U.S. women look ahead to new pro soccer league

By Steve Keating

DETROIT (Reuters) - At the end of a long season, the U.S. women''s soccer team stood at center field, hugged, shared a few tears then looked forward after a golden year.

A 1-0 victory over China in a friendly on a biting December night in a cavernous stadium in downtown Detroit, a city that has come to represent Ground Zero for the U.S. economic meltdown, would hardly seem the place for happy endings.

In a time of such financial turmoil it would be easier to think back on a giddy season of success highlighted by an Olympic gold medal in Beijing rather than to look ahead to an uncertain future.

But for members of the U.S. soccer team, who would likely have suffered a low media profile until the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics, this year is now bright with possibilities, most of them centered on the return to the country of women''s professional soccer.

Next month, the seven-team Women''s Professional Soccer (WPS) league will enter a turbulent sport market place, replacing WUSA (the Women''s United Soccer Association) which disappeared in 2003 after just three seasons.

The re-launch comes at a perilous time when events, teams and entire leagues are disappearing from the U.S. sporting landscape.

Victims include the Arena Football League, an indoor soccer competition which had run for two decades. It announced in December it would not operate in 2009 because of the harsh economic environment.

WARNING SIGNS

Despite the ominous warning signs, WPS insists the time is right. Armed with a sound business plan and it will push ahead with its March 29 launch.

"It''s an opportunity to grow off the Olympic momentum but with realistic expectations," WPS Chief Operating Officer Mary Harvey told Reuters. "If we had seen this coming I would have bought gold, a ton of it.

"The situation is what it is and even though that is the case it doesn''t change the fact that we have a really committed ownership group; we have a great cash position."

Soccer leagues, men''s and women''s, indoor and outdoor have come and gone.

They include, most famously, the North American Soccer League which spent millions on aging icons like Pele and Franz Beckenbauer to grab a brief share of the U.S. sporting spotlight before fading away after 16 years in 1984.

NICHE FOUND

Born out of the hugely successful 1999 women''s World Cup, when over 90,000 spectators filled the Rose Bowl to watch the final between U.S. and China, WUSA looked to have found a niche.  Continued...