay our launch one year.” There are all kinds of data points that historically lean towards this decision. You know, look how much time had lapsed between the NASL collapsing and the launch of MLS.

You really do want to take the long view and make sure that again, you’re not rushing, and then you’ve got a short-term solution but it might go away again. We’re only going to get this second bite at the apple at least in this country. That’s something that the owners, the marketers, WSII, we all felt that we get a second bite at this apple. Let’s make sure that we’re not handicapping ourselves.

I assume that the league offices will be out in the Bay Area with you?

We haven’t determined the final location of the league office. Temporarily, at a minimum, we are running the offices out of the Bay Area with me here and then we’ll make a decision on that later, probably after the New Year. There are really no other front-runners at this point. The issue is that we want to manage costs and be efficient so one of the options is, in the early years if possible share our league office including physical space and some staff with one of our franchise owners to keep the costs down. We have seven markets at a minimum for 2009 so you can hypothesis where we might wind up, but really, it’s going to come down to how do we manage costs and how do we kind of buckle down through the early years. That’s going to impact the final decision.

Have you made any hires yet?

I’m in the process of starting to evaluate some candidates in the short term. I’ve identified someone who I’m working on as an administrative, project manager type person to help me stand up the office. I don’t have an announcement yet, but I will have more announcements in the near future. Some of our executive level hires will be phased in the coming months. Once we launch our league website, that will be a great platform to share with folks and also to do recruiting. We’d love to hear who’s out there that would like to be part of our management team. We’re just beginning all that process now.

I know you’ve been watching the World Cup. What have you thought about the level of play so far and how it might impact the new league?

As far as the level, there’s a couple different ways to look at this. You look at a team like North Korea and you say, “Wow!” You know, we’ve not been exposed in this country to the level of play and they’re exciting in their attacking style. Their ability to play a possession game is a very attractive style of soccer. That’s exiting. Will some of those players be in a position politically to come and play in our league? I don’t know.

Not withstanding those issues, I’ve had a great time watching some of these players that I don’t have a chance to get exposed to on a regular basis. We don’t get exposed to the attacking duo of Hanna Ljungberg and Victoria Svensson. Granted Hanna’s not 100% fit and Sweden overall was not happy with their performance in this tournament and they’ve obviously not advanced, but just to see those players and look at the potential for them to come into our league and play on a regular basis against our American athletes is pretty exciting. And also, of course, Sweden’s number 8, Schelin, the top goal soccer in the Swedish league with more goals than Marta from Brazil. She didn’t have the best World Cup, but for us to get exposure to her, it’s been really exciting. And then of course there are tons of players from Germany, Marta, and Kelly Smith from England. Of course Kelly played in the previous WUSA.

Player development continues to improve and the level of play I just think is impressive. A lot of credit to the WUSA as well as the leagues in Germany and Sweden for creating an environment of player development that has, in part, led to the competitiveness that we’re seeing.

Now the flip side of course of that is you see a team like Argentina and you say, “Gosh, those countries and FIFA need to do more to support their teams.” They need to put more money into those national team programs. They need to put more money into the development of women’s football. Even Brazil, which is a super talented team, how many games did they get before this World Cup to get ready? Not enough. There needs to be more onus on the federations and more involvement with FIFA to get those federations to stand up. Having said that, we’re still seeing a lot of wonderful, athletic ability, soccer ability and talent on so many of these teams.

That’s exciting to me and from a perspective of can we bring these players here? Yes, we think we can have competitive offers. We think that we can get creative with these athletes. We know a bit about the various ways they are compensated in their countries when they’re playing women’s football either professional or semi-professionally that may be a little different than how we would normally compensate players here in the United States. We’ve rolled up our sleeves, we continue to look at it and we think we’re going to have competitive salaries not only for domestic players but also for the international players. We’re excited to start those conversations and bringing those personalities into discussions. Our goal as a league is to have the best women’s soccer league in the world. We want the best players here, the best American players and the best foreign players playing on American soil.

How close are you guys to naming this league?

We’re getting pretty close actually. We’ve been in the process of doing research for several weeks and that research involves talking to fans through surveys. Fans have been looking at logos. They’ve been looking at potential names. We’ve been testing hardcore soccer fans and we’ve also been testing general sports fans. We’ve been testing with some members of the sponsorship community and of course our owners. We feel like we’ve touched a number of the key constituents. We can’t get everybody, but we’re in the process of the research. We’re learning some interesting things. We’re looking at the data and we hope that we can unveil a really cool logo. We’re researching the names too. WUSA is part of research. There are a lot of really strong positives and good will that still exist with that brand with respect to the product on the field and the quality of athletes, the quality of the soccer players and the experience for fans. That’s being tested as well as some other potential new names.

