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MLS has a continuity problem  

By on May 12, 2016

Leicester City’s glorious rags-to-riches Premier League triumph captures the essence of the beautiful game: the ability for any team, player or coach to rise from the bottom with nothing but hard work, talent, and a shrewd outlook.

The same general theory applies in Major League Soccer.  Well, sort of.  Any given team can beat another on any given day, that’s for sure, but the problem this season more than others has become the lack of rhyme or reason behind this unpredictability.

For instance, the Chicago Fire, bottom of the Eastern conference, secured their only win so far this season over the Philadelphia Union, top of the division.  Then Philadelphia went on to lose just one of their next five games.  And that is no outlier in the league this season.

So far in 2016, there has been little to no consistency throughout the league and no team has had the same consecutive result for more than four matches.  At this point in the current the Premier League season, there were four streaks of similar or larger lengths, the largest losing run being Aston Villa’s seven straight losses and the biggest winning streak of five games jointly shared between Manchester City and Arsenal.

By comparison, no team in MLS has even managed to string together more than three consecutive victories this season.

MLS scheduling is partly to blame.  The fact that the league ignores most FIFA International breaks leaves the top teams exposed during the summer months, and the Seattle Sounders will potentially be missing six players for the Copa Centenario next month.  For the past two years, for example, the San Jose Earthquakes have lost their main forward Chris Wondolowski to international duty and have subsequently suffered dry spells in the summer that have cost them playoff berths.

Additionally, MLS’ unbalanced fixture list skews the table until mid-summer.  For instance, the last-place Fire have played four fewer games than second-placed FC Dallas, confusing the league table significantly.  If Chicago had won all four games in hand at this point, they would be in third, just one point behind Dallas.  However hard professional players try to overlook the standings, this can have an untold effect on the Fire’s confidence and that of their fanbase.

The heart of the issue, though, lies beyond these individual cases: it’s that there is no clear key to winning in MLS.  Last season, there was no correlation between salary and performance in MLS and although many claim the LA Galaxy have “bought” the MLS Cup for three out of the last five years, the reality is much more nuanced.

In other American sports such as the NFL, the annual Draft helps determines the fate of organizations, preventing any single team from being stuck at the bottom of the table many years in a row and allowing teams to slowly build up strength over time.

In MLS, though, the SuperDraft isn’t very deep and certainly can’t be the focal point of a team’s recruitment system.

Success in MLS relies on smart tactics, a shrewd scouting system, a little bit of luck in the SuperDraft, a good youth development system and most of all, synergies between Designated Players and the rest of the squad: in other words, a good balance of everything.  The problem is that MLS’ various scheduling flaws can throw that delicate balance this way and that.

It is perhaps more useful to judge a team by their weakest link than their best player, as a well-rounded FC Dallas have begun shown in recent years with their stellar consistency, but that directly conflicts with MLS’ high-level marketing strategy of bringing in big names to spur TV viewership and ticket sales.

With no consistency in results week-by-week or season-to-season, the league is lacking a coherent plot that can help fans link results from year-to-year.  For this reason, MLS will isn’t capable of having a rags-to-riches story like Leicester City’s Premier League title victory in England, or even Chelsea’s massive capitulation.  Promotion and relegation, in theory (because that’s the extent of its existence in MLS right now: barely a thought experiment), isn’t the only solution to this problem, or even the most likely one, though it would certainly focus more on results than marketing; therefore, inherently creating more balance in the system.

Few fans would wish for the balance of power situation in markets such as Germany or Spain, where at most three teams have even a shot at winning the title. Yet the MLS contrast, where last year’s league winners find themselves near the bottom of the table the following season, is hardly a superior balance.  The talent gap would be forgiven a lot quicker if European soccer fans based in America (or non-soccer fans at all) could understand why their local team wins and loses.  And that’s the heart of Major League Soccer’s continuity problem.

Update: This article was updated to reflect that fact that no team has won more than three consecutive games in MLS this season

Homepage photo credit: ArtBrom, via Flickr [CC BY SA 2.0]

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.