What's so rough about that schedule? Boston, Toronto and Newark are all within an hour flight of each other, and Miami is maybe a three hour flight from Newark, max? (All in the same time zone). Barely time for flight attendants to hand out peanuts, assuming they still do that.
It's more a matter of taking 3 separate flights in the same day to get to your next game, which sucks no matter who you are, even if you're not a guy who just ran for 90 minutes+ and is sitting in a coach seat. And it's probably more that that. 2 hours Toronto to Newark, 3 hours Newark to Miami, and probably 2-3 from Miami to Port of Spain, which is just off the coast of Venezuela, not to mention layover time in 2 different airports. But the Red Bulls would have just taken a nonstop charter from Toronto to Trinidad. Long flight, but it's only one single flight
Not to quibble, but I've flown Buffalo to Newark and it's barely an hour; Toronto's flight path is necessarily roughly the same. I've also flown three separate flights in the same day, most recently in early December, when I flew coach from Buffalo to Newark (in the wrong direction), and then from Newark to Houston (more than three hours, also out of the way), and then from Houston home to San Jose (again more than three hours in flight). I'm also larger (need more leg room), older and less physically conditioned than your typical MLS player.
Clearly we should just stop playing soccer in North America. I never understood why we started in the first place.
I said "players on European clubs," and I wasn't claiming that Drogba was European. I was also only talking about travel within domestic leagues, not travel between a player's club and his national team. If Drogba was complaining about travel within MLS, the distance from MLS clubs or Chelsea in London to Cote d'Ivoire or wherever their national team was playing is irrelevant. If the USA split into eight smaller countries with their own leagues, each league would be much worse in quality than what MLS is now, and the distance between a city with an MLS club and Cote d'Ivoire would be the same, but if domestic travel was the only thing you looked at then that split would make Drogba happier.
if only we had other big sports leagues in this country that had to travel all over for their games. If only.
Is this where In point out that in the month of November there were three college teams that played games over 8000 miles apart? (Washington, Texas, and Gonzaga, all played games in Shanghai/Okinawa to start the season and then played in the Bahamas tournament later that same month. Washington and Texas played each other in both Shanghai and Nassau.)
Nothing you say is factually incorrect, but you miss the larger point about Drogba not being European (Lionel Messi is not European, either, by the way): he travelled a long way from his tiny homeland in the Ivory Coast (where domestic league travel is doubtless a breeze) to practice his chosen profession, and plainly profited enormously from doing so. He necessarily travels a long way to visit his family and to play for his national team. Now he's travelled even further to North America, to profit even more. And yet he whines about the inconvenience of travel, no less, within the foreign league he has adopted and which has showered him with riches beyond the comprehension of most his fellow countrymen! A Syrian refugee in Silicon Valley might have a point, as well, complaining that public transit doesn't adequately service Avaya. But he wouldn't garner much of an audience for his critique about the rough edges of life here in the car-centric epicenter of the First World. My heart bleeds for Drogba.
London to Africa? 2 hours 20 minutes from Heathrow to Tangiers. You can buy a round trip ticket for $200 Iberia.
More like 6.5 hours from London to Ivory Coast. http://www.happyzebra.com/distance-calculator/UK-and-Cote dIvoire.php
That's the real question here. But it'll be the owners deciding collectively, not the league mandating a change.
Chartered flights seem past due. I'm 6'6" and have a bad knee; coach is tough for me to handle. If I flew around for work each week, it would be rough to be in cramped seats and have connecting flights. Soccer players may be in great shape, but many of them have old leg injuries, too.
If I am a European star with concerns with too much travel I would play in the East. The travel is much easier than Seattle's or LA's. It seems round trip flights for the east coast teams playing east coast teams are one to four hours round trip.
I wonder if something like this is used when MLS decides which teams you play 2 times vs 3 times in conference play. Also interesting to see SJ get shafted in the way they did.
Longest distances in North American sports leagues: NHL: Miami - Vancouver, 2810 mi. MLB/NFL: Miami - Seattle, 2730 mi. NBA: Miami - Portland, 2710 mi. MLS: Orlando - Vancouver, 2620 mi. In each of these leagues, even short trips are longer than what most European soccer players are used to in domestic competition.
It seems to be a rotation from what I see so far. The Dynamo in 2015 played these teams 3 times: Dallas, San Jose, LA Galaxy, Colorado, Kansas City, Portland In 2016, these teams: Dallas, San Jose, LA Galaxy, Vancouver, Seattle, Salt Lake So three different and three the same but it does mean that we will have played everyone in the West three times at least once. If this system had continued in 2017 we would have seen if it was a true rotation or not but things will probably completely change with Atlanta coming in and possibly Minnesota.
It's possible to play consecutive away games, so note that the miles for each team may not be the same as the round-trip distance for each of the 17 away games. If the Red Bulls were going to more than one of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, they could reduce travel by playing something like Wednesday at Seattle and Saturday or Sunday at Vancouver. Another factor is other competitions. There's the U.S. Open Cup, Canadian Championship, CONCACAF Champions League, and possibly friendlies increasing travel. Montreal had 234 fewer MLS miles traveled than New England, but Montreal's three trips in the 2014-2015 CONCACAF Champions League Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Final totaled a lot more than 234 miles.
Chartered flights? Hell, a few years back I ran into SKC making a multi-hour layover at Midway while flying Southwest. The league apparently couldn't find a direct flight from Logan to MCI.