Philadelphia Independence owner David Halstead has debunked the reported deal published by Beau Dure on ESPNW and denied that WPS and Dan Borislow had ever agreed on an arrangement for 2013 where Borislow’s magicJack team, featuring several prominent U.S. Women’s National Team members, would play exhibition games versus the five WPS teams in 2012.
"Over the past several months, there have been a lot of prospective and potential arrangements and discussions and settlements and deals between the League and magicJack," said Halstead. "When I read them in the news, some of them were accurate from what we were hearing at the Board level and some of them were very inaccurate.
A deal where there’s exhibition games against magicJack, I don’t know much about a deal like that."
Halstead noted that such a deal would not be cost-effective or feasible for WPS teams.
"When you start talking about exhibition games, here’s what you have to think about," said Halstead. "Where are you going to play? What are the dimensions of the field? What does it cost? What are the splits going to be on revenue like concessions, etc? When you play the exhibition team - what are the standards in the locker room setup, who’s going to pay for what, what are the transportation costs going to be?
When you’re in a league playing a league game, all of that is very simple because you all agree on certain burdens and you sign up and so you know the groundwork. When we play an exhibition game in Philadelphia and we have say, Duke come to United Sports, there’s a lot of pre-work to talk about, insurance, for instance. A player gets hurt on the field, whose responsibility is that?
If we were to construct something where we have an exhibition team like the Mexican National Team or magicJack, who’s not part of the League, frankly in Philadelphia I’d be thinking about my costs. How can I generate revenue in this exhibition? I’m going to play at United Sports, I’m not going to play at PPL Park where it’s very expensive. Is that going to be acceptable to who comes in and wants some kind of national media attention?
I was never faced with those questions because there’s nothing like that that ever materialized from a standpoint of something we needed to analyze as a real settlement option.
It would have had to be analyzed very deeply to see its impact on the schedule. Also, if I have eight home games evenly spread across the season and I need time to promote each one and I have this mandatory exhibition game, what if it doesn’t fit into my schedule? My priority would have been to win the League and put Paul [Riley] in a position to do that. So wedging in somebody like a random exhibition game, I would have had to just look at it from a financial standpoint."
For more about the problems that have plagued WPS in the past two years, read WPS train wreck needs overhaul: 10 easy lessons and WPS shuts down magicJack franchise: A brief tortured history.
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