MLS is Back: Caleb Porter exposes crucial issue
Ahead of the MLS is Back Tournament, Columbus Crew head coach Caleb Porter has said that he will try to win the group-stage matches more than the knockout-stage matches. It exposes a crucial issue with the competition’s structure.
Next week, Major League Soccer returns. After almost four months of suspended play due to the coronavirus, the league has concocted quite the structure for its return: an entirely isolated, league-wide bubble, World Cup-style tournament at ESPN’s Wide World of Sport at Disney World, Florida.
All games are played behind closed doors and televised. The league has been drawn into six groups and there will be a subsequent knockout stage featuring the top 16 teams to qualify. To put it kindly, it is a farce. The only reason it exists is that the league has lost $1 billion in revenue, as commissioner Don Garber explained earlier this year.
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There are plenty of issues with the tournament, from the morality of hosting it in a state that is struggling to the ‘random draw’ which somehow managed to feature almost every major rivalry in the league to boost television ratings. However, perhaps the most important, at least purely from a footballing perspective, is the inability to make it matter.
Unlike with the NWSL’s Challenge Cup, the MLS is Back Tournament is not designed to replace the regular season. Garber stated that teams will return to their home markets following the competition and will complete the regular season from their respective stadiums. This will ultimately end in MLS Cup, which is the trophy every team wants to win. So who cares about some money-orientated, farcical mickey-mouse cup?
That is the question the league has been unable to answer.
This week, Columbus Crew head coach Caleb Porter spelled out this issue plainly for all to see. Speaking to the Columbus Dispatch, he said that his priority is the group-stage matches, not the knockout matches that come after:
"“Our priority is to win MLS Cup. That’s the number one goal that we have. I look at it as the first three games are the most important and then the next four games (in the knockout stage), it’s an Open Cup, essentially. We’ll try to win every game so that we get a Champions League berth, but also what we don’t want to do is try to win every game to get the Champions League and then sacrifice the regular season. That’s the exact same way that we approach the Open Cup. I think it’s important for people to understand it’s unique.”"
In MLS is Back, the group-stage matches will count towards the regular-season standings, thus providing teams with a chance to better position themselves for a postseason run later in the year. Once teams are out of the groups, however, the matches only have relevance for the tournament itself. The winner will receive a 2021 CONCACAF Champions League berth and there is a $1.1 million pool of prize money, too.
These add something to the mix, of course, but they do not exactly move the needle in terms of teams’ desperation to win. They also undermine the value of the tournament itself. The only reason why winning the competition is remotely important is because of money and the potential to play in another competition. In and of itself, winning the tournament is not valuable.
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This is the crucial issue that Garber and the league must face. Who cares who wins? And if it doesn’t matter who wins, sport is utterly undermined.