MLS is finally on the verge of filling up its 24 franchise slots, which is four more than pretty much any other soccer league on earth, but hey, American exceptionalism and all, and league commissioner Don Garber says—
“We never thought we would get, when we were at 10, to 14, then at 16, then we have a goal for 24. We’re really evaluating going past that. We’ve got a couple more decisions we need to make. I imagine some time in, you know, the next year or so, we’re going to lay out the plan for how large this league can be.”
Really, what else is he going to say? There’s no real reason MLS can’t go to 26 teams, or 28 or 30, when it’s already at 24, and with everybody and their sister clamoring to get into the league, might as well rack up a few more expansion fees (and publicly subsidized soccer-specific stadiums) while you can, right? Everyone who thinks that the problem with MLS is that the quality of play is too watered down already, as opposed to those who think that the problem is that it would be watered down even with only 12 teams, commence to wailing and rending your garments.
N A S L
You get a team!!!
And you get a team!!!
And you get a team!!!
And you get a team!!!
(ad infinitum)
“four more than pretty much any other soccer league on earth”
Argentina’s Primera Division has 30 teams. England’s Championship, as well as Leagues One and Two, each have 24 teams. And of course, the US is geographically far more expansive then either of those countries.
There’s no reason MLS can’t go to at least 30, especially considering they already have an unbalanced schedule. Yes, it will water down the talent, but as you eloquently note, it would be watered down even with 12 teams, and that doesn’t seem to have stopped the enthusiasm.
If MLS does go to 30 or higher, it will likely split up into two divisions with promotion and relegation (much like Japan’s J-League, where there are 40 clubs in 2 divisions). So you’d end up with two normal-sized divisions anyway.
Given the ownership structure, I would be shocked to see MLS go to promotion/relegation anytime soon.
Promotion/Relegation won’t happen, no matter how much some of us might like to see it. No owner is going to pay these ridiculous expansion fees knowing that in a season or two they could find themelves in the “minor leagues.” As long as the league uses the franchise model, pro/rel will not exist.
I guess this promise of never-ending expansion allows the long-term owners who (allegedly) have not been making money an opportunity to see a return on their investments. And MLS must love the “big league” treatment where cities keep tripping over themselves in an attempt to offer the best handouts in an effort to get one of these coveted expansion slots. But eventually there will be no cities left to use as leverage when a club isn’t getting enough public money and wants to move to a new market, right?
“But eventually there will be no cities left to use as leverage when a club isn’t getting enough public money and wants to move to a new market, right?”
We’ll always have Albuquerque.
The watering down of talent is much more of function of the salary and labor structure of the MLS. There are hundreds of professional soccer leagues in the world (although most are probably below MLS standards). Raising the median pay (averages are meaningless in the MLS with their high-end outliers) would attract a few more U.S. and Canadian players and better international players. So, the constraint for quality and talent is interest (TV and fan) and willingness to pay. You could argue that interest is itself a function of the quality/talent and hence back to old arguments against the MLS itself.
I certainly think it is possible to expand MLS and increase interest but I still think the constraint is the unfavorable salary structure. I do not think it is generally understood how great the disparity is between how much one can earn with MLS level talent in the MLS versus Mexico, Germany or Scandanavia (I know there are tax differences). At minimum, MLS should be able to pay equivalent salaries to Mexico.
@Surly Duff: J-League recently established a third division with 12 teams, and iirc, it also has designs on having 20 teams in it depending on how quickly teams in the division below (the top amateur tier, if you will) can establish their professional credentials.
By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine a future of American soccer where even a two-tiered pro/rel structure exists. At this point, MLS is more likely to complete its transformation into NFL-lite, where there are two conferences, either 30 or 32 teams, and a bigger number of teams making up the numbers during any given year than your typical top-flight soccer league around the world.
“I do not think it is generally understood how great the disparity is between how much one can earn with MLS level talent in the MLS versus Mexico, Germany or Scandinavia…”
Perhaps true but irrelevant, unless you’re not interested in making a profit. If team income isn’t sufficient, you can’t pay your players more. Doesn’t matter what’s happening elsewhere.
Well, it would ideally be an investment, right? Pay more for players, sell more tickets because the quality of play is better?
