Dave’s Football Blog

With the MLS Cup Final coming up on Sunday — and at a time that makes it impossible for me to watch, because there’s no way I’m missing Panthers @ Falcons or the Grey Cup Final, dammit — the New York Times decided to have a chat with Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber about the state of the league. This gave him another yet another opportunity to explain to the non-sycophant soccer fans in America why MLS will remain inside it’s bubble and never become quite the kind of league they want.

I should probably give this piece the full Fire Joe Morgan treatment, but really, I want to focus on the money quotes from Garber. Quotes like this one:

When the Giants get to the Super Bowl as a wild card or with a .500 records, it’s heralded as an incredible sports story. But when the Red Bulls do it people think it’s a joke. It’s a great story, and we need great stories.

Let’s make this clear. We’re not mocking MLS because of the Red Bulls’ excellent playoff run. Truth be told, that is a pretty good story. We’re mocking MLS because it actually has the balls to call an Eastern Conference club from New Jersey “Western Conference Champions.” That’s just silly, Don, and it’s the kind of thing that gives people a reason to argue for a single-table league.

And let’s not kid ourselves. MLS will never be a single-table league. Once MLS expands to 18 teams in 2011, a single-table league in which everyone plays each other home-and-away will require a 34-round season. MLS couldn’t fit 30 rounds into this season without top teams complaining about massive fixture congestion. Unless MLS pulls out of the U.S. Open Cup (no) or drops Superliga (probably not), where would the league fit four more rounds?

And speaking of Superliga…

When we added SuperLiga it was a necessary tournament to give our teams more international competition. We never anticipated the CONCACAF Champions League.

Maybe that’s because Superliga practically begat the CONCACAF Champions League. Jack Warner compared the TV ratings for Superliga with the ratings for the old Champions Cup and realized he had to do something to keep the Caribbean and Central American teams relevant in international competition. You said it yourself…

Our SuperLiga has been a wild success.

You might want to share some of that success with the players, Don.

So along comes the CONCACAF Champions League, which we have no control over. The fans scream and yell and the media looks at our teams not performing well, but what are we supposed to do? Our teams have to decide what’s more important to them. So we are left to plow along, take our lumps and stay steady and strong. Then people up in Montreal look at what the U.S.L. teams have done in the Champions League and wonder why they should even want to be in M.L.S. But it’s big for them, not as big for us.

And that, folks, is MLS in a nutshell. The league only puts emphasis on the competitions that it can control. It doesn’t want to open itself up to the rest of the region, because that just doesn’t jibe with its business model, and as long as the business model keeps working, there’s no reason to make major changes.

To be fair, there are plenty of positive things to take away from this interview. MLS is still growing, and fans are starting to care more about it. The boisterous crowds in Columbus and Salt Lake City last week were a credit to this league. Plus, Garber does recognize that a few things need to be tweaked in order to relieve some of the fixture congestion that successful clubs were complaining about a few months ago.

Still, it’s clear that MLS is never going to be quite the league that some of us want it to be. It’s not going to drop SuperLiga to focus more on the CONCACAF Champions League. It’s not going to take the U.S. Open Cup seriously. (Garber argues that the Open Cup “does not have much meaning for our fans,” though I wonder how many of those fans are even aware that it exists.) MLS is going to do things its own way, regardless of how the rest of the world operates, and we can either buy in or drop out.

Personally, I don’t even mind the salary cap, the end-of-season playoffs and the geographic divisions all that much. Just increase the cap, increase the roster sizes, boost the minimum salaries and give clubs more autonomy in buying and selling players. Those little things will not only make MLS much more competitive with the rest of the world, but it will help make MLS a top-flight league that all American soccer fans can be proud of. That’s all we want, really.

Until that happens, though, USL clubs will keep working harder to take more Champions League spots away from MLS. Then again, I guess that’s an acceptable loss for Garber, isn’t it?