To align with international competition?
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Football will crush them.
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I’m watching Gold Cup draw live now. Also, Inter Miami win last night was beautiful. I love Messi.
The soccer-only people in the fandom have been clamoring for this (and pro/rel) for at least a decade, but I think it’s one of the stupidest things they could possibly do. You’re going to shift from a part of the American sports calendar where your only competition for the bulk of the season is Baseball and instead try to play in the part of the year where you have to go up against the NFL, NBA, and NHL? You’re going to play outdoor games in Minnesota, Toronto, and Columbus in January and February? This is pants-on-head dumb.
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It’s about time. Glad they’re aligning with the International schedule
From a competitive standpoint, I believe this is what the MLS has to do (which might also end up benefitting the USMNT).
And I’m curious how the MLS will fare, viewership-wise, going up against the NFL.
They will be non-competitive.
Hell, MLB ratings bury theirs; NFL, which is more popular than MLB, will have an even bigger ratings lead.
As it relates to attending games, this would be great, especially for Dynamo fans. Summer games are brutal due to the heat, and it is part of the reason I attend less frequently in that stretch of the season. I’d welcome the fall/spring scheduling for that reason alone.
Maybe they realized that they aren’t direct competitors with MLB and NFL. Their fans and viewership are choosing between them and music festivals, local brewery events, or sitting around on social media for excessive periods of time, not soccer vs football.
In a way, they might not be competing with euro leagues either. With the time zone difference, they might be better served letting Europe warm up their viewers on a Saturday, like a pregame show, before switching to the MLS game. Besides the soccer considerations, people are in the mood for meaningful games when they’ve just seen meaningful games. Watch a derby match at 9 with champions League spots at risk, you don’t want to see a ho hum match day 2 in the afternoon.
If they strengthen their core fanbase rather than worry about competing for the marginal fan, they can build more sustainable growth.
Hmmpf.
Hadn’t thought of that, but that might actually make sense.
Plus I think they’re looking to build the perception of legitimacy as a soccer league internationally, rather than as a sports league in the US. That means acting like a real league.
Well, to do that…wouldn’t they have to begin a system of promotion/relegation with the lower level leagues in the USA?
That’s how all the Euro leagues operate, right?
Eventually, but the infrastructure has to be there. Electric cars don’t make sense until there are enough charging stations. Relegation doesn’t work until there are enough teams with suitable stadia to promote, and enough support to sustain relegated teams. The US has a huge population and more money than Davy Crockett, but the soccer segment is more comparable to, IDK, maybe Belgium? MLS should focus on sustaining what it has and encouraging celebrities and other rich collectors of Vebelin goods to invest in lower division teams in order to build a big enough roster for promotion and relegation.
It has nothing do with the above. There is a giant tug of war between the MLS and the USL. Here is why MLS is looking at adjusting to the “world”" Late Summer/Fall/late Spring schedule:
Ultimately the USL wants a chance to at least become the MLS second division, third and so forth. By doing so two to three USL clubs will be promoted in the second season if it happens.
For all of you naysayers you are entitled to your opinion like everyone else. What we have seen in the last twenty is an explosion of USL clubs in their top league and 2nd and third tiers. Each one of these clubs have their own soccer stadium be small or large.
i know the world loves soccer but in the usa who cares !
with colleg and pro football, badketball, baseball and hockey; who has time for soccerr; i dont and i barely watch pro basdketball; did not know the rockets were number 2 in the west until a couple of weeks ago
MLS has plenty of teams to do promotion and relegation right now. Two leagues of 15 (or, more likely, 16 and 14 for scheduling reasons) would probably be more workable than a single 30-team league as it stands; 30 is far larger than most top-flight leagues, which typically top out around 20. There are three much larger issues for the pro/rel model in the US:
- MLS is one of the few top-flight leagues in the world where Association Football follows a franchise model. In the rest of the world, teams have historically been independent clubs. They’re not typically founded at the top level by multimillionaire or billionaire owners like ours are. The Premier League and Serie A didn’t expand. MLS, by contrast, charged San Diego FC’s owners a half-billion dollar expansion fee. Owners are unlikely to take kindly to the probability of their team getting relegated.
- Geographically, MLS covers way more land than any European league. The only country in Europe larger than the US is Russia, and the easternmost club in the Russian Premier League is Orenburg; the league only covers a fraction of the country’s land mass. Introducing promotion and relegation in the US would introduce a whole host of potential travel issues to go along with it.
- Coverage of large markets is key to the success of MLS. It’s the same with any league, but the issue is that the US has a larger population than the Big Five leagues’ countries’ combined population, spread over a larger land mass, and that’s before you even include Canada. That makes maintaining coverage of large markets in the top league really difficult with pro/rel, especially without making the top league unmanageably large. It would be a disaster for MLS if, say, NYC’s teams both got relegated. European countries don’t have the sheer number of markets the US and Canada do, nor the same phobia of local competition, which means they can stack multiple teams in the same market. Most cities with a city-limits population over 1 million in Big Five associations have multiple teams, but that’s doable there because there are only eleven of them across the five countries. The US alone has nine, and Canada has five of their own. Several of them (Phoenix, San Antonio, Calgary) don’t even have MLS teams as things stand because there aren’t enough teams to go around. Promotion and Relegation would make it extremely difficult to maintain decent coverage there.
Every time I think about this I think that the eventual answer has to be regionalization of leagues before pro/rel. Just divide the Eastern and Western conferences into separate leagues that don’t meet until the playoffs, like the old AL and NL, and then when those get too large, do it again until you have somewhere between four and six top-flight leagues. Then you can think about promotion/relegation structures, but not until then.
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Your comments are for LHCOOG but does it apply to everyone else? Obviously not. The sports media market is changing. Coming back to the power conferences system the media powers are playing with fire.
Absolutely, I was just trying to think into their swot analysis.
I wonder if a better question is why do euro leagues still do relegation? I know their super league idea recently was extremely unpopular, but it’s really just them trying to MLS European football.
Maybe MLS just needs to wait until college football collapses under the weight of its contradictions, and then NFL follows shortly after.