Chapter 9: Distance and Possibility
Summer–Fall 2014The first few months in Las Vegas passed without ceremony.
There was no dramatic beginning, no defining moment that marked the transition from one life to another. Instead, time moved quietly—measured in routines, flights, emails, and long hours alone with ideas that had nowhere to settle yet.
From afar, Manson watched Hong Kong football begin to stabilise.
The leagues kicked off. Fixtures ran on schedule. Clubs appeared—at least publicly—more anchored than they had been before. Stadiums filled modestly but consistently. The system was working, not perfectly, but enough to justify the years spent arguing for it.
There was satisfaction in that.
And a strange sense of distance.
The project that had defined his early twenties no longer needed him in the same way. It had moved beyond theory. Others were now responsible for its day-to-day survival.
In Las Vegas, there was nothing yet to replace it.
A Different Kind of Silence
Summer in the desert was relentless.The heat made the city feel paused during the day, alive only at night. Manson spent long mornings inside—reading, writing, sketching models that were not yet meant to be shared.
This was thinking time.
Not the reactive thinking of meetings and deadlines, but the slower work of asking questions without expecting answers.
What would a proper North American football system look like if you weren’t constrained by what already existed?
Early Shapes
The first realisation was uncomfortable but unavoidable:MLS and USL could not continue as parallel worlds forever.
They served the same markets. Competed for players. Fragmented investment. Created confusion for supporters and broadcasters alike.
Amalgamation—once unthinkable—began to feel inevitable.
Not immediately. Not forcibly.
But eventually.
The question was not if, but how.
Would it be a tiered system?
A phased integration?
A shared commercial structure with sporting separation?
There were no answers yet—only frameworks.
Geography as Strategy
North America demanded a different way of thinking.Markets mattered.
Not just population size, but identity, history, and economic gravity.
Manson began mapping cities not as expansion targets, but as missing pieces:
- San Francisco – a global city without a football identity that matched its stature
- Detroit – a sleeping giant, defined by resilience and reinvention
- Baltimore – historically rich, culturally distinct, overshadowed but not insignificant
They were corrections.
The Power of Names
Another idea surfaced repeatedly in his notes—almost obsessively.Identity.
American sports understood the value of heritage better than most football cultures, yet soccer had abandoned much of its own history in the pursuit of novelty.
What if it didn’t have to?
Manson began exploring whether intellectual property rights to iconic names could be reclaimed.
Names that still carried weight:
- LA Aztecs
- New York Cosmos
- Others scattered through American soccer history
They were anchors—shortcuts to legitimacy.
A new system didn’t need new names everywhere.
Sometimes it needed old ones, handled correctly.
Watching From Afar
As summer turned to fall, the distance from Hong Kong felt less painful and more instructive.The league he had helped design was running without him.
That mattered.
It meant the idea had outgrown its author.
In Vegas, nothing had begun yet.
But something was forming.
Not a plan.
A direction.
One shaped by scale, patience, and the understanding that North America could not be approached with the same urgency as Hong Kong.
This would take longer.
And that, for the first time, felt acceptable.
