Inter Miami working on trying to buy its way to more trophies apparently close to signing Luis Suarez.
I don’t think the struck-out portion is what is happening. What might be happening is players want to play with Messi, might forego some salary to do it (or find additional revenue sources elsewhere in América that they cannot find in the world). Cuz #Murican salary cap keeps Billionaires billionaires. Can’t really “buy” their way to more trophies without getting in trouble with their partners, er, other teams’ owners.
So, co-ownership for all players!
When I saw this headline I correctly guessed the player involved
Bump, for more playoffs! So, after best of three, it’s one-and-done. Sounds right, for this league.
Acosta, who makes Messi look tall, wins the MVP.
The new playoff format is stupid. I hope they fix this.
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Pro/rel in five years with 20 teams and no playoffs. Give the billionaires time to bail, give other billionaires time to buy or build their own clubs.
Several ways to get there. Here’s one:
In 2027, have teams play only their conference. Top 10 stay, bottom 5 drop to MLS 2, which will contain ten teams determined by USSF in some competition.
Here’s another: Merge with LigaMX and do Pro/rel with 48 teams, add 12 more to make Three Divisions.
I’m skeptical we will ever see pro/rel in the US, but I would welcome it. Even if it happens, I doubt that would be the end of playoffs due to $.
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Got that big centuries-old Crew-FCC derby in the East.
Miazga out three matches:
Despite the complaints about price increases MIA sold all of their season tickets
Place doesn’t hold that many people. Have them play at Hard Rock, and the plebes can sit in the top section at $100 per.
Complain all they want. They either bought the tickets or they didn’t.
Home tickets of IM’s away matches are up as well, some teams inputting a “Messi Premium.”
I see Messi skipping the artificial turf matches or being played extremely sparingly, say final 20-30 minutes or so.
It is on the smaller side at 21k.
AFAIK they are sticking with the plan for their fancy new stadium to seat 25k
We’re never going to see it in any major professional league in North America. And by never, I mean it’s never happening, quit wasting your time wishing for it, you’ll 
in your hand a million times before pro/rel happens in a major N.A. sport kind of never. The “there’s a better chance of a competing professional hockey league based solely in Canada, and all the current Canadian NHL teams bail on the NHL for it” kind of never. The absolute best hope is that someone launches a new league with a number of teams and has pro/rel as part of the original structure and teams are largely fan-owned. Without that, given the money that’s going to be put up to launch it to give it a shot of success, no one is going to want to see their franchise value crater on a relegation / want to deal with cash calls to be.
And I’m skeptical the “fan-owned teams” model is going to have any shot of being successful. There’s way too much money sloshing around the system for that quaint concept to launch, much less survive a handful of years.
OK, back to reality. we have The Playoff Finals, which, instead of letting 58 matches (more credible, actuarially) determine a champion, let’s just make the league like the FA Cup or something, down to one match, for all the marbles, cuz 'murica.
Also, anyone care to C/P this ESPN+ article?
Short answers to questions I can read:
- Not that close.
- Not that good.
- No. Just not enough oil revenues and reserves.
The article is full of embedded pictures illustrating talking points, embedded video, and linked ads. I posted it below, but not going to try to edit all that crap.
Summary
Remember when everyone was talking about Major League Soccer?
It seems like six years ago, or just yesterday, but an actual MLS team was the main storyline across the American-sports landscape for most of the summer. LeBron, Serena Williams, Selena Gomez, and even Owen Wilson all came out to games to watch the greatest soccer player of all time play for what was, at the time, the worst team in America’s fifth-most-popular sports league.
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And then it just … stopped. Lionel Messi got injured, college and professional football started, European soccer began, Inter Miami missed the playoffs by nine points, and the average American sports fan stopped caring about the league that, briefly, everyone seemed to care about.
So, with Messi’s first MLS season in the books and the final between LAFC and the Columbus Crew set for Saturday, it feels like the right time to take stock. Twenty-eight years in, just how good is MLS?
