Hispanic community key for Major League Soccer

When Major League Soccer breaks down its core fan base — the target audiences that will determine how much the sport can prosper at the professional level — it looks at three distinct groups.

• The core European soccer fans who get up at 3 a.m. to watch live matches of their favorite teams and live and die with the sport.

• The suburban soccer mom/minivan families that have kids who play the sport and root for their local teams in a traditional American way.

• And finally, the Hispanic audience, which now numbers 42 million across the country — including 1.65 million in Arizona — and makes up the ever-growing, ever-particular group of hardcore fans who could make or break soccer’s bottom line.

Of the 42 million Hispanics in the U.S., 27 million are Mexican Americans according to the U.S. Census. For almost all of them, soccer is the sport they grew up on. And MLS teams across the country — from hotbeds like California and Texas on down — do their best to cater to Hispanic fans. MLS’s senior vice president of marketing, Dan Courtemanche, said league title sponsors such as Honda, Budweiser and Adidas do bilingual advertising and cross-promote their products and the game.

“It’s a huge opportunity for us, something each team recognizes and tries to respond to,” Courtemanche said. “Every team has at least one bilingual member of the public relations staff. Ticket departments, business departments, community relations — we have play-by-play of our games on Spanish radio. Our Hispanic stars like (Chivas USA striker) Paco Palencia and (D.C. United’s) Jaime Moreno are filming spots for Spanish television. A lot of resources are thrown in that direction.”

Two of the most successful MLS teams in terms of attendance — Chivas USA and the Los Angeles Galaxy — share the new, built-for-soccer Home Depot Center that is the prototype that many cities and franchises are emulating.

But while the Galaxy — led by Team USA star Landon Donovan and the owner of four MLS titles — had a broad ethnic fan base, Chivas, an offshoot of its namesake team in Mexico, is the favorite of Hispanics.

“The name recognition has made Chivas popular all over the country. When they play a game in Columbus, many of the Hispanic fans come from all over the Midwest to cheer on Chivas,” Courtemanche said. “That’s an opportunity for the local teams (like the Columbus Crew) to show what they have to offer and build on their fans.”

But even Chivas’ popularity in the U.S. pales to that of the Mexican national team, whose visits regularly attract 80,000 fans to the Rose Bowl. Even Team USA shies away from playing “Los Tricolores” in Los Angeles because it gives away such a homefield advantage.

The MLS also sponsors the annual U.S. visits by the Mexican team, which has drawn about 50,000 fans to an average of six matches they play here each year. National team games in Phoenix, held at Chase Field, have averaged about 30,000 over the last five years despite lessthan-stellar opposition.

Its woeful performance in the 2006 World Cup aside, the success of Team USA, especially in the friendly matches on home soil against Mexico, has helped legitimize the level of play in the MLS — where 18 of the 23 players on the U.S. side play professionally.

“We’ve played them toe-to-toe recently, and that really helps show the kind of soccer being played in the league,” Courtemanche said.

The league would love to lure some of the top Mexican players across the border, but can’t match the salaries they are paid in their home country. According to salary figures obtained recently by the Washington Post, Palencia was the MLS’s top-paid player at $1.36 million — a little more than the veteran league minimum in the NBA.

But MLS owners — soccer-crazy millionaires Lamar Hunt and Phil Anschutz own seven of the 10 current teams and have absorbed losses that approach $100 million over the last decade — are considering relaxing their $2 million-per-team salary cap to allow each team to sign one “superstar” whose salary won’t count. That could open the door for more Hispanic stars — which would attract more fans.