Normally we don’t link to paywalled/gated material on the other newsletter service¹, but in the interest of journalistic integrity and as a way to start this week’s newsletter differently than previous weeks, we must: Per “exclusive” reporting there by Tristan Lavalette, Major League Cricket has finalized what have been long-standing plans to ‘expand’ into two new markets.

According to Lavalette (who reported both stories,) Chicago and Toronto will be added to the league’s franchises “in” New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas-Fort Worthy, Washington and Los Angeles.

“In” has quotations marks around it, of course, because although there are stadiums at which these teams play in half of the markets they represent — LA, DFW and SF — no team really has a local, “exclusive” market in the same way most ‘traditional’ leagues do. Like the Premier Lacrosse League, the MLC uses a barnstorming style schedule to stage its games, with the idea that sustaining a single team in a single place for a fledgling league is a risky proposition because of the fickle nature of fans without built-in emotional equity with the laundry worn by the players.

It’s a necessary quirk for obscure sports leagues, as attendance at games when the sport and league are popular is usually generated by one of three things in terms of the on-field product:

When the sport is popular but the league isn’t, the options are limited to the last two. And when the sport and the league both aren’t popular (or at least particularly well known,) but the product is good, the only thing that works is combining them. Which is why, because of cricket’s relatively low profile in the US — especially for the teams (Seattle, Washington and San Francisco) not serving as an outpost for their IPL counterparts — the MLC has settled on this model.

By having every player in the league (some of whom are among the best players in the world, albeit mostly teetering towards the ends of their careers) available for fans to see basically every time they come to a venue, the league can almost guarantee that even when it’s not their best foot, one of their better ones will find its way forward.

What makes the MLC unique in this context, however, is the insistence on associating each team with a location, but not playing in every one of those locations throughout the “tournament”/season. This choice essentially leaves fans of specific franchises that don’t get to/don’t have a stadium which can host dates during the tour in an “all dressed up with no place to go” situation.

Not wanting to deal with this contradiction is one of the reasons that the PLL started out with location-neutral teams for the first five years of their existence while working their way across the country for their now-standard summer weekend tours.

This meant that the league’s current line up of (Utah) Archers, (NY) Atlas, (Boston) Cannons, (Carolina) Chaos, (California) Redwoods, (Philadelphia) Waterdogs and (Maryland) Whipsnakes all existed as team identities with largely the same logos and color schemes before making the transition to teams with “homes”. Only the now-extinct Chrome Lacrosse Club would be left behind, as the franchise — along with the Cannons being assigned to Boston — was rebranded as a remnant (the Denver Outlaws) of the PLL’s predecessor, Major League Lacrosse.

It was a move that allowed fans across the country to associate themselves with the franchises free from unnecessary animosity or distance between them and whatever group of guys they found the most exciting or aesthetically pleasing to watch based entirely off of which part of the country the work in.

Unlike the MLC, which has made me already hate the LA Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians New York (which, talk about a Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim-ass name) because of their association with locations and brands I am already inclined to hate². Which makes sense, as the PLL, while larger in terms of revenue, occupies a space in the US sporting landscape that serves as a yin to the yang of MLC: the PLL is centered around a hyper-local/regional activity that seeks to increase growth in lacrosse’s popularity as a spectator sport in its totality, while the MLC essentially wants to colonize America on behalf of cricket, the second-most popular spectator sport in the world.

As it stands now, the PLL follows what is a variation on the “MLS model” of ‘single-entity’ ownership, where the league owns the teams, trademark, player contracts, et al.. The PLL differs in a few ways from that model, most notably by offering players equity in the league as well³. The model has served the league, and their relatively highly-compensated players⁴, well enough though it has pretty much always been the goal for the teams and stakeholders (players, coaches, fans, etc.) to have a home base from which to operate.

And, as the league made its transition to its more narrowly focused touring model that has stops in each of the league’s “home bases” along with other areas of the country, those preexisting location-specific associations have allowed some sort of local attachment (especially from kids) to happen as the league sets itself up for a transition to the league’s long-stated goals of independently-owned-and-operated franchises.

Which is why it was so exciting at OSA HQ (Brad and I’s gchat window) that around same time the moves out of the MLC were reportedly confirmed, news came out of the Premier Lacrosse League that they just finished a major investment/fundraising round for the organization (which involved Glen Powell⁵ and Rob Mac⁶) in anticipation of this transition into the next phase of league growth with individual ownership of teams.

League expansion is something we’ve talked about fairly extensively here. Which, for us, works on a couple of different levels, as it allows us to talk about the stuff we spend the most time thinking about: dumb team names, weird logos from the 90s and failed lacrosse franchises. And for the first time in a generation, we are getting to see a few new leagues, representing a few new sports, make an attempt to see what expansion and growth models work best, for their specific needs and to fit their desired markets.

Or, in the case of the MLC, the markets that their IPL overlords want them associated with for branding purposes.

Listen, I know we said that we were going to mostly avoid covering the FIFA World Cup here, on account of Rodger doing a much better job than we would, as well as the World Cup being the literal antithesis of “obscure” on account of it being the most popular sporting event in the recorded history of the world. But I did want to highlight a few bits of coverage from some of my favorite outlets so far this tournament on the subjects found therein:

Defector has, unsurprisingly, had some of the best coverage of the World Cup on the internet, but this story in particular hit a sweet spot for me as a devotee of French international sporting endeavors:

And, as always, listen to the Sweeper Podcast for all your obscure soccer needs: