Major League Soccer’s Most Valuable Teams

by Chris Smith for Forbes

When MLS kicked off its 2017 season this past March, it expected to do so with the fanfare of two new expansion teams based in Atlanta and Minnesota. What it maybe didn’t plan for, however, was one team to sell out its stadium for the league’s coldest-ever game, and the other to not only play its first home game in front of one of the world’s biggest soccer crowds, but to maintain that popularity throughout its inaugural season. It’s a tremendous statement for the league, and one that’s hard to overstate.

“We opened up in Minnesota in the middle of a blizzard with 35,000 people,” remarks MLS president Mark Abbott, “and Atlanta has almost 50,000 people per game, which is the highest average attendance for any professional sports team in the United States or Canada outside of the NFL.” It’s true, and what’s more is that, at over 46,000 fans per home game through mid-August, Atlanta has knocked Seattle off the top of the MLS attendance chart for the first time since the Sounders joined the league in 2009.

It’s that sort of immediate success that helps illustrate why prospective MLS team owners across the country are clamoring for a piece of the league, even with the next round of expansion now costing new owners a fee of $150 million, a whopping 275% increase from just five years ago when the Montreal Impact paid $40 million. And it’s that tremendous demand that goes a long way toward explaining why the average MLS team is now worth $223 million, up 20% from last year. Read More (the entire list is on page 2).

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