When the Seattle Sounders take to the pitch at their towering CenturyLink Field ground, you could be forgiven for thinking that football has finally caught on in America.

The Sounders may not have a name to conjure with (or a global brand to sell) like Manchester United or Barcelona, but they are regularly greeted by 36,000- plus home supporters whose chanting, scarf-waving intensity creates the kind of atmosphere that can inspire the home side and intimidate opponents. When the Sounders’ fluid and attractive play – often spearheaded by Uruguayan midfielder Alvaro Fernandez – results in a goal, the roar that goes around the ground would do many European teams proud.

The Sounders, though, are still a rare football success story in the US, a country that has never quite succumbed to the charms of the ‘the beautiful game’.

Outside the Pacific Northwest (organisers hope the game’s popularity will now spread from Seattle to nearby Portland and Vancouver), matches can feel like muted affairs, with smaller crowds that often appear more interested in the ground’s fast-food options than the sometimes lacklustre and, by American standards, low-scoring play on the pitch.

The fact is, in US sport, football – or soccer as it’s known, in deference to American football – has seemingly always been the Next Big Thing. It almost took off in the mid-70s when the North American Soccer League (NASL) enjoyed a dazzling run of success – before overspending by the wealthiest teams and the US’s failure to land the 1986 World Cup conspired to blow the whistle. It was on the brink again in 1996, when another national professional league was launched on the back of the 1994 World Cup, the first hosted by the US.

Major League Soccer (MLS) began life with just 10 teams and founding investors including the Hunt family and Philip Anschutz’s AEG, both big financial players in other US sports. To avoid the problems that did for the NASL, MLS was given a single-entity business structure that still sets it apart from most other national football leagues. Club operators own stakes in MLS LLC, not just their individual teams, and they share certain revenue streams, including gate money and main shirt sponsorship, with the league. In turn, the league contracts and pays the players and sells the rights to launch new franchises, known as expansion teams.

MLS had an undeniably shaky first half-decade as the American public’s post- World Cup enthusiasm waned. Recently, though, the league has been evolving in ways that might point to a brighter future. In fact, says Dr William Sutton, professor at the University of Central Florida’s DeVos Sport Business Management Program, US football has “gone further in the last two or three years than it did in the preceding 10”.

The most visible change came in 2007 when English star David Beckham joined MLS’s Los Angeles Galaxy, heralding an influx of big-name foreign players into the US game. Beckham, now in the final year of a Galaxy contract that guarantees him an annual salary of $6.5m (€4.5m), was the first player signed under the ‘designated player’ rule, which allows each MLS team to have up to three players whose wages count only partially against the league- imposed salary cap of $2,675,000 per team.

The so-called ‘Beckham experiment’ produced a late-career windfall for the star (his additional earnings are thought to be several times as big as his salary, making him, by some counts, the world’s highest- paid player), helped get the Galaxy a new sponsor and sold hundreds of thousands of Beckham Galaxy shirts. It also, according to some fans and commentators, turned the Galaxy into a media circus, with Beckham and his fashion trend-setting wife Victoria getting more attention than anything happening on the field. Beckham’s injuries and loan spell with AC Milan just made the experiment seem even more like a failure.

Still, the idea of the designated-player rule – to bring high-profile foreign stars to the US and keep the best American players at home without ditching the salary-cap system altogether – has been welcomed by teams, which have made use of the rule to import players including French striker Thierry Henry, who gets guaranteed annual pay of $5.6m with the New York Red Bulls, and Ireland’s Robbie Keane, who recently joined the Galaxy on a two-and-a-half- year contract for a reported $5.7m.

But the imports have cost US clubs dearly – MLS pays only $335,000 of each designated player’s wage – and their value in attendance and sponsorship terms has been debatable.

Less trumpeted than the Beckham Experiment but perhaps more significant has been the arrival of a new breed of investor promising to bring fresh ideas to US football. These include the league’s first foreign backers – Jorge Vergara, owner of leading Mexican team Chivas Guadalajara, who with partner Antonio Cue paid $7.5m to start Los Angeles-based expansion team Chivas USA, and Austrian energy drink company Red Bull, which paid AEG a reported $100m for original MLS team the MetroStars, now renamed the New York Red Bulls. Red Bull is also the first owner of a top-flight European team – Red Bull Salzberg – to get involved in the US game.

The league has also attracted former US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who with his son Merritt is the investor-operator of 2011 expansion team the Portland Timbers, and former Yahoo! president/COO Jeff Mallett, who with three other partners paid $35m to launch the Vancouver Whitecaps. Canadian Mallett is the first owner of a big English club, Championship side Derby County, to enter the US game.

