NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Mia Hamm on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The start of the Women's World Cup. This should have been a great week for women's soccer.

Instead, fans got a kick in the shins when the WUSA, the women's professional soccer league, announced it would fold after three years.

Mia Hamm is on cover of this week's SI, but even her star power, unusual for both women's sports and U.S. soccer, wasn't enough to save the WUSA.

What happened? After all, the 1999 cup competition, won by Hamm's U.S. squad, set a new high-water mark for fan interest in soccer here, whether men's or women's. The final was watched in 11.4 percent of U.S. homes, a rating that would be the envy of many premier men's sporting events.

But this success led to delusions of grandeur on the part of the league's organizers. Trying to run before they could even crawl, they burned through $40 million they had raised to fund their first five years of operations before the first season was completed. They ended up with losses of close to $60 million by the end of that 2001 season, and nearly $100 million overall before they closed up shop this week.

They ran up these losses even though player salaries over the three seasons totaled less than $18 million, or only a bit more than New York Met Mo Vaughn got for hitting .190 over 27 games this season. Player salaries averaged $37,235 this year and were basically covered by ticket sales, even with a modest average ticket price of $12.50 and games played in college stadiums that couldn't hold 10,000 fans.

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In the first year, money was spent on expensive mid-town Manhattan offices, a top-flight marketing campaign and multiple public relations agencies on retainer. It paid Turner Sports to broadcast games weekly in the league's first season, on the belief that regularity would build viewership and sponsor support. All it did was drain resources.

Even after the league trimmed expenses, it never got its overall cost structure in line with revenue. Sponsorship dollars never materialized, as only about 100,000 households turned in for its nationally televised games in 2002 and 2003.

Part of the problem was timing -- plans for the league were formed in 1999 and 2000, when the economy boomed and advertising dollars flowed. By the time the first ball was kicked in 2001, much of that spending had dried up.

"Weaker sports are going to have more problems in a weak economy," said Neal Pilson, a sports television consultant who was negotiating for the league for its 2004 television contract. "The big sports tend to take up most of the money. An advertiser with a limited budget is not going to buy women's soccer if the choice is that or college football."

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Pilson said the league also had the problem that soccer's continuous play means no in-game commercials. Plus, women's sports have trouble attracting advertising dollars even when ratings are strong, Pilson said.

"They generally attract a mixed audience of men and women," said Pilson, making them an inefficient buy for sponsors trying to reach one group or the other.

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By this week league officials realized that this year's World Cup wouldn't save them even if the Cup again draws great ratings.

"We didn't see any immediate impact that could bridge the funding problem," said WUSA Chairman John Hendricks. "We tried as a last resort to look around the country to see if there were any markets or alliances that we could make. That was just too challenging."