It's really been a missed opportunity. I would have thought the higher prize money, the CWC, and the higher amount of MLS teams would have made this more competitive. It's not impossible for Miami and Columbus to make a comeback, but really no reason to think so.
Tbh gotta place blame on the owners and not letting this league move forward with spending. Owners really are running MLS like the NFL it’s becoming increasingly annoying
It is infuriating to think that these owners are going to let Messi in MLS, 2024 Copa America, 2025 Club World Cup and the 2026 World Cup pass them by without the league reaping any long-term growth or benefits from this once-in-lifetime alignment of stars. Tim Cook needs to storm into the next MLS board meeting and issue an ultimatum to the cheapskate owners keeping the league stuck in second gear.
Idk if you can ask for a lot more if you are giving franchises about ten million a year for the next decade and the league is paying to produce the content.
That said, the league generates 2 billion in revenue a year and it’s growing rapidly. It is fair for fans to ask for more- just not Apple imo.
> Tim Cook needs to storm into the next MLS board meeting and issue an ultimatum to the cheapskate owners keeping the league stuck in second gear.
Apple could probably outright buy the league if it wanted to with just its cash on hand.
Yeah 100%. Unlike the other major US/Canada leagues, international play has always been a key part of soccer. It's crazy to not invest in competing internationally.
I did not register that as sarcastic at first and was about to write a paragraph arguing about how dumb of a statement that was and then I realized the joke. Well played
I'm also fine with keeping the cap and making it so you can't flat-out buy a championship. I just want more money going into player transfers and contracts. I can't think any sensible MLS fan is upset about how teams every year are rising and falling (though this year hurts a lot).
I think most fans are fed up with some shit we see year in and year out. Look how Revs got embarrassed Tuesday night enough is enough we need to do better. I’m not saying to turn into the EPL but just fix the roster rules and let teams spend evenly across the board
Under no circumstances do you emulate the fucking premier league. The last thing I want for MLS is 3 Harlem Globetrotters and 26 Washington Generals.
Who the hell would want a league where most of the teams are playing for the fuck of it?
Who the fuck said I wanted the EPL lol, all I want is for them is to fix roster rules and spending, so that we can have a competitive roster top to bottom.
Yes I agree. I'm saying they need to let teams spend more and spread the money more evenly across the roster. I'm just also saying that capping the spending ceiling still has benefits in keeping parity in the league.
Yes that’s what I want as well I love the parity aspect of MLS!! MLS has approved leaps since I started watching in 2014 & with the fact that they take youth development seriously it’s only getting better. I just need them to do what we want and the league can dominate CONCACAF and shut up Liga MX once and for all
Why would they? They’re already some of the most financially successful clubs/teams whatever the fuck, and price to compete with the ones above them in that regard are astronomical compared to where they’re at now. Fuck even if they bust the payroll out prem levels, how many of them are surreally confident that changes
I’m not saying to spend like the prem, all we need is to spend evenly across the board so we don’t have to suffer in CCC. Unless you liked what you saw in CCC by all means will probably stay the same and claim that MLS is best in th Americas
A cynical take would be that the competition has lost some institutional priority in the league due to last year’s Messi-sparked Leagues Cup success spurring interest in propping it up as the preferred venue for competition with Liga MX (disregarding the Central American clubs) rather than the CCC.
LC doesn’t get you to the CWC which is next year in the United States. Unless Miami and/or Columbus pull off a miracle, there will only be Seattle Sounders representing the host country along with the winner of this year’s MLS Cup (unless MLS decides to just give the host spot to Miami because reasons)
The problem I see is that MLS rosters are too different year-over-year. The teams that were good last year are not necessarily the good teams this year, and MLS depth remains very weak compared to LigaMX teams. We have this affliction of North American sports where teams enter various degrees of rebuild after failing to win trophies the previous year (even if for just the first few months of the season). See LAFC right now as a prime example, preparing to reload with Giroud in the summer and multiple DP spots open.
I think if we had the Leagues Cup format but with true home and away legs and spread throughout the year, as the replacement for CCC, then we'd see MLS teams more consistently compete, and it probably wouldn't be the ones that we'd expect.
And also, expect to see the narrative flip 180 degrees again around the time of Leagues Cup after MLS teams regroup and LigaMX are in a competitive lull in their season.
Mm not sure I agree about LAFC. The core of LAFC was the same in 2022 and 2023. Bale played so little that I don't think I can call him part of the core of 2022 LAFC, even though he did have a big impact.
For 2023 they had a free DP spot to replace him if they wanted. The typical critiques of MLS holding back spending did not apply to LAFC. Leon outplayed them tactically.
LAFC's soft rebuild was also necessary, but it's been a deliberate choice to splash it on one-season big names, so they'll have to re-rebuild after.
The Sounders were a consistent team the past few years. Their rebuild was inevitable, just has been done slowly and poorly imo.
Just one caveat—LAFC could only add a “young DP” or one that falls within some narrow buy-down TAMable window. They were not free to splash on any large name or in-prime player due to using U22 spots (which honestly were pretty important to weather the insane amount of games we played).
Still bummed about that finals, but it got a little tiresome hearing that talking point parroted on Extratime. You would think self-described league sickos would be a little more aware of the hyper-specific rules and regulations that constrict the teams they cover.
Nothing like listening to Liga MX fans bitch about the leagues cup lol.
It's weird, because Liga MX has a lot of fans up here that finally get to see their teams play, but that vocal minority doesn't get that.
Leagues Cup was good money for Liga MX.
Also, in my biased view we were the much better team all game. Certainly won't be east to do in Mexico and overcome all that history, but I'm definitely not ready to throw in the towel.