Most noted among the new investors has been the group – former film studio executive Joe Roth, businessman Adrian Hanauer, TV star Drew Carey and, through his Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – which five years ago put up $30m to launch expansion team the Seattle Sounders. In the Sounders‘ third season, attendance has averaged more than 37,000, twice the average for the MLS as a whole and better than many teams in the top English, Spanish and Italian leagues. Seattle sells more season tickets and merchandise than any other MLS club – many of those loyal supporters come to games wearing $70 replicas of the players’ trendy ‘rave green’ shirts – and on the pitch the team has twice won the US Open Cup (which is the equivalent of England’s FA Cup).

Hanauer, who is also the team’s general manager, puts the Sounders’ success down to pent-up demand (Seattle has always been a soccer hotspot), timing (the area’s other sports teams have recently been struggling) and a focus on 18 to 40-year- old sports fans rather than just the youth that has traditionally backed US soccer.

The focus on committed, informed fans even extends to giving each season- ticket holder a vote on the direction of the franchise – and on the fate after the 2012 season of Hanauer. From an investment perspective, he says, the goal is “to run a rational business. We don’t want to be highly profitable because then we’re not putting enough into the product. We also don’t want to lose a lot of money.”

The evolution of the US game has produced steady growth: the league, now comprises 18 teams split into Eastern and Western conferences, with 19th team Montreal set to join next year; and the average crowd attendance is up 6.3% for the first half of the 2011 season.

But it hasn’t yet made football in the US a significant financial success. After incurring losses of $250m over its first five years of operation, MLS LLC itself is thought to be approaching profitability (league representatives won’t say whether profitability has actually been reached). It’s been reported, however, that only six of its individual teams have ever broken even and only a couple of teams – the Sounders and Toronto FC – are believed to have made a profit last season.

So can football now take a great leap and live up to its perennial billing by joining ice hockey, basketball, baseball and American football as a big-league US sport? And can its backers ever turn it into a big business?

One key to achieving big-league status could be a continued focus on soccer stadiums. A decade ago most MLS teams played in American football or baseball stadiums that were the wrong shape and size. Now 13 out of 18 teams play in stadiums designed with soccer in mind.

With capacities of between 18,000 and 27,000 (Seattle’s ground was designed for both soccer and American football and can be configured to house up to 67,000), the new stadiums are fairly small by European standards but that, argues the league, creates a better atmosphere. Just as importantly, MLS clubs that invest in their own stadium keep all the revenue from concessions, parking, naming rights and other stadium-related sources.

“That control over revenue provides a lot more flexibility,” says Robb Heineman, one of the investors who in 2006 paid the Hunt family $20m for Sporting Kansas City, which just moved into its new, hi-tech Livestrong Sporting Park stadium.

Television deals are crucial to any major sport and although TV ratings for MLS games have been flat in recent years, the league is hoping that a new TV deal with the NBC broadcast network and its Versus cable channel will improve the picture.

The new three-year deal (which will run alongside the league’s deal with ESPN) is worth a reported $12m a year, almost double the $6.75m that cable network Fox Soccer pays for a similar package but still a long way short of the hundreds of millions of dollars that NBC pays to show ice hockey and American football games.

The failure of the US bid to host the 2022 World Cup (Qatar was the surprise winner) was, in the words of Heineman, “a huge missed opportunity” for MLS, which has always tried to parlay interest in the national team to the club-level game.

The hope now is that under newly- appointed coach Jürgen Klinsmann, the former German player who turned down the US coaching job on two previous occasions, the national team will be more successful on other shores (its best World Cup performance to date was a 2002 quarter-final appearance in South Korea).

To accommodate the 2022 World Cup, MLS had been considering a switch from its current March-November playing season to the international August-May season. Now such a switch – or a change in the American play-off system that decides the MLS champion – seems unlikely.

More likely is that MLS teams will try to grow their sport by using reserve teams and youth programmes to encourage the development of homegrown stars and by fostering rivalries between local teams. The rivalry between Portland, Seattle and Vancouver teams has boosted attendances in the Pacific Northwest and MLS is now considering giving the New York area a second team (see ‘A new team for New York’, p69) to spur local competition on the East Coast.

One big question is whether the unusual – by European standards – MLS business model will have to change to enable the sport to grow. The salary cap is an understandably sensitive subject with MLS and its players, who almost went on strike last year before a new collective bargaining agreement allowed the 2010 season to go ahead as planned. Some investors concede that wages will at some point have to increase, but that can only happen, they say, if revenue streams increase as well.

