Remember when everyone was talking about Major League Soccer?
It seems like six years ago, or just yesterday, but an actual MLS team was the main storyline across the American-sports landscape for most of the summer. LeBron, Serena Williams, Selena Gomez, and even Owen Wilson all came out to games to watch the greatest soccer player of all time play for what was, at the time, the worst team in America's fifth-most-popular sports league.
And then it just ... stopped. Lionel Messi got injured, college and professional football started, European soccer began, Inter Miami missed the playoffs by nine points, and the average American sports fan stopped caring about the league that, briefly, everyone seemed to care about.
So, with Messi's first MLS season in the books and with the Columbus Crew winning MLS Cup, it feels like the right time to take stock. Twenty-eight years in, just how good is MLS?
Avert your eyes, MLS fans
At the consultancy Twenty First Group, they do all kinds of high-level work: modeling the strengths of different teams, simulating potential playoff and league formats, and figuring out ways to calculate the quality of various competitions in comparison to each other. Leagues themselves are some of their biggest clients, so they're forced to think about the sport in a rigorous bigger-picture way than, say, a consultancy that just wants to help clubs identify undervalued players.
The TFG answer to the question we asked above is, well, "not very."
Columbus Crew captain Darlington Nagbe speaks about what it means to reach the MLS Cup final.
According to their global ranking system, MLS is the 31st-best league in the world. That puts it right alongside the level of the Colombian, Polish, Czech and Croatian first divisions.
Why not higher? MLS teams have barely beaten anyone.
"Our World Super League uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate a rating for any given team by learning from historical football matches," said Aurel Namziu, a senior data scientist at Twenty First Group. "Our league ratings are based on the average rating of all teams in a given league. Performances in continental competitions such as the CONCACAF Champions League for MLS teams is where they'll be judged on how good they are relative to other leagues. They've had three finalists in the last four years, which suggests the league is heading in the right direction, but only one winner [Seattle Sounders] since 2008-09. Therefore more consistency at this level is required to improve the quality of the league relative to others."
Liga MX clubs have won 14 of the last 15 CONCACAF Champions League titles, and its teams have made up 80% of the past 30 finalists. As such, it remains the highest-rated league in North America. However, Twenty First Group also models individual player ratings, mainly by looking at a combination of how much playing time players get and how good the teams they're playing for are.
Unsurprisingly, Messi is the highest-rated player in the league, with his current and former teammates, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba, ranking second and third respectively. Among the top 31 leagues in the world, the gap between Messi and Busquets is bigger than the gap between one and two in any league other than Ligue 1, where Messi's former teammates Kylian Mbappé and Achraf Hakimi are even further apart. However, the gap between Messi and Alba or between Messi and anyone not on the Miami roster would be the biggest of any of the top 31 leagues.
The fourth-best player? Right now, that would be LAFC's Dénis Bouanga, the 29-year-old forward who leads the league in goals and touches in the penalty area, while also ranking eighth in expected goals assisted.
These are all of his shots, sized by the quality of the attempt (as measured by its expected-goal value):
Per TFG's player estimations, Bouanga is good enough to play for a top-half team in one of Europe's biggest leagues, like Serie A's Lazio or LaLiga's Villarreal -- teams that qualify for the Champions League a few times per decade. The best player on the Crew, per TFG, is a former LAFC player: 24-year-old Uruguayan winger Diego Rossi, who returned to MLS this summer after spending two seasons getting significant playing time for Fenerbache as they finished in second place in Turkey both years. TFG estimates that he could contribute to a lower-half team in one of Europe's biggest leagues, like the Premier League's Everton or LaLiga's Getafe.
As for the teams themselves, the Crew are ranked 322nd among all teams globally. That's their highest-ever rating, but they're still rated below every team in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. Based on the TFG projections, they'd expect the Crew to beat an average Premier League team on a neutral field 27% of the time.
For LAFC, that number is just slightly higher, at 28%. They're ranked 281st globally, which puts them right around where Sheffield United -- who are in with a shout as the worst Premier League team ever -- currently sit. However, quality-compared-to-others is only one way to quantify this. What about the quality of the soccer itself?
Herculez Gomez defends Lionel Messi's recent comments about the quality of the MLS.
Someone who works in Europe once told me that the easiest way to sum up the gap in quality of MLS compared to, say, the Premier League, is how much more often the ball goes out of bounds when it gets near the sideline in the U.S. domestic league. While maybe pure athleticism and effort isn't an issue for MLS, the fine-tuned technical skills and spatial awareness and off-ball movement that allow you to keep a ball in bounds near the sideline under pressure just wasn't as widely available in MLS, but that might be changing.
Take a simple metric, like pass-completion percentage. It's been on a steady rise since 2016:
While stability in possession has risen right up to what we see in Europe every weekend, so has the approach out of possession. Although clubs are getting better at keeping the ball, they're also getting better at winning the ball in the final third:
Rather than the high press cannibalizing the ability to pass -- or vice versa -- both aspects, which feel like somewhat fundamental building blocks for an interesting soccer product to watch, have risen up together. Yet despite all of that, MLS still hasn't really risen in its overall standing in relation to the rest of the world. Since 2009, the league has sat somewhere between 29th- and 34th-best in the world, according to Twenty First Group.
