MLS Impact on US Team Fading

Some may blame the MLS play­off race. Oth­ers may sim­ply claim Bob Bradley is biased towards play­ers play­ing their club foot­ball in Europe. What is unde­ni­able is that MLS has put only four squad play­ers on this train­ing camp ros­ter for the United States. That’s an all time low for a qual­i­fier since MLS began. By com­par­i­son MLS boasted 17 of 23 squad mem­bers in 1998 World Cup. How­ever, Bradley’s squads have con­sis­tently included the same play­ers and sev­eral of them have moved from MLS to Europe dur­ing his tenure, mean­ing even if the MLS play­off race wasn’t ongo­ing at this time per­haps only one or two more MLS based play­ers would be in the squad. Also the inclu­sion of Jose Fran­cisco Tor­res, a player too skilled to ever waste his time in MLS is a fur­ther sign that the US tal­ent level is mov­ing beyond what is a lower tier pro­fes­sional league in world football.

For all the hype and flair sur­round­ing MLS’ recent for­eign sign­ings its over­all com­mit­ment to devel­op­ing Amer­i­can play­ers has declined the last few years. The years 2001 through 2005 are con­sid­ered lean years in MLS his­tory from a finan­cial stand­point but that was a golden period for the league in the sense that it was com­mit­ted to build­ing the domes­tic prod­uct with domes­tic play­ers, many young, many get­ting a taste of first team, first divi­sion foot­ball which pro­pelled them for­ward in their careers. The truth be told the empha­sis on MLS ros­ters towards Amer­i­can play­ers in that era may have owed itself to the leagues then pre­car­i­ous finan­cial situation.

MLS has recently been exposed for its poor qual­ity: games are often unwatch­able and the sec­ond divi­sion in the United States, USL-1 used a back­door route to place two teams in the CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League: until this year con­ti­nen­tal com­pe­ti­tions were not open to USL sides partly due to MLS’ insis­tence. In the Cham­pi­ons League USL-1 sides fac­ing greater fix­ture con­ges­tion and travel demands on a lower pay­roll than any MLS team have vastly out­per­formed the MLS con­tin­gent. Of the four MLS sides that qual­i­fied for the event only the remark­able Hous­ton Dynamo and their first class man­ager Dom Kin­n­ear have man­aged to even put up a fight: iron­i­cally the same two teams from the region that knocked out MLS sides Chivas USA and New Eng­land in the qual­i­fy­ing round have since been beaten by the two par­tic­i­pat­ing USL-1 sides.

MLS did some very good work in player devel­op­ment between 2001 and 2005: good work which cur­rently ben­e­fits the US team. Prior to that MLS pro­duced in my opin­ion bet­ter foot­ball from 1996 to 2000 than it cur­rently does. The rules were Amer­i­can­ized and odd, as were the funky look­ing NBA influ­enced kits, but if you could sep­a­rate that and focus on the foot­ball, it really was sur­pris­ingly good for a brand new league. But cur­rently, MLS is less com­pelling than ever: fewer and fewer Amer­i­can national team play­ers call the league home, more Amer­i­can young­sters like Char­lie Davies, Andrew Jacob­son, and Sal Zizzo are skip­ping MLS entirely and ply­ing their trade in more com­pet­i­tive foot­ball atmos­pheres and the league seems to be oper­at­ing in more of a vac­uum than ever. The league deem­pha­sizes the estab­lished regional cham­pi­onship which holds with a ticket to the club world cup, some­thing that could help MLS sag­ging inter­na­tional cred­i­bil­ity (just this morn­ing the Inde­pen­dent a fair minded British daily com­pared the top of MLS to bot­tom of the sec­ond flight Cham­pi­onship in the Eng­land: I believe Hous­ton could play in the Pre­mier League but for the rest of MLS that is a fair com­par­i­son.) in favor of a con­trived three week long event, Superliga which MLS con­trols the rev­enues from.

We’ve dis­cussed MLS’ prob­lems and lack of qual­ity before on this site. I’m not sure I want to rehash every­thing other than encour­ag­ing new read­ers to look at the archives going back to early this sea­son and to observe my dis­plea­sure as a thir­teen year fan of the league. But I do think it is telling that Bob Bradley who coached eleven sea­sons in MLS as head man and an assis­tant to Bruce Arena seems to value club form in Europe and Mex­ico over club form in MLS when mak­ing his selec­tions. “in form” Euro­pean based play­ers like Char­lie Davies while ignor­ing for many months in form MLS play­ers like Chad Mar­shall and Kenny Cooper. (Davies is vir­tu­ally the only Amer­i­can “in form” cur­rently in an aver­age to above aver­age Euro­pean first divi­sion: yet Bradley relies on Euro­pean based play­ers to form the back­bone of his squad.)

As the United States national team con­tin­ues to push for­ward and MLS becomes more con­cerned about mak­ing money, expan­sion and mean­ing­less friendlies/Superliga, the back­bone of the US team will con­tinue to be play­ers based in Europe and Mex­ico. MLS is becom­ing more and more of a retire­ment home for for­eign play­ers and select Amer­i­can stars like Brian McBride and Eddie Lewis. It is a league that has been shown up the sec­ond divi­sion that cov­ers the same are in con­ti­nen­tal com­pe­ti­tion, and is a league whose insult­ing salary scale has pushed mid level Amer­i­can play­ers like Clarence Good­son, Brian West and Hunter Free­man to seek fair pay for their ser­vices abroad. Bob Bradley knows this and as the US man­ager he has a respon­si­bil­ity to keep ahead of the curve with his national team and based on his last sev­eral squads he’s mov­ing past MLS other than some very pre­cious exception.