The Friday news dump has been generally found out for what it is. A way for slimy organizations to try to sneak another piece of larceny or incompetence or just generally distasteful act past the goalie of our awareness without the normal level of scrutiny. By now, the actual act of releasing news at that time makes a statement of its own and you’d have thought companies and entities would have caught on to that fact. But when an organization is as backward and slimy as MLS, perception of oneself isn’t in great abundance.
So on Friday, MLS thought it prudent to announce that next season, its clubs will not be participating in the US Open Cup, the nation’s oldest soccer competition, though MLS would prefer no one ever knew that the sport on these shores exited long before it came online in 1996. Instead, MLS will send its MLS Next Pro. — essentially its youth teams and the third division here in this country — to represent them in the competition. Funny, as DC United doesn’t have an MLS Next Pro team as of yet, so their name won’t be in the competition at all.
The cover story is that it is an effort to relieve fixture congestion and what is often cited is that LAFC played 53 games last season. But even that BS story doesn’t hold water if you try to judge it on its own merits. One, it wasn’t anyone else who jammed in the Leagues Cup into last season’s calendar but MLS and Liga MX, so if fixture congestion was a problem, it’s one of their own making. Two, 53 games is a lot, but it is hardly an obscene number among the most successful clubs around the world. Go far in competitions, you play a lot of games. For a league that still laughably peddles the idea that it wants to be one of the biggest leagues in the world, for it to faux clutch its pearls and claim the vapors about a high, but not abnormal amount of games played by its glamor club, gives up the game.
No, as always with MLS, it’s about cheapness and thinking it’s above any other soccer league or organization in the country, as well as trying to hoard everything for themselves. MLS has regularly tried to pretend that the USL isn’t part of its world, when not actively trying to destroy it.
LAFC’s match-load, or any team’s that goes far in cup competitions while piling on playoff games, wouldn’t be so burdensome without MLS byzantine and restrictive salary cap, merely still in place, as with every other sport, to keep newer owners from making entrenched owners look bad by outspending them (here are some updates to MLS’s roster and salary cap rules. See if you can figure out what any of this means, and then be comforted by the idea that even a lot of long time observers of the league are still a little foggy).
But it goes beyond that. The US Open Cup isn’t televised by Apple, the league’s streaming partner. CBS and Bleacher Report took that on last year and MLS doesn’t want any of its product (including a certain team in South Florida), playing games where it isn’t controlling the broadcast.
Now, how MLS is going to crowbar the Leagues Cup into next summer that has Copa America sitting in the middle of it, with either the league having to break for part or all of it or just plow through it with a lot of rosters scraped of talent, hasn’t been confirmed. Certainly, that will be a jam, too.
But mostly, it’s just an example of how MLS thinks it is simply separate from and above the rest of competitive soccer in the country, which is why promotion/relegation remains a pipe dream and why MLS’s regular season is such a slog. The structure is certainly there to make the game look like the one fans spend the rest of their weekends watching, but MLS has its heart set on keeping the doors closed.
Don Garber can bleat on about how the quality or the look of the competition erodes the perception of the league, but that’s the point of a cup competition. That LAFC or the Philadelphia Union have to go play in Hartford or Phoenix, or those teams get a run out against the biggest clubs in the land. The Open Cup was even regionalized to keep teams from having to travel too far in the early rounds and yet that isn’t enough for Garber and his cronies.
MLS isn’t special, at least not to the degree it thinks it is. And shrinking within itself doesn’t make it any more so. It certainly chips away at the facade the league would like to present that it wants to be one of the world’s most noticeable and biggest leagues. When all it’s really after is making every dollar it can, the product and fans’ desires be damned.
Follow Sam on Twitter @Felsgate and on Bluesky @felsgate.bsky.social