Avert your eyes, MLS fans
At the consultancy Twenty First Group, they do all kinds of high-level work: modeling the strengths of different teams, simulating potential playoff and league formats, and figuring out ways to calculate the quality of various competitions in comparison to each other. Leagues themselves are some of their biggest clients, so they’re forced to think about the sport in a rigorous bigger-picture way than, say, a consultancy that just wants to help clubs identify undervalued players.
The TFG answer to the question we asked above is, well, “not very.”
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2:37
Futbol Americas split on MLS Cup winners
Sebastian Salazar and Herculez Gomez make their picks for Columbus vs. LAFC in MLS Cup.
According to their global ranking system, MLS is the 31st-best league in the world. That puts it right alongside the level of the Colombian, Polish, Czech and Croatian first divisions.
Why not higher? MLS teams have barely beaten anyone.
“Our World Super League uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate a rating for any given team by learning from historical football matches,” said Aurel Namziu, a senior data scientist at Twenty First Group. “Our league ratings are based on the average rating of all teams in a given league. Performances in continental competitions such as the CONCACAF Champions League for MLS teams is where they’ll be judged on how good they are relative to other leagues. They’ve had three finalists in the last four years, which suggests the league is heading in the right direction, but only one winner [Seattle Sounders] since 2008-09. Therefore more consistency at this level is required to improve the quality of the league relative to others.”
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Liga MX clubs have won 14 of the last 15 CONCACAF Champions League titles, and its teams have made up 80% of the past 30 finalists. As such, it remains the highest-rated league in North America. However, Twenty First Group also models individual player ratings, mainly by looking at a combination of how much playing time players get and how good the teams they’re playing for are.
Unsurprisingly, Messi is the highest-rated player in the league, with his current and former teammates, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba, ranking second and third respectively. Among the top 31 leagues in the world, the gap between Messi and Busquets is bigger than the gap between one and two in any league other than Ligue 1, where Messi’s former teammates Kylian Mbappé and Achraf Hakimi are even further apart. However, the gap between Messi and Alba or between Messi and anyone not on the Miami roster would be the biggest of any of the top 31 leagues.
The fourth-best player? Right now, that would be LAFC’s Dénis Bouanga, the 29-year-old forward who leads the league in goals and touches in the penalty area, while also ranking eighth in expected goals assisted.
These are all of his shots, sized by the quality of the attempt (as measured by its expected-goal value):
Per TFG’s player estimations, Bouanga is good enough to play for a top-half team in one of Europe’s biggest leagues, like Serie A’s Lazio or LaLiga’s Villarreal – teams that qualify for the Champions League a few times per decade. The best player on the Crew, per TFG, is a former LAFC player: 24-year-old Uruguayan winger Diego Rossi, who returned to MLS this summer after spending two seasons getting significant playing time for Fenerbache as they finished in second place in Turkey both years. TFG estimates that he could contribute to a lower-half team in one of Europe’s biggest leagues, like the Premier League’s Everton or LaLiga’s Getafe.
As for the teams themselves, the Crew are ranked 322nd among all teams globally. That’s their highest-ever rating, but they’re still rated below every team in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. Based on the TFG projections, they’d expect the Crew to beat an average Premier League team on a neutral field 27% of the time.
For LAFC, that number is just slightly higher, at 28%. They’re ranked 281st globally, which puts them right around where Sheffield United – who are in with a shout as the worst Premier League team ever – currently sit. However, quality-compared-to-others is only one way to quantify this. What about the quality of the soccer itself?
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1:55
Nagbe reflects on Columbus Crew’s journey to MLS Cup final
Columbus Crew captain Darlington Nagbe speaks about what it means to reach the MLS Cup final.
Someone who works in Europe once told me that the easiest way to sum up the gap in quality of MLS compared to, say, the Premier League, is how much more often the ball goes out of bounds when it gets near the sideline in the U.S. domestic league. While maybe pure athleticism and effort isn’t an issue for MLS, the fine-tuned technical skills and spatial awareness and off-ball movement that allow you to keep a ball in bounds near the sideline under pressure just wasn’t as widely available in MLS, but that might be changing.
