USMNT Transfer Watch - Movers and Shakers

European leagues are far less competitive than MLS. It's stacked teams with all the best talent with zero chances of being relegated and wildly overmatched teams trying to just stay on the field.

Neither is Christian Pulisic. But Seb Berhalter -- a guy all of you wrote off as nothing -- is about to play for a continental championship.

I assume that if teams outside of MLS scout Berhalter and think he can be something, they will offer for him. And there's a good chance he goes. What he won't likely do is go to Belgium, because ********ing why? That's not better than playing in CCL or MLS.

As for this:

WTF are you talking about? There's a massively wide range of style of play in MLS. So many of your arguments here have so many completely wrong or utterly incoherent points like "MLS paying more stunts its long term growth."

MLS is still has more consistent quality than these second tier leagues. Yes, the Galaxy are a mess right now, but those losses are against MLS teams ... when you face them, you still face Joseph Paintstill -- who, btw, was the best attacking player in Belgium and now plays on the worst team in MLS. But somehow ...

You're easily explained. We all know your argument. It's not novel. You're repeating shit from the last thirty years.

You don't care about the players having decisions.
You claim to believe in competition but not in the world market.
You are locked into this decades old idea that competition is the only thing that improves players, despite much evidence to the contrary.
You claim you know MLS has improved, but you are citing dudes like Eric Wynalda, who played in MLS thirty years ago.
You ignore actual real world evidence like the fact that the vast majority of young Americans still go overseas anyway, creating a problem that doesn't exist.
You are so biased to your assumptions that you make doozies of statements like increasing payroll stunts the growth of leagues.
The fact that you bring pro/rel into this discussion just shows how much this isn't really about MLS pay.

It's like you went back 10 years on Big Soccer and found an old post and just restated it.

The Chinese league has collapsed. Their business plan failed and they abandoned it. Their national team is still not any good. MLS should follow that? "Hey, China had government level resources and they followed this plan and it was a giant failure in every way! Let's do this!"

The Saudi plan isn't a plan -- it's a sportswashing exercise run by a Royal Family with unlimited resources.

MLS has built a competitive, improving league that draws great attendance and funds the only free developmental network in the country. They run the academy league and they've built a new third division league, all again, funded by the top league. Is it perfect? No. Of course not. Will some players stay in MLS for the money? Yes. And the league gets a bit better every time.

If a player wants to play at the highest level, they will leave no matter the monetary discrepancy. And if a player chooses the money, they weren't likely to make that level.

And meanwhile, MLS keeps building.

 

your arguments are boring and full of shit. isnt bob posting somewhere so you can like and agree?

 

Pro-rel does not make better footballers.

 

Hopefully.......................he doesn't have the George Bello experience.

There are so many big clubs in Bund2. A club as big as Hamburg has been in Bund2 for six seasons before just earning promotion.

Hannover, Hertha Berlin, Schalke, Kaiserslautern, Nurnberg not getting promoted this season.

[Schalke barely avoiding relegation again.]

Holstein Kiel really is the kind of club that could go thru what Bello did at Bielefeld. The dreaded double relegation. [Like Luton just did in England.] This is a relatively small club. I mean, their stadium would be the smallest stadium in MLS.

I get it. Tolkin is going to say the right things. But can we agree that if he's playing in Bund2, he's unlikely to make the World Cup roster. Even though LB after Antonee is murky.

 

I mean, now that he's in Europe, he will magically improve. There's no way there's drawbacks there that people aren't considering.

That said, I'm glad he's trying, and I'm glad he actually chose a step up (at the time) rather than the first offer that came by. There are tons of good and bad situations in Europe, as in anywhere, so don't move where the upside is low or the risks are high. This isn't even an MLS / Europe thing, it's an awareness that it is easy, at this level of player, to get buried and lost on a team where there's fit or other issue not directly tied to your quality.

(Although Bello was pretty much all athleticism, anyway).

 

If after the next EPL season all promoted teams go back down - again then I don't want to hear anymore about pro ' rel. It will then be bungee teams getting a glimpse of the EPL before certain return to lower levels.

I actually wonder if other leagues are looking at MLS and the American pro sports system and thinking about how that might be better for all but the very top teams.

 

Bello continues to be a superficial/specious analog to Tolkin. Tolkin was good, Bello bad. The fact Tolkin's team got relegated is guilt by association. They weren't on pace when he played.

Bello surely didn't have s**t for offers to transfer from Bielefeld after his stint in the BL. Tolkin already has them (per FussballTransfers) or will. Then the ball's in Tolkin's pitch whether he leaves.

