Salt Lake City is the smallest market in the Major League Soccer landscape. However, the club has still managed to find success on and off the field in a league that features teams in the comparably gigantic markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
Despite sitting in the 33rd-largest television market in the U.S., though, RSL has found a way to compete with those big market behemoths. In town for a speaking engagement, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said on Wednesday that Salt Lake isn’t viewed as small-market in the league office and shouldn’t consider itself as such.
“When we look at Salt Lake, we don’t think of it as behaving or being viewed by anybody as a small market team,” Garber said in an interview with KUTV’s David James that will air on Talkin’ Sports on Thursday night. “There’s a team in New York that hasn’t had the success on the field that this team has had. There’s a big team in Chicago that hasn’t had that success and a big team in Dallas that hasn’t had that success. So I can’t imagine why anyone here would be insecure about being a fan of this club, being an employee of this club or being a Technical Director of this club. Ownership and management are going to make the decisions that are right for them and so far they’ve been making some pretty good decisions.”
Salt Lake has attracted its share of talent to MLS even if it isn’t the big-name type of player that have landed in Seattle, New York, Toronto or Los Angeles. Additionally, national team talent with the U.S. (Kyle Beckerman and Nick Rimando), Costa Rica (Alvaro Saborio) and Ecuador (Joao Plata) have chosen to stay with RSL by signing long-term contracts with the club.
Having Beckerman and Rimando, two World Cup players and fixtures with the U.S. National Team under Jurgen Klinsmann, with the Claret-and-Cobalt has helped draw other American players to the league, though, as MLS continues its rapid growth that has seen U.S. National Teamers Jozy Altidore, Mix Diskerud, Sacha Kljestan and Brek Shea in the past off-season.
Bringing in those players has become a focus of the league as it strives toward joining the top-tier leagues in the world.
“We want to be a league of choice for the best American players and the best Canadian players. In order to do that, they’ve got to be here and they’ve got to show that you can make a good living. You can still play with your national team and earn the respect of the national team coach. And you can be playing in a great facility and have the right infrastructure around you,” Garber said. “It was a concentrated effort and that effort will continue.”
To see the full interview with David James, tune in to KMYU’s Talkin’ Sports on Thursday at 10:30 p.m. MT.
