With the caveat that an interview given over a year before the stadium opens is subject to lots of change and evolution, the interview with Jason Levien and Erick Thohir is not filling me with a great degree of confidence in the direction of DC United. Since the team was purchased in 2012, fans have been waiting for a change in the play on the field, the quality of the experience or administration of the team, and have been repeatedly told to "wait for when the new stadium opens". The new stadium was assumed to the be the panacea that would open the floodgates of funding which would allow the team to sign players that anyone who isn’t already coming to RFK might have heard of, sign…any international scouts, improve their digital offerings (this has happened anyway, but with room to improve) and make positive strides in any other number of ways that this team has previously been embarrassingly low budget.
Maybe they could bring back free bagels for the staff.
The interview explained the general team building philosophy of the ownership group as, "build around young core and add talented yet very affordable players from South America to build quality." Levien specifically shot down the idea of bringing in a Schweinstager type of player, saying that DC is a "soccer town" that doesn’t necessarily need gimmicks to build fan excitement.
There are a few ways this can be interpreted. Potentially, DC has been here long enough and knows the market well enough to know that the team will always be an afterthought in a crowded market, and that the only fans they’re able to obtain are fans they’ve already had and have lost. Additionally, maybe they think this is the way to build a winner, even pointing out Atlanta’s early success utilizing this model (note: using half a season of an expansion team that DCU has beaten twice when the team only has 5 wins all season is maybe not the gold standard).
The other less charitable way to take this interview is to notice a distinct lack of imagination and ambition in their statements. DC is a peculiar sports town for a wide variety of reasons, from a large portion of the population being transient, possessing an extremely crowded sports market, and having an extensive offering of things for casual fans to do instead of go see a soccer game. When sports talk radio or the Washington Post generally brings up DC sports ineptitude, United’s storied past is dependably absent. The city has shown time and again that they are an event town, and will show up dependably for a spectacle. You may think that you can build a winner or a team that plays exciting soccer, but if you think you can gain the attention of the local news media, casual soccer fans, or the broader populace, you’re going to need to bring in star power. Not star power in lieu of a strong corps of less famous but talented players, but only in concert with the big names are you going to hope to expand your brand beyond a limited footprint. The stadium only has 20,000 seats, but if you want more than the 9 people already watching the games on TV, you’re going to have try harder.
It’s entirely possible that DCU is able to build an exciting, winning team on the back of shrewd, under the radar signings from Latin America, and that fans are beating down the door at Audi Field beyond the first season. But it’s also possible that ownership squanders their one chance at a reintroduction/first impression with the broader market who will be paying closer attention to United than at any time previous in their history.