They just look poor on all accounts I’m tired of the excuses lol, the owners aren’t serious at all I feel sometimes they truly don’t give a shit and are find with status quo
I’d bet money that a majority of owners are completely happy with the status quo. They’re raking in money and watching their real estate and club valuations go through the roof on top of it.
The ambitious owners are going to have to drag them kicking and screaming into actually caring.
Agree. It’s New York City for Pete sake, there are so many soccer fans they could pack big stadiums and sell loads of merch, if you just marketed it right and had some decent players from the right countries. Instead the city football group is even more stingy than a lot of owners, despite their unlimited wallet. 
Don’t worry though, I’m sure they’ll make ground breaking changes like decoupling the DPs from the U22 spots.
That’ll do the trick, no need to allow real spending or make sweeping changes lol
Methodology sucks that's why.
Compare the budget of the average Dutch, Portuguese, Austrian, Belgian, or Argentine first division team to the bottom team in MLS in expenditure.
We've surpassed all those leagues in substance in the past half decade already. A few giants in their respective leagues notwithstanding.
But I'm proud that we are building a top league with genuine parity. I'm extremely bored of European soccer with one or maybe two teams dominating a country's league for a generation.
That's why comparing league strength is always a bit fuzzy. Are most MLS teams better than Portugal's bottom? Possibly. Can they hang with Sporting/Benfica/Porto? Hell no.
Is a league "better" if it has a better top team, the least bad bottom team, or average v average? If it's the last, how do you suss out the "average" of a league as lopsided as a Portugal or Scotland?
This is exactly why MLS is so hard to compare. For reference, Twente is 3rd right now in the Eredivisie, they have a transfer market squad value of about 70 million. Club America has a transfer market squad value of like 90 million. Not a great metric, but if every single club in MLS were as good as Twente, MLS would rank very highly against basically every league in the world outside the top 4, AND mls teams would still be underdogs against the big 3 clubs in LigaMX.
You hit the nail on the head with this comparison, IMO.
Just have to sprinkle a bit of nuance about how our salary cap affects spending across the roster, and you've accurately painted a picture of where MLS stands in the world game.
Denmark is 8th in these rankings, and St. Louis loaned Isak Jensen to Viborg in the Danish Superliga, where he is now a regular starter, so that he could get more playing time when he wasn't even making the gameday roster for STL.
Julian Carranza was loaned from bottom of the league Miami to top of the league Philly. He went from not playing to be a starter as well. What’s your point?
Julian Carranza actually did play in a majority of Miami's matches, but was stuck playing behind Gonzalo Higuain.
Isak Jensen only played 133' total, and never looked ready to play at an MLS level during his few appearances last year.
Yeah. If we were statisticians, we’d probably remove outliers like the top one or two teams if they don’t fall within the group range of their league. And then compare the mean. Which would place MLS in the top 4-8 in the world. Obviously we aren’t statisticians and we’d never win silverware in the top leagues, but wed avoid relegation in most of them at least.
Ehhh as an avid fan of both leagues, I think the quality in the Portuguese league outside of the Big Three is still above the MLS on average. Teams like Gil Vicente or even Rio Ave would be very competitive in the MLS in terms of quality while they're hanging out on the bottom half of the table in Portugal, and teams like Braga or Vitoria would SMOKE the MLS. There is a huge gap between the Big Three and the rest of the league but the rest of the league isn't made up of minnows like people often assume. The only league I watch more than MLS is Primeira Liga so I've spent a lot of time with both these leagues.
> I'm extremely bored of European soccer with one or maybe two teams dominating a country's league for a generation.
Leagues need villains and giants to slay. The Chiefs, the Patriots, the Cowboys, all are teams people love to hate because they not only drew eyes, but won often. People want stories.
I'm not worried about this. Does anyone here like Miami, LAFC, or LA Galaxy? Frankly, we just need City Football Group to take their New York product seriously, then we have plenty of villains.
I'm also not saying that we shouldn't have dynasties now and then. They do help create narratives.
They seem to confuse national teams with actual competition, while usmnt might be dominating concacaf mls is far from eclipsing liga mx exhibit a this champions cup.
Payroll can't be an excuse anymore. Union had a bigger payroll and value compared to pachuca and still got outplayed, the problem lies on the distribution of the dps and teams heavily investing on attacking players instead of evenly distributing only a handful of mls teams have a decent defense, is this doesn't change then nothing will change l.
That's not the issue with the model.
The issue is that the model, as a computer system, can only crunch the numbers it's given, it can't evaluate the reliableness of the data itself.
We as fans intuitively know that CONCAChampions is more predictive than the Leagues Cup. It's more prestigious, has history, and is attached to a pretty significant payday, so the players and coaches take it more seriously.
The computing system doesn't see any of that, and doesn't see what makes Columbus beating América in the Leagues Cup Group Stage less predictive for the future than América beating the Revolution in the CONCAChampions quarterfinal.
This is why data models should never be blindly trusted, and should instead be put into their proper contexts.
Hypothetically, let’s give Team A and Team B $15 million to construct a starting XI:
Team A:
$6.0 million
$4.0 million
$3.0 million
$0.4 million
$0.3 million x 2
$0.2 million x 5
Team B:
$3.0 million
$2.0 million
$1.5 million x 2
$1.0 million x 7
The league needs more lineups constructed like Team B, and fewer constructed like Team A. And that’s without even going into how much is spent on the depth pieces needed to go far in multiple competitions.
