The Columbus Crew are the oldest team in MLS, and it would be a terrible look for the league if they picked up and moved to Austin.
MK Dons, a fairly irrelevant football club that’s battling to stay up in League One, is one of the more infamous clubs in English history. Not because of having legendary players, or winning the Premier League, or making deep runs in Europe. They’re famous for the wrong reasons, and there aren’t many people outside of their own fan base that have positive views of them.
Why did this club draw the ire of British fans everywhere? They relocated, dropping their identity as Wimbledon FC and trading in the London suburb for Milton Keynes. A relocation like this, of course, was unheard of at the time. Even today, it’s still something alien to fans from Europe and South America, and just about anywhere else except for the United States.
Relocation has largely stayed away from MLS, so far. Only one team has left their home city, which is a low number if you compare MLS to American sports leagues such as the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The Earthquakes left for Houston to become the Dynamo, but the franchise reappeared in 2008 as an expansion team that took on the old team’s identity and history.
However, a second team could soon join the list of relocated MLS clubs, in a move that’s more egregious than MK Dons moving an hour and a half from their original location. That move was roughly 60 miles, but if the Columbus Crew are allowed to move to Austin, it would be a move of more than a thousand miles.
The Crew aren’t a team that nobody care’s about, either. They aren’t in danger of folding from lack of fan support, and it’s actually quite the opposite. They’re the oldest team in the league, they’ve won MLS Cup before, and they reached the final again in 2015.
While their attendance is a problem, they have a strong core fan base and their attendance numbers could be solved through methods other than relocation.
There’s already been pushback from both Crew fans and locals against a move to Austin, and the move would also depend on finding a place to play, or one to build a stadium. It’s not certain that it will work out, which is the reason why the Crew are still in Columbus for this season.
It’s a problem, however, that this is even a possibility. Relocation would be out of the question in the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, and any other respected league abroad. Clubs having ties to their local communities is part of the game, and allowing them to pack their bags and move on a whim ruins that.
It hurts both the fan base of the relocating club, and supporters in general. Most fans, after all, don’t want to invest emotionally and sometimes financially in a team that could leave them in an instant because another city offered a better chance to make money. Just ask the former fans of the Saint Louis Rams, San Diego Chargers, or Oakland Raiders.
Many American fans want MLS to be taken as seriously as the big European leagues, some day. It’s not necessarily a matter of quality, but pride. If the league doesn’t want to be a laughing-stock internationally, it can’t allow one of the game’s biggest taboos to become a regular thing.
The league has the chance here to take a stand, to stand up for the traditional values of the game. It didn’t do so when the Earthquakes relocated, but that was years ago, and the Earthquakes received an expansion team almost immediately afterwards to make up for the relocation.
Or, instead of protecting the identity and culture that Columbus has built around their team over the years, they can let a move happen in the same way that the NFL owners supported the latest round of relocations.
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Whatever choice they make, it will send waves through the supporter community in both the United States and Europe, and for better or worse, will have a big effect on how many fans look at the league going forward.