It’s exciting for us. This is a good example of now that we’re substantially funded; we can actually start to do the business of the sports league. This is one of the first things that we’ll be able unveil for our fans.

Stay tuned. More to come.

WSII made the official announcement that a women’s professional soccer league was set to launch in 2009 on September 4th. I played telephone tag with WSII CEO (and new league commissioner) Tonya Antonucci for a few days before leaving for China and the World Cup on the 8th. I continued my quest to get the scoop on the new league while I was in China and after several more rounds of tag we finally connected a couple weeks into my trip. Of course about that time, the U.S. lost to Brazil, all hell broke loose and this informative interview with Antonucci got shelved.

So, better late than never, I bring you this league update. The interview was long (I have the phone bill from China to prove it), so I will break it up into a few pieces and post it over the next week. Today’s section focuses on the initial funding of the league and what played into the decision to postpone until 2009.

Can you give me the status of where things stand with the launch?

The good news is that the league has now been physically formed and the investors have put in a sizeable financial contribution; sizable six figures each as of the time of the announcement and there’s another capital infusion coming at the end of the year that’s even larger, which all goes toward standing up the league and preparing the league for the launch in 2009.

In addition, the owners are also spending on their own markets what they need to spend to prepare their own front office staff, ticketing, facilities and preparations to be ready in 2009.

In reality, moving to 2009 actually cost the owners a little bit more because there’s a longer ramp up time and that’s just a function of the reality of our decision to go to 2009.

To reinforce, the good news is that we evolved from having a goal to launch and having a group of investors that were committed to the process, to actually having real funding in, more funding being staged in and we are actually starting the league at this point, making hires and preparing marketing budgets, etc. It’s pretty exciting.

From WSII’s perspective, we’ve had to have a lot of patience over the last two and a half years to keep these owners involved in the process and convince them of the viability of the business plan. The reality was that it took a while to get them to understand that whereas WUSA has some missteps from a business standpoint, that this business model is sound and they should invest in it and that they should commit to it. That took some time and it took getting the right group of people together on the investment side and now they’ve not only said they’re going to do it but they’ve actually put their money in, in a sizeable way to do it.

So, the ball is rolling. With respect to the timing of 2009 versus our goal of 2008, certainly from a player and fan standpoint, and even from WSII’s standpoint, it was a disappointment that we couldn’t be ready for 2008. However, the reality we were faced with was, can we get this league ready in six months or do we go to the alternative which was 18 months. When starting a sports league and you’ve picked your season there’s not anything in between as an option. We felt it was more important to do it right that to do it fast. We had a situation where at least half of our owners were on a path where they could be ready for April of 2008, but we had some markets that weren’t on a path to be ready. That’s just really a crucial issue when you’ve got seven teams.

These guys are in business together now. Again, they’ve made a sizable financial contribution each to the business. They want to make sure that all the franchises can be successful, so they made a decision together that what was best for the entirety of the league, even though some were ready to go in 2008, what was best for the entirety of the league for the sustainable, long term viability of the league was 2009.

From a marketing standpoint, the other issue that came into play, and we discussed this for over five hours with the owners, was the Olympics calendar. What we concluded was that there were three alternatives for dealing with the Olympics and none of them were attractive to the owners. Those three alternatives were:

• Run the season in two parts. Run the season, take a break and all the international stars and domestic stars get called into camp and then go play in the Olympics and then we’d start the league again. That’s not attractive because not unlike what we are seeing with the World Cup, there is a lot of sports competition in the fall in the states that make it a crowded landscape. So, that wasn’t attractive from a timing standpoint. It just wasn’t a smart choice.
• The second alterative was playing through the Olympics without our international and domestic stars. That did not make sense to us, particularly in our launch year. An astute person would say that there are Olympics and World Cups ever few years, you’re going to have to deal with that and that’s a fair point. But, there’s a difference between you having your stride as a league. While fans may be attracted to the stars at first, they build a connection to their team. It goes beyond specific players. Players come and go but people are passionate about the Green Bay Packers. People are passionate about the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, etc. That’s part of the process that goes on with the evolution of a team and the league as well.
• The third option that was again, not very attractive to the owners, was the notion that we play a compacted season, that we try to force 21 games per team into 13 weeks. Part of the challenge with us and our model is that we’re going to be sharing facilities with MLS teams, in some case universities, in some cases in the future, we’re looking at potential USL markets as possibilities, so in that sense, trying to force the schedule, we may not get desirable dates. We would have been forced to make decisions about scheduling that could really impact the marketing and the business negatively.

So those were all considerations, when in combination with the operational readiness question, gave the owners a clear decision, which was 2009.

Check back over the next few days for how the owners are going about selecting a name, on whether to expect other markets before the 2009 launch and more.