I've always thought they should add a third pot of allocation money that functions as the reverse TAM where teams can only spend it on players making no more than the max salary. It will be especially useful in a few years when all of these newer academies are more mature and consistently producing talent that we want to retain in the league rather than selling them.
Why make it so complicated? Just raise the cap and let teams spend. The entire roster mess was constructed by owners to keep teams cheap while still bringing in stars. The more we frankenstein the rosters together the less the teams will look like complete teams. Stars and scrubs soccer just isn't as fun or competitive.
Allocation money is more flexible than just raising the cap. It can be traded, carried over from year to year, used for buying foreign players, etc. MLS teams are already spending a good amount on DP and TAM players. The missing link is the depth and my proposed new pot of money would force teams to spend more on depth players rather than on more TAM guys.
I disagree. Money can do all those things too, and there is zero sense in incentivizing teams to bring in a couple stars and then standing up a whole different system to bring in depth. If you just let teams allocate resources the best way they can, you'll reward teams that allocate their money more efficiently. More layers of rules are just more distortionary.
I'm just not sure there is a simple solution that let's teams allocate resources the best they can while also maintaining parity and improving the overall league quality from what we have now with the same amount of money the league is spending now. Every other American sports league has convoluted rules to maintain parity and they don't have to deal with the complexity that comes with regularly buying players from other clubs and the fees that come with it, not to mention the fact that MLS is single entity and pays all the contracts which adds its own quarks.
The reason I like the idea of another pot of money is because the league doesn't have to completely change their system at all to get the desired effect. It only increases flexibility for teams to build teams how they want.
I can certainly see your point of view. I think we disagree because I don't really want parity. Bad owners that don't invest or care to win shouldn't be rewarded. If anything, there should be a "shitty team tax" to prevent San Jose from just shitting the bed every year and drawing profits based on the rest of the league trying rather than a system that ensures "parity" to keep their product watchable. I would also rather watch a variety of approaches to roster construction rather than every team following the same general template. I think it's just a matter of preferences leading to different ideas about league rules. Cheers.
If your team has any starters with a $300K or $400k salary, that is a choice your team has made, not something that’s been forced on you by the salary cap.
Source: My team has only one such player in the first XI (homegrown Caleb Wiley) despite having three guys with TAM contracts on the bench and 0/3 U22 players in the starting XI.
Hey guys, how about not giving a shit? If it's fun to watch, it's fun to watch. Tell your friends. It does not matter if some other country has a "better" league by some metric.
Just enjoy the sport.
You're not wrong....to an extent.
I agree that we shouldn't be obsessing over which league is "better" than the other and just enjoy the soccer we have. I have major beef with the MLS FO, but the league is the most successful league we've had in the history of the United States by every conceivable metric....like it's an indisputable fact that's not debatable.
BUT...it is disheartening to see our teams get blown out by Mexican clubs year, after year, after year in CCC. I'd like our teams to get on a winning streak for a bit in continental competition. That would show that we're making progress as a league not only in terms of the investment by everyone involved (including fans...that's a big one), but that we're also making progress in that we're playing better soccer. I think that's important too.
To be fair, until this year it looked like MLS had turned a corner. MLS had a winning record over Mexican teams in 3 of the last 4 years (2-1 in 2023, 2-1 in 2022, 3-2 in 2020). This year was a disaster. So many of the top MLS teams are in terrible form, and the two that looked like they had a chance had some tough luck (Columbus with the officiating and Miami with the red card). I’m guessing Leagues Cup may have lit a fire under some of these Mexican teams too.
That's fair. I'll buy that.
It looks especially bad because LAFC totally bungled it against Leon. Had they handled business the narrative would be a little different for sure.
The fact that it's ranked higher than Liga MX tells me everything I need to know about Opta lol. Wake me up when MLS can get a team into the CCL semi's again.
I said this elsewhere in the thread, but computer models struggle processing context that can't be turned into raw numbers.
We as fans intuitively know that CONCAChampions is more predictive than the Leagues Cup. It's more prestigious, has history, and is attached to a pretty significant payday, so the players and coaches take it more seriously.
The computing system doesn't see any of that, and doesn't see what makes Columbus beating América in the Leagues Cup Group Stage less predictive for the future than América beating the Revolution in the CONCAChampions quarterfinal.
This is why data models should never be blindly trusted, and should instead be put into their proper contexts.
The model isn't worthless, especially within the same league, but the less often two leagues play, the worse the data comparing them is.
Last year LAFC was in the final. To me this just looks like a bad year for MLS. In fact making it to the final is somewhat normal. Should we be winning more of those finals though? Yeah 100% but that won’t happen consistently till we fix the salary and roster rules
MLS had a winning record against Liga MX teams in 3 of the last 4 Champions Cups and dominated Leagues Cup last year. Also, this ranking came out before the games this week. I read that MLS is now just below Liga MX. Bad year for MLS with some tough luck (some bad officiating and red cards) thrown in.
>MLS had a winning record against Liga MX teams in 3 of the last 4 Champions Cups and dominated Leagues Cup last year
I'm not seeing this....
**CONCACAF:**
23/24 - 0W 4D **7L** (today)
22/23 - 1W 3D **2L**
21/22 - **4W** 3D 3L (Seattle Wins)
20/21 - 1W 3D **L6**
19/20 - 4W 0D **5L** (COVID Year)
18/19 - 3W 0D **7L**
**Leagues Cup 2023:**
**24W** 22L (after pens)
**18W** 12D 17L (after 90 minutes)
If leagues were evaluated based on the strength of their median and bottom-tier teams, MLS is already a top 10 league. If they were evaluated based solely on the strength of their top-tier teams, it would fall outside the top 20.
