Hopefully the RSL supporters appreciate him. In many ways he reminds me of Tim Ream at NY, similar undersized CB.
Sure, some of the things are really dumb. But I have no sympathy for a soccer exec who can't understand the rules. It's your job; it's not that hard. But most of them mean is "I wanted to sign this guy and the rules made it hard." I get that the idea of any restrictions aside from budget is new. But when people say they don't understand ... you didn't try. Like, hire someone if need be.
Yep. I think people really fail to realize how hard it would be to build a national league in the US with the current level of European-style economic inequality. Most of the teams that can never dream of a title built a fanbase over decades where the league wasn't patently unfair; where their team may have won or not, but it wasn't because an oil sheik had more cash. Europeans are also a bit more fatalistic than Americans -- they are much more content in their current state. But imagine trying to build MLS if NY and LA won every title, and not only won every title, but did so by spending 10x the salary year after year. How do you build a fanbase anywhere else? It's hard to build one if you are always losing no matter what, but it's going to be impossible if you are always going to lose.
Exactly where I'm sitting on this issue. And in 10 or 15 years maybe there are a half-dozen USL clubs that are good enough (and have good enough stadia and fanbase) to really justify it. Regardless, I don't see pro/rel happening for quite a while yet if it ever does.
And that's basically been happening with expansion. Some of these teams are USL teams, often with upgraded ownership. At some point, as has been noted, the league will start to get unwieldy. Whether that's at 32 or 36, they will either need to be content with what they have or think about splitting up. In order to not degrade half the league ... they will need mass expansion -- so 2 league of 32 or 36. Which means MLS and USL merging or a buyout or something.
They really could use a better stadium situation. Soldier Field is better than playing out in the suburbs, but it’s also not the answer.
Mansueto has the cash. But I also think he is trying to see what happens when the Bears leave. Can he get a steal on Soldier Field and convert it?
I don’t think MLS should ever kick out the Canadian teams, but it wouldn’t terrible if CPL ever grew to the point where the Canadian teams wanted to jump ship. CPL is a very long way away from that point though.
The sort of rules I’m thinking of are things like this the discovery rule. Just an example, but when Luis Suarez was thinking about coming to MLS, Seattle had his discovery rights. He didn’t want to go Seattle so he decided to go to Uruguay instead. Who knows whether or not he would have come to MLS or not without it, but what is the purpose of such a rule? It’s not like the Seattle Sounders discovered Luis Suarez. And I don’t think it adds a ton to competitive balance, other than to prevent players from coming to the league because the team they want to play for doesn’t have their discovery rights.
Honestly, I think it is far more likely that MLS becomes the North American Super League, with CPL, USL and LigaMX feeding into it ... after grabbing the top LigaMX teams. I know no one likes that, but everything always points to more money. (I think the CPL has little to no shot. I know they have the Canadian league angle, but the media money for MLS will grow faster than the CPL can ever keep up. Canadian is a bit over a 10th the population, and they aren't as advertising happy ... the media contracts simply cannot ever keep up even with a smaller league).
The Discovery List and Allocation Order are about cost control, not parity. I mean, they all are, but these don't even have any good reason. They are intended to keep two MLS teams from bidding too much against each other. I agree it is somewhat unnecessary at this point, but I do think that it has probably saved MLS owners a LOT of money over the years. And I'm not convinced discovery rights were really the deciding factor. Those things are usually settled cheaply. But sure, scrap it. I'm thinking more the DP rule and the cap rules.
This is where we part ways a bit. My concern is seeing individual teams improve which will help them in cross league competition and basically for me, individual teams improve, and the league improves. Get better, incentivize on field success not vague ideas of the "right" way to play. I'm far less interested in a league trying to force teams to budget or play in specific ways. It's not the 70s or 80s anymore, soccer fans understand it's not always a goal fest and that's fine. Everyone gets their opinion on this one, but that's mine. Here we're in agreement although my reasons are purely selfish. I'm still a bit unsure how it will all play out though, in particular how the high pressing always forward ideas work out when it gets 90 degrees plus and high humidity this summer. I think this can be possible without so much coercion. We've seen big spenders fail in MLS as you mention. It always comes down to being smart about it no matter how much or how little you can spend. And an overall cap still addresses this without incentivizing unbalanced rosters. The designated players not counting toward the cap actually lets teams overspend far more than a hard cap would.
Justen Glad is on the third year of his contract and making 750K a year. I think his next contract will show just how much he is valued in the league. Of course, he might want to see just how far he can go in Europe. I’d like to see more of that 25-27 range make the jump. It will show that MLS can produce high quality peak players and not just young prospects. The challenge is that often that kind of player can make a lot more in MLS than elsewhere.