 

I hated to see Tolkin go, but for his development it was a good move. He'd stagnated in his last year as a Metro and needed a challenge. The crucial point for this discussion is that he got a significant raise with his new team. He wasn't being held back by an overly generous MLS salary. And he could have received a similar raise from the best teams in the secondary Euro leagues (Brugge and Genk, Ajax and PSV, Lisbon and Benfica), but not from lesser teams. That feels right to me, and if his salary demands removed other teams as possibilities, that's no real loss.

 

The promoted EPL teams aren't just going straight back down, they're setting records with how bad they are. So really the Premier League is a 17 team league with a revolving door of Champo level cannon fodder.

I think we would rather have any of our USMNT-relevant guys stay in the Champo rather than be promoted and get that play for an awful team experience that is totally useless. Granted it did work out for Jedi and even Ream who somehow elevated his game by like two levels right after, but Fulham is probably the exception and in general the relegation experience is not a positive one.

 

https://meninred97.com/gutierrez-eyes-future-with-club-and-country/

 

I think it’s just that the sport is just more popular in those countries and there’s way more pressure on guys that’s even more heightened by promotion and regulation (and a level of pressure that lots of US sports franchises in other leagues don’t replicate either).

 

Yeah I think the hope is they get bought based on their Championship play versus going up on a relegated team and just getting shelled every game.

 

Now there's the @rgli13 that I'd remembered!

 

Eh, I don't know that that's really true. In La Liga this season, the 16th highest transfer fee was under €10M.

 

I hope he gets loaned to a newly promoted squad or another bottom 3rd squad. That would be a sign that the BuLi pyramid values him.

 

Indeed. It's over-hyped nonsense.

 

Part of this is because Barcelona is stuck in financial purgatory and can’t spend any money on transfers for the most part. And Real Madrid are in better financial shape but hasn’t spent a ton in net transfer spend other than Bellingham in recent years (I think because they were sinking alot of money into the stadium renovation but not entirely sure).

And when those two aren’t spending a ton that’s most the financial firepower of La Liga.

 

This was the idea behind the Super League no?

 

We just need more Bundesliga teams buying into this in terms of bringing guys over straight from MLS as opposed to an intermediate league. I think with of these non top 5 leagues the quality isn’t necessarily that different from MLS but it’s easier to make a move to a bigger league from there.

 

Miles Robinson to me was just really unlucky with the injury. He was playing at a very high level for the USMNT at the time and I don’t know he quite gets back there. If he’s healthy he plays every minute of the World Cup next to Zimmerman (and we maybe never see Ream) and maybe gets a good move off that.

Whereas the injury of the sort he had both limited his options and also meant he’s not quite the same player to my eyes.

 

The result of coaches and players being under pressure is generally not good football. It's not the development of young players.

And how many top internationals come from teams regularly involved in pro-rel battles? I don't think Salah or De Bruyne ever have. Beckenbauer and Pele certainly didn't.

 

In general I very much agree, just wanted to mention that Genoa CB Johan Vásquez is a pretty important piece for Mexico despite having been relegated like a million times...

 

Meh. I think the whole pro/rel thing in terms of the development discussion.........is overblown.

From a transfers point of view, a player has to be careful that they don't "do a Bello."
Tolkin, to me, is on that path. Don't have some sort of loyalty to a club when they go down. Be selfish. Holstein Kiel isn't Hannover. Its a small club that was punching above its weight. Maybe he's saying the right things in the press, but behind the scenes is trying to decide how to approach it.

Some moves end up being horrific and it was hard to see coming. Reggie Cannon at Boavista was a disaster. That club turned into a disaster. Their supposedly wealthy owner turned out to be a charlatan. They're about to be relegated in Portugal, which might mean the end of the club.

A fish rots from the head down: The rapid decline of Boavista

It has been 10 years since López’s first sporting acquisition – the British Formula One racing team Lotus F1 – were staring down the threat of administration, only for Renault to purchase the team and repay £2.7m in unpaid taxes. Since then, López has driven Mouscron to extinction and steered Bordeaux to the fourth division, and today, he has led Boavista to the precipice of liquidation.

There's one thing MLS has that I think folks undervalue. Stability. I remember an Argentine player saying the best thing about MLS is that the checks come on time and have the amount of money they're supposed to have in them. We take this for granted. In the rest of the world, that doesn't always happen. See the Reggie Cannon example.

MLS pays well and on time.

 

Which Argentina player? Thank you

 

I remember the comment but every time you Google MLS and Argentina a certain player comes up.