MLS Commissioner Don Garber has been in Manchester this past week for Soccerex, the game’s largest business networking event. While overseas, Garber got interviewed on Sky Sports, and told viewers that MLS and the Barclays Premier League had been in talks about creating a tournament between each league’s champions and cup winners.
It appears that Garber, who still envisions MLS being in the same conversation as the top European leagues in the next 10 years, prefers this model rather than “just having clubs come over to the country (America) on a random basis.”
I agree with Garber in the sense that an organized tournament between the two best teams from each league makes more sense than the current set up. But in a lot of other ways, a MLS-EPL tournament makes no sense whatsoever, the subject for this week’s edition of The Wins Column.
I’m going to start with the fundamental issue here. Whether these friendlies are contested between Chicago and Stoke or Los Angeles and Manchester City, they’re still friendlies. You can market it as much as you want, you can give the winner a shiny trophy. You can generate crowds that would indicate a great deal of success, like the International Champions Cup has done in North America has done since the tournament began in 2013.
But at the end of the day, nobody REALLY cares. Real Madrid won the 2013 edition as well as the Australian and Chinese editions of the 2015 tournament. I can’t testify, as I’ve never seen the club’s trophy case, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve just thrown those trophies into the back corner with all the other useless ones they’ve won over the years.
But if we’re going to be realistic, I suspect that of the three ICC trophies they’ve won, one got lost in customs, another is being used as a doorstop by manager Rafa Benitez, and the third one got salvaged for scrap metal.
Let’s also take a logistic eye to this proposed MLS-EPL tournament, otherwise dubbed by Garber as the (shudder-inducing) “Anglo-American Cup”.
Garber has said he wants this thing to be an annual tournament held in New York. Because the EPL is smart enough to realize how colossal a waste of time this tournament is, they’ll only play it in July when all the other friendlies against North American clubs take place. That means that right off the bat this tournament will get lost in the already overcrowded field of friendlies, and won’t be treated as anything more significant.
Fans will still get to see the big names they’re paying to see, but only because it would be criminal if they didn’t. But don’t expect them to play the full 90, or to even try that hard. This will be like any other friendly in that 90 per cent of the players the Premier League clubs field will be third-stringers or U-19 academy players.
Or (gulp) third-stringers on the U-19 academy. Cue the GIF of the Week:
To top it all off, this tournament would add yet another event on a busy MLS calendar. I’ve long been on the side that the season is too long as it is and that a return to a 30 game regular season instead of the current 34 wouldn’t hurt anyone. This tournament wouldn’t make that process any easier.
Matches couldn’t be played during international breaks; the smart fan knows the star players won’t take the field, if the casual fan knew then ticket sales would plummet. In essence, you either have to tack on another two weeks to MLS’ season or throw in even more double game weeks into it. So it’s either playing MLS Cup on Boxing Day or watching your club’s starters rested more because of a congested schedule. GREAT.
The idea of an Anglo-American Cup goes against what MLS aspires to be. A league that wants to be considered among the world’s best can’t keep defaulting to riding on coattails to find success. There are things to be proud of no doubt, attendances, salaries, quality of play, television numbers, and virtually every other way to measure MLS’ stature in on the rise. At some point MLS clubs need to actually become the main attraction in these events if there is any hope for the league to reach its goal, and there’s no evidence of that being the case with this proposed tournament.
In fact, I think that the best route for MLS is one of greater separation from the current top leagues. Not a 1996-style rulebook-burning style, but more of a “we can grow by ourselves” distancing. Maintaining a focus on the important stuff (the regular season and the playoffs) and making those competitions the best they can be will help MLS improve. Reducing the number of double game weeks will be easier if friendlies with European clubs are taken out of the picture. Making sure northern clubs aren’t playing in the middle of winter will be easier too.
Garber has always been a polarizing figure. For every soccer-specific stadium there’s been a Frank Lampard-esque debacle. There have been good expansion choices (Portland, Orlando) and bad ones (Miami and Minnesota). It’s boneheaded ideas like this one that make it harder for me to like him.
There’s no need for MLS to challenge the EPL for top dog status at this point. At full strength, MLS rosters still can’t compete. Even if MLS clubs were to beat EPL sides, everyone will point to the EPL sides rolling over while MLS sides push their hardest in a tournament that ultimately means nothing. If the EPL sides dominate, North American fans will have more fuel for their “MLS isn’t a league worth watching” fire.
Simply put, there’s nothing to gain and a lot to lose if Don Garber’s proposed “Anglo-American Cup” becomes a reality.