Yeah, it's still 10-15 years down the road to me. And I would never expect rich American ownership groups to concede to more than a closed two-tier system with 40 clubs. But it's starting to become a tiny bit more realistic, given the sheer advances in soccer infrastructure as well as the growth of the sport in general (I never expected USL to be so successful, or for MLS to be such a hit in the South). I don't think the true MLS nightmare scenarios of club owners facing horrifying collapses in value in a promotion-relegation system are quite as realistic anymore. MLS now has 29 teams with 21+1 soccer stadiums, with Miami's odd situation (the +1) on the verge of resolution and NYCFC seemingly in line as well. If the league magically collapsed today due to executive mismanagement, then I would expect a replacement organization to pop into place almost immediately. That never would have been realistic before the massive wave of new stadiums in the last 5-6 years, with the short-term one in Ft. Lauderdale plus another 9 first-tier stadiums. Geographic distribution of this infrastructure covers sufficient national territory as well.
Glad is a good 2nd tier league player. The question as a flavor is where does he fit on the USMNT depth chart? Is he a better USMNT prospect than Sands given that they are similar kinds of players. The issue with moving to Europe in that age range is that every country that could afford Glad has 100s of local players that have a very similar profile that are likely cheaper. Once you get to be > 25 you have to have some special attribute.
It’s also the problem that a player in that age range is likely worth much more to their MLS team than a European team is willing to pay. At least for now.
Updated the flavors with their Whoscored ratings. Only 4 matches in so we should expect some reverting to their historical values. [Prior Year, Historical Average] 5th Tim Tillman 7.73 [6.47, 6.45] 9th Cristian Roldan 7.64 [7.02, 7.07] 10th Drake Callender 7.56 [6.64, 6.77] 11th Jordan Morris 7.56 [6.84, 6.86] 12th DeJuan Jones 7.55 [6.78, 6.87] 14th Jesus Ferreira 7.45 [7.24, 7.04] 20th Justen Glad 7.39 [6.80, 6.78] 23rd Brandon Bye 7.37 [7.06] [6.88] 24th Caleb Wiley 7.36 [6.42, 6.54] 25th Aidan Morris 7.36 [6.58, 6.70] 31th Andrew Gutman 7.29 [6.81, 6.78] 40th Walker Zimmerman 7.22 [6.92, 7.00]
G+ Outfielder Leaderboard (very early), and using total instead of a rate because it is so early I don't want to mess with minute minimums. 2. Justen Glad 5. Tristan Blackmon 7. Brandon Bye 8. Cristian Roldan 9. Matt Hedges 10. Andrew Gutman 15. Henry Kessler 16. Jordan Morris 24. Walker Zimmerman 26. Brian White 27. Andrew Brody 28. Timothy Tillman 30. Jesus Ferreira 31. Jackson Regan 33. Julian Gressel That's actually very strong American representation even if most of it is in defense. Keepers: 1. Drake Callendar 3. William Yarborough 4. Zac MacMath 7. John McCarthy 8. John Pulskamp 9. Joe Willis 10. Brad Stuver 11. Stefan Frei 12. Chris Brady 13. JT Marcinkowski 14. Roman Celentano Very early on this one. A couple of big saves can really shift the rating this early.
You need to site some sources on this one. Lodeiro and Suarez are very good friends. So if the Sounders and Suarez wanted to make a deal one would have been made. But the Sounders weren't getting rid of Ruidiaz. If another team was wanting to sign Suarez a trade for the discovery rights would have been made for him no problem. It just didn't line up for Suarez and MLS, that happens. Maybe he only wanted to play with his good friend Lodeiro and because Seattle wasn't interested in signing him he went to Uruguay. But the discovery list isn't much of any impediment considering its only like 75k to purchase someone's rights. MLS doesn't let teams hold discovery rights hostage.
What is happening on here over the last few pages, pro/rel fan fiction and you be the Don nonsense combined... As for Suarez, another thing for him was he had to be on a team that made the playoffs so that he was playing up until close to the World Cup, and none of the teams (plural not just Seattle) that were pursuing him were assured of making the playoffs. Okay even that's not thread-relevant, so I'll add that every time I see Andrew Brody I have to re-learn who that is... I couldn't pick him out of a lineup. #1 in our hearts
I have to track down a source for it but at the time Lodeiro was reportedly trying very hard to sell Suarez on Seattle but he wasn’t interested in going there. I don’t know if it would have worked out with another MLS team or not if the situation had been different, but my point is less about Luis Suarez though and more about the discovery rights in general. Why should Seattle have the right of first refusal to sign Luis Suarez? And yes a team can purchase another players discovery rights but a team doesn’t have to sell those rights if they don’t want to. It’s just a rule that I believe doesn’t really have much of a purpose. Just like the allocation order (which has now been eliminated). Like I said earlier, it’s not as if the Seattle Sounders “discovered” Luis Suarez.
NASL had the NY Cosmos spending the most and winning the most and the league collapsed because most of the other teams had terrible attendance and was only high when the Cosmos visited. It's why MLS was set up the way it was so it couldn't happen again.