Portland's MLS expansion wobbles along, with stadium financing taking shape (we hope), a marketing campaign already in place, and the typical community-resistance and tired questions over Major League Soccer's viability all along for the ride.

It's that last tag-along that sticks in the craw of many fans; if there's anything that Major League Soccer has done right in its fourteen years of existence, it's ensuring that it won't be going away due to financial instability. It's been a long, penny-pinching road to get to this point, and while "success" for the league is in the eye of the beholder, few that really understand the landscape, how the league operates, and the lengths to which the leadership has gone to maintain a solid footing, believe it's likely to fold.

Still there is skepticism in Portland, despite the city's rich soccer history. The Oregon Economics Blog points out the parallels with Portland's gaining of an NBA team back in 1970; amazingly enough, professional basketball was less of a sure thing than MLS might be. It's taken for granted now that the NBA was always a success; but time has a way skewing our perception, and with professional basketball becoming big business over the last thirty years, those less-than-big-time days are forgotten about.

It's forty years later Portland still has the Blazers, a team that has become a significant part of their civic identity. Is there really any reason to believe that the Timbers will be any different?

• Speaking of financial instability and overspending, the MLS pragmatists need only point Down Under for an example of where league could be if the powers that be aren't careful. Australia's A-League is struggling with red ink, declining attendance, and a tough decision between slow-growth and rapid expansion. Sound familiar? The parallels between the A-League and MLS may be overblown just a bit, but there's probably a lesson in there somewhere. Australia is bidding, just as the U.S. is, for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, something that gets some of the blame for the A-League's lack of direction. The one parallel that doesn't exist is who controls the league; the Aussie FA runs the club competition there, a setup many American soccer fans would cringe to conceive of here.

• MLS players are (generally) underpaid, a situation that most observers and fans rightfully lament. But the opposite viewpoint is that American players are the opposite of "spoiled", a condition often applied to players in other parts of the world. A Polish site has taken a look at the difference between "spoiled" Polish players and those in Major League Soccer, using the latter to criticize the former (this was passed through Google translate, so I apologize for the difficult read); most interesting is the implication that here it's about winning, while there it's about money. I'm not sure that makes players here more virtuous, necessarily (some of them have little choice about where to play), but it does put our little league into perspective. Most galling for the Polish writer is the thought that the Americans, many of whom play in MLS, will be competing for the World Cup next year while those pampered Polish stars sit home.