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MLS is a league of contrasts. They were on display throughout 2023, a “transformational year for our league,” as commissioner Don Garber said Friday. And they were on display this past weekend in Columbus, even without the transformer himself, Lionel Messi, present. A boisterous, overflowing crowd filled a sleek new stadium for a gripping final. Apple and Fox broadcasted it. Major corporations sponsored it. Fireworks and ecstasy capped a 2-1 Columbus victory, and capped a season that set new benchmarks for attendance, revenue, merch sales and digital engagement.
By those measures and more, MLS is growing, rising toward its stated goal: “To be one of the top soccer leagues in the world,” as Garber reiterated last week.
But by most objective on-field measures, it still isn’t anywhere close. Two oft-cited indexes built on data — Opta’s and Twenty First Group’s — rate MLS around the 30th best domestic league globally. While many subjective eyes would place it in the top 20, the rough industry consensus is that it hasn’t reached the top 10.
And the maddening context for that entire paragraph is this: The primary reason MLS still lags is self-imposed constraints.
For years, the league’s relative youth explained and excused its inferiority. For most of its 27-year existence, its baseline goal has been survival. Fans and pundits tolerated cost controls, like the salary cap, because owners were already losing tens of millions of dollars. Limiting losses seemed necessary to secure their continued investment in a long-term project. Restricting their spending on players suppressed the quality of the league, but contributed to a collective plan that emphasized stability and slow, steady, strategic growth.
Now, though, times have changed — because the plan was brilliant, and clearly worked.
Most MLS clubs still lose money, according to Forbes, but they are worth hundreds of millions more than they once were. And now, the league’s trajectory seems clear. Its foundational infrastructure is excellent. Its stadiums are among the most fabulous and functional in the world. It boasts young, diverse, vibrant local fan bases in a majority of its soon-to-be-28 markets. There is no longer much risk or worry that it won’t continue to grow.
The question is how much, and how fast.
The next step is wooing knowledgeable soccer fans, many of whom still dismiss or disparage MLS (sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly) as a second-rate league.
The best way to woo them — arguably the only way — is to make the on-field product better in a global context, by spending more on players who’ll improve the quality of play and organically market it to new audiences.
And the perfect time to do that is now.
“The eyes of the world are now on Major League Soccer, because the best player to ever play the game is here,” Garber said Friday, referring to Messi. The GOAT brought unprecedented attention. And more is coming.
Copa América is coming. The 2025 Club World Cup is coming. The 2026 men’s World Cup is coming. Messi will be here through at least 2025, and “for the next few years, North America will be the epicenter of the beautiful game,” Garber said. So the next few years will be pivotal. MLS executives awake everyday thinking about how to maximize them. And a core piece of whatever plans they concoct must be the removal, or at least the easing, of some self-imposed spending limits.
Most inhibitive is the soft salary cap, which currently sits at $5.2 million, or 1/16th of the NHL cap, 1/26th of the NBA cap and 1/43rd of the NFL cap. Teams are allowed to spend beyond the cap via various exemptions, most notably the “Designated Player” rule; but those, in turn, are part of the problem. The rules are devilishly complicated. They’re also unique in global soccer, where most clubs are constrained only by their revenues and/or the depth of their owners’ pockets.
Many MLS owners have the wealth to compete with those foreign clubs. Some simply don’t have the freedom to compete; others don’t have the willingness. There’s a subset of owners, many of them new-ish to the league, who want to spend more freely, and compete for continental titles, and perhaps even the Club World Cup; there’s another subset still worried about losing money.
Garber’s job is to position the league somewhere between the aggressive and conservative factions, toward the middle of the spectrum. The league’s approach thus far, over the past decade — to slowly raise the cap and introduce arcane rules to allow for additional targeted spending — has yielded moderate year-by-year improvement.
But not enough. Not as broader contexts come into focus. Over the next three years, “the soccer market here in the United States is gonna be exposed to the entire global soccer and football community,” Garber explained. “And that is the pressure we’re under: as everybody’s paying attention to us, what is the product that we can deliver?”
He and MLS know it has to get better. An initial set of rule changes will likely be approved Thursday by the league’s board of governors (the owners). Garber promised “some exciting things,” but didn’t specify. Whatever they are, the scale of them will be telling. Will they be another round of incremental changes? Or a significant shift in roster flexibility, and a sign of ambition?
Garber’s Friday comments seemed to hint at the former. “I think you’ll start seeing, in the years ahead, some streamlining of those [spending and roster] rules, now that we have more fans, particularly more fans that are looking outside the United States, or soccer fans of international leagues here, and are looking at clubs that don’t have those restrictions,” he said. “But I will tell you, it has really, really been working for us up until now.”
And that’s the thing: it has been working. Really, really well. The current trajectory is upward. MLS, with all its strategic shrewdness, and with all its built-in advantages in the world’s richest country, is on track to someday become the world’s sixth-best league. With the European balance of power increasingly concentrated in England, MLS could even crack the Big Five.
At its current pace, though, it won’t get there this decade, and perhaps not even by 2040 or 2050.
So there’s an urge to accelerate. Among fans, there’s a clamoring. And there is no better time to accelerate, to truly transform the league, than the present.