(Not that I actually think quality of play is the selling point for MLS teams at all — most MLS fans seem divided into one of two categories: Don’t know the difference, or know the difference all too well but want somebody local to root for. But that would be the theory, anyway.)
@Neil: That second group then be divided into “know the different all too well and believe that their support could help them catch up to other leagues”
Not sure how that jives with the men who run the league paying such low wages that certain players have to take up side jobs and receive public assistance to make ends meet.
Kei: The role of fans is a tough one, isn’t it? If you go to the games despite the quality issues, MLS leadership hears, “I’m happy to watch anybody run around and play soccer in my home team’s kit so long as there’s some 35-year-old guy I recognize from the Premier League out there too.” If you don’t go to the games, they hear, “Soccer doesn’t have enough support in the U.S. for it to be worth raising wages.”
Either way, I think anybody hoping that MLS teams will be on a par with top European clubs in our lifetimes (depending on how much lifetime you have left) is almost certainly deluding themselves. And that’s regardless of how many teams they let in or whether they pay non-star players a living wage or not.
Neil, Kei, to continue the discussion, what makes soccer so very different is that I can turn on basic cable TV any weekend (and some weekdays) from September to May and see games with better than talent than MLS. The Big 4 either have little or very limited competition, and have a virtual monopoly on American television, so if you want to watch those sports you have little choice but to watch the domestic leagues on TV or in person.
Right now, marketing the right way to the right people may be more important than improving the level of play on the field. Paying higher salaries may entice better players to come play here and can help raise the level of talent in both the short- and long-term, but I don’t see how MLS will ever compete with the established Euro leagues for top level talent. This puts MLS in the unique position of trying to convince American soccer fans to watch MLS instead of another league, or get potential fans to watch MLS before they find out other leagues are available on TV.
Can’t MLS also do what the rest of the non-elite club team world does, and try to get fans to root for a local team because it’s local, not because it’s the best in the world?
I was amused to see that when Barcelona played in Eibar recently, Eibar’s kits were near copies of Barça’s, because everyone there is Barça fans in addition to being Eibar fans. I think this is where American exceptionalism may actually be getting in the way — Americans are used to having their teams buy up all the best talent in the world, so to be told, “Go and watch your local players, and maybe if you’re lucky one day you’ll get to see them go play for Tottenham or something,” isn’t the sales pitch they’re used to.
Ha ha, you think Tottenham is among the best in the world.
Anyway, did you hear that about Eibar from actual fans? That’s a pretty old club and it’s really, really small. So this is its first season in La Liga. In fact it’s so small it didn’t even meet the financial requirements to play in La Liga. More importantly, it’s Basque. So I would think that the combination of “We’re never going to be in the top division” and “We are Basque” (which is fiercely regional), would make them far more likely to be Bilbao (or Sociedad) fans and want to mimic their colors.
I just assumed the color scheme was similar to how Claret and Blue (and it’s usually a sky-blue). Not sure I see it anywhere outside of England yet Villa, West Ham, Burnley and Scunthorpe all use it. There are only so many pleasing color combinations and patterns. The non-scientific part of me thinks that vertical stripes seem to be very popular in Spain. Plus Levante uses the same pattern (hell the old school soccer ball on the crest is identical), so it’s not like it’s totally unique.
Michael: I almost wrote “Chelsea” but wanted it to be at least semi-plausible.
I heard the Eibar kit thing from Ray Hudson, who was doing the BeIn broadcast, and who seemed to know what he was talking about (in between coming up with ways to call Messi a genius every time he tied his shoes. I suppose he could have been wrong, though.
But regardless, my point is that if you’re a fan of Eibar, or some even lower-division club in Europe, or a team elsewhere in the world, you probably have a top team that you root for in international competitions that your team is never even going to smell. That’s how my son roots for soccer (Red Bulls/Barça), but outside of maybe minor-league baseball or hockey towns, it’s not something very common to U.S. sports fandom.