The MLS owners’ goal, says Vancouver Whitecaps investor Mallett, “is to continue to increase revenues and move it down to the players, because quality of play will drive the asset’s equity value.”

Changing the league’s single-entity, revenue-sharing structure might give individual team owners more control over their destinies and allow them to maximise profits. But the league and its investors see the single-entity structure as an important part of US football’s success so far. It prevents the kind of overspending on players that plagued the NASL, the argument goes, and guards against the kind of highly leveraged buyouts that recently landed Manchester United and Liverpool, American-owned teams in the less centrally regulated English Premier League, with huge debt loads.

The single-entity model, says Kansas co-owner Heineman, is “the single greatest attribute of our league. It’s something that over time is going to allow us to raise the value of our respective teams far more than if they were independent franchises.”

Heineman once made the bold prediction that in 20 years football could overtake baseball – often referred to as America’s ‘national pastime’ – as the number-two US sport. And he’s not backing off the prediction today. “If we do things the right way there’s no question that we could have MLB [Major League Baseball] in our sights,” he says.

A new team for New York

The addition of a 20th team to the MLS roster could end up being an important, lucrative and perhaps entertaining watershed for US soccer.

While Detroit or some other city could still get the franchise, MLS has confirmed that its current focus is New York, where a new team would set up a local rivalry with the New York Red Bulls (who actually play a few miles west of New York City in Harrison, New Jersey).

A New York franchise would not come cheap: the league is expected to ask between $75m and $100m for the right to operate a team, twice what it got for the Montreal franchise that will join the MLS next year. And in keeping with the league's emphasis on soccer-specific stadiums, the new owner would be expected to build its own playing facility in the city.

But the revenue potential is huge too, given that many of the 13 million people living in the area are football-loving Latinos. A recent friendly between Ecuador and Greece drew a crowd of nearly 40,000 to Citi Field, home of the New York Mets baseball team.

Possible contenders for the franchise include the Wilpon family, whose ownership of the Mets and the Citi Field site might give it an edge but whose financial future appears uncertain. Most intriguing, though, has been the interest shown by Paul Kemsley, a British property dealer, reality-TV star (he did a stint on the UK version of The Apprentice) and former vice-chairman of English Premier League team Tottenham Hotspur. After his Rock property empire collapsed in 2009, Kemsley moved to the US and bought the rights to the Cosmos, the New York team that was the star of the North American Soccer League of the 70s and early 80s.

Though the Cosmos currently fields only an under-23s team in a minor US league, Kemsley has recruited former Cosmos star Pelé as the club's honorary president, former Manchester United great Eric Cantona as director of soccer and former US national team player Cobi Jones as associate director. He has also been busy rebranding the Cosmos through events such as the testimonial game that the team recently played in England against Manchester United (who thrashed the American visitors 6-0).

Cantona, who played in that game, sees plenty of potential in US football. "I am honestly convinced that, with or without the help of the Cosmos – I hope with – America can win the World Cup in the next 20 years," he says. And the sometimes controversial former captain of France puts a lot of his faith in young homegrown players, the kind currently being developed by the Cosmos' Academy system. "We can buy players," he says. "Of course we can buy players. But we want to work a lot on young talent, because there's a lot of young talent in America.”

But why should the Cosmos, a team that is identified with the burnout of the NASL as well as the rise, become MLS’s new New York team? “We were the biggest club then, and we can be the biggest club again,” says Cosmos vice-chairman Terry Byrne, the British football figure who was previously David Beckham's personal manager and helped bring the England star to the US. “We have 40 years of history and heritage – and we did many things well back then despite the ending of the NASL – and we believe we can bring a lot of excitement to the US soccer landscape with the global attention that we attract. In addition, we have some of the biggest names in soccer, who are committed to building this club from the ground up. The MLS has made incredible progress in its 16 years and the sport will only continue to grow in this country.”

Byrne says that while signing more star players, aggressive marketing and better TV coverage are necessary to take soccer into the big leagues, it is also about “creating an aspiration so that the millions of young kids who play the sport in this country won’t divert to other American sports as they grow up – because they see that a career path as a professional soccer player can be a viable and financially rewarding option".

On the subject of the Cosmos’ own finances – which, it has been rumoured, have been boosted by Middle East money – Byrne will only say: “Our backing will come from a number of domestic and international investors, who will remain private.” As for the revenue structure of the US business model, he says: "As the sport grows, I would assume that the league will continue to address and modify its rules to adapt to the changing needs of the owners, players, media, fans, sponsors, TV partners and everyone else involved.”