Chaos or stability?
In a couple ways, it doesn't make any sense to compare MLS to the other leagues in Europe and South America.
To start, the CONCACAF Champions League typically does occur while MLS sides are in preseason, and you can argue in a bunch of different directions for this. Liga MX teams, who are in the middle of their seasons during the tournament, have already figured out their best lineups and any newly acquired players will have been integrated into the squad. However, MLS sides might be more fresh in terms of fitness, and they seem less likely to have suffered any key injuries before the tournament. Plus, the teams that are in the tournament know they're in the tournament, so they can prepare differently than they might've otherwise.
Overall, the timing of the tournament likely does put MLS teams at a disadvantage, but not enough to explain the massive gap in performance between the teams from the United States and Canada and the clubs from Mexico.
However, there's another disadvantage that MLS teams have compared to Liga MX sides and the rest of the world: the salary cap.
While the league's payroll rules remain incredibly opaque and ever-changing based on whatever star wants to come to the league, there are financial mechanisms in place to create more equality across the league. (Perhaps more important than that, those mechanisms mean no owners spend so much money that they pressure the other owners into spending more. The primary reason leagues have salary caps is to lower costs for owners.)
Unlike everyone else, the league also doesn't have relegation. While adding promotion and relegation isn't the cure-all that some make it out to be, the lack of it does create a different competitive dynamic.
In most other leagues across the world, there are a handful of teams that qualify for continental competition on a regular basis, boosted by the virtuous cycle of "continental competition means more money and more money means better players and better players means more wins and more wins means continental competition." Most other clubs, then, steadily drift away toward smaller revenues and all carry some risk of relegation, which forces you to lose some of your best players and lots of your revenue. If you get promoted back up, you're usually equipped with less money and a worse squad than you had last time ... when you got relegated.
As such, MLS is the sixth-most concentrated league competitively, per TFG, among those top 31 leagues globally. In other words, the best teams in other leagues are more likely to be better than the best teams in MLS, even if the, say, 12th-best team in MLS is likely to be better than the 12th-best team in another league of comparative size and resources. And since the best teams are the teams playing each other in continental competition, MLS teams are likely to do worse in those competitions, which then penalizes the league in any kind of cross-country comparison.
Of course, "But look at our 15th-best team! They're pretty decent!" is a weak argument for a sports league to be making about itself. If MLS really wants to be considered a top-15 league (or better) in the world, then the teams just have to start beating teams from other leagues in competitive matches. In other words, the Seattle Sounders need to beat the third-place team from the Egyptian Premier League at the Club World Cup.
However, it's not all doom and gloom as the league's current handicap could be to its long-term gain. The relative strength of your 15th-best team might not help you win any trophies, but it probably does speak to the relative long-term financial health of your competition.
MLS teams have been steadily spending more money and acquiring more valuable players, year over year. It's hard to compare to other leagues because there are 29 teams (compared to the 20 in the Premier League), but the total average estimated transfer values, per Transfermarkt, of all of the players in MLS is €1.28 million. That's the second-highest number in the Americas after Brazil, and it'd be ninth in Europe behind the Big Five, Portugal, Turkey, and the Netherlands.
Rather than chasing the incredibly unstable "European model," which fuses a truly egalitarian competition structure with massively unequal amounts of wealth from anyone who wants to invest, the league took the sport that the world loves and combined it with the much more stable closed system inherent to American sports. That drastically reduces the competitive value of a given regular season game, but also drastically increases the long-term stability and viability of the league.
"What MLS has going for it is it's stable," said Omar Chaudhuri, Chief Intelligence Officer at Twenty First Group. "It's an environment in which you can plan, which is very, very helpful. And so I think if the domestic player pool begins to catch up with the broader underlying traits that you'd expect from a nature of the size of the U.S., then you're getting into a world where the top 20 or top 50 players in the U.S. are similar to the level of Portugal or the Netherlands."
The current structure of European soccer is seemingly held together by gum and oil money. Other than Manchester United, the richest teams always win, while everyone else lives in a yearly state of precarity. And any kind of structural changes are always going to favor the richest teams because if they don't get what they want, they're just going to threaten to leave and form their own competition, like they did in 2021. It's equally hard to envision things remaining the way they are and to envision things ever meaningfully changing.
MLS, meanwhile, gives its owners somewhat guaranteed revenues and its players somewhat guaranteed paychecks. It's still an incredibly flawed competitive product, but it's way less likely to fall apart, and the closed-loop structure incentivizes the league to experiment in ways you'd never see in Europe. It's the first major American league to sign an exclusive broadcast television deal with a tech company and just this season, they introduced a totally new playoff structure.
That structure, by the way? It worked pretty well. By expected goals, the best team in the Eastern Conference and the best team in the Western Conference are in the final. And if any of the innovations flop, they can just just go back to the old ways or try something new; there's no tradition or history to uphold or protect.
Nearly 30 years into its existence, MLS still isn't close to being competitive with Europe's top leagues, but maybe that's the point. For MLS to eventually be competitive with Europe in 10 or 15 or 20 years, its best bet might be to not try to compete at all.