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.