MLS All-Star Game: Emblematic of all that is wrong with Major League Soccer
This week, the MLS All-Stars will face Atletico Madrid. The yearly match is the perfect emblem for all that is wrong with Major League Soccer.
The three most popular sports in America, Baseball, Basketball and Football, are almost exclusively American. Although they are of course played and watched in other countries, primarily, they are played and followed by Americans, in America. The global numbers are far smaller than many other, more worldwide sports.
Soccer is a worldwide sport. It is played on every continent, one of the only sports in the world to do so, is watched by a truly global audience, and regularly boasts the highest-earning players and most followed organisations.
Major League Soccer, being based in America and Canada but partaking in a global game, is attempting to span the gap between the two. It wants to attract new fans from North America and be respected within its own sport.
Sadly, there are many cultural differences between American and global sports. Salary caps, for instance, are primarily an American thing. Roster designations, trades for players, rather than transfers, even basic things like injury reports, conferences and having routine stoppages in play every few seconds or minutes are not well understood by a non-American audience unaffiliated with these concepts.
MLS has tried to incorporate these things so that it can be attracted to an American audience while watering them down a little and still sticking to the basic tenets of soccer so that it is better respected on the global scale. One example is the All-Star game.
The All-Star Game is a largely American idea. Very few other sports have an All-Star Game at the end of the season. Even fewer have one in the middle of the season! The point of it is to bring new fans to the game of soccer, in part by all the fanfare that surrounds the event, like overhyped skills challenge, and to make money through advertising by bringing one of the biggest teams in world football. This year, it is the turn of Atletico Madrid.
More from MLS Multiplex
- Javier Milei Elected in Argentina: Potential Impacts on MLS and Signings of Argentine Players
- Orlando City and New York City FC in the Battle for Matías Arezo; Grêmio Enters Negotiations! Who Will Come Out on Top?
- USA, Honduras, Panama, and Canada Close in on a Spot in the 2024 Copa America
- De Gea Turns Down Al-Nassr’s Lucrative Offer: Speculation Points to Possible Reunion with Messi at Inter Miami
- Messi’s Magnetic Impact in the United States
But the problem is that no one really cares. The players do not care. They just don’t want to get injured, more than anything else. The European teams do not care, they are looking to gain fitness and match sharpness for the season ahead. And even those that watch do not really care. The proper soccer fans are largely more interested in European leagues than MLS, and those that care about MLS are not particularly moved by the All-Star game.
If MLS wants to grow, it would be much better off by focusing on the quality of the league, moving to a European style by introducing promotion and relegation, reducing of all the Americanisms like roster designations, raising or ridding of the salary cap, such that teams can spend as they would like to and rival the Liga MX and other global opponents, and ensuring that the quality is higher, not that the commercial revenue is increased through a pompous, PR-driven show.
Next. MLS: Top 5 performances from Week 21. dark
The All-Star Game is the perfect emblem for much of what is wrong in MLS. It is commercialised, overly-Americanised, does not produce genuine fans who care about or understand the sport, and is extremely short-termism. All in all, it is not very healthy.