I’d like to see Women’s Professional Soccer — the new women’s pro soccer league — survive. I really would. I’m just not optimistic it will.

Not after the crash-and-burn of the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA), which opened in 2001 and shut down in 2003, after all of three seasons.

All but invisible to date, the WPS had its coming out party today, dividing 21 of the most prominent U.S. national team players among the seven franchises.

The still-unnamed Los Angeles franchise got midfielders Shannon Boxx, Stephanie Cox and Aly Wagner.

One would think a women’s pro soccer league would be an easy sell in the U.S. If just 10 percent of all the little girls playing soccer went out and saw a game with their parents … the league would be a financial success, right?

Yes, it would. But here are the problems with a play-for-pay women’s league:

1. Aside from the national team players, and a very very small sampling of foreign players (Brazil’s Marta, comes to mind), female soccer players have very little name recognition. It’s not as if there are scads of leagues around the world the WPS can cherry-pick from and pick up a name someone might know.

I like soccer. I follow the women’s game casually. Yet I can’t name one female soccer player from this country who didn’t play for the national team.

2. Selling a team on the national players is tough, particularly now, when really only two or three active players have significant name recognition: Abby Wambach, Kristine Lilly and Hope Solo.

Boxx is a nice player, a fiesty, athletic competitor who can score, and she is from Redondo Beach, close to the Home Depot Center, where the L.A. franchise will play. Aly Wagner is solid but I confuse her with Ali Krieger and Lindsay Tarpley. Wagner, turns out, is 28 and perhaps on the back side of an injury-checkered career. She got into one match at Beijing. Cox wasn’t on the Olympic roster, but then Cat Reddick was polite enough to tear up her knee, and Cox got back on the roster and played in five matches.

3. Recent immigrants, who make up a big chunk of U.S. soccer enthusiasts, rarely are women’s soccer enthusiasts. The women’s game is basically not played (and certainly not appreciated) in Mexico or Central America. And you take those folks out of your marketing scheme, your potential audience is getting small.

Anyway, league promoters have to sell a product with players who are nearly unknown to all but the most enthusiastic of women’s soccer fans. And there aren’t many of those. National team players or women’s soccer fans.

The WUSA started with a lot of money — and blew through it all in three seasons. Someone who was an executive with that league almost shuddered when I asked about its brief history … saying that money was wasted everywhere, that it had no coherent financial plan.

Maybe the new league does have a plan. Maybe it can keep expenses under control. But if a particular team wants to win, won’t it have to pay decent wages to the foreigners who could come over and make a difference? (Or is this one of centralized leagues where the home office divvies up all talent and limits payrolls?)

Anyway, women’s soccer is no more popular now, far as I can tell, than it was in 2001, and maybe less so, considering Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and Joy Fawcett all have retired — and the excitement of the 1999 Women’s World Cup has long since dissipated.

Have any of the fundamentals changed? Well, yes, there are more soccer-specific stadiums, and Los Angeles will have a franchise (the WUSA skipped L.A., which was just plain stupid, but the stadium issue was a real one).

I just wonder where the money is going to come from, where the fans will come from, how much the players will be willing to play for and whether the league can survive in a country that has yet to show any real enthusiasm for women’s soccer — aside from the national team and only in its big events, the World Cup and the Olympics.

Good luck, WPS. You’re going to need it.

Note: If you’d like to see the entire dispersal of the 21 players to the seven franchises, check the league’s home page, here and click on “view the results” beneath those 21 mug shots.