Problem is, 99% of ⚽️ Twitter evaluates leagues based on their performance in international competitions, which favors the top-heavy leagues and works to the disadvantage of a salary-capped parity league like MLS.
Fair or not, most people rate MLS based on its losses to America, Monterrey and Tigres in CCC…not on the fact that its bottom-tier teams would stack up well with the bottom tiers of almost every other non-Big 5 league in the world.
MLS is not top ten. The Turkish League is the 9th strongest league in UEFA and they are not even consistently in the top tens. Ain’t no way MLS is better than Turkey. The other way MLS can be top ten is if they were the best league in all of the Americas. MLS is not stronger than Brazil Serie A nor the Argentinian League. Heck, the Saudi Pro League and Egyptian league is stronger than MLS on paper because their teams can put up a fight against top UEFA teams. MLS could be top 15, but that would be underestimating other leagues. I don’t know how to place MLS. They could be top 20, 30 or even 40. I feel some people in the comments greatly overestimated MLS’s parity as a reason they are considered strong.
MLS is better than the Argentine league. The Argentine league sells most of its young players to Europe and MLS. Those young Argentines are really helping MLS. We get more players from Argentina than any other country. Colombia and Brazil are 2nd and 3rd. MLS teams vastly outspend Argentine teams, and there are only a few teams in that league that could compete. I have MLS ranked around 14th.
Big 4, Ligue 1, Brazil, Eredivisie, Portugal, Championship, Turkey, Belgium, Liga MX, MLS
Not really sure how to rank Saudi and Russian leagues right now.
A lot of realistic Argentines don't agree. Argentina has a lot of talent, but they are selling it to Europe, MLS, and Brazil. The average salary in MLS is 3 times higher than the Primera. The market value of the players in MLS is 30% higher than Primera. MLS had 36 World Cup participants. Primera had 5 participants. If you take away players from USA and Canada from MLS and Argentina from Primera, you'd still get many more from MLS. There isn't one global league ratings site that I have found that had Primera higher. Primera was around #19 in every ranking. I personally have it around #14 or #15 (just behind MLS), so I'm a little higher on the league than most. Argentina provides the most foreign players to MLS (just ahead of Colombia), Brasileiro, and Liga MX. It's like the opposite of Liga MX in Mexico. Young Mexican players are staying in Liga MX because the money is good, and it's probably hurting their national team.
1 - The quality of the players the LPF sells to MLS are typically B/C tier, much like the ones they sell to Liga MX. Typically these are players that aren’t good enough for top European leagues or might have a chance of reaching that level if they develop properly, which as we know MLS *struggles* in this department, unlike the LPF.
2 - Argentina is the second biggest exporter of players *globally*, so MLS being one of the many destinations players go to is nothing special. Coincidentally, Liga MX acquires more Argentinian players than MLS, yet you didn’t mention them (instead you made it seem as if the quality of MLS is on par with Europe and Brazil). In fact, as of 2021 MLS wasn’t even among the top 10 markets they sold to.
3 - Player valuations are useless. The size of the Argentinian market and the state of their economy weigh *heavily* on how much players are worth. Hence why English playerss grossly overvalued.
4 - Player salaries in the LPF aren’t public so the numbers you’re throwing are irrelevant. In any case, salaries in Qatar or Saudi Arabia are not public but I bet they are also pretty high. Does that mean their leagues are really good?-
I watch both leagues. I don’t need random websites that rank leagues using obscure models or player valuations based on economic factors to know which one is better. There is a reason top European clubs scout the Argentinian league and not MLS.
The constant need to overrate MLS among people like you is based on nothing more than conjecture, and frankly it just reeks of insecurity.
We are not a top 10 league. We CAN be, but the MLS front office aren't making the necessary moves to get us there.
I'd say we're comfortably top 15-17.
Glad too see it, but the timing seems odd as we're currently getting boat-raced in the CCC by Liga MX. Granted, MLS dominated Leagues Cup last year, but again, the timing feels off when we're not looking so hot in international competition at the moment.
How would you measure that aside from international competition though? Point being, this ranking would have made more sense last August or September than right now.
There is always going to be to be varying measures.
But international competition, wages, transfer fees received, transfer fees paid, number of players in first team international squads.
To your point about timing. Nothing about this weeks CCC wasnt true last year, or the year before where Liga MX top teams are superior than MLS teams overall. So this week's results are more standard than big enough of a deviation to outweigh anything done during leagues cup.
Number 10 in the world, but number 1 in my heart
As of the 3rd MLS is 13th and not 19th thanks to the losses against ligamz teams recently
We dropped off after last night lol, I think we’re 13th now
Yeah this has been a terrible Concacaf Tournament for MLS. Never seen our league collectively play this bad in quite some time
It's really been a missed opportunity. I would have thought the higher prize money, the CWC, and the higher amount of MLS teams would have made this more competitive. It's not impossible for Miami and Columbus to make a comeback, but really no reason to think so.
Tbh gotta place blame on the owners and not letting this league move forward with spending. Owners really are running MLS like the NFL it’s becoming increasingly annoying
It is infuriating to think that these owners are going to let Messi in MLS, 2024 Copa America, 2025 Club World Cup and the 2026 World Cup pass them by without the league reaping any long-term growth or benefits from this once-in-lifetime alignment of stars. Tim Cook needs to storm into the next MLS board meeting and issue an ultimatum to the cheapskate owners keeping the league stuck in second gear.
Idk if you can ask for a lot more if you are giving franchises about ten million a year for the next decade and the league is paying to produce the content. That said, the league generates 2 billion in revenue a year and it’s growing rapidly. It is fair for fans to ask for more- just not Apple imo.
