The MLS Has NOT Arrived

A response

The MLS Has NOT Arrived

I don’t usually do this, but I couldn’t resist.

I read this article by Joe Pompliano this morning:

Major League Soccer has arrived (with sky-rocketing valuations and increased profitability)

Now, I don’t want to take anything away from Pompliano’s writing. This is well written, as is his other content. I strongly recommend supporting him.

However, I disagree with his conclusion.

I say this because I’ve spent the past few months immersing myself in the history of the defunct North American Soccer League. And, well, every single point Pompliano brings up to describe how the MLS is going to “make it” also applied to the NASL in the 1970s.

The reason why Inter Miami’s annual revenue rose by such a large amount from 2023 to today is its acquisition of Lionel Messi. This is very similar to how the value and notoriety of the New York Cosmos exploded after the signing of Pelé in 1975.

The problem, though, is that excitement over an aging superstar signing is not necessarily good for the league.

This is the problem I’ve been talking about in my recent posts about how the MLS works. In fact, I uplodaed a video not long ago detailing the many issues with Major League Soccer’s business model:

The 55,000 or so people who showed up at Soldier Field to watch Inter Miami crush Chicago on August 31, 2024 is also not an amazing even that we’ve never seen before. Actually, a larger crowd saw Pelé and the Cosmos take on the Seattle Sounders at the brand new Seattle Kingdome on April 9, 1976. The crazy part is that the 1976 game was a friendly:

From The News Tribune, (Tacoma, WA), April 10, 1976, page C1

In fact — Pompliano himself hints at the troubles that the MLS faces when he notes that the Inter Miami game accounted for almost 55% of the Chicago Fire’s ticket revenue for the entire season.

Those who want to defend the MLS’ byzantine and extremely aggressive salary cap rules only need to look at these numbers to understand the problem:

Missing here is the Los Angeles Galaxy — the team that hired David Beckham and started the ridiculous Designated Player rule in the first place! Apparently the good times don’t last as long as you think.

Most MLS clubs continue to lose money. The rules prohibiting teams from signing multiple players at high salaries effectively prevented Inter Miami from signing Neymar during the most recent offseason, and arbitrarily limit the spending power of a club that allegedly is worth as much as the richest clubs in the world.

The quality of play is also awful. Knowledgable fans tend to rank clubs around the League Two level, with a few maybe making it to League One. This idea that the MLS will soon be considered among the top 5 leagues in the world is ridiculous.

Most observers seem to criticize the lack of defense in particular. And, after all, if you’re only able to sign at most 3 players at internationally competitive wages, you’re not going to waste one of those slots on a left back, are you? Poor defense, by the way, is the same issue that plagued the NASL for its entire existence, and is why those films seem so odd in comparison with Football League film from the same years.

So what can be done to make the MLS an internationally competitive league?

• Ditch the outdated National League model. It’s not the Guilded Age anymore. Adopt a Football Association-based model, allow for promotion and relegation, and, above all else, get rid of the idiotic rules that grant franchises territorial monopolies.

• Ditch the salary cap. Let teams make their own decisions according to how they view the market. The fall of the NASL was not because the Cosmos had all the money and could get all the players; rather, the fall came because the league insisted on the monopolistic structure and tried to raise funds through overexpansion.

• Keep talented youngsters. The American youth development system is notoriously poor, and the various incentives used to try to keep talented youngsters in the American system frankly do not work. This is because MLS teams are not able to pay competitive wages because of the salary cap. Nobody knows this better than Football Manager players who give the MLS a try — and wonder why in the world their young players are making peanuts. Take a look at the U.S. Men’s National Team roster and note how many players are not playing in the MLS.

• Give the fans time to get to know the teams. Can you distinguish LAFC from the LA Galaxy? Should the New York Red Bulls be considered a New York team, or a New Jersey team? Do any of the MLS teams have a clear identity, aside from the big spenders in Miami? Fans like storylines and culture — and those things take time to develop. The MLS, like the NASL before it, seems so focused on short term gains that it ignores the long term domestic development of the sport.

I’d like to be optimistic, but I frankly can’t. I do think the time might come when we see American teams play in front of sold out crowds of 50,000 or more on a regular basis. However, a lot needs to change for us to get there.