RailHawks owner Selby Wellman said Tuesday that the North American Soccer League would be submitting its bid to the United States Soccer Federation this week, with hopes of getting approval to play in 2011.
Ten teams make up the proposed NASL: Carolina, Puerto Rico, Montreal, FC Tampa Bay, Miami FC, Rochester, NSC Minnesota, CP Baltimore, AC St. Louis and expansion franchise FC Edmonton.
Attention wealthy sports fans: If buying part of the local hockey team is too rich for your blood, how about a stake in the soccer squad?
The owners of the Carolina RailHawks are seeking new investors "to participate in the next, exciting phase of growth" of the Cary-based professional soccer franchise. Its backers now include majority owner Selby Wellman, a former Cisco Systems executive, as well as Lulu.com CEO Bob Young, Brian Wellman and Dr. H. Paul Singh.
The owners are looking for a $1 million investment from one to three potential partners, RailHawks spokesman Marco Rosa wrote in an e-mail. And they do have some unnamed prospects.
The Carolina RailHawks confirmed today through a news release that they will be looking for additional investors. The team said they are "actively seeking" more partners "to participate in the next, exciting phase of growth."
The statement says the need to drive ticket and sponsorship revenues by expanding business operations and increasing sales and marketing staff is at the root of the announcement.
We will have more on this later today on carynews.com/sports and in tomorrow's N&O.
UPDATE: here's a link to the team website, where the release is now posted: http://www.carolinarailhawks.com/article/railhawks-look-to-add-additional-partners
Q: Where do the RailHawks stand with what's happened in the past week and how does the organization feel about what transpired?
A: Well, I've been involved in this for two and a half years up to my eyebrows. There's a little bit of nostalgia and happiness in that it's finally over. The RailHawks are full steam ahead for this year even though it's a transition year. I think the thing that did not come out in the conference call is that there are three NASL teams that are playing in the USL Conference -- that's all they're doing. That's all they are doing is playing in a conference in order to have two conferences for 12 teams. They are NASL teams so we have nine NASL teams that are committed to us for 2011. I'm excited because we'll get all these problems with USL and we all get to play this year and I'm even more excited we will now be able to dedicate all of our resources towards launching NASL completely with the beginning of 2011. The Carolina RailHawks are an integral part of that and we're pretty excited about that.
Q: In hindsight, is it better to have almost a full season to launch a league than trying to launch it almost immediately after one season ends?
A: That's a very good question. We were going so fast and rapid for the past two or three months to launch our league, once you got into the details of it you could see all of the ramifications the deeper we got into it. So now that it's come to the point where we have this transition year we actually think it's kind of a blessing that we now have a full year to lay out the whole league and launch it properly.
Q: What did you think of [USSF President Sunil] Gulati's assessment that there wasn't enough long-term stability in the proposed NASL?
A: That was a point of debate throughout all of the negotiations because the standards for division II aren't very tight, they're very loose -- he later stated he was going to tighten those up -- it's kind of the in the eye of the beholder. With the nine teams on the NASL side, they're all strong financial owners and we see no risk of them not being a part of our league for the long-term.
Q: What's it going to be with the division setup? How will it affect championship play?
A: We're going to work towards a balanced schedule as best we can but one reason I'm down here in Fort Lauderdale is that we've got this settled we've got to produce a schedule. So we'll probably have that done in another week or so but we'll try to work as much of a balanced schedule as we can. But quite frankly from a championship standpoint, it'll be easier to use a single table. And it will be put together single table to determine who makes the playoffs, just like it does now.
Q: Then why have the divisions? Is it to just have the names out there?
A: Yeah, it gives both of us trying to brand ourselves and launch it because pretty soon we'll be competitors off the field. On the field we'll compete. Off the field, NASL will start looking towards expansion and so will USL. We have nine [teams], they have three -- that's the starting point. And as soon as things get settled with tightening up these division II standards which is a very high priority of the federation now, I think that'll be done relatively quickly. The NASL, we will file for sanctioning immediately. The day after in which standards are tightened up and announced, the application will be re-filed and I have every confidence that we'll be sanctioned for 2011.
Aug. 27 - Nike sells the USL to NuRock soccer holdings instead of the team of owners. The owners are believed to be considering a new soccer league.
Oct. 3 - The USL releases players from Carolina, Minnesota and Miami, stating that they own the contracts to each team and the team's decision to leave the league makes them null and void. Left out of this was Montreal and Vancouver, which were playing in the USL final and are successful enough to plan for jumps to the MLS. However, the players remained with their teams as the owners maintained the USL did not, in fact, own the contracts.
Nov. 3 - Minnesota, mired in debt, releases its players for real this time. It had previously lost its general manager and coach.
Nov. 10 - Carolina, Minnesota, Miami, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta and St. Louis submit an application for a new league to the United States Soccer Federation. This is one team shy of the 8-team minimum the USSF normally requires as Tampa was dropped from the initially rumored list.
Nov. 20 - Tampa and Baltimore are added to the list, which is significant because it gives the new league nine teams — one more than eight should Minnesota fold (more on that on Sunday). However, the USL struck back later that day with a release vowing to pursue all (legal?) actions to keep Tampa and Baltimore in the USL. The USL says it believes the TOA is meddling with current USL teams under contract for the 2010 season.
Q: Just to be clear, you never paid the [USL franchise fee] for this upcoming year right?
A: No, I got out several months ago.
Q: Was there a team that did pay the fee but is leaving the USL?
A: Not in our group. There's a few others in the league now that still haven't paid the fee. They're kind of sitting on the fence waiting to see what will happen.
Q: Is there any talk about switching to the FIFA calendar?
A: There’s nothing serious in the time. Now, FIFA likes that, for everyone to be on the same calendar but you’ve got all these objections. We’ve got teams up in Rochester, Minnesota, Montreal and Vancouver. So there’s some objection to it. Now the answer to it is really not all that difficult. The way they do it over in Europe – they have cold weather over there too – so what they do is basically take two seasons. They usually start about August and end around April. But what they’ll do is split it. They’ll play from August till like December. Then they’ll take a big ol’ break during the cold months and maybe do some friendly matches and things like that in between. And then they’ll start the second half of the season late February/March. That’s how we’d do it in the United States to get around the weather problem. To me, that’s probably several years down the road.