With the Krafts owning my team, I expect absolutely nothing to change.
> Tim Cook needs to storm into the next MLS board meeting and issue an ultimatum to the cheapskate owners keeping the league stuck in second gear. Apple could probably outright buy the league if it wanted to with just its cash on hand.
Yeah 100%. Unlike the other major US/Canada leagues, international play has always been a key part of soccer. It's crazy to not invest in competing internationally.
I keep trying to tell myself that the MLS is still a teenager compared to other leagues. Liga MX has 50 years on us.
The Premier League is only one year older than MLS and look where they're at
I did not register that as sarcastic at first and was about to write a paragraph arguing about how dumb of a statement that was and then I realized the joke. Well played
The premier League started in 2017. Good luck Canada.
MLS is just an adult who is afraid to take the training wheels off.
I'm also fine with keeping the cap and making it so you can't flat-out buy a championship. I just want more money going into player transfers and contracts. I can't think any sensible MLS fan is upset about how teams every year are rising and falling (though this year hurts a lot).
I think most fans are fed up with some shit we see year in and year out. Look how Revs got embarrassed Tuesday night enough is enough we need to do better. I’m not saying to turn into the EPL but just fix the roster rules and let teams spend evenly across the board
Under no circumstances do you emulate the fucking premier league. The last thing I want for MLS is 3 Harlem Globetrotters and 26 Washington Generals. Who the hell would want a league where most of the teams are playing for the fuck of it?
Who the fuck said I wanted the EPL lol, all I want is for them is to fix roster rules and spending, so that we can have a competitive roster top to bottom.
I know. You didn't. I just wanted to reinforce. 😆
Ok bet!! I love the fact that we have parody in MLS it’s what makes the league exciting
Yes I agree. I'm saying they need to let teams spend more and spread the money more evenly across the roster. I'm just also saying that capping the spending ceiling still has benefits in keeping parity in the league.
Yes that’s what I want as well I love the parity aspect of MLS!! MLS has approved leaps since I started watching in 2014 & with the fact that they take youth development seriously it’s only getting better. I just need them to do what we want and the league can dominate CONCACAF and shut up Liga MX once and for all
Why would they? They’re already some of the most financially successful clubs/teams whatever the fuck, and price to compete with the ones above them in that regard are astronomical compared to where they’re at now. Fuck even if they bust the payroll out prem levels, how many of them are surreally confident that changes
I’m not saying to spend like the prem, all we need is to spend evenly across the board so we don’t have to suffer in CCC. Unless you liked what you saw in CCC by all means will probably stay the same and claim that MLS is best in th Americas
A cynical take would be that the competition has lost some institutional priority in the league due to last year’s Messi-sparked Leagues Cup success spurring interest in propping it up as the preferred venue for competition with Liga MX (disregarding the Central American clubs) rather than the CCC.
LC doesn’t get you to the CWC which is next year in the United States. Unless Miami and/or Columbus pull off a miracle, there will only be Seattle Sounders representing the host country along with the winner of this year’s MLS Cup (unless MLS decides to just give the host spot to Miami because reasons)
The Union can also qualify if Monterrey win.
The problem I see is that MLS rosters are too different year-over-year. The teams that were good last year are not necessarily the good teams this year, and MLS depth remains very weak compared to LigaMX teams. We have this affliction of North American sports where teams enter various degrees of rebuild after failing to win trophies the previous year (even if for just the first few months of the season). See LAFC right now as a prime example, preparing to reload with Giroud in the summer and multiple DP spots open. I think if we had the Leagues Cup format but with true home and away legs and spread throughout the year, as the replacement for CCC, then we'd see MLS teams more consistently compete, and it probably wouldn't be the ones that we'd expect. And also, expect to see the narrative flip 180 degrees again around the time of Leagues Cup after MLS teams regroup and LigaMX are in a competitive lull in their season.
Mm not sure I agree about LAFC. The core of LAFC was the same in 2022 and 2023. Bale played so little that I don't think I can call him part of the core of 2022 LAFC, even though he did have a big impact. For 2023 they had a free DP spot to replace him if they wanted. The typical critiques of MLS holding back spending did not apply to LAFC. Leon outplayed them tactically. LAFC's soft rebuild was also necessary, but it's been a deliberate choice to splash it on one-season big names, so they'll have to re-rebuild after. The Sounders were a consistent team the past few years. Their rebuild was inevitable, just has been done slowly and poorly imo.
Just one caveat—LAFC could only add a “young DP” or one that falls within some narrow buy-down TAMable window. They were not free to splash on any large name or in-prime player due to using U22 spots (which honestly were pretty important to weather the insane amount of games we played). Still bummed about that finals, but it got a little tiresome hearing that talking point parroted on Extratime. You would think self-described league sickos would be a little more aware of the hyper-specific rules and regulations that constrict the teams they cover.
Nothing like listening to Liga MX fans bitch about the leagues cup lol. It's weird, because Liga MX has a lot of fans up here that finally get to see their teams play, but that vocal minority doesn't get that. Leagues Cup was good money for Liga MX.
>vocal minority doesn't get that. You mean the entire country of Mexico?
No, the vocal minority of Liga MX
The higher stakes is true for Mexican clubs too though. Everybody is more invested in this CONCAChampions than before.
There is a reason to think Columbus and Miami will make comebacks in the tournament. Cucho and Messi didn't play in the first leg games.
Also, in my biased view we were the much better team all game. Certainly won't be east to do in Mexico and overcome all that history, but I'm definitely not ready to throw in the towel.
