MLS is a stagnant league
Major League Soccer announced earlier this week that the city of Charlotte will be getting their very own franchise. The club will be owned by David Tepper, who owns the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League.
I think it’s great that MLS is expanding all over the country, but they’re in denial when it comes to their belief that the league is doing well and the fact that more teams being added means the league is doing great.
While the game of soccer is certainly growing in the United States and will likely over take both hockey and baseball in popularity as some point in the future, people aren’t swarming to watch MLS. No, the most popular leagues in this country are Liga MX (Mexican league) and the English Premier League.
If you don’t believe me, look at the television ratings. Despite the fact that this year’s MLS Cup final featured two of the most popular teams in the league in Toronto FC and the Seattle Sounders, the ratings were down compared to 2018, according to Awful Announcing.
ESPN raved about how these are their best ratings for an MLS Cup but that’s because they haven’t been broadcasting the match every year. It was on FOX in 2018.
FOX’s broadcast last year drew a total of 1.563 million viewers compared to ABC’s 823,000. Now this of course is just one game, but if the league was really growing the way MLS wants you to think, the numbers would be getting bigger.
Now, lets compare Major League Soccer’s biggest match in the MLS Cup to regular season matches for both Liga MX and the EPL. Recently Morella and Club America drew in 1.8 million viewers on Univision and Manchester City vs. Manchester United had a total of 999,000 people watching their match, according to World Soccer Talk. Clearly more people watched those matches the MLS’s championship.
Ok, you can argue that I’m comparing the ratings from games featuring some of the most popular teams in the world in Club American, Man City and Man United. Don’t worry I have more for you.
Let’s compare the ratings of a regular season MLS match and a match between two EPL teams that aren’t very popular worldwide.
Between September 23-30th of 2019, in the EPL, Leicester City and Newcastle United drew 595,000 people, while the highest rated MLS match that week was Minnesota United vs. LAFC with 84,000 viewers.
I hope I’ve made the point that MLS might be growing in size, but people are’t watching on TV and most of the stadiums aren’t even full. Yes, the Sounders, Atlanta United, LAFC and a few others do a great job of filling their stadiums, but most are struggling.
The problem is that MLS is still trying to make their league like the NFL and other American leagues. They clearly want to have 32 teams like the NFL when the top leagues around the world have 16-18 teams in their leagues and have promotion and relegation. This is what happens when you have former NFL guys in Lamar Hunt and Don Garber starting and running things in MLS.
As a country we have set the trend when it comes to our baseball, basketball and football leagues, but when it comes to soccer we have to be humble and realize that we don’t know what we’re doing and we need to copy leagues like La Liga, the English Premier League and other top leagues in Europe because they clearly know how to get people in the US to watch and follow their teams. Something MLS doesn’t know how to do and their TV ratings reflect that.
I know MLS doesn’t want to face reality, but the only way their product is going to get better is by having promotion and relegation and changes the way their league is run to reflect the likes of those in Europe.
Something else that would help MLS is to improve their marketing. I never know when they have games on ESPN and FS1 because it’s not consistent. There might be a few weeks in a row with games on national TV and then none for a couple of weeks.
Also the fact that many teams aren’t showing their home games on local television is hurting their exposure. But I will admit the fact that you can get every game on ESPN + for $5 per month aside from your local team and nationally televised games that’s a good deal.
I enjoy the MLS. I know it’s not like Europe, but there are some good things about the league. I want to see it grow and that’s not going to happen until they conform to the way the rest of the world does things.
Leave a Reply