Yeah, another anti-SuperLiga post coming up right here. While I won’t complain about the clubs involved this time around or the lack of playing any of these games in Mexico, I will harp a little on how the first round went this year.

Thanks for Daune Rollins for posting this one on his super-Canadian soccer blog the 24th Minute, Rollins listed out the attendance for all the first round games. And as you can imagine the numbers won’t lie that this tournament will need some major changes in the very near future if it even wants to survive.

• 8,421
• 11,197
• 9,126
• 9,126
• 9,157
• 7,411
• 5,278
• 9,512
• 5,378
• 5,378
• 7,411
• 10,385

But where do we go to fix this? Moving the tournament up the calendar a bit to say March? Would that even make a difference? I know having a lot of the games in New England where the fans really could care less about some sub-park Mexican clubs really did a number on the attendence here but this is rather pathetic. Hell even FC Dallas can post better numbers than this tournament.

So is this tournament really worth saving if we are going to see numbers like this? Can SUM really continue to make money on this venture? I highly doubt it.

Going back to Friday’s thoughts about the 2009 edition of SuperLiga, I realized that maybe one thing to help improve the tournament’s ability to reach people may be to do what happened in St. Louis this past weekend.

For those who don’t know the city of St. Louis hosted an opening round game for Kansas City since their current stadium was a bit busy with minor league baseball this past weekend.

St. Louis stepped up and hosted a game in a slightly smaller stadium that holds just over 6,000. It turns out that the final number of folks that were there was just a shade over 5,200.

One has to wonder if putting more games in random towns like St. Louis to test out potential MLS markets would work for SuperLiga. One also has to wonder in St. Louis’ case if they would be able to handle a MLS club full-time based on the numbers they pulled in this weekend for the SuperLiga contest. Some have said that even though the announced final attendance was pretty good for the stadium size that there were plenty of noticeable empty seats in the stands.

What do you make of St. Louis as a MLS market now that you’ve seen a fairly big game there? For me I still believe the league needs to be in that market. I know Don Garber agrees still with that even though the money just isn’t there still for a potential owner.

So what do you make of the potential with St. Louis? Also do you believe SuperLiga would be good in other markets that don’t currently have a MLS club? Would that rasie the level of interest any for this tournament?

As mentioned earlier in the weekend preview, this weekend marks the start of the third (annual) SuperLiga tournament between MLS clubs and Mexican league clubs.

I am a bit happier about how this year’s tournament is set up for those MLS clubs involved. No longer are we going to see clubs play in both SuperLiga and CONCACAF Champions League. The league front office and owners got that one right when they called for a new plan of how teams qualified for each tournament.

The thing is we now have a tournament that went from very interesting in year one to so-so in year two to a flat-out uninteresting in year three. Even though I do support having middle of the pack MLS clubs going against Mexican league teams for experience what we in turn got this year was a bunch of middle of the pack Mexcian league clubs facing middle of the pack MLS clubs.

The top FMF club finished 9th last season, while two others battled in the never-good regulation zone. What happened was a similar decision by the FMF to not include clubs going to the CCL in this tournament. What also happened was two other clubs turning down the chance at playing in this tournament (both Chivas and UNAM declined participation). I know San Luis was first overall in the 2008 Apertura but they failed to get out of the quarter-finals of that tournament.

I can’t say looking at this I am overly excited for this tournament or its chances of having a good future. While I am all for the mid-level clubs in both leagues getting a shot at things here I have to say this tournament needs some spice in the terms of playing some games in Mexico. I really believe that is the only way this tournament gets any better than it already is right now.

Plus how can we actually get better as a league internationally until we win outside our country? Until things change with this tournament set up we will never know.

This week has already been interesting and we’ve only seen one MLS game. The DC-Seattle game on Wednesday should have been a marquee thing but as we all saw ESPN and the family of networks dropped the ball a bit on getting the MLS game shipped over to another channel to make us MLS folks happy until the college world series game was over on the deuce.

Yes it was unfortunate but there was some good out of it. SoccerAmeria just posted a great article on the 80 seconds of silence that Glenn Davis and Kyle Martino did at the start of the broadcast when the game was finally shown on ESPN2. Looking back on the tape of that game I saw and heard those 80 seconds. Boy it was pretty neat to say the least.

Aside from the ESPN fail on Wednesday this week and weekend are pretty big. We’ve already seen Toronto FC blow away Montreal last night in the final game of the Canadian Cup to advance to this year’s edition of the CONCACAF Champions League tournament. MLS will now field five teams with Toronto now to take on Puerto Rico in the preliminary rounds with a chance to be grouped in with the Columbus Crew.

We also have another competition starting up for a few clubs this weekend as well. The 2009 edition of SuperLiga comes at a good time for teams like Chivas USA and Chicago Fire. Both clubs play on Saturday in their opening matches of the tournament. Kansas City and New England will see their first games on Sunday. All SuperLiga matches can be seen live on the SuperLiga website.

But let’s get down to business as far as the MLS weekend slate goes. Plenty of decent games on the menu for us including one that I am very interested in out in Colorado between the Rapids and DC United.

As always feel free to leave your score predictions below. Continue Reading…

For those who enjoy this summer clash between MLS clubs and Mexican clubs. Start your planning now. The schedule has been released for this year’s edition of SuperLiga.

The SuperLiga field of teams is divided into two groups, each with two representatives from the respective leagues:

SUPERLIGA™ 2009 SCHEDULE*
(All Times Eastern) / * Subject to change

Saturday, June 20
Chicago Fire vs. San Luis (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill) 20:00
Chivas USA vs. Tigres UANL (The Home Depot Center – Carson, Calif.) 22:00

Sunday, June 21
Kansas City Wizards vs. Atlas (Venue TBD – St. Louis, Mo.) 16:30
NE Revolution vs. Santos Laguna (Gillette Stadium – Foxorough, Mass.) 18:30

Tuesday, June 23
Chicago Fire vs. Chivas USA (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 20:00
San Luis vs. Tigres UANL (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 22:00

Wednesday, June 24
NE Revolution vs. Kansas City Wizards (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 19:00
Santos Laguna vs. Atlas (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 21:00

Saturday, June 27
Chicago Fire vs. Tigres UANL (Toyota Park – Bridgeview, Ill.) 20:00
Chivas USA vs. San Luis (The Home Depot Center – Carson, Calif.) 22:00

Sunday, June 28
NE Revolution vs. Atlas (Gillette Stadium – Foxborough, Mass.) 16:30
KC Wizards vs. Santos Laguna (CommunityAmerica Ballpark – Kansas City, Mo.) 18:30

Wednesday, July 15
Semifinal 1 (TBD)
Semifinal 2 (TBD)

Wednesday, August 5
Final (TBD)