Yes. 2/3 of Scottish National Team players play in England and every Northern Irish national team player plays in England or Scotland. Really? How many players in overseas leagues travel over 40,000 miles per season, on scheduled flights, with associated stopovers, delays and all the other complications. When NYC FC traveled to KC last season they had two flights cancelled and ended up scrambling to find a charter plane which got into KC at 4 am on the day of the game. It was probably their worst away performance of the season. They took a 6 hour flight to Portland for a Sunday game, played Toronto on the following Wednesday then flew home to lose 7-0 to a team from New Jersey. Young players may be able to take that sort of schedule but Saunders, Pirlo, Villa, Lampard, Iraola? Gerrard had first-class travel written into his contract and he couldn't take it. In 2016 the AFC Champions League was split regionally up until the final. The Korean and Japanese teams would probably have one ten hour flight a season. Only the Australian (or NZ) teams would have had it tough. A flight from Egypt to SA takes eight hours, not much less than Vancouver to Houston (as there are no direct flights) and those two are in the same regional conference.
Well that's still not as far as Western Conference teams but it may help explain why Australian teams rarely get past the round of 16 stage.
Football and soccer are completely different. There are tournaments with three games in six days. Can you do that with football? European soccer leagues cancel games for a variety of reasons that MLS doesn't have to deal with (multiple cup tournaments, weather). Is it that hard to schedule teams that will be playing in the Champions League together so that they can have make-up dates? And breaking up the competition into three-team groups, four team groups with only two from South America in each group, or even a direct knockout stage would all require less travel. Plenty of ways to make it work. Do you have any quotes from players that they wouldn't want to travel to South America? MLS teams have been traveling to Central America and the Caribbean for CCL games for awhile now. Has anyone asked them if having a joint CL and going to Argentina or Brazil for example instead of Honduras or Trinidad would really upset them? Right, so the NFL is promoting a sport and MLS would be promoting their league. That's the difference. NFL players don't need more money, which is why it's so surprising that they want to go overseas to play games. MLS on the other hand, could definitely use more sponsorship and television money and players definitely deserve, and probably would receive, higher salaries and the competition would definitely generate more prize money. This article is a good read on one way the competition would work. The club owner says that he has $440 million in sponsorship money already guaranteed! So obviously there are people that are making an educated guess that it will work. I didn't think that the Copa Centenario QF game between U.S.-Ecuador was going to generate over two million viewers with Game 6 of the NBA Finals on at the same time. I definitely didn't watch the game to watch certain players. And I definitely watch more Copa Libertadores games than CCL. So this competition would open some eyes for people that think Americans don't care about soccer outside of the World Cup, just like the Copa Centenario did. I agree that if the confederations weren't merged they shouldn't have the competition. But there's an effort now more than ever probably to get them unified so if that happens a joint Champions League would happen naturally. What happens with the Caribbean on whether they'll go along or join in will have to wait and see. The benefit of a joint Champions League is that a secondary cup competition could be created like every other continent currently has.
Re: Travel In 2012 the AFC had the stupid idea to place Uzbekistan's Bunyodkor in an Eastern group. I maintain that this must be a world record for continental competition travel. Not to mention the jet lag: Group Stage: Pohang, South Korea (10,286 km return) Group Stage: Osaka, Japan (11,414 km return) Group Stage: Adelaide, Australia (22,058 km return) Round-of-16: Seongnam, South Korea (10,168 km return) Quarterfinal: Adelaide, Australia (22,058 km return) Semifinal: Ulsan, South Korea (10,326 km return) Total: 86,310 km (53,629 miles) If MLS joins Liga MX in Libertadores you could have a couple of "CONCACAF" groups than then join South America in the knockout rounds. That would keep travel in check.
Good news, more and 81 HGPs on pro terms in MLS. Years produced - 2009 - 2 2011 - 7 2012 - 4 2013 - 8 2014 - 13 2015 - 8 2016 - 19 2017 - 21 More than half of 2017's crop are non-white and the vast majority didn't play college soccer, examples of two frequently mentioned challenges for MLS being addressed. We're heading in to 2017 with 81 HGPs, 218 players with international caps, a great crop of Latin American youngsters, with 54 players coming from Brazil, Argentina or Colombia, an expansion team that sold 30,000 season tickets before they even kicked off, 1 new sss and 3 more being built, 60 professional teams, 148 academies in the USSDA and 250,000 players registered as amateurs. Why didn't Garber mention that on CNBC today?
Note that several MLS teams exceeded 40,000 miles for away MLS matches alone in 2016. Vancouver exceeded 40,000 miles in domestic play and added more than 12,000 miles in the CONCACAF Champions League and 4,500 in the Canadian Championship (both opponents were cross-country flights).
Vancouver was listed as one of several teams exceeding 40,000 miles in MLS regular seaosn play, but I couldn't find an exact number. It turns out the actual total is 47,220 miles in the 2016 regular season. http://www.themaneland.com/2016/1/1...-orlando-city-set-to-lead-east-in-flyer-miles Bunyodkor's total domestic travel in the 2012 season, including both league and cup matches, was around 5,500 km. Their single farthest-away domestic opponent was in Bukhara, 440 km away.