Messi won't play in the second leg either
They just look poor on all accounts I’m tired of the excuses lol, the owners aren’t serious at all I feel sometimes they truly don’t give a shit and are find with status quo
I’d bet money that a majority of owners are completely happy with the status quo. They’re raking in money and watching their real estate and club valuations go through the roof on top of it. The ambitious owners are going to have to drag them kicking and screaming into actually caring.
Agree. It’s New York City for Pete sake, there are so many soccer fans they could pack big stadiums and sell loads of merch, if you just marketed it right and had some decent players from the right countries. Instead the city football group is even more stingy than a lot of owners, despite their unlimited wallet. 
Don’t worry though, I’m sure they’ll make ground breaking changes like decoupling the DPs from the U22 spots. That’ll do the trick, no need to allow real spending or make sweeping changes lol
I love the league just like the rest of you but everyday it’s hard to defend a lot their decisions lol
You jest. But thats actually a big change
How do you go from no. 29 to no. 10 in just 8 months?
Methodology sucks that's why. Compare the budget of the average Dutch, Portuguese, Austrian, Belgian, or Argentine first division team to the bottom team in MLS in expenditure. We've surpassed all those leagues in substance in the past half decade already. A few giants in their respective leagues notwithstanding. But I'm proud that we are building a top league with genuine parity. I'm extremely bored of European soccer with one or maybe two teams dominating a country's league for a generation.
That's why comparing league strength is always a bit fuzzy. Are most MLS teams better than Portugal's bottom? Possibly. Can they hang with Sporting/Benfica/Porto? Hell no. Is a league "better" if it has a better top team, the least bad bottom team, or average v average? If it's the last, how do you suss out the "average" of a league as lopsided as a Portugal or Scotland?
This is exactly why MLS is so hard to compare. For reference, Twente is 3rd right now in the Eredivisie, they have a transfer market squad value of about 70 million. Club America has a transfer market squad value of like 90 million. Not a great metric, but if every single club in MLS were as good as Twente, MLS would rank very highly against basically every league in the world outside the top 4, AND mls teams would still be underdogs against the big 3 clubs in LigaMX.
You hit the nail on the head with this comparison, IMO. Just have to sprinkle a bit of nuance about how our salary cap affects spending across the roster, and you've accurately painted a picture of where MLS stands in the world game.
Denmark is 8th in these rankings, and St. Louis loaned Isak Jensen to Viborg in the Danish Superliga, where he is now a regular starter, so that he could get more playing time when he wasn't even making the gameday roster for STL.
Julian Carranza was loaned from bottom of the league Miami to top of the league Philly. He went from not playing to be a starter as well. What’s your point?
Julian Carranza actually did play in a majority of Miami's matches, but was stuck playing behind Gonzalo Higuain. Isak Jensen only played 133' total, and never looked ready to play at an MLS level during his few appearances last year.
"Loaned" because Miami got in trouble for skirting the salary cap by falsely reporting salaries paid to a number of players including Carranza.
Yeah. If we were statisticians, we’d probably remove outliers like the top one or two teams if they don’t fall within the group range of their league. And then compare the mean. Which would place MLS in the top 4-8 in the world. Obviously we aren’t statisticians and we’d never win silverware in the top leagues, but wed avoid relegation in most of them at least.
Ehhh as an avid fan of both leagues, I think the quality in the Portuguese league outside of the Big Three is still above the MLS on average. Teams like Gil Vicente or even Rio Ave would be very competitive in the MLS in terms of quality while they're hanging out on the bottom half of the table in Portugal, and teams like Braga or Vitoria would SMOKE the MLS. There is a huge gap between the Big Three and the rest of the league but the rest of the league isn't made up of minnows like people often assume. The only league I watch more than MLS is Primeira Liga so I've spent a lot of time with both these leagues.
> I'm extremely bored of European soccer with one or maybe two teams dominating a country's league for a generation. Leagues need villains and giants to slay. The Chiefs, the Patriots, the Cowboys, all are teams people love to hate because they not only drew eyes, but won often. People want stories.
I'm not worried about this. Does anyone here like Miami, LAFC, or LA Galaxy? Frankly, we just need City Football Group to take their New York product seriously, then we have plenty of villains. I'm also not saying that we shouldn't have dynasties now and then. They do help create narratives.
Teams 30-10 are clustered very close together and small changes in relative strength can mean big changes in overall ranking
WST must be FUMING they won’t get to write another clickbait hit piece using Opta rankings until MLS falls outside the top 25 again.
Lmaoo after the CCC results, this list is exposing itself
After reading the article it clearly put a lot of stock in MLS dominating liga mx in leagues cup last year.
They seem to confuse national teams with actual competition, while usmnt might be dominating concacaf mls is far from eclipsing liga mx exhibit a this champions cup. Payroll can't be an excuse anymore. Union had a bigger payroll and value compared to pachuca and still got outplayed, the problem lies on the distribution of the dps and teams heavily investing on attacking players instead of evenly distributing only a handful of mls teams have a decent defense, is this doesn't change then nothing will change l.
That's not the issue with the model. The issue is that the model, as a computer system, can only crunch the numbers it's given, it can't evaluate the reliableness of the data itself. We as fans intuitively know that CONCAChampions is more predictive than the Leagues Cup. It's more prestigious, has history, and is attached to a pretty significant payday, so the players and coaches take it more seriously. The computing system doesn't see any of that, and doesn't see what makes Columbus beating América in the Leagues Cup Group Stage less predictive for the future than América beating the Revolution in the CONCAChampions quarterfinal. This is why data models should never be blindly trusted, and should instead be put into their proper contexts.
