Soccer Scrimmage wrote:

QUOTE:
Portland has 2-2.5m people in its metro area. You've already said that people there support the Seahawks and Mariners, so it seems reasonable to assume that *some* (not all) people in Portland will support Seattle as their MLS club. Thus the "net gain" for MLS in terms of audience size would probably be less than 2-2.5m. There are probably a dozen metro areas in the US and Canada which are better expansion candidates from a "footprint" point of view than is Portland.

This will no doubt be important to MLS as the decide what to do. However, as I implied at the end of my previous post, and as AdC pointed out, there's evidence that audience size isn't the be-all end-all. So it should be interesting to see if MLS decides to sacrifice a bit of audience size in exchange for passion.

What Portland has going for it is that after the Trailblazers, a MLS team there would be the only big league game in town. I know Portland fans really want a major league baseball team. I think having a MLS club in a major city being the only major team in action for the entire summer would be a boon for the league in terms of getting support and people talking about the team.

There would be the built in rivalry with Seattle, and who knows--some crazies might travel down to San Jose for a game.