Former NBA and NHL executive Dave Checketts called Real Salt Lake, the MLS team he co-founded in 2005, the “worst investment I made.”
In an episode of Portfolio Players, Checketts described to Front Office Sports the difficulties of generating profit in an emerging league. He mentioned that Real Salt Lake struggled with a sparsely-filled stadium in its heyday, fielding just around 16,000 every year at the University of Utah football’s Rice-Eccles Stadium that seats over 45,000 people.
After the MLS club moved to the 20,000-seat America First Field in 2008, attendance optics were no longer a struggle, as Checketts said the venue is “full all the time.” However, the sports investor notes that the team “still is a ways from making money.”
Checketts also said that MLS’s deal with Apple TV shows that Americans are still more interested in watching European men’s soccer. The deal, initially worth $2.5 billion for 10 years, will end three years early under re-negotiated terms that will pay the league an extra $50 million.
“The Apple TV deal is not like having all of the Premier League games,” Checketts said. (NBC owns the U.S. rights to Premier League games and airs them across their broadcast, cable, and streaming properties in a six-year, $2.7 billion deal.) “Americans watch European soccer. And then when you ask people who their teams are, they don’t say the Chicago Fire typically, they’re going to say Arsenal or something in Europe.”