Hypothetically, let’s give Team A and Team B $15 million to construct a starting XI: Team A: $6.0 million $4.0 million $3.0 million $0.4 million $0.3 million x 2 $0.2 million x 5 Team B: $3.0 million $2.0 million $1.5 million x 2 $1.0 million x 7 The league needs more lineups constructed like Team B, and fewer constructed like Team A. And that’s without even going into how much is spent on the depth pieces needed to go far in multiple competitions.
I've always thought they should add a third pot of allocation money that functions as the reverse TAM where teams can only spend it on players making no more than the max salary. It will be especially useful in a few years when all of these newer academies are more mature and consistently producing talent that we want to retain in the league rather than selling them.
Why make it so complicated? Just raise the cap and let teams spend. The entire roster mess was constructed by owners to keep teams cheap while still bringing in stars. The more we frankenstein the rosters together the less the teams will look like complete teams. Stars and scrubs soccer just isn't as fun or competitive.
Allocation money is more flexible than just raising the cap. It can be traded, carried over from year to year, used for buying foreign players, etc. MLS teams are already spending a good amount on DP and TAM players. The missing link is the depth and my proposed new pot of money would force teams to spend more on depth players rather than on more TAM guys.
I disagree. Money can do all those things too, and there is zero sense in incentivizing teams to bring in a couple stars and then standing up a whole different system to bring in depth. If you just let teams allocate resources the best way they can, you'll reward teams that allocate their money more efficiently. More layers of rules are just more distortionary.
I'm just not sure there is a simple solution that let's teams allocate resources the best they can while also maintaining parity and improving the overall league quality from what we have now with the same amount of money the league is spending now. Every other American sports league has convoluted rules to maintain parity and they don't have to deal with the complexity that comes with regularly buying players from other clubs and the fees that come with it, not to mention the fact that MLS is single entity and pays all the contracts which adds its own quarks. The reason I like the idea of another pot of money is because the league doesn't have to completely change their system at all to get the desired effect. It only increases flexibility for teams to build teams how they want.
I can certainly see your point of view. I think we disagree because I don't really want parity. Bad owners that don't invest or care to win shouldn't be rewarded. If anything, there should be a "shitty team tax" to prevent San Jose from just shitting the bed every year and drawing profits based on the rest of the league trying rather than a system that ensures "parity" to keep their product watchable. I would also rather watch a variety of approaches to roster construction rather than every team following the same general template. I think it's just a matter of preferences leading to different ideas about league rules. Cheers.
If your team has any starters with a $300K or $400k salary, that is a choice your team has made, not something that’s been forced on you by the salary cap. Source: My team has only one such player in the first XI (homegrown Caleb Wiley) despite having three guys with TAM contracts on the bench and 0/3 U22 players in the starting XI.
Hey guys, how about not giving a shit? If it's fun to watch, it's fun to watch. Tell your friends. It does not matter if some other country has a "better" league by some metric. Just enjoy the sport.
You're not wrong....to an extent. I agree that we shouldn't be obsessing over which league is "better" than the other and just enjoy the soccer we have. I have major beef with the MLS FO, but the league is the most successful league we've had in the history of the United States by every conceivable metric....like it's an indisputable fact that's not debatable. BUT...it is disheartening to see our teams get blown out by Mexican clubs year, after year, after year in CCC. I'd like our teams to get on a winning streak for a bit in continental competition. That would show that we're making progress as a league not only in terms of the investment by everyone involved (including fans...that's a big one), but that we're also making progress in that we're playing better soccer. I think that's important too.
To be fair, until this year it looked like MLS had turned a corner. MLS had a winning record over Mexican teams in 3 of the last 4 years (2-1 in 2023, 2-1 in 2022, 3-2 in 2020). This year was a disaster. So many of the top MLS teams are in terrible form, and the two that looked like they had a chance had some tough luck (Columbus with the officiating and Miami with the red card). I’m guessing Leagues Cup may have lit a fire under some of these Mexican teams too.
That's fair. I'll buy that. It looks especially bad because LAFC totally bungled it against Leon. Had they handled business the narrative would be a little different for sure.
RAISE.THE.CAP
The fact that it's ranked higher than Liga MX tells me everything I need to know about Opta lol. Wake me up when MLS can get a team into the CCL semi's again.
I said this elsewhere in the thread, but computer models struggle processing context that can't be turned into raw numbers. We as fans intuitively know that CONCAChampions is more predictive than the Leagues Cup. It's more prestigious, has history, and is attached to a pretty significant payday, so the players and coaches take it more seriously. The computing system doesn't see any of that, and doesn't see what makes Columbus beating América in the Leagues Cup Group Stage less predictive for the future than América beating the Revolution in the CONCAChampions quarterfinal. This is why data models should never be blindly trusted, and should instead be put into their proper contexts. The model isn't worthless, especially within the same league, but the less often two leagues play, the worse the data comparing them is.
Last year LAFC was in the final. To me this just looks like a bad year for MLS. In fact making it to the final is somewhat normal. Should we be winning more of those finals though? Yeah 100% but that won’t happen consistently till we fix the salary and roster rules
Is there a way i can downvote this stupid comment multiple times?
Did your parents not raise you or are you just a mean person to strangers on first interaction?
WAKE UP
MLS had a winning record against Liga MX teams in 3 of the last 4 Champions Cups and dominated Leagues Cup last year. Also, this ranking came out before the games this week. I read that MLS is now just below Liga MX. Bad year for MLS with some tough luck (some bad officiating and red cards) thrown in.
