League in Limbo

By Sean Gregory

In BendIt like Beckham, the soccer movie that has grossed more than $100 million worldwide since 2002 and now incessantly runs on HBO, the two main characters, British teenage girls who dream of becoming the next Mia Hamm, stare at a television screen, jaws agape. They are watching a promo for the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), the American professional league that featured the best female players in the world, including Hamm, Brazil's Katia and Bai Jie of China. Brandi Chastain knocks a header into the net. England's Kelly Smith shakes a defender. Unbelievable, the girls say. We can make a living in the game we love.

That scene is now as dated as Pele and skirted soccer gear. A year ago, just months after the hit film's U.S. release, the WUSA folded, citing crippling debt and $20 million in annual losses. Among other problems, the league spent itself into oblivion, having budgeted $40 million to finance its first five years yet laid out $100 million in the first three. Says industry consultant David Carter, founder of Sports Business Group, based in Redondo Beach, Calif.: "The WUSA blew through money like drunken dotcommers."

But now, with an Olympic gold medal for the U.S. fanning interest, the WUSA is showing new signs of life. Tony DiCicco, coach of the 1999 women's World Cup champions and the WUSA's last commissioner, is leading an effort to relaunch the league, targeting an exhibition tour by next spring and a full season by 2006.

It's an ambitious plan, to be sure. And DiCicco is fighting more than the WUSA's history. Despite record numbers of girls participating in sports and U.S. dominance in soccer, softball and basketball on the international stage, four of the five major women's professional leagues launched since 1996 have folded. (Only the WNBA, the women's basketball league subsidized by the NBA, remains. The American Basketball League, the Women's Pro Softball League and United States Professional Volleyball have, like the WUSA, gone under.) Plus, the WUSA is trying to come back when it's losing its Michael Jordan: Hamm is hanging up her cleats. "I made that promise to myself, but I also made it to my family," says Hamm, wife of Chicago Cubs star Nomar Garciaparra. Four other favorites who led the Olympic team in Athens, including captain Julie Foudy and shirt-shedding cover girl Chastain, are also likely to retire.

So what in the world is this league thinking? Surprisingly, most experts believe a new WUSA can kick. "They are not crazy," says Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp Ltd., a Chicago marketing firm. "They just have to align their expectations with reality." DiCicco has heeded that advice. In July he called a meeting of about 30 ex--WUSA officials, sports leaders and consultants to revamp the league's business model. Gone are the five-year financial projections relied upon in the old league, which was founded on Web-like hysteria after the 1999 World Cup victory. (John Hendricks, chairman of Discovery Communications, was so "intoxicated" by the World Cup victory, he persuaded his cable brethren at Comcast, Cox and Time Warner, which owns TIME magazine, to help fund the start-up.) This time around, DiCicco says, the WUSA will rely on modest one-year figures. "Potential owners told us they're not going to believe anything we project," he explains. "They said, 'Don't waste your time.'" And even the one-year numbers are more conservative. For example, when the WUSA debuted, top players were paid salaries of up to $93,000. Says league player representative John Langel: "I don't see that happening again." (By comparison, the 2002 maximum salary in the WNBA, a more established, healthier league, was about $80,000.)

The most important aspect of the new model is the change from a single-entity league to a franchise operation. In the old WUSA, each investor operated a team or two--Time Warner Cable, for example, ran the Carolina Courage and New York Power, and Hendricks ran the San Jose CyberRays and Washington Freedom. The owners split losses equally. Under the franchise model, danger does loom: one team can acquire more riches, creating competitive imbalance that bankrupts other teams and adds instability (see Yankees, New York, and Expos, Montreal, in baseball). But single-team ownership builds incentives to leverage local sponsors, a strategy the WUSA missed the first time. "It's really important for them to understand that soccer is a community-based sport," says sports consultant Carter. "Sure, it's nice to have national names like McDonald's on board. But it's also nice to have Joe's Service Station. You must create that local feel." DiCicco has proposed a salary cap to prevent one team from scooping up the stars.

DiCicco still has a long way to go. He has identified a group of interested potential owners--including old hands Hendricks, cable baron Amos Hostetter and Cox chairman Jim Kennedy--but none have made any commitments. Nor have any advertisers. McDonald's, Coca-Cola, apparel maker Under Armour and Deutsche Bank sponsored WUSA exhibition festivals in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, Minn., this summer, but as McDonald's marketing executive John Lewicki puts it, "We're in wait-and-see mode."

Patience is the mantra among many WUSA boosters. "One thing I've noticed about women's sports is that the tolerance level changes," says Foudy. "If results aren't delivered right now, people are quicker to call it a failure." But at least one critic argues that the WUSA hasn't acted fast enough. Lisa Delpy Neirotti, a sports-management professor at George Washington University, says that even if the WUSA is seeking a soft relaunch next spring, it should have lined up sponsors before companies set fiscal-year ad budgets over the summer, giving the league a more solid foundation coming off the Olympic soccer gold. Says Delpy Neirotti: "I really think they missed a crucial moment."

Then again, the WUSA might need some more time; failure is fresh in the soccer fan's mind. The timing debate is a draw, but most analysts believe some scaled-back women's soccer league will eventually be a winner. With 5.6 million girls playing the sport, the market is just too big for the sidelines. And as the first members of the Title IX generation become soccer moms over the next five to 10 years, the WUSA and other women's sports leagues will have ever greater chances of success. "America will support one," Carter says of a women's league. But don't start comparing it to the NFL: "It will be pretty low on the food chain, at least for a very long time," he notes. For the 11-year-old girl who emailed Foudy after the WUSA folded, offering to hold a bake sale to save the WUSA, any league would be just fine.