Kevin Baxter: Amid rising MLS popularity, should its teams gamble on bigger stadiums?

LOS ANGELES — Major League Soccer was born 28 years ago in cavernous NFL stadiums. Three seasons later, the league was averaging 14,312 fans a game in venues built to house five times that many.

At most games it was so quiet you could hear each team's profits drop.

So with the league on the verge of bankruptcy in 2002, clubs began building their own soccer-specific stadiums with smaller grandstands, wider fields and a much better atmosphere. Less than a decade later, more than half the teams played in soccer-specific homes, most with fewer than 26,000 seats. And thanks to that change, MLS not only survived, but began to thrive.

Now, however, with soccer