Take a simple metric, like pass-completion percentage. It’s been on a steady rise since 2016:
While stability in possession has risen right up to what we see in Europe every weekend, so has the approach out of possession. Although clubs are getting better at keeping the ball, they’re also getting better at winning the ball in the final third:
Rather than the high press cannibalizing the ability to pass – or vice versa – both aspects, which feel like somewhat fundamental building blocks for an interesting soccer product to watch, have risen up together. Yet despite all of that, MLS still hasn’t really risen in its overall standing in relation to the rest of the world. Since 2009, the league has sat somewhere between 29th- and 34th-best in the world, according to Twenty First Group.
Chaos or stability?
In a couple ways, it doesn’t make any sense to compare MLS to the other leagues in Europe and South America.
To start, the CONCACAF Champions League typically does occur while MLS sides are in preseason, and you can argue in a bunch of different directions for this. Liga MX teams, who are in the middle of their seasons during the tournament, have already figured out their best lineups and any newly acquired players will have been integrated into the squad. However, MLS sides might be more fresh in terms of fitness, and they seem less likely to have suffered any key injuries before the tournament. Plus, the teams that are in the tournament know they’re in the tournament, so they can prepare differently than they might’ve otherwise.
Overall, the timing of the tournament likely does put MLS teams at a disadvantage, but not enough to explain the massive gap in performance between the teams from the United States and Canada and the clubs from Mexico.
However, there’s another disadvantage that MLS teams have compared to Liga MX sides and the rest of the world: the salary cap.
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0:30
Steve Cherundolo noncommittal on Carlos Vela’s future
LAFC coach Steve Cherundolo heaps praise on club captain Carlos Vela and hopes the Mexican forward stays in California next season.
While the league’s payroll rules remain incredibly opaque and ever-changing based on whatever star wants to come to the league, there are financial mechanisms in place to create more equality across the league. (Perhaps more important than that, those mechanisms mean no owners spend so much money that they pressure the other owners into spending more. The primary reason leagues have salary caps is to lower costs for owners.)
Unlike everyone else, the league also doesn’t have relegation. While adding promotion and relegation isn’t the cure-all that some make it out to be, the lack of it does create a different competitive dynamic.
In most other leagues across the world, there are a handful of teams that qualify for continental competition on a regular basis, boosted by the virtuous cycle of “continental competition means more money and more money means better players and better players means more wins and more wins means continental competition.” Most other clubs, then, steadily drift away toward smaller revenues and all carry some risk of relegation, which forces you to lose some of your best players and lots of your revenue. If you get promoted back up, you’re usually equipped with less money and a worse squad than you had last time … when you got relegated.
As such, MLS is the sixth-most concentrated league competitively, per TFG, among those top 31 leagues globally. In other words, the best teams in other leagues are more likely to be better than the best teams in MLS, even if the, say, 12th-best team in MLS is likely to be better than the 12th-best team in another league of comparative size and resources. And since the best teams are the teams playing each other in continental competition, MLS teams are likely to do worse in those competitions, which then penalizes the league in any kind of cross-country comparison.
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Of course, “But look at our 15th-best team! They’re pretty decent!” is a weak argument for a sports league to be making about itself. If MLS really wants to be considered a top-15 league (or better) in the world, then the teams just have to start beating teams from other leagues in competitive matches. In other words, the Seattle Sounders need to beat the third-place team from the Egyptian Premier League at the Club World Cup.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom as the league’s current handicap could be to its long-term gain. The relative strength of your 15th-best team might not help you win any trophies, but it probably does speak to the relative long-term financial health of your competition.
MLS teams have been steadily spending more money and acquiring more valuable players, year over year. It’s hard to compare to other leagues because there are 29 teams (compared to the 20 in the Premier League), but the total average estimated transfer values, per Transfermarkt, of all of the players in MLS is €1.28 million. That’s the second-highest number in the Americas after Brazil, and it’d be ninth in Europe behind the Big Five, Portugal, Turkey, and the Netherlands.