Exactly and they'll continue flying coach on commercial flights so this isn't going to change whether there's a combined CL or not. Current players and owners can be the ones that pave the way for the next generation to have the luxuries of other American leagues, but that will take some sacrifice just like every other league has had to endure. A combined CL might make charter flights and bigger salaries a reality for all MLS teams but no one is going to give MLS a billion dollar TV deal and hundreds of millions in sponsorship money just because it's soccer and soccer is popular all over the world. The Miami FC owner trying to spearhead a combined competition has already said there's $440 million in sponsorships with just a concept. Who knows how much money media rights would bring in. So there's no possibility in knowing how transformational this would be without at least giving it a trial run like they did with the Copa Centenario. Corinthians and Flamengo already said they'd participate. In fact CONMEBOL want to have the Copa Libertadores final played in Miami.
Yes, but that is for six away games! Anyway, I'm not here to downplay MLS domestic travel. It is no doubt one of the most challenging ones in world soccer. But the above will probably forever remain untouched from a continental competition perspective.
Last night during the Wild vs. Jets intermission an announcer said it costs on average around $100,000 per game to travel.
Charter airlines charge about $10,000 an hour for a 120 seater airliner according to my Google search.
Even flying on commercial airlines, with the staff and the excess baggage that have to go with the team, the flights alone probably run something like $20,000 a game.
Agreed, going back to the previous posters (Gauch0 16, page 17) point on parents motivations/influence (little Johnny playing elite youth level soccer, to get a scholarship, and then a safe 9-5 job) it is a mindset that hopefully changes. If the risk/reward situation changes (risk= trying to go pro early, and having it not work out for w/e reason, with little $$ saved up) then the motivation will change. Other American sports you can essentially retire (on average I am guessing) after 4-5 years, with $1M+ in the bank. MLS? not so much.
On the surface, NFL players dont "need" more money, but professional athletes are an egotistical bunch, and money matters regardless of how much you have. And supposedly on the whole, they dont like going overseas. Its in their job description.
Tomorrow? Pro/rel could start today. All it takes is for a group of owners willing to lose billions of dollars creating enough clubs that meet USSF's D1 standards and a second division that is capable of holding the newly relegated clubs. These new league(s) will compete directly with MLS and USL but if what you say is true the pro/rel club structure will brush aside the single entity MLS and closed USL no problem. Right? One thing though, I think you'll have a hard time getting to 100 clubs. First of all, none of the MLS clubs would leave. Second, the teams vying for the right to pay the "ridiculous expansion fees" to gain spots 26 to 32 would still wait for MLS. Lastly, if there's one thing JK knows about is stagnation.
And remember, it wouldn't even cost that much to brush aside MLS. There are currently 122 teams in the US that each have more than double the most expensive payroll in MLS, and that means there are plenty of potential owners who have enough money to offer every player in MLS double his current salary.
Or instead of re-inventing the wheel, they could just use the teams already in place. All the cities that have expressed an interest in joining MLS could fill out a second-tier alone. USSF only created those standards so NASL wouldn't attain D1 status. Who said anything about starting from scratch? Owners could put whatever resources they'd want into their teams. Every team in the Premier Development League would probably jump at a chance to start at the third tier for a chance at promotion. We're not trying to find a solution for world peace. It's not that hard, there's a blueprint all over the world, with even third-world countries able to pull it off. Teams are awarded through performance, fans become invested in the process, youth development improves because every team invests in academies. I've yet to figure out how having a closed system is more beneficial.
Oh, that conspiracy theory? If the USSF was really trying to keep the NASL down, it wouldn't have waived some of the D2 requirements for the NASL. And the PDL? The league that relies on unpaid college players to fill its rosters? The league that USL teams in financial trouble have self-relegated to? Most USL teams' weekly budgets exceed the average PDL team's annual budget.
Have you asked any of those teams if they would opt for the second tier in a pro-rel system (without knowing who is in the first tier) and compete for talent against MLS over paying $150m to join MLS? Because that's the only relevant question. Nobody is re-inventing anything. The franchise model in NA sports has been going on for a hundred years. Pro-rel in Europe probably just as long or longer. This would be a perfect chance to see what system is better for US & Canadian soccer. It took the original MLS owners 20 years and $3.5 billion to get to the point where they are now. Your problem is nobody with any brains is going to risk that capital to build a D1 league that they can get relegated from. But I may be mistaken. Do you know of anyone willing to do that?
I think it's telling that most if not all pro/rel blueprints hinge on MLS deciding to drastically alter the model that has gained them 20 years of mindshare in a sporting landscape that is still not anything close to soccer mad. If the model is so vastly superior then it should be the primary selling point for a competing domestic league. Relying on MLS to change is just an admission of the relevancy that MLS has earned.