Kind of late, but piggybacking on the defeat of the defending European champions and actually remembering the 5-0 beating at the hands of Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in 2005, do you think they'll ever take a match on the road again? I know and remember that that match featured a hastily thrown together team, but I remember the publicity from that game was pretty big. some youtube clips
I doubt it, not from a results perspective but from a club demands perspective. We've had clubs pulling their players out of the All-Star Game to play in the CONCACAF Champions League in recent years, and we have regular-season games only a few days before and after the All-Star Game. This year it was a midweek fixture between two full weekends of games. With the league expanding and the schedule getting more congested, I don't see how an All-Star team can ever travel to Europe during the season again. That said, a format I'd like to see tried is MLS All-Stars vs. Liga Mexicana All-Stars. Maybe even make that an annual game and alternate between US and Mexican venues. I think the J-League and K-League did something like that for at least a few years.
Didn't the original tour take place in the MLS off-season? If not, this proposed new one can. I like the idea.
The trip to Madrid took place in late August. It was a month after the All-Star Game, but the regular season was going on and MLS sent a somewhat weakened team as a result.
Yeah, I don't think that doing it that way would be a good idea. Isn't there some kind of friendly/tournament thing in Spain in January, during what some European leagues use as a winter break? Putting an MLS All-Star team in something like that would be worth thinking about.
That's the La Manga Cup, site of the MetroStars' greatest glory. I don't know what the point would be of taking players away from their teams' preseason training to muck about with Scandinavian and Russian clubs in Spain.