By Ben Knight

 

These are nervy days down in USL-1.

With a bunch of teams actively gone and trying to form a new league of their own, the second tier of men’s pro soccer north of the Rio Grande is trying to make it sound like all is fine and dandy, thanks.

Earlier this week, the league happily burbled it has four expansion teams in the works: Detroit, Boston, Ottawa and Edmonton.

Ottawa – presumably – is the Jeff Hunt group, although they famously don’t have a stadium to play in.  Edmonton?  No owners named specifically, and none on the horizon as far as anyone can currently tell.

As much as a financially sound pro team in Northern Alberta would be a great thing, this is far too eerily reminiscent of Edmonton’s last kick at the pro soccer can.

Anyone remember the Edmonton Aviators?

Here’s how I wrote it up for Sportsnet.ca five years ago, when these hype-propelled hollow men crashed and burned.

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July 20, 2004

Crash landing

Soccer’s Edmonton Aviators couldn’t live up to their own ambitions.  So what else is new?

Owning a minor-league professional soccer team in Canada sure ain’t easy.  Talk about a faith-based initiative!  Yeah, the world loves its footie, but this particular part of the world isn’t all that eager to dig into the wallets for tickets or replica jerseys. 

It doesn’t help any that this is only the A-League, where there are no big-name players in their prime, and the standard of play is, well, let us be kind and just say it’s naïve.

So before this blast begins, let me just take a moment to express admiration for the owners of the Montreal Impact, Vancouver Whitecaps, Toronto Lynx – heck, even the Calgary Mustangs – who continue to hang in there and put the product on the field, regardless of the odds.  Rest assured, I support your efforts, even if I’m not crazy about the league.

And then there’s the Edmonton Aviators.  Born a few months back to apparently strong local ownership, Northern Alberta’s latest soccer adventure pancaked on the runway this week.  The franchise has been returned to the league, the next home game has been cancelled, and it seems very unlikely the team will escape the history book that is now slamming shut.

It retrospect, it should have been obvious.  The Aviators were born in a cloud of grandiose dreaming, exactly the flavour of far-fetched fictional fantasy that has flattened Canadian soccer hopes far too many times in the past. 

Specifically: The team announced it would play its games at Commonwealth Stadium before average expected home crowds of 11,000-plus.  No, I didn’t like it when I heard it, but I opted to take an optimistic approach, figuring the truth would become clear soon enough, and the Aviators would settle into a smaller park and get properly about the business of creating a couple, then a few, thousand honest, loyal fans.  That, after all, is how the A-League game is played.

Surprise, surprise, the Commonwealth caper was a dud.  Just over a thousand curious souls showed up for the opener.  The team lost a lot, and games started getting shunted out to make way for Edmonton Eskimo football practices.  Indeed, Commonwealth conflicts meant the Aviators’ inaugural schedule was heavily front-loaded with road games.  That didn’t help either the team’s record or the generation of a fan base.

So now, to the sad, resigned shock of the players, coaches and such fans as actually exist, yet another weak group of big-talking owners has been flushed back to reality, and another Canadian pro soccer team bites the dust.

The timing is beyond terrible.  After playing most of the season on the road, the Aviators were just about to start a run of eight games out of nine at home over the next five weeks.  Whatever money this team was ever going to make – or at least not lose this year – was going to start coming in now.

In Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, A-League owners know they can’t afford to fantasize.  Surviving one season at a time, selling season tickets one fan at a time, they gear their entire operations to financial survival, and hope their local minor soccer systems turn up enough young talent to lift their teams into contention.  It’s not out of the question that the Whitecaps or Impact might even win a championship some day.  That would really help, but no one’s counting on it.

Contrasting all this to the Edmonton fiasco, I’m feeling pretty steamed.

Folks, let’s talk about a Canadian professional soccer league.  We’ve already got three of the teams that will be there.  Unless, that is, either the Lynx or the Whitecaps (or both) get wiped out by the next few rounds of MLS expansion.  Calgary?  Too soon to tell.  They played the big-stadium card as well, and no one is exactly saying they’re financially healthy.

What we have to do – and I include myself here, because I didn’t lean hard enough on the Commonwealth crap – is stop the fly-by-nighters before they get started. 

Okay, admittedly, we don’t really have any power here, and I’m not saying Edmonton soccer fans should have boycotted the Aviators.  But can we at least agree that there are two different ways of running an A-League soccer team in Canada?  There’s the steady, patient, non-spectacular way (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary if they survive), which is the good and proper way forward.

Then there’s the grandiose grab-bag gravy train (Edmonton, Calgary if they don’t survive).  My question to all of us?  Why do we believe these jokers?  I bit on Edmonton because I wanted it to be true.  I’m sure I’ve got lots of company.  So what do we do the next time a Canadian soccer league proposal comes along?

The biggest reason we can’t have a league now – maybe ever – is there just aren’t enough good owners out there willing to run a small team for marginal returns.  This is why the CUSL proposal could never, ever, ever have flown.  We have to understand that a new Canadian league would essentially be A-League north, with the talent level boosted a bit by a handful of international players in the early or late days of their careers.

What we do not need – and must no longer tolerate – is the big-talking blowhard owner who makes huge promises and says “trust me.”  It doesn’t work, people. 

What really galls me about the crash of the Aviators is that I believe there is a good chance this team could have caught on if it hadn’t lashed itself to the Commonwealth Stadium boulder before it leapt into the A-League sea.  The local ownership seemed to have a good pedigree.  They seemed like a pretty good approximation of what A-League ownership – at least when their mouths were shut.

Well, they didn’t, and we all got fooled again.

Can we make a deal here?  The next time this looks like it’s going to happen, let’s all speak out against it. 

What’s that old saying?  “Fool me twice, shame on me?”  Well, this is more than twice, people.  From the NASL to the CSL to the NSL to the CPSL to the CUSL to the Aviators, we’ve been fleeced more often than a blanket that got left in a laundromat dryer for a month.

Not all ownership is good ownership.  Let’s promise ourselves to all find the courage to say “no” to the next bunch of incoming glad-handing buffoons.

…Or this is as good as it will ever get.

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Onward!