Aha, here we go:
“Eibar was almost wiped off the map during the Spanish Civil War, when General Francisco Franco’s forces obliterated the left-leaning pueblo. After that, the town’s two soccer teams merged to form SD Eibar in 1940. Three years later, the team was so poor that the regional soccer federation donated a box of jerseys in Barcelona’s scarlet-and-blue, the colors Eibar still wears today.”
http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2014/11/15/sd-eibar-real-madrid-la-liga
MLS’s strategy goes against the grain. Power and popularity are flowing to a relatively small number of elite teams, who seem to be willing to tolerate a number of matches against also-ran clubs as long as they win a trophy or two every year. The elite teams stockpile names on large rosters and dominate the competition for media attention.
Putting teams in Sacramento and other such cities may make the league bigger (like in the UK) but also prevents existing teams from gaining star power and attention relative to European rivals. European leagues are different but most big teams recognize that they leave money on the table playing local teams from small, economically decaying cities.
Putting a Frank Lampard or a Kaka on each team sells a few tickets occasionally to casual fans. Putting 4-5 stars together creates the kind of club that young kids want to follow and are ready to plunk down a few bucks for an online subscription.
Huh, didn’t know that story. Which, obviously, was the reason I asked if it was intentional or just coincidence. Turns out, like 90% of everything in Spain, the real explanation involves Franco.
And I got the original point. Soccer in America is in a different position than the NFL or the NBA in that it’s not the best league in the world). I will note have friends in different parts of Europe. And they are usually fans of a team in their domestic league first and foremost. They might have a separate team they follow in the bigger leagues (England, Italy, Spain, etc.) but they mostly watch the CL and the bigger Euro leagues just for entertainment.
Don’t these owners realize that more teams means it will be that much harder to win the championship? Or is that just gravy?
mp34: I think most of them have made peace with the fact that the odds are already tilted in favor of whatever club Garber’s ad hoc decisions benefit (mostly LA and probably NYCFC moving forward).
There’s a good read about MLS and specifically Miami’s maybe-won’t-happen stadium and team here: http://reprints.longform.org/howler-miami-marcelo-claure
My guess for the future? Hard stop at 28 teams. 40 games a season. Home AND away intra-division games (26 games), home OR away inter-division games (14 games). Additional games means there need to be more weeks to play games for gone are the MLS cup playoffs as we know them and in its place is a championship between east and west champs at the end of the year. The MLS cup playoffs instead are moved and becomes an in season MLS only domestic cup that top 5 in each division qualify for the next year with the MLS cup final as part of an extended MLS all-star week/weekend. Beyond the 4 teams we know are coming to get to 24 the MLS will go to Sacramento, San Antonio, St. Louis (especially if the NFL leaves), and one of Carolina (Charlotte or Raligh), Baltimore, Oklahoma City or Indianapolis. Just the way I feel it will happen right now.
MLS has a problem right now, in that they’re thinking geographically instead of placing teams where the interest is. MLS is going to announce (probabaly) tomorrow that Minnesota United will be franchise #23, and we’re still waiting for Beckham to get off the stick and get a stadium done in Miami for #24, and neither Minnesota nor Miami has any sort of groundswell for MLS. Atlanta (which has tried pro soccer several times and failed each time it’s tried) is coming in 2017, and the Undead Corpse of Chivas will be entering in 2018, because somebody decided LA needs two soccer teams to be badly attended instead of just one.
And in the meantime, you have Sacramento who is ready to go on all fronts, now being told to “wait your turn” even though they have season tickets at 10K+ per game…for a third-division team.
Something’s wrong with this picture.
MLS = postN*A*S*L drip.
MLS must have decided that level of play is somewhat irrelevant to the league’s financial success. MLS can’t compete with the soccer that’s available on TV. I probably wouldn’t watch any MLS games if it weren’t for the national team, I’ll check in now and then on specific players but I can’t watch a full game.
Per World Soccer Talk, the MLS game that drew the most eyeballs this weekend (Red Bulls v DC) was still only the 15th most-watched soccer broadcast in the US from the previous week — both English and Spanish — and 13th most-watched game overall. (http://worldsoccertalk.com/2015/03/24/tv-viewing-numbers-for-soccer-games-on-us-television-march-16-22-2015)
2 million people watched El Clasico on a pair of channels that only a sliver slice of the US population has access to, with countless more watching on an online stream, legal or otherwise. That’s not a “Eurosnob” thing — that’s just a rational consumer’s decision.
Beckham should drop his Miami bid and join the Sacramento group.