Rather than chasing the incredibly unstable “European model,” which fuses a truly egalitarian competition structure with massively unequal amounts of wealth from anyone who wants to invest, the league took the sport that the world loves and combined it with the much more stable closed system inherent to American sports. That drastically reduces the competitive value of a given regular season game, but also drastically increases the long-term stability and viability of the league.
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1:15
Has Messi taken a swipe at the MLS?
Herculez Gomez defends Lionel Messi’s recent comments about the quality of the MLS.
“What MLS has going for it is it’s stable,” said Omar Chaudhuri, Chief Intelligence Officer at Twenty First Group. “It’s an environment in which you can plan, which is very, very helpful. And so I think if the domestic player pool begins to catch up with the broader underlying traits that you’d expect from a nature of the size of the U.S., then you’re getting into a world where the top 20 or top 50 players in the U.S. are similar to the level of Portugal or the Netherlands.”
The current structure of European soccer is seemingly held together by gum and oil money. Other than Manchester United, the richest teams always win, while everyone else lives in a yearly state of precarity. And any kind of structural changes are always going to favor the richest teams because if they don’t get what they want, they’re just going to threaten to leave and form their own competition, like they did in 2021. It’s equally hard to envision things remaining the way they are and to envision things ever meaningfully changing.
MLS, meanwhile, gives its owners somewhat guaranteed revenues and its players somewhat guaranteed paychecks. It’s still an incredibly flawed competitive product, but it’s way less likely to fall apart, and the closed-loop structure incentivizes the league to experiment in ways you’d never see in Europe. It’s the first major American league to sign an exclusive broadcast television deal with a tech company and just this season, they introduced a totally new playoff structure.
That structure, by the way? It worked pretty well. By expected goals, the best team in the Eastern Conference and the best team in the Western Conference are in the final. And if any of the innovations flop, they can just just go back to the old ways or try something new; there’s no tradition or history to uphold or protect.
Nearly 30 years into its existence, MLS still isn’t close to being competitive with Europe’s top leagues, but maybe that’s the point. For MLS to eventually be competitive with Europe in 10 or 15 or 20 years, its best bet might be to not try to compete at all.
Thank you, AI!
Fixed
Short version:
- Too much competition from other #murican sports.
- No pro/rel, benefitting owners.
- Salary cap, benefitting owners.
When you have no relegation there is basically zero impetus to improve.
MLS won’t get better until they have a better league structure.
Shockingly enough, the Saudi league is probably on par with the MLS now because of the influx of top players and coaches from Europe.
Old players and washed-up coaches, you mean.
When there’s no financial motivation to spend, there’s zero reason to try to improve. Continually running out poor teams = fewer fans = less revenue = harder to make a profit. However, if you’re in a league like the NFL with massive TV contracts, where fan support is relatively firm and public entities are fronting a significant amount of the stadium costs, it’s really difficult to not make money. Even in MLB, with no salary cap (and no salary floor) you can run a bare bones roster and make money because there’s no financial incentive to spend money you don’t have to.
If you’re an owner of a team in the top league - especially if you’re an owner that had to put up $500 million, $1 billion, $6 billion to get into the group - you’re never voting for a system that has the chance to tank your franchise value and your personal worth because of one bad season and requires you to shell out a ton of money (which cuts from the profits you realize every year) to try and stay in the club every year. Because … that’s the American way.
And money to attract top-tier talent before those players are past their prime. And development of the U.S. talent pool in general. And widespread name recognition of those top players like you see with football and basketball. And a playoff that doesn’t take 6 weeks with a 2-week break and a 1st round that’s not a best-of-3 that takes almost 2 weeks itself.
And a lot of stuff beyond that.
The top couple of team$ in $audi Arabia are above the top teams in MLS, for … rea$on$ which I’m not $ure of just yet. Overall, though? MLS is a much deeper league than the Saudi Pro League. When the royal house decides to spread talent across more than 4 teams, then we can talk. Otherwise, it’s sportswashing and loading up a couple select squads.
No worries. Europe takes care of that.