[Jimmy Stang]

It isn't just the size of the stadium that makes some venues poor for soccer. The distance from the field is a big one, and the obscenely bright football lines make for poor viewing. I'm not suggesting that an NASL club could justify their own surface and the labour involved to swap it, but just try and watch a FC Edmonton match on Ustream without getting a headache. I don't know enough about the types of lines (painted-on vs. stitched in), but some facilities do share a surface for football and soccer by (I can only assume) scrubbing the lines off and re-painting.

I'm honestly not trying to dump on this from every angle, but these things matter. I'll still go to the matches no matter what, but I'm one of the very few people that don't need any convincing to support it - like many of you here. To a lot of the population, they're going to go to a match at McMahon to try it out, observe the lack of atmosphere of being in a 10% full stadium (and that's being optimistic) and they're going to thing "well that sort of sucked" and never come back.

Whether or not a new stadium addresses any of those issues (by making a more intimate environment, closer to the pitch, etc.) won't really matter if the NASL team folds before the stadium even gets started.