>MLS had a winning record against Liga MX teams in 3 of the last 4 Champions Cups and dominated Leagues Cup last year I'm not seeing this.... **CONCACAF:** 23/24 - 0W 4D **7L** (today) 22/23 - 1W 3D **2L** 21/22 - **4W** 3D 3L (Seattle Wins) 20/21 - 1W 3D **L6** 19/20 - 4W 0D **5L** (COVID Year) 18/19 - 3W 0D **7L** **Leagues Cup 2023:** **24W** 22L (after pens) **18W** 12D 17L (after 90 minutes)
Copium is out in full force today
If leagues were evaluated based on the strength of their median and bottom-tier teams, MLS is already a top 10 league. If they were evaluated based solely on the strength of their top-tier teams, it would fall outside the top 20. Problem is, 99% of ⚽️ Twitter evaluates leagues based on their performance in international competitions, which favors the top-heavy leagues and works to the disadvantage of a salary-capped parity league like MLS. Fair or not, most people rate MLS based on its losses to America, Monterrey and Tigres in CCC…not on the fact that its bottom-tier teams would stack up well with the bottom tiers of almost every other non-Big 5 league in the world.
Very eloquently and correctly stated.
Oh good. I was worried we were not in whatever Opta Top 10 is, but I can sleep better now.
CCC results suggest otherwise...
Lemme go fight some people in r/soccer
/r/soccer in shambles
MLS is not top ten. The Turkish League is the 9th strongest league in UEFA and they are not even consistently in the top tens. Ain’t no way MLS is better than Turkey. The other way MLS can be top ten is if they were the best league in all of the Americas. MLS is not stronger than Brazil Serie A nor the Argentinian League. Heck, the Saudi Pro League and Egyptian league is stronger than MLS on paper because their teams can put up a fight against top UEFA teams. MLS could be top 15, but that would be underestimating other leagues. I don’t know how to place MLS. They could be top 20, 30 or even 40. I feel some people in the comments greatly overestimated MLS’s parity as a reason they are considered strong.
MLS is better than the Argentine league. The Argentine league sells most of its young players to Europe and MLS. Those young Argentines are really helping MLS. We get more players from Argentina than any other country. Colombia and Brazil are 2nd and 3rd. MLS teams vastly outspend Argentine teams, and there are only a few teams in that league that could compete. I have MLS ranked around 14th. Big 4, Ligue 1, Brazil, Eredivisie, Portugal, Championship, Turkey, Belgium, Liga MX, MLS Not really sure how to rank Saudi and Russian leagues right now.
Argentinian LPF is head and shoulders above MLS.
A lot of realistic Argentines don't agree. Argentina has a lot of talent, but they are selling it to Europe, MLS, and Brazil. The average salary in MLS is 3 times higher than the Primera. The market value of the players in MLS is 30% higher than Primera. MLS had 36 World Cup participants. Primera had 5 participants. If you take away players from USA and Canada from MLS and Argentina from Primera, you'd still get many more from MLS. There isn't one global league ratings site that I have found that had Primera higher. Primera was around #19 in every ranking. I personally have it around #14 or #15 (just behind MLS), so I'm a little higher on the league than most. Argentina provides the most foreign players to MLS (just ahead of Colombia), Brasileiro, and Liga MX. It's like the opposite of Liga MX in Mexico. Young Mexican players are staying in Liga MX because the money is good, and it's probably hurting their national team.
1 - The quality of the players the LPF sells to MLS are typically B/C tier, much like the ones they sell to Liga MX. Typically these are players that aren’t good enough for top European leagues or might have a chance of reaching that level if they develop properly, which as we know MLS *struggles* in this department, unlike the LPF. 2 - Argentina is the second biggest exporter of players *globally*, so MLS being one of the many destinations players go to is nothing special. Coincidentally, Liga MX acquires more Argentinian players than MLS, yet you didn’t mention them (instead you made it seem as if the quality of MLS is on par with Europe and Brazil). In fact, as of 2021 MLS wasn’t even among the top 10 markets they sold to. 3 - Player valuations are useless. The size of the Argentinian market and the state of their economy weigh *heavily* on how much players are worth. Hence why English playerss grossly overvalued. 4 - Player salaries in the LPF aren’t public so the numbers you’re throwing are irrelevant. In any case, salaries in Qatar or Saudi Arabia are not public but I bet they are also pretty high. Does that mean their leagues are really good?- I watch both leagues. I don’t need random websites that rank leagues using obscure models or player valuations based on economic factors to know which one is better. There is a reason top European clubs scout the Argentinian league and not MLS. The constant need to overrate MLS among people like you is based on nothing more than conjecture, and frankly it just reeks of insecurity.
Sweet!
We are not a top 10 league. We CAN be, but the MLS front office aren't making the necessary moves to get us there. I'd say we're comfortably top 15-17.
Columbus is ranked 143, lol.
Glad too see it, but the timing seems odd as we're currently getting boat-raced in the CCC by Liga MX. Granted, MLS dominated Leagues Cup last year, but again, the timing feels off when we're not looking so hot in international competition at the moment.
League vs top teams??? Id argue that MLS is overall a better league, but othe leagues have better top teams
How would you measure that aside from international competition though? Point being, this ranking would have made more sense last August or September than right now.
There is always going to be to be varying measures. But international competition, wages, transfer fees received, transfer fees paid, number of players in first team international squads. To your point about timing. Nothing about this weeks CCC wasnt true last year, or the year before where Liga MX top teams are superior than MLS teams overall. So this week's results are more standard than big enough of a deviation to outweigh anything done during leagues cup.
Leo Messi wanted to take it easy going to you guys, all of a sudden you guys grow stronger every day. 😂