MLS needs more quality players to return to the glory years of 1998 and 2000.
The MLS has done well in the last few years to attract a few big names, such as David Beckham and Thierry Henry, however such high points for the league have been very few and far between in recent years.

With home recording technology, US soccer fans do not have to work around the trans-Atlantic time difference. They now have the choice of a live MLS match or one of many European matches recorded that day. So this means that the MLS is in direct competition with the European soccer leagues such as the Spanish La Liga and the English Premier league.

The soccer scoreboards show that year on year the attendance figures for MLS matches are gradually improving. Major league is here to stay providing that this trend continues. However, unless more soccer fans in the US develop an interest in watching MLS on TV, the league will not get the fat TV contracts it really needs to accelerate its growth. The English Premier League is the world leader in this respect: Its global TV audience is huge, and its network revenue correspondingly big.

There were record TV viewing figures in the US for the 2010 World Cup. Unfortunately, however, the World Cup contained almost primarily European based players, and there was a total of only six Major League Soccer players represented in the competition. All of these players were on the US team.
That representation is a very low number considering that 21 players from the MLS played in the World Cup in France 12 year ago. This high number of players coincided with the most successful period for MLS clubs on the international arena: the glory days of 1998 and 2000 when D.C. United and Los Angeles won the CONCAF Cup.

This low representation: just six players, forces us to entertain the idea that few World-Cup calibre players are being attracted to the MLS, and just as few are being developed in the youth system of MLS clubs. The ‘coincidence’ of the international success of MLS teams and the high World Cup representation points to the fact that MLS really needs higher quality players, so that at the 2014 World Cup it can have a representation closer to the 1998 level than the 2010 level. Without this, network figures won’t increase, as the European leagues will always be too attractive for soccer fans.

There is a relatively simple solution to this, and that is that MLS has to continue to do everything within its power to attract stars such as Beckham and Henry to its ranks. This may seem to be quite obvious, but it has only been acknowledged in the last few months that the league’s quality has declined since some point at the turn of the century. Let’s hope that there will be progress over the next few year, and that the MLs soccer scoreboards will show more big names.

For more information, go to: mlssoccer.com