F.C. Gold Pride, Women's Soccer Champs, Abruptly Disband

Sadly, Tiffeny Milbrett's F.C. Gold Pride uniform is now a collector's item

​The world champion F.C. Gold Pride soccer team has gone from kicking balls to kicking the bucket in a matter of a few short weeks.

After handily capturing the Women's Professional Soccer league title with a 4-0 win in the title game in late September, F.C. Gold Pride today released a jarring e-mail announcing they will "shut down operations effective immediately."

Based on another communique from the league's San Francisco-based office, it seems the Hayward franchise did not meet the league's "reserve funding requirement."

Your humble narrator attended the Gold Pride's inaugural press conference in 2008. As we wrote at the time, the WPS seemed a likely candidate to join the alphabet soup of failed pro soccer leagues littering the graveyard of American sports -- and it brings us no joy to have made the safe and predictable call.

The league, in fact, continues, as teams from Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, and Western New York did have enough money in the bank to keep WPS officials from kicking out the plug. But the life-support metaphor is apt.

This year, the league's runaway champs are kaput. Last year, the regular season's winningest franchise, Los Angeles, was contracted. Both teams featured Marta, the premier women's soccer player on God's green earth (in fact, L.A.'s demise paved the way for the Bay Area franchise to land her).

If you can't support teams featuring the world's best players and bringing home championship trophies, what'll it take? Let us know when you find out. Let the